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 transcribedWhat do Renaissance painting, civil-rights movements, and Olympic cycling have in common? In each case, huge breakthroughs came from taking tiny steps...
Has our culture's obsession with innovation led us to neglect the fact that things also need to be taken care of?
Neuroscientists still have a great deal to learn about the human brain. One recent MRI study sheds some light, finding that a certain kind of storytel...
The process is famously secretive (and conducted in Swedish!) but we pry the lid off at least a little bit.
It facilitates crime, bribery, and tax evasion -- and yet some governments (including ours) are printing more cash than ever. Other countries, meanwhi...
Sure, we all pay lip service to the Madisonian system of checks and balances. But as one legal scholar argues, presidents have been running roughshod...
Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate, likes to say that most Americans are libertarians but don't know it yet. So why can't Li...
To you, it's just a ride-sharing app that gets you where you're going. But to an economist, Uber is a massive repository of moment-by-moment data that...
Internet pioneer Kevin Kelly tries to predict the future by identifying what's truly inevitable. How worried should we be? Yes, robots will probably t...
The gist: we spend billions on end-of-life healthcare that doesn’t do much good. So what if a patient could forego the standard treatment and get a ca...
The comedian, actor -- and now, author -- answers our FREAK-quently Asked Questions.
Standing in line represents a particularly sloppy - and frustrating - way for supply and demand to meet. Why haven't we found a better way to get what...
We seem to have decided that ethnic food tastes better when it's served by people of that ethnicity (or at least something close). Does this make sens...
We Americans may love our democracy -- at least in theory -- but at the moment our feelings toward the federal government lie somewhere between disdai...
Overt discrimination in the labor markets may be on the wane, but women are still subtly penalized by all sorts of societal conventions. How can those...
It's a remarkable ecosystem that allows each of us to exercise control over our lives. But how much control do we truly have? How many of our decision...
Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, has big ambitions but knows he must first master the small stuff. He's also a polymath who relies heavily on...
There are more than twice as many suicides as murders in the U.S., but suicide attracts far less scrutiny. Freakonomics Radio digs through the numbers...
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...
There are all kinds of civics-class answers to that question. But how true are they? Could it be that we like to read about war, politics, and miscell...
