Freakonomics Radio - What Happens When You Turn 20

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

The world has changed a good bit since Freakonomics was first published. In this live anniversary episode, Stephen Dubner tells Geoff Bennett of PBS NewsHour everything he has learned since then. Happy birthday, Freakonomics. SOURCES:Geoff Bennett, co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS News Hour. RESOURCES:Freakonomics Twentieth Anniversary Edition: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt (2025). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner. I am recording this on November 11th, 2025, which is the very day that the 20th anniversary edition of our book Freakonomics is being published. To celebrate, we've put together this bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio. The episode has two parts. The first one is very short. It's just me reading the new forward for the 20th anniversary edition of the book. After that, you will hear me again. in conversation with Jeff Bennett at a recent live event in Washington, D.C. Jeff is host of PBS NewsHour. I only met him recently, but I think he's pretty great, and I would be surprised if you didn't agree. Big thanks to him, also to 6th and I in D.C. for hosting the event, especially to Jackie Leaventhall and Clara Wallace. Thanks also to everyone who came out that night,

and thanks to all of you who listened to Freakonomics radio every week, and thanks to everyone who's ever read Freakonomics or Will We'll read it now in the 20th anniversary edition. Plainly, I have a lot to be thankful for. The last 20 years have been pretty wonderful, and I can't wait for the next 20. Okay, so here's today's bonus episode, starting with the new forward from the 20th anniversary edition of Freakonomics. One recent day, I stood in my office and stared down a big, stupid mountain. of plastic file boxes. I've been staring them down for a few years now. They are full of notebooks

and research files and manuscripts, the byproducts of a writing career, no longer essential but not quite disposable either. That was my dilemma, and it had me paralyzed. But on this day, I finally decided I was going to get rid of it all. The past is past, I told myself. Life's too short to be weighed down by nostalgia. I started looking around for those extra large trash bags. And then my phone chimed. It was a text from my friend Steve Levitt. Happy 20th anniversary.

Not many people get to ride the same train for two decades. Let's hope we've got 20 more years ahead just as good. I was touched that Levitt had remembered our publication date, a little surprise that I hadn't. After all, I'm the pack rat. Nearly everything in those file boxes came from my partnership with Steve Levitt. It began when I wrote a piece about him for the New York Times Magazine, and it flourished when we paired up to write Freakonomics.

The book did not enter the world with high expectations. It had no central thesis, and even our publisher disliked the title. With such low expectations, we were freed up to write exactly the book that we wanted to write. Both of us were, in our own ways, bored by convention. So we tried something different. We mashed up Levitt's empirical research with a writing style that came from narrative nonfiction. It took a while to make the voice sound like the both of us, but we got there eventually. We wrote that, yes, the modern world can be extremely complicated, but you can figure things out by using the right tools and asking the right questions.

We wrote about conventional wisdoms that are at best half true. We relied on data versus anecdote as often as we could, and we always tried to show the data behind our conclusions. None of this struck either of us as a remotely radical way to write a book, but in retrospect, it did go against the flow. And somehow it worked, beyond our wildest dreams. The reviews were almost embarrassingly good. The book showed up on bestseller lists and then weirdly on TV shows like Modern Family and Jeopardy and Sherlock.

It seemed to represent something far beyond what either of us could have imagined, although even now, it's hard to say exactly what that is. Plainly, Freakonomics means many things to different people. I like to think of it as an exercise in curiosity without the cynicism. Up to this point, Levitt as an academic and I as a writer had been accustomed to fighting for people's attention and for access to good material and data. suddenly we had a platform. We have tried ever since to use that platform wisely. We published a few more books and we worked on all sorts of projects with all sorts of collaborators. These days, Levitt runs a research center at the University of Chicago that's trying to remake the U.S. education system. Typical Levitt trying to blow up the institution from inside the institution. And I have spent the past 15 years making Freakonomics radio covering everything from kidney, donations to academic fraud, to the future of meat. Once again, an opportunity to exercise

maximum curiosity, which has been a pure joy. The world has changed a good bit over these past 20 years. The field of economics has been proven both incredibly important and somewhat impotent. In the political realm, meanwhile, it appears that the center really cannot hold. Leavitt and I have always thought of ourselves as devout centrists, driven by common sense and law. rather than ideology, that has become harder. Re-reading this book recently had me marveling at how carefree we seem then, how full of adventure and spirit. I think all of us are hoping to feel that way again someday.

One consequence of getting older is that you know a lot more people who die, including, if you are unlucky, your own siblings. This goes for both Steve Levitt and me. You find yourself missing not just them, but the part of your own siblings. life that included them. You're constantly trying to preserve whatever stray memories you can. My sea of plastic boxes are stuffed with stray memories of Freakonomics. They represent the lifetime of this book. And I've decided I'm not ready to get rid of them after all. And I think I'll toss a printout of this forward into one of the boxes. It might be fun to read

in 20 years. I'm so glad that Steve Levitt texted me that day. Do we really have 20 more years ahead just as good? I would love that, but let's be honest. The two of us have already been blessed beyond reason over these past 20 years. It has been the thrill of a lifetime to create a body of work that reverberates with so many people. Not just fans, but the good faith critics, too. We have learned so much from so many of you. Take care of yourself.

And if you can, someone else, too. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner. Today, in conversation with Jeff Bennett, on November 2, 2025, at 6th and I in Washington, D.C. Good evening, everybody. Congratulations on 20 years. Does it feel like 20 years? Feels like 19 and a half, I'd say. Yeah, it's been, I mean, all of us work hard and care about things. And a lot of the things you work hard at and care about don't work out the way you want. You need a certain amount of luck or timing or whatever it is. And with this project, I had it. And it's been paying dividends for 20 years. So I've gotten to do the work that I want to do

for 20 years because the book worked. So I think about that every day. So like, does it seem like 20 years? Yes, in a way, it went fast, but in a way, it's like I think about it so often. It could have been like 4,000 years. I'm so invested in it. But I'm very grateful. Among the things that struck me in the book was that you wrote that at the outset,

you and Steve Levitt, were bored by convention. What conventions, whether intellectual, academic, journalistic, did you see yourselves rebelling against? So I love journalism. I think journalism is quite important. I think good journalism is really hard to do. You know, we're talking earlier, Jeff and I about a former colleague of mine friend Jeffrey Goldberg, who runs the Atlantic. I used to work with Jeffrey when I was an editor and he was a writer. And he was one of the few people that had what I consider like the big three traits you need to be a really good print journalist, which was a good reporter slash researcher. You had to know where to find material. A good thinker. You had to take what you have

and sort it out. And sort it out could mean a hundred different things. And you had to be able to write well. Very few people can do all three of those things. So, you know, what was the question? I have no idea of the question. When you say that you were bored by convention, what conventions were you rebelling against? So as much as I love journalism, a lot of journalism, I think, is not very good. just like a lot of anything is not very good. And one of the things that I really wanted to do with Freakonomics was show a style of writing that was just narrative, nonfiction, journalism-based, all factual, all fact-checked, and so on,

where you tell good stories, as with journalism, but you've got the data underneath it. And in my case, I hooked up with this amazing data partner, Steve Levitt, who'd done all this research, that we could sort of harness or exploit for telling different stories. So I wanted to bring to the kind of writing that I've always liked to do some other layers or dimensions that in this case came from economics and the other social sciences. But I also love journalists who marry up storytelling with physics and other sciences and so on. I think it's a very natural blend.

The more multidisciplinary journalism can get the better. One more question about process that's not specific to journalism, because I am really interested in how the data guy and the storyteller find a shared voice. There are a million reasons why a collaboration like that should not work, but yours did work. How? Steve Levitt is one of the most unusual and creative minds I've ever encountered. So he was a great partner for me. And he's a great economist, even though a very atypical economist. Steve Levitt, the one shortcoming I can think of for Levitt that I'm willing to say in public, is that he thinks that I'm as good at writing as I think he is at economics. So he thought

when he found me that he was the lucky one, and I'm pretty sure that I was the lucky one. But we truly felt that way about each other. And so that's what made it work. There was a lot of trial and error in the beginning. It was terrible. We tried for a while to literally like write together, like sit at the computer and him say words and me think words and me type words and they were barely words. They were terrible. And the publisher wasn't convinced that this was going to work and also hated the name. Is that right? Yeah, they had many regrets, yes. But it worked out, okay, yeah. You said at the time that the book had no central thesis, 20 years on, does that still hold?

I think it does. But if I were forced, I would say, like, since we're sitting in the synagogue, I would say, one of my favorite lines from all of Jewish, you know, teaching is a very, very simple one. Turn it and turn it for everything is in it, it being the Torah. So the idea is that any topic you can take. And this is what we love about doing what we do. You know, you can take any curiosity you have and talk to enough interesting people, and it becomes fascinating for you. So once again, I've forgotten the original question. I'm not kidding. I have a very short-term memory. I almost forgot the question, too. Does anybody remember the question? It was a good question. It was good. Oh, no central thesis. No central thesis, yeah.

Is there a thesis? So if I wanted to say there's a philosophical-ish thesis, I would say that, I wouldn't say that everything is interesting, but everything is worth examination, because you never know. But then if I want to make it a little bit more concrete or pragmatic or a little bit more of a blueprint, I would say, and I think we do write this in the book, which is that data are really useful for a lot of things, but especially if you can use them to understand the incentives that people respond to. That's the thing. So if you think about like as a parent or if you're making public policy, whatever it is, you try to come up with what you think is a good idea and the right thing. And then you try to think about how people will respond to that. And that can be very difficult because the kind of people who make rules often don't have that much in common with the people that they're giving the rules to and wanting to be followed. So understanding how people will respond to any program is tricky because the incentive.

are sort of hard to figure out. If you can use the data to understand why people make the decisions that they do, then I think you can really make progress in the world. And when economists talk about incentives, most of us just think of financial incentives. And that's plainly an important thing. But we have so many others, you know, we care about who we are. We care about our relationships with people and so on. And sometimes those are the incentives that will rule, but they're very hard to anticipate. You also said in the book, and I took notes on this,

that you thought, Freakonomics, you saw it as an exercise and curiosity without cynicism. That's a beautiful phrase. Unpack what you mean by that. I think it's very easy to tip into cynicism.

I think we're living through an extraordinarily unusual time, an extraordinarily, you know, noisy time. When I say noise, I mean, not just noise, but also signal-to-noise ratio. Like, there's a lot of noise

and not that much signal. I find this in news, It's why I like your show so much. Thank you. You all know his show, I gather, News Hour. It's a great, great, great news show. And one reason I think it's so good is it's very simple. You guys do a good job at giving a lot of information

that I can then figure out what I want to do with, as opposed to a little bit of information than being kind of harangued about how I need to feel about that information. And so, once again, I'm pretty sure I've forgotten the actual question. An exercise in curiosity without cynicism. The other side of that is, do you ever worry? that people can apply the data cynically and use the data to justify whatever they want. When I first started publishing as a journalist in New York City, you know, a bunch of years ago,

you become, this was pre-internet, and you become acquainted with the letter to the editor ecosystem. And it's a very funny ecosystem because it was a really small subset of people who had the time and the energy and the anger to write a letter to the editor, okay? You would read them, and they were almost always based in some legitimate grievance. but they were usually, you know, quite overboard. The way I learned to think about it was, I'm the writer, I had my say, I did my best. I had an idea, I executed as well as I could, we fact-checked, we did the whole thing. I had the platform, and I turned it over, and now whoever reads it, they should be able to say whatever they want about it.

What's happened in, you know, recent years, called 20 years, is that everybody writes a letter to the editor, but it's not to the editor. it's to you directly and it's to the world and it's very voluminous and it's very noisy and it's not very considered that people used to write letters to the editor would take an hour and a half to write a three-page letter with every stupid thing you said and now it's just like you're a blank or you are in the pocket of blank whatever and you as the writer you know none of that is true or at least you hope none of that is true but it's very easy to think that that noise represents the norm I don't think it does I still think that the world is still mostly full of fantastically well-intentioned people, kind people,

people who want to be loved and want to love back. And I think that a great deal of the anger and hatred comes from people who really feel unloved. I really think that's at the root of it. I mean, if you read any psychology, philosophy, theology, it seems pretty clear to me. And so I've never been a cynic, but when I feel people being cynical and trying to use information in a way like that, I don't necessarily communicate directly with them, but I keep it in mind. So the next show I make, I really just try to present an argument or an idea in a way that shows that this is not done to punish anyone, that a rising tide really does lift all boats. It's happened so many times in history, and I just want it to keep happening.

And so, yeah, I think skepticism is good. You never want to believe anything at face value without checking out. But cynicism, I think, is the first few steps to a place that I don't think we need to go. Well, building on your point about the signal-to-noise ratio these days, how do you define the hidden side of everything when everything is visible? Everything feels tracked and monetized. How do you create space for yourself and for free economics? So I don't have a job. This is all I do, right?

So what that means is I have a lot of time. Like, unlike you, you have to show up every day and have a story meeting in the morning and start making plans and then things change and like, I would die. I couldn't do, I could do it for like one week. I'm like a cheap version of a hot house flower, whatever that is. I just need to be in my environment doing my thing. I just spend a lot of time alone, thinking, reading, and I do love to talk to people. You know, that's where ideas come from. I am constantly amazed at how interesting the world is, remains, even when you think you know a lot. So we've got a podcast on the economics of the horse industry, the horse market. So I knew a little bit about race-horsing, but not much else.

And I went to an economics conference. I got to talk to this woman there and somehow comes up that she just bought a second horse. Like, I didn't know you had a first horse. Tell me more. She does equestrian. And I said, what do you pay for a horse like that? Because I'm obnoxious. Okay. So I will say that. Cynicism I'm not in favor of. obnoxious is okay sometimes inquisitive inquisitive that's the other problem is I grew up I was the youngest in a big family I didn't really get to talk that much for a long time so now I'm just like ah but um so I said what do you pay for a horse like that and she said well I can't tell you that and I said well that means it's more than more than well and then I just keep going she didn't

give me the number of her horse she said a horse very much like mine bought by someone like me in a market like this might pay about blank. And it was low-ish six figures for a hobby horse. Most people who buy these, it's kind of an advanced hobby. And then she said, but if you think that's a lot, especially in the Florida market, there are billionaires who buy $2 million horses for their kids just to train on,

just to see if they're any good at it. And moreover, almost none of these sales are recorded anywhere, all private transactions. So that got me really interested because I had done a series about the economics of the art markets, which are fascinating, the intersection with galleries,

artists, museums. There's so much there. And even though it's economics, I do like the economics of these things. It's about much more. And so with horses, it became really fun. And so if I can find an idea like that,

you know, six, eight times a year, and then there are things in the news that I do like to play off of. We did a piece a couple weeks ago about the doctor shortage. We could have done a 12-parter on that. It's such a big thing. So, you know, I do have journalist DNA

from working at the Times and elsewhere, but then kind of the, let's put on a show DNA also from, you know, playing music and all those other things. Is that typically how stories and ideas find their way to you, just conversations you're having with people or just, you're watching the news and you get a spark of an idea?

Yeah, not so much the news, no offense. No, no. No, I'm not kidding. because, like, what I said about your show, like, I do learn a lot there. A lot of the media news broadcasts on TV irritates me because there's such little information and it's all done theatrically. It's more entertainment than news. It's unbelievably well done.

I think we're living in an age of gonzo broadcast art. I'm an NFL fan. If I watch a three-hour NFL telecast, I think that is one of the most majestically produced. live three-hour theatrical broadcast events you could imagine the photography, the commentary and so on. It's unbelievable how good we are at entertainment like that. The problem is too much of the news has become entertainment like that for me. So I do like to seek out people who do interesting things. I love smart people. I love humble people. I love decent people. So if I meet a smart, humble, decent person, I just glom on to them and, you know, talk to them until they're so

sick of me, but it's the way I like to learn. Well, if Freakonomics is all about knowing what to measure and encouraging people to measure it well, what are we measuring well in 2025, and what are we falling short on? What a great question. Thank you. You know, what your question reminds me of, which is not a direct answer, though, it might become one, although I'm going to forget the question at least twice on the way to it becoming one.

At that same conference where I met this woman about the horses, I saw Jay Powell, Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, give a talk. And it was not a public economics conference. So he was speaking to other economists, not like Jay Powell is off the chain when he's talking to other economists. He's still pretty much the same guy. He's going rogue. Yeah. But he said something that I think to all economists and to him maybe was obvious, but to me made me sit up and pay attention, which was how good the U.S. government has been at collecting, analyzing, storing, and distributing data. So if you think about it over the past 100 years, just the amount of government data we've had to work on, whether it has to do with jobs, housing, education, on and on.

Not all of that comes from the federal government, but a great, great deal does. And so he was just making a kind of side comment that the quality of data coming out of the U.S. government that pertains to economics is really large. I would agree with him. I think it's been damaged since then. This was probably six or eight months ago. So what's interesting is it's never binary. I think that's one thing we try to do with Freakonomics or everything I try to do on the radio show.

Almost nothing is a binary. Sometimes it's a yes or no, high or low, black or white, but very seldom, I think the reality lives in the gap there and that one of the jobs of a writer, a journalist, or an artist or parent anyone, is to kind of get in that gap and sort it out. And so, for instance, now that the typical government jobs data seem to be, you know, changed on dimensions that most people think is probably not very good, it turns out that the private sector has started to aggregate a lot of jobs data because it's in their interest to have that too. So that may be a case where an incentive was created by the change in government policy that may create a better stream of data for all we know. We'll have to see. What is lost when we lose quality data at the federal level or lose trust and confidence in the data at the federal level? I would like to think we lose the main tool in the policymaking toolkit.

That's what I would like to argue, but that would imply the data has been used as the main tool in the policymaking toolkit. You got the right audience for an argument like that. And look, it hurts me to say this, but I am not a big fan. of politics. And the reason is it frustrates me too much because I know how important it is, but the way that I've kind of, I don't know about, I was going to say been trained. It's not like I was trained as a PhD economist to look at things this way, but I have hung out with Steve Lev, and other economists now long enough to kind of naturally think this way. And if I know that you just want my data, this goes back to what you were saying about cynicism, if I read a paper, and this

happen to Steve Levitt, happened to every economist I know. They'll get a call from a staffer on the hill who wants to use the paper to make an argument. Would you be willing to come on and consult with us or whatever? But then you might get a call the next day from someone on the other side of the aisle about the same paper wanting you to do a different piece of the argument. And you realize that when you're the cherry being picked, it's no fun. I think that's a big problem universally is that we make a lot. As individuals, we make too many decisions based on emotion. Thinking fast versus thinking slow, you may have heard. That's the title of a wonderful book by Danny Connman. We make too many personal and family decisions on emotion and having a lack of data. And I think we make

too many policy decisions having access to a lot of data, but just enough to know that you can exploit it to make an argument that is not really an empirical argument. And that frustrates me. I don't think you have to be a Republican, a Democrat, whatever, to just look at the data on, for instance, the amount of money that the federal government distributes for any one of a number of child-related causes. So in this country, we support families and children much less than any other rich country. Some people on one side may tell you, well, there are different tax incentives that make up for, and that's not untrue. But if you look at the data, it's pretty overwhelming. me. If you look at the way that we support families generally, and then when you look at what we know about how a loved and supported child turns out, on average, versus one who receives

neither a lot of love and nerd support, it's a no-brainer. If you want to have a thriving, healthy society, support children on every level, support families on every level. And the data are there to indicate that we're not very good at doing that federally. I know the arguments from both sides. They both have very legitimate points, but when I get in the middle of that, I give up. Like, what's a person like me to do? So sometimes I feel not like I'm hiding. When I do a series on horses, I got an email the other day from someone that says, you know, there's all this chaos going on. Why are you doing horses? And I mean, how am I going to, they're right. They're right. But you know what? I'm doing horses because all this chaos is going on. And I think there's still a lot

room in the world to, you know, ask questions, be curious, spend time with good people. Government is important for sure, but it's the people that makes a place. It's not the government that makes a place. I'm very pro people. I'm just not huge on politics. Coming up after the break, more of my conversation with Jeff Bennett at 6th and I in Washington, D.C. I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is Free Economics Radio. Let me ask, what did you learn from Steve about applying economics to questions or applying data to questions that seemed absurd on the surface? But then over time, you thought, wow, he's really on to something.

I think the biggest thing I learned from Steve Levitt and from other economists was reading their papers and their journals, which I encourage you to do, especially if you've ever had any sleep issues. They're written in a language that really isn't English. It's not the English that we know. Economics papers are filled with words that are just beautifully bizarre, heteroscadasticity. Okay, let's live with that one for ten minutes. Which means what?

I have no idea. Heteroscadasticity, I think it has to do with a certain type or form of randomness. Okay. But so the question was, yeah. Yeah. So what they do in their econ papers that I think is great for all of us, especially for journalists. And other social scientists don't do this in their papers. Like if you read psych papers or sociology, and I think econ is just better. They work with bigger data sets. They say, this paper is going to argue that blank. Let's say that blank is that minimum wage laws don't generally have the intended effect of lifting incomes for the people that we really want to lift incomes for. And in fact, they may discourage job growth because there are firms that will lay people off as the minimum wage rises, right? That's an old argument. And as it turns out, in the economics literature, there's a lot of really good research arguing on either side.

It's a very tricky issue, and it's very case-specific. But what an economics paper will do when it's laying out its argument, it says, here's our thesis. And we're going to tell you how we reach the thesis. Here's the data. Here's the methodology of analyzing the data. Here are the countervailing forces. Here's the things we couldn't answer and so on. But one thing they also do is say, here are, let's say, five other possible explanations other than ours. And we're going to interrogate those also. And we'll tell you why we think those are not the most legitimate. It's like I said before, turn it and turn it for everything is in it. Go in, study it deeply, come out, and then synthesize and write it very simply. So with Levitt, he invited me into this sort of fraternity of amazing.

brilliant people, these economists, who came from a variety of backgrounds, they all very good at math, because economics got very mathy for a period there. It wasn't always, and hopefully it won't always be that way in the future. No, I mean, some math is good, but when the papers are all theory that no one can read and understand, it's not very useful, I think, but when you spend time with people who, you know, rather than the knee-jerk response, like, oh, X policy is about to be invoked. Well, I've been reading the Washington Post, or I've been reading the Wall Street Journal. I know how that's going to turn out. No, you don't. Nobody knows how it's going to turn out. The best you can do to make an educated guess is to look at a lot of data,

to look at history, to look at economic history, to talk to people who really understand the mechanism that's being invoked right now and using real data to figure out how that might work. And that I find thrilling in the way that, like, if you're in grad school and you're studying literature and you really sort of figure it out, that can be thrilling. If you're studying some religious tradition. You read these religious texts and figure, oh, that's what they're getting at there, philosophy. And so to me, economics is a sort of toolkit that I was invited to use not quite as a professional. Like, if they were safe cracking tools, like, I might be the guys that broke into the Louvre. It was a great idea, but I was kind of sloppy. I wasn't really a

total pro, but like, I know how to use the tools. Would you back a ladder up to the building and then climb up into the window? Okay, I thought that was a very good idea. That was next level. 20 years on, what insights have aged well and which have not? Wow, I don't know if I'm the one to answer that. I am a pack rat when it comes to my stuff. My work, I have cases, you know, too many files. You write about it, the plastic bins of paper.

The forward of this book, this is how bad I am, the forward of this book, the reason this book is published in November and not in like September is because this three page forward that I ended up right that I really wanted to write, it took me six months because I really needed to kind of figure out what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say was related to the fact that, as you know, I have these bins and bins and bins of mostly work product, drafts of articles, but like for every two pages you write for a book, you have this much in printed out research material. And I can't throw it up. I don't know what to do with it. I don't know what to do it. So I'm kind of hamstrung with it. I've already forgotten the

question. I know that I've forgotten the question. Insights that aged well. I know I'm circling back to it. So here's the thing. I kind of dread thinking about the past. I respect the past, but it makes me feel usually mournful, the past generally. Other than I like reading economic history because it's not like my past. So I don't really think about that. I really do think about like what's coming into me today.

And what I do know is every day we get a lot of correspondence from people who have used something from Freakonomics, the books or the radio show to do awesome stuff. there is a bill being considered in Congress right now having to do with trying to increase the amount of kidney donations because of some work related to some work that we had done on kidney donations. I did a piece a year ago maybe about the astonishingly high false positive rate on penicillin allergies, which it turns out if you think that you're allergic to the penicillin family of drugs, I'll bet you $100 that you're not. And at the end of the I'll win a lot more money because nine out of ten people think they are and they're not. So I'm going to

walk away the winner there. And I'm getting all these emails from people who have parents who now are in a hospital and need a drug but couldn't get it to their kids who are told that they're allergic to something. So I love having a small effect in that way. I think from this book and the books that we wrote, I know there are a lot of people who trampolined into something. I think the single biggest category is actually a terrible one. A lot of people read and so read our books when they're young, 14, 15, 16. And then they go to college and they say, I'm going to study economics because I realize for economics. And then they get in their first class, like, this is terrible. It's so boring. It's unrelated to anything. So I think that

might be the biggest negative effect we've had. Generations of children misled by you and your book. That's incredible. I want to talk about the business of what you do in the medium, because you had the book, then you launched a blog, then the podcast, and the blog and the podcast existed long before blogs and podcasts were even a thing. Did you see the podcast boom in particular coming? No, that was, again, really, really lucky. So Leavitt and I just finished the manuscript for our second book, Super Free Economics. This was maybe 2009, and I was just a little lonely. So, like, I love Leavitt. We have a great, great, great partnership, and we're very, very good friends. It's been a remarkable partnership. But we've never lived in the same place. Even though we collaborated on the books,

I'm the writer. So I would be the one alone in the room. And then I would run everything by him. And sometimes you would participate a lot, sometimes less. But I was still, it was lonely. And I really wanted to do something collaborative. I missed that a lot. And in my earlier years, before I became a journalist by profession, I was a musician. That was my life. When you're in a band, it's kind of like being married to a few people. It's a very close, relationship. And so when I stopped that, I missed it a lot, but it was also very stressful. So I became a writer. I liked doing it alone. Then my partnership with Leavitt was kind of like being a band again. It was really, really, really fun. And I think that gave me the taste again for a little

bit more collaboration. So when I started the podcast, part of the reason was I want to have a little gang. I just did it for fun. I always liked audio. When I was a kid, I had a cassette I'd love to record voices. You know, I was playing music when I was little. I feel like when you listen to audio and you don't see the image, you bring so much of yourself to it. And so I'd always loved audio and I'd always loved interviewing as a journalist. I'd write a piece about, you know, Stephen Spielberg for the New York Times magazine.

I would come home with dozens of hours of audio tape and transcribe it myself back in the old days with little transcriber with the pedal. And you really get to know the material that way. and I loved, loved, loved that. It's hard to be very productive. I mean, technology has totally changed that. I get a transcript from Trent now five minutes after the two-hour interview. So it's remarkable how the technology is helping with things like that.

Lost my thought. Anybody? Did you see the podcast boom coming? Yeah. So what appealed to me about, you are so good, by the way. That's high praise coming from you. No, I mean, you're super, like your eyes listen in a way that makes it so intense, can barely look at you. This is awesome.

So, you know why I learned that? I used to work for Scott Simon as his editor at NPR, one of the best broadcasters ever. I learned that from Scott. You're kidding. When you're doing in-person audio, that's really important because you don't want to keep going, uh-huh, uh-huh. So I don't do most in-person audio, which is a problem for me because I'm getting ready to do this new project, which is in-person.

I have to learn to shut up. No, seriously, I'm the biggest interrupter. But the thing about podcasting that really appealed to me is two things that I loved, interviewing. And when I say interviewing, it's really having a conversation. It's bringing yourself to the conversation and trying to learn about a person. But I also love what audio is. So if I were to write a piece about Steven Spielberg for the Times Magazine, those cover stories are about 8,000 words, which sounds like a lot. If I were to measure the ratio of that 8,000 that is actually him talking, it's maybe 20%

30%, then you have other voices talking about him, then you have the writer explaining, right? And I like that. I have an ego just like every writer, but it's different because the person being portrayed, it's really a piece of writing that's really about the writer as much as the person. And I get that. I like that form. I like the magazine profile format. I've always loved that. But with audio on a podcast, the listener, which is the audience, gets to experience the subject in a much more legitimate, unvarnished way. You're hearing them. You're hearing their voice.

You're hearing their pauses. You're hearing their laughter. You're hearing when they get a little exasperated with a question I might ask. And so I really like the idea of combining those too. And that's why I did a podcast. And then when it became like a going business, that was just a surprise to everybody.

Well, how do you know when a question is worthy of an entire episode or can sustain an episode or series? I try to operate fearlessly, by which I mean, you have to trust your instincts. If midway in, you decide it's not a good question, you just dump it. We go fairly far down the road on quite a few things, then just throw them away. We've published things that I didn't think were A plus pieces, but if it gets below like B plus,

I pull the plug or run a repeat or something, the biggest challenge I have is when I come up with a question that I like and that I think is a valuable question, but I can't find anything empirical, any good data on it. and then I'm likely to give it up because I need to find someone who can quantify it for me because otherwise then you're just talking around it and I don't like that. When I think of incredible storytellers, I think of you, I think of Scott Simon, I think of Robert Krollwich. How do you translate intellectual rigor into accessible storytelling?

Is there a process? Is there a do this, than that, than this? I mean, at the risk of sounding whatever the bad word is, arrogant, cocky, I think there's a certain amount of talent in it. But I think the talent is not what people think. I think in audio, it really helps to have a good ear. One of the first questions that I ask anyone that I'm potentially going to work with in audio is whether they ever played or sang music.

And if the answer is no, it turns out they're usually not my kind of people. Because if you think about it, what is the human voice other than the most amazing musical instrument ever invented? That's what it is. Think about what you can do with your voice. You can express dozens of emotions. So I think part of it is when you're talking to someone the first time, but then when you're also, if you're editing on paper, which you and I both do,

if that's in your brain, if you can really hear that instrument go, that's a big advantage. A lot of people can't do that. And then when you're listening to rough cuts and music cuts and final cuts, you're always listening for, does this explain it well? if there's emotion in it, is the emotion legitimate? You don't want to, you know, gin things up. Is my question trying to sound like a smart person? That's something I try to avoid. Like, I take pride in doing my homework and, like, being prepared, but I don't like the interviews where, you know, here's my theory. Do you agree with that? I'm not much for those. I try to act kind of like a fairly

intelligent 10th grader who gets the opportunity to sit down with someone who's really a master of some domain of knowledge and say, I really want to know, teach me that. Coming up after the break, audience questions, always the best part. I'm Stephen Dovner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. I want to start incorporating some of the audience questions. Some of you in the room and folks who are watching online submitted some really terrific questions.

This one from Jana, do you regret anything you put into the Freakonomics books, be it opinions you voiced or takes you defended that you wished you hadn't? I mean, I think everyone loves confessions and loves mistakes aired publicly. I hate to say it. Like, I know there have been things that we've written that certainly people didn't like a lot. That's kind of the nature of it. But no, I don't regret them. There is a mantra from someone, you know, it's probably something that someone says, Churchill said, but he almost certainly didn't. If it's not Churchill, it's Mark Twain. If it's not Mark

Twain, it's Confucius. But anyway, it was no indecision, no regrets. When I first read that, I thought, oh, that's cocky. I didn't know indecision, no regrets. But then I realize it's very valuable. Once you're on a path, it's not like I decided I'm not going to murder this person, and now I am, and I should reconsider. I'm not talking about that kind of indecision. That's a good indecision. That's a rare indecision. But I mean by no indecision would mean that once I'm committed to thinking through an idea, let me do it even if it's really hard. And the no regrets is if I've really given it my all. And I, you know, I give it my all every script, every, I even read the ads with great intention. I really do. I think there are some things in this world that when

you do them with intention or not, they look very similar, but they're different. Look, we're in a synagogue. Prayer with intention is different than prayer without intention. Sex without intention is basically, like, I don't want to say sex without intention is pornography per se, but it's heading in that territory. Writing or being a communicator of ideas without intention and care, then you're just asking people to pay attention to you. And so I don't do that. I sometimes make mistakes and I fail all the time. But when you know that you've done it with a good heart and with intention, then even if people perceive it ungenerously, I'm okay with that. Sam asks, have you ever chosen not to publish a true but combustible finding

because the likely misinterpretation outweighed public benefit? That is so Sam. I know that, Sam. The only thing I can think, like a sexy finding that we were going to maybe do a radio episode on, I think it was the argument that the availability of online pornography was probably a driver in the decrease in sexual assault crimes. This was someone who had purported to measure that quite carefully. So if you're an economist or someone trying to measure an effect like that, how can you do that? And like when a new TV show or a new type of show is introduced and it would get rolled out in different parts of the country over time, you can measure the effect of that

versus crime or education, whatever, in that area. So you try to isolate what economists would call an instrumental variable. And so these people had done some version of that, I think, with pornography and sexual assaults. I think someone had done something similar with the attendance of violent movies and violent crime and found that it went down. And then there was maybe an argument that, well, it went down because the people who would be doing the crime are actually in the movie theaters at the time. or it could be a different idea, which is that if you kind of get your y-ya's out by watching

this brutal stuff, then you're less inclined to do? I don't know. Laura asks, are there any tips for federal employees who now find ourselves unexpectedly out of work, especially those over 60 who can't or don't want to retire just yet? Wow. Yeah, that's a tough one, a good one. I would say I'm worthless for this kind of advice, but what I would say that's adjacent to this problem is that I think a lot of lot of us make decisions about what to do in life generally, career or a project, and we base it on the likelihood of success or the payout if you get it. We all know a lot of people who pursued a career education. They went to law school or medical school, whatever. Maybe most

of them, it ended up working out great, but many of them, maybe not so much for medical schools, I think most people who do that really do it for a very different set of reasons. but a lot of people, you know, get a business degree or a law degree because it's prestigious. They'll make money. They'll feel good about themselves. They can have the life they want. And then they find that they don't like it. A lot of people don't like their jobs, unfortunately. And so what Levitt really persuaded me, the more work we did together, and we wrote about a number of things that kind of ran into this idea, which is that it's really hard to get good at something unless you really love it. because how do you get good at something? You practice, practice, practice, obsess, obsess,

obsess, gather feedback, gather feedback, analyze it. And you have to be really devoted to do all that if it's something you don't like. Find something you really like and are good at. And if you want to bring a little economics into it, find something at which you think you've got what they called a comparative advantage. Something in which you, for whatever set of reasons, you're a little bit better than most people at it and that you know that it's the kind of thing that will light you up every day and that will even keep you up at night. And that's the thing that I find that if you do that, there's certainly no guarantee that it's going to turn into a thing that rewards you monetarily and reputation-wise and so on,

but it's a heck of a lot better of a gamble, I think, than the other way around, which is let me try the tried and true path that, there are many people on because it leads to a lot of money and so on, because then you're entering into this sort of tournament model, as economists would call it, but the competition is intense. So try to do what you think you can do really, really well. And if you do it that well, it's going to have value to someone. That's terrific advice. Claire asks, if you could rewrite Freakonomics in 2025, which would be a heavy lift since it took six months to write three pages of the forward. But if you could, what's the biggest change you would make and why? Has anything in the

past two decades. New research changes in the world at large made you question conclusions from the book. Well, again, I'd say the conclusions we feel really good about. There's certainly been new research in some of the areas. We always look at that research. In one case, maybe the most famous case from Freakonomics, this was research that Levitt had done before I met him with John Donahue, a legal scholar, about the relationship between abortion and crime, the argument being that the legalization of abortion at the Supreme Court level with Roe v. Wade led to a decrease in crime across the United States because it led to fewer unwanted children being born, which goes back to what we were talking about earlier about wantedness and being loved and paid resources

and attention being paid to you. So if you think about that from a social science perspective, that's not a very surprising argument, right? But there are other perspectives to think about that from. But the real issue is Leavitt had made a coding error in the original paper. And even I think by the time that we wrote about it, that paper had been floated and Leavitt had responded to that the way that academics do. But then years later, Leavitt and John Donahue, the original scholar, went back and re-examined the entire collage of evidence with new data and found the finding to be actually even stronger. So, yeah, we try to do a version of social science storytelling that's really based on fact and reporting and data and fact checking. So I feel good about that.

In terms of what I would do different, the tone of the book, I think, would be totally different. First of all, we were a lot younger. We just were. It's 20 years ago. You're a different person. The world was different. I think we sound like if you read that, we didn't change the book. We thought about it. And I thought, you know, it's not a, I wanted it to be the same book with a different cover. We found a couple typos and there's a new forward. Because it's, You write a book. The book is the book. But I did read it again, and parts of it were a little bit painful, just because we sound like immature and callow. But we were. Levin and I are both. Like, we are a pair of nine-year-olds when you get us together sometime. We just have...

That's the best kind of partnership, though. Well, part of that is great, because it's like, hey, have you ever thought of this? No, what would happen if we did? And then let's go. It's nice to have a partner like that. So I think there is a certain juvenalia in there that I would probably do very differently, but I'm not so sure it'd be better. I think it's a good thing to be in touch with your, not your inner child, but like your actual old child. Well, on that point, what have you learned about yourself in studying everybody else's incentive systems? Hanging out with economists did make me really think about making a lot more decisions on a fully rational basis. Economists bring a cold, not a cold-blooded, but a cold-eyed rationality

to a lot of policy conversations that are very, very important. And I will never give up on that. But if you start looking at everything that way, it makes you a cold person. And so I feel like for a while I tried a form of being as a parent, as a husband, as a friend, that was a little bit like, ah, that really doesn't matter. The data show that doesn't matter. And even though the data show that it doesn't matter, how people feel about it matters, We're all a lot more than what the probabilities say. Probability is very important and data is important, but I feel like the connection between people is far more important. Decency is a virtue that has been appreciated throughout civilization. We see it. We have the ancient writings. I think it's appreciated differently now than it has been in the past, but I think it will be appreciated more in the future. And I think that decency is a kind of foundation upon.

which to build your life, whether personally, professionally, politically, and so on. And so that's a way that I've kind of changed, but that was really getting more back to how I was raised as a kid. That's who my parents were. We could certainly use more decency. What can the Freakonomics mindset offer in this age of misinformation and disinformation? You know, this sounds like the advice of an old man, which is what I'm getting to be. So I can do it. And I can even do it in that voice. Or I say it like that. It sounds more legitimate. I think people need to really. understand their relationships with their phones and with their online world, I see a lot of

very well-educated adults bemoaning what's happening to their children. And when I look at the adults, I'm like, oh, my goodness, physician heal thyself. Like, it's a real issue. I don't mean just addiction. I don't mean just like not being able to go through dinner. Like, I have this thing. I haven't identified what this moment is. It's a moment in a conversation. in person with someone. It could be friends at dinner. It's that moment when someone says something that is just enough of an invitation to, oh, hang on, I'll look it up for you. And then really what they want to do is they want to look at the 19 other things. It's driving them crazy that they're not up to date at the moment. There's just so much evidence to me that our relationship with information

and misinformation is unhealthy. You need time to think. This is something Levitt always preached, and I really came to be a big believer in it, too. One thing that's great about being a university professor, which he was, or being a journalist writer, which I am, is part of your job is to sit and think. And when you think, it's a different process than just reacting. You read about something. You try to say, well, do I have any level of experience to judge whether this is interesting, whether it's important and so on, all those things?

And then you get to live with it for a couple days. It's like a good wintertime stew. It gets a little bit better every day. You're bringing in more and more elements of your thinking to that idea. That's what thinking is. And we not only don't do very much of it, but I feel like we don't encourage very much of it, too. So I think if the question was, which I'm pretty sure it wasn't, what's something? What was the actual question?

Oh, gosh. Finally. He stumped me. I think it might have been something about like Freakonomics. Oh, yeah. What can the Freakonomics mindset offer an age of this? So I think it would be... Thank you for your support.

Appreciate it. It's the least I could do. I think it would be literally an invitation to think of yourself as a thinker. Make some time. Could be 15 minutes. It could be 15 minutes on the treadmill without a podcast. It could be 15 minutes walking the dog without a podcast. It could be talking with someone without phones, without screens.

and really listening to them in a way you haven't before. It could be watching TV, it could be watching a film, could be thinking about that film. You know, my wife is a visual person. She was a photographer, and she looks at art and visual things in a way that I'm learning to after all these years, and I love it. But it took me a long time. And she likes to say, there are picture people like her,

and there are word people like me, and never the twain shall meet. We process things in very, very different ways. People have a lot of different styles of processing and using information. And so I will sometimes now, I'll see a picture. It could be a painting or it could be a scene from a film that I just remember and start to think about that in a way that I never used to do. And so I think if you let yourself be a thinker in that way, it will not only make you more pleasant in yourself, more pleasant to be around other people, but I really think it leads to better insights because insights don't come from that kind of, no, you're wrong, I'm right,

let me shout at you for 30 seconds. That does not lead to any insights at all. It's a very kind of cheap form of entertainment. And the reason I say it's cheap is because it's cruel. It's taking advantage of people who want to learn about these issues of the day and treating them like their entertainment. I think that's the opposite of the way to be. Is there any counterintuitive research that's catching your eye? I'm trying to think through my 1,800 files on my desktop of story ideas. Yeah, there is a lot. The biggest, potentially somewhat counterintuitive idea at the moment is what is AI and machine learning or automation. I think AI has become, I think, a too short, a short hand for a lot of different things. I think that the way that many of us have been thinking about what AI is and does will turn out to look very primitive. Will it destroy jobs? Yes, every technology always has. Will it also create some other jobs within that industry?

Yes, every other industry always has. But will it also do other things that we can't really anticipate yet that might provide a lot of real benefit? A lot of people say the answer to that is no. A lot of people say, if I could live in a world with AI or without, right now I would choose without. I don't feel that way. I look at medical diagnosing, for instance.

There are people who argue people who know a great deal more than me about how this really works, that it's possible that the cost of medical diagnostics goes to close to zero within 10 years. I mean, it makes sense if you think about it. What physicians try to do to diagnose is very, very, very difficult, and it's a lot of science and a lot of art, a lot of experience, and a lot of luck and so on. But if you look at the success rate of reading mammograms now of a human radiologist versus a computer, if that sort of idea can be applied to medical diagnosis, but also to clinical

treatments to cancer treatment and so on, which is now being applied, the gains from that are mind-boggling. And so I think one potentially counterintuitive finding I'm thinking about right now is what are the results from this new digital age, including AI, that we may look back on in 20 or 50 years and say, oh my goodness, how do we live without that? Isn't it wonderful? As our conversation comes to a close, there's one wildcard question in here from TK, and he asks, do you think the stock market's going to crash now or in 2026? And if so, what tips can you give? Nice work, TK. I appreciate that. Is TK like they didn't want to, so in journalism, TK is what you fill in when you don't know the fact, to come?

To come, yeah. Yeah, but do you think that's actually, is that you? Is that what you're saying? This whole thing was just a scam to get me in stock advice. A little insider trading on a Sunday name. So it's interesting you say. So I've been having this conversation a lot. with a lot of people because why was I having this conversation somebody oh I know it wasn't the lady with the horse was it you're paying attention there was a piece somewhere the other day wall street journal maybe about yeah Jason's why I think about how the old advice for retirees was

no you don't want to go like 60% stock and 40% bond to preserve you just want to say 100% stock to the end because if you look at the return on average of course there's more risk in a more volatile market like equities are, but on average, there's more returns. So what are you doing? So that made me think about there have been many, many, many conventional wisdoms about investing, for sure. One of my favorite findings in all of science, and this really comes from a lot of economists at Chicago and elsewhere, is that a low-cost market diversified mutual fund or ETF beats almost anything on average, right? And we know that now. There's a lot of science on that. But if you look at the size of the industry around actively managed funds, and now what we're

going to get, so we're doing an episode on this right now on, you know, private equity is an amazingly interesting topic and something that I've done a medium amount on and continue to do. Something like 20% of the economy is essentially controlled by private equity investment firms, which is a lot up from whatever it was, four or five, maybe 20 years ago. So that has produced a lot of changes in and of itself. But now there's an executive order that will allow anyone with a 401k or other retirement or maybe just with a brokerage account to invest in a version of private equity ETFs or funds. But they won't really be like ETFs.

They can't be traded the same way because they're not liquid, although there will be some kind of conversion. So that leads to a whole other thing about, well, these will be actively managed. And moreover, you know that those fund managers are going to use AI, it's a great tool. So now you're going to have a generation of people investing in AI-aided, actively managed private equity funds, which have a massive amount of non-transparency, illiquidity, and it's kind of a guess. So I think that the conventional wisdoms of investing are constantly needing to be re-examined, and that's one that, am I answering any version of the question that you asked? Yeah, and then some. That's terrific. Well, I'll tell you,

what, your work reminds us that curiosity is a civic virtue. And this book, the podcast, really everything that you have contributed exists as a public service. So thank you. And thank you for your time tonight. It's a delight to be in conversation with you. Congratulations on 20 years, Stephen Dubman. Okay. Once again, that was Jeff Bennett from PBS News Hour in conversation with me, a very chatty me now that I've listened back to it. If I sound like I was having a really good time, that's all thanks to Jeff, the audience, and to the folks at Sixth and I in Washington, D.C., which was built in the early 1900s as synagogue later became an African Methodist Episcopal Church.

And today is an occasional synagogue, but mostly an art center with all kinds of good speakers. If you ever find yourself in D.C. Sixth and I is a good place to go. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Ripon, Ilaria Montenicourt,

Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly, and Teo Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. Why am I talking? Nobody cares about it. I realize, as a writer and as a journalist, I love to think and talk about this stuff, but I realize nobody cares.

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