Freakonomics

“When I read that, I immediately thought about when Steven Dubner and I began writing Freconomics. We spent a few months mapping out the book together, abiding by all sorts of unconscious rules. we had about what a non-fiction book should look like.”

“A lot of the content from the Hartley podcast was used in a rather snarky article that the magazine published titled, 'Why Freakonomics Failed to Transform Economics.'”

“The main argument the article makes is that Freakonomics is a failure because it didn't change economics, but that premise is so absurd that I wasn't sure it deserved rebutting because Freakonomics is a book written for a popular audience.”

“My own experience with movies is somewhat like what you're describing; they made a documentary about our book for economics, and it played in theaters.”

“So then we talked, and I have to say it took all of your persuasive powers not even to make a book like Freakonomics happen, but even to get Dubner and me to talk on the phone because I would say that we left that New York Times piece not particularly cordial because again I was super anti-social at the”

“And we should say that you wrote about this in the original Freakonomics book, correct? We did, so it started out just as academic research.”

“especially in first book for economics because we talked through a lot of that before”

“I don't think I'm making this up; I think I remember that the publisher even initially insisted that your name had to be in a smaller typeface—you know, on the cover of Freakonomics.”

“Have you ever gone back and read just chunks of Freakonomics or Super Freakonomics?”

“Well, I don't know about that, but for me, the biggest thing that Freakonomics did is that it opened up options outside of academics, and honestly, much to my surprise, a lot of those activities were a lot more fun than academics.”

“Alright, so let me ask you this, had you not written Freakonomics, do you think you would have won a Nobel Prize by now for the body of academic research you've done?”

“so we wrote a bit in or first and second Freakonomics books about different kinds of cheating you mentioned School teachers who looked the other way we wrote about school teachers who actually did the cheating to make their students test scores higher”

“you know why I watched it is because Freakonomics was on it it was in the first season wait Freakonomics was mentioned you had a cameo who was the super smart daughter”

“And by that I mean Freakonomics was by Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and by putting us out of alphabetical order, it was like I was a star, and you were the hired hand.”

“You want to swallow a lot of pride to write Freakonomics!”

“Not for the cash, because honestly, even though the deal for Freakonomics was relatively large for book deals, my half wasn't that much larger than the contracts I was already getting for other books, so it wasn't really that.”

“Obviously, our two lives would look really different if we'd never written Freakonomics.”

“So I did think through all this, but when it worked with Freakonomics, it was just like, it wasn't so much joy like, 'Oh my God, this is great for me.'”

“When Freakonomics happened, my biggest priority in life was having a family and raising a family and hopefully trying to live in New York City.”

“so a lot of the younger readers to Mr may not even be aware of like for economics being released in 2005 and there's just this onslaught of like popular economics books”

“but things like the right Queen selfish Gene right in many different Freakonomics and everyone had to read all those books to be intellectually illiterate”

“and oh yeah so Freakonomics I think did uh something about this too those guys”

“this is from Freakonomics highly recommend uh Freakonomics just if you want to learn interesting things about the world”

“Actually, it's interesting because Freakonomics is a book that doesn't make that mistake. Freakonomics, right from the start, is a book that says, 'Hey, let me tell you something really interesting about the world using this data.'”

“Years later, when you and I wrote about it in Freakonomics, where we had the time and space to really describe our hypothesis and approach, we didn't get any of the negative feedback we initially received.”

“then Alex Dunphy is the name of the nerdy middle child on Modern Family who chose to read Freakonomics during her family's pool party this scene is part of the premiere episode of season three not as Steven said season one”

“number two for economics for the next year and a half it was number two was Freakonomics I was really jealous”

“and it makes me think a bit of advice that I got from Steven Dubner author of Freakonomics or co-author at least he collaborates with Steven levit”

“I rarely do this, but today I'm going to start by reading a couple of sentences from Freakonomics, which Steve Levitt and I published in 2005. Cheating, we wrote, may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor.”

“Today on Freakonomics Radio, another conversation in our ongoing look at what college is really for, with higher ed under attack from multiple angles.”

“So anyway, this night of the World Series game, sleeping on the couch in your house and I was up pretty late for the game and then I couldn't sleep because I wasn't feeling well; I just stayed up all night and I wrote a version of what's the opening, the intro, the prelude of Freakonomics.”

“Also, it has come to my attention that many of you who listen to Freconomics Radio have never read Freconomics, which is fine, even awesome. But in case you are curious, we recently published a 20th anniversary edition of Freconomics with a new forward, and you can get it wherever you get your books.”

“And to make it worth your while to pass along that information, I'm offering $5,000 and a signed copy of Freconomics as a finders fee for each teacher we hire who found out about the job because of the podcast.”

“So you're a theoretical mathematician who, because of your applied work, has gotten to see the real world in action, and at least for me, when I wrote Freakonomics and got a taste of the real world, I was really poisoned to academics after that because I found the real world to be much more fun.”

“he inspired me to read all the Freakonomics books and he was the reason I wanted to major in economics”

“and you wrote the book Freakonomics among quite a few others”

“All right, here it is: which word appeared in the title of a 2005 book by Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner that explored the hidden side of many processes?”

“30 years later I can honestly say that as many papers that I've written that have policy implications I can very precisely estimate the total sum impact that my research and Freakonomics books and podcasting has had on policy and that is a big fat zero”

“I've kept an eye on his progress since then and, wow, even I've been amazed at what he's done, more or less single-handedly bringing Freakonomics-style approaches into the mainstream of medicine.”

“This was around the time that Levitt and I published our first Freakonomics book”

“so by then we had two books for economics and super Freakonomics and we'd started Freakonomics radio”

“if you've read his amazing book gang leader for a day or the chapter in Freakonomics called why do drug dealers live with their moms”

“you may remember sudir from the first Freakonomics book If you ever read it sudir wrote an amazing book himself called Gang leader”

“our first book Freakonomics came out and then as we were working on the second book there was a movie being made”

“and then we also wrote in super Freakonomics about something that might not strike many people's cheating”

“I think they were at a swimming pool and everybody's jumping around having fun, and she's sitting by the pool reading Freakonomics. Oh my gosh, that's so cool, Stephen!”

“I do remember the number of copies of Freakonomics that we sold the first week and it was thrilling”

“You no doubt know Stephen as the co-author of the Freakonomics books and the creator and host of Freakonomics Radio.”

“I think you're selling yourself short on how much you participate, especially in the first book Freakonomics because we talked through a lot of that before I would write—sometimes in person, sometimes on the phone—and I always took a lot of notes.”

“This was like the beginning of our starting to write Freakonomics in your office.”

“So anyway, this night of the World Series game, sleeping on the couch in your house, and I was up pretty late for the game, and then I couldn't sleep because I wasn't feeling well; I just stayed up all night, and I wrote a version of what's the opening, the intro, the prelude of Freakonomics.”

“My single favorite story about us is what happened when it came time to negotiate how we'd split the payments over Freakonomics because we had gotten this big advance to write a book together, but we'd never actually talked about who would get what share.”

“Because we got offered a bunch of money to write the book that would become Freakonomics, right?”

“Love it, and this conversation with Stephen Dubner, after this short break, they'll return to talk about what would have happened if they'd never written Freakonomics.”

“Like Michael Lewis wrote about you a long time ago, Stephen Dubner profiled me in a New York Times piece, and it fundamentally changed my life. Publishers came asking me to write a popular book, which ended up being Freakonomics, which Dubner and I wrote together.”

“After "Freakonomics" came out and we had some success in terms of publishing, there was a historian that I knew, and I was at a seminar he was at, and clearly within my earshot, he grumbled that he would never want a wide audience to read his scholarship, with clearly a reference to the fact that I had somehow degraded”

“Stephen Dubner is an award-winning author, journalist, and podcast and radio host. He is co-author of the popular Freakonomics book series and host of Freakonomics Radio and podcast available on Spotify.”