Freakonomics Radio - Why Is There So Much Ground Beef in the World? (Special Feature)

Episode Date: November 7, 2017

In this live episode of "Tell Me Something I Don't Know," you'll learn about carcass balancing, teen sleeping, and brand naming. Joining Stephen J. Dubner as co-host is Alex Wagner (CBS This Morning Saturday); author A.J. Jacobs (It's All Relative) is the live fact-checker.

Hey there, Stephen Dubner. This is a special episode of our live podcast, Tell Me Something I Don't Know. You'll learn about the hidden side of ground beef, why it's good to let teenagers sleep in, and how to name a brand. You can subscribe to Tell Me Something I Don't Know wherever you get your podcasts, and if you want to come on stage to tell me something I don't know, please visit TMSIDK.com and click be on the show. Hope you enjoy. Tell Me Something I Don't Know is sponsored by The Future According to Now. How often do you hear about some new technology and think, yeah, that's cool, but does it actually matter? If you're skeptical about innovation, check out The Future According to Now.

It's a new podcast from Atlantic Rethink, the branded content studio at The Atlantic, and Fidelity Investments. Each episode explores a tech innovation that has real potential to change our lives in the foreseeable future. That's The Future According to Now, available wherever you listen to podcasts. Why do I read? Why do I have conversations? Why do I travel? Why do I have to go to school? Why do I pay attention? Why do I pay attention? Because I want to be amused. Because I want to get outside my comfort zone. But mostly. Mostly.

Mostly. Mostly because. Because I want to find out stuff. Find out stuff. Find out stuff. Stuff. Because I want you to tell me something I don't know. Good evening, I'm Stephen Dubner and this is Tell Me Something I Don't Know,

recorded live tonight at Joe's Pub in New York City. We have got a crowd full of smart people, and we will bring them on stage to tell us something interesting or puzzling, maybe even amazing. If it all goes as planned, we'll all be a bit smarter by the time we're through. Joining me tonight as co-host is the Atlantic contributing editor and CBS This Morning Saturday co-anchor, Alex Wagner. It is a pleasure to be here. Aloha, Stephen. Aloha.

Alex, let's see what we know about you so far. We know that you grew up in Washington, D.C., in what I would call a professionally democratic household. We know that besides co-hosting CBS This Morning Saturday, you co-host the Radio Atlantic podcast, and you cohabit and co-parent the new baby with your husband, Sam Kass, who's a former White House chef for President Obama. We also know, Alex, that you worked for George Clooney's anti-genocide organization. And that Vogue magazine called you

delightfully profane, so I'm looking forward to that. And Alex Wagner, why don't you... This is an explicit podcast, is it not? You know, we have to pay... I should have checked. You know that little red E with a square? You know how much that costs?

Yeah, a lot. To put that on iTunes? Well, a f***ing lot. Okay. You're welcome, Stephen. Let's just be passing the hat for the E rating. Yep. So, Alex Wagner, why don't we begin by you telling something we don't know about you, please.

In second grade, everyone, all the kids in the class, had drawn pictures of what they wanted to be when they grew up. My mom and dad, professional Democrats, as you called them, said, oh, and what does Alex want to be? Surely it's president of the United States or astronaut. And my second grade teacher looked and said, well, actually, your daughter said she'd like to be a makeup artist. What happened there? Why didn't you become that? You know, I learned that I hate makeup, as it turns out, which is why television is a weird profession for me.

Alex Wagner, very happy to have you here tonight. Happy to be here. Let's explain how it works. Guests will come on stage to tell us some interesting fact or idea or story about a topic of their choosing. Then Alex and I will hear them out, we'll ask some questions, and then our live audience will vote for a winner. The vote is based on three simple criteria. Number one, did they tell us something we truly did not know?

Number two, was it worth knowing? And number three, was it demonstrably true? Since truth is kind of, sort of important, we've got on stage tonight a real live human fact checker. Please welcome the much beloved A.J. Jacobs. A.J. is the author of five wonderful books, including the forthcoming It's All Relative, Adventures Up and Down the World's Family Tree. A.J., can you give us a fun fact from the new book? Well, Stephen, as you may know, most of us have Neanderthal ancestors.

Speak for yourself. Are you denied? Don't deny it. Be proud. The Neanderthals and Homo sapiens mixed it up way back when. So your great-great-great-great times 15,000 or so, Grandma and Grandpa were a Neanderthal. And my favorite fact about Grandma and Grandpa Neanderthal is they're not as dumb as you think. Don't believe the stereotypes. In fact, according to scientists, Neanderthals, they likely have the gift of speech and apparently had a high-pitched, raspy voice like Julia Child. That's literally the description, like Julia Child. Could Julia Child have actually

been a Neanderthal? That's a good question. I'm just asking for a friend. We gotta literally the description. Could Julia Child have actually been a Neanderthal? That's a good question. I'm just asking for a friend. We got to get her DNA. Well, AJ, thanks for Neanderthal facts. Thanks for being here tonight. I'm excited to play our little game show together. Let's start. Would you please welcome our first guest? Her name is Sam Garwin. Hey, Sam, what do you do? I am a butcher and the CEO of Fleischer's Craft Butchery here in New York City. Excellent. All right, Sam, so I'm ready. So are Alex Wagner and A.J. Jacobs.

What do you know that's worth knowing that you think we don't know? Well, I have a hypothetical. You're looking to shop at a whole animal butcher shop. Maybe it's Fleischer's. Maybe it's one of the other butcher shops we have in New York. You walk in to this whole animal butcher shop and you're in the mood for beef. Which cut do you think the butcher really, really wants you to stock up your refrigerator with. So which cut does, should we assume it's something either very expensive or something from maybe a body part that not a lot of people want to put in their mouths? I can't confirm or deny your assumptions. You can't, yeah. No.

And we're assuming this is a cow. This is, yeah, beef. We're talking beef right now. Now, let me ask you, you said a whole animal butcher shop? Is that what you called it? So that's a thing? And what does that mean? Yeah, well, you know, in the 50s when farms were told to really get big or get out,

there was a shift in the way butcher shops operated. So it used to be that a butcher shop would work with farmers and people would have rails where the whole animals came in and then they'd be broken down. And now there are very few number of butcher shops or even companies that operate that way. But a whole animal butcher shop would be considered an operation that really goes direct to the farm and purchases from the farmer in units of whole animals. And that's how the farmer sells. And the bigger distribution system then is, I want 1,000 pounds of X and zero pounds of Y. Correct. Okay, all right.

Let me just, what's the shelf life for a cow carcass? Interestingly, the longer you leave something as a whole piece, the longer you can go without actually turning it into something else. So that's what dry aging is. Yeah. Can you explain? I've always wondered about that because if I hang up a chicken breast the way that you hang up... Don't do that. Don't do that. And are there other meats? I guess pork, right? You dry age pork or you... There are some people in the culinary world who are playing around with aging pork and aging lamb. In my experience in the butcher shops that I have worked in, it's not a good idea. They're crazy. It doesn't age the same way.

And I honestly don't know the science behind it, but it gets kind of like tacky and slimy and smells weird. So ideally, when you are properly dry aging something, you put it in refrigeration that also has really, really great airflow. And if you're getting very fancy about it, you might have salt or you might actually put a bacterial culture into the walk-in refrigerator where you have that, just like you might do it with a cheese or something like that, kind of like a starter culture. And it can sit there forever? Not forever. The oldest piece of meat I have ever had the questionable pleasure of eating was 365 days old.

All right. So the question was, what kind of meat or what cut in a whole animal butcher shop we think the butcher would most likely want us to buy, right? Okay. So why don't you tell us the answer because we're not getting there. So the answer is ground beef, which is really not glamorous to most people. But when you are a whole animal butcher shop or a whole animal company,

there's this concept of carcass balancing. And actually the entire- Carcass balancing? Mm-hmm, that's a phrase that we use. Balancing. That sounds like a Cirque du Soleil move. Yes. So does this phrase that we use. Balancing. That sounds like a Cirque du Soleil move. Yes. So does this mean that they direct cows to gain more weight in certain spots and others

before they kill them, or this happens after the killing? This is an after the killing thing. I mean, there definitely are people who focus on genetics, but actually the entire meat industry is trying to carcass balance. Because if you think about it, on a single cow, there's only so many steaks. So you're talking like 16 ribeyes, 10 New York strips, two whole tenderloins, two flanks, two stigarts, basically two of every steak except for the hanger. There's only one hanger. And then the rest is braising cuts, roasts, and ground beef. So if you're sourcing an entire

animal for your butcher shop, you actually have to move those parts kind of in equilibrium. You have to make sure that you're using up the ground beef at the same rate that you are moving steaks. Otherwise, you're going to end up with a big pile of ground beef, and that's when it's time to have a freezer sale or make chili. Dare I ask, when we talk about ground beef, does that come from specific parts of the animal? It depends. I mean, the most basic way to think about ground beef is just the lean to fat ratio, but it could come from any muscle on the animal. So for example, the shank meat, your calf muscle, very, very tough. So there's a trade-off always between how much a muscle has been used and how tough it's going to be, but the tougher muscle has been used and how tough it's going to be.

But the tougher it is, also the more flavor it's going to have. So that's the reason that a tenderloin is great. You can cook it in five minutes. You can cut it with a fork. But it's never going to have the same flavor as a pot roast, which you have to cook low and slow for six hours. There's also little bits and pieces that you can't turn into a steak. Some of us are steak. Some of us are ground beef.

But we all belong in this world. You call it a cow? Well, a cow technically is a female. We would call it a beef animal, maybe. You call it a beef animal? I don't know. I don't know. Once it's dead, it's beef.

Once it's dead, it's beef. We would call it a beef. Like, honestly, you might say a beef or something like that. So you get 16 ribeyes, you said, right? Right. So just like humans, you have ribs. And so that's where the ribeyes come from. So if you cut them by hand in between each rib, you end up with eight of them per side.

If you cut them on a bandsaw and you cut them to a specific thickness, you could get a few more, a few less. So here's my question. I can understand that ground beef is less expensive than steaks because there's apparently a lot of it, right? And also people may prefer steaks. But if there are 16 at least ribeyes in a beef and there are only like two flanks, two skirts, and one hanger, I know those have gotten more expensive lately. They've become more in demand lately. But for a long time, those were really cheap. Why would ribeyes be relatively more abundant than those and yet also relatively more expensive, at least in the past? Right. So there's a couple of reasons for that.

One is that these days, a lot of ribeyes are dry aged. It's one of the few pieces of meat that you can do that with because you dry age the whole rack of ribs. Then if you cut some off the edges, you're still left with a decent piece of meat and it's aged. There's another piece of it, which is how many bone-in cuts there are. So yeah, there are tons of steaks. And these days you can get more and more cuts from the shoulder, which we love to do at our butcher shops. But there's not very many that have bones in them that you can then put on the grill. To that end, how many pounds of ground beef do you get from the average cow? At least 200. Whoa.

Wowzer. No wonder you're trying to shovel it out the door. That's a lot of burger. Now, is this why when you go to kind of farm-to-table-y restaurants, you see a lot of grass-fed burger and not a lot of grass-fed steak? Absolutely. So there really is no boxed meat supply chain right now for pasture-raised animals. There's pretty much, if you want a pasture-raised animal, you have to either get it directly from the farmer or seek out one of these small butcher shops. So if you're a restaurant, it's the same deal. Either you go

directly to the farmer and then you're on the hook for balancing the carcass, which nobody wants to do with a notable exception of Gramercy Tavern here in New York City. They actually buy whole animals and... Spread it to their different restaurants or... No, they use it all in-house. Just within the restaurant. They use it all at Gramercy. They special the steaks.

So you will never see a steak listed on their menu because each server has different steaks that they... No way. Yes. Each server in the restaurant can offer a different part of the beef that night? That's right. That is pretty cool. So, okay, so if you're eating there, what do you ask for? What's your favorite part of the beef?

Well, you can't ask for it. You don't get to choose. If you get the server who has the hanger steak, you can order that. Oh, I see. No kidding. All right. Well, let's say you know which server has which. I'm just asking you personally as the butcher.

Basically, that was a terrible way of asking you, what's your favorite kind of beef to eat? Okay. Well, as a butcher at a whole animal shop, my answer has to be that different cuts are good for different things. So I have no true favorite, but I am a big fan of the flat iron steak, which is a cut from the shoulder. The point is that it is both tender and flavorful and it's really thin. So it cooks super quickly and I love it. You can dry age all of the cow, right? And to that end, why don't more people dry age other parts of the cow? So a lot of small butcher shops will hang their carcasses for one to two weeks before doing anything to it. And that helps firm up the meat because as it's hanging there,

water will start to evaporate. And when the water evaporates, the flavor concentrates a little bit, and then it also improves the texture. And so there's no reason you can't. But if you think about the big industrial beef operations they're you know it's pennies that they're trying to get so they actually are motivated very much to keep their weights up so they want it to be as wet as possible and so they've been kind of invented this term of wet aging which is when you take yeah it doesn't sound as good um where you take a cut of meat and as soon as you can, you vacuum seal it. And that way any, this is a really attractive word,

but any purge that comes off of it is kept in the bag, and then the customer pays for that. It would be a good name for a punk band, though, Beef Purge. Isn't that just amazing? It's so fascinating for you to bring your beefy knowledge to us. AJ now, you've heard a lot from Sam about carcass balancing. Is there anything that you need to flag or anything more you'd like to tell us? Yeah, just a couple of quick things. First, I looked it up. The gender neutral noun is bovine. That covers cow or bull, or a cow who identifies

as a bull. So just if you want to be safe. Hopefully this imbalance will not be a problem in a few years because several teams of scientists are working on something called clean meat, cultured meat. But you take a cell from a cow and you create a hamburger or a steak, and it's actually coming quite soon in the next few years. And the amazing thing about this, you don't have to be restricted to cows or pigs. You could have rhinos, giraffes, humans, ethical cannibalism. And another business idea, celebrity meat. So like a fantastic Neanderthal burgers for everyone. Sam Garwin, thank you so much for playing.

Tell me something I don't know. Would you please welcome our next guest, Marco Hafner. Alright, Marco, where are you from? What do you do? I'm a senior economist at RAND Europe, which is the European affiliate of the RAND Corporation. RAND, right, which is kind of like the CIA.

Kind of. Yeah. And you live where? I live in London, but originally I'm from Switzerland. Uh-huh. And why are you in New York? I'm just visiting, yes. Extra for you, Stephen. It's the first time, actually, yes, for me in New York. So you're just another Swiss guy that works for a british branch of the cia who comes to new york for his first and only time to be on a podcast all right um what do you have to tell us marco so my question today is um across the u.s the majority of middle and high schools start at 8 a.m. or earlier. So what would be the impact on the economy if schools would start later? Impact on the economy if schools were to start later? I'm assuming we're talking about the parents of children who are going to school later and sort of how they would affect the economy. Not necessarily, no.

Interesting. Now, we know i've heard and i have teenagers so i hear it directly from them that teenagers need more sleep because it's an intense physiological developmental stage not an intense emotional developmental stage let me clarify but intense physiological um so, does it have something to do with that? Yes, you go to the right direction. Something to do with sleep. And I'm assuming that sleep patterns established in adolescence have a long-term effect on productivity in adult years?

We're getting there. Very Swiss answer. Yeah. That's not how we do things here, Marco. We just come out and say whatever we're thinking, even if it's not based on fact. That's not what I meant. All right, Alex, let's start with this.

Let's narrow it down. Do we think it's positive or negative? I'm assuming it's positive if school started later just because that's sort of where the trend is going in education, right? Here's what I'm thinking, though. Let's say you get the teenagers up really early and you get them off to school early, get them home by 2. If you get them in bed by 8,

then they can't be out doing mayhem and destroying the economy. Or buying things. So that could have an adverse effect on the economy. Marco, I think Alex and I have reached an impasse here, and we'd love you to use your crafty Swiss knowledge to bring us out of it. So you may have heard or you've experienced yourself that teenagers have different sleep-wake cycles compared to adults or young children.

So based on that, to accommodate the different sleep-wake cycles, major medical organizations recommend that middle and high schools don't start before 8.30 a.m. in the morning. And beyond the health benefits of that, actually later school start time could have a very beneficial effect on the economy. So our own research shows that if nationwide schools would start at 8.30 a.m., that would add about $9 billion a year to the U.S. economy in terms of larger GDP. So to put that into perspective, that's roughly about the annual revenue of Major League Baseball. Wow. Wait, it adds to GDP because teenagers sleep, they get more sleep, meaning they do better in school, and then that leads to increased productivity? That's the idea? Yes, they do better in school.

So it has been found that one hour more sleep increases the probability of graduation or attending college by somewhere between 8% to 13%. And plus, a lack of sleep is heavily associated with car crashes. And car crashes is one of the leading causes of death among American teenagers. And when you're dead, you can't contribute to the economy. Exactly. It's difficult, yes. That would also mean, presumably, teenagers, many of whom drive themselves to school, if they're going to school a little bit later, maybe that's also when congestion is generally less, and that might increase productivity for all those other people who are trying to get to work, or is that not part of your calculation?

We haven't looked at that, but definitely there could be one. Check it out. Would you, Marco, get back to us when you... I did read somewhere, because there is a movement to push for a later school start, that teenagers would just take advantage of that like they take advantage of so many other things, and stay up even later. And so actually, they wouldn't accrue the sleep benefits, because they'd stay up till one o'clock or two o'clock in the morning and then get up at eight o'clock. That's a good point. But interestingly, research shows that if school start times are delayed,

teenagers get more sleep. The meets on average, they go to bed roughly at the same time, but they get up in the morning later. And actually, interestingly, they benefit from the better quality of sleep that tends to come their way in the early hours of the morning. And that means the school lets out a little bit later, right? Yes. Do you lose the gains by having a later exit time?

Not necessarily. And also, it would leave you less time between school and after-school activities to smoke dope. A.J. Jacobs, Marco Hafner has been telling us that starting school later would not only be kind of a more humane thing to do on some level, but would actually increase GDP. Does that sound remotely plausible? Well, I think the gist is true. I cannot vouch for the dollar amount unless I get a doctorate in statistics, so I'll get back to you in a few years. But it's definitely true that it would help. And I also think, my kids will kill me for saying this, but that summer vacation should be

shorter. That would help our economy. And by the way, since I am a fact checker, I did have to check. And the U.S. funeral industry does account for about $20 billion in economic activity. Oh, so we'd have to subtract your nine from that 20. This is morbid. It's not such a big win anymore, is it, Marco? Marco Hafner, thank you so much for playing Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Great job.

It is time now for a quick break. When we return, more guests will make Alex Wagner tell us some things we don't know. If you would like to be a guest on a future show or attend a future show, please visit TMSIDK.com. You can follow us on social media at TMSIDK underscore show. We will be right back. Welcome back to Tell Me Something I Don't Know.

My name is Stephen Dubner. Our fact checker is AJ Jacobs, and tonight's co-host is Alex Wagner. Before we get back to the game, we have some lightning round questions written especially for you, Alex Wagner. You ready? Fantastic. Very much so.

Okay, here we go. Your Twitter bio says you are, quote, a person trying hard to finish a book. What's the problem? I had no idea that books were so damn long. I am writing a book. It is actually, I will say, nearing completion. We are going into galleys, which is a terrifying concept. But I've been working on it for three and a half years, which is a really long time in television world. Is it a memoir to some degree?

It is to some degree a memoir. It's about immigration identity, and there are Neanderthal percentages in it, actually much like AJ's book. There you go. Well, we all look forward to reading that. Alex, as noted earlier, you grew up in a very democratic household

with your mother, Sway Thant, and your late father, Carl, who was a political consultant who also co-chaired Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. Pretend, however, for a second that somehow, maybe as a teenager, you saw the light and became a Republican. How would you have gone about telling your parents?

I would write a note and pack all my belongings because I would never be allowed in the house again. As we heard, your husband, Sam Cass, former White House chef, is he actually good at cooking or is that just a thing you can get away with at the White House? He is a very good chef and he is a very fast chef,

which matters in the White House. Name something that you make better than him, however. I make better meatballs, spaghetti and meatballs. Good to know. Any day of the week. Come on over, guys. If you could host or co-host your own show about anything except politics, what would it be? The Joy of Painting 2.

I'm playing Bob Ross. Alex, you were a trend forecaster for three years. So considering your training, which I'm sure was extensive in trend forecasting, list three trends that we can expect in the next year. Very specifically, please. Okay, number one, drop waist MC Hammer harem pants. Get ready for them.

Number two, croquis. Do you guys remember them? The eyeglasses thing still useful okay number three bone up on how to launder money for russian oligarchs because we're gonna be talking about that a lot in 2018 you heard it here first ladies and gentlemen alex wagner well done all right let's get back to the game. Would you please welcome our next guest, Doug Howarth. Doug, why don't you tell us where you're from, what do you do?

I'm from Los Angeles. I'm the CEO of Multidimensional Economic Evaluators. We figure out what things are worth, and then we figure out if things are overpriced or underpriced for them. Okay, so you help firms derive the most value that they can from their business, essentially? Yes, and we also help them figure out where new products should lie. So we find gaps in markets, and it tells you where you might be able to place a new product where you wouldn't have any competition. All right, what do you have to tell us tonight, Doug?

Why is underpriced beef bad? Why is underpriced beef bad is your question. This is a podcast sponsored by the Beef Board, isn't it? I feel like somehow big beef got to our guests tonight.

We're all on the take for big beef tonight. Okay, so I'm assuming here beef is an expensive product. It's an impactful product in terms of the environment and it's expensive to grow. Beef finds itself

in the nexus of several other industries. So if the pricing is off, it could have repercussions around other industries, right? It could, and it's got a repercussion in its own industry. That's where we're getting at here. Oh, okay. Yeah, the beef wholesale industry.

What we've discovered here is that people buy ground beef based on the leanness and package size. Okay. And so we've actually derived an equation that predicts that. That predicts what they want or what they should be priced at? Predicts the sustainable price. That's a very important concept in what we do. Sustainable price as a function of that leanness in package size.

So people are paying for the convenience of the smaller packages, and they're paying for the leanness of the ground beef. And at the wholesale level, in January 2012, we discovered one point that was $0 34 cents a pound under its predicted price. Now, it's 34 cents a pound times 290 million pounds. That's a $100 million boo-boo that they created because they didn't understand their market. Wholesalers are underpricing beef, you're saying. In January 2012, yes, they had one product underpriced. It was $100 billion air

because there's so many pounds being sold at that price. What industry is most far off base when it comes to pricing? Well, the ground beef was pretty far off, but the aerospace industry is very off base on a lot of things. In Albuquerque, somebody built a business jet that was only priced at one third of what it was worth, and they lost a billion dollars, and they went bankrupt. And had they known what they were doing, they wouldn't have gone bankrupt. I looked up to see what is the most overpriced industry, and according to some semi-reputable websites, it is movie theater concessions.

But isn't that where they make all their money? This says 900%. I don't know about that. I think everybody thinks about this, what AJ just raised. And we kind of know, like Alex said, well, that's where they make the money. Have you ever done any work in the concession pricing industry? We're starting to look at beer right now. What's the value of a good beer in, you know, Mojave, California, which is a little small town versus downtown Manhattan,

sometimes you see some beers that are overpriced and you wonder, would they make more money if they dropped the price? It's very important to figure out where that median point is so that you don't lose money. And that's what this is designed to do. And each market probably has a different story, right? Oh, yes, absolutely. Consumers in New York are more likely to pay for overpriced drinks yes well that's the that's kind of the whole point yes but we get our beef cheap so it all kind of works out in the end uh aj jacobs doug has been telling us about um underpriced beef and a hundred million dollar boo-boo you said uh do you have anything to support or refute? Well, there isn't a huge amount of literature yet

online about this, but I did run across the most expensive beef in the world, to continue with the beef theme. There's a butcher in France who serves a $3,200 rib steak, and he claims that every steak is 15 years old and kept in deep freeze. And the cows live in forests and they are talked to every day to lower their stress level. AJ, thank you. And Doug Howard, thank you so much for playing Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Nicely done. It's time for one more quick break. When we return, our final guest,

and then you, our live audience, will pick a winner that's right after this. Welcome back. Would you please welcome our final guest of the evening, Jonathan Bell. Jonathan Bell, nice to see you. What do you do? I run a brand naming agency. So over the years we've named some pretty cool stuff. We named Singular, we named SiriusXM.

We named the recent Call of Duty game, Infinite Warfare. We named One World, the Airline Alliance. Now, I do have two questions before you even proceed. Number one, you say you named SiriusXM. Correct. Wasn't that a merger of Sirius and XM? Thank you. I should have clarified.

I named Sirius before it merged with XM. So it was actually called CD Radio. Okay. And so I came in and came up with the name Sirius. Because I was thinking, what were your choices? Sirius XM? XM Sirius. And that'll be $4 million.

The other thing I found curious is you introduced yourself and said that you run a brand naming consultancy, but you didn't tell us its name. So it took me a long time to figure this out, but my company is called WANT, W-A-N-T. So the idea is that it's a call to action, WANT branding, but also the premise is that any brand, a brand is really a product that's wanted. It has a desirable component to it. So that's where I came up with it. I like it, especially in print, but with your lovely British accent, it sounds a little like won't, which is probably not what you were going

for. Everything I say sounds so much better, Stephen. It does. You know, there was a study that showed that American assessments of British speakers, basically we overjudge their IQ by about 15%. I think that's about right. Yeah. All right. So you came here to tell us something we don't know. What do you have for us? So when we are creating brand names for product services and companies, what do you think the failure rate is on a naming project? What do you mean by failure rate? So if we generate a list of 50 names, how many of those will fail? Based on the SiriusXM story, I'll say 50%. 50%, okay. Alex?

75%. But wait, I have to say, if he's the brand naming guy, I know. It must be like 101%. Yeah, so it's been like 98%. Yeah. Like what have you named in your life? Did you name your kid?

My son, and I still can't believe we named him. I'm like, God, we got to do that, and we didn't have to apply for a license. What's his name? Cy. Don't say anything negative. So Jonathan, do you have kids? I'm curious. I do.

What are their names? Lucas and Louisa. Did you pay someone for those names? I had nothing to do with it. I let my wife pick the decision. See? All right. So we've been sniffing around at a number that we think is somewhere between, let's say, 0 and 99.

We've narrowed it down there. What is the actual failure rate? So it's about 95%. Oh, right. It's a very high percentage in terms of failure rate because you've got so many names out there. You've got trademark issues. You've got URLs.

I think there's something like 170,000 words in an English dictionary, real words, and something like 300 million companies or company brands. So do the math, right? Are there trademark trolls? Like there are patent trolls. In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of people just lock up patents. Are people locking up trademark names? You can't lock up a trademark because you have to demonstrate use. It's not like buying a URL. So there's a lot of complexities and nuances of trademark law, which is why trademark lawyers exist to solve some of those issues and challenges. What's harder to name,

a company or a product? I would say a company, just because you've normally got more stakeholders, more people that need to put their fingerprints on it and have an opinion. Typically, companies have much longer durations. Products get named further down at the management ranks, whereas everyone can be aligned on a final name, and you walk into the CEO's office, and they might say, don't like it. What else you got? And then you're back to square one. So it's very, very difficult. Which industry spends the most naming its products? I think of the pharmaceutical industry is one that must spend a lot. Yes, it does. Because pharmaceutical naming is very, very complex. Because not only do you

have to surpass and make past the hurdle rates of trademarks, the FDA actually needs to approve your final brand name. And the reason is because people can die if they're given the wrong prescription drug. Therefore, there's a higher hurdle rate in terms of making sure the pharmaceutical brand is distinctive and unique versus everything else. That's why you see these really crazy, weird- Six-faultier. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. There was a situation back in the early 90s, I think, where there were two drugs on the market, LOSEC, L-O-S-E-C, and Lasix, L-A-S-I-X.

And someone died because they got the wrong prescription drugs. So the FDA forced Losec to change its name to Prilosec, right? What's the ideation process for the pharma naming? Very complicated. I mean, you've got to understand some of the science. You've got to be very careful about not making false claims. You can't call something like cure perfect. You can't say the drug's going to work. In terms of the industry that you find gets your creative juices flowing the most, it sounds like obviously pharma's really difficult. But is there one where you're like, oh, we have a fashion client,

and this is going to be fun to do because the process is? Yeah, I mean, cars are pretty cool. We've just named seven cruise ships for Royal Caribbean and Celebrity Cruise Lines. Really? But the cruise ships are always like Swedish Princess and like Norwegian Queen. No, so we worked for two years with Royal Caribbean and we named Quantum, Anthem, Ovation. And then we just named another ship Harmony. So that's the biggest thing I've ever named. I mean, these things are huge. What do you think when you see a car company like Audi names its models like A6 and A7? Does that just make you feel like a barber walking around in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco,

and can't get your hands on them? Well, not really, because there's actually a lot of wisdom to that. Oh, come on. No, it's true. You know, a car name with some acronyms afterwards puts all the emphasis back on Audi. When you're a Ford and you've got Explorer and you've got a dozen or two dozen different names, that sort of takes away from the Ford name and means you've got to build equity in those different car brands. And Jonathan, quick question.

How do you rate the name Tell Me Something I Don't Know? Kind of long, hence the reason why it turns into an acronym. AJ, Jonathan Bell is telling us that naming things for business, for commercial purposes, is very difficult. High rate of rejection, etc., etc. Anything to dispute that? I think that's very true. And also, there's another problem he didn't mention, which is that how brand names translate in other languages. And there are many examples. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Chevrolet introduced their car Nova to South America.

But in Spanish, Nova means no va, as in it doesn't go, it doesn't work. So it's huge to that. But wait, actually, it sold just fine. Everyone says, oh, here's an example of the stupidity of corporate America. But actually, it sold fine because I guess there are a lot of ironic car buyers in South America.

AJ, thank you so much. And Jonathan Bell, thanks so much for playing. Thank you. Tell me something I don't know. Can we please give one more hand to all our guests tonight? Great stuff all around. It is time now for our live audience to pick a winner. But first, Alex Wagner, A.J. Jacobs, and I will each weigh in with our favorites.

Remember the three criteria. Did our guests tell us something we really did not know? Was it worth knowing? And was it demonstrably true? So Alex, I'm curious to know what particularly intrigued you tonight. I mean, look, did I know that teens not being able to sleep in

was costing the US economy $9 billion? No. I did not know that there was a $3,200 rib steak. I got to go with Sam Garwin, though, because I did not know there were 200 pounds of ground beef on the average bovine carcass. It kind of makes you feel that even after you eat a big burger, that you should eat a lot more. It's just the tip of the iceberg. It's literally just the tip of the iceberg. Er.

AJ Jacobs, what tickled you tonight? Well, I was delighted with many of them. Jonathan Bell, I thought, was interesting, partly because I have a son named Lucas, and he has a son named Lucas. So this is a huge relief, because if my son ever complains, I can tell him this is the scientifically correct name for a boy. I found Doug Howarth's presentation so compelling, because I love to know that there are people out there trying to determine through means that I cannot begin to understand where things should be priced, because I think that's a pretty important and interesting thing. But listen, our votes are non-binding. You are the people who have the real vote. So it is time now for you to

take out your phones, follow the texting instructions on the screen. Okay, so who will it be? Sam Garwin with Carcass Balancing. Marco Hafner with Why You Should Let Teenagers Sleep Even More Than They Do, Doug Howarth with The Law of Value and Demand, we'll call it, please spread the word. Give it a nice rating on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to listen to the show without ads, sign up for Stitcher Premium at stitcherpremium.com slash tellme. Thank you. Okay, the audience vote is in. Once again, thanks to all our guest presenters. Our winner tonight, thank you so much for telling us about carcass balancing Sam Garwin. Congratulations. Sam, to commemorate your victory, we'd like to present you

with this certificate of impressive knowledge. It reads, I, Stephen Dubner, in collaboration with Alex Wagner and A.J. Jacobs do solemnly swear that Sam Garwin told us something we did not know for which we are eternally grateful. And that is our show for tonight. I hope we told you something you did not know. Huge thanks to Alex and A.J., to our guests, and thanks especially to you for coming to play Tell Me Something. I don't know. On the next Tell Me Something I Don't Know, John McWhorter joins me as co-host for a show about bugs. Bugs of every variety you can imagine. I have often

found slugs to be uniquely disgusting creatures. I see them coming out of the garden and it reminds me of what one advantage might be of dying. That's next time on Tell Me Something I Don't Know.

Tell Me Something I Don't Know is produced by Dubner Produ productions in association with Stitcher. Our staff includes Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, Brian Gutierrez, Dan Dizzula,

Rachel Jacobs, Nathan Rossborough, and David Herman, who also composed our theme music. Thanks also to our good friends at Qualtrics, whose online survey software has been so helpful in putting on this show. You can subscribe to tell me something. Don't Know on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or on TMSIDK.com. You can also listen without ads by signing up for Stitcher Premium at StitcherPremium.com.

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