Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner uncovers the hidden side of everything. Why is it safer to fly in an airplane than drive a car? How do we decide whom to marry? Why is the media so full of bad news? Also: things you never knew you wanted to know about wolves, bananas, pollution, search engines, and the quirks of human behavior. To get every show in our network without ads and a monthly bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio, sign up for SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts at http://apple.co/SiriusXM.
829 episodes transcribedThe serial entrepreneur Miki Agrawal loves to talk about the bodily functions that make most people flinch. That's why she's building a business aroun...
In their chase for a global audience, American movie studios spend billions to make their films look amazing. But almost none of those dollars stay in...
What happens when a public-health researcher deep in coal country argues that mountaintop mining endangers the entire community? Hint: it doesn't go v...
The psychologist Angela Duckworth argues that a person's level of stick-to-itiveness is directly related to their level of success. No big surprise th...
We assembled a panel of smart dudes -- a two-time Super Bowl champ; a couple of NFL linemen, including one who's getting a math Ph.D. at MIT; and our...
For years, economists promised that global free trade would be mostly win-win. Now they admit the pace of change has been "traumatic." This...
Just a few decades ago, more than 90 percent of 30-year-olds earned more than their parents had earned at the same age. Now it's only about 50 percent...
The Daily Show host grew up as a poor, mixed-race South African kid going to three churches every Sunday. So he has a sui generis view of America — es...
Starting in the late 1960s, the Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman began to redefine how the human mind actually works. Michael Lew...
What if the thing we call "talent" is grotesquely overrated? And what if deliberate practice is the secret to excellence? Those are the clai...
In this busy time of year, we could all use some tips on how to get more done in less time. First, however, a warning: there's a big difference betwee...
By some estimates, medical error is the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. How can that be? And what's to be done? Our third and final episode i...
How do so many ineffective and even dangerous drugs make it to market? One reason is that clinical trials are often run on "dream patients"...
We tend to think of medicine as a science, but for most of human history it has been scientific-ish at best. In the first episode of a three-part seri...
The restaurant business model is warped: kitchen wages are too low to hire cooks, while diners are put in charge of paying the waitstaff. So what happ...
Some of our most important decisions are shaped by something as random as the order in which we make them. The gambler's fallacy, as it's known, affec...
"Tell Me Something I Don't Know" is a live game show hosted by Stephen J. Dubner of "Freakonomics Radio." He has always had a miss...
Societies where people trust one another are healthier and wealthier. In the U.S. (and the U.K. and elsewhere), social trust has been falling for deca...
The U.S. president is often called the "leader of free world." But if you ask an economist or a Constitutional scholar how much the occupant...
A tiny behavioral-sciences startup is trying to improve the way federal agencies do their work. Considering the size (and habits) of most federal agen...
