Updated By Jerold

Ninety-nine percent of commercially traded bananas are just one variety: the Cavendish. (Photo: Moore/Getty)

The banana used to be a luxury good. Now it’s the most popular fruit in the U.S. and elsewhere. But the production efficiencies that made it so cheap have also made it vulnerable to a deadly fungus that may wipe out the one variety most of us eat. Scientists do have a way to save it — but will Big Banana let them?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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In 1876, the city of Philadelphia commemorated 100 years of American independence with a Centennial Exposition.

Virginia Scott JENKINS: Well, it was a big trade fair. It was like a World’s Fair. And there was a horticultural exhibit, and they had a banana plant with bananas growing on it.

That’s Virginia Scott Jenkins. She’s a cultural historian and the author of Bananas: An American History.

JENKINS: And they had to put a guard on it because people wanted to pick a leaf, or poke at it. Because people hadn’t seen one of these things.

The banana plant— and yes, it’s a plant, technically, not a tree; and the banana is technically a berry — anyway, this banana plant had stiff competition for attention at the centennial expo. Also on display were the right arm and flame of the Statue of Liberty, which hadn’t yet been erected in New York Harbor. There were the first public demonstrations of the typewriter and of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. And: an appearance by the President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. Still, the humble banana plant caused a stir, thanks to its novelty.

JENKINS: They’re not native to the Americas, at all.

And in North America, bananas weren’t even possible.

JENKINS: Well, they take about 18 months from sprouting to fruit, and the climate in different ecological zones in the United States, you don’t get frost-free that long.

The banana was one of the first fruits cultivated by humans; the earliest written accounts go back to 500 B.C.E., in India. The Americas didn’t get the banana ‘til much later — although exactly when and how are, like much banana history, disputed facts. But it’s safe to say that in 1876 in Philadelphia, the banana was still exotic to most Americans.

JENKINS: In the first two-thirds or three-quarters of the 19th century, bananas might come in to an East Coast port on a sailing ship, and then they’d be sold at the port. But they weren’t generally commercially available anywhere. They were a luxury item. They were very expensive. I found some very interesting menus, for very fancy occasions, that might have bananas on the menu. But they were something that most people had never seen, most people had never tasted.

Even though bananas were by then being grown in Latin America, sailing ships couldn’t travel fast enough to reliably keep the fruit from overripening. But then came steamships and railroads.

JENKINS: They would just put huge pieces of ice at each end of a freight car to try to keep the bananas cool.

And by the 1920’s, trains started getting mechanical refrigeration; in the 1930’s came refrigerated trucks. This new technology had a huge impact on food distribution generally — it made possible the modern meat industry, for instance. It also allowed for the bulk importation of bananas to the United States. The variety that Americans came to know and love was the Gros Michel, also known as “Big Mike.”

JENKINS: And it was a large banana, and it had thick skin, so it didn’t bruise easily.

There are more than 1,000 banana varieties in the world. But, Jenkins says:

JENKINS: A lot of other banana varieties don’t travel well. Either they’re small, or they have thin skins, or for one reason or another didn’t grow well.

In 1900, Americans were eating 15 million bunches of bananas a year. Just a decade later: 40 million. So it was very bad news when a fungus emerged.

JENKINS: Devastating the plantations in Latin America.

This fungus came to be called Panama Disease. It was first noticed in the late 1800’s; by the 1950’s, it was wiping out the Gros Michel.

JENKINS: What the fruit companies did was, they’d move on to another country and buy up a lot more land, and grow bananas until the disease caught up with them and they had to move on.

But the disease couldn’t be outrun. The Gros Michel was doomed.

JENKINS: So they changed to a variety called the Cavendish banana.

The Cavendish was not susceptible to the disease that wiped out the Gros Michel. So the Cavendish is the banana most of us eat today. It accounts for 99 percent of the banana export market. The last Gros Michels in the U.S. were sold in 1965. So our banana is not the same banana our elders ate.

JENKINS: Well, I’ve never had a Gros Michel. I’m not old enough, so I’m not really sure how much difference there was.

Some people who did eat the Gros Michel say it was more delicious than the Cavendish. But the Cavendish has done very well, thank you. It is the most popular fruit in both the U.S. and Europe, even though the vast majority of them must be imported. The E.U. imports around six million tons of Cavendish bananas each year, or 110 bananas per person; the U.S., about 130 bananas per person. Canada beats us both, with 150 bananas. So you can imagine there would be a lot of unhappy people if the banana we all eat were, once again, under existential threat.

Douglas SOUTHGATE: Well, the doomsday scenario is that it wipes out the international banana trade.

That’s right: Panama Disease is back, and this time it’s come for the Cavendish. Today on Freakonomics Radio: sometimes a banana is just a banana but in this case, it’s also a symbol of commerce, of political discord, of scientific dilemmas — and of course, personal taste:

Andrew BILES: My preference is bananas as they are, or, curiously enough, bananas on toast.

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Why are bananas so popular? Let us count the ways. And — full disclosure — I say this as someone who, personally, does not love bananas. But I do recognize how appealing they are. Sorry about that. But, seriously, the peel: it’s got to be part of it. First of all: it’s bright yellow; it’s basically an advertisement for itself. Also, Virginia Scott Jenkins notes that the banana first gained popularity around the time people were just starting to learn about germs and food hygiene. One early banana importer called it “a fruit in a germ-proof wrapper.”

JENKINS: This was something that you could eat on the street and not worry about getting sick from it.

There was also a new awareness around food and nutrition.

JENKINS: People were interested in calories, and this was a good way to get more nutrition and vitamins at the same time.

Still, if you know even a little bit about economics, you’d have to think that price must also have something to do with the banana being the most popular fruit in America. And this is where it gets interesting. Picture yourself in a grocery store: you see piles and piles of apples, all different varieties. About 95 percent of the apples eaten in the U.S. are grown in the U.S.; the imports usually just plug a hole at the end of the growing season.

Now check out the pile of bananas. First thing you notice: just the one variety, the Cavendish. And every one of them has been grown, picked, washed, and boxed in another country. Then they’re shipped, still green, in a temperature-controlled environment. At their destination, they’re put in special “ripening rooms” that provide, among other amenities, the release of gases that trick the banana into thinking it’s still back home in the tropics. At a temperature of 64 degrees, a banana can be ripened in as little as four days; at 58 degrees, it’ll take seven days.

Considering all this aftercare, and the fact that they’re all imported, you might expect a banana to be much more expensive than those very American apples. And yet they’re not: bananas are typically less than half the price of apples. In fact, they’re among the cheapest fruits around. How can this be? How did an imported luxury item become a cheap American staple? Well, let’s start here:

SOUTHGATE: It’s in part a story of economies of scale.

That’s the economist Douglas Southgate, an emeritus professor at Ohio State University. He started studying bananas because:

SOUTHGATE: Well, the short answer is that my wife is from Ecuador, which happens to be the leading exporter of bananas, and has been for the last 65 years. Even though the country is no larger than the state of Colorado.

Bananas are grown in many warm countries around the world, in the eastern and western hemispheres.

SOUTHGATE: Bananas are far and away the most widely traded fruit, fruit or vegetable.

Andrew BILES: Basically, there are 135 countries that grow bananas, and there are 145 million tons of bananas produced every year. That’s about 800 billion bananas.

And that’s Andrew Biles, who until recently worked at Chiquita, one of the world’s largest banana companies. His title at Chiquita was C.E.O. of bananas and pineapples — seriously, that’s the title. As for the bananas:

BILES: In the world, it’s the fourth most-important crop after rice, wheat, and corn. The economic value generated by the banana industry is some $52 billion. And there are some 400 million people that rely on bananas for a staple food or a staple source of income. There are many countries if they did not have bananas, they would go short of food.

The Cavendish banana accounts for just under 50 percent of global banana production but, again, almost 100 percent of exported bananas. And Ecuador alone accounts for more than a quarter of all Cavendish exports.

SOUTHGATE: If you produce something in very, very large numbers, then you bring down the per-unit or average cost.

For the early American banana companies, the transition from luxury fruit to mass import was a strategic move.

SOUTHGATE: The key to the strategy or to understanding the strategy was to realize that they made more money from having a smaller margin on a much larger volume than they would have had continuing to treat bananas as a luxury item.

And how did they accomplish this? Consider the history of Chiquita.

BILES: Chiquita started way back in the 1800’s and was a company that first went public, believe it or not, in 1903.

Back then, it was known as the United Fruit Company. And United Fruit happened to have:

SOUTHGATE: United Fruit happened to have the largest fleet of ships in the Western Hemisphere. Only the U.S. Navy had a larger fleet of ships.

In fact, the Navy would requisition some United ships during World War II. But in peacetime:

SOUTHGATE: Well, they used those fleets to move bananas to the United States very, very efficiently. And as is always the case, or practically always the case, the major beneficiaries of this efficiency were in fact consumers. Prices were slashed, and within a few years, bananas were no longer a luxury item. They were instead a fruit of poor people. The first food that a lot of poor babies ate after weaning were mashed bananas, in the days before canned baby food.

It would be hard to overstate here the role of the United Fruit Company.

BILES: What we have here is a company that did develop over time a significant business and actually created a banana industry.

SOUTHGATE: It was called the Octopus because it had a near-monopoly on production. United Fruit definitely had its tentacles wrapped around this industry.

Most of United’s bananas were grown in the Spanish-speaking countries to our south:

SOUTHGATE: Costa Rica, Honduras and other Central American nations happen to be an ideal setting for raising bananas for the U.S. market.

Ideal because of the climate, yes. But also because land and labor were both very, very cheap. So: American consumers were winning; United Fruit was really winning; and what about those Central American countries? Keep in mind they were largely undeveloped at the time.

SOUTHGATE: Foreign companies, led by United Fruit, were willing to make the investment to clear land, put in infrastructure and so forth to start producing bananas on a massive scale for the U.S. market. But only if they were awarded vast tracts of land and largely exempted from taxation. So that gave them the dominant position. That’s what led to “banana republics.”

Yes, before it was a clothing store, “banana republic” meant something very different — essentially, a fragile country whose economy and, often, political leadership, were propped up by an export crop. And when a banana republic acted against the interests of their banana overlords, things could get ugly. Consider the case of Guatemala in the early 1950’s. President Jacobo Arbenz, a former army colonel, was pursuing a land-reform program that would have reclaimed property from the banana companies.

SOUTHGATE: And this angered United Fruit. United Fruit definitely wanted to see Arbenz go.

United Fruit lobbied the U.S. Congress to act against Guatemala — and Arbenz was ultimately ousted in a coup led by the C.I.A.

SOUTHGATE: Drawing a simple line of causation — United Fruit, U.S. Government overthrow of Guatemala — doesn’t capture all of what was going on. The U.S. government had other reasons why it was alarmed at some of what Arbenz was doing, apart from the land reform.

Specifically: the American government was worried that Guatemala was sliding toward communism, and an alliance with the Soviet Union. This was a common theme of the Cold War era; we’re not talking only Guatemala here. In any case, the U.S. overthrow of Guatemala led to destabilization and decades of bloody civil war. United Fruit, meanwhile, continued to tangle with the governments in other banana republics — and, ultimately, the U.S. Government as well, which accused United Fruit of monopolistic behavior.

SOUTHGATE: They controlled production and also had an extensive, deep network for distributing bananas from U.S. ports inland. So United Fruit was very much the banana business.

In 1967, United Fruit agreed to reorganize and sell off some of its strategic assets. The Octopus was shrinking. The next blow came from Ecuador.

SOUTHGATE: That was the most important development that ended the Octopus’s time. Ecuador does not fit at all into the standard banana-republic narrative.

Land in Ecuador was owned by independent farmers, so it wasn’t susceptible to the political and economic exploitation that had worked elsewhere.

SOUTHGATE: By the time the major companies were taking a serious look in Ecuador, most of the good farmland, the prime farmland, was already owned by Ecuadorians. That meant that there were never going to be any extensive concessions and grants of tax exemptions, all those sorts of things.

In the late 1940s, Ecuador’s president, Galo Plaza, invested heavily in infrastructure and pest control that benefited the local banana growers.

SOUTHGATE: Here was this important source of supply that came online in a very big way, very quickly, after World War II, and it was a source of supply that was impossible for United Fruit to control. We learned from Ecuador something that’s more typical about the role of local entrepreneurs in agricultural trade and development, the contributions that they can make.

Today, no one company comes close to dominating the international banana trade like United Fruit once did. The three biggest banana companies — Dole, Del Monte, and Chiquita, United’s successor — they share around 40 percent of the global export market. So there’s more competition than there used to be — which, economists would tell you, helps keep prices down. But there’s an even more powerful explanation for why bananas are so cheap: standardization.

BILES: So the advantage of having the Cavendish is that it is really a monoculture, that you can actually grow it consistently.

Andrew Biles again, formerly of Chiquita.

BILES: You know that it’s going to take eight to nine months to come to fruition. And you know how that banana is going to function when it’s transported in a refrigerated cargo. You know how it’s going to perform in the ripening rooms in the country of destination, and you know how it’s going to perform and hold up on the retail shelf.

And it’s not just that nearly every banana grown for export is a Cavendish; it’s that every Cavendish banana is genetically the same as the next Cavendish. From a business perspective, that’s ideal — the ultimate in quality control. From an agricultural perspective, however:

BILES: There’s no diversity, so there’s that, each plant is the same, each plant has the same resistance to disease as it spreads.

As you’ll recall, the Gros Michel banana was wiped out years ago by Panama Disease — or, technically, Fusarium wilt. It’s caused by a fungus that infects the plant’s roots and eventually kills the whole plant — and leaves the soil unfit for future banana growth. The strain of Panama Disease that killed off the Gros Michel was known as TR1, or Tropical Race 1. Now there’s a strain called TR4 that’s attacking the Cavendish.

BILES: So, indeed, it’s fallen victim to almost the same disease as the Gros Michel. So what we see is TR4 start apparently in Indonesia, it spread in the Philippines, it’s devastated crops there as farmers move to the Mekong Delta or to Myanmar.

And the banana industry is very worried that TR4 will make it to Latin America.

BILES: If you look at the map, it’s a disease that seems to be spreading west.

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It may sound like a made-up name, but Humpty Doo is a real place — a small town in the Northern Territory of Australia. It’s hot, wet, and fairly rugged.

James DALE: When we first went onto the plantation, the plantation manager said, “You got to be a bit careful working around here. A girl was taken by a crocodile a couple of months ago.” We also have a real problem with wild buffalo. But we’ve managed to work there without losing any of our staff.

That’s James Dale. He’s a plant scientist.

DALE: I work at Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane, in Australia. I work on bananas.

Dale’s first job out of grad school was working on a banana disease.

DALE: And it was a disease called bunchy top, and it had a long history in Australia.

Bunchy top was caused by a virus that scientists couldn’t find a way to control.

DALE: When the concept of genetic modification came along, and that was sort of, the late 1980’s, we said, “Wow, this is going to be absolutely perfect for bananas.” And the reason for that is that the bananas that we eat are primarily sterile.

Wild banana seeds are very hard, and so the Cavendish, like other banana varieties that people eat, has essentially been bred into a seedless, sterile condition.

DALE: So crops that don’t have any seeds are extremely difficult to breed conventionally. So the idea of being able to genetically modify them — that is, to add additional genes to Cavendish, for instance, which we are interested in, seemed really, really attractive.

Attractive and, for the global banana trade, important. Because the Cavendish, like the Gros Michel before it, has rare attributes.

DALE: They’re robust. They travel long distances. And there really isn’t anything else on the horizon that could now go and replace Cavendish. There is nothing that you could pull out and say, “This is going to do what Cavendish did after the last outbreak.”

The new strain of Panama Disease emerged in the 1990s.

DALE: And around about 2000, we decided that this disease, Tropical Race 4, was going to be a huge problem, so we set out to look for genes that provide resistance to the disease.

As part of this research, Dale had a former Ph.D. student out collecting wild bananas.

DALE: And this scientist was in Malaysia, and happened to see this patch of bananas, which were growing where everything else had died from Tropical Race 4. So she and her colleagues collected seeds of those bananas and they sent them back to Australia.

James Dale and his team began studying these bananas.

DALE: We said, “Okay, let’s go and look in the DNA of those resistant ones, and see if we can find the gene that would provide resistance.” And we came up with a number of candidates, genes that seemed to be working in the resistant seedlings, but not in the susceptible seedlings. And one of those looked really promising to us. So we took that gene. And by a process known as agrobacterium-mediated transformation, we put it into — another terminology — embryogenic cells, or embryogenic cell suspensions. And these are — we make these cells from Cavendish. They have the ability to regenerate an entire plant from a single cell.

And this leads us back to Humpty Doo, Australia, which had been a fertile site for banana production.

DALE: But because of the Tropical Race 4, it’s been wiped out.

Which made Humpty Doo the perfect place to hold the world’s first experiment to see whether genetically modified Cavendish bananas could survive Panama Disease. Remember: once Panama Disease has struck, the soil remains contaminated with the fungus.

DALE: So we put this gene into these single cells and grew bananas back.

In 2012, they began field trials that would last a few years, planting both genetically modified and non-G.M. bananas in the Humpty Doo soil. What’d they find?

DALE: So what we found is — and we found a number of things — we found that the non-G.M. bananas were between 100 percent and around two-thirds of them were either dead or infected after three years. So the disease was having a pretty big impact.

Okay, that’s important to know — that Panama Disease was still in the soil. Which meant if a genetically-modified plant survived, it was surviving Panama Disease. So how did the genetically modified plants do? Dale and his team planted six different lines of G.M. Cavendish plants.

DALE: One of those, line three, the gene we put in was R.G.A. 2, so R.G.A. 2, line 3 — appeared to be completely immune. At the end of three years, none of the plants were infected at all. So essentially, what we’ve done is, we’ve taken a gene from a wild banana that is resistant to Tropical Race 4, and we’ve taken that one banana gene and we’ve gone and put it into Cavendish. And by doing that, we have generated resistance to the disease.

This was amazing banana news. R.G.A. 2, line 3 was a clear winner. Some of the other genetic modifications did well too.

DALE: Three of the other lines had relatively high levels of resistance, where there was 20 percent or less plants either infected or dead. Which was, to us, an incredible outcome. Rarely do you get that sort of percentage success in the sorts of things we do. So we were pretty excited about that.

And there was something else to be excited about.

DALE: The other really important thing we found was that the gene that we put in, this R.G.A. 2 gene, not only occurs in these wild bananas, but it also occurs in Cavendish. It just doesn’t work very well. That’s actually really, really important, because there’s a new technology known as gene editing. It’s different to gene modifications. Gene editing is where you can go into the D.N.A. and just tweak genes that are already there. So it’s very, very close to, sort of, natural processes. So that’s where we’re now starting to figure out how we can tweak the gene in Cavendish to make them resistant without actually adding any new genes at all.

This type of gene editing is made possible by something known as CRISPR— which, as I’m sure you know, stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” We spoke with one of CRISPR’s inventors, the biochemist Jennifer Doudna, back in 2017, for an episode called “Evolution, Accelerated.”

Jennifer DOUDNA: At its core, the CRISPR gene-editing technology is now giving human beings the opportunity to change the course of evolution. And human beings have been affecting evolution for a long time. But now there’s a technology that allows very specific changes to be made to DNA that gives us a new level of control.

DALE: CRISPR is terrific, so yes, we are using CRISPR at the moment.

So this would seem to be super-amazing banana news. There are potentially two ways to save the Cavendish from Panama Disease: by using CRISPR to tweak its genetic code or by introducing new, resistant genes from other bananas. Either way, the banana industry must be thrilled by the solutions that James Dale is proposing. Right? We asked Andrew Biles, former C.E.O. of bananas (and pineapples) at Chiquita:

BILES: James Dale, he is working on more of a GM approach, okay. That, of course, is not so acceptable societally. So some people will say, “yes, I don’t mind genetic modification.” Others will say they do.

Indeed, a sizeable fraction of consumers, in the U.S. and especially in Europe, consider genetically modified crops to be risky, despite assurances to the contrary from scientists like James Dale.

DALE: And that’s where we’ve failed. We really haven’t got the message across. This is one of the most incredibly highly-regulated technologies in the world. So the sorts of things that we go through to demonstrate safety is amazing.

The objection to G.M.O. crops is also curious in light of the fact that traditional plant breeding — without which many, many fewer of us would be alive — is itself a form of genetic modification. Jennifer Doudna again.

DOUDNA: It’s important for people to appreciate that, first of all, that humans have been modifying plants for a long time genetically —

DUBNER: Thank goodness.

DOUDNA: — for literally thousands of years. Exactly — thank goodness. And you realize, “Wow, I’m glad there’s plant breeding.” But the way that that’s been done traditionally is to use chemicals or even radiation to introduce genetic changes into seeds, and then plant breeders will select for plants that have traits that they want. The opportunity here with gene-editing in plants is to be able to make changes precisely. Not to drag along traits that you don’t want.

DALE: Really, the difference between what we’re doing, and conventional breeding is that they moved thousands of genes at one time, from one banana to another. We’re just moving one or two.

It’s worth noting nearly every technological advance is greeted with skepticism by at least a small segment of any population. And such skepticism may be magnified when it comes to something you’re going to put in your mouth.

SOUTHGATE: A great example for me is pasteurized milk.

The economist Douglas Southgate again.

SOUTHGATE: In the United States and other countries, lots of kids used to die from drinking raw milk — raw milk that had been exposed to flies or whatever. Pasteurization came along, that entire source of mortality went away, and yet there were people who swore up and down that they were never going to consume pasteurized milk. They claimed it didn’t have the same nutritional properties, didn’t taste the same, it was in one way or another undesirable.

There are still some raw-milk advocates; but most people, Southgate says:

SOUTHGATE: Most people ended up drinking pasteurized milk and I just have a hunch that if we produce a substitute for the Cavendish, or if we improve the Cavendish by moving in a gene from some other banana people will have a tough time telling the difference, and the product will win acceptance.

But big companies like Chiquita — or, to be fair, most big companies, in any industry, period — they’re pretty risk-averse. Honestly, they can’t afford to not be. But there’s another reason James Dale isn’t surprised at Chiquita’s resistance to his banana proposals.

DALE: The big banana companies, unfortunately, have had a history of not being terribly innovative. They are much more reactive. They don’t run big research and development divisions. Yeah, we talk to them, they take more of a “let’s just see what’s going to happen” reaction.

So how does Chiquita see a path forward for the endangered Cavendish banana?

BILES: We believe the path towards this is actually through improving breeding techniques. We feel that the logical first place for us as a leading branded premium quality banana to go is to try and go down, in a very sophisticated, in a very organized, in a very thorough way, the plant-breeding route.

And James Dale’s response to that?

DALE: There are some exceptionally good breeding programs going on in the world, but you don’t end up with Cavendish. You end up with something different to Cavendish. If we want to replace Cavendish with something probably very, very different, we’ll probably get that from the conventional breeding programs.

So if you want to have the Cavendish in the future?

DALE: Hey, if you want to have Cavendish in twenty years’ time, they’re probably going to be genetically modified, or they’re probably gonna be gene-edited.

That makes it sound as if the Cavendish as we know it may well be headed for extinction, depending on the banana companies’ decisions and the public’s response to genetic modification. So for the billions of people who eat trillions of bananas, a great many of them Cavendish, how panicked should they be?

BILES: We in the industry would say there’s no need to panic. The world is not going to run out of bananas.

But what about the Cavendish banana?

BILES: Okay, what we’re going to have to probably confront is actually having more varieties of bananas available in the future. As we protect the farming of bananas, we’re going to have to get used to how we can actually grow and commercialize and do the logistics for different bananas.

The prospect of exporting several different kinds of bananas would be an adjustment for the industry, of course. For consumers, less standardization might mean higher prices — but the prospect of finding several varieties of banana in a grocery store would hardly be unsettling, considering how many varieties of apples and grapes and citrus fruits are available. But in a world with so many options in most realms, there has been something nice, something unifying, about all of us eating the same banana. No matter how you eat it — straight out of the peel; cut up on cereal, if you’re feeling a little bit more ambitious. As you’ll recall, the banana historian Virginia Scott Jenkins told us about researching earlier banana recipes.

JENKINS: I found some very interesting menus, for very fancy occasions, that might have bananas on the menu.

Jenkins has a rather interesting banana recipe of her own, passed on from her mother.

JENKINS: You take a peeled banana, you put mustard on it. You wrap it in a slice of ham, and then you bake it in a cream sauce. And I’ve tried it on two husbands and neither of them could eat it. They thought that was just nasty.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky and Matt Hickey. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra.You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Virginia Scott Jenkins, cultural historian and author.

Douglas Southgate, emeritus professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at Ohio State University.

Andrew Biles, former C.E.O. of bananas and pineapples at Chiquita.

James Dale, professor of Agricultural Biotechnology at Queensland University of Technology.

Jennifer Doudna, professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

RESOURCES

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel.

Bananas: An American History by Virginia Scott Jenkins.

The post The Most Interesting Fruit in the World (Ep. 375) appeared first on Freakonomics.

Daniel Ek, a 23-year-old Swede who grew up on pirated music, made the record labels an offer they couldn’t refuse: a legal platform to stream all the world’s music. Spotify reversed the labels’ fortunes, made Ek rich, and thrilled millions of music fans. But what has it done for all those musicians stuck in the long tail?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability.

For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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Over the past year or two, we’ve done a couple special series of episodes. One was called “How to Be Creative”; the other was “The Secret Life of a C.E.O.” You wouldn’t think those two themes would intersect all that often. But today, they do — in a rare conversation with this man:

Daniel EK: My name is Daniel Ek and I’m the C.E.O. and founder of Spotify.

How does Daniel Ek define Spotify’s mission?

EK: So the way I think about our mission is to inspire human creativity by enabling a million artists to be able to live off of their art and a billion people to be able to enjoy and be inspired by it.

Spotify, if you don’t know, is a Swedish music-streaming service with roughly 100 million paid subscribers. Another 100-million-plus listen free on an ad-supported model. But it’s the subscribers that drive 90 percent of the company’s revenue. Ek co-founded the company in 2006, at age 23. It went public in 2018 and its market cap is now around $25 billion. Billion, with a b. For a company that doesn’t really make anything — other than making the connection between a beloved product and people who want to consume that product. The Spotify story is a singular story about the sudden transformation of an old, hidebound industry; it’s also a story about digital piracy, bandwidth, and of course about creativity; oh, also: it’s about the future of podcasting. In person, Daniel Ek is mild-mannered and unexcitable; he doesn’t soundlike an anarchist. But don’t be fooled.

EK: I think we are in the process of creating a more fair and equal music industry than it’s ever been in the past.

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Depending on your personal perspective, Spotify is either an idealized digital jukebox or, as Radiohead’s Thom Yorke once put it, “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.” Yorke wasn’t the only musician to hate on Spotify, especially in its earlier years. The Beatles and Pink Floyd famously kept their music off Spotify, as did some younger musicians:

ABC News anchor: Superstar Taylor Swift abruptly pulling all her albums from the streaming service Spotify, just days after the release of her hot new album 1989.

Today, Taylor Swift, Pink Floyd, the Beatles, and Radiohead can all be heard on Spotify. The barriers that might have made Spotify seem impossible have mostly been leveled. Primarily by one person: Daniel Ek. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Stockholm. These days, he spends about one week a month in New York, but he still lives in Stockholm.

EK: Yeah, and I have two very young kids, so one has just turned four and one is about to turn six.

DUBNER: You’re in the middle of it, aren’t you?

EK: I’m definitely in the middle of it.

One constant throughout Ek’s life has been music.

EK: So my grandfather was an opera singer and my grandmother, she was an actress but also a jazz pianist. So in my family learning music was almost an essential. It was probably more important than you going to college or university at that level. And in Sweden, we have public music education, so it almost costs nothing to get music education in Sweden and my cousin told me — he was way older than me — and was like, “You should learn how to play the guitar because that’s how you get girls.” And I was four or five at the time and definitely didn’t realize why that was a big thing. But I really thought he was really cool. So I was like, OK, well, he must know something, so I learned how to play the guitar. And then about the same time, I got my first computer. And that was a seminal inflection point because I had these two parallel interests that were both formed at a very, very young age.

For a time, Ek thought he might become a full-time musician. But the other interest began to win out.

EK: I think it was 1996 I got broadband Internet. It was like 10 megabits and when you think about it today — because it took until maybe two, three years ago until the average person in the U.S. even had that. But I had it in 1997 and —

DUBNER: And that was just a Swedish thing.

EK: That was just a Swedish thing, because the Swedes said, “Look, we believe everyone should have broadband. That’s going to be a big thing and by the way, we’ll subsidize your PC too, and it will cost $500 and you can get state-of-the-art PC.” So I had this virtually new computer which was subsidized by the government. I had this broadband that was subsidized by the government. And I went on the internet obviously all the time. The problem was there wasn’t really a lot to do on the internet except reading stuff. So I read a lot of stuff, but it wasn’t like the internet had movies for streaming or music or any of that stuff. And on came Napster. And it was a pure epiphany for me because you can search for any kind of music in the world. And within 10, 15 minutes you could have the entire album and you can listen to it, which was amazing.

Napster, which launched in 1999, became the most prominent peer-to-peer file-sharing service. And by “peer-to-peer file-sharing service,” I mean a piece of software that let a user like Daniel Ek download music files directly from the hard drives of other Napster users all over the world. Which meant that if one person bought a CD and copied it onto their hard drive, and shared it on Napster, all of a sudden, an infinite number of people could own it. For free. One problem: this is an infringement of copyright, and totally illegal. At least in most places. Sweden did not forbid the downloading of pirated content until 2005; the country became an international hub for illegal downloads and even gave rise to a political party, the Pirate Party, that won seats in the European Parliament. I asked Ek whether he had thought about the legality of music piracy.

EK: Yeah, I thought about it. But I was 14. It wasn’t like it was a big thing. And since it was so easy to access and the alternative was for me to go out and buy a record with money I didn’t have, it was like the only option. So it was this weird thing where you start off with something and all of a sudden, maybe I was — wanted to listen to Metallica and all of a sudden realized that this person also had King Crimson. Which was like, “Oh, holy shit, I didn’t know that Metallica was inspired by those guys.” And Led Zeppelin and Beatles and all the seminal ones that all of a sudden you start listening to. Or prog music or Jimi Hendrix’s entire discography. It brought me this weird sense of very broad music education and quite eclectic taste, which in turn got me even further into music. I mean, I don’t think I would have been that interested in music if it weren’t for piracy, to be honest, because I come from a working-class family. We couldn’t afford all the records that I wanted.

Napster became very large very fast. You might have thought the music industry would see this growth as a natural expression of demand for their product, and try to find a way to exploit that demand. But they didn’t see it that way. They saw piracy as nothing but theft. And as the music industry began to go the way of many fading 20th-century industries, they blamed their decline on piracy.

A pair of economists wrote a research paper at the time which found that illegal downloads in fact did almost nothing to affect music sales. They wrote: “Our estimates are inconsistent with claims that file-sharing is the primary reason for the decline in music sales.” The idea here was that the kind of people who illegally downloaded music weren’t the kind of people who were going to pay $15 for a CD anyway. Daniel Ek certainly wasn’t going to pay $15 for one CD. What he found ludicrous was that the only choice the music industry gave you was $15 for one CD versus zero dollars for all the music in the world.

EK: My view is that the music industry has always been excluding the vast majority of its potential. And what do I mean by that? Well, at the peak of the recorded-music industry, 2001, it was about 200 million people who were participating in the economy, who bought records. So was it 200 million people who were listening to music? No, of course not. That number was in the billions. So what the music industry did fairly well was they priced a product at a premium for an audience that was willing to pay for it. But it only captured a very, very small portion of the revenues. So what was obvious to me as I started using Napster back in the day, it was just, this is a way better product than going to a record store, there ought to be a way where you can give consumers what they want and at the same time make it work for artists.

DUBNER: As you got to know the record labels over time, years after Napster started, do you think they regretted not having partnered with Napster earlier?

EK: I definitely think so. I mean, in hindsight they probably realized that it was the wrong thing, but they thought by shutting it down that they’ve contained the problem and didn’t realize that it would just create seven new ones.

The music industry did get Napster shut down, but it had to keep playing whack-a-mole with a bunch of new pirated-music services.

EK: If you think about piracy for music, what it really forced in this first incarnation was the unbundling of the album.

Unbundling the album, that is, into single songs.

EK: So Apple then created a business of that by selling songs for 99 cents.

Apple, by way of iTunes, introduced the world to legal music downloading. It had taken Apple a while, but they finally succeeded in negotiating the rights with record labels. Daniel Ek, meanwhile, was having a lot of success himself.

EK: I started web-design companies, web-hosting companies, and a bunch of different companies.

He actually started doing this work when he was 14. By the time he was 18, he had a couple dozen programmers working for him. He enrolled at the Royal Institute for Technology but only lasted a couple months. Starting and selling internet companies was more fun. Ek was a millionaire by the time he was 23, and he started living like one: a fancy apartment, nightclubs, a red Ferrari. All this left him flat, and depressed. As he’d later tell Forbes magazine: “I was deeply uncertain of who I was and who I wanted to be. I really thought I wanted to be a much cooler guy than I was.” He moved into a cabin in the woods, back near his family; he played guitar, meditated, and over time thought up the idea for Spotify. It was very simple, really: an essentially infinite library of all the music in the world, available instantaneously, to anyone with an internet connection. How hard could that be? Ek and his co-founder, Martin Lorentzon, had two fundamental problems to solve: building the technology to allow for the instantaneous streaming of music; and persuading the rights-holders of all the music in the world to go into business with a brand-new company from Sweden — a country famous for its music piracy — and headed by a man who’d grown up on pirated music.

EK: There’s many different pirates, we would put it. There’s the pirates who just religiously feel like everything should be free. We were never that. Sean Parker definitely was never that either.

Sean Parker as in the co-founder of Napster; Parker later provided some venture capital to Spotify.

EK: There’s the other group who just looks at it like, this is the kind of consumer experience that makes sense and that’s how the world will look at it.

DUBNER: So then how professional of a pirate were you? What was the highest level of professionalism of piracy you ever accomplished? It was uTorrent, was that the name of the company?

EK: So actually this is probably an unknown part of the story. I wasn’t very much at all a professional pirate. At the time as I was thinking about starting Spotify, my co-founder, who’s not very technical, said to me, “Hey, there’s my friend who’s asking me about this programmer and he needs some advice.” And I was kind of dismissive about the whole idea and then he told me the name of this programmer and this guy was the founder of uTorrent.

This guy was Ludvig Strigeus, and uTorrent was a piece of file-sharing software that was particularly useful for digital piracy.

EK: And he’s a legendary engineer and I knew about him from engineering circles as being one of those persons who wins a lot of competitions for being great engineers. And I was like, “I have to meet this person.” And he had started this thing, just a fun side project, and it was uTorrent and it was growing very massively. We were actually trying to recruit him to come to Spotify. And he was like, “Well, I got this thing, uTorrent, and I don’t really know what to do with it.” So we persuaded him to sell uTorrent to us instead. And the whole idea from the beginning was actually to fold it because we didn’t really care about it.

DUBNER: Because by then you’re saying you already had a vision of how to make this the legit model work?

EK: Yeah yeah.

Spotify did install Strigeus as a top engineer at Spotify; and they didn’t shut down uTorrent — they sold it, to BitTorrent, the huge peer-to-peer protocol. I asked Daniel Ek which early task had been harder: building out Spotify’s technology or persuading the record companies to let him stream their music.

EK: Well, it’s hard at different stages. So first, you need to have a really good idea of what it is that you’re trying to solve. And in our case it wasn’t necessarily that the technology had a worth in and on itself. It was more around, how do we solve a real problem? And I think the problem that we were trying to solve was it needs to feel like you have all your music on your hard drive. So if you think about that, that means instantaneous. So we probably have to solve that. It probably means also all the world’s music. Okay, well you have to solve all the rights issues and all of those different things all encompassed in this one thing. So it was very clear to me that if we could deliver something that felt like you had all the world’s music on your hard drive, it would likely be way better than piracy, which was the dominant force of music consumption at the time.

From the outset, Spotify partnered with the record companies, first in Europe and eventually the U.S. What enticed the labels to participate? Actually, they would have been fools not to. Remember, the music industry was in steep decline thanks to changes in technology, economics, and consumer preferences. As Ek noted earlier, the industry’s model had always been inefficient: charging relatively high prices to capture only the top layer of the listening market. Most people got most of their music on the radio, which was free.

Now, before you start feeling too sorry for the record labels, let me say this: in the history of the creative arts, and in the modern history of business generally, it would be hard to find an industry that was sleazier, more exploitative, and more deserving of its comeuppance than the music industry. Through means legal and illegal, from sham contracts and bribes to strong-arming and collusion, the industry had for decades stayed fat by making relatively skinny payments to the people who actually made the music. Their royalty statements were masterpieces of creative accounting. Yes, they did provide venture capital to thousands of musicians with no money, but on the rare occasion when one of those musicians recorded a smash hit, the label made sure to capture most of the profits. What about the industry’s role in discovering new talent? That’s a bit of a myth — like saying that publishers “discover” great authors or NFL coaches “discover” great quarterbacks. They mainly cherry-pick the talented people who’ve already worked their way up, and then squeeze out as much juice as possible for their own use. Many industries exploit their labor force, but few had done so with as much vigor as the music industry.

Now that they were starting to go under, Spotify was offering a lifeboat — and a fairly luxurious one: 70 percent of streaming revenues and an equity stake in the company. The big record labels — Sony, Universal, and Warner — were reportedly each given between 4 and 6 percent of Spotify’s shares, with a consortium of independent labels getting another 1 percent. When Spotify went public, in 2018, these stakes would be worth billions. The labels would also get to keep drawing down 70 percent of Spotify’s revenues, and distributing it to their artists according to their own royalty formulas.

EK: Correct.

DUBNER: So that 70 percent flows then to the rights-holders , which are primarily still the three big music labels.

EK: Yep.

DUBNER: But in terms of the money flowing to the actual creators of the content, that’s complicated and problematic. So can you talk about your views on that and how actually involved you are or can be or want to be?

EK: Yeah, sure. Yeah, it’s — music copyrights generally is probably one of the more complicated areas of both law, just because of how copyright law is treated by society, and then just how it actually works and how it flows down. It’s pretty complicated for a lay person to understand. But the best way to start is just taking two steps back. So the birth of the music industry, and if you think about the role that everyone had, a record company was both — it used to cost a lot of money to make music. So a record company could help you by paying for the studio, the studio engineers, all the people to help you record your music. So that was a pretty big value-add. The next thing that ended up being a big problem was getting promoted onto — in the U.S. was thousands of different radio stations. And internationally it was multiplied by 10 times. It was a pretty big thing. And then distribution ended up being very expensive. So why we have major record companies ended up being — it ended up being easier for them to aggregate around distribution. And that’s how they were formed. That’s how they grew to power.

If you look at it right now, some of those things have obviously shifted. So the recording of music ends up becoming fairly cheap today in most instances because anyone can record if they have a laptop and a mic. Distribution also ends up becoming fairly cheap because you can just put your music on Spotify or Apple Music or any other service virtually free and get distributed. Now the flip side of that is the problem of then getting heard ends up becoming harder than ever before.

DUBNER: Because the supply is so much greater.

EK: Yeah. The supply is infinite, so in order to stand out you have to do quite a lot more. And where we have been as an industry just a few years ago was that you couldn’t rely on one income stream alone. So even if you felt, OK, this is digital distribution or streaming and I kind of get that. The truth of the matter is radio certainly here in the U.S. is still a massive, massive force. So you needed to do a lot of radio both for promotion but just generally distribution and even how you did royalty accounting and all those different things was a massive thing. And then physical still matters greatly. Certainly in the middle of the country. So the value-add by record companies is fairly great and is very important certainly as you’re thinking about how to get this out.

Now the roles going forward is changing quite dramatically. So you’re finding that there are a lot more younger record companies coming out that are formed by maybe being specialists in a certain genre. They’re now finding equal opportunities to get their music heard. So they’re being distributed via indie labels or they may even go and distribute their record companies through one of the major record companies in order to get the support that they’re getting. So the industry is really changing. And we’re obviously a huge part not so much in the change but just being a participant in that dialogue about where it’s going, what is the role of a manager, what’s the role of a label, what’s the role of an agent, what’s the role of a publisher. Because all of those roles are now moving along as the industry is becoming more and more digital.

DUBNER: Right. But you — from what I gather Spotify has little leverage or maybe even interest in once you turn over the royalty share in how they distribute it to their artists, correct? You have nothing to do with that, I assume.

EK: We have nothing to do with that. What we are trying to do, however, because this is such a dramatic shift in an economic model for artists, one of the big things was just how do we educate people about this. Because really even the iTunes model was fairly simple. Because I’m selling my goods and I’m getting X for it. We can argue what X should be, but it’s really that. Here with streaming it’s like I’m getting a revenue share of something and it’s streaming, and it looks like it’s a very small number per stream. But what is a million streams? Is a million streams a lot? Is it a little? Is it — how should I think about it? That ended up being a very big shift.

DUBNER: Are you saying that independent artists are over time via Spotify gaining leverage in the revenue ecosystem or not really? Because the common complaint is this: Spotify is great for customers.

EK: Right.

DUBNER: Spotify has turned out to be a life-saver for labels. Spotify has been great for Spotify, and for you. And it’s been great for some musicians. But then there are others who feel that they’re worse off than they would have been. Now every case is a little bit different. But to those who feel like, “Great, I’m glad all music is available to everybody all the time and I’m glad everybody else is making out well” — what do you say to those artists, or maybe what do you say to someone who’s starting in music now? Can it be a sustainable future for them?

EK: I think we are in the process of creating a more fair and equal music industry than it’s ever been in the past. So I’ll take an example, back in 2000, 2001, at the very, very peak of the music industry, peak of CD, all of those different things. Our estimate is that there were about 20- to maybe 30,000 artists that could live on being recorded music artists. Now, they could be touring, they could be doing other things, and the number could be far greater than that. But there were only 20- or 30,000 that could sustain themselves being that. Why? Well, because, again the distribution costs so much, which ended up being that there’s very few artists that could even get distributed to begin with. And because the costs were fairly high for a person buying the music, you ended up going with what you knew and wouldn’t take that much risk on unknown artists. So in the world with streaming, what’s really interesting is the alternative cost for you to listen to something new is virtually zero. It’s just your time. And because of that, you do listen to a lot more music than you did before and you listen to a bigger diversity of artists than you did before which in turn then grows the music industry.

DUBNER: You were saying there were 20, to 30,000 artists that could be supported. Do you know what that number is now?

EK: I don’t know what the number is now but it’s far greater. Even on Spotify itself, it’s far greater than that.

The economist Alan Krueger taught for years at Princeton and worked in both the Clinton and Obama White Houses. He was also fascinated by the economics of the music industry. Krueger once gave a speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame comparing the music industry to the modern economy at large. In both cases, he argued, most of the earnings were going to fewer and fewer people at the top of the pyramid. It’s what some people call a tournament model, where the winners get most, if not all, of the profits. Krueger died recently at age 58 — by suicide. He left behind a book, to be published soon, called Rockonomics. In it, he writes that there are roughly 200,000 professional musicians in the U.S. today, accounting for 0.13 percent of all U.S. workers. That percent has stayed about the same since 1970.And what’s the median annual income for these musicians? Twenty thousand dollars. The argument Daniel Ek is making sounds good in theory — that digital distribution should make it easier for lesser-known artists to find listeners and get paid. Remember how Ek defines the Spotify mission:

EK: To inspire human creativity by enabling a million artists to be able to live off of their art.

This was one of the great promises of the digital era — that you wouldn’t have to be a superstar to make a living. In 2006, the journalist Chris Anderson published an influential book called The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Daniel Ek, in a 2010 interview, called The Long Tail his favorite book. But Alan Krueger’s findings don’t support the long-tail promise. Social media and algorithm-driven recommendations — including Spotify’s own playlists — seem to magnify the bandwagon effect, whereby popular songs become even more popular by virtue of their popularity. In 2018, Spotify’s most-streamed artist was Drake, with 8.2 billion streams. Assuming a typical streaming royalty rate of 0.4 cents per play, that’s nearly $33 million going to Drake’s camp. But the pyramid is sharp, and things fall off really fast once you go beneath the top. Alan Krueger cites an industry survey which found that just 28 percent of artists earned money from streaming in 2018, with the median amount just $100.

So if you think about the streaming-music revolution as a sort of tournament, let’s think about how the various constituencies are making out. Spotify and Daniel Ek are doing very well; so are the company’s original funders, who got a huge return on their investment. The record labels have also been big winners: not only did Spotify reinvigorate their industry but it seems to have substantially improved their overall valuations. The Universal Music Group, for instance, which is currently for sale, has recently been valued at more than $30 billion; in 2013, its valuation was just $8.4 billion. Other winners in the Spotify tournament are customers, who get much more music than they used to get for much less money; and the most popular musicians are also winning big. One constituency that’s not obviously sharing in the winnings: the long-tail artists, of which there are many.

DUBNER: So if you weren’t you, and you were looking at this revolution from the outside, what would you say about the fact that a company like Spotify, which doesn’t produce content — well, it’s starting to, more — but is essentially a friction-remover and a distributor, is worth more than the entire music industry was about the time of its creation?

EK: Well, I mean I don’t want to — I’m actually very little focused on what a company is worth or isn’t, or if that’s fair. There’s something called a Wall Street which is really focused on that instead. I don’t really focus on that. We at Spotify are interested in is how do we get a music industry which actually participates in all of the income streams?

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Daniel Ek was a teenage entrepreneur; a millionaire in his early twenties; and now, at 36, a billionaire, having built Spotify into a streaming juggernaut that is now worth more than the entire music industry was worth at the time of Spotify’s founding. Spotify is in the news pretty much constantly these days: launching their service in India, filing an antitrust lawsuit in Europe against Apple, claiming that Apple’s App Store is unfairly favoring its own Apple Music over Spotify. For Ek, the biggest challenge at the moment would seem to be figuring out a way to derive more value — more revenue — from the massive, sprawling ecosystem of recorded music, an ecosystem whose business evolution has been very slow.

EK: So if you look at say the video industry — I say video and I really encompass the entire TV industry, the movie industry, all in video. What I find fascinating is it used to be a conversation where it started off only as paid. Then it added advertising as a component. And then there was a bunch of firms that were only focused on the advertising part of it and then a bunch of firms that were only focused on the subscription income. So most notable, you had CBS on one end, on the advertising end of the spectrum. You had HBO on the other end of this spectrum, asking for subscription income. And then if you look at it today, the truth of the matter is CBS is about 50/50. So it focuses as much on subscription income as it does on advertising. And HBO still is paid-only. But you’re — as an industry, it’s moving that both of these revenue models are equally important.

And that’s my point with the music industry too. My point it’s like, what would happen to the music industry if you all of a sudden combined the the power of advertising as a revenue model, the power of subscription as a revenue model, the power of a la carte on top of that as a revenue model. The three of them on a base of the three billion people around the world that are interested in music easily, just by virtue of looking at how much time people spend listening to music, ought to be at least multiples greater than what the current music industry is and probably larger than the music industry’s ever been.

DUBNER: And you just added 1.3 billion or so in India, yes, potentially?

EK: The Indian music market, what’s fascinating to me, is 90 percent of that market is about Bollywood films. And they are throwing off music and that’s what’s selling in India.

DUBNER: Is it being well-monetized still? I mean people buy it, or I mean —

EK: It’s not well-monetized. But the music industry is essentially a byproduct to the film industry, which for me tells a very interesting story, that there’s so much development left to do. What would happen if the ecosystem there was healthy? Then people wouldn’t think about making music just for movies.

DUBNER: So the India Spotify story could turn out to be exactly the opposite in a way of the American Spotify story, where some people feel here small artists are getting — the long tail is so skinny that you can’t make a living. And theoretically it may disincentive some people from creating. There — maybe there’s incentives to join, even the middle of the long tail there would be a step up, yeah?

EK: Yeah. Well, I mean it’s virtually non-existent. So it’s in a much earlier development stage than the U.S. music economy.

DUBNER: Let me ask you about consumer surplus, which is something economists love to talk about — those rare cases where you get something for much less than you’d be willing to pay. So Spotify is, relatively, super cheap, $10 a month for all the music I want. And that $10 would buy two-thirds of one downloaded album. So if you like music enough to buy two-thirds of one album per month, then to get all the music in the world essentially for that same price is ridiculously cheap. So I’m curious to know two things. What do you know about willingness to pay more? And what do you know, if anything, about the disposable income that’s now been captured by consumers by not having to spend more than $10 to consume the universe of music — where that disposable income goes, I’m curious to have any data on that.

EK: Well, I mean, obviously we agree. We think $10 a month is a very, very cheap and an amazing proposition. But the amount of people who wake up in the morning thinking, Hey, I want to pay $10 a month for music isn’t as great as most people would believe. And we believe that is because not only did piracy exist in a big way just a few years ago, but there are all of these other sources where you can access music very cheaply. Mostly free. So you can go on radio and listen to it, but you can also go on YouTube and you can find the entire archive of music, including all the bootlegs and videos and you can listen to that entirely for free. That’s what we’re competing against. So in order to do that, you can imagine then it’s a free product versus one that’s $10 a month. That’s a pretty big stretch , certainly since all of these other things may have other things like convenience — in the case of radio, works in your car, works in all those different things. And then, in the case of YouTube, it’s just, it’s everything. It’s even greater than what Spotify’s library is. So that’s where we’re, from a competitive set, wrestling with. Now obviously as cars get more and more connected, I do think streaming service is a way better user proposition.

DUBNER: Although I did wonder with autonomous vehicles theoretically coming maybe relatively soon.

EK: Right.

DUBNER: It does strike me that listening to music in a car is a perfect complementary activity. Because you need to drive, you need to keep your eyes on the road, but your ears are free. I do wonder with autonomous vehicles whether it may actually be harmful to streaming music because now my eyes are free to something that might be more interactive.

EK: Right. I mean, you may be right. I don’t know. I think that what’s really interesting, however, is that countercultural force right now from people looking into their phones is all of these well-being things, both Google and Apple released “screen time,” which is supposed to restrict your screen time. And we have the Alexa in your home, which is another device which you’re not supposed to look at, which are all great countercultural reactions to this, watching a screen, which we wouldn’t probably have imagined just a few years ago.

DUBNER: Do you have those kind of aspirations for Spotify to get into, health and wellness and hand-holding of various sorts?

EK: Not directly. To the extent that we do something like that, we’re already very big in terms of meditational music, wellness music, sleep, pink noise, white noise, everything on the spectrum. And now with podcasts obviously on the service too, there’s a lot of people who are focused on those things, which I’m very excited about.

Spotify has been streaming podcasts for years. But it made news recently by spending a few hundred million dollars to acquire two podcast-production companies, Gimlet and Parcast, and a firm called Anchor that’s primarily a podcast technology platform.

EK: Correct. Correct.

DUBNER: So that really changes things in a number of ways. Because you have been successful not being a content creator or producer — too much, at least. So I guess first question is why, and then the second question is, how will it unfurl?

EK: Right. Well, in the future, I don’t think people will make a choice whether they’re subscribing to a music service. We think that they’re making a choice whether they will have an audio service of their choice. It wasn’t this well-thought-out master plan. “Hey, we need an adjacent business, and we don’t know which one it is.” It wasn’t like that at all. What actually happened, because Spotify is a platform was we started seeing in my home country Sweden actually, we started seeing record companies buying podcasts and uploading them to the platform as another revenue opportunity for them to grow. And it resonated really well with listeners. And that was the first step. And then in Germany, record companies there had massive amounts of rights to audio books, which I wasn’t aware of. And they started uploading that to the service and very quickly, we went from no listening to that and now we’re probably if not the biggest, the second-biggest audio book service in Germany. And this is without our involvement. This just happened by proxy of us being a platform. So we started seeing it resonating really well into people’s lives. And they thought of Spotify not just as a music service but as a service where they can find audio. And it played really well into our strategy of ubiquity — i.e., being on all of these different devices in your home, whether it’s the Alexas or TV screens or in your cars or whatever as just another source where you could play your audio.

DUBNER: But why do you want to go to the trouble to pay a couple hundred million to buy a firm that’s creating it when almost everybody making podcasts would probably willingly have their content on Spotify?

EK: Yeah. Well, the reason why is really twofold. So one is that the format of podcasts, we’re still very early on into what it will be. If you really think about it, for most people, there’s all of these basic things for creators that haven’t been solved, like how well am I doing. It’s not that easy to find out. How am I monetizing the show and the value for advertisers, it’s just not that easy to find out. And thirdly, what are people saying about my show, feedback. Those are three very elemental things that if you think about it almost all other formats, if you’re a journalist today and writing in text, there’s ways to solve all three of them. We can already —

DUBNER: I mean what you’re describing does exist to some degree on Apple Podcasts, which I realize Spotify has a complicated relationship with. But that’s also, like Spotify, it’s a closed ecosystem. It’s not part of the web, quite. So if Apple Podcasts data existed in a non-closed environment would that have been enough for Spotify to not need to buy its own firm?

EK: Probably. I mean, in the end I mean it’s all about solving needs that creators or consumers are having. That’s what we’re focused on. And if someone had solved that need then obviously there would be less of a reason for us to do anything about it. And you know the same thing, if there was massive amounts of audio-book services in Germany I’m sure we wouldn’t have been successful.

DUBNER: Can you talk about Spotify customer data. What do you have and what do you do with it?

EK: Well, what we do with it now is very tightly regulated because we’re originally a European company and in Europe, I believe, five or six years ago there was a new initiative called G.D.P.R. that officially became a law some time April, May I believe last year. And obviously we’re complying with that. And what it basically says is that all the data that we have around you as a customer, you need to be able to ask us for it and we need to deliver it back to you. You need to have an opportunity for it getting deleted by us.

DUBNER: What are your abilities to monetize that data, though, to third parties?

EK: Well our ability to monetize it is obviously based on the contract that we have with our users, so obvious things that would be what genre of music are you listening to, what’s your age, what’s your demographics. And those are things that advertisers can target against.

DUBNER: Right. And how well do you monetize that currently?

EK: You mean if we do monetize it?

DUBNER: Yes. If you do monetize it how well do you —

EK: We monetize some of those aspects of course like any normal ad platform. It’s very important though to note that we’re not selling any customer data.

DUBNER: That’s what I’m asking. So there’s ads on the Spotify platform.

EK: Yes.

DUBNER: You’d be fools not to target those to listeners based on their demographics and their listening tendencies.

EK: Of course.

DUBNER: But you do have a lot of data that would be valuable to third parties.

EK: Oh yeah, massive amounts, but not even just for other advertisers. But you can imagine even for the music industry, there’s tons of data about how their songs are performing or other people’s songs might be performing that could inform them about what they’re doing. We’ve taken the stance that we don’t monetize the data itself at all. We don’t sell the data.

DUBNER: Why?

EK: Well, it’s an important one for us that users should be able to rely on us not — my fundamental view is, it’s their data. If we can use the data in order to make the Spotify experience better, then all good and great. And I think many users would say yeah, I agree with that. But because now of G.D.P.R., which I do think is the right step — we can argue about like was it the right implementation of it and all those things. But I do think it’s great for customers that there’s something like G.D.P.R. there. And you can delete the data. You can also say opt out of specific things that we are gathering about you and say, hey I don’t want you to know X or Y.

DUBNER: Yeah. I’ve read that you operate your life in a series of sort of five-year commitments. I don’t know how finite or real that is, but if it is real.

EK: Right.

DUBNER: Where are you now in the five-year cycle, and what happens next?

EK: It’s not always been five years, by the way. So when I started the company, it was a five-year commitment because being 23 at the time, having started lots of different companies before I really wanted to see what would happen if I applied myself to one thing and only one thing and do it for a meaningful amount of time, how far I could get on that problem. And the longest I could imagine spending on anything was five years. So that’s how it ended up being five years. And then when the five years passed, I was 28 so I said, Well when 30 — so it was a two-year increment. And now I said to myself, just before going public last year, is this what I want to do? And what would happen if I made a 10-year commitment? Which felt pretty daunting and what is it that we would have to do, what does the company have to look like for me to be interested to do this for another 10 years? Well what would my role have to look like in order for me to be interested?

DUBNER: Is that a key component, how interested you can remain — I mean it needs to be constantly challenging to you?

EK: Yeah, definitely so. I mean to be honest because otherwise if you don’t have that passion and you don’t feel like you’re growing and challenging yourself, someone else will probably do a much better job.

DUBNER: So where are you right now?

EK: I’m in year two now of a ten-year commitment.

DUBNER: So what did you see in the future of Spotify that you thought was going to be so amazingly, excitingly challenging for 10 years?

EK: Well, there’s really two things. So the first and more important one is really from the inception of Spotify, the assumption was that we would solve the user problem. I.e., — get people to listen in a much better way and then they’ll contribute back to the music industry. The core assumption was that the music industry would take care of all the other things — how people get signed, how they get heard. And I realized that that just didn’t happen. So we’re largely doing business the same way as we were doing 10 years ago. There’s been some evolution of that. But I want to work with the music industry. I was never a disrupter. That’s the big misunderstanding about me. I’ve — I believe the record companies are important and will be important in the future. But we believe we can be the R & D arm for the music industry, that we can develop better tools and technology to allow them to be more efficient and thereby creating more, better solutions for them and for artists.

DUBNER: Can you give an example of how the efficiency happens?

EK: Well, one of the hardest problems right now for an artist is to get heard. One of the biggest platforms to be heard at would be Spotify, right? So today the primary tool that an artist has to get heard on Spotify besides putting the music on there is getting known by one of our editors. So in a weird way, while we want to democratize music, we’ve become gatekeepers as well. So the question is: can we develop tools that enables artists to promote their music more efficiently just by themselves on the platform? And that could be in the form of being able to talk to their existing super fans that are on the platform. It could be in the form of better promotional tools for record companies in how they pitch music and get the music out there.

Spotify having become a gatekeeper — whether inadvertently or not — is an important point. A song that Spotify adds to one of its playlists will get many more streams than one that doesn’t. And streams translate into money for the rights-holders. So having that power is important, especially from a profit-maximizing perspective. If Spotify were primarily concerned with profit-maximizing, it might promote content that is cheaper for Spotify to stream. Maybe it’s content they produce themselves; or just content that comes with a lower payment rate than others. It may not sound like a big difference to pay a rights-holder 0.4 cents per stream versus 0.3 cents, but if you’re talking hundreds of millions or billions of streams, it adds up.

DUBNER: What do you listen to these days?

EK: Music-wise or podcast —

DUBNER: Well, both.

EK: So music-wise I’ve been really interested in African music lately. So particularly West African dancehall music has been something that’s been pretty cool. We launched in South Africa a year ago. So all of those playlists started bubbling up and there’s been a lot of really cool —

DUBNER: It must be so cool to launch in a new place as a means for you guys to discover what’s the music —

EK: Oh yeah, for sure, and there’s a lot of things that you just don’t even know about. So that’s been for me the biggest thing over the last year that’s been really interesting. And then on the podcast side, it’s such a fascinating format to me. There’s obviously people who can listen to Crimetown or whatever it may be, just to get entertained. For me it’s more the educational part of it. So it could be a Freakonomics. There’s one called Invest Like the Best that’s quite interesting and thoughtful about investments and how you do that. I do listen to quite a lot of history podcasts as well. Just to get an hour uninterrupted about a subject. There’s no other format that goes to the same depth as I find that podcasting does.

DUBNER: Are there still holes in the Spotify music library that you really want to fix?

EK: There are. But obviously by now the holes that we have are probably more regional holes than the fact of the big ones. I’m sure that there are — Garth Brooks being probably the best-known example right now. But most of it is really about old music, getting the archives up. I’m very proud that we did that deal with the BBC a few years ago where we’re now bringing the entire archive onto streaming. Same with Deutsche Grammophon, the German equivalents as well.

DUBNER: Would you ever consider in a case like Garth Brooks — I mean, I’m sure you’re going to say no to this, because it would be illegal — but would you ever consider saying, “Look, we’re Spotify, we’re just going to put the music there,” and then he will see how well it does. And then the first check gets written. And then that will bring him to the table in a proper way. Would you or did you ever do that?

EK: No. We’ve never done that. It goes against the ethos of what it is we’re trying to do. I mean, again, when we started, that was the modus operandi. There was all these —

DUBNER: A sort of terrorism in a way, yeah?

EK: Yeah, a lot of these services, where people just uploaded all the music and then they figured out the problem later on. That was never the approach that we took.

DUBNER: And why was that? I mean, do you consider yourself a particularly ethical person? Is that the way Swedish business is done? Because to be fair, Uber pretty much did that. They would go into cities where they knew that local authorities wouldn’t allow them to operate.

EK: Right. Well I don’t like to say that we’re more ethical than other people. It just felt like the right thing to do. And I believed that the problem for the music industry with the past had been just that fact, that it always felt like it was people who wanted to disrupt the existing music industry. I don’t believe that the music industry has to be disrupted. I believe it has to be evolved. So we like to work with them as partners. That’s always been our approach. There isn’t music on Spotify that the copyright owners haven’t authorized us.

DUBNER: I have one last question. If you weren’t doing this now — let’s just pretend Spotify really hadn’t worked, that either the technology or the rights-gathering proved impossible. You’d be doing what now, and where?

EK: If I weren’t doing this, I would probably do something in health care. And it’s a weird revelation, if you asked me ten years ago, I wouldn’t have said that. But right now it’s like I came to that realization because people always said, “Oh, Spotify is so amazing,” and my response was always, “Well, it’s not saving lives, but it’s good.” A few years ago I was thinking to myself, why am I not saving lives, and what would I do if I did that? And I talked about these technology currents, and I think in healthcare a lot of those technology currents are starting to play out. And it’s not just about the sort of digital part of these things. It’s just the advancement in biotech overall, CRISPR, proactive medicine. It’s going to be the next decade or two decades, we’re fundamentally moving from a place where we will look at doctors or the way we treated people like it’s almost witchcraft two decades from now. We’ll just know a lot more. And that’s fascinating, to think about the implications that that will have economically, because I believe in the end it means that we can spend a lot less of our GDP on healthcare and as a consequence hopefully treat a lot more people. So yeah, I’m really interested in that part, and what’s going to happen in that space.

DUBNER: Do you think you will do that, I mean, in eight years? At the end of this ten-year, quote, commitment, you’ll be only 44.

EK: Right.

DUBNER: Do you think you will try something radically different for you like that?

EK: I hope so. My interests — I love music. It’s been a passion really since the beginning of my life. And that will always be a passion and always be something that I’ll do in some shape or form. But we’re here a very, very short period of time on Earth. And I feel a tremendous amount of responsibility having — you know, it’s insane that I’m 30-plus years old and having had as much fortune as I’ve had, so I feel like I need to do a lot more than what I’m doing to leave the world a better place than what I entered it.

If you want to learn more about Spotify — including how a team of Swedish social scientists tried to reverse-engineer it to see how the platform really works — check out a new book called Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, Matt Hickey, and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Daniel Ek, co-founder and C.E.O. of Spotify.

RESOURCES

“The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” by Felix Oberholzer‐Gee and Koleman Strumpf (Journal of Political Economy, 2007).

The post How Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians) appeared first on Freakonomics.

Are you missing all of your teeth?

Do you have dentures that currently move around when you eat?

Then full mouth dental implants could be an option for you. Full mouth dental implants can be used to either replace a full set of missing teeth with a fixed bridge or stabilise an existing loose or wobbly denture.

Why do people get dental implants?

We’ve written before about the consequences of not replacing missing teeth . With full mouth dental implants many people consider dentures first, however there are a few advantages of having traditional implants rather than just a simple denture.

Dental implants can support the bone in the area where teeth have been lost thereby reducing the amount of bone resorption.

Implants provide a rigid basis on which to create a brand-new set of teeth, whether this be a denture or dental bridge.

Because they have a more rigid base it makes eating far easier.

Because implant restorations are more stable than basic dentures it means there is less chance of embarrassment that is sometimes caused when a regular dentures move about during smiling or talking.

What are full mouth implants?

Dental implants themselves don’t actually restore any teeth at all, the implants provide a substructure or frame on which to support the teeth that you see. Depending on the number of implants (substructures) used governs the way that you’re missing teeth are replaced.

Here’s a simple list of what full mouth implants are and how they might be used:

2-4 Dental implants – 2 would usually be the minimum required in order to replace all of your teeth. Usually the implants would be placed where your eye teeth were (canines), these implants would support little pop studs which would stick up on your gums (the dental implants would be completely concealed within your gums). A full denture would then click onto these pop studs.

4-6 Implants – if you had more dental implants fitted then you may be able to have a fixed bridge. This is where the dentist screws a fixed bridge made of either metal and porcelain or zirconia onto the dental implant heads. You won’t be up to remove the bridge yourself but it can be removed by the dentist for regular maintenance.

What we describe here is a very basic summary of full mouth dental implants, there are other slight modifications to the techniques above depending upon your exact clinical situation.

What are the pros and cons of dental implants?

Full mouth dental implant pros:

They support the surrounding bone and can prevent bone resorption.

They support the final restoration to ensure it stays in rigidly during eating, smiling and in everyday life.

Full mouth dental implant cons:

Can need more maintenance than regular denture.

Will almost certainly be more expensive in the short term than a regular denture.

The process for having full mouth dental implants

The process for having a full mouth dental implant treatment will vary significantly depending on your exact situation. The dental implant procedure will often be undertaken by a range of healthcare professionals including, but not limited to:

Your referring dentist (sometimes this dentist may place the implants themselves).

The dental implant dentist.

A periodontics specialist who may perform more specialised bone grafting procedures.

A dental laboratory who will be making the implant retained which or denture.

The dental implant manufacturer who may get involved in the design and planning stage to work out which implant from their range is best.

A dental hygienist that will help you with post operative care to help you clean and maintain a dental implant.

All of these people work together, sometimes in different dental clinics to ensure you have the best dental care. The procedure will, however usually be along the following lines:

An initial consultation with your dental implant dentist. Some practices offer a free dental implant consultation.

Initial impressions of the top and bottom to work out the relationship between the jaws and begin diagnostic stages.

Possible CT scan in order to work out position, density and quality of the bone.

Possible computer aided design stages to work out where the implants are going to be.

Bite registration in order to work out the relationship and distance between the top and bottom jaw.

Mock up of how you may look once the implants are placed.

Creation of a surgical spent from the mockup in order to guide the dental implant surgeon to place the implants in the right place.

Dental implant surgery to put the dental implants into your mouth.

Healing phase, anywhere between three and six months.

Checking of the mockup to ensure that everything is okay.

Construction of the final dental bridge or denture. This process may take a month or so depending upon the complexity.

Various tryings of the final bridge or denture throughout the manufacturing process to ensure that each stage is accurate prior to proceeding to the next. Then maybe three or four different stages and visits to the surgery during this process.

Final fitting of the final bridge or denture (false teeth).

Follow-up to ensure everything is okay.

How long does it take for dental implants?

It can often take a year from initial discussion to final restoration to have a full mouth dental implant bridge or denture so it’s worth beginning the process as early as you can.

What are the alternative options?

The first option in any situation within dentistry is to do nothing, this is sometimes the best option depending upon your situation. However, if you know that you want to restore a full mouth of missing teeth then the options are usually:

A dental bridge fixed and fully supported on the implants.

A denture which clicks into the mouth on the implants.

A hybrid. This can often be a bar which sits in your mouth and is permanently fitted to the implants. Over the top of this bar clips a removable bridge.

The cost of full mouth dental implants

And so, we come on to the thrust of this blog post which is about the cost of dental implants. As you can see there are a wide range of alternatives and possibilities. You may need to have extensive bone grafting or treatments such as a sinus lift in order to create enough bone in which to place the dental implant. These are additional surgical treatments which is difficult to give prices for at the beginning as it depends upon the complexity.

As a general guide, the cost of full mouth dental implants in the UK will be along the following lines:

Initial dental implant consultation £100

initial diagnostic stages for study models and x-rays £100

bone grafting from £500

Full denture retained by two implants from £3500

Fixed full arch bridge from £9000

As you can see the treatment is not especially cheap however, consider it against the cost of a car.

the average cost of a small car in the UK is up to £12,715.

the average car lasts for 8 years

The average car is used for only 4% of the time!

Compare this to the cost of full mouth dental implants:

The average cost in the UK is from £9000

The average lifespan of a dental bridge is 15 years

Your teeth are used 100% of the time. These are not only used whilst you are eating, they are used to keep your face supported to keep you looking good. Many people also use their teeth at night as they grind.

Most people would consider finance to purchase a car and indeed finances usually available for dental implants also, making them and affordable option for many people.

We do hope you have found this in-depth blog post about the cost of full mouth dental implants both informative and educational, please do let us know your comments below.

Caption: In the U.S., median rent has doubled since the 1990’s, outpacing inflation. Politicians and the public think rent control is the solution. Spoiler alert: it’s not. (Photo: Caelie Frampton)

As cities become ever-more expensive, politicians and housing advocates keep calling for rent control. Economists think that’s a terrible idea. They say it helps a small (albeit noisy) group of renters, but keeps overall rents artificially high by disincentivizing new construction. So what happens next?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability.

For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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I’m sure you know this already, but let me say it anyway: cities have become really popular, all over the world. An ever-larger share of the U.S. and global population lives in cities, and that large share is expected to get even larger. As demand for city living grows, the supply of housing often can’t keep up. Which results in — and you know this too — a rise in prices. In the U.S., median rent has doubled since the 1990’s, outpacing inflation by quite a bit. In many cities, this makes it hard for people who already live there to stay, and hard for people who’d like to move there. I’m sure you’ve heard the horror stories about rents in cities like London and Hong Kong; Seattle and San Francisco, where the median one-bedroom apartment costs about $3,700 a month. The problem is so bad in New York City that it inspired a new political party.

Jimmy McMILLAN: I represent the Rent Is Too Damn High Party. People are working eight hours a day and forty hours a week and some a third job.

New York, like many cities, has over time put in place various affordable-housing policies. One time-honored tradition is some form of rent control. That might mean setting a price cap on what a landlord can charge or limiting the amount the rent can be raised. Here’s the Stanford economist Rebecca Diamond.

Rebecca DIAMOND: From an economics point of view, it provides insurance against getting priced out of your neighborhood.

And rent control seems to be having a moment. It already exists in a number of places.

DIAMOND: The most expensive cities in the U.S., they almost all have rent control.

And the appetite is spreading.

DIAMOND: You see rent control popping up politically when housing prices and rents are going up. 

Among the cities currently considering some form of rent control are Chicago, Philadelphia, Providence, and Denver. Oregon recently became the first state to pass a rent-control bill. A statewide proposition in California failed, but some cities there are moving ahead on their own. A recent report by a consortium of affordable-housing advocates says that if all the proposed rent-control legislation were to pass, nearly one in three American tenants would have some kind of rent protection.

*      *      *

Most economists say that rent control is a bad idea, as is just about any form of price control. They believe that markets work best when supply and demand are allowed to find a natural equilibrium, with price acting as the referee. Here’s one such economist.

GLAESER: My name is Ed Glaeser and I am the Fred and Eleanor Glimp professor of economics at Harvard, where I teach both microeconomic theory and the economics of cities.

DUBNER: Ed, you have one minute to convince someone that rent control is a terrible idea. Go.

GLAESER: All right. So, I’ve already squandered five of my seconds. It’s not particularly fair. It’s not a good way of allocating scarce space. It’s not a good way of helping the downtrodden. It’s a way that freezes a city and stops it from adjusting to changes, a way that freezes people in apartments and stops the motion that is inherent in cities.

So that’s a baseline economic take, at least. Let’s try to unravel this issue, starting with a brief history of rent control.

GLAESER: Rent controls really became ubiquitous in World War II, and the idea here was, the nation was laying down its life to try and bring freedom to the world, and it seemed wrong that some people who were well-placed should earn some form of extra bonuses by being able to raise up rents on people, maybe whose sons and daughters were off fighting for the U.S. elsewhere. And rent control was seen as being a way of, somehow or other, trying to keep America being a bit fairer during World War II. Now, lots of places introduced rent control during this period. After the war, most of them got rid of it because that cause seemed to be a little bit less pressing. But, some cities kept it, and New York, of course, is the most famous place that still has it.

Glaeser himself grew up in New York.

GLAESER: I lived in a rent-stabilized unit for the first ten years of my life. I mean something like 72, 74 percent of New York City’s households were renters in those days. And indeed, the mid-1970s was an era in which New York’s housing didn’t seem that expensive, affordability just wasn’t the same issue that it was today. Now, flash forward 30 years, the cities have been enormously successful they haven’t built enough to accommodate the new demand. They risk becoming boutique towns affordable only to the wealthy, and people are desperate to see that those cities don’t push out every poor resident, that they don’t become monocultures built around the privileged and the rich, and rent control appears to be at least one avenue for doing it. But it’s a very blunt instrument.

Just how blunt? There are decades’ worth of economic research describing the downsides of rent control. The first major paper was written in 1946 by Milton Friedman and George Stigler; here’s Friedman:

Milton FRIEDMAN: Rent control is a law that supposedly is passed to help the people who are in housing. And it does help those who are in current housing. But the effect of rent control is to create scarcity, and to make it difficult for other people to get housing.

Where did this scarcity come from? For one, developers had less incentive to build new housing if there was a ceiling placed on what they could charge. Friedman also argued that rent control created a “haphazard and arbitrary allocation of space.” This was echoed in a 1972 paper by Edgar Olsen, which found that rent control led to what economists call an “overconsumption” of housing.

GLAESER Let’s say you rented an apartment in New York in 1955, you had three small kids, you rented a three-bedroom. It was perfectly matched for the needs of you with your kids growing up. They moved out of the house in the early 70’s. By the late 80’s, maybe your husband or wife actually died and you’re living on your own in a three-bedroom apartment in New York. But, my goodness, would you ever move out? Your rent is a fraction of what the market rent is. One of my favorite stories about this — and this is quoted by Ken Auletta’s The Streets Were Paved with Gold, he cites Nat Sherman, the famous tobacconist to the world, who had this big shop on Fifth Avenue, who said that he pays, I forget what it was.

DUBNER: $355 a month for a six-room apartment, it says here.

GLAESER: Isn’t that amazing? Keep in mind, it’s a few decades ago. But it’s an unbelievable deal. Now, what’s outrageous about this is, he then says, “I think it’s fair because I use it so rarely,” right? Which means that he’s not getting very much value out of it, but the crazy thing about this is, there were lots of New Yorkers who would love to have that apartment and it would get a lot more value out of it.

In 1997, Ed Glaeser did his own analysis of rent control in New York City, trying to determine just how economically inefficient it was. He and his co-author, Erzo Luttmer, found that “this misallocation of bedrooms leads to a loss in welfare which could be well over $500 million annually to the consumers of New York, before we even consider the social losses due to undersupply of housing.” Glaeser’s work has also inspired a new generation of economists to further the literature on rent control.

DIAMOND: Historically, people relied much more on theory in making their arguments about rent control.

That’s Rebecca Diamond again. She’s a former student of Ed Glaeser’s.

DIAMOND: Because even without a lot of data you can make some pretty simple theoretical predictions about what rent control might do to a housing market.

But there are some things that theory alone cannot tell you.

DIAMOND: One of the biggest open questions in the literature of rent control is: what happens to those tenants that get rent control? Really, how much are the renters benefiting, because they’re the potential big winners of rent control. And to measure that, you really need to have data on where everybody lives, and who gets access to rent control, and whether they decide to stay in that rent-controlled apartment or go somewhere else. And traditional data sources that economists work with very rarely track migration of an individual.

DUBNER: So you recently co-authored with Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian a paper called “The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco.” First, if you would, talk about the data.

DIAMOND: Yeah, we have some really cool data. So, traditional data sets, you can get things on the distribution of earnings and income, things like that. But you won’t also see their migration. So, we have this, you could call, administrative data, which tracks people’s address histories.

DUBNER: And where did these migratory data come from?

DIAMOND: We bought them from a company called Infutor. They are a company that works in “identity management,” So they have this history of addresses for everyone which they collect from a number of different sources and stitch them together, which is very useful for the private sector and firms that need to keep track of up-to-date addresses. But from a research perspective, it’s super-exciting data because it’s so big and so detailed.

Armed with this super-exciting data on individual tenants, Diamond and her fellow researchers set out to measure some of the long-term effects of rent control in San Francisco. They made particular use of a change in the city’s rent laws. San Francisco had rent control, but it didn’t apply many of the city’s smaller apartment buildings.

DIAMOND: And the exemption was basically thought of as, “Well, these are mom-and-pop landlords. They don’t have market power. They’re not corporations. So we don’t need to regulate their rents.” And then newspapers reported that those smaller multi-family buildings were increasingly purchased by corporate entities, because that’s really where you could make your money in the housing market. And that led to a vote in 1994 where everyone in the city got to vote about whether we could remove this small multi-family exemption, and that would then expand rent control, not just to the large multi-family housing stock, but also the small multi-family housing stock. And that, indeed, passed.

DUBNER: So, you’ve got this awesome new law — awesome for you guys, at least, as researchers — that lets you mark before and after. It’s a perfect little natural experiment with a control group. And then you’ve got these wonderful data sets. And then you mash up all of these data together and analyze it and you find the following: your paper concludes that among many things “rent control limits renters’ mobility by 20 percent and lowers displacement from San Francisco, especially for minorities.” So let’s start with this: what does it mean exactly that renters’ mobility is lowered by 20 percent, and why is that important?

DIAMOND: So, we look at whether the renters who get access to rent control choose to remain in their newly rent-controlled apartment. So, we find that they are 20 percent more likely to remain there, relative to our control-group renters who don’t get access to rent control.

DUBNER: So, that seems totally unsurprising, yes?

DIAMOND: Yes, I more see that result as a validation that our data is good and high-quality and we have some something to work with here.

DUBNER: Okay. Further, you write that “rent control lowers displacement from San Francisco.” What does that mean, exactly?

DIAMOND: So, we can look at not just whether you remain in the actual apartment you lived in when you got access to rent control, but whether you remain in San Francisco as a whole. We find rent control has a dramatic impact on whether you actually live in San Francisco or not. So, it prevents those renters from leaving the city as a whole, which I think from a policy perspective of rent-control advocates, that’s one of the goals they talk about as preventing displacement from the city.

DUBNER: And then you write that, especially for minorities, that displacement is lowered.

DIAMOND: Right. So, when you look at that first cohort of renters that already lived in the city at the time of rent control, it is definitely helping minorities more. It’s preventing displacement of them especially.

DUBNER: Furthermore, you write that landlords who are susceptible to rent control “reduce rental housing supplies by 15 percent either by converting to condos, selling to owner-occupants, or redeveloping buildings.” So, now it starts to get a little more complicated. Can you talk about who’s now starting to win here and who’s starting to lose here?

DIAMOND: So, obviously, when the landlord is first notified about rent control, he or she can quickly deduce that his or her rental stream is going to be lower than previously expected. And just like any other business owner, they might think about changing their business strategy. So, if renting out their apartments is no longer very profitable, now they may decide, “Oh, maybe it’s worthwhile to convert to condos and sell off the apartments to owner-occupants” and that would be a way to recover some of this lost income. Or, another thing they could do is, say, knock down their old building and build some new construction and either sell those as condos or rent them out as apartments.

Both of those options would avoid them having to pay this tax of rent control, help recoup some of their losses — which is good for the landlords, but is going to undermine the goals of rent control because now we’re going to have less rental housing out there available for rent control.

So you can start to see how rent control may be accomplishing a narrow, short-term goal — making existing housing more affordable for a select group of people — at the expense of the long-term goal of making a city more affordable generally.

DIAMOND: When you pass rent control, the landlords of the property suddenly getting covered by rent control are losing so much money, they no longer really want to rent their apartments out at the prevailing new prices, so they decrease their supply of rental housing to the market. And if there’s less supply, that’s going to drive up prices.  

DUBNER: Okay, so, let me just make sure I have it pretty straight. You find evidence that rent control increases gentrification, one component of which is the displacement of low-income tenants. On the other hand, you also find evidence that low-income people, including minorities — at least those who are in rent-controlled units already — they’re likely to disproportionately benefit from rent control.

So, if I’m an affordable-housing advocate, I might say, “Oh, fine, fancy Stanford professor — who I’m sure has some kind of great income and/or housing subsidy and/or situation — I don’t care that some landlords are suffering. I don’t care that the policy is having some downstream effects that you don’t like. I need to make sure that low-income people aren’t going to get a rent increase of 50 percent overnight.” So, how do you respond to that argument?

DIAMOND: So, when you think about those initial tenants, that’s the best bet you’re going to get for the benefits of rent control to low-income tenants: the people that are already in the housing. But even though we find that those tenants are much more likely to stay in their apartment, when we look 10, 15 years later, the share of those 1994 residents that are still there is down to 10 percent or so. So 90 percent of them no longer live in that initial apartment.

And it’s that next low-income tenant that wants to live in the city, that low-income tenant is going to have a very hard time finding an affordable option, because now there’s going to be less rental housing, the prices that that low-income tenant are going to face when they want to initially move in are going to be higher than they would have been absent rent control.

DUBNER: I’m curious how generalizable you think your findings from San Francisco are for other cities.

DIAMOND: I would suspect that the actual quantitative loss of rental supply or benefits to the tenant will depend a little bit city to city, but I think the qualitative takeaway that landlords are savvy and are going to work hard to not lose money on their investments, I think is a very general point.  

For economists who already felt confident in the theoretical arguments against rent control, research like Diamond’s provides empirical evidence that essentially tells the same story. Yes, there are some winners in rent control; but the losing is more widespread, and longer term. But how about empirical evidence from a reverse angle — that is, not when a city adds or expands rent control, like San Francisco did, but when it gets rid of it?

DIAMOND: So, there’s other work by David Autor and coauthors that looks at the removal of rent control in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1994.

By the early 1990s, Cambridge was one of the few remaining rent-control strongholds in Massachusetts. Landlords had been trying to get rid of it for years. But there are a lot fewer landlords than there are tenants, so any attempt to change the local law was voted down. Finally, the rent control opponents had a winning idea: put the issue up on a statewide referendum, where there might be less empathy for all those city dwellers with below-market rents. When the referendum was held, nearly 60 percent of the voters in Cambridge were opposed — but, statewide, it passed, and so Cambridge began to deregulate its rents. Years later, a trio of M.I.T. economists examined the effects of removing rent control.

GLAESER: Okay, so, the classic paper on this has been written by David Autor, Parag Pathak, and Chris Palmer.

Ed Glaeser again.

GLAESER: It showed that when units were brought out of rent control, their owners invested in them. So, they upped the quality of the units; there was more of a supply of higher-end housing.  

DIAMOND: They find that the rent-controlled apartments experience a lot of renovation. Landlords renovate a lot, and that drives up the desirability of living in those apartments. Also, they find that that creates spillovers onto the nearby apartment buildings that they themselves weren’t rent-controlled.

GLAESER: So neighboring apartments became more valued as a result of the end of rent control. And the most recent paper has shown that crime has gone down — particularly, street crime has gone down right after the elimination of rent control in Cambridge.

DIAMOND: So it looked like rent control had negative externalities on the neighborhood.

So what does economic research tell us about rent control? There are at least two conclusions — which, if I’m reading it right, sort of work against each other. The first conclusion is that rent control doesn’t help many people for very long, in part because it constrains the supply of affordable housing. The second conclusion is that just getting rid of rent control does not, in and of itself, lead to more affordable housing; in fact a deregulated housing market can easily lead to less affordable housing. The Boston-Cambridge area is one of many places experiencing a steep shortage in not just affordable housing but housing overall.

So even if you accept that rent control is a big contributor to the affordable-housing problem, getting rid of it isn’t necessarily a solution. You can see why politicians and policy-makers are confused. In Massachusetts, in fact, there’s currently a movement to bring back statewide rent control. And as we mentioned earlier, Massachusetts is not alone.

DIAMOND: So, we just had this big vote in California about whether we should repeal a statewide law that restricts the scope of rent control in California, and indeed we did not repeal that law.

DUBNER: So, somebody read your paper.

DIAMOND: It was interesting to see how our results were used by policy makers and media on both sides of the fight. Because indeed, some of our results are, like, rent control are good, others make them look bad. You’ve got to read the whole paper and take it all into account to make a decision, but it was a very policy-relevant paper for that discussion.

DUBNER: I’m curious what you can tell us about the political dimensions of rent control. I may be wrong, but I believe that rent control is generally supported by Democrats and generally opposed by Republicans.

DIAMOND: I think it’s a simplification to say all Democrats support rent control. But I think in the short run, you can see the benefits of rent control — the tenants right away benefit. What’s much harder to see are these indirect effects that take a long time, and it’s harder to put your finger on that. The losses are spread everywhere a little bit, and harder to see walking down the street or talking to your constituents.

GLAESER: There certainly are some poor people who can benefit. And, it’s a very tangible benefit, right? It’s not some complicated thing which requires you to trust in the market. It’s just sort of very clear, and if you think that people on the left, many of them just don’t trust markets to begin with, then saying there’s going to be some negative market effect to them, that sounds like capitalist hocus-pocus, whereas, what they can see right now is that Mrs. Reyes’s rents won’t go up because of their regulation.

Vicki BEEN: Economists tend to believe their models and say, “End of story,” and, “Believe me,” right?

That’s Vicki Been.

BEEN: But communities don’t necessarily have to believe economists, and so economists need to do a better job of responding to the very real fears that communities have.

Been used to be commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Now she’s a law professor at New York University, and she directs the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

BEEN: The Furman Center has embarked on a project that we call “Not Your Grandmother’s Rent Control” to try to figure out, if you were starting from scratch, and you were designing the most efficient rent-regulation system, what would that look like?

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As we’ve been hearing, economists are generally opposed to rent control. It rewards some people, but fairly arbitrarily; it punishes many others, and generally doesn’t do much to improve overall access to housing. That said, most people don’t think like economists, or even believe them. Which is why many politicians and members of the public think rent control is a great idea.

David EISENBACH: Well, I’m in favor of residential rent control and rent regulations. 

That’s David Eisenbach; he teaches history at Columbia University and he recently ran for a citywide office in New York called public advocate. There are in New York City about 3.4 million apartment units, nearly 1 million of which are rent-stabilized. And New York’s rental market is incredibly expensive — as it is in many other cities with regulated rents, like San Francisco. Economists argue that overall high prices are a direct consequence of rent regulation; what does Eisenbach think?

EISENBACH: I disagree. I mean, there are a lot of reasons why real estate in San Francisco and real estate in New York are high. Blaming it on rent stabilization is definitely not it. The consequences of getting rid of either rent control and/or rent stabilization would be the immediate displacement, of a big portion of the population, and that would just be cruel at this point. I don’t know how anybody could justify — even somebody looking at it purely in economic terms — how anybody could justify that, just in human terms. You’re going to blame the high rents on rent control? Come on.

Okay, so Eisenbach does not believe the economic research on rent control. What does he believe in?

EISENBACH: Well, first and foremost, I’m an angry New Yorker who walks around the streets of New York and sees empty storefront after empty storefront, and just feels like my city is dying.

New York’s commercial rents have spiked along with its residential rents. And in some parts of Manhattan, as much as 20 percent of the retail space is either vacant or soon to be vacant.

EISENBACH: And I found out that there is this bill called the Small Business Jobs Survival Act. It was initially submitted back in the 1980’s and I figured, why don’t I run for office pushing this bill? And so I ran for public advocate on the platform, “We’re going to pass this bill; it’s going to save small business in New York City.”

We should say that Eisenbach did not win the election. He came in 13th in a field of 17. But he did get a fair amount of attention for talking about all those empty storefronts, which have upset a lot of people.

EISENBACH: There are two major provisions of the Small Business Jobs Survival Act. One: it guarantees a 10-year lease renewal offer from the landlord to the tenant for any tenant with a commercial lease in New York City. Number two: if the landlord and tenant cannot come to an agreement, they go to legally binding arbitration, and that arbitrator then will pick a fair market rent, which will then be charged in the next 10-year lease renewal.

Opponents of this proposal call it commercial rent control.

EISENBACH: But this bill, the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, is absolutely not rent control. It doesn’t put a limit on how much rent can be charged, which is the very definition of rent control. It’s legally binding arbitration. Much different.

DUBNER: Are there other cities that have this kind of small-business jobs protection on the real-estate front that works well?

EISENBACH: It’s going to be unique.  

Even though Eisenbach lost his election, he still believes the Small Business Jobs Survival Act may get through New York’s City Council. I was interested to know what the economists we’ve been speaking with — Rebecca Diamond of Stanford and Ed Glaeser of Harvard — what they thought about commercial rent regulation.

DIAMOND: So, I’m also very interested in that, and I also know almost nothing about it. I have never seen any work on it.  

GLAESER: You can easily tell a story where the threat of some form of rent control makes a vacancy problem worse in the short run. So, for example, I don’t want to rent right now to a lower-end tenant who could fill my space, because I’ll be locked in by the rent-control law and I’ve got that tenant forever. So, that means, I’m going to really hold out for a blue-chip tenant because I have this threat of this law over my shoulder.

So, do I think vacant empty storefronts are a problem? Sure. I mean, we can talk about it from a perspective merely as an urbanist, where we think it’s unattractive to have these things, but I’m also disturbed by it as an economist, because someone’s got space to sell, there are people who want to buy that space. Why isn’t the transaction happening, right? It’s sort of — the market is going awry. And the answer to that — of why the market is going awry — is not immediately obvious.

There are of course plenty of theories as to why so many storefronts in New York are vacant. Here again is Vicki Been, the former housing official who studies the real-estate market at NYU.

BEEN: I think there are a lot of questions about how commercial rent regulation would work and how it might interfere with an efficient market. One concern that I would have right now is, we seem to be in the middle of an upset, of a transition in retail in general, because of the availability of Internet retail. A lot is in flux.

GLAESER: But there are two points of evidence against that. One of which is that many of these storefronts formerly held services, and I don’t think a nail salon has been made obsolete by Amazon just yet. And secondly, the rents, the asking rents, at least according to the most recent Real Estate Board of New York report, in many of these areas are still sky-high. It’s not like there’s no demand for areas where you’re charging $300, $400 per square foot to rent these areas.

In the long term, all the economic push for both the landlords and the tenants is to get those units occupied and get the rent payments again flowing to the landlord.

Landlords, whether small or large, are often left out of public discussions about property markets. And if they’re not left out, they’re usually drawn as villains. Vicki Been, in thinking about the project she calls “Not Your Grandmother’s Rent Control,” is trying to change that.

BEEN: I think the thing that you really need to focus on is: how can I ensure that the landlord is getting a reasonable return, right? Because otherwise, people will take their money and put it elsewhere and you won’t get building. And how can we at the same time try to close some of these avenues that landlords could use to try to escape rent regulation without it becoming a system that’s so weighed down with so many different enforcement challenges that it kind of collapses of its own weight, right?

You need to pay attention to the different ways in which property owners are making money on the property, so you really need to have a holistic look. At the same time, you need to have very open-eyes view of the kinds of costs that we’re imposing on them.

There’s one huge cost that drives real-estate prices, whether we’re talking about rentals or sales, for both commercial and residential buildings.

BEEN: In New York City, for example, a very high percentage of rent goes for property taxes. So we can’t be saying to landlords, “Hey, keep prices down — but by the way, your property tax just went up by 10 percent. So we have to recognize that, okay, we as a taxpaying body have an obligation to understand the effect that those increases may have on rents, and we can’t just turn around and say to the landlord, “You absorb them,” right? “Don’t pass them onto the tenant.” Because that’s an unsustainable system.  

GLAESER: It’s certainly true that renters implicitly have to pay for property taxes. And it’s not obvious that’s wrong, because the idea of property taxes is they’re paying for city services and renters use city services, too. That’s obviously not wrong.

DUBNER: So, here’s a big question that I really hope you can answer, because I’ve wondered this for a long time. Some of the biggest property owners in a city like New York — and some of the wealthiest property holders generally — are universities, religious institutions, hospitals, and other not-for-profit institutions, which makes them either partially or wholly exempt from paying property taxes. So, I’m curious, how does that exemption affect a) the taxes paid by everyone else, and how does that b) ultimately affect housing prices for everyone.  

GLAESER: First of all: clearly, you’re right. The government has decided to subsidize certain institutions by enabling them not to pay property taxes. And from a purely accounting point of view, those taxes need to come from somewhere else.

On the other hand, it is also true that at least some of the institutions that you’re talking about have proven to be extraordinarily important for the economic health of the area, right? We’re subsidizing the university student, right? We’re making it cheaper for them to rent than it would be otherwise. Is that fair? Well, we thought that, somehow or other, it was a good idea to subsidize educational institutions at one point in time. We thought there might be some spillovers from that, some benefits from encouraging people to become educated. But, we should be open to re-investigating that, and anyway, you shouldn’t take my word for it, because after all, I’m the employee of an educational institution.

We can ask whether or not the blanket property-tax exemption that we’ve given to religious institutions and educational institutions is appropriate. I mean, that seems like a reasonable question to ask. In the case of religious institutions it in some sense goes back to fundamental issues about separation of church and state in the U.S., but we can still ask this question.

I would be surprised if we think that changing those tax rates is the number-one step to take to promote affordability in New York City though, relative to bringing more space on market that you can actually build on, changing the regulations. I mean, it seems like that’s not likely to be the case, but it is true that you move stuff to a religious or educational use, in many cases you’re moving away from an owner who would actually build on it. And that’s also correct.

So what have we learned about housing, especially affordable housing, especially in the most desirable cities? For starters, we’ve learned that it’s complicated. Property taxes play a large, underappreciated role in driving up costs, and the tax burden isn’t necessarily spread so equitably. Rent regulations, meanwhile, appeal to the public and politicians, but they also create perverse incentives that in the long run work against affordable housing. How about housing vouchers: aren’t they a more flexible way to subsidize housing?

BEEN: The advantage of a voucher is, you can go through all of those eligibility requirements and really target the voucher to the families that you think are most in need. And we in New York, and in many other major cities, we have prohibitions against a landlord refusing a tenant because they’re using a voucher rather than earned income.

But we’re still getting enormous resistance from landlords, because if you have a federal government that shuts down and isn’t paying its voucher payments, and there, the landlord is stuck with that, right? Or if you have a city, like New York City did, that issued vouchers and then changed its mind, and said, “Oops, that program is over,” then the landlord has a tenant in place who no longer can pay the rent and the landlord has to take them to court and bear the costs of that.

Meanwhile, the market price of housing in a place like Manhattan lies somewhere between punitive and prohibitive. So if rent control isn’t a viable tool in the fight for affordable housing, what is?

GLAESER: The most natural tool towards affordability is supply, and to make sure that we are making it easy enough to build moderate-cost rental-apartment buildings in these cities. 

Ed Glaeser again. 

GLAESER: We’ve used regulations to so restrict our ability to provide affordable housing units that now we’re at this restricted frozen-in-amber form. In the case of New York — gosh, New York is New York. It’s hard to imagine how much housing you’d really need to sate demand for New York.

DUBNER: What about Boston, where you live? Boston is facing what it calls a historic housing shortage. The city’s growing, not enough housing to match. What do you suggest Boston do to accommodate that surge, other than let the market work its famous magic?

 GLAESER: Look, drive around Boston. It doesn’t look overcrowded to me, and I don’t think it should look overcrowded to anyone else. There’s a lot of vacant industrial space that could easily house tens of thousands of units. If you made it easy enough to build, I’ve got to think that this is a doable problem, at least from an engineering and economics point of view. The politics, of course, are more difficult.  

DUBNER: What, specifically, would need to be done to change it?  

GLAESER: So, the big answer is, you need, as-of-right zoning that enables fairly high-density levels over a fair amount of space. So, currently Boston’s zoning plan is highly antiquated. Every project is handled on an ad-hoc basis. Usually, it involves variances that are quite high from the original plan, which means that they are highly subject to judicial challenge. All of that is a recipe for uncertainty and delay and endless community meetings.

The thing that works best is when you have something where you’ve decided in advance, “This is how much we’re going to allow to build; there are a couple of simple rules that you’ve got to follow. Come here, bring your units and make it happen.” And that’s what’s needed. That’s what actually works. It’s not something that involves a 10-year negotiation process, but something that says, “Here are the rules upfront. Go to it.”

It should be noted that not all U.S. cities impose the same level of red tape you see in Boston and New York and San Francisco.

GLAESER: If you want to look for affordability, the American Sunbelt is pretty great. The Atlantas, the Houstons, the Dallases, the places that just have made it very easy to build over the last 40 years — you want to ask why Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix each added a million people between 2000 and 2010 as metro areas, it’s because they make it astonishingly easy to build. And you can go and you can buy a great-looking house for a fraction of what you’d pay in New York in these places.

We don’t have an affordable housing crisis in the U.S. nationally. We have lots of affordable housing in places with names like Atlanta, but just not in New York City.

Many European cities, meanwhile, are more like New York — in fact, exaggerated versions of New York.

GLAESER: Much of Europe is quite restrictive in your cities, but I’m much more comfortable about the idea that much of central Paris is patrimony of the world that needs to be protected.

While policies vary from city to city and country to country, almost all major European cities have rent control.

GLAESER: Sweden, of course, is the place where Assar Lindbeck, the famous economist — and although he was market-oriented, he certainly skewed to the left — Assar famously said that, “short of bombing, I know of no way to destroy a city that was more effective than rent control,” and he certainly had Stockholm in mind.

Tommy ANDERSSON: Right now, there are around 10 million people living in Sweden. Around 550,000 of these people were standing in a queue waiting for an apartment in Stockholm. That is 5 percent of the Swedish population.

That’s the economist Tommy Andersson.

ANDERSSON: I am a professor at Lund University, which is located in the south of Sweden. I focus on an area called market design.

Sweden has nationwide rent control.

ANDERSSON: The rental system in Sweden is based on collective bargaining. So according to the Swedish law, there is a union called the Swedish Union of Tenants and their job is essentially to negotiate the rents for tenants. And it’s based on something which is called the utility value, which essentially means that if you have two comparable apartments, they should have the same rents. Another objective that they have is that they should keep the rents low. The rents cannot be increased by too much.

If you’ve been listening closely, it may not surprise you to learn that this system has led to a housing shortage. 

ANDERSSON: Because people will not invest in new buildings unless they can get good returns. So if you look at this report written by the National Board of Housing, Building, and Planning from 2016, they estimated that Sweden needs around 440,000 new homes before 2020.

And that’s not going to happen. This shortage is what can lead to long lines to get an apartment, especially in the more desirable places. How long do you have to wait in Stockholm?

ANDERSSON: You have to wait for 10 or 20 or even 30 years to get an apartment right now, if you would sign up today.

What if you don’t want to wait 10 or 20 or 30 years for an apartment?

ANDERSSON: So, there are no official figures because it’s a black market. But it’s clear that there exists a black market. You can get an apartment in several different ways. So one of them is essentially to buy contract with black money. You can also bribe someone in charge of allocating available apartments to get the better position in the queue. And another thing which is popular is these fake swaps. So, you’re allowed by law to swap apartments with other persons. So you’re just pretending that you are swapping apartments, but essentially you’re not.

In the old days what I had heard — and I must stress that I don’t have any scientific evidence of this — but apparently, black contracts used to cost around 10 percent of the market value. But in recent years it has actually grown to say 20 percent of the market value of the apartment. So it’s expensive to buy a black contract. You know, it’s always a risk to be involved in this business because even if you paid the money, it’s not clear that you will get the apartment simply because, I mean, there are criminal gangs involved in this as well.

That doesn’t sound like what the designers of the Swedish rental system were going for. But the housing market in Stockholm is so bad that even business leaders there have risen up in protest.

ANDERSSON: The C.E.O. and the founder of Spotify, in 2016, he wrote an open letter to the people of Sweden saying that unless you solve this housing situation in Stockholm, Spotify may consider moving its headquarters out of Stockholm simply because we cannot find housing for our future employees.

If policy makers can’t figure out smarter ways to encourage more affordable housing, you can expect to see this kind of scenario playing out in cities all over the world.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Zack Lapinski. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Matt Hickey and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Rebecca Diamond, Associate Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

David Eisenbach, history lecturer at Columbia University.

Vicki Been, former commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development and law professor at the New York University School of Law.

Ed Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

Tommy Andersson, economics professor at Lund University.

RESOURCES

“Roofs or Ceilings?: The Current Housing Problem,” by Milton Friedman and George J. Stigler (Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1946).

“An Econometric Analysis of Rent Control,” by Edgar O. Olsen (Journal of Political Economy, 1972).

“The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco,” by Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2019).

“Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” by David H. Autor, Christopher J. Palmer, and Parang A. Pathak (Journal of Political Economy, 2014).

The post Why Rent Control Doesn’t Work (Ep. 373) appeared first on Freakonomics.

Angela Duckworth and Stephen Dubner listen to Rossini’s “L’Italiana in Algeri,” an opera that may owe its remarkable creativity to Napoleon’s invasion of Italy. (Photo: Lucy Sutton)

What your disgust level says about your politics, how Napoleon influenced opera, why New York City’s subways may finally run on time, and more. Five compelling guests tell Stephen Dubner, co-host Angela Duckworth, and fact-checker Jody Avirgan lots of things they didn’t know.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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Today’s episode is a special live installment of Freakonomics Radio. You’ll hear about New York City’s subway system and the man who’s trying to fix it. You’ll hear about the relationship between Napoleon and music — and the relationship between politics and disgust, which is not as obvious as you might think. If you’d like to attend a future taping of Freakonomics Radio Live, we’d love to have you. We have upcoming shows in San Francisco on May 16th, Los Angeles on May 18, Philadelphia on June 6, London on September 6, and in Chicago on September 26th. For details, visit freakonomics.com/live.

Stephen J. DUBNER: Good evening. I’m Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio Live, coming to you tonight from City Winery in New York City. As you know, Freakonomics Radio is typically a studio show based on lots of forethought and research and extensive interviews. In this live show, we throw all that out the window. No forethought whatsoever. Joining me tonight as co-host, would you please welcome the University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Angela Duckworth. Angela, if you don’t know, is the author of the longtime bestseller Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. She’s also C.E.O. of Character Lab and one of the founders of Behavior Change For Good. Angela, what else are you up to?

Angela DUCKWORTH: Through Character Lab, I’m hoping to quadruple the amount of behavioral science that’s done on kids and how they grow up to thrive. So we’ve been doing okay, but I think we should have more science so that we can have more to talk about on Freakonomics.

DUBNER: Excellent. So as you know, we play here a game called “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know.” We bring guests onstage to tell us some interesting fact or idea or story. You and I will poke and prod them as much as we’d like. Then later on, our live audience will pick a winner. The criteria are very simple. No. 1, did they tell us something we truly did not know? No. 2, was it truly worth knowing? And No. 3, was it demonstrably true? Which is important. And to help with the demonstrably true part, would you please welcome our real-time fact checker. He’s the host and producer of ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcasts. Jody Avirgan. Hey, Jody.

Jody AVIRGAN: Hello, Stephen.

DUBNER: Something I learned about you very recently, Jody, is you have a young daughter who has become an Internet phenomenon.

AVIRGAN: Well, she had a moment as an Internet phenomenon, actually, a photo I took of my daughter went viral. It was a photo we took of her after she’d eaten pizza for the first time. The audience is seeing it right now. She went to this sort of blissful state with pizza sauce all over her face. And I put it out into the world, and it went nuts. I checked this morning. Fifteen million people have seen this photo off of my Twitter account, and then it got ripped on to all of the meme accounts, and people were sending us examples of it being used in random Czechoslovakian advertisements. And the morning shows were asking us to come on. And we kind of just laid low. But yeah, it was kind of wild ride.

DUBNER: All right, Jody, I’m glad to hear that your daughter is meme-worthy. I’m glad that you are here tonight to be our fact checker. Our first guest, would you please give a warm welcome. He is president of the New York City Transit Authority. Andy Byford. Andy, welcome to the show. Now, the audience — this puzzles me.

DUCKWORTH: They’re happy!

DUBNER: Here’s what we know about you so far. You are president of the Transit Authority, which means that you essentially run the subways and buses. Correct?

Andy BYFORD: That’s correct.

DUBNER: And most of these people, including myself — we ride your subways and buses. And yet, when you walked in, they applauded. Which to me, seems paradoxical. So by what magic has Andy Byford won over the transit riders of New York City?

BYFORD: A British accent goes a long way.

DUCKWORTH: It really does.

BYFORD: It’s British charm.

DUBNER: And I understand you come from a transit family. Correct? Third generation?

BYFORD: I do. My granddad drove a bus through the Blitz, actually, through the Blitz. I ride the subway or the bus into work every day. I have never owned a car in my life. I probably never will. I rely on public transit and I believe in it. I’ve also failed my driving test twice.

DUBNER: So, compared to the Blitz, and buildings being crumbled in the streets, I guess the New York City subways are easy.

BYFORD: Oh, piece of cake. Absolutely, yeah. We have a long way to go. But it is improving. And what I wanted to do tonight is just talk about what we’re doing to make it better.

DUBNER: Let’s start with a little history. Obviously, New York is one of the older subways — I guess London is the oldest in the world.

BYFORD: London dates back to 1863, our subway is 1904. Coming here, the challenge is the same, but it is exponentially bigger. Interestingly, I’d say 15 to 20 years ago, the London Underground was in a similar state to that in which we find ourselves here in New York today. Stations looking a bit shoddy, unreliable signaling, tired vehicles, lack of funding. Sustained funding has transformed the Tube. That’s what we need here today. And a focus on basics. That’s what I want to talk about.

DUBNER: I love that we’re getting applause for infrastructure funding. We’ve never had that before. So the New York City subway, as I understand it, has the worst on-time performance of any major transit system in the world. Is that accurate, first of all?

BYFORD: We certainly are nowhere near where we need to be. In January of 2018, our on-time performance — admittedly it was a bad month — but it was a woeful 58, just over 58 percent. Through relentless focus on basics and substantial investment, a year later we’ve got it up to just over 76 percent

DUBNER: Now, to be fair, New York’s subways generally get people where they’re going. They can be slow and crowded and unpleasant on occasion but they’re also transporting — how many million people a day?

BYFORD: Well, for the whole of transit, it’s 8 million people. It’s made up of 5.7 million people on the subway, 2.3 million on the buses. And on a good day, going from the Bronx down to Manhattan, where I work, southern tip of Manhattan, that train hammered down the express line. You try doing that in a cab, and you try doing that for $2.75, you’re not going to do it.

DUBNER: Right. When I think of New York, I think that one reason it was able to grow into the city it did was because it had subways early, and so it was able to move people around a lot, underground, without tying things up. The downside of that is it was an old system, and therefore I gather — like any old system — hard to retrofit, right? So can you just kind of set the scene for us, in terms of how good, I guess, the bones still are, and assuming they are good enough to upgrade as you’d like, what are the impediments to the higher speed, the fewer delays, etc.?

BYFORD: So, I think it’s fundamentally, the system does have good bones. And let’s look at the positives. We do have express tracks. We do have a lot of stations. We have the most stations in the world. We have 472 stations. So, we’re starting from a good basis. But on a less-positive side, for various reasons, primarily lack of investment — crippling lack of investment — over the past few decades, the subway has been allowed to degrade, to the point that now we really struggle with on-time performance, because of lack of two things: one, lack of service reliability; and two, a crippling lack of capacity.

DUBNER: Can you point some fingers, please? If your chief argument is that funding is necessary for maintenance of an expensive and complicated system — which seems obvious — where is it, has it been a lack of funding? Has it been poor spending? Is it the typical political hide-and-seek games, where the money is diverted? And I would like you to name some names, with email addresses, please.

BYFORD: So, I think one of the lessons that constantly gets learned in transit is, you cannot stop investing in maintenance and what’s called state of good repair. People point to the subway system in Washington, D.C., WMATA. That was built in, I believe it was 1976. It’s really groovy, it’s a very sort of nice system.

AVIRGAN: Usually on fire, though.

BYFORD: Well, that’s the thing. People in D.C. — it stands for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority — I’m told people say it stands for We Make A Town Afraid. That’s a bad place to be. Why? Because it was a new system, you can put it off. Politicians can put off the investment, because it works perfectly fine. So to your question, here, much the same. Politicians have lots of draws on their time. You’ve got to sort the roads out, you’ve got to sort out education, you’ve got to sort out hospitals. And for various reasons, this has snuck up on us. And you see this slow but incessant, relentless decline in terms of service reliability. The city’s population has grown. The infrastructure has got older, the pressure on it has got higher, the funding in real terms has dropped. And that’s why we’re in the state that we’re in.

If what Byford is saying here about infrastructure and maintenance warms your heart, check out Freakonomics Radio episode no. 263. It’s called “In Praise of Maintenance.” Okay, back to Andy Byford.

BYFORD: So, let me tell you what we’re doing about it. The city and the state have jointly funded what’s called the Subway Action Plan. So it’s installing what we call continuously welded rail — better rail that is less prone to rail defects. It’s about fixing leaks. It’s about renewing components. It’s about unblocking drains. So it’s really about fixing those elements that were allowed to degrade on the existing system.

To me on arrival, what was missing was the complementary part — which is, you must get your operational disciplines right. So when I came here, it drove me crazy, as a railway man of 30 years’ experience, that you see trains sit in the platform, you all see it, doors open, close, open, close, open, close. “Can we please get going?”

There were speed restrictions that were not necessary — speed restrictions went in initially, for a valid reason, that either the track had a defect years ago, or because we had trains that were made of wood years ago, or didn’t have such strong brakes. Those speed restrictions are no longer necessary. We had what are called signal-grade timers that were put in for a safety reason, but they’ve been allowed to fall out of calibration.

DUBNER: So you’re saying, even when the equipment is capable and the tracks are fine—

BYFORD: It’s not properly calibrated. So that was my suspicion. Obviously, you listen to the customers, but you also look at data. What was it about 2012, suddenly the delays went exponentially up? That’s when we started putting in those signal-grade timers. They were wrongly calibrated. So we have set up a team called the SPEED Team. It stands for Subway Performance Evaluation and Education Development, because we love acronyms, right? We subscribe to the PUMA initiative at New York City Transit Authority. You know what PUMA stands for?

DUCKWORTH: I don’t.

BYFORD: Please Use More Acronyms. So we set this team up to cover, on a specialized train, every inch of New York City Transit’s 600 track miles. They drive at the signal at the speed that it should be set for. And if the train gets automatically stopped, then the signal is wrongly calibrated. So, so far, we have identified 320 such signals that are wrongly calibrated, and we’re working our way through correcting them.

AVIRGAN: Can I just clarify one thing? You’re saying that the only way to test a signal is to take a train and drive it as fast as possible at the signal and see what happens?

BYFORD: Well, just for the benefit of everyone listening on the radio — this fact checker is actually on his third bottle of beer.  But just to clarify, to put everyone’s mind to rest — when I say drive the train at it, obviously it’s for the speed limit that should be, the signal should clear at that speed.

AVIRGAN: But you need a full train to test that one signal?

BYFORD: No, this is an empty train. This is an empty train. These are qualified people.

DUBNER: I believe Jody’s question is, isn’t there software or something that does that?

BYFORD: No, I want to test the reality. So, these people, qualified people—

DUCKWORTH: Oh, you definitely want to test it with an actual train.

BYFORD: —and if that signal, the signal plate, says that signal should clear at 15 miles per hour, but it’s actually what we call tripping the station, stopping it at a lesser speed, then it’s wrongly calibrated.

DUBNER: Can I can I ask a funding question? So there is — as I understand it, a relatively new congestion surcharge on taxis and car services. And now, there is talk of another congestion fee for vehicles entering certain parts of Manhattan, which is what we more typically think of as a congestion fee. That money, we’re told, is directed to “the subways.” So: how much money will there be? Is it really coming to you? What is the money going toward? Etc.

BYFORD: First of all, the for-hire vehicle surcharge, the one that you just described, and that will now start to see a flow of funding come towards — dedicated funding — coming towards transit, which I very much welcome, because the one thing, working in transit, that really cripples you, is stop-start funding. You can’t plan unless every year you’re thinking, well, what are we going to get this year? That’s no way to run a business. I need to be able to plan with certainty.

The real game changer will be made major, sustainable, affordable, long-term sources of funding. And one of those suggested is a congestion charge. Because it does two things. One, it cuts congestion. And the other half of my focus is of course buses, which have the lowest speed of any North American bus system. Why? It’s nothing to do with my operators, the buses can’t levitate. They’re stuck in traffic.

DUCKWORTH: Not yet.

BYFORD: We’re working on that, by the way. But they’re hopelessly stuck in traffic. So what it gives you is, less traffic, but the traffic that does come in, pay a fee, and that fee must be lock-boxed, ring-fenced, cannot be siphoned off anywhere else, guaranteed go into funding.

DUBNER: What’s your annual budget now, and what do you want, let’s say, two, five years from now?

BYFORD: So, at the moment, the operating budget of New York City Transit is around $8 billion. So it’s a big chunk of cash, but bear in mind this is a huge system, in that we run thousands of services 24/7, which is another reason this is a tricky system to upgrade, because no one wants their lines shut down while we upgrade.

DUBNER: It’s like the 24-hour diner, and you always wonder, when do they clean out the fryer? That’s what I wonder about you.

DUCKWORTH: Never.

BYFORD: I’ve often wondered that. That’s my next challenge. I’ve often wondered that. So, what we really need is to bite the bullet. And I’m saying, with the right funding, sustainable funding, we can turn this system around. No more tweaking. Let’s totally re-signal the network. Let’s make the system fully accessible. We can’t be proud of this system unless and until it is fully accessible to all New Yorkers. Let’s sort out the bus network. Let’s modernize the prevailing mindset, the bureaucracy of the transit network.

So, some specifics: within the first five years, properly funded, we can re-signal five lines. In the next five years, for a total of 10, we can modernize 11 of the lines. In that 10 years, completely modernize 300 stations. We can make 180 stations accessible within that time frame. I’d need, we’ve calculated, $40 billion over those 10 years. Can we really not afford $4 billion a year, maybe two from the state, one from the city, $500 million from Washington, D.C., $500 million — maybe we could find it in Transit.

We can move from state of emergency to state of the art within just 10 years. If we don’t do this plan, all that will happen is, the infrastructure will get even older, the population will grow even bigger, and the pressure on it will grow harder. But guess what? The price will go up. So now’s the time to bite the bullet.

DUBNER: Jody Avirgan, we heard a lot of interesting ideas, some statistics, massive optimism, and, I would say, energy, which I admire.

DUCKWORTH: Charm and charisma. And grit.

DUBNER: A lot of grit.

AVIRGAN: I want to talk specifically about one thing, which is, you said there is a lack of capacity. Are you running, at any given time, the maximum number of trains that could be on the system at that time?

BYFORD: No, we’re not. No. And that is, again, something that we are in the process of addressing. A classic example of that would be the L line, because that line is one of the two that has communications-based train-control, modern signaling, that currently runs 20 trains per hour. After the upgrade, we’ll be able to run more trains because we’re providing more power. The signaling system can handle it. There’s not enough power. Which is ridiculous. So we’re addressing that.

DUBNER: Andy Byford, thank you so much for coming on our show. Would you please welcome our next guest. She is an economic historian at N.Y.U. She studies creativity and innovation. Her name is Petra Moser. Petra. How are you?

Petra MOSER: Great.

DUBNER: Good. You teach quite nearby at N.Y.U. How did you get here tonight?

MOSER: Subway.

DUBNER: And it worked.

MOSER: It did.

DUBNER: What do you have for us tonight, Petra?

MOSER: So, I wanted to ask you whether you might know: how did Napoleon influence music?

DUBNER: How did Napoleon influence music? Angie Duckworth, do you have any thoughts?

DUCKWORTH: Did he commission a special piece for Josephine?

MOSER: I don’t know that.

DUCKWORTH: That’s not the answer then.

MOSER: No, that’s not the answer. You got to be a little bit more creative. You got to think a little bit out of the box.

DUBNER: Did it have to do with war-making?

MOSER: Yes.

DUCKWORTH: Did he conquer a nation and then have the musical traditions blend together—

MOSER: No.

DUCKWORTH: I was so close.

MOSER: It was good. If we put the two of you together, we’re actually getting somewhere.

DUBNER: Since we’re not going to get there on our own, why don’t you tell us?

MOSER: So, Napoleon started his Italian campaign at the end of the 18th century. And he won Lombardy and Venetia, which are two states in Italy. These states, by 1801 were under French control, and they got all the French laws, including copyright. But Italy did not have copyrights. So now in Italy, you have two sets of states. They have the same language, they have similar culture. They both get flooded with Napoleon, with the soldiers, with everything, with the gambling, all of that. But only two states have copyrights for the next 20 years.

So now we can actually look what that does to music. Because now we have these two states where composers own what they produce, what they create, and what we wanted to see is whether, once you give an artist an intellectual property right, whether that actually makes them produce more and whether it makes them produce better stuff.

DUBNER: What was your measure for quality?

MOSER: Opera is really great. You can quantify both quantity and quality. So quantity is fairly easy. It’s really helpful that opera is a public art form.

DUCKWORTH: You can count the number of operas.

MOSER: Exactly. So, it’s public. So you can count it. But then, the other thing is that lots of people really love opera and they write everything about opera. So we have lots of people who just say, “Oh, this was a really notable performance, there are tons of people at this performance. People were streaming at the doors.” And there’s a record of that. So we know which were the hits. Then another measure of quality is whether we still play something today. So if something still plays at the Met today, or whether it’s still available on Amazon today, whether people want to buy it.

DUBNER: But wouldn’t that be directly following on from whether they were popular or not, is that not the same thing?

MOSER: There’s some endogeneity there. So, if something is popular now, then it may be more—

DUCKWORTH: How about how many stars it gets on Amazon? Is that part of the academic scholarship?

MOSER: Not in this paper.

DUBNER: So I’m not surprised that an economic historian would want to understand the innovation impact of copyright, because copyright and patent — we know there’s a lot of debate over how strong it needs to be to encourage the right amount of innovation, without overprotecting, etc. Did you go looking for opera first? Did you go looking for Napoleon? Did you go looking for old copyright law?

MOSER: No. So, I’ve done a lot of work on patents. And when you do the same thing over and over and over again, you just get bored. And I sang a lot as a kid, and I was trying to sing opera in college, and then I took economics at the same time, and I liked that better.

DUBNER: Do you have an example for us of an opera that was composed during that era, in one of those states — that you said — Lombardy and Venetia, you said?

MOSER: Yeah, so we have a Rossini opera, L’Italiana in Algeri, which I think would be a nice one.

DUBNER: Let’s hear some. Petra, you’re welcome to join in, if you’d like.

MOSER: If you will, I will too.

Let me break in here to say I chose not to sing that night, because I wasn’t warmed up.

DUBNER: Okay, so tell us a bit about this Rossini piece, and how it’s an example of the phenomenon that you’ve measured.

MOSER: Rossini was a very peculiar character, as many of these composers. He was also poor. And so he is a good example of the way in which copyright influences composers. So, he really responded to what people paid him. So, we have records of him saying to the theater managers, “Look, you are not paying me enough, so I’m just going to give you the same stuff over and over and over again. I just take this aria, and I’ve changed a little bit, and that’s it.” And that’s precisely what we think is not novelty — what we think is not creativity. But when he actually got enough money, then he would really make something that was better.

DUCKWORTH: So what’s really interesting about that is that creativity, most people think of as being intrinsically rewarding, right? And in fact, people think that when you pay, you actually decrease the intrinsic amount of it. No?

MOSER: This completely fits economics. He is poor. His mother and father were itinerant musicians. So he didn’t come in saying, “Oh, I’m just gonna do this for fun.” So he did it, in part, to make money. So, suppose, say, a composer today needs $2,000 to live. And say before copyright, you get like just $1,000 per opera. And now with copyright, because they have to pay you for repeat performances, you get $2,000. So now he only has to write one opera instead of two. That gives him the freedom to do precisely what he wants to do. So we actually see this in Rossini and other people, that they make things more complicated, they play around with things and he now has more time and he has more freedom. So it’s a wealth effect.

DUBNER: I’m curious where you land on issues of copyright and patent ownership, in a world that’s obviously gotten a lot more complicated. And what your position is on the optimal copyright policy.

MOSER: Having basic copyright protection is important for two reasons. The first one is that it gives people an incentive to produce better work, but then the other one is if you actually make art something that people can make money off, you also change the type of person who can become an artist.

So we see this actually with 19th-century novelists. Before copyrights were really a thing, the only people who would write were people who, when we matched them with their parents’ wealth records, they were actually just wealthy — there’d be men and women, but they would both be wealthy. Once you have stronger copyrights in England, then, when you look again at the parents of the people who would become writers and become novelists, now all of a sudden we have people from humbler backgrounds.

DUBNER: Petra, thank you so much for playing with us. Our next guest is a psychology professor at Cornell who studies how people make moral and ethical judgments. Would you please welcome David Pizarro. Hi David, what do you have for us tonight?

David PIZARRO: Suppose that you walked into a public restroom, and there’s—

DUBNER: Whatever comes next is not good.

PIZARRO: And there’s just a mess, an un-flushed toilet. How disgusted would you be? Say, 10, really, really, really disgusted. Zero, wouldn’t bother you.

DUBNER: This one goes to 11, I’m gonna say.

DUCKWORTH: Depends on what’s in the toilet. As low as 5, as high as 10.

AVIRGAN: I’d probably be in the 3 to 6 range.

DUBNER: Really?

AVIRGAN: I’ve seen some stuff.

PIZARRO: My follow-up is, what do you think this has to do with who you voted for in the last election, say the Presidential election?

DUBNER: And do you study disgust?

PIZARRO: I do study disgust. I’m really easily disgusted. So it’s a difficult thing to do, but that’s what grad students are for.

DUBNER: All right. So the the example you’re using is an unflushed toilet. Could you use a different example?

PIZARRO: One of my favorite examples, actually: how disgusted would you be if you took a sip of a soda can and realized it wasn’t yours? It was a stranger’s?

DUCKWORTH: Zero. I ate food backstage that literally—

DUBNER: My plate, actually.

DUCKWORTH: Yes, and I didn’t even know whose it was.

DUBNER: I’m glad you brought that up, because I thought that was really strange. So you’re looking at how the emotion — is disgust an emotion, by the way?

PIZARRO: Yeah, most people call it an emotion. I mean, there’s some debate, because it seems a little different from the other emotions, because it’s so reflexive. But I think most people who study disgust would call it an emotion.

DUBNER: But what you’re getting at is, your research is about the relationship between disgust and political affiliation?

PIZARRO: That’s right, political orientation. So, how conservative or liberal are you on the spectrum? And what we’ve found — the more disgusted you were, the more likely you were to say you were conservative. We’ve now looked at this across different countries, in different languages. We keep finding this relationship. The more easily disgusted people say they are, the more likely they are to be toward the right of the scale, less easily disgusted, toward the left.

DUBNER: Let me ask you: so there’s a question we came across in a series we’ve been doing on creativity, and especially if you’re in the creative arts, the political orientation is way, way left. That led to conversations about, is there something about creativity in the arts that is correlated with liberalism? Because if you think of liberalism as essentially wanting to change the state of the thing, and conservatism as an attitude toward traditionalism, I’m curious whether you have anything to say about the mechanism by which that kind of relationship may exist.

PIZARRO: Yeah, that’s been the most interesting question to us, because if you just demonstrate a relationship, that doesn’t get at the heart of the question. The question was what is the nature of this relationship? So one way to ask that is, what part of conservatism is really being captured by this? And so in looking at various measures, what we see is exactly what you said, Stephen. It’s the traditionalism aspect. Keeping things the way they are. So the old ways of doing things are good, don’t do the new things.

This shows up in other ways that you could ask the question. So one of the big findings in personality psychology is the dimension called “openness to experience” — people who are more liberal are very high in openness to experience. They may want to try out new things. People who are more conservative are very low in openness to experience. So you can see disgust as one of those emotions that’s kind of like, “Well, I have a set level. How risky do I want to behave for a reward? So do I try a new food?”

DUCKWORTH: So is it true, then, that picky eaters and hypochondriacs are more likely to be politically conservative?

PIZARRO: I don’t know the answer to picky eaters. That’s a very good question.

DUCKWORTH: That would be your prediction maybe, right?

PIZARRO: It would be the prediction. Although, whenever I talk about this stuff, I always want to point out that this isn’t — it’s not as if how grossed out you are is 100 percent predictive. About between 3 and 10 percent of why you might be liberal or conservative seems to be captured by disgust measures.

DUBNER: Hey, something I’ve wondered about a long time is, the people who care for sick people, let’s say, I’m astonished that they’re able to do it so well and regularly, et cetera. And I often wonder, is that acclimation, or is it a trait?

PIZARRO: That’s a really good question, And in fact, Angela’s colleague at Pennsylvania, Paul Rozin, one of the pioneers who studied this, did a study looking at first-year med students asking this question, trying to see, if you ask a bunch of questions like the ones I asked you, in general how easily disgusted are you in everyday life, and you get a score — so if we asked everybody here, there’d be a nice normal distribution. Some people are really easily, some people are not.

He was asking those questions of incoming med students, and what he found was that most students were like the rest of the population coming in. After a year of medical school, when — as you might know, you have to poke into bodies, and you get used to bodily fluids and all that stuff — they were less disgusted when it came to that stuff. But not in general — they were still disgusted by all the other stuff, but they acclimated. So the answer to your question is, we’re really good at acclimating to specific things. Anybody who’s a parent knows you get used to certain things.

DUBNER: Jody Avirgan, David Pizarro has been telling us about the politics of disgust, which are really interesting, and lead to a lot of interesting thoughts and questions. Anything factual we should know?

AVIRGAN: This isn’t exactly a fact check. But I do want to go back to how you actually measure disgust. You ask people about hypothetical scenarios, and ask them to rate how disgusted they were. Do you trust that?

PIZARRO: That’s one way. Other people have done the work of correlating—

AVIRGAN: Of actually disgusting people in real time — love it.

PIZARRO: Of actually disgusting people. So they’ve brought people into the lab and they’ve asked them to do really gross but safe things. So, would you eat a piece of chocolate shaped like dog poop?

DUCKWORTH: Yes.

DUBNER: I think Angela’s answer says less about her liberalism than about her chocolate attitude.

PIZARRO: That may be right. And that’s why it’s a noisy measure.

DUBNER: Exactly. David Pizarro, thank you so much. I really enjoyed having you here.

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DUBNER: Our next guest is the commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation. Please welcome Polly Trottenberg. Polly, nice to have you here.

Polly TROTTENBERG: Thanks for having me.

DUBNER: First of all, tell us what the New York City Department of Transportation is and does, and how it differs from Andy Byford’s New York City Transit Authority please.

TROTTENBERG: It’s a good question. Andy and I work together a lot, but New York City Department of Transportation, we’re responsible for roads, bridges, bike lanes, ferries, bike share, car share.

DUBNER: Before we get into what you’re working on and what you’re going to tell us, Andy began by describing the general state of transit. What about your overall view — what are the big problems, and how many different dimensions do they exist on?

TROTTENBERG: We actually have a different kind of challenge for a lot of my infrastructure, which is, it’s kind of a fun challenge. The city is growing in leaps and bounds. New York City now, population 8.6 million people, the highest it has been in the city’s history. Sixty-two million tourists last year. Incredible economic activity. Construction. And then of course, we have things like Uber and Lyft and Amazon, and Fresh Direct, which have just filled our streets, and made an incredible competition for space.

Side note: Fresh Direct is an online grocery-delivery company in New York. They’re famous for having their trucks idle on the streets for hours. But one other thing they do is they rate their fruit on a five-star scale. So whatever fruit has five stars this week — maybe it’s pixie tangerines or red plumcots — you know it’ll be at peak flavor. It’s a smart system, and I wish this practice would spread; just thought you might like to know.

TROTTENBERG: Meanwhile, a new generation that’s not so car-centric. They like transit, they want to ride bikes. They maybe want to ride scooters. There’s a big competition now, at least in my world, for street space.

DUBNER: So, what do you have for us tonight specifically, then?

TROTTENBERG: Well, when you build a bike lane on an avenue in New York City, what happens?

DUBNER: You’re asking about safety? Are you asking about congestion? Are you asking about density, speed, or whatnot?

TROTTENBERG: So, I mean all of the above. There’s a traditional view, when people who maybe aren’t cyclists think about bike lanes, they focus on the traffic elements of it. But there are actually a whole lot of other elements that come in when you put in a bike lane.

DUBNER: So, I do know that when you add a lane to a highway, let’s say, it actually doesn’t ease congestion because it draws demand, right?

TROTTENBERG: Induced demand is the phrase you’re looking for.

DUBNER: Right. So is it the case that when you subtract a lane of car traffic and replace it with a bike lane, that actually it does not cause car congestion problems?

TROTTENBERG: I’m happy to say, if you take out that lane but you redesign the street at the same time, you make the traffic move in a more orderly way, you put in turn lanes, and you change the signaling, you can keep the traffic speed some cases better, and a lot of cases sort of the same, while also adding in a safe space for cyclists. And just one of the statistics, where we put in bike lanes, we see huge safety improvements, not only for cyclists, who we consider a vulnerable population on the street, but for pedestrians and for motorists too, because it calms the traffic and it organizes it better.

DUBNER: I love the way that you frame the problem, which is that there’s a competition for a resource, and the resource is space — street space, lane space, and so on. One thing that I’m curious on your position — in terms of congestion in New York City, I believe that 97 percent of New York street parking is free. Transportation scholars have found that an enormous amount of congestion in New York, and other places that offer free parking, is caused by cars cruising around looking for a parking spot. So economists think this is idiotic, that you’ve got something of value — this parking space — that you’re charging zero for, especially when it has so many negative externalities — causing congestion for everybody else, pollution, etc. So, have you thought about eliminating or severely limiting free street parking, as a means to address congestion generally in New York City?

TROTTENBERG: Obviously from the economist’s point of view, it’s the same problem, both the parking and the road space, which is, it’s a scarce resource and demand greatly exceeds supply. We should price it. It’s a perfectly logical economic place to be. It is an impossible political place to be.

DUCKWORTH: Nobody wants to give up their free parking.

TROTTENBERG: The politics of parking has been, certainly for me, one of the most eye-opening parts of my job. It is something that is very intensely debated. We have, over the time that I’ve been in this job for five years, we have modestly raised parking rates. We have added in, in some places, bike share and car share, we’ve taken some of those spaces and repurposed them for uses that are more shared. But it’s certainly been a slow process.

DUCKWORTH: Is that because of the endowment effect, that now that people already have their free parking. I mean, hard to get, but free parking. You just can’t take it away.

TROTTENBERG: Yes. It’s not complicated.

DUCKWORTH: Can I ask — you are somebody who has a really hard job—

TROTTENBERG: And a lot of grit.

DUCKWORTH: Well, that is where I was going. A lot of grit. And I wanted to know how you got into this. I mean, I don’t know if you were a little girl and said, “I’m going to be the commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation.”

TROTTENBERG: No.

DUCKWORTH: So could you just share a little bit of the story? How did you get into this calling?

TROTTENBERG: I went to college here in New York, back in what we would say were the bad old days, when the city was experiencing a lot of difficulties, a lot of crime, a lot of disinvestment. And I just got very interested in urban policy and transportation policy. And one of the great success stories of New York — again, why my streets are so full, why Andy’s subways are so full — we took a city where there had been disinvestment, and we really turned it around. At one time, the Williamsburg Bridge was shut down because it was coming to pieces. Now we really invest in our bridges and our roads. So I think being part of that process — and now, today we have bikes and scooters, and Uber and Lyft, and all these other really exciting changes.

DUCKWORTH: Does the bike lane innovation actually improve physical health? Because one of the other major trends over the last 50 years is that we just sit around all the time.

TROTTENBERG: If you think about cycling as a mode, it is an inexpensive mode to own and operate. And for us to provide for. I mean, basically it’s paint. It emits no carbon, burns no fuel. It gets you moving, it’s physical exercise. It connects you to your city. Of course, it is terrific for general individual health, public health, and the health of the city.

DUCKWORTH: Is there any evidence of that? I’m wondering whether when you put in a new bike lane, there is any measure that the physical health of, I don’t know, that community, that neighborhood has — that might be very difficult to quantify, but it would be very exciting if you could.

TROTTENBERG: Well, we’re going to be looking at the long term health statistics. Anecdotally, we see evidence that it is getting people moving, particularly kids. But I don’t know, maybe Jody will dig up some some better numbers than I have.

DUBNER: If you were able to start from scratch, would you have streets on a grid system? Because one thing that a grid does is it encourages speed, because it’s wide open, straight.

TROTTENBERG: There’s a wonderful book written just recently about how the grid came about in New York City. And it was sort of a bunch of half-drunken foreign guys who threw it together a little haphazardly, when you read the book, it’s very surprising. When I’m in other cities where they have less of a grid — and for example, they have alleyways. I like to joke, I have alley envy. Because here in New York without those alleys, there are no places for the garbage trucks and the deliveries and the utility poles. Everything has to happen on those same streets where the cars are traveling, the buses are traveling, the bikes are traveling, and the pedestrians are traveling. So no, I think there are places where a grid is very efficient, but I would design it very differently.

DUBNER: Jody Avirgan, Polly Trottenberg has been telling us about the roads primarily, and other things in her purview. Did you find anything that needs flagging?

AVIRGAN: Angela, to your question about effects on public health, there was one study from the Mailman School here at Columbia University. It tries to measure the effect of a bike lane on an increase in the probability of riding a bike, and then quantify the effect on health, and reduced pollution, and then measures that against other public-health measures. And the conclusion is that investments in bike lanes are more cost-effective than the majority of preventative approaches used today, so we’ll see. That’s one study.

DUBNER: Polly Trottenberg, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It is time — I’m so sad to say — for tonight’s final guest. She is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Would you please welcome Katherine Hornbostel. Katherine, it is nice to have you. You are our last guest tonight, so make it good. What do you have for us?

Katherine HORNBOSTEL: All right. No pressure. So, if I handed you a bucket filled with water and laundry detergent, and asked you to tackle global warming, what would you do?

DUBNER: Oh, that’s so easy.

DUCKWORTH: You would wash something.

DUBNER: I would make a giant bubble bath and I would invite—

DUCKWORTH: With laundry detergent.

DUBNER: Hey, don’t yuck my yum. I would make a giant bubble bath, and I would invite the climate lions and the climate lambs to lie down together in the bubble bath and relax, and proceed to have an empirical, sane conversation about the best ways to address climate change. That’s what I would do with a big bucket of soapy water.

HORNBOSTEL: I really like that approach.

DUBNER: Are we done here? Is that the answer?

DUCKWORTH: That’s exactly what she was gonna recommend.

HORNBOSTEL: I can’t say I wrote about that approach in my paper. Do you have any other suggestions?

DUCKWORTH: I don’t really know what’s in laundry detergent — can you give me a hint?

HORNBOSTEL: Yes, so I’m actually talking about the active ingredient sodium carbonate. I don’t know if that helps.

DUCKWORTH: Sodium carbonate. Is that baking soda?

HORNBOSTEL: Very similar.

DUBNER: Would you wash the sky?

HORNBOSTEL: Not quite — what would I be wash— are you saying, like, throw a bubble bath in the air?

DUBNER: Like one of those geo-engineering schemes that run a giant hose into the stratosphere and spray out some benign material that refracts sunlight, that kind of thing?

HORNBOSTEL: Not quite. That is a very creative approach. So, I’ll give you guys a little bit of a hint: I’m going to send you to a coal power plant with this bucket of water and detergent.

DUCKWORTH: So, what is the specific, I guess, byproduct or whatever, of coal burning, that’s bad — and then maybe we’ll be a little closer.

HORNBOSTEL: There are a lot of things that come off of coal that are bad. Some of them, thankfully, we already have regulations against — things like SOx and NOx. They already scrub a lot of the crap that comes off of coal plants.

DUBNER: Can you give the full name of SOx and NOx, please?

HORNBOSTEL: So, sulfur oxides and nitrous oxides. Gaseous compounds that are bad for the environment.

DUBNER: Because we all thought it was a Dr. Seuss story.

DUCKWORTH: I was like, “That is so cute! Why would we want to legislate against them?”

HORNBOSTEL: So, carbon dioxide is the other obvious one, that there are no regulations for, currently, for coal plants.

DUBNER: Are some of the emissions in a coal plant, do they react in some way, negatively, I guess, with sodium carbonate? Is that the idea?

HORNBOSTEL: You’re on the right track, you’re getting very close.

DUBNER: So I don’t think we’re going to get closer without a mechanical engineering degree, which you do have.

HORNBOSTEL: So, this particular combination — water and sodium carbonate — if you dissolve it in water, can react with carbon dioxide and extract it from a gas stream coming off a coal plant. And the really interesting thing that I’ve studied is that if you put these chemicals into little capsules that look like caviar, you can actually pack them into a reactor, attach it to a power plant, and selectively take out the carbon dioxide that’s being released from the exhaust.

DUBNER: So you’re describing a form of carbon capture, correct?

HORNBOSTEL: Yes. It is a carbon-capture technology.

DUBNER: What stage is it in? Are you one of the inventors of said technology?

HORNBOSTEL: Yes, I was on a team at a national lab from the D.O.E. that invented and studied this technology. It’s been demonstrated at a lab scale. Currently we’re looking for partners to adopt it. Not at a power-plant scale yet, but at smaller scales to test out and figure out the kinks and try to scale it up.

DUBNER: And what you’re describing, there is obviously chemical reactions here. But is it essentially a filter?

HORNBOSTEL: It’s a good question. It’s not exactly a filter — I guess you could think of it from a big picture standpoint as a filter, though. So you’re sending the nasty gas from a power plant through it, it selectively takes out carbon dioxide. At some point it reaches capacity. And then you have to de-sorb or remove the CO2 from the full solution.

DUBNER: And how do you do that?

HORNBOSTEL: So, usually you have to heat up steam and send it through these capsules, and it’ll take the carbon dioxide back out. And then you pressurize it and put it underground.

DUBNER: Okay. So, it’s carbon capture, you bury the carbon underground, which some people have big concerns about there. What’s your level of concern on that?

HORNBOSTEL: I think that’s very safe, if you — it’s actually being done already in a lot of places — it’s fairly safe and there’s a lot of science to back up the fact that it’s not going to leak out or cause problems, if you—

DUCKWORTH: Does it just stay there forever?

HORNBOSTEL: Really, if you find the right formations — that’s kind of beyond my research area, but the scientists on that side are pretty confident you can store a lot of carbon dioxide underground. Just the sheer magnitude of carbon dioxide emissions requires that we put it underground at this point.

DUBNER: So the unit or machine that you’re talking about, what do you call it?

HORNBOSTEL: So I guess I would call it a reactor. So, it’s basically a giant vat filled with this solution that will react with carbon dioxide to hold it, until you need to release it and store it.

DUBNER: So, I can’t tell whether it’s because you cleverly began the conversation by talking about laundry detergent. Was it as simple, really, as just getting something kind of like laundry detergent and figuring out how that responded to these carbon emissions?

HORNBOSTEL: Yeah I mean, so it is simple compared to other technologies for carbon capture. By putting them in small capsules, what you’re essentially doing is raising the surface area. So imagine a big vat filled with caviar. You have a very large surface area of contact between the liquid in those capsules and then the gas flowing through, which really allows you to use these very simple ingredients, instead of a very tricky or corrosive solvent instead.

DUCKWORTH: So you said laundry detergent is a lot like baking soda. Now, this might be a digression, Stephen, but since I have a mechanical engineering professor — is that little box of baking soda that I have in my refrigerator, is it really absorbing the odors?

DUBNER: I love how she can tell us about carbon capture, and this is the tough question for her.

DUCKWORTH: This is the most important question of the evening.

HORNBOSTEL: The more degrees you get, the farther removed you are from practical solutions to things like that. So, sodium carbonate reacts with carbon dioxide. It actually forms baking soda. So that is the reaction — that is the product of this reaction. I guess to emphasize here is that both the initial chemical and the final product are both very safe, very cheap, very abundant.

DUCKWORTH: I have to ask this question: this is such a simple, elegant, commonsense, straightforward, hiding-in-plain sight — was your team composed mostly of women?

HORNBOSTEL: We had a very good proportion of women on my team.

DUCKWORTH: Just a hypothesis.

DUBNER: So, when I hear the words “safe, cheap, and abundant,” it does sound literally too good to be true. So let’s pretend that you were not involved with this project at all. But you knew about it, and you knew all the other competing carbon-capture systems that are being developed and funded and so on. What would you put the odds of this project succeeding — I’m not saying as the only carbon capture solution, but as a significant one?

HORNBOSTEL: So, I’m very confident that it could work if we invested and did it. Confidence in terms of whether or not this will be the winning technology — lower, much lower, just because there are a lot of technologies out there for carbon capture, there’s a lot of competition, there are some others that are much more mature than ours.

DUBNER: Does it have a name?

HORNBOSTEL: We call it M.E.C.S. It’s an acronym — so, Micro-Encapsulated Carbonate Solution.

DUBNER: Do you think we could crowdsource a better—

HORNBOSTEL: I just call them capsules, but I’m open to suggestions.

DUBNER: I like the caviar idea.

HORNBOSTEL: Carbon-Capture Caviar.

DUBNER: Carbon-Capture Caviar.

DUCKWORTH: Oh, I like that.

DUBNER: It says here you invented something else a few years back called the Pump2Baby Bottle.

HORNBOSTEL: I didn’t expect you to bring that little curveball up. Yes. So I had twins when I was in grad school. I was pumping for them. And they did not nurse well, and so I invented this little hack where you can actually feed your babies breast milk as you’re pumping it. So you attach it to any breast pump, as you’re pumping the milk, the baby starts drinking it.

DUCKWORTH: That is genius. Did you patent it? Did you make a lot of money?

HORNBOSTEL: In the process of patent prosecution right now. Filed for patent, working on it.

DUBNER: Congratulations.

DUCKWORTH: If you are not jumping up and down with excitement about it, then you have not nursed a child or pumped.

DUBNER: Yes, I haven’t. I’m gonna confess right now. Hey, Katherine Hornbostel, thank you so much for telling us something we didn’t know. And can we get one more hand here for all our guests please. It is time now for our live audience to pick a winner. Obviously, all our guests have come here in the spirit of inquiry and information-sharing so we shouldn’t reduce this thing to a horse race but — well, this is America, and we really like to know who wins. Who’s it going to be?

Andy Byford, with “How to Fix New York City’s Subways,”

Petra Moser, with “Napoleon’s Copyright Legacy,”

David Pizarro, with “The Politics of Disgust,”

Polly Trottenberg, with “How to Fix New York City’s Roads,” or

Katherine Hornbostel, with “How to Launder Your Carbon.”

DUBNER: Our grand prize winner tonight — we had a dead tie. So thank you so much to both Andy Byford and Petra Moser, for telling us about fixing New York City subways and Napoleon’s copyright legacy. To commemorate your victories, you will each receive this Certificate of Impressive Knowledge. And it reads, “I, Stephen Dubner, in consultation with Angela Duckworth and Jody Avirgan, do solemnly swear that both Andy Byford and Petra Moser told us something we did not know. And for that we are eternally grateful.” Thank you so much. That’s our show for tonight. I hope we told you something you did not know. Huge thanks to Jody and Angela, to our guests, and thanks especially to you for coming to play “Tell Me Something—

AUDIENCE: I Don’t Know!”

DUBNER: Thank you very much.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, and Corinne Wallace; we had help this week from Morgan Levey, David Herman, and Dan Dzula. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Angela Duckworth, University of Pennsylvania psychologist and author of Grit.

Jody Avirgan, host of ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcasts.

Andy Byford, president of the New York City Transit Authority.

Petra Moser, economic historian at New York University.

David Pizarro, psychologist at Cornell University.

Polly Trottenberg, commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation.

Katherine Hornbostel, mechanical engineering professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

RESOURCES

“Copyrights and Creativity: Evidence from Italian Operas,” by Michela Giorcelli and Petra Moser (Journal of Political Economy, 2016).

“Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting,” by Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro, Ravi Iyer, and Jonathan Haidt (Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2011).

“The cost-effectiveness of bike lanes in New York City,” by Jing Gu, Babak Mohit, Peter Alexander Muennig (Injury Prevention, 2017).

“Packed and fluidized bed absorber modeling for carbon capture with micro-encapsulated sodium carbonate solution,” by Katherine Hornbostel, et. al. (Applied Energy, 2019).

EXTRA

“In Praise of Maintenance,” Freakonomics Radio Ep. 263 (2016).

Fresh Direct’s top-rated page.

The post Freakonomics Radio Live: “Would You Eat a Piece of Chocolate Shaped Like Dog Poop?” appeared first on Freakonomics.

The all-star food writer Kenji López-Alt decided to open his own restaurant. Then came kitchen snafus, disastrously clogged toilets, and long days away from his young daughter. (Photo: Max Pixel)

Kenji López-Alt became a rock star of the food world by bringing science into the kitchen in a way that everyday cooks can appreciate. Then he dared to start his own restaurant — and discovered problems that even science can’t solve.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

This week, we’re playing an updated Episode No. 347, “Why You Shouldn’t Open a Restaurant.” It features the best-selling food writer Kenji López-Alt, telling us about his adventures as a first-time restaurateur. And then, at the end of the original episode, you’ll hear a recent follow-up interview that’ll give you even more reasons to never, ever open a restaurant. Also, we’re bringing Freakonomics Radio Live to Philadelphia on June 6 and London on Sept. 7. For tickets, go to freakonomics.com/live. You’ll also find information on our upcoming shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

*      *      *

Some people just can’t leave well enough alone. Consider, for instance, the case of the famous food writer, the one who used the scientific method to take apart everything we know about cooking and put it back together.

Kenji LÓPEZ-ALT: If you use vodka in place of some of the water in your pie crust, you end up with a dough that is much flakier and much lighter.

He investigated whether the key ingredient in New York pizza really is the water.

LÓPEZ-ALT: So I did a full double-blind experiment where I got water — starting with perfectly distilled water and up to various levels of dissolved solids inside the water. And what we basically ended up finding was the water makes almost no difference compared to other variables in the dough.

He found that the secret to General Tso’s chicken lay in geometry.

LÓPEZ-ALT: The geometry of food is important because one of the big things is surface-area-to-volume ratio.

And he explored the relationship between meat and salt; he proved why it’s important to salt a hamburger at the last minute, on the surface of the meat:

LOPEZ-ALT: We rented a baseball pitching machine that would throw hamburgers at the wall at 45 miles per hour. You’ll see that salted hamburger kind of bounces off the wall like a rubber ball, whereas the burger that has salt only on the outside kind of splatters.

This was the man who finally brought science into the kitchen in a way that non-scientists could appreciate. It helped that his work was fun, not preachy, and delicious. We interviewed him a while back, for an episode called “Food + Science = Victory!”

LÓPEZ-ALT: I think a lot of people think of science as sort of the opposite of tradition or the opposite of natural. And really it’s not.

He had just published his first cookbook, a massive thing called The Food Lab, which went on to win a James Beard Award. His reputation and reach only grew. But then, something else beckoned. Was it opportunity — or a trap?

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s that temptation you can’t resist.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: the food writer who flew too close to the flame.

*      *      *

Kenji López-Alt grew up in New York, in a family of scientists, and went off to M.I.T. to study biology. He got a little bored, maybe burnt-out, and during the summers started working in restaurant kitchens in Boston. After college, he worked in an architecture firm for a bit.

LÓPEZ-ALT: For a few months, half a year maybe.

And then back to restaurant kitchens.

LÓPEZ-ALT: My very first restaurant job was at a place called Fire and Ice. It’s a Mongolian grill, so I was a knight of the round grill. I stood in the middle of a giant cast iron grill and cooked stir-fried food for people, and flipped asparagus tips into the air and stuff.

Over the next several years, he worked in a series of higher-end restaurants in Boston.

LÓPEZ-ALT: After that, that was the end of my culinary career, or my cooking career.

He began building a career as a food writer, at Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen. Then, on the food site Serious Eats, he started a column called The Food Lab. He wasn’t expecting to turn into a food-writing rock star.

LÓPEZ-ALT: I absolutely wasn’t expecting it. I was a freelance writer living in a one-bedroom apartment with no windows in Brooklyn at the time.

DUBNER: Now, after doing all that and having that platform and enjoying it, what made you think it was a good idea to not only get back into the restaurant business, but open your own restaurant?

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s always that temptation you can’t resist. It’s like, “Oh, what if I just went back and do cooking for a little while? Would I be able to do this?” So, I had a daughter. She’s 17 months old now.

DUBNER: Congratulations.

LÓPEZ-ALT: Thank you. And when she was born, my wife and I decided that she would continue to work, and I would be the at-home parent. So I’ve been a stay-at-home dad for the last 17 months. And about six months into that, I was approached by some friends of friends who owned a bar in San Mateo, near where we live. And they were interested in opening up a beer hall and they were looking for a chef partner. And so I thought this might be something fun I could do in my spare time. Which, you don’t have too much spare time with a baby on your hands, but I thought this could be something fun and this is a good opportunity, relatively low-risk. Mainly it was because my wife and I sort of longed for a place like this in San Mateo, a family-friendly, casual, upscale place. And that was the concept that they were working on. So it seemed perfect for me.

And initially I thought my involvement would be relatively minimal. I would work on some menus. I would lend my name to the menu. What was actually really surprising to me was — when I first signed on with them, I sent a short little tweet saying, “Hey, this is happening, I’m opening a restaurant,” something like that. Eater picked it up. A bunch of other publications picked it up. And then all of a sudden it became not, “Kenji López-Alt is partnering with these two guys who are opening a restaurant.” What it became was, “Kenji López-Alt is opening a restaurant.” And then I was like, “Oh man, I guess I’m really going to get sucked into this.”

DUBNER: Okay, so the restaurant is called Wursthall. So, first of all, for those who haven’t been to San Mateo, California, just give us a quick sense of the vibe of the place, and then we’ll get into the restaurant and why the choices were made to have a German beer hall with sausages.

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well, San Mateo is a city that’s basically dead center between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. My wife works at Google and she works down in Silicon Valley. We initially moved up into the city and her commute was crazy. So we’re like, “All right we’ll move down to San Mateo.” And if you look at the real estate curve: very expensive everywhere, but extremely expensive in San Francisco, extremely expensive in Silicon Valley. And in San Mateo and a couple of the surrounding cities, there’s a small dip, so we were like, “Alright, that’s where we can afford to live.” And that’s where my wife’s commute will be all right. I think there’s actually a lot of people in our situation there right now.

DUBNER: Why a German beer hall — why was that the right concept? Or why was that the concept they wanted?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well, it’s two factors. One of them is the space itself. We’re located in a really nice, old, historic building, lots of nice light, so it seemed very conducive to this beer-hall atmosphere. The other thing is that my partner Adam Simpson, he is really into beer. And finally, beer halls are kind of just popular right now. So it seemed like a concept that worked in the space, that worked with Adam’s knowledge-base, and it seemed to be something that was hot and lacking in the San Mateo area.

So far so good, right? So for everyone out there who’s thinking, “Hey, maybe I should open a restaurant” — we asked Kenji López-Alt: “what’s the first step?”

LÓPEZ-ALT: So, the first step to opening a restaurant is, don’t. Opening a restaurant is a series of putting out fires every single day. I mean, even once you’re open, it’s still a series of putting out fires. Step one: don’t.

DUBNER: Okay. So, can you walk us through the opening process? What kind of work goes into those preparatory weeks, months, I assume?

LÓPEZ-ALT: So, the first step is, you have to have a reason for people to believe that you’re going to succeed and to give you money to do it. Because it’s not cheap to open a restaurant. And then from there it’s working with the architects and designers and doing all the build-out, which inevitably takes way more time than you expect. And for us we had this extra problem, because we’re in this really old building and the previous tenants and the landlord, they didn’t take the best care of the space.

But working back from my side, from the kitchen perspective: initially a lot of it was conceptualizing how German do we want to be? How California do we want to be? Because we knew we wanted to do both. Figuring out what the service style was going to be, and how customers are going to order. And really thinking to ourselves, “All right, when people come in here, what are they coming in to do?” Initially, when Adam and my other partner, Tyson Mao — when they were thinking of a beer hall, they thought, “Right, this is going to be essentially a bar. Some people maybe come to have a nice meal, but most will be coming to drink and have some food on the side.” And that’s what the initial menu is designed around: a selection of sausages, a couple of sandwiches, some appetizers to share.

So now he got to work creating a menu.

LÓPEZ-ALT: I had developed the initial opening menu on my own in my home kitchen before we had even hired any sort of kitchen staff. And I’m pretty methodical, so I had a recipe booklet written out, everything done in metric units, something that anybody could look at and replicate. Part of the idea was because it’s going to be relatively low-priced and high-volume, the kitchen has to be able to run itself, even without very minute oversight.

DUBNER: What about the sausage-making itself? That’s a big component. Can you just talk about how involved you were in the design and execution, and maybe experimentation, and figuring out how to not only make the sausages that you wanted, but how they were going to be prepared?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Yeah, from the start, we knew that we weren’t going to be able to make the sausages in-house, because we didn’t have the facilities. So in order to make a large volume of sausage, you need to have a dedicated refrigerated room, where you can grind and mix and stuff and everything, because if sausage mixture gets too warm while you’re forming it, it doesn’t bind properly, and your sausages end up crumbly and dry. It was literally physically impossible for us to make sausages in-house. So very early on we decided, “All right, we’re going to have to find some partners to work with who can execute our ideas at a level of quality and volume that we’re happy with.”

DUBNER: Is it an easy thing to find, someone who can handle that kind of quality and especially volume?

LÓPEZ-ALT: No. I mean the sausage part was mainly me going to every single sausage maker I could find in the Bay Area. We did want to keep it local. We visited many, many butchers and sausage makers, and there are many, many bad sausages around. Sausage-making is a non-trivial skill. You think, “Okay it’s just meat and fat, spiced, ground up, stuffed into a casing. How hard could it be?” But it’s one of these things where the minutiae of the technique can make a huge difference in the quality of the final product. It mainly comes down to the binding element, making sure that you have the right level of salt, and that the meat has been salted long enough that the proteins start to dissolve before you mix it. Making sure that you mix it right, and that you have the right ratio of fat to lean. And then also making sure that it stays chilled through the entire process.

And if any one of those things is off, your sausage doesn’t bind properly. And that’s what you find is the problem with most mediocre sausages. They could be flavored very well, they could be crazy and interesting, but if they’re not mixed properly they crumble instead of having that nice, juicy, snappy texture that I look for in a sausage. And so finding someone who can do that was hard.

There was also the consideration of creating a sausage restaurant that could be vegan-friendly.

LÓPEZ-ALT: So one of my goals from the beginning was: vegan items on the menu that aren’t vegan by omission, they’re just vegan by default, and they’re delicious. So we have a number of things like that, but the one that I was really excited about is a vegan doner kebab. And for that I worked with a company called Impossible Meats, they make a vegan ground-meat blend mostly out of wheat protein, but they add heme, which is a lot of what gives red meat its irony, bloody flavor. But it can also be derived from plant sources. It’s by far the best faux meat available. And so what we do is we spice it with Turkish spices — so cumin, urfa biber chilies, sumac.

And then we serve it as a — well, initially we were reforming it into a cylinder and doing it in front of one of those doner kebab spits that spins around, and you shave it off. But the fat in this stuff is coconut oil, and coconut oil melts at a slightly lower temperature than animal fat does, so the fat would end up melting out of it, and it would eventually just crumble off the spit. So that didn’t end up working. It would’ve been so cool if we could get that to work. Now we’re just forming it straight into hamburger-style patties, so all the flavor is there.

DUBNER: Okay, so you talked about the food and the building, etc. What about the people? How involved were you in hiring and training up the kitchen and front of house?

LÓPEZ-ALT: I was very involved in back of the house, and finding good people is by far the hardest thing. So, when you’re living in a place like New York or San Francisco, where the cost of living is so high, finding great people is very hard. Even finding remotely reliable people. Even before we opened, when we were training staff, we must have lost probably 50 percent over the course of a few weeks.

DUBNER: Wow.

LÓPEZ-ALT: Which is not abnormal. One day we’re there and two of our cooks don’t show up. What do we do? One of them was on a bender and the other one was just a no-show. But then, luckily, the restaurant down the street, all the cooks there showed up that morning and the manager said, “We’re closing, and you don’t have a job anymore.” So, suddenly we had 12 cooks just walk up to the front door saying, “Hey, can we have a job?” So there’s never really a shortage of résumés and applicants, it’s finding reliable people that’s hard. What I’ve discovered in my years as a cook — and it played out exactly as expected here — was that it’s much better to hire people who give a s—, even if they have no previous experience or skills, than to hire someone who has a great résumé who doesn’t really understand the concept.

Our No. 1 kitchen hire is this guy Erik Drobey, who is a career changer, he was in his 40’s, he worked in an office job, always loved cooking on the side, was a Food Lab follower. He stopped by my house once to give me some sausages and sauerkraut he made because he was so proud of them. And they were great, I thought they were great. And then he said, “Hey, I think I’ve decided I want to be a cook. Would you give me a shot?” I’m like, “Absolutely.” Finding people who really care. That’s the key. Because you can always teach people skills, but you can’t teach people to give a s—.

DUBNER: And what about front of the house?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Front of the house is actually probably even a little bit harder at the start, because you have to really dangle this carrot in front of them because during training and during the first month that we were doing friends and family meals, people are working and they’re getting paid, but they’re not getting the same tips that they would. And so they have to realize, “Okay, I’m putting in this work now. So in a month I’ll be making much more money.” But it’s hard to find people who are willing to think about that.

DUBNER: So shortly before opening, you tweeted — in all caps, by the way — “Opening a restaurant is insane. And I don’t know why anyone in their right mind would choose to do it.” So what’s going on in the weeks and days just before opening?

LÓPEZ-ALT: I can tell you what was in my head when that tweet went out. It was not actually related directly to the restaurant itself, it was more about its toll on my personal life, and particularly my family life and my marriage, because a restaurant is a harsh mistress. During those three months I was in there, I would wake up, take my daughter to daycare, go to the restaurant from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m., go pick up my daughter from daycare, bring her home, put her to bed, and then go back to the restaurant from 8:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m. It had been two-and-a-half months where I had been basically never at home. I saw my daughter for a few hours a day, but I basically never saw my wife.

We lost the chance to sit down and talk together. The only time I ever saw her was when we were with our daughter, so we never really had any alone time, which is very difficult when you’re raising a child, to not be able to talk to your partner, not even have the time to talk about things related to raising the child. And the worst part of it was that no matter how well you plan, and you think to yourself, “Right, this is the amount of work I’m going to have to put into this restaurant, and I’m just going to say no after that,” it’s really hard to say no when there’s 40 people whose jobs rely on you making this a success.

Finally, Wursthall was ready for its soft opening — investors, friends and family.

LÓPEZ-ALT: About 100 people, and everything was great. We had completely gutted the old bathrooms, retiled them in this beautiful blue tile, really nice wallpaper with these hand pen-and-ink-drawn animals and stuff. It was a really nice bathroom. And the first night we had 100 people in, the toilets backed up, stopped working. And we had to shut down the bathrooms. And as it turns out, the waste line leaving one of the toilets had never been repaired or replaced in probably decades and decades and had a huge sag in it. So we had to close for two weeks so that they can rip out all the tile we just put in, dig into the foundation, replace that. All of a sudden, we thought we were going to be ready to open the next week and now it’s like another two weeks and another 30 grand to fix the bathroom that we had never even considered might be a problem.

*      *      *

Kenji López-Alt, rock star of the food-writing world, decided after years on the sidelines to get back into the restaurant business with a place called Wursthall, in San Mateo, California, which started out as a simple concept: a German beer hall serving nouveau-ish sausages.

LÓPEZ-ALT: I was always one of these “I’d rather have influence and bring joy to people than have a lot of money” type-of-career people, you know? And if the money comes along with it, then that’s great as well. But I’d rather just be doing something I love.

DUBNER: Okay, so walk us through opening night, and I’m sure everything went exactly as it was planned, and everybody was thrilled, and it was perfect. Yes?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well, we had a sizable number of people in there and we were cooking food, people were ordering food, tickets were coming in, we were firing it. It was a disaster. Major, major disaster. Some people were waiting over an hour for their food. Some people never got their food. It’s the kind of night where we’re like, “These problems are insurmountable, how the f— are we going to fix this?” But we decided, “All right, we’ll focus on a couple of the big problems first.” When I tell them to you, they’re going to seem like stupid, small things. It’s like, “Well, why couldn’t you just do that?”

So, one of them was that we have sausages and you get your choice of topping. One of the problems was communicating to the cooks on the line. In case you’re not aware of how restaurant kitchens work, there’s a line, which is where all the stoves are, where the counters with the little cutting boards are, it’s where the cooks, the guys and girls are actually making the food. And then there’s a station called “expo,” the expediter, and the expediter’s job is to first of all act as a liaison between the front of the house and the back of the house. But, more importantly, the expediter’s job is to coordinate everybody in the back of the house so that dishes come out at the same time, so that everyone in the back of the house knows what they’re doing. So, essentially, they’re the general managing the army back there.

On opening night, we had all the toppings back on the line, and I was expediting, and I was just calling out, saying, “All right, hot Italian with speck and cherry-pepper relish. One bratwurst with sauerkraut.” And it’s a lot of information to take in when you have a full restaurant, there’s 100 people there, and you’re cooking say, 25, 30 sausages at a time, and each one has their own designated topping. It’s a lot of information for the person on the line actually cooking it and plating it to take in. And so every single sausage had this huge delay, where they maybe go out with the wrong topping on it and we’d have to re-fire it, or they would yell out and everything is really noisy, and we can’t hear each other.

And once you have these tiny little problems, that can lead to huge, huge backups, because the customers — they don’t care what problems you have back there. Once they’re seated, they want to start ordering food. And they don’t care that you already have a full board of tickets and that the grill is completely full. They don’t care that you screwed up one order and you have to re-fire it. Those tickets are just going to keep coming and coming and coming. So you have the ticket printer machine that’s spitting out these tickets constantly, and you’re constantly struggling to try and catch up with it. And that puts more and more stress on you. So you make more mistakes, the people on the line make more mistakes. And it can be these tiny little things that add to the likelihood of making a mistake that can throw a wrench in the entire operation, and that’s essentially what happened that first night.

So, the second night, what we did was we took those toppings, we took them off the line, and put them next to the expediter’s station, next to my station, so that all they had to remember was which sausages they were cooking. They would pass the sausages to me, right before I handed it to the server, I would put the topping on. I had the ticket right in front of me, it was easy for me to read it. And that smoothed things over unbelievably so. A couple of seconds of extra work on the cook’s part, it translated from a sausage taking over an hour to get to a customer, because there was this huge backlog of tickets, to customers getting their sausages in about eight minutes.

There was another major problem they discovered only on opening night.

LÓPEZ-ALT: And it’s one that we didn’t resolve until relatively recently.

It had to do with the pretzels.

LÓPEZ-ALT: So, I’m also partner at a bakery called Backhaus and they make all of our pretzels and all of our bread. Really wonderful pretzels, but we serve them hot. So we were trying to figure out, “How do we get these pretzels that were baked that morning and delivered to us, how do we serve them hot and fresh?” And the obvious thing is, “All right, well, when someone orders a pretzel, put it in the oven, let it get hot, and then we serve it.”

This was a problem in a couple different ways: one of them was that Backhaus, they were salting their pretzels before they came to us. And what happens with pretzel salt is that it draws out moisture from the pretzels, so after eight hours or so, some of the moisture from the pretzels beads up on the surface of the pretzels and then it leaves kind of a splotchy wet marks, which is not good, and the salt is all gone. So we’re like, “Okay, so we have to salt our pretzels,” so that’s adding another layer of stuff we have to do. And the only oven that we have back on the line is next to the fry station, and the fryer is extremely busy with potatoes and we also do a chicken schnitzel sandwich. Adding pretzels on top of that to him became very difficult. So, for the early nights, we were firing pretzels to-order in the oven. And that was another one of those things that seemed like it’s a thing that takes two seconds, but it just piled onto the likelihood that we were going to screw something up.

So what was the pretzel-salting solution?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well, we found a much more efficient way of salting them. So, one of the cooks had this idea to take a squeeze bottle, cut off the top until it was big enough that pretzel salt could flow through it. Now what we do is we just spray the pretzels and draw a line, trace the outline with the squeeze bottle, and that clears up all the space.

DUBNER: So what you just described, plainly these are things that most people eating at restaurants would never ever think about.

LÓPEZ-ALT: And they shouldn’t have to think about it.

DUBNER: But you have to think about it! But, as you’re describing it, it strikes me that you being who you are, and the way that you like to work, and the way that you do take an empirical and scientific approach to food and cooking and so on, that you were driven to solve these problems and get it right. Is that often the difference between a restaurant that works and one that doesn’t, which is that you have to be driven to constantly adjust, solve problems like that, that are going to come up? Do most restaurants really try as hard as you just described?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Most restaurants really try as hard. Any good chef cares deeply about the quality, and any good restaurant owner cares deeply about the quality of what they’re putting out. So I don’t think I’m unique in that regard at all. Me and my partners, Tyson and Adam, we have a lot of sit-down meetings where we analyze problems and try and solve them. So, maybe we do that a little bit more than other restaurants, but that’s my skill. I’ve worked for chefs that seem to have an innate skill to just be able to figure things out on the fly, or be able to work harder and faster to be able to solve those problems. People will attack those problems in different ways. But any good restaurant owner is going to recognize those problems and try and solve it in their own way.

DUBNER: I’m curious how much you pay attention to reviews of any sort. If you had opened a restaurant 10, certainly 20 years ago, there’s so much less feedback then, and now, some people feel swamped by it. Some people feel a lot of it is disingenuous. I know you said in the past that Yelp, in fact, this is from a tweet of yours: “Yelp is and has always been the worst place to look for decent reviews. Shady business practices, reviews by people who I know nothing about and have no reason to trust their opinion, even on the off chance they actually dined at the restaurant you’re rating.” So talk about that for a minute, your experience with Yelp and/or other online reviews.

LÓPEZ-ALT: So, it’s difficult to gain value from them for me.

DUBNER: You mean as a consumer or a producer?

LÓPEZ-ALT: As a consumer. To some degree, as a producer there is a little bit of value to it. But, especially if you start looking at trends and see, all right, people that are complaining, what are they complaining about? At the beginning when we opened, it was service. And that was some very legitimate feedback on that.

DUBNER: You didn’t need online reviews to know that was a problem, I gather, right?

LÓPEZ-ALT: There’s very little that I’ve read, I’ve seen in Yelp, that we didn’t already realize was a problem. As a consumer of Yelp, I find Yelp useful as a map of what restaurants are around, but it’s hard to trust opinions. A very good professional review, you don’t necessarily have to agree with the reviewer’s point of view on what is good and what’s not, but if you have an idea of what they think is good, then they tell you whether this restaurant met those expectations, and then you can sort of gauge, “All right, well, do I agree with whether that’s good or not?” And that’s what a good restaurant review will do. Whereas on Yelp, it’s like someone, BasicUser12345, says “this restaurant was terrible, the potatoes sucked.” Well, I don’t know what you define as good potatoes, so how is that helpful to me?

DUBNER: But the problem is that everybody eats, right? So everybody considers themself a legitimate critic, which, you can’t totally discount that fact, can you?

LÓPEZ-ALT: No, no you can’t. But at the end of the day, I’m involved in this project because I want to be, I want to have my name on it. I want to be proud of what we’re putting out. At some point you just have to stick to your guns and say, “This is what I believe is good. And I’m not going to change that just because some people say they disagree that it’s good.” And if your idea of what is good is so far off from what most people think is good, then maybe you’re in trouble and you’re going to go out of business. But I’m of the mind that I’d rather lose a little business and stick to what I believe is true than to just pander to everybody to try and make the most money, which is hard to explain to partners and investors. But at the end of the day, as a food writer, I think I do have a pretty good pulse of what people think is good.

DUBNER: Right. So overall on Yelp, Wursthall is doing pretty well. Averaging about three-and-a-half out of five stars. So let me read you one Yelp review and hear your response.

LÓPEZ-ALT: Ok, I honestly haven’t looked at Yelp reviews since, like, the second month after we opened, so we’ll see, all right.

DUBNER: This is from just over a month ago. This is from Andrew R. He writes, “I was really disappointed. I expected more. Not that I had high expectations. They were modest, honestly. But it fell below that bar as well. For one, the service was not that great. For two, the food just isn’t that good. It’s okay. Like, you would eat it if you were hungry. But another sausage would probably satisfy you more. And I like a split-top bun because you can grill both sides like they do here. But when it’s split only halfway down there’s a lot of bread with no meat at the bottom. And that’s terrible. Cut that bun all the way down. It’ll be better. Trust me.” So, that’s Andrew R. What does Kenji L. say?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well, I’ll start from the end of it and work back. Believe it or not, we tested how far to cut the bun extensively before opening. And trust me when I say it’s not better to cut it too far, because the buns end up falling apart. It doesn’t stand right. That sounds all fair, I mean those seem like legitimate concerns. If I was at the restaurant, I would definitely love to talk to him and get a little more details about exactly what they were disappointed with. What is it about the sausage that you didn’t like? And to his point about sausages being not great: I fully admit sometimes, like any restaurant or any business, we have consistency issues now and then, and we work our best to make sure that those don’t happen. And every day gets better.

DUBNER: Here’s a professional review, this is Peter Lawrence Kane on SF Weekly. He writes, “The quality of the food is high, and it is consistent. The thing is, considering López-Alt’s eminently well-deserved reputation for being a demystifier of culinary techniques, Wursthall falls a little short of the gosh-wow factor longtime fans might clamor for. Maybe that’s not entirely fair. After all, it’s exactly what it claims to be.” What’s your take on that, Kenji?

LÓPEZ-ALT: So, I fully agree with that. This is again one of those things where it’s like what happened to the restaurant between the initial concept and between what customers expect. And, the initial concept was, “All right, we’re going to serve some damn good sausages. We’re going to make our own sauerkraut. It’s going to be good sauerkraut, but it’s still sausages and sauerkraut.” And there’s only so far that can go, as far as gosh-darn-wow factor. This is one of those things where the concept of the restaurant on paper turned out very different from what the restaurant is now. Once my name got attached to it and started bringing the media attention to it, it turns out people are coming there for dinner. They’re not coming there to drink. So, we started as a beer hall, but we’re not really a beer hall anymore. We’re a restaurant. And so that’s been one of the challenges since opening, coming to terms with that and realizing, “You know what? Some of the stuff we initially thought isn’t going to work, because customers are coming in with different expectations.” Any restaurant takes a while to find its legs. I think for us maybe it’s taking a little bit longer just because it was such a big shift from what we had initially planned compared to what customers perceive.

DUBNER: I see that — maybe yesterday, or within the last little while, you tweeted — a new menu item that’s starting soon. Maybe maybe it’s already started by now.

LÓPEZ-ALT: Starting today. I was at the restaurant all morning training the staff and making making sure the cooks knew how it worked.

DUBNER: So, this is tomato mayo toast with grilled corn vinaigrette and a corn soup, paprika oil and shishito peppers. So that’s not what I think of as beer-hall food. Was it the clientele who drove it primarily? In other words, were people confused when they came originally because they know your name and they think it was going to be more of a sit-down, knife-and-fork situation?

LÓPEZ-ALT: I think that’s part of it. I definitely saw comments saying, like, “I expected the menu to be a little more Kenji than what it is.” Because it’s sausages, and I don’t write that much about sausages. I don’t eat that many sausages. I like them. And we cook them well, but it doesn’t exactly scream “Kenji” or “Food Lab” or whatever. So, yes, part of this revamping process has been, “How do we make this menu more me?”

DUBNER: So from what I’ve read, you own 12 percent of the restaurant and 20 percent of anything else with these partners?

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s something like that. That’s ballpark correct.

DUBNER: Would you have had the same share of ownership had you just acted as a sort of consulting-founding chef, as opposed to roll up your sleeves fully involved?

LÓPEZ-ALT: No. My partners are actually very understanding of the entire situation and the fact that I’ve now got more involved than I was planning on. Initially it was it was going to be basically just a fee plus a smaller percentage of ownership.

DUBNER: The big question I have then really is, so far, do you feel overall that it’s worth it? Another way of putting that is, if I came to you tomorrow, Kenji, with an idea that you liked, an idea for a restaurant, maybe a site for a restaurant, and a potentially worthwhile partnership, what do you do? Do you succumb? Or do you refrain this time?

LÓPEZ-ALT: I would say the restaurant on its own, in a bubble, detached from every other part of my life, was absolutely worth it. I don’t mind putting in hours and hours and hours of work even for little to no — I haven’t made any money off this restaurant yet, and I don’t plan on making any money for a while, until we pay off our investors. But we don’t live in a vacuum. So if someone came to me right now and asked me if I want to do this restaurant again, I would probably say no. Only because it cost me three months of being with my daughter. And that was a price that I wasn’t expecting to have to pay at the beginning, and one that made me deeply sad as it was happening, and also in retrospect. I don’t regret anything I did with the restaurant. I do regret how it affected my personal life and my family. But we learned those lessons.

DUBNER: Okay, final question. Let’s say that — maybe this is when your daughter is in school, when your daughter is in college even — but let’s say I come to you and I want you to work with me to open a new restaurant. What is the dream concept? Whether it’s cuisine or style or location. What is the restaurant that you absolutely would sacrifice again almost your entire life to do?

LÓPEZ-ALT: It would be something much smaller than Wursthall. So, we’re opening a couple more Wursthalls in the coming years, but we’ve talked about other restaurant concepts as well, and if we were to work on something together again, we would do something much smaller. The idea I’ve been throwing out at them is a Korean fried chicken sandwich place, which is a recipe that I’ve done at a number of pop-ups, I think is extremely delicious, but it’s essentially chicken brined in kimchi juice and then done Nashville hot chicken style. But instead of the Nashville hot chicken oil that goes on there, we make a sauce with Korean chili flakes and a bunch of Korean flavors, and it’s super delicious and the kind of thing that I think would do well as a fast-casual thing. That would basically be it for me. I want to feed a lot of people and make them happy. I don’t want to open an ego restaurant. I don’t want people to come to worship at the altar of Kenji López-Alt, come for this experience. I want a place that people say, “Hey, that’s a f—ing good sandwich. I’m going to have that once a week.”

We had that conversation with Kenji López-Alt back in July. And we caught up with him again a few weeks ago, for an update.

DUBNER: So first of all, I’m just curious: how is life?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Life is great now. At home I found a much better balance between restaurant and home life after that sort of craziness of opening. We’ve hired some more people in to help fill some management voids in the restaurant, which means that I get to spend a lot more time with my daughter and working on my other projects without having to freak out about what’s going on at the restaurant.

DUBNER: Did your marriage recover from the stress of opening?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Yeah it’s definitely in much better shape. And I have a much better understanding of what it means to overcommit myself to things. Yes, everything on that front is going much better.

DUBNER: Okay, and then importantly: how’s Wursthall going?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Wursthall is going well. I think the last time we talked, we were in this position where it was having a little bit of an identity crisis, because we had planned for it one way at the beginning, and then people were coming and expecting something different, and so we’ve been slowly trying to push it in that direction. And we’ll have completely transitioned our menu into a more sit-down experience, fork-and-knife, all that. But things are going well. We’ve never had trouble getting people in the door. We’ve never had trouble with revenue per se — the trouble has always been with profit. Maybe that’s true with most businesses. So, that’s been our concern for the last six months or so: all right, we’re making this money, we get people in the door — how do we actually turn that into profit so that we can actually start breaking even and making money and paying back our investors and all that?

DUBNER: So a lot of economists would say, “Well, the first and probably second and third and fourth steps toward bridging the revenue-profit gap would be very, very, very, very, simple, especially since you said that the demand is really strong. Right? You’re not having any trouble filling it, just raise prices.” So why not do that?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well part of it is our goal is to make sure that families and neighborhood people can come in and feel good about coming in. And as it is right now, I would say among our top three complaints is price already, so part of our goal especially with these new menu changes, is how do we give people an experience that they are willing to pay a little bit more for that they still see value in? And, originally with the menu the problem was everything came on a bun. And there is a limit to what people will pay for a sandwich and what people feel comfortable paying for a sandwich. Despite the quality of the ingredients inside, despite the amount of labor that goes into all that, there’s a certain amount you can charge for a sandwich and people will not pay any more. That’s not the case with fork-and-knife plates. People see more value in a fork-and-knife plate. We do this chicken schnitzel sandwich. We could just take off the bun and serve the exact same plate and charge $4 more for it, and people wouldn’t bat an eye.

The restaurant’s original concept, you’ll recall, was German-beer-hall-goes-to-California.

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s still a California beer hall. We still have sausages and German-themed things.

But customers who were fans of Kenji López-Alt’s food writing were expecting a menu that was more Kenji-fied. And so it has become more Kenji-fied. They’re serving a cacio e pepe …

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s like a quick Roman version of macaroni and cheese.

But with Germanic noodles rather than Italian.

LÓPEZ-ALT: So it’s our house spaetzle that we pan fry in brown butter, which is the traditional way to do spaetzle.

Also: smash-burgers and Korean-style fried chicken.

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s something we resisted at the beginning: should we do a burger? People know me for the burger, but do we need another place that serves a burger? And then we just decided, “Yeah, people want a burger. It’s good. People are going to order it, let’s just do it.” That and the fried chicken are probably our two top sellers. Once we got past that mental hurdle of being like, we don’t have to be strictly German, it was a pretty easy call at that point. Like, fried chicken and burgers — people love making them, they’re easy to prep, and they’ll help with this profit problem because both of them are high-profit dishes, compared to sausage, which are among are lowest-profit dishes because they take so much more work.

DUBNER: So you mentioned that one of the biggest problems is just personnel and turnover, both in the kitchen and front of the house, and I’m just curious to hear how you’re doing on that front with retention.

LÓPEZ-ALT: We have a number of people have been around since the very beginning. There was a bit of turnover when we changed executive chefs. I recently hired a new executive chef, and so when that management change happened, there was turnover. But we were expecting it because people are loyal to their bosses. But things seem to be settling down again.

DUBNER: Why did you need a new one?

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s not that our previous chef was bad at his job. It’s just that the needs that we had in terms of efficiency and really managing the volume that we were doing was just something that he didn’t have experience at. Oh, one thing I should mention that actually really helped with our staff morale when these changes were happening is that we hired a translator, which I think is good advice for any business that has a lot of employees that aren’t very fluent in English. So we hired someone to come in for an entire day and we scheduled every Spanish-speaking employee to come in and sit down.

DUBNER: So it was really about communication to understand the flow of work and so on?

LOPEZ-ALT: No, it was less about the flow of work and more about the management change, the new chef, and the transition in menu. But a lot of it is also to get their feedback and to find out what they needed from us in order to be happy in their work.

DUBNER: Okay, really important question: how are the toilets holding up now?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Toilet situation’s fine. We put in the money to do the big fix, and it’s all it’s all fine.

DUBNER: So I understand that you’ve also, in the midst of all this, put yourself and the restaurant in the middle of a MAGA controversy. You tweeted, in response to public events in D.C., you tweeted, “It hasn’t happened yet, but if you come to my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren’t getting served. Same as if you come in wearing a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate.” So, that’s what you tweeted. What happened next?

LÓPEZ-ALT: What happened next was — well, nothing for a few days and then it got picked up by some newspapers and then went around national news. And that’s when trouble happened. It was a mistake on a number of fronts for me to say that. The first one and the one that I was really concerned about was, it was a mistake the way I treated my staff and my partners, because that’s my personal Twitter account. It was something I said off the cuff and I never talked to my partners about it. And I realized afterwards that I just put my partners and especially my staff in a really tough position. Because now there’s all this anger being directed at them, and they had nothing to do with it. It was just me shooting off my mouth.

The other thing I want to say is that people very fairly read that as an attack on individuals, and as an attack on themselves after reading it, an attack on Republicans. And I can understand why it was read that way. And all I can say is that in my head it was really not about individuals. It is about the symbol, the symbol of the hat. I very admittedly live in a liberal bubble, I live in the Bay Area. I obviously I get exposed to a lot of people from around the country, including my family. And if you go just outside the Bay Area, of course there’s lots of right-wing people, lots of Republicans. And I get along fine with everyone. But, when you see that hat at rallies where there’s hateful things being said, or you see that hat being worn by people who are doing hateful things, it comes on to take a specific meaning that makes me uncomfortable. I guess my big regret as it came out in the way that closed down discussion as opposed to opening discussion.

DUBNER: You said it caused a lot of anger. Were people in your restaurant, whether partners or employees, were they angry because it endangered their livelihood, or were they angry on a level beyond that?

LÓPEZ-ALT: To be honest I don’t really want to talk about my partners or my staff — I don’t want to bring any of that up again, because I’ve already put them in an uncomfortable position. It’s been tough. I’ve been realizing that I’m in this position where I want to have my cake and eat it too. I’m a normal guy. I feel just like any other schlub on the Internet. I spend my days doing normal-people things, puttering around the house and fixing things and repairing the furnace. And I’ll just talk the way I talk on the Internet. But then, especially in the last couple of years, I have this platform and it’s my responsibility to use it. And that’s an impulse control thing, and that’s something my wife tells me all the time, like, “You can’t do this, because whether you want it or not, you’re well-known and you can’t just talk like this, because it’s going to get us in trouble. It’s not just about getting you in trouble, it’s going to get our family in trouble.” It is something that I very consciously have been thinking about. This year, I made a New Year’s resolution that if I make any kind of political comments, that I won’t respond back to commenters.

DUBNER: How are you doing with that resolution?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Good. Actually, I’m pretty much zero in terms of responding back. I also promised I wouldn’t make any more ad hominem attacks on social media, which, the one time I broke that was when I made an ad hominem attack against everybody who wears a MAGA hat, and that got me into trouble.

Soon enough, López-Alt will be taking a break from America and its politics.

LÓPEZ-ALT: I’m actually planning with my wife and my daughter — we’re going to be taking three months in Colombia. The idea is researching a book on Colombian cuisine, written for an American audience, which doesn’t really exist right now.

DUBNER: And where does your passion for that cuisine come from?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well my wife is Colombian, and we spend a lot of time down there and it’s a huge country, hugely varied in terms of geography and culture and cuisine — there’s the Andes, there’s coastal regions, there’s plains, there’s rainforest, there’s deserts — with widely varied cuisine as well, that I think is under-represented and I feel like I have a good inside track on that.

DUBNER: What happens if or when the next time you open a restaurant — how do you come into it thinking differently, knowing now what you know?

LÓPEZ-ALT: I take less on myself. I delegate more. I think I spend more time figuring out the personnel issue as opposed to the fun-concept issue and figure out how do we make this happen where I don’t have to upturn my life and give up everything else to do it. And if I can’t do it, then that just means I won’t do it. I’ve come to this place where — when the first restaurant — when the opportunity came to me it was like, I don’t want to die thinking, “What if? This is an opportunity to do something I’ve always thought about doing, it wasn’t a lifelong dream, but I’ve thought about doing it, I should do it.” And at this point, you know what? I don’t need to do it again. If the opportunity comes up and I can find a way to ensure that I don’t have to upend my life again to do it, then I would. But I’m perfectly content saying no.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rosalsky, Greg Rippin, Alvin Melathe, Zack Lapinski, and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

J. Kenji López-Alt, chef, restauranteur, and food writer.

RESOURCES

The Food Lab by James Kenji López-Alt (W. W. Norton & Company 2015).

EXTRA

Wursthall, 310 Baldwin Ave, San Mateo, CA 94401.

“Food + Science = Victory!” (Freakonomics Radio, Nov. 5, 2015).

The post Why You Shouldn’t Open a Restaurant (Ep. 347 Update) appeared first on Freakonomics.

Gary Cohn was leaving the number two position at Goldman Sachs when he met with Donald Trump. But was this Wall Street veteran ready for the challenges of Pennsylvania Avenue? (Photo: Pool/Getty)

For years, Gary Cohn thought he’d be the next C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs. Instead, he became the “adult in the room” in a chaotic administration. Cohn talks about the fights he won, the fights he lost, and the fights he was no longer willing to have. Also: why he and Trump are still on speaking terms even after he reportedly called the president “a professional liar.”

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Stephen J. DUBNER: So your life story, I guess, is pretty remarkable.

Gary COHN: Thank you.

DUBNER: You were not destined for—

COHN: For Wall Street.

DUBNER: For Wall Street.

COHN: Any street.

Gary Cohn was born in 1960 in the suburbs of Cleveland. He had severe dyslexia and was a terrible student. As a consequence, he bounced from school to school. If there were an award for “least likely to succeed,” Cohn might have qualified. His parents were worried he wouldn’t make it through high school. His grandparents ran an electrical-contracting business, where Gary worked after school. He was a whiz with inventory and anything else numerical.

COHN: As the rest of the world was telling me, “You’re going to be a disaster, you’re a failure, maybe you’ll be lucky to drive a truck,” my grandparents — who I really admired, who’d built the family business — they kept saying, “You’re going to be fine.” And they were great people in my life, really influential.

Cohn did make it through high school, and college — at American University, where he programmed computers and became obsessed with the financial markets. But back home in Cleveland, the best he could do was a sales job in the home-products division of U.S. Steel. On a work trip to New York, he stopped in at the commodities exchange, hoping to somehow land a job there. He hitched a ride to the airport with a stranger — a guy who’d just been put in charge of the new options-trading desk at his brokerage firm. He admitted to Cohn he didn’t know anything about options. Cohn replied that he knew everything about them. Which was a lie. But it got Cohn an interview, several days later. By then, it was no longer a lie: Cohn had read the definitive book on options trading four times over — an act of extreme stamina for a dyslexic. He got the job. Several years later, in 1990, Cohn was hired by Goldman Sachs. He wound up working at Goldman for 27 years, the last 10 as president and C.O.O. But it was the job he took in early 2017 that would make Gary Cohn a household name: director of the National Economic Council under President Trump. How did a Wall Street rationalist deal with a Fifth Avenue hyperbolist?

COHN: I treated the President of the United States the way I would have liked to have been treated. That’s how I dealt with him.

*      *      *

I spoke with Gary Cohn the first week in March. It was starting to look like the trade war between the U.S. and China might be moving toward a peaceful conclusion — although, that hasn’t happened yet. Also: there’d been yet another report of behavior unbecoming the President of the United States — this time, a New Yorker piece alleging that in 2017, Donald Trump had instructed Gary Cohn to get the Justice Department to block a media deal that Trump disliked. Cohn reportedly told chief of staff John Kelly, “Don’t you f—ing dare call the Justice Department. We are not going to do business that way.”

DUBNER: Have you communicated with the President since you left the White House?

Gary COHN: Yes.

DUBNER: Can you tell us anything about that?

COHN: We have a very amicable relationship. We usually talk about the economy. Sometimes about personnel. We’ve talked about personnel, and when he’s had to fill a job or two, I’ve talked to him.

DUBNER: I’m a little surprised to hear that you’re on such good terms with the President still, mostly because I read Fear by Bob Woodward. And you’re kind of the star of that book, or one of the stars of that book. The most famous story concerns you removing a letter that somebody drafted for the President to sign, a letter to the President of South Korea that would have terminated KORUS, the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. So let’s hear your version of that. Is the reporting in Fear essentially true, and did you participate?

COHN: I’m not going to comment on that.

DUBNER: Do you want to comment on whether you participated in the writing of the book. Did you talk to Woodward or—

COHN: I’m not going to comment. I’ve said all I’m going to say on the Woodward book. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s sort of come and gone.

For the record, here’s what Cohn had to say when Fear was published: “This book does not accurately portray my experience at the White House. I am proud of my service in the Trump Administration, and I continue to support the President and his economic agenda.” But, also for the record: in Fear, Cohn calls Trump “a professional liar.” And in a meeting over steel tariffs, which Cohn vehemently opposed, here’s what he reportedly told Trump and Peter Navarro, the President’s favorite economist. “If you just shut the f— up and listen, you might learn something.” So how can it be that Cohn and the President are still on speaking terms?

COHN: I think the President is about results, and when he looks back at our time together, I was part of a team that got a lot done. We got tax reform done.

It also says something about the kind of businessman Cohn was: a team player, and not a backstabber; eager to debate the facts but quick to forget a fight; and a man who exercised substantial patience. At Goldman Sachs, he was heir apparent to the C.E.O., Lloyd Blankfein, for many years.

COHN: So the story is: when I was asked by Lloyd and the board to become president, chief operating officer, Lloyd called me and Jon Winkelried into a room. We were co-’s at the time and said, “Guys, will you give me two years? I got to know you’re committed for two years.” And I said, “Lloyd, I’ll give you two. Two’s not hard. But you’ve got to understand, I think these are seven-to-10-year jobs. I don’t think these are lifetime jobs.”

DUBNER: And you did it for 10, correct?

COHN: I did it for over 10. And literally at seven years, I started getting a little antsy. Lloyd, at that point, ended up getting sick. And I wasn’t going to rattle the boat or rock the boat at all in year seven or eight, or maybe it was eight, nine—

DUBNER: He was treated for cancer. I don’t know if you were technically acting C.E.O. but you were essentially—

COHN: I did whatever I did to protect the firm. I went when I needed to go, I did what I needed to go. And to me the most important thing for Lloyd was for him to get healthy. We had worked together our whole life. But at that point, I was letting the board know that I wasn’t going to be here forever. So I sat down, and I made it clear that I would be gone by the end of the year.

DUBNER: Oh, regardless?

COHN: Yeah, I was going. And the Trump thing was pure lucky coincidence.

We should note two things here. The first is that Gary Cohn is a registered Democrat — although, to be fair, a Goldman Sachs Democrat isn’t exactly an Elizabeth Warren Democrat. Cohn did make a lot of campaign contributions to Democrats over the years, but also to lots of Republicans, including a political action committee called Every Republican Is Crucial. The second thing to note is that Donald Trump was the sort of businessman, prone as he was to bankruptcy and hyperbole, that Goldman Sachs avoided doing business with. According to William Cohan, who’s written a definitive history of the firm, “Goldman determined never to do business with Trump and conveyed that message to its new recruits.” Keep in mind this is the same Goldman Sachs that until recently was happy to do bond deals with the government of Venezuela. In any case, by the fall of 2016, Trump had emerged as the Republicans’ nominee for President.

COHN: So if you remember, after the convention in Cleveland, the first debate in September at Hofstra was supposed to be an economic debate. And remember, the operative word there is “supposed to.”

That’s when Cohn got a phone call from Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser.

COHN: And said, “Hey, we’re preparing the nominee for the economic debate at Hofstra. Can I come in and talk to you about what’s going on in the U.S. economy?” We had a mutual friend.

DUBNER: And what was your initial response to whatever the Trump economic ideas were at that point?

COHN: I clearly support deregulation. I clearly support lower taxes on corporate repatriation, redoing the tax system. So there were a lot of big, high-level things I supported on the economic side.

TRUMP: You are going to approve one of the biggest tax increases in history. You are going to drive business out. Your regulations are a disaster. And by the way, my tax cut is the biggest since Ronald Reagan.

DUBNER: Then on the other hand, there was trade and tariffs and immigration and so on.

TRUMP: NAFTA is the worst trade deal, maybe ever signed anywhere.

COHN: On the flip side there were things that I support on Hillary Clinton’s side, and things that I didn’t support on Hillary’s side. And it was interesting, when Jared called, I walked down three offices to the chief of staff of the executive office of Goldman, John Rogers, a political veteran, and I said, “Hey, John, should I meet with him?” And he’s like, “He’s the Republican nominee. If the Democratic nominee called you’d meet with her too right?” I go, “Yeah. Okay.” “So go meet with him.”

DUBNER: Were you not put off at all by the fact that he was considered by a lot of people to be, whatever adjective you want to use — I mean, the most anomalous major party candidate we’ve had probably ever.

COHN: But he was still the nominee.

DUBNER: Right.

COHN: He was still the Republican nominee for president.

DUBNER: But I’m asking you if you were put off as you — reputationally, for Gary Cohn or for Goldman — whether that was a consideration.

COHN: And that’s why I went, and I asked John Rogers who really is one the most astute political guys I knew — had been in and around Washington forever, been in the Treasury, been in the White House. I said “John, should I do this?” He goes, “What are you asking me? Of course you’re going to do this. If any nominee for president calls you from one of the major parties you’re going to meet with them.” And I didn’t meet with him. I met with his advisers.

Once Trump was elected, Cohn did meet with him. The meeting went very well — even though Cohn is what Trump calls a “globalist,” a believer in free, fair, and open trade. Trump had essentially run against that position. But Cohn’s views on deregulation and tax reform — especially lowering the corporate rate — they were exactly what Trump wanted to hear. Cohn also tried to pitch Trump on preparing for the huge disruption that automation will bring to labor markets; and the need to maintain a strong flow of immigrants.

According to the Woodward book Fear, Trump was so enthusiastic about Gary Cohn that he offered him a number of jobs then and there: deputy secretary of defense; director of national intelligence; secretary of energy; director of the Office of Management and Budget. “You know what?” Trump finally said. “I hired the wrong guy for treasury secretary. You would be the best treasury secretary.”

This must have been a bit awkward: as Woodward reports, Trump’s pick for treasury secretary was also in the room — Steve Mnuchin, another Goldman Sachs alum. Cohn didn’t accept any post at the meeting. But some time afterward, he was offered the role formally known as Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Director of the National Economic Council. By this time, remember, Cohn was already on the way out at Goldman Sachs.

COHN: The meeting with Donald Trump happened after I’d already made my decision. So I was in motion.

DUBNER: Did anyone say to you, however, “Gary, this president is anomalous, and he is a human third rail, and what are you thinking about?” Did anyone say that to you?

COHN: Of course.

DUBNER: And what did you say?

COHN: I said, “The President of the United States has asked me to work for him. I am going to go in and serve and do the best I can for my country.” Remember, I am taking an oath to the Constitution of the United States to protect and defend, not an oath to the President of the United States. And I am going to go serve the people of the United States.

The Trump White House turned out to be stranger than Cohn, or anyone, could have imagined.

COHN: The White House in itself is an amazing organization in many ways. It’s the craziest organization under any presidency, and it’s an amazing organization under any presidency.

Under Trump, workflow was unpredictable. Protocol was ignored. Turnover was endemic. People started calling Gary Cohn “the adult in the room”: disciplined, focused, and most of all dedicated to tax reform, a goal he shared with the President. Even if their numbers didn’t line up.

COHN: This is not a secret that at one point he wanted a 15 percent corporate tax rate. And I just told him a 15 percent corporate tax rate will not work.

DUBNER: Will not work — will not raise enough money, or politically?

COHN: It just a) politically and b) algebraic. I mean, when you start understanding the numbers of what a 15 percent tax rate means, we’d have to manipulate so many other things in the code. So, I personally would have settled for 25. The corporates would have settled for 25.

He then said, “Okay. I could live with 20. But if you —” and he was talking to Mnuchin and I at the time, he said, “If you guys start at 20, you’ll end up going higher. I know you. I know you can’t negotiate that well.” I said, “If we start at 20, we’ll end up at 20, we’ll hold it. We’ll hold it.” And we were holding 20. He was the one that kept willing — he was willing to go higher.

DUBNER: So what did it end up, 22?

COHN: Twenty-one. Yeah, 21.

Cohn also helped manage the political process, making sure the President’s habit of insulting people via Twitter didn’t undermine Congressional support for the tax plan.

COHN: When we were really working taxes hard, there was no way I could deal with the president going after any one of those Republican senators — I need every one of their votes. I don’t have a spare.

DUBNER: So did you steal his phone? What did you do?

COHN: No, no, no. We and Secretary Mnuchin and others, we kept reminding him. That was one of the reasons that we didn’t do anything in tariffs in the first year, is because a lot of our marginal voters are free-traders. And we didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to hold up a tax vote because they were going to retaliate on trade in the tax vote.

While putting together the tax plan, just eight months into Trump’s term, came a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

MARCHERS: Anti-white, anti-white, anti-white.

MARCHERS: Jews will not replace us. Jews will not replace us.

There were counter demonstrations as well, and violence. Trump’s response is now infamous.

TRUMP: You had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.

And it did nothing to ease the tension; Gary Cohn, by the way, is Jewish.

DUBNER: From what I’ve read, you were ready to resign then, and kind of had to be talked out of it. You were talked out of it.

COHN: Yeah, we had had two or three, I would say, very intense, very open, very honest discussions. And it boiled down to the president asking me, as his leader of tax reform in the White House and the person that he felt could help him get it done, to please stay on through tax reform.

DUBNER: All right.

COHN: And I did agree to that.

Trump signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 on Dec. 22 of that year. It got through Congress without a single Democratic vote. In addition to lowering the corporate rate, it also incentivized U.S. firms to repatriate money they’d parked overseas, and to invest some of that money here. It also lowered personal tax rates across the board, including a dip at the highest income level. The Joint Committee on Taxation projects the new tax law will be very generous to the very wealthy. But Cohn — who is himself very, very wealthy — he argues with that perception. Indeed, some of the new provisions hurt high earners: a lower cap on the the mortgage-interest deduction and a new $10,000 cap on the State and Local Tax Deduction, or SALT, which is especially punitive to high earners living in high-tax states — states, by the way, that did not vote for Trump in 2016.

COHN: There was a very big tech company in California I was at two weeks ago, where all the senior management was bitching at me because how much their taxes are going up. I said, “Please tell Nancy Pelosi, because she was the first one that came out and said this was a tax cut for the rich.” Well, it was not a tax cut for the rich in San Francisco and it was not a tax cut for the rich in New York City or in Illinois. One of the ways that we made the tax tables work, and we pushed money down into lower-income brackets, is you have to find revenue. We found revenue in this deduction, which if you see who it affects, the vast majority of the people it affects are the high-income earners.

DUBNER: Big question: it’s been a while now, too early for big macro results, but how do you think your tax plan is working so far?

COHN: I’m glad you say that, that it’s too early, because it’s amazing how everyone wants to take a 10-year tax plan and judge it after one year. We talked about increasing economic growth by one percent. And I think in essence we did that in the first year. We went from sort of two to sub-two percent to three and just below three-percent growth. We finally have real wage growth, wage growth in excess of inflation in the United States. It’s still not as high as we’d like to see it. We’re seeing job creation. We’re seeing movement in the labor force. And I do think that we’ve seen that disposable income in the system.

So when you look at corporate earnings and you look at what’s going on in the stock market, a lot of that’s being driven by excess disposable income because of the tax rates. And I will be happy to be criticized if I’m wrong in the tax system, but we won’t know for five-plus years. We gave companies 100 percent of capital-expenditure expensing for the first five years, trying to get companies to make a long-term investment in the U.S. economy. And all we’re hearing right now is how U.S. companies aren’t paying taxes because they’re using that opportunity to invest in capital to manage their tax rate down. That is going to pay dividends for the next 20, 30 years.

*      *      *

Gary Cohn spent 27 years at Goldman Sachs, the massive investment bank and financial-services company. He never got the C.E.O. job he thought he’d get, but you probably shouldn’t feel too sorry for him. In 2007 alone, the first year of the financial crisis, Cohn’s compensation was $72.5 million. $72.5 million. In 2007. Goldman came through the crisis relatively well because of what came to be called “the big short,” a bet against the mortgage market whose collapse left so many other firms, and individuals, in big trouble.

DUBNER: Goldman hedged itself really well and really smartly. But for the average, let’s say, American voter, they look at Goldman and say “What are the goods and services that they provide? What value are they to me and why is a Gary Cohn, why is he making $72.5 million that year when the U.S. economy, the global economy, were starting to totally crater?” And many people really do think of Goldman as the giant vampire squid sucking the lifeblood out of anything that they can. So persuade me that the activities of a firm like Goldman are not essentially rent-seeking, and that the profits of such activities are not out of line with how we generally think of a society like ours, which creates opportunity for all.

COHN: I completely understand the question. I’m not offended. You can see — I get the question completely. The service we provide, and we are in the service industry, no different than other services that people pay for. And we are a service economy. We’re in the service of giving advice, intermediating, providing liquidity. And that’s what people were willing to pay for. And when we talk about that rent-seeking, it’s interesting because you even said it yourself in asking the question. The vast majority of the time we’re selling a bond. So on one hand, we’re representing Venezuela selling the bond, on the other hand, we’re finding buyers. So we literally have to do both sides of the transaction. And we are not taking a principal position in there. We are finding a buyer that will buy a Venezuelan bond at a certain interest rate. We’re talking to the Venezuelan Central Bank or the Treasury saying what rate will you issue at, and trying to find a meeting of the minds. And getting paid a fee in the middle which is fully disclosed to both the buyer and seller to do that.

DUBNER: We should say in that one case, Goldman may have been the last party to have been paid by the Nicolás Maduro government. Right? Isn’t that true. Probably.

COHN: I’ve been out there for a couple of years, but you may be—

DUBNER: I mean, it was a $90 million payment by Maduro. I think it was the last money that was made available for that kind of—

COHN: I’m not going to argue with you. You may be right.

To all the voters in 2016 captivated by Donald Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp,” a man like Gary Cohn was the swamp, at least its New York outpost: the ultimate insider, wealthy beyond belief — and worse yet, he did not even share Trump’s nationalism.

COHN: It’s no secret, I am known as the globalist in the White House. Thank you Breitbart for putting little globes next to my name every time you print my name. It’s one of my crowning successes in the White House that I’m now known as a globalist, not a nationalist.

DUBNER: I don’t think it was a compliment, by the way, when they put it next to you.

COHN: It wasn’t a compliment for Breitbart. It was a compliment for me, though! It was a compliment for me though. So the fact that I’m a globalist, also I — that’s a synonym for realist. Because I believe we live in a globalized world and we’re not putting that toothpaste back in the tube.

The president ran on coal and coal jobs. I remember vividly having a conversation with the president on coal jobs versus solar-panel installers. We ended up putting tariffs on solar panels, which I didn’t understand either. And I did turn to him one day and I said, “Mr. President, how many coal miners do we have in the United States and how many solar-panel installers do we have?” And I said, “I’m not here to trick you up — the answer’s — I’ll make it simple: less than 50,000 coal miners in the United States and more than 350,000 solar-panel installers. And by the way, 10 years ago we had no solar-panels installers. It’s a growth industry in the United States. In fact in California now, you cannot build a house without solar panels. It’s an industry that’s going to continue to grow. And we have to recognize where this country is going, not where this country has been.”

DUBNER: And was his connection to that, what most people would consider an outdated belief, was that political, was it intellectual, was it just kind of spiritual?

COHN: I think it was all the above. I think during his formative years growing up, coal might have been an integral part in thinking about the energy sectors, but clearly in states like West Virginia and parts of Pennsylvania, he understood, and he was a bit of a marketing genius on this. He understood in West Virginia, and southern Ohio and Pennsylvania, you better go talk about coal. And he understood in certain steel towns, when he looked at the empty steel mills, he should talk about bringing back steel jobs.

The Trump plan to bring back steel jobs included placing tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum — along with solar panels and washing machines and hundreds of other imported goods, especially those made in China.

COHN: And when you put tariffs on goods that people in the United States consume every day, it’s a consumption tax. So all the tariffs did is they made products that Americans were going to buy more expensive. And in fact we got the final trade data numbers this morning for what trade deficit looked like for last year in the United States. And lo and behold, we hit an all-time record-high trade deficit globally, and with China.

DUBNER: Despite the best efforts of the White House.

COHN: Tariffs don’t work. If anything, they hurt the economy because if you’re a typical American worker, you have a finite amount of income to spend. If you have to spend more on the necessity products that you need to live, you have less to spend on the services that you want to buy. And you definitely don’t have anything left over to save. So we should try and make the goods as cheap as possible. And we don’t produce the goods in the United States; we import the goods from other countries. And if we could produce the goods as cheaply as other countries do, we would produce them in the United States.

DUBNER: Now, every Ph.D. economist that I’ve ever come across would agree — I would say, probably 99.5 percent — with what you just said.

COHN: No, I think 99.99999.

DUBNER: But the one that doesn’t, is in the White House, which is Peter Navarro, is that right?

COHN: There’s only one in the world. That we know of.

Peter Navarro is director of the White House National Trade Council, a position and office that Trump seems to have created specifically for Navarro. According to Bob Woodward’s Fear, Navarro referred to Gary Cohn as a “Wall Street establishment idiot.” Navarro’s other ally on tariffs was Wilbur Ross, the investor Trump had chosen as Commerce Secretary.

COHN: I was losing the war on tariffs every day with the President. I knew I wasn’t convincing him I was right. I was not going to take a 74-year-old man who’s believed something since he was 30 and convince him that I was right. Believe me, I tried. Don’t think I didn’t try. Don’t think I didn’t use every example I could try and use, from windows and buildings, to steel and buildings, to the bike manufacturer in Detroit. I used every example I could come up with.

DUBNER: We know that Trump has his ways of thinking. He admits that he’s not that interested in changing. We’ve read a lot about how you and others tried to educate him on things, give him new options, but at the end of the day it didn’t work. So what does that say about, I guess, either the president or the ability of our political system to absorb the best information?

COHN: Well, it definitely makes a statement about the power of the Executive Office and the presidency. And ultimately, everyone in the White House works at the pleasure of the president. And I was more than happy, I was actually excited to go in and fight with Peter Navarro every day and I was happy to be on the 99.9999 percent of the equation and explain and use real-life examples to what would happen.

DUBNER: And what would his defense be? Because it’s hard to defend — and, to be fair, there have been people in history, Copernicus, who were outliers, but they were right. Okay. Maybe that’s Peter Navarro’s view. What would his defense be?

COHN: Well his defense would be that he was the Copernicus, that he would be right. I don’t think you or I will live long enough to ever see him right. And the data just came out for last year that proves that so far he’s completely wrong. So far he’s been unable to show anyone any facts that he’s right.

DUBNER: And when the president sees these data, why does he not have a change of mind?

COHN: I don’t know. I mean data is data. Data — numbers really don’t lie. Yes, you can manipulate numbers, but these are numbers put out by his own Commerce Department. These are not your numbers, these are not my numbers. These are his numbers. His Commerce Department put out a 2018 trade deficit of $891-point-something billion. That’s an all-time record high. And the China number in there was the biggest single number, at an all-time record.

DUBNER: That number, however, coincides with a newly, I guess, resurgent stock market you could call it. Really, that’s not even fair. It had a brief downfall.

COHN: Yeah.

DUBNER: It had a one-month decline.

COHN: We had a bad December.

DUBNER: It was a bad December.

COHN: Bad December.

DUBNER: We happen to be speaking now in early March, let’s just pretend for a minute that there’d been a bad January and bad February, too. And let’s say the market had fallen 25, 30 percent overall. Do you think that would have substantially changed the President’s view on tariffs and trade, particularly on China? Because I can see how it might be easy to not worry about the deficit numbers when the markets are doing well.

COHN: You’re asking a really good, fun question. Yeah, what are the benchmarks for success of the presidency? The stock market is the most obvious, most transparent, most talked-about-by-the-president benchmark of success. We can debate how much the president should be accountable for the stock market going up or going down. I mean that’s an interesting debate.

DUBNER: All right. How about on the count of three, we both say a number, one to ten, how influential we think the president is overall, stock market. All right. I’m going to think of my number. You got your number?

COHN: Yeah. I got my number.

DUBNER: Okay. One, two, three.

COHN: Four.

DUBNER: Three. All right. So you’re even more cynical than I am.

COHN: Okay.

DUBNER: So that said, this president really uses it.

COHN: He really uses it. And he uses it more when the stock market’s going up, by the way, than he does when it’s going down. By the way, everyone does that.

What led to the strong market recovery after that bad December? Cohn attributes it to a number of factors: the end of a month-long partial government shutdown; indications that the trade war with China was moving toward a détente; and a decision by the Federal Reserve to stop raising interest rates.

DUBNER: It’s interesting because usually the chair of the Fed is, as we know, wildly independent. But here was a case where the president pretty much came out and said to Jay Powell, the chair of the Fed Reserve, “I would really prefer that you stop doing what you’re doing, and stop talking about raising interest rates.” What’s your view of that? And let me ask a two-part question. I know there was — I’ve read at least, that you were interested in that position at one point. I don’t know whether you were under consideration or not. You’re shaking your head no.

COHN: I am totally not the person to be the chairman of the Fed. That would be the worst position you could give to Gary Cohn.

DUBNER: Because you’re too excitable, or why?

COHN: No it’s a real, real, real academic position sitting with Ph.D. economists all day long and debating the economic tilt/slant micro of the U.S. economy. It’s not my skill set. One of my successes in life is knowing what I’m good at, and more importantly knowing what I’m not good at. I would not have been good at that job.

DUBNER: Okay. I totally take you at your word there. That said, did you consider it — and I don’t mean to assail Jay Powell here, but was it essentially — a “cave” is a strong word, but was it a capitulation based on the President’s wishes, and should the Fed work that way?

COHN: I’m going to hope it wasn’t. I’m going hope it wasn’t. I’m going to hope that Jay Powell and the Fed governors in seeing all of the data they see — I mean, they’ve got more Ph.D. economists than anyone else. They talk to all the companies in the world and the United States, and the regional Fed system is designed to bring them real-time data from the local economies. I surely hope, and I almost pray, that what the Fed did was in reaction to what they were seeing in the data, that they felt that there was an actual slowing of the economy and they were in the wrong place.

After a year in the White House, with tax reform done, Gary Cohn decided he’d had enough.

COHN: The chronology goes something like this: We signed tax reform on Dec. 22, it was a Friday.

DUBNER: 2017.

COHN: 2017. President left for Mar-a-Lago for vacation. I left with my family for vacation. We all came back in early January. And I sat down and had a one-on-one lunch with the President. And I was at the point now where I was getting ready to move on. And I said “I want to work with you to make sure there’s a smooth transition, that you hire someone. I’m happy to work with you to transition that person and I’ll leave as soon as you need me to, or I’ll stay as long as you need me to.”

DUBNER: And was this with the understanding that you were essentially losing the war on the trade war?

COHN: No, no. It really wasn’t. It was with the understanding that my main mission of getting tax reform had been done.

Cohn’s replacement was named: Larry Kudlow. And Cohn received a pat on the back from the President.

TRUMP: This is Gary Cohn’s last meeting in the cabinet and of the cabinet. And he’s been terrific. He may be a globalist, but I still like him.

Just to be clear, Cohn was losing the war on the trade war. But he says the reason he left the White House was because of how he was losing.

COHN: The most important thing to me — and this is the way I’ve always lived my life, whether I was at Goldman Sachs or I was at the White House — is you have to have a set of policies and procedures to debate issues. And as long as you abide by the sets of policies and procedures to debate the issues, and everyone gets their ample opportunity to express their point of view in an open forum, that’s a perfectly legitimate environment to work in.

DUBNER: The best idea wins.

COHN: And you’re never going to win every argument. You’re never going to win every fight. But you’re part of a team. And when the team decides you’re going to do X versus Y even though you’re passionately think that Y is right and X is definitely wrong, you have to be a team player. When I worked at Goldman Sachs for 27 years, it is the most team-oriented place in the world. So I believe in that team-oriented approach. What happened in the White House is we got to a point, unfortunately, where one or two people decided that they were going to no longer be part of a process and a debate. And they were going to use a direct connection to the president to set up a meeting and call in C.E.O.’s of aluminum companies and steel companies to announce steel tariffs and aluminum tariffs without there being a process and a procedure to set up that meeting; without the chief of staff knowing there was a meeting; without the Office of Legal Counsel having written an executive order or a memo or anything to sign. And they created that meeting without anyone knowing it.

DUBNER: These were [Peter] Navarro and Wilbur Ross? Are those the two people?

COHN: Yes. Those are the two people. When the process breaks down, then you’re, sort of, in my mind, living in chaos. I don’t want to live in a chaotic organization. I’ll live in an organization where people vehemently disagree all day long, as long as there’s a policy to vehemently disagree. When people start end-running the process and start trying to take over, that’s not an organization that I wanted to be part of.

Since Cohn left the White House, a pattern has emerged: the Trump administration uses tariffs, or the threat thereof, to leverage trading partners to renegotiate an old deal, like NAFTA, or substantially reconfigure the trading dynamic, as is the case with China. When I spoke with Cohn, there was a lot of talk that a new Chinese deal was potentially close; that sentiment has since receded. Still, I asked him: is it possible that a better U.S.-China trade deal will come about, and that it wouldn’t have been possible without the tariffs he despises?

COHN: There’s absolutely a possibility that that happens. The one thing the president and I completely, 100 percent agree upon is the Chinese stealing of intellectual property, the forced technology transfer into China, the market access for businesses into China. That has been a huge issue for the United States for years. And the president and I completely agree on the biggest problem with China. I’m not here defending China and China policy and China tactics. I have been on the other side of the store Chinese issue for a long time, I just differ on how we get to a conclusion.

DUBNER: What would you have proposed that’s different? Again, nothing’s been resolved as we speak. But basically, tariffs were used as a threat, essentially. That may have—

COHN: Here’s my problem with this. So tariffs were used as the threat. Did it hurt the Chinese at all? We had record trade deficits.

DUBNER: So why do the Chinese seem to be, at least at this point, amenable? Or is that a smokescreen?

COHN: I think the U.S. is desperate right now for an agreement.

DUBNER: An agreement or headline?

COHN: The president needs a win. The only big open issue right now that he could claim as a big win that he’d hope would have a big impact on the stock market would be a Chinese resolution. Getting the trade deficit down I will never say is easy, but of the issues on the table, that’s relatively easier. Getting the intellectual property, the forced technology transfer and the market access — much more difficult. I think market access, the Chinese will give because they’ve been close to giving it for a while. But how are we going to stop the Chinese from stealing intellectual property or not paying for it? How are we going to stop them from copyright infringement? What is the enforcement mechanism and what are the punitive damages if they don’t stop?

On balance, however, Cohn remains essentially a fan of President Trump’s economic agenda.

COHN: The president has come in and looked at the tax system, and looked at the economy, and looked at the regulatory environment, and said, “Hey can we, can we as a federal government, can we help stimulate economic growth?” Something that the prior administration had tried for eight years and never really got. So the president did come in and say, “I do believe in creating a stronger America. I do believe in creating jobs at home. I do believe in wage growth. And I do believe in making America more competitive.” And so those are things that he has executed on. And you have to give him credit. We continue to have a pretty robust market, a pretty robust economy. There’s a couple things going on in the U.S. that don’t really get the attention they deserve. There’s one report that everyone in Washington, the geek world, sort of hangs on. It’s called the JOLTS report, it’s jobs open, jobs lost. We have 7.3 million job openings in the United States. These are like $50-, $60-, $70,000 jobs with benefits.

DUBNER: So this points to you — you’ve always been pro-immigration generally, anti-wall.

COHN: Yep.

DUBNER: Did you try hard on that fight with the President, or—

COHN: I tried a little bit, but honestly I tried to stay in my lane of the economy. If I had bullets to shoot, I want to shoot them on the economy.

DUBNER: I mean it’s pretty easy to argue that immigration is a major part of the economy.

COHN: So we have 7.3 million jobs openings in the United States. We have 6.3 million unemployed people. If all those people were capable of working, which they’re not, we still have a million more jobs than people to fill them. So we need a million immigrants today just to balance the equation. So this is pretty simple to me.

And then I think back — think about my grandparents. They’re all immigrants. They were the ones that helped build this country. This country was built by some natives, but we had a huge immigrant population that came in. And were really all the construction in this country. All the homes, all the bricklayers, the electricians, the plumbers, most of them were immigrant labor and were willing to work 60, 70, 80, 90 hours a week. And willing to get dirty and work and most of those people built good businesses and did very well for their families.

Cohn’s grandmother, he told me, recently died, at age 106.

COHN: If I live to my grandmother’s age, I’ve got 50 years left.

DUBNER: All right, so, do you have a plan for your remaining half-century?

COHN: I don’t know if I have a plan, but I’m doing lots of interesting things.

DUBNER: So you’re investing.

COHN: Yes.

DUBNER: You’ve always done a lot of philanthropy and you’re doing that now. You’re teaching some.

COHN: I’m teaching.

DUBNER: What about politics, per se?

COHN: I mean, I’m not an elected official and I never intend to be an elected official. Let’s make sure about that. I don’t think I would ever — I know I would never run for anything. If I could serve my country again, I would never rule that out. I think it’s one of the greatest honors that you can have is to serve your country.

DUBNER: Treasury Secretary, maybe?

COHN: I’m not gonna say yes, I’m not going to say no. But there’s lots of ways to serve your country.

DUBNER: You went in obviously with your eyes open, knowing that there would be substantial disagreements or differences. What — did your expectation—

COHN: Let me stop you there. Because you don’t know that, right?

DUBNER: Even on trade and tariffs you didn’t—

COHN: I knew we would fight. But again, I’m not sure I knew for sure that the Donald Trump that ran for office would be the Donald Trump I got when he got to the White House. I didn’t know. I didn’t know if he was going to moderate. I didn’t know if the pressure of McConnell and Ryan and McCarthy was going to be able to move him. I just didn’t know for sure what was going to happen.

DUBNER: Give yourself a grade.

COHN: Oh, that’s a good question. I never got an A in my life so I can’t give myself an A now. I got a lot of D’s. I think I’m moving out of the D category. I’ll give myself a B. That’s a good grade for Gary Cohn.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Zack Lapinski. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Gary Cohn, former Director of the National Economic Council and former president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs

RESOURCES

Money and Power by William Cohan (Doubleday 2011).

David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown 2013).

Fear by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster 2018).

EXTRA

“Why the Trump Tax Cuts Are Awesome/Terrible (Part 1)” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Why the Trump Tax Cuts Are Terrible/Awesome (Part 2)” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

The post A Free-Trade Democrat in the Trump White House (Ep. 271) appeared first on Freakonomics.

Mark Teixeira, the retired Yankee first baseman, hit 409 career home runs — No. 54 on the all-time list. The hardest thing to do in sports, he says: hitting a baseball. (Photo: Elsa/Getty)

Great athletes aren’t just great at the physical stuff. They’ve also learned how to handle pressure, overcome fear, and stay focused. Here’s the good news: you don’t have to be an athlete to use what they know. (Part of “The Hidden Side of Sports” series.)

To find out more, check out the podcast from which this hour was drawn: “Think Like a Winner.”

The post Season 8, Episode 27 appeared first on Freakonomics.

Inventor James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes before he succeeded in revolutionizing the vacuum cleaner. (Photo: Bruno Vincent/Getty)

The road to success is paved with failure, so you might as well learn to do it right. (Ep. 5 of the “How to Be Creative” series.)

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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In our “How to Be Creative” series, we’ve talked to artists, scientists, inventors, and others about their creative process; about having good ideas and, even more important, how to execute those ideas. Today, we’ll hear about a part of the creative process that everyone can relate to — even if you don’t think of yourself as a “creative person.” This is something we all do, probably more than we’d like to admit; it’s something that almost no one enjoys; but it’s an inevitable, and absolutely essential, component of any success. I’m going to let you figure out what it is. Don’t worry, it won’t take long. Let’s start back in the late 1980’s. A young physicist named Saul Perlmutter, at the University of California-Berkeley, was looking around for a good research project.

Saul PERLMUTTER: And at that time I was lucky enough to come across the possibility that we could go back and make a measurement that people had wanted to do ever since the times of Einstein and Hubble, which was the measurement of how much the universe has been slowing down in its expansion over its lifetime.

Ever since Einstein theorized it, and Edwin Hubble observed it, everyone knew the universe was expanding. But another thing everyone knew was that all the matter in the universe — all the galaxies and nebulae and stars and planets and moons and comets and asteroids — all the stuff in the universe has gravitational attraction. So physicists assumed that, eventually, that gravitational attraction would slow down the expansion of the universe. For a physicist, understanding this dynamic was itself an attraction.

PERLMUTTER: If you could measure how much it was slowing, it would tell you a couple really amazing things. Like, first of all, you could find out: is it slowing enough so someday it could come to a halt and then collapse? And this was just before the millennium, so we thought we could walk around with those signs saying “The universe is coming to an end.” But if we found out that it wasn’t, then we would have shown that the universe will last forever. And also we would have shown that we live in an infinite universe. It just seemed like, whatever we found would be a great story, and we’d love to know the answer.

Stephen DUBNER: I have to say, I think the latter headline is much more exciting, personally — not just because of infinity and because long-lasting but it’s optimistic, yes?

PERLMUTTER: Yeah, I think that’s right. You start getting a little personally invested in our universe even though we’re talking about billions of years from now. We sort of would like it to go on, you know.

So you can see why it’d be valuable to measure the rate of the universe’s expansion. But conducting this sort of measurement — even for an astrophysicist — is, well, it’s hard. Saul Perlmutter had an idea. It involved measuring the light coming off of supernovas. But they had to be a particular kind of supernova. And they had to be very far away.

PERLMUTTER: We needed to find these very distant ones because we want to look way back in history. And the further away you look in astronomy, the further back in time you’re getting to see, because it’s taking light that time to travel to you from those very, very distant locations. We needed to look some, three, four, five billion years back in time for us to be able to see the slowing effects that we thought we were trying to track.

Given the specificity of what they needed, and the overall degree of difficulty, Perlmutter know the project would take some time.

PERLMUTTER: We wrote the original proposals saying that we did not expect to be able to find the 30-some-odd supernovae that we would need to make those measurements in anything less than three years. And we thought this was going to be like a long three-year project.

Perlmutter and his team built a tool for this project: a new kind of high-resolution, wide-field digital camera that could be attached to the big telescopes you find in observatories. Now all they had to do was get some time on one of those big observatory telescopes.

PERLMUTTER: Telescope time on these biggest telescopes in the world is really precious.

One observatory, in Australia, was open to a deal.

PERLMUTTER: And we traded the use of that camera for 12-and-a-half nights of telescope time. And so you’re doing everything you can to try to find the time that you’ll need to make the measurements you want. In those 12-and-a-half nights, we got two-and-half nights of good weather.

Two-and-a-half nights of useful telescope time, over three years. Remember, they needed to find “30-some-odd” supernovas to make their measurements. So how many did they find?

PERLMUTTER: At the end of three years, we had not yet found a single supernova.

So, picture that. You started with a quest, a creative scientific idea. Drawing on all the knowledge you’ve amassed over time, and all the knowledge amassed by earlier generations, you formulate a plan of attack. You write the grant proposals; you get the grant. You invent a special tool to facilitate your plan, and use that tool as leverage to gain access to an even more important tool. You’ve done everything possible, and you’ve done everything right. But you know what? You still failed.

PERLMUTTER: At the end of three years, we had not yet found a single supernova.

The failure of Perlmutter’s team was compounded by the fact that there was another team of physicists out there, working on the same problem, using the same technique.

PERLMUTTER: Which meant that we were going to the same telescopes and using the same instruments, and so we passed each other in the airports, you know, going back and forth.

The rivalry was not all that friendly.

PERLMUTTER: It was highly secretive between each other in general. I’d say the competition with each other was a big deal but it’s nothing like the competition with the ways in which the universe is trying to give you a hard time.

“A hard time” meaning instruments breaking; the night sky being cloudy.

PERLMUTTER: It was so hard to get these whole sequence of observations to work in a given semester that had to all run like clockwork. And if anything went wrong, the whole thing would fall apart.

The overall challenge was so difficult, the chance of failure so strong, that Perlmutter’s team and the rival team, led by the astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, would in fact help each other out.

PERLMUTTER: So there were several occasions where our sequence was about to fall apart and the other team would help. So one time we took some observations for that team and similarly there was one time where the other team traded night with us at a telescope so that we could keep our time sequence working.

Years of effort; years of difficulty and uncertainty; years of failure. But in the end, a breakthrough: Perlmutter’s team found the supernovas they were looking for; they were able to get enough observations to take their measurements; and those measurements led them to a surprising result: the expansion of the universe was not slowing down; in fact, it was speeding up. Saul Perlmutter’s team wrote up its findings and, in 2011, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics — which they shared, by the way, with the other team. The lesson for Perlmutter in all this?

PERLMUTTER: One thing that’s really interesting that it’s important for people to hear sometimes is that a really tough, challenging problem is worth spending a lot of time on, and that you can be learning a lot while you’re trying to get there.

In other words: failure is an inevitable component of success. So in order to bring your creative project to a happy place, you’d better learn to handle failure well — or even better, as Perlmutter suggests, handle it productively. After all, failure provides data: this doesn’t work, that didn’t work, that didn’t work. Great! Now you can cross all those off the list. So what does work?

*      *      *

This is not the first time we’ve discussed failure on this program. Episode No. 169, from 2014, was called “Failure Is Your Friend.” Episode No. 42, back in 2011, was called “The Upside of Quitting,” and it looked at failure as a signal that it might be time to just move on. But that calculus is very, very tricky: what if you quit too soon? What if all your failures are an unavoidable desert you need to trek through in order to make it to the promised land? In today’s show, we look at the relationship between failure and creativity.

Dean SIMONTON: The number one thing in my view is that people who don’t understand creativity, who are looking at it from the outside, don’t really appreciate how much you have to fail.

Dean Simonton is a University of California psychologist who’s spent decades studying creative genius.

SIMONTON: How many revisions this has to go through. How many masterpieces you put out there, and nobody even buys a copy. Maybe your mom does, whatever. But the failure rate is just horrendous, even for the creative geniuses.

Which genius does Simonton pick as the most successful hitmaker of all time?

SIMONTON: That’s Mozart. And he’s about 60 to 70 percent success rate. Well, you turn it upside down, and that’s a 30 to 40 percent failure rate.

On the other hand, consider Toni Basil. Or Nena. Or the Baha Men. Who? Yes, exactly. Toni Basil brought the world “Mickey.” Nena gave us “99 Luftballons” The Baha Men? How could you forget “Who Let the Dogs Out”?

The Baha Men, Nena, and Toni Basil were some of the biggest one-hit wonders in modern history. Which puts their failure rates a lot higher than Mozart’s. But what happens when you do succeed? Success can raise expectations to a level that’s crippling. The novelist Jennifer Egan had been writing for a couple decades when she had a breakout hit with A Visit From the Goon Squad — which produced, among other things, a Pulitzer Prize. And the book after that?

Jennifer EGAN: I sort of finally got into my new book and at first I was actually having a great time with it. It was really going well, I felt. And I was excited. And then things started to feel rockier and I really started to have serious doubts about whether I could actually pull it off at all. And then, I have to say, I kind of flipped out. I plunged into a state of despair over my work. And I really thought maybe my career was over, that maybe I was kind of ruined by all of this.

DUBNER: Was the problem expectation, then? Was that the barrier?

EGAN: I think the problem was that I actually was struggling with my book because every book is a struggle, especially if you’re pushing yourself. And at a certain point I started thinking about how I would be perceived if the book sucked. And it’s never good to be looking at yourself from the outside in. It’s very difficult to engage creatively when when you know, mean and horrible commentary is flowing through one’s mind. In retrospect, I thought, I was really an abusive boss. I was a boss who was telling her employee, namely me, that I was worthless. And it’s really hard to work in those conditions.

Nico MUHLY: I’m enormously self-critical. I begin and end each day with a litany of things that I consider failures and shortcomings.

Nico Muhly is a composer, the youngest ever to get a commission from the Metropolitan Opera.

MUHLY: Back in the day, it was a combination of self-flagellation and complete emotional neutrality. So, it was like I hated it, but I didn’t care. I didn’t feel anything, like I made this huge opera and I thought it was really good. But literally the sense of achievement was akin to like a successful morning of errands or like I went to the dry cleaner and bought dog food.

That began to change when Muhly started on a new medication.

MUHLY: I had a really dark like mental-health journey involving the wrong medication which I assumed wasn’t having a bearing on my artistic output, which of course it was. But the big change in the last three years is that I’m finally able to see some pieces as the end of the sentence of that conversation. So, it’s not, “I could do better next time.” It’s not, “I can’t believe I didn’t do better this last time.” And the difference is insane, to have written pieces now where I’m not in a state of constant self-flagellation. I think the first piece I wrote in my new and improved version was this mass called Spiral Mass. I can hear it and enjoy it and think that that was, you know, better than three minutes of silence.

It’s a fairly obvious fact that outsiders often overlook when they think about a creative lifestyle, and how cool it must be. In most cases, you are both creator and critic, boss and employee. Since many people who have a boss do not like their boss, it might seem incredibly attractive to be your own. But do you really want to be your own boss? Do you have the discipline to keep your projects on track? Do you have the temperament to drive yourself? Do you have the requisite paranoia?

John HODGMAN: I am a person for whom being creative is terrifying.

John Hodgman has done a lot of creative work over the years, most of it somewhere on the humor spectrum.

HODGMAN: It is the most rewarding thing that I can do. But it is a constant struggle with a very clear feeling that I am out of gas every day, every day. And that I will not be able to support myself or my family, because I have now finally run out of ideas, for sure, this time, I mean it. I started writing jokes for the Internet morphed into writing humor for books, morphed into doing T.V. on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, morphed into doing some ads for Apple Computer that gave me some acting opportunities, and all of these, I just sort of jumped from job to job very happily and very luckily, in no small part because it allowed everything to feel a little bit like a hobby. And at no point was I ever putting all of my eggs, say, into writing books, because my fear was, if I run out of gas on that, then I’m done.

If I lose the ability to write a book — which sounds irrational, but it is a true fear that I have — in fact, today I have it — then I can always fall back on the podcast, or I can always fall back on going out and touring my imitation stand-up comedy, or I can always try to get more work as an actor. It’s not even a fear. It is a certainty that I’m done, that I have no further ideas, and trick my brain into providing ideas again, because they’re in there. I’m 47 years old and I’ve been doing this — this and only this, whatever this is — now for 21 years.

DUBNER: And that’s not enough of a track record to persuade yourself that there will be 21 more?

HODGMAN: I figured out, sort of rationally, that I have enough data to support the suggestion that I will be able to continue. But even though I understand it rationally, in a deep part of me, I am certain it is done.

Don HAHN: I was lucky early in my life to have some successes in my 30s with Roger Rabbit and Lion King and Beauty and the Beast.

Don Hahn is a Hollywood producer.

HAHN: And 15 or 20 years after that, you start second-guessing yourself. And start saying, “Have I lost what I had back then?” Then you lose the process because then you don’t start. You just don’t start because you’re afraid that somebody is going to say, “Well, Don was really great back when he was 30 years old, but boy has he lost it,” you know? Those are really hard times to get over because they’re a crisis of confidence.

So how do you quiet those voices of disapproval — voices that are often imagined, either your own or someone else’s?

EGAN: It took a while. It was like a year and a half of that.

Jennifer Egan, remember, was stuck on her post-Pulitzer novel. Her solution was just to keep plowing through.

EGAN: I kept working through it because one thing I really know is that, you know, you can work through anything. I think we we think we are more fragile as artists than we really are. One thing that kind of helped me get through it psychologically was that I finally thought, winning a Pulitzer Prize shouldn’t ruin anyone. I mean, if I really can’t write another good book because of winning that, I was done.

HODGMAN: The only reason I’m terrified now is because I’m not actively working on it today, but when I get down into it line-by-line, something clicks, something comes together.

John Hodgman also finds the only solution for fearing the work is doing the work.

HODGMAN: It also helps to be in the shower. I remember back in early 2009 I was invited to do some comedy at the Radio and Television Correspondents Awards Dinner, which is sort of the junior-league White House Correspondents Dinner. The tradition was, the comedian would do comedy and the president would be there and say some words as well. This was a stunning invitation for me to receive. I had only been on The Daily Show for a couple of years. And of course, I had to say yes, even though I had no idea what sort of comedy I could do, on that stage, for then-newly-inaugurated President Barack Obama, whom I liked, but also who had no track record as a president to even make jokes about. And I really was frozen for a long time as I tried to think up “jokes,” to tell.

And then I was in the shower and I remembered, just sort of talking out loud to myself, I remembered that on a different radio show — Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me — Peter Sagal had asked Barack Obama, who was a guest on the show at the time when he was a Senator, “Is it true that you saw Leonard Nimoy in the streets of Chicago, and did you flash him the Vulcan salute?” And Barack Obama confirmed that this was true. And I remembered that Barack Obama had been making jokes regarding dilithium crystals and Jor-El, the parent of Kal-El, who of course is better known as Clark Kent/Superman. And I’m like, “Oh, right. There’s a reason I like this guy. He’s a nerd. Yeah. Or is he a nerd? Or is it all an act?”

And I realized in that moment in the shower what my preoccupation was — what I wanted to know was, are you really a nerd, or are you faking it? Which, I realized in that moment, was sort of the question that everyone on all political sides were asking about Barack Obama. Are you for real? Of course, we remember a lot of people who did not like Barack Obama asking him if he was a real U.S. citizen, asking him if he wasn’t secretly a Muslim, or an alien, or whatever it was. We forget, there were a lot of people on the left-leaning wing of the spectrum who didn’t trust that he was a real liberal, and there was so much about him that was unknown. And for me, I had a genuine question to ask, “Are you really a nerd?,” that could serve as a metaphor for asking, “Who are you, and what kind of leap of faith are we taking with you?”

Hearing Hodgman describe this you may be thinking: wait a minute; you were asked to do comedy; is this nerd thing funny?

HODGMAN What’s more important than funny, when you’re creating comedy, is: what are you genuinely curious about? What are you genuinely feeling? Even the most absurd fake facts that I wrote for The Daily Show had to resonate around an ounce of truth. So tuning into that — what am I thinking about — knowing what you know, or knowing what’s going on in the back of your head, is kind of the hardest part. And once you get that out of there, suddenly for me, it all floods out from there.

*      *      *

Failure is such an obvious component of any success that it probably keeps a lot of people from trying things they should. That’s a shame. Teresa Amabile is a social psychologist at the Harvard Business School who studies creativity, especially in work settings.

AMABILE: If people have a growth mindset, they believe, “I can always get smarter, I can always get better at something, and I’m not going to get better unless I try things that are hard, and sometimes that means I’m going to fail at something, but who cares?”

But a lot of people do care. For a lot of people, failure hurts; and it hurts to have other people witness your failures. So who are these people who don’t care? Where does that come from?

AMABILE: Partly that’s a trait. But it’s something that can be changed. Parents can talk to their kids about it and we can certainly do that as as managers of ourselves. “Look, I know that this is a stretch for me. I’ve been asked to take on this project but I’m going to go for it. And if it doesn’t work out that well, I will have learned how I can do better next time.”

James DYSON: I had to build 5,127 prototypes. So 5,126 failures.

James Dyson is the British engineer best known for having revolutionized the vacuum cleaner.

DYSON: And just when you’ve had enough, and you think you’re never going to get the answer, that’s the point where you must try even harder. Because that’s the point where everybody else gave up. So you must go through that pain barrier in order to succeed. I would say that for an engineer or someone developing technology, it’s really a life of failure. And you have to get used to that. Because your successes are pretty rare. But it’s not an unhappy life, I mean failure isn’t something that makes you unhappy. It makes you even more curious as to how to overcome the problem. And in order to fail, you have to experiment and experimenting is exciting. Even if it doesn’t work. In fact it’s almost slightly disappointing when it does work. Because you’ve then done it and that’s the end of that one, and then you’ve got to get on to something else.

RESNICK: So as you’re building things, you have one idea in mind.

Mitch Resnick runs a project called Lifelong Kindergarten at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

RESNICK: But then it works a little differently than you expect and that gives you a new idea and you start making adjustments. And I do think the most creative and the most enjoyable experiences come when you’re involved in that process at the intersection of making and playing, where you’re constantly experimenting, iterating, trying new things, refining. And I think it’s true that in today’s society oftentimes kids aren’t given enough opportunities for tinkering. They’re given fully made things that they just use, or they’re given instructions exactly how to do things. So I really do think we need to give them the tools, materials, and support where they can tinker, experiment, and iterate constantly trying new things. That’s the way they’re going to best develop as creative thinkers and be ready to thrive in a society that’s going to demand and require creative thinking more than ever before.

There’s one word that Resnick does not use to describe this iterative process: failure. He feels the negative connotation is just too strong.

RESNICK: Clearly things go wrong, things go unexpectedly all of the time, but you should become accustomed that. Don’t see it as a problem but see it as something of an opportunity. It’s really important to create environments where kids feel safe to take the risks, because when things do go wrong, if someone says, “Hey, you know, that’s no good, why’d you ever try that?,” they won’t take risks again. So we have to make sure to create environments where kids are encouraged and feel safe to take risks, to have things go wrong but then be able to recover and to take it in new directions.

The ability to recognize when something’s failing, or at least foundering, is important in the creative arts as well. Maybe you’ve had success doing one thing for a long time. But tastes change; technologies change. And the thing you’ve been doing — even if you keep improving — it’s just not connecting the same way.

Conan O’BRIEN: Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Conan O’Brien is a history nerd; maybe he’ll become a U.S. ambassador someday.

O’BRIEN: I’d like to know what it pays. I’d like to know what kind of ambassadorial residence I would have. Am I really free to commit crimes in those countries?

In the meantime, he’s still a late-night TV talk-show host, which he’s been doing for more than a quarter of a century. But recently he made a change.

O’BRIEN: The story there is I realized a couple of years ago that I’m killing time at half an hour. When I first got the gig it was, you fill an hour because it’s this precious hour that needs to be filled and it’s all how you do it creatively. But over time you’re starting to say “and my next guest, and my next guest” And that felt artificial to me. And it felt like it didn’t fit this new world we’re in.

And so he reformatted his show, which is called Conan. It’s now 30 minutes instead of 60. He also did away with the stream of celebrity guests that march through most talk shows. Instead, he’s focusing on the comic pieces that have driven his massive online numbers.

O’BRIEN: We have YouTube videos that have had 70 million views. But no one’s watching the whole show. Other than my parents, no one is watching the show from 11 to 12. But there’s a whole generation of people that don’t watch anything like that.

There is another creative medium where taste changes so aggressively, so ethereally, that trying to outthink your audience, or the market, may drive you mad.

Jorinde VOIGT: I’m Jorinde Voigt. I’m an artist.

Jorinde Voigt, who lives in Berlin, has become quite successful: her paintings sell for a lot of money and they’re in the permanent collections of the Pompidou in Paris, the British Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But she doesn’t like this kind of success as a measuring stick.

VOIGT: It’s not about failing or winning, it’s just about being and doing. Failure is always part of it. To accept it and take it as part of a reason to do something new.

There’s one form of failure that Voigt celebrates …

VOIGT: Of course you could say a picture fails if it’s not sold. For a gallery it might be like that, for me not. I’m always happy when I get a picture back. Really! I mean really, because I’m — it’s also weird to sell the works all the time.

DUBNER: Yeah, is that right?

VOIGT: Yeah. It’s not made for selling. You made it because you want to know something. Yeah? And it’s ready, and you know something, then you don’t need it anymore and you are able to sell it.

I like Jorinde Voigt’s attitude: the failure of a painting to sell is actually a success because she gets to have the painting back. How you think about a failure, or what other people might consider a failure, says a lot about who you are as a creative, and as a person. Also as a brother.

Mark DUPLASS: This is Mark Duplass. I am a filmmaker.

Duplass and his brother Jay Duplass have been working together, extraordinarily closely, since they were kids. They wrote a book about it, called Like Brothers.

DUPLASS: Yeah, I mean the biggest failure we had in our career was making this feature film Vince Del Rio for about $70,000, that turned out terribly and we never even finished it. And then a couple of weeks later we turned around and we spent $3 making a short film in our kitchen and that was our first movie that went to Sundance. So we very quickly realized that being professional and making a movie for a lot of money does not mean it’s going to be a good movie. But staying near and dear to your anxieties, your fallibilities, your vulnerabilities, staying close to that conversation you had at 2:00 a.m. with your sibling or loved one or friend, where you were giggling with shame or crying about something that was so personal to you you think no one could understand it. As soon as you go into that stuff, I think that’s where you win.

The Duplass brothers over the years built an unusual and unusually robust career, making films and TV shows together. They wrote and directed together — sometimes inseparably. In the beginning, Mark did a lot more acting but eventually Jay was doing a lot too — most notably in Transparent. They made the films Cyrus; Jeff, Who Lives at Home, and they made the H.B.O. series Togetherness. That show was all-consuming:

DUPLASS: Yeah, we wrote, produced, and directed every episode of that series like idiots. And the main issue is that we had completely lost our desire to hang out with each other because we were essentially hanging out together 13 hours a day working. And we weren’t spending any time together as brothers and friends. And we always promised ourselves we would keep an eye on that, on that work and personal balance.

They’d had two successful seasons with H.B.O.

DUPLASS: And we were in the middle of writing season 3.

But there was a shakeup at H.B.O.

DUPLASS: And we got the news that we were going to be canceled, and neither of us wanted to be the first one to speak and we were both scared about how relieved we were as opposed to actually emotionally crushed and didn’t want to admit it to each other. And once we did it felt amazing. We realized that there was no way we were going to cancel Togetherness ourselves. There was no way, the situation was too good. The money was too good. The creative opportunity was too good. People were loving the show. We were going to go and drive that thing until it killed us. We had to actually have it taken away from us and that began the new phase of of Jay’s and my relationship.

So for the first time in forever, Mark and Jay Duplass weren’t really a team anymore. It was a sort of failure.

DUPLASS: And we both felt a little bad about it and both felt a little excited about it. And it’s been really healthy for us in the long run. I mean, I’ll be honest with you, there was a lot of tears and a lot of heartbreak on both of our parts. And there are times when I wake up and I miss so desperately the way it felt when Jay and I were 23 and 27 just moving through the world as one being. But we’re also aware that that was of a time and a place, when our life was a unilateral thing, and we can’t really get that back and we have to redefine what that thing is now for us.

DUBNER: Does the collaboration feel a little bit like a phantom limb that, like, “Whoa I’m used to this working this way.” And I guess another way of asking the same question is does it feel like something that you want or need to get back to or that you’re kind of happily or resignedly or just organically getting to a new phase and you’re willing to take it as it comes?

DUPLASS: It doesn’t feel dissimilar to a really amicable breakup, and I would liken it to a couple that breaks up because one wants to have kids and the other one doesn’t. They still very clearly love each other but they have different views of the future and they would miss each other desperately but also know that it doesn’t work right now if they were to do that. Right. And so that’s very similar to the way Jay and I are. There’s actually kind of a working rhythm that we have developed into where my brain is this very firework-y, loud, explosive place where ideas tend to come whether I want them or not.

DUBNER: You’re the barfer, correct?

DUPLASS: Yes I’m the barfer, and they’re noisy and they are at times quite annoying to Jay because he can’t get the space to incubate his really well-crafted, quiet, thoughtful, soulful ideas. At the same time, Jay can be really annoying to me because I’m ready to go. My fireworks are going off and he’s holding me back because he’s like trying to do his thing and so we had to get honest with each other and be like, “Uh-oh, we might be creatively bad for each other right now. And this is just one rhythm and one phase we’re in.”

And God knows what’s going to happen a year or two from now. We might listen to this podcast and be like, “Whoa, you were totally wrong you just needed six months away and then you’ll be fine.” But you know, he’d be the first one to admit he feels like an albatross to my rhythms at certain times. It’s really good for us. But the phantom limb thing is I would say very, very accurate. I can go make a project on my own. I can literally hear what Jay is saying to me without him saying it because I know what he would say. And I can get a lot of his feedback.

DUBNER: So who needs him?

DUPLASS: And — yeah who needs him, yeah? And then the other element is that we have been able to take some of the lessons we’ve learned as collaborators and collaborate with other people and make those collaborations pretty successful too. Because I will say this to anyone out there, if there is anyone in the world who is interested in collaborating with Jay Duplass, there is no greater, more self-aware, sweeter, more generous collaborator in the f—ing universe.

DUBNER: Would he say the same about you roughly? Slightly different adjectives maybe.

DUPLASS: I think he would use different adjectives. I think what he would say — I know what he would say. He would say that there is no more generous collaborator than Mark. There’s no one who is willing to drown himself while holding you above water so you can achieve your glory than Mark, which is you know something else I’m working on in therapy too but, you know. That’s a whole other podcast.

Thanks to Mark Duplass and everyone else who’s shared their ideas, their fears, their advice in this “How to Be Creative” series. If you want to hear some of the full interviews from the series, check out Stitcher Premium — you’ll find my full conversations with Jennifer Egan, Conan O’Brien, and Wynton Marsalis.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica, with help from Stephanie Tam and Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Zack Lapinski, and Corinne Wallace. We had help this week from Andi Kristins. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Teresa Amabile, psychologist and professor emerita at the Harvard Business School.

Mark Duplass, film director, film producer, and actor.

James Dyson, inventor, industrial design engineer and founder of the Dyson company.

Jennifer Egan, novelist and journalist.

Don Hahn, filmmaker.

John Hodgman, humorist.

Nico Muhly, composer.

Conan O’Brien, television host, comedian, and writer.

Saul Perlmutter, astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Mitch Resnick, leader of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Dean Simonton, professor emeritus of psychology at University of California, Davis.

Jorinde Voigt, artist.

RESOURCES

Creativity In Context by Teresa Amabile (Routledge 1996).

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf 2010).

EXTRA

“How to Be Creative,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)?,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Where Do Good Ideas Come From?,” Freakonomics Radio (2019).

“A Good Idea Is Not Good Enough,” Freakonomics Radio (2019).

The post How to Fail Like a Pro (Ep. 370) appeared first on Freakonomics.

Dental anxiety and fear are quite common concerns when visiting the dentist, hence the reason people search for the phrase ‘dentist near me for nervous patients’, this is quite understandable!

So, to help, we’ve researched some of the most common questions that people ask when they are nervous about visiting the dentist.

Do dentists hate to see anxious patients?

No, we don’t hate seeing anxious patients at all. We absolutely understand that it can often be quite disconcerting going to the dentist. Panic attacks and actual dental phobia unfortunately relatively rare.

What’s important is to let your dentist know that you are anxious, That way we can look for ways to help you know you are in safe hands and to help you overcome any physical symptoms of your anxiety.

The fight or flight response can be quite strong when we are put under stressful situations, communicating with us PRIOR to your appointment means we can understand what triggers any anxiety disorder and help avoid any trigger situation.

How can people overcome fear of going to the dentist?

A few simple tips are as follows:

Book an appointment in the morning, this will ensure you can relax for the rest of the day as your appointment will be over.

For regular appointments, make sure you have a good breakfast. This will set you up for the day and ensure your energy levels remain high.

Lay off the alcohol! Not only does it dehydrate you but it can also make you worry.

Bring a friend. Decide before hand on what you are going to talk about, make it subjects that relax you and keep you calm. Perhaps discuss a recent holiday, or where you are going next time.

Recognise that you have an inner voice talking to you (we all have this) and that this inner voice can actually be controlled.

Talk openly to us. We will NOT judge you or tell you off for not coming to see us… honestly

Agree a stop signal with us, this will ensure that (like you inner voice technique) YOU are in control

Is it normal that I’m scared of dentists judging my teeth?

It is quite a common misconception that dentists will judge your teeth. We absolutely will not. Our role is to investigate and report on anything clinically that we see. If we see a problem with your teeth we will let you know, based on the clinical evidence presented before us.

NEVER will we judge your teeth or anything about you. We may give you advice to get the best dental treatment to help you, but this is always done in a non-judgemental factual way.

What are my options if I’m terrified of the dentist?

There are a few options to help with anxiety or panic disorder at the dentist, we always recommend going with the least invasive option to begin with, in ascending order these are:

Talk to your dentist, be open and honest, follow our advice above and relax knowing that we have your best interests at heart.

Ask your dentist for oral sedation prior to visiting, a simple tablet can help you relax.

Relative analgesia could also be used, this is laughing gas, it is self-administered at the dentist and can help you relax deeply. Not all practices offer relative analgesia.

Conscious sedation via intravenous injection. This is often known as twilight sedation, you will be conscious but so deeply relaxed that you will have no recollection of your treatment at all. Many patients opt for this type of sedation when having treatments such as dental implants.

Why are most little kids afraid of dentists?

The honest truth is that children learn to feel nervous! Most commonly kids learn the behaviour from parents. Modern dentistry can be made extremely comfortable for adults and children alike and people are often surprised that it is completely pain-free most of the time.

Unfortunately people don’t often realise this and accidentally pass on dental anxieties to their kids.

One of the best ways to overcome this is to bring children to the dentist at a very early age, allow them to sit on your lap in the dental chair at the beginning, progressing to them sitting alone on the chair and just enjoying the ride as it goes up and down. As they progress into toddlers we can then begin to look in their mouth in a very gentle way.

How many adults have fears of going to the dentist?

In the United States up to 75% of people have some form of dental anxiety, according to the Journal of The American Dental Association. In addition to this approximately 20% of those people have a diagnosis of an anxiety disorder or phobia.

Oddly, in the UK these figures seem to be much lower:

One in every seven adults who has ever been to a dentist suffers from extreme dental anxiety

The most common fears for visiting a dentist are having a tooth drilled (30%) and having a local anaesthetic injection (28%)

Visiting the Dentist is ranked number one (22%) for making people nervous, closely followed by heights (19%). Nearly 10 times as many people (22%) are nervous of visiting their dentists, compared to their doctor (2%)

Figures quoted via The British Dental Association.

A few years ago, we made a podcast episode with Al Roth, the Stanford economist whose work on market design and matchmaking won him a Nobel Prize. His most eye-catching work involves a system to increase the supply of kidney donors (and, more important, kidney recipients).

We followed up that episode with another one, the following year, that told the story of a man named Ned Brooks who was so inspired by Roth’s work that he decided to become a kidney donor himself — a “non-directed” donor, meaning his kidney could go to anyone in need (as opposed to a directed donation to a relative or friend) and could therefore trigger a much larger chain of kidney donation.

More than a few times, we’ve heard from others who have been similarly inspired by Roth (and, now, by Brooks too). Here’s the latest, which we wanted to share with you. It began with an e-mail sent on Feb. 18 by a man named Steve Tucker:

Gentlemen,

I wanted you to know that I am doing it. I am donating a kidney as a good Samaritan non-directed donor. It is happening tomorrow, Feb. 19th, at Virginia Mason Hospital, in Seattle. And I am doing it largely because of you.

I had been considering donating a kidney for years. It is one of those things that you consider doing and usually never get around to actually doing. But just considering doing it made me feel like a better person, and for a long time, that was good enough. After hearing your podcast, I decided it was time, and I started making inquiries.

That was almost two years ago. It took me that long to get all my ducks in a row and get my year set up so that I could do this. Today, I found out that my donation triggered another one too, and a lady from Barrow, Alaska, is going to get a kidney from an acquaintance of my recipient. That made me very happy.

Anyhow, I don’t think I would have ever made the call if I hadn’t learned about the National Kidney Registry from your podcast. Thanks for getting me off the stick.

I am an engineer on tugboats that sail out of Seattle, and much of my job consists of pretty mindless work, by myself, in an engine room. You keep me company down there on long watches up and down the coast.

Tomorrow is the big day. Wish me luck, and thanks again.

Steve Tucker

Indeed, Tucker wrote again on Feb. 22:

The fellow on the left is Douglas Crist, from Bainbridge Island, Washington. He will be keeping my left kidney warm for me, hopefully for about 30 years.

The nice lady on the right is Wendy Johnson. She tried to donate to Doug, but was not a match. By signing up for a paired-kidney exchange, she got Doug paired up with me. I was a non-directed, altruistic donor. Wendy’s kidney will be going to a lady from Barrow, Alaska, on Tuesday of next week.

That’s me in the middle, by the way. The operation happened at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle. We were all able to meet two days after the surgery.

Doug and I are both doing great. The doctors called my kidney “The Beast,” because it had three arteries and two ureters. (Tri-Power with Dual Exhaust, one of the surgeons said.) It took them 6- 1/2 hours to get it out of me and get everything spliced up to where it could be hooked up to Doug. They said it was a “real pisser!”

This all happened because of your show, episode 209. Thank you for that. You do good work.

Our role in all this is of course minimal. All thanks goes to people like Steve Tucker, Ned Brooks, Al Roth, and everyone else who steps up to save the lives of strangers. That said, it is incredibly gratifying to play a tiny role in connecting good people with good information and if that is the only function this entire Freakonomics enterprise ever accomplishes, it will to me have been well worth it.

The post Another Kidney-Donation Story to Make You Smile appeared first on Freakonomics.

Pablo Picasso drew over 400 preparatory sketches — the most in history for a single painting — before starting to paint Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. (Photo: Steven Zucker/flickr)

Whether you’re building a business or a cathedral, execution is everything. We ask artists, scientists, and inventors how they turned ideas into reality. And we find out why it’s so hard for a group to get things done — and what you can do about it. (Ep. 4 of the “How to Be Creative” series.)

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Jessica O. MATTHEWS: So, I’m at Harvard, undergrad, I think it’s the end of my sophomore year, and I’m taking this course called “Idea Translation: Effecting Change Through Art and Science.”

That’s Jessica O. Matthews. And this class was back in 2008.

MATTHEWS: And I had heard from people that they gave you some money to do some cool stuff and that unlike most universities, they wouldn’t own the cool thing that you did. And I was like, “Okay, I like doing cool stuff and I like inventing, let’s see what happens.

Stephen J. DUBNER: But we should say, you were not an engineer or an engineer wannabe.

MATTHEWS: Well, I was studying psychology and economics. I grew up wanting to be an inventor. My father is a businessman. My sister, who had been at Harvard for two years before me, she actually was studying film, but she told my dad, my Nigerian dad, that she was studying economics.

DUBNER: I don’t blame her.

MATTHEWS: So two years pass and she graduates and we hear “visual and environmental studies” and my dad almost has a heart attack in the graduation stadium. And I’m sitting there just like, “All right dad, I’ll add economics.” So, I’m taking this course and I remembered thinking back to when I was 17, when I was in Nigeria and I was at my aunt’s wedding. And, as expected, we lost power. As expected, we brought in a diesel generator. And the fumes were so bad. And my cousins, who were in their 20’s at the time, they were just like, “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”

And that’s what shook me. I was like, “Don’t worry, I’ll get used to it?” And I was like, “Okay, that’s a problem for the people in my family, that’s a problem for people in the world.” You have 1.3 billion people around the world who still, to this day, they don’t have reliable access to electricity. When the sun goes down, that’s often the end of their day. And that’s a travesty.

So Matthews, faced with a classroom assignment to invent something that would “effect change through art and science” — she thought about this problem, and she thought about a creative way to address it.

MATTHEWS: And I observed my cousins showing passion and showing excitement when they were playing soccer, right? So this is where the psychology comes in. And the same cousins that were saying, “Don’t worry, you get used to it,” had all these highfalutin, delusional ideas about what they could do on the soccer pitch that they just couldn’t do. They were not as good as Pele in any single way, but they would tell you they were. And this is how you need to be attacking life. I want to invent something, not something that would solve the energy problem but that would address it in a manner that would inspire people to be part of the movement toward solving it.

The invention she came up with was ingenious: a soccer ball that captures the kinetic energy that builds up as it’s being kicked and turns it into enough electrical energy to power a reading light. She called her electric soccer ball the Soccket. It won some fans in very high places:

Barack OBAMA: Some of you saw the Soccket, the soccer ball that we were kicking around that generates electricity as it’s kicked. I don’t want to get too technical, but I thought it was pretty cool.

After the Soccket came a jump rope that used the same technology. Matthews finished her undergrad degree and got an M.B.A., also at Harvard. And she started a company, based in Harlem, called Uncharted Power. The soccer ball and the jump rope didn’t turn out to be durable enough. But Matthews has raised $7 million in venture capital and is pushing her company to work on a larger scale: the electrical grid itself.

MATTHEWS: Our platform is called M.O.R.E. That stands for “motion-based off-grid renewable energy.” And it’s a platform that basically leverages our innovations in energy generation, energy transmission, and energy storage to offer what we like to call convenient energy.

One advantage of “convenient energy,” theoretically at least, is that it is decentralized, and therefore would not require the massive capital investments that power plants traditionally need. How well will Jessica Matthews’s idea actually work? It’s hard to say — and Matthews wouldn’t get into the details of Uncharted Power’s technology and implementation. So why am I telling you this story? Because it’s a story about the power of a good idea — and I think you’d agree that turning kinetic energy that’s fun to generate into electricity is a good idea. But really why I’m telling you this story is to point out that a good idea is worth nothing without great execution. That’s where Jessica Matthews stands right now, and she knows it.

MATTHEWS: I think ideas are great. But in a weird way it’s almost like they’re meaningless if they don’t actually make a difference in our lives. So I had to figure out execution because how can I go to my cousins and be like, “Oh, I have this cool idea for an energy-generating soccer ball” and then two weeks later they’re like, “Hey how’s it going?” I’m like, “Oh, I just have more ideas.” They’d be like, “What? Shut up. Stop coming here and telling us dumb stuff, Jessica.” So I had to come back and be like, “Here’s the prototype. What do you think?” Everyone is going to be motivated by different things but I’m the kind of inventor that’s looking to make whatever amount of time we have on this world better. And so execution has always been part of it.

*      *      *

Walter Isaacson has written biographies of some of the most creative people in history: Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein — and Steve Jobs—

Walter ISAACSON: Who, in his first stint at Apple, was such a perfectionist that he holds up shipping the original Macintosh because he doesn’t think the circuit board inside is pretty enough. Even though nobody will ever see it. And after a while, he gets fired from Apple because he’s such a perfectionist. And he would say, “Well, real artists sign their work,” meaning they have to wait until they are perfect before they ship. When he comes back to Apple at the end of the 1990’s, they give him a new motto, which is, “Real artists ship.”

But how do you ship your work? How do artists and scientists and inventors and other creative people turn the sparks flying around in their heads into something they can share with the world?

Margaret GELLER: Well, one of the difficult things of course is moving projects forward. There’s a big difference between the idea and execution.

That’s the pioneering astrophysicist Margaret Geller.

GELLER: And sometimes, you know, you start to do something, and nature just doesn’t conform. And you wonder, why me? And after the fact it’s fun, but it’s not so much fun while you’re doing it. It’s often very slow, it takes a long time, a lot of it is drudgery. It’s not as though you have an idea and tomorrow you write a paper and you submit it to the journal, and it’s done. And I think it’s the same with art and with writing.

Now, there are exceptions to prove every rule. The writer Michael Lewis, for instance. Among his books are The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Undoing Project. Even when he writes about complicated topics, Lewis’s writing is extraordinarily pleasurable and easy to read. So I once asked Lewis — it can’t be so pleasurable and easy to write, can it?

Michael LEWIS: Yes. It is pleasurable and easy. I hate to ruin your punchline, but actually what is hard for me is figuring out in the beginning what I want to say. I spend a lot of time gathering material and organizing the material before I sit down to write. I’d say three-quarters of the time is that. When the actual writing starts, it’s, for me, fun. It’s just fun. I mean, it’s fun and hard, but if it’s hard, it’s hard in a fun way. And people like my wife, who has walked in on me while I’m writing — I write with headphones on that just plays on a loop the same playlist that I’ve built for whatever book I’m writing. And I cease to hear anything in the world outside of what I’m doing. And apparently I’m sitting there laughing the whole time. And I think basically what I’m doing is laughing at my own jokes, but I wasn’t even aware of that. But people like my kids and my wife say that, “You’re sitting at your desk laughing all the time.”

Okay, so let’s set Michael Lewis aside. He’s his own category: the untortured artist. Let’s look at a project that was so difficult to execute that its creator did not finish it in his lifetime. And which is still being worked on today, nearly a century after his death. If you’ve ever been to Barcelona, you already know what I’m talking about: the Sagrada Familia church, designed by Antoni Gaudi, among the world’s best-known architects today. Who, during his lifetime, was a troublemaker.

Gijs Van HENSBERGEN: He was someone who was very loath to follow the kind of textbook, standard way.

Gijs van Hensbergen is a Dutch art historian who’s written a biography of Gaudi. He’s also, interestingly, a certified suckling-pig specialist.

VAN HENSBERGEN: Yes. I trained to write a cookery book, in fact. And using food as a way of understanding a different culture. So I went to train in Segovia, in the center of Spain, just north of Madrid, as a suckling pig chef.

All right, let’s get back to Gaudi, the man behind the unfinished masterpiece in Barcelona.

VAN HENSBERGEN: He was someone who was prepared not to just go down the orthodox route of what his teachers were saying. And in fact, once somebody asked him who influenced you most, and he said, “Well, I probably learned more from watching my father making boilers than I ever learned at architecture school.”

He was born in 1852 and grew up in a rural area outside of Barcelona.

VAN HENSBERGEN: As a child, he suffered badly from kind of a youthful version of arthritis. And so as a kid, he couldn’t always go to school, and his father — who was a boilermaker for making the stills for brandy distilling — would take him out to the workshop, out in the country.

He was enthralled by the exotic look of buildings around the world.

VAN HENSBERGEN: It was also for his generation, the first generation that could actually just look at photographs and see photographs of buildings all over the world. And he spent all his free time in the library just going through magazines and looking at photographs of buildings.

He was also enthralled by nature.

VAN HENSBERGEN: The little details of shells, the way the wind blew, the way that trees grow, the kind of magical Fibonacci sequences that appear in sunflower heads. And all these things, he’s instinctively, but very empirically, noticing, and would reappear in his buildings and his building techniques later on.

Gaudi studied architecture formally in Barcelona but was unimpressed by the orthodoxy of his teachers. It bored him. When he started getting commissions — for houses and apartment buildings and parks — he was relentlessly experimental. His traditional elements were exotic, his modern elements phantasmagorical. Gaudi was also an oddball: a hermit, a celibate, and something of a despot. He’d show up at a building site in the morning and order the contractors to demolish what they’d built the day before, so that he could redesign it. Meanwhile, in the rural Catalonia where he’d grown up there was a massive economic disruption caused by phylloxera, a disease that ruined the grapevines that were the source of many farmers’ income.

VAN HENSBERGEN: Once the vines started being attacked, and people lost their vines and they lost their livelihoods, came flooding into the cities. And it meant that there was massive, massive social pressure from a predominantly illiterate working class, which would fill the factories. And massive overcrowding, and the working classes felt that they were being abused. But particularly with the Church, they felt that sometimes the Church was misusing its so-called charity, looking after them but actually in a sense controlling them.

The Catholic Church was looking to rehabilitate its relationship with these newly urban parishioners. So it decided to build a huge church in a working-class part of Barcelona. It would be dedicated to the Holy Family — the Sagrada Familia — because, after all, Joseph was a carpenter.

VAN HENSBERGEN: The Holy Family could act as a model, that the working man — their handicraft or whatever — should be something that is respected.

Gaudi himself was a very conservative Catholic; his feelings for the Church and for Jesus ran deep and pure.

VAN HENSBERGEN: Right at the heart of his belief system was this idea that Christ’s suffering is something that we understand only through our own suffering, and that his ultimate generosity of course was to die for us.

When Gaudi received the commission to build the Sagrada Familia, after the original architect resigned from the project, he was only in his early thirties.

VAN HENSBERGEN: And I think Gaudí felt his duty as an architect, and certainly with the Sagrada Família, was that a building should reflect the glory of God, and that God was working through him.

Gaudi’s concept for the church was massive, extraordinarily detailed, a mashup of every architectural style under the sun but like nothing anyone had ever seen. It included life-like sculptures of Bible stories — emphasis on the life-like.

VAN HENSBERGEN: So when, on the Sagrada Família, you have the flight to Egypt, he wanted a donkey, it had to be life-size, he sends one of his workmen over to look around for a donkey that might look as if it had walked 40 days through the desert, and he finds the rag-and-bone man’s donkey, and he gets it, puts it in a harness, chloroforms the donkey, and then puts it into plaster and makes molds. He does it with chicken, with geese. One of the most dramatic moments is actually the Slaughter of the Innocents, where the little babies being cast down by this giant Roman centurion, total kind of brutal scene, this baby has his head smashed on the ground. And Gaudi actually took stillborn children, cast them, and used those models for the sculptures that would then be on the face of his building.

The scale, both exterior and interior, was way larger-than-life, designed to inspire awe. The interior pillars resemble a forest of grand trees.

VAN HENSBERGEN: Trees are actually some of the most efficient pieces of architecture ever grown, not built, and the way that they can put up with wind, and the way that they know where they should stick out a new branch. And he creates this lapidary forest, this extraordinary forest of columns, as you walk in. And this soaring space which is so dramatic, and with these stained-glass windows and this amazing light. I mean, even if you weren’t religious, there is a very, very powerful kind of explosion of space.

Gaudí would work on the project for the rest of his life, eventually moving into the basement workshop.

VAN HENSBERGEN Later on in life, he became very ascetic. He made his own clothes. He looked more and more like a tramp. He lived the whole purpose of the Sagrada Familia, which was to create this new Christian temple on a scale which today is kind of only just, we’re beginning to see, what an extraordinary kind of fantasy and dream that Gaudi had created for this building.

DUBNER: I’m also curious, because of what Gaudí said about creativity, as you write, “Creation works ceaselessly through man, but man does not create, he discovers. Those who seek out the laws of nature as support for their new work collaborate with the Creator. Those who copy are not collaborators. For this reason, originality consists in returning to the origin.” So to me, that is a bit of a paradox. And I wonder if you can explain that for me, as it relates to Gaudí, and especially as it relates to the Sagrada Família.

VAN HENSBERGEN: Well,  I often think back on Isaac Newton, saying, “Look, I was just like a little boy walking along the beach, picking up a pebble, and I noticed one was shinier than the other.” And there is a sense of humility about Gaudí’s genius as well. And this idea of going back to the origin. Because one of his signature discoveries — and something which became right at the core of his building technique — was the discovery of the power of the catenary arch. And the catenary arch is: take a chain, hold it between your fingers, and let it drop. It’s gravity pulling it down, which of course for Gaudí becomes another kind of religious metaphor, because who is it that invents gravity? Well, God of course.

But what you get is this chain formation. If you flip it over, it forms this catenary arch, which is the most economical shape in architecture. And he uses that as a kind of leitmotif, for the last 20, 30 years of his creative life, and works on the model which is four-and-a-half meters high and all these little chains with little bags, shotgun pellets, representing the different stresses, etc. And almost like an analog computer, sitting there over 10 years out in the countryside. People must have thought, Who is this madman? And creating a system which is still used today by the architects who are working on the Sagrada Família to try and finish it for 2026.

2026 will be the 100-year anniversary of Gaudi’s death. He died at age 73, after getting hit by a streetcar. As the story goes, his ragged clothes led passers-by to think he was a tramp, not the city’s most famous architect. In any case: a team of architects is continuing Gaudi’s work on the Sagrada Familia. By necessity, they are amending his original plans. To some, this is a betrayal of Gaudí’s original genius. Gijs van Hensbergen is not one of those people; he thinks it’s in line with what Gaudí himself would have done.

VAN HENSBERGEN: Well, clearly, we can’t go back to just what was built by Gaudí. Gaudí knew equally that future generations would have to work on it. And he talked about Chartres and other cathedrals saying that God took 400 years to finish Chartres. It took 600 years to finish Barcelona Cathedral, in the Gothic Quarter. And he said that God is very patient as a client. He doesn’t want to be hurried.

Gaudí was constantly tinkering with his designs, sometimes changing them from day to day. Execution-by-tinkering: it turns out this is a common thread among many creatives.

ISAACSON: Leonardo da Vinci worked on the Mona Lisa for more than 15 years.

Walter Isaacson again.

ISAACSON: During that period, he was dissecting the human face, figuring out every nerve and muscle that touches the lips, figuring out how details of sight go right into the center of the retina, but what you see out of the corner of your eye are shadows and colors. So he uses all of that knowledge, for example, to make the details on the Mona Lisa’s smile go straight, but the shadows and colors go up, so the smile flickers on and off, depending on how you’re looking at it. He also has it so perfectly anatomically correct that it’s the most amazing and memorable smile ever created.

All of these things he does over the course of this very long period as he’s living in Milan, and then in Rome, and then in Florence, and then taking it across the Alps with him when he goes to Paris, he adds layer after layer of tiny translucent brush strokes until he can make what is probably the most perfect painting ever done.

“The most perfect painting ever done?” That’s pretty hard to quantify. There are people, however, who’ve spent a great deal of time trying to quantify different trends in painting over the centuries, different styles of execution, and their relative value.

David GALENSON: I am David Galenson. I’m a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.

DUBNER: And you would describe your research specialty as what?

GALENSON: I study creativity. And really, more specifically, the life cycles of human creativity. What I’ve tried to do is find the process. You know, what are the mechanisms behind the discoveries?

Most great painters throughout history are considered innovators, at least on some dimension. But Galenson separates these innovators into two camps, what he calls experimentalists and conceptualists. Da Vinci and Gaudi would fit into the experimentalist category.

GALENSON: These are empiricists. They’re interested in perception, observation, generalization about the real world. They have very vague but very ambitious goals. And because they’re vague, they’re uncertain how to achieve them. So they work by trial and error. These are the people who never reach their goal. They are never satisfied.

Another example would be Paul Cézanne.

GALENSON: Very near the end of his life, he wrote to a younger artist. He said, “The progress needed is endless.” And that’s experimental creativity. You never can reach the goal.

Cézanne wanted to fuse the realism of the old master paintings he loved with the immediacy of a new style, impressionism.

GALENSON: Impressionism was, as the name implies, it was an ephemeral, momentary art. So Cézanne was frustrated with impressionism, with the superficiality. There’s no depth in impressionist paintings. These are all just on the surface. He set out to combine the bright colors of impressionism with the solidity of the old masters. So Cézanne set out to do something that was essentially impossible, but he spent then the next 40 years trying to do it.

For instance: in his later years, he kept painting the view of a mountain near his home, Mont Sainte-Victoire.

GALENSON: If you just take all the textbooks of art history that you can find, there’s no single painting by Cézanne that appears more than a few times. But he painted Mont Sainte-Victoire about 50 times over a period of about 30 years. If those were all a single painting, all of those illustrations were of a single painting, that would be the single-most-reproduced painting in the history of modern art. Now, they’re all different. He’s never doing the same thing. He’s always changing. But he’s changing so gradually that a lot of people don’t perceive it at the time.

So the experimentalist, as Galenson sees it, innovates by tweaking and tinkering, by methodically moving the needle an inch at a time. Meanwhile, the conceptualists?

GALENSON: As the name implies, these are people who have new ideas. These are theorists.

Galenson’s favorite example? Pablo Picasso — who, like Gaudi, was from Catalonia. But they were not pals.

VAN HENSBERGEN: Picasso famously loathed Gaudi.

That’s Gijs Van Hensbergen again. In addition to the Gaudi biography, he wrote a book about Picasso’s most famous painting, Guernica.

VAN HENSBERGEN: He saw him as the opposite of what he was doing. But they both shared a reverence for popular art.

Anyway, Picasso’s process of creation, as described by David Galenson:

GALENSON: Basically, the process is, you come to a new discipline, you learn the rules, and you say, I don’t like some very basic rule. And I get rid of it.

Picasso’s rule-breaking masterpiece? Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

GALENSON: Now, that’s a painting that Pablo Picasso made when he was 26 years old. And it wasn’t just casually done. When Picasso was about 25, he was a young, struggling painter in Paris. And the king of the hill was about 10 years older, Henri Matisse. Matisse had made a large figure painting called The Joy of Life, that made a tremendous splash at the annual salon. And Picasso was very jealous.

So, here’s this young 25-year-old who starts making preparatory drawings. In total, he makes between 400-500 preparatory drawings for this — the largest painting he’s ever attempted, by far. That’s the most preparatory works that have ever been made in Western history for a single painting, as far as we know. Here’s a 25-year-old who’s not really thriving economically, but he takes essentially a full year to prepare to make this one painting. So, he’s deliberately creating a masterpiece. That painting is in 95 percent of all the textbooks of art that cover the early 20th century. No other painting is in more than half.

DUBNER: Now, let me ask you this. The way you just described that process, however, doesn’t sound so different from the way you described the process of the experimental innovators. Over and over, repeating and repeating.

GALENSON: The difference is the following: If you x-ray a Cézanne, you’ll find there’s nothing underneath the paint. He painted, what the artists say, “directly.” He just began using a brush on canvas. He made no preparatory drawings for his paintings, ever. The whole point actually was to be spontaneous. That was the point of impressionism. Whereas, if you x-ray the Demoiselle, you’ll find very precise under-drawing. And it’s not an accident. If you go to the Picasso Museum, where they have these dozens and dozens of sketchbooks, you’ll find that every figure in that painting was planned extremely carefully. So that by the time he began painting the painting, he knew what it was going to look like.

See, this was the first thing I discovered about the difference between experimental and conceptual artists. That it’s not just that they paint differently, but they want to paint differently. The conceptual artist wants to know, before he starts — before he picks up a brush — he wants to know exactly what the painting is going to look like. Whereas the experimental painter goes out of his way to avoid that. They want to make discoveries in the process of painting. So, it comes down to this fundamental question: Do you make the discovery before you start working or while you’re working? And in discipline after discipline, that is going to be the key question separating the two types of innovator.

“Experimental innovators,” Galenson has written, “work by trial and error, and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life. In contrast, conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at an early age.” Picasso invented cubism in his 20’s; Bob Dylan wrote “Like a Rolling Stone” when he was 24.

GALENSON: You can get an idea at any age. But the most radical ideas come not necessarily when you’re young chronologically, although you tend to be, but when you’re new to a discipline.

Experimental innovators, meanwhile, build up to their masterpieces. Virginia Woolf was 44 when she wrote To the Lighthouse; Cézanne was still painting Mont Sainte-Victoire when he died, at 67. The novelist Jennifer Egan is now in her mid-fifties. By the time Egan won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her book A Visit From the Goon Squad, she’d been writing for a couple decades. She’d only completed three novels during that time — and the one that followed, Manhattan Beach, took another seven years. One reason it takes so long: her process; the way she executes the idea.

EGAN: Once I write that first draft — which, in the case of Manhattan Beach was 1,400 pages, and type it up, I do many, many, many revisions, usually by hand on hard copies. But we’re talking ultimately 40 to 50 drafts per chapter. So there’s a lot of fixing and problem-solving. And in certain ways, that’s where a lot of the writing happens. It’s the big moves that I’m trying to get a hold of in that first draft. And then once I have those, then I can work with it and try to bring it all up many, many notches to be something that’s actually readable and entertaining. My first drafts are full of clichés. I loathe clichés. It’s not that you can’t write them in the first place. They have to be replaced. So, ultimately, I have weighed every word. To use a cliché.

Okay, so if your style of execution is to produce draft after draft after draft; or sketch after sketch or prototype after prototype — how do you judge what’s working and what’s not? Every domain is different, of course: writing a novel is different from building a better means to capture kinetic energy. But in every case: how do you measure the success of your execution? When Jennifer Egan was writing her first novel, The Invisible Circus, she did not have a reliable way to do that.

EGAN: I wrote in a vacuum, and that was just wildly unsuccessful. I spent two years writing — horrible. Just dreadful. And this isn’t even being over-harsh. I’m never going to make that mistake again.

Ever since then, Egan has relied on a writers’ group. Even today, after all the success and all the awards.

EGAN: It includes a couple of the people I’ve been showing work to since 1989. We have an essayist, a playwright, a poet, and then a couple of fiction writers.

What the writers’ group provides Egan is something that every creator needs constantly, whether you’re working in the arts, in science, in business, whatever: feedback.

*      *      *

It’s not that great ideas are easy; but without good execution, an idea doesn’t mean much. A key component to execution — a key component to getting better at anything — is feedback. The writer Jennifer Egan was telling us that she still relies on a writers’ group to workshop her current novel-in-progress.

EGAN: Even with Manhattan Beach.

That’s her latest book, an historical novel published in 2017.

EGAN: I had an idea about a present-day narrator who would be kind of winking at the reader because we all know that it’s not 1934 anymore. That was so dead on arrival.

DUBNER: And when you get that kind of feedback, and you decide ultimately that it’s fruitful and that it’s correct, what does that feel like?

EGAN: It feels like a relief, because usually I can feel when something is not working. Sometimes things aren’t working because I just haven’t spent enough time making them better.

DUBNER: Did you have to beat up your writing group a little bit after you started winning these awards and say, “Listen, I still need you to come at me as hard as you did”?

EGAN: No, they they did it. I would recommend that anyone do this. People are afraid of hearing criticism. And I think often when they say, “What did you think of something?” you know that they don’t really want to know if you have any thought that isn’t positive. And I so understand that. I mean, it’s awful to hear that something you think is working isn’t. And I’ve sat there, and many times thought, “I’m done. I’m never coming back here. It’s been great. You guys suck. You don’t get it. Other people tell me I’m great.”

But even by the end of the meeting I’m already — I can feel my brain kind of prickling around whatever it is and I’m already starting to think of solutions. So it hurts, but it’s not going to kill you. I feel like criticism that’s wrong-headed, okay, I don’t agree with it. Fine. Keep going. There’s a fear that somehow criticism can break you. I don’t believe it.

DUBNER: Do you have any advice for people who have that fear, which I would guess is probably 95 percent of humanity?

EGAN: I would say think very carefully about which is worse: finding out now that this work has problems or finding out after everyone has told you it’s perfect and you’ve published it. You’re going to find out.

Teresa AMABILE: I think the best thing we could do is to find one honest person who you know will give you honest feedback.

Teresa Amabile is a psychologist who studies creativity.

AMABILE: Ideally, you’ll have an artist friend, or maybe it’s a teacher, who knows you reasonably well, whom you trust, to whom you can say, “I really want some feedback on this, but I need you to not dampen my spark here, if you would.” I think that’s much better than trying to get feedback from a large number of individuals. One or two people who will be honest with you, but who can who can give you the feedback in a way that you’ll be able to use it and not be not be destroyed by it. We can manage our feedback givers.

But what if you aren’t in a position to manage your feedback givers? What if your feedback givers are your employer, or your funder, or your customer?

Don HAHN: We test-screen everything we do. We bring in a living room full of people and show them the movie and then sit around afterwards and have a really painful discussion about things they didn’t understand, or story points they didn’t like, or characters they didn’t like.

That’s Don Hahn.

HAHN: And I’m a filmmaker and I’ve made most of my career producing animation for Disney. But now I do a lot of documentary work.

Among the films he’s worked on: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?; Beauty and the Beast — both the animated and live versions.

HAHN: And The Lion King, a little story about a lion cub that gets framed for murder.

Hollywood calculus, as we all know, can be strange. A team of filmmakers can work on something for a couple years — and then have it quashed by a room full of little kids who get squirmy at a test screening.

HAHN: And then you have to go away and decide whether they’re right or not. And you can also dismiss it to your peril, or dismiss it to your advantage. Gosh, and there’s endless stories about that. In Pocahontas, the animated movie, there was a love song that Mel Gibson as John Smith sang to Pocahontas. And he was tied up in a tent and Pocahontas came in and they sang this beautiful love song under the moon. It’s a lovely song. But the audience just checked out and kids started wiggling in their seats and moms started running out for a bathroom break. So it got cut from the movie.

But conversely, there’s a song in The Little Mermaid called “Part of Your World,” and it’s Ariel’s “I-want” song. And that was a real kind of wiggler song where in previews, even though it happens early in the movie and even though it’s crucial to Ariel’s character, our executive at the studio said, “Ah, kids are wiggling during this. We have to cut it out. It’s not working.” And he was wrong. The directors and the animators came back and said, “Kids may wiggle during it but it’s the kind of song you need in these movies. It’s a statement of what she wants. It’s a statement of her goals and passions and without it, it’s ambiguous what she wants.” So it stayed in the movie and became one of the most favorite songs in the movie.

You can see why producers and studios might be cautious: a big film is a huge investment. The desire for feedback has deep roots in Hollywood, including Walt Disney himself.

HAHN: Walt Disney used to famously walk around the studio, and he would tell the story of, let’s say, Pinocchio to a couple of guys in the coffee lounge. And then he’d get their reaction and then he’d go down the road to a couple of secretaries and tell them the story. And so he was workshopping again and again and again this story. And every time refining it in his mind a little bit more until it became very close to what was in the film.

A documentary film, meanwhile, which is what Don Hahn is mostly making these days—

HAHN: Documentaries are a little different because you’re telling an existing story. But you have to go where the story takes you, and when you start out you may not know all the ins and outs of the plot. So, it’s a little like putting a jigsaw puzzle together without the picture on the box. You’re kind of feeling your way through the dark. And a lot of times there’s discoveries halfway through the making of the movie.

We did a movie for Disney Nature called Chimpanzee about a mother and her little baby chimp. And halfway through the shooting, the mother went out one night and was killed by a panther. So you just go, “Okay, I guess we’re done.” But over the ensuing weeks the alpha male in that tribe of chimpanzees adopted that little baby, otherwise it would have died. And that’s something that just never happens. Jane Goodall even said she didn’t ever see that in the wild. So sometimes you have to just open up enough to go kind of ride the horse in the direction that it’s going to have the movie tell you what it wants.

Another documentary that comes to mind is the 2007 film The King of Kong, directed by Seth Gordon.

Seth GORDON: It was definitely a let’s-see-what-happens mission in the sense that we had no idea what would transpire.

Gordon’s made a lot of big movies and TV shows since then; he also worked on a documentary version of Freakonomics; that’s how I got to know him. The King of Kong is a great story about a couple of guys competing for the world-record score in the arcade game Donkey Kong. There’s the self-important defender, Billy Mitchell, and the underdog challenger, Steve Wiebe.

Steve WIEBE: I was just doing it because I thought it would be a neat achievement. I didn’t think it would ever blow up to be a big story.

GORDON: I had been going to the arcade featured in that film in New Hampshire, it’s called Fun Spot, since I was a kid. And I was aware that there was a culture of gamers for whom that was where the battles would be waged, and the official scores would be set. Because they have all the legitimate old machines. And I knew of Billy Mitchell, but I didn’t know if he was going to commit to be filmed by us. So that was a big question.

And then the other was, how would he and Steve be on camera? And because those were very much unknowns, we were simultaneously chasing other rivalries in the video game world, and we thought it was going to be a film that was about portraits of these rivalries. But because Billy is such an extraordinary person and masterful storyteller himself, he made the movie become about him.

Billy MITCHELL: Competitive gaming? When you want to attach your name to a world record, when you want your name written into history? You have to pay the price.

GORDON: Because of the situations that he created and the actions that he took, all the other storylines paled in comparison.

It makes sense that you can’t foretell how a documentary will unfold. But what about scripted entertainment? How locked-in are you there, and how flexible do you need to be?

HAHN: So you start out with a script and make it as good as you can. And then as you actually get into the production, you allow yourself to improvise and make it better. So animation is a real iterative process. You can visit and revisit and revisit, and sometimes it takes five or six or seven times of putting the movie up on reels to look at it and then have it fall apart and rebuild it and tear it down and rebuild it before it starts to be anything.

And the reason is the leap from the written word to a visual storytelling medium is huge. It’s like the leap from a recipe on a page to a beautifully prepared dinner that you’re actually ingesting. So on a page, how do you describe a perfectly cooked steak with just the right seasoning? You try your best, but once you get that in the frying pan and start to cook that steak, it’s a whole other thing.

And I think that’s why some people shy away from the making part because you can have perfection on a piece of paper and say, “This is a beautifully designed piece of architecture, or a fantastic recipe, or a great script,” and it’s going to really go south when you try to execute it, no matter what it is. And it’s just experience and craft that allows you to maintain some sort of order and work that written idea into something that’s actually visual up on the screen.

Again, as we’ve been hearing from all sorts of creatives: the execution of an idea requires determination, craft, experience, maybe a little luck. It’s almost enough to persuade you, at least in some cases, that if there were a competition between idea and execution, the idea isn’t even such a formidable competitor.

HAHN: There’s an argument to say a film like E.T. or Star Wars or Roger Rabbit was a great idea out of the box, and anybody could have made that movie. But I subscribe to the other approach, which is you can take a mediocre idea and put great people on it and come up with a great movie. So, take the Pixar movie Ratatouille. It’s the worst idea for a movie ever. It’s like, “Let’s put rats in a kitchen and we’ll make an animated film about it.” It’s a horrible idea. And there’s plenty of really good ideas — we’ve all seen movies that had tremendous promise and the buzz was great about them and then you go see you in the theater and they’re awful.

Filmmaking is, by its nature, a hugely collaborative project. Dozens, maybe hundreds of people, all with specific skills and tasks. It’s a creative team. That is a common construct these days, in many realms.

ISAACSON: We sometimes think that there’s some guy or gal who goes into a garage or garret, and they have a light bulb moment, and that’s how innovation happens. But that’s not the way it is. Great scientific research these days is going to be done in large collaborative units. When you look at how people are going to do gene editing, or CRISPR technology, or, for that matter, figure out background gravitational waves, these are the type of papers that are going to have dozens of names on them, or hundreds of names on them. And it’s not going to be like Newton sitting under an apple tree, or Galileo peering into a telescope, because this ability to make great mental leaps is now augmented and amplified by our ability to work together collaboratively.

AMABILE: Most work done in organizations now is done on a project basis, by teams. That has advantages because you’re combining the efforts of many people, you’re combining the viewpoints of many people. But oh, it’s hard.

Teresa Amabile has studied creativity in corporate settings by having people keep daily work diaries.

AMABILE: It’s really hard to work effectively in a team. It’s hard to manage a team effectively. And there are a number of things that can help. One is to make sure that you have a nice diversity of skills in the team, where people are not completely overlapping in what they know, because that redundancy is not really helpful, but where people do have different perspectives and different knowledge base to some extent that they can bring to the problem.

It’s also helpful to have different cognitive styles. So doing things better within a paradigm or differently outside paradigms, you’re likely to make a lot of progress in a project if you have both kinds of cognitive style on a team, but only if you have people who can effectively translate between the different styles. They have to be able to talk to each other and very often you find conflict arising. “That idea is crazy, how would you possibly think that that would work?” And on the other hand, “What are you doing, you’re stuck in the status quo, you’re not doing anything at all exciting, you’re boring.” And we actually in our research saw a team that had to just call a halt to its project because we had these very different cognitive styles and there was no one who could mediate between them. That can be someone else on the team, it can be a manager, but you have to watch out for that.

There’s one more thing a successful creative team needs.

AMABILE: You need a high level of trust. You need people to be to be willing to give each other a little slack, to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Under those circumstances, if you’ve got that diversity of skills and styles you can do great things on a team.

But some creative endeavors tend to be solitary, even if you routinely submit your work for feedback. And some creative people just prefer to work on their own. So how do those artists ship? How do they execute ideas without a team, without the boss or studio or publisher watching over them?

Dean SIMONTON: There are some people who, they are only creative in the morning. They will get up early, they will write so much, and then that’s it for the rest of the day.

Dean Simonton is a psychologist who for years has studied the productivity habits of creative giants.

SIMONTON: There’s others that can only work late at night after everybody has gone to bed. There’s others that make their own time. They have a cue, like who was it? I think it was Schiller, who had to have the smell of rotten apples. And when he felt like being creative, he’d pull out a rotten apple. And that would cue him to be creative.

DUBNER: What about you, when you’re working?

SIMONTON: I’m generally a morning person.

DUBNER: And do you need to cue or trick yourself in any way? Or do you sit down, and you put away the distractions and get to work?

SIMONTON: I, first of all I pick the morning because there’s the fewest distractions, and the smell of black coffee really helps as well. Okay. Pretty ordinary.

DUBNER: Do you think if you smelled it and didn’t actually consume the caffeine, it would have the same effect?

SIMONTON: Oh I have to have it. I need it.

DUBNER: So it’s not just the smell. The smell is the cue to the physiological reaction.

SIMONTON: No, I need the caffeine in my system. But then, usually by a few hours, I’m kind of pooped out. Sometimes I get rejuvenated before I go to bed. But then, it’s usually a glass of wine that does it. So go figure.

DUBNER: So, let’s say the pattern that you just described happens to be the one that I subscribe to. I’m a morning person. I get up early. I like those hours quiet, alone, etc. So if you’re that person, and let’s say you have four or five hours of really hardcore productivity and creativity, then you have the rest of the day. And let’s say you’re lucky enough to have a life like an academic, like you do, or a writer, like I do, and you can actually choose what to do. No one’s telling you what to do. What do you do there, with your now diminished capacity for creativity or productivity?

SIMONTON: Well, fortunately, guess what? You know this is the case. There’s so much else that’s involved with being creative. Like when the proofs arrive. You know? I can’t do proofreading in the morning. I don’t want to waste my creativity doing proofreading in the morning. The things on your reading list that you have to catch up on. And particularly when you’re doing what I’m doing, scientific research, you have to find out what other people are doing. I review a lot of submitted manuscripts and grant proposals.

DUBNER: Right. So you don’t want to waste your best brain cells on all that stuff?

SIMONTON: Oh, no. I mean don’t tell them that I’m only working at half-mast. You know?

DUBNER: I think you just did, but that’s okay.

Getting up early, drinking coffee; or staying up late and drinking wine; working alone, or with collaborators — plainly, there’s no single route for getting good work done. Everyone has their own strategies for executing ideas.

SIMONTON: Too many people want a one-size-fits-all. “What do I need to do to be creative?” And I’m afraid there’s no one-size-fits-all. There’s a few things that everybody has to adhere to. You have to know what you’re doing, and you have to be willing to fail. You have to be committed to achieving in that domain. You have to be reasonably bright, and so forth. But beyond that, some people have red socks and some people have purple socks.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica, with help from Stephanie Tam and Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Teresa Amabile, psychologist and professor emerita at the Harvard Business School.

Jennifer Egan, novelist and journalist.

David Galenson, economist at the University of Chicago.

Margaret Geller, astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Seth Gordon, filmmaker.

Don Hahn, filmmaker.

Gijs van Hensbergen, art historian.

Walter Isaacson, biographer and professor of history at Tulane University.

Jessica O. Matthews, inventor and c.e.o. of Uncharted Power.

Dean Simonton, professor emeritus of psychology at University of California, Davis.

RESOURCES

Creativity In Context by Teresa Amabile (Routledge 1996).

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf 2010).

The Invisible Circus by Jennifer Egan (Knopf 1994).

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan (Scribner 2017).

Gaudi by Gijs van Hensbergen (Harper Perennial 2003).

Guernica by Gijs van Hensbergen (Bloomsbury Publishing 2005).

Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster 2017).

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster 2011).

EXTRA

“How to Be Creative,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)?,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Where Do Good Ideas Come From?,” Freakonomics Radio (2019).

The post A Good Idea Is Not Good Enough (Ep. 369) appeared first on Freakonomics.

Sometimes ideas depend on technology: “mapping the universe” would have been impossible with standard refracting telescopes — then came solid-state detectors. (Photo: Smithsonian Institution Archives/Wikimedia Commons)

Whether you’re mapping the universe, hosting a late-night talk show, or running a meeting, there are a lot of ways to up your idea game. Plus: the truth about brainstorming.  (Ep. 3 of the “How to Be Creative” series.)

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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Our previous episode — No. 367 if you’re counting — was about the future of meat. One of the people helping determine that future is a biochemist named Pat Brown. He founded a company called Impossible Foods, whose mission is …?

Pat BROWN: … whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology by 2035.

The science behind Brown’s idea is fascinating, and impressive, and all that. But it is also — to me, at least — it’s also an act of remarkable creativity.

BROWN: Well, just in principle it should be possible to produce foods that deliver all the qualities that consumers want more sustainably, from plants.

Making meat out of plants was not Pat Brown’s first creative breakthrough. Years earlier, as a Stanford researcher, he created a genetic tool called the DNA microarray …

BROWN: That lets you learn how the genome writes the life story of a cell.

As interesting as it was to talk to Pat Brown about both the DNA microarray and Impossible meat, I found myself thinking about an even more interesting question, or at least a much broader one: whether we’re talking science, or the arts, or business, where do creative ideas come from?

*      *      *

Up to this point in our series on creativity, we’ve looked at some myths — like the connection between creativity and dysfunction.

Teresa AMABILE: It’s false. Many creative people do have dysfunctional families but not every creative person has a dysfunctional family.

We looked at the connection between creativity and school:

Mitch RESNICK: Schools end up focusing on the things that are most easily assessed rather than focusing on the things that are most valuable for kids. So what we need to do is to focus more on trying to assess the things we value rather than valuing the things that are most easily assessed.

But what we haven’t figured out yet is how to answer the question you may ask whenever you see an enormously creative thing, whether it’s a sculpture or a movie or a scientific leap: how did they come up with that idea? The idea, of course, is just the beginning. I’m sure you’ve heard the famous saying, generally attributed to Thomas Edison: genius is one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. But still — what about that one percent? Where does it come from? And how can you get more if it?

GELLER: In the evening when I’m listening to music, that’s when ideas come. It’s very important to feel free. I don’t think there’s any way you can be creative without feeling free.

That is the pioneering astrophysicist Margaret Geller.

GELLER: I like to say that I’ve spent my life mapping the universe.

Geller is responsible for discoveries about the distribution of galaxies in the universe — the fact that they’re often in clumps and not distributed evenly. To reach that understanding, Geller had to gather many observations of distant galaxies, essentially take pictures of them.

GELLER: And the thing that enabled us to do what we did was a big change in the technology.

Geller started doing this research around 1980.

GELLER: So at that time what happened is that people went from photographic plates to what we call solid-state detectors. Now that may be a confusing term, but every single person has one of those in their pocket. So your cell phone, the detector in it, the thing you take pictures with, is a so-called charge-coupled device, and it’s about as big as your fingernail. We use those same things in astronomy, bigger ones. And that’s what enabled the revolution in our ability to map the universe.

The galaxies Geller wanted to observe were many light-years away.

GELLER: I think it’s amazing to think about that, that these photons, these particles of light, travel through the pretty-empty universe for hundreds of millions, billions of years. They don’t hit anything until they hit these tiny detectors on this tiny speck of dust we call the Earth. We interpret those signals to figure out what the universe looks like and how it came to be. So the question was, “Are there patterns in the universe? Are there features, is there some geometry?”

So that’s where Geller’s path-breaking idea came from. First, there was a new technology that afforded a much better view of the universe; then, the big question that hadn’t been answered: what is the underlying geometry of the universe?

GELLER: So then the question is, the universe is big, and life is short. So how do you address this question if you have a small telescope and you want to get done? So I began to think about the Earth and the patterns on the surface of the Earth. So what are the biggest patterns? It’s the continents and the oceans. So suppose you’re an alien and you want to know whether the Earth has continents and oceans, but you can only see a tiny fraction of it, say the fraction covered by Rhode Island. What shape do you take for the sample that you’re allowed to see?

Well if you take a patch, you’re not going to learn much, because most of the time it will land in the ocean. But you can take a very thin great circle around the Earth and there are a few great circles that pass through only oceans but those are few. Most will cross both the landmass and the ocean. You’ll find out that the Earth has two kinds of patterns, both big. Now the universe of course is not a two-dimensional surface; it’s a three-dimensional place, so the analogy to this great circle is a slice in three-dimensional space, so that’s what we did. We mapped galaxies in this three-dimensional slice of the universe.

So Geller and her fellow researchers took a three-dimensional slice of the universe, and mapped the galaxies contained inside.

GELLER: It turned out that the survey we made, the slice was just thick enough and it reached just deep enough in the universe to see what turns out to be the characteristic pattern in the way galaxies are arranged in the universe. So galaxies surround huge regions that are dark, essentially devoid of galaxies, that are tens of millions of light-years across, and the galaxies are in thin structures that surround these kinds of empty regions and that turns out to be the characteristic structure that people now call the cosmic web.

And what’s it like to be able to look into the sky and see the deep structure of the universe?

GELLER: It’s a kind of thrill that you never forget. I think there’s a kind of awe. I think that there is an artistry in nature that has a beauty that we’re all wired up to appreciate.

So Margaret Geller’s big idea happened like this: she started from what was already known, and unknown; she looked at the new capabilities that technology gave her; she formulated a big, important question, and found a smart way to answer that question using the new tools at her disposal. Sounds like a rational way to come up with an idea — at least in retrospect. There’s another deeply rational sort of question that can lead to good ideas. It goes like this: “Isn’t it ludicrous that so many things we encounter every day are designed so poorly?”

James DYSON: That, rather an arrogant way of putting it.

That’s James Dyson.

DYSON: Yeah, I think in my profession I do go around looking at things critically to see if it’s a good idea or if there could be an improvement or how I would improve it. I think, I know, really almost all engineers do that. And if you don’t you are not really an engineer.

Dyson, along with Elon Musk, is among the most famous living inventors. But unlike Musk, who dreams up hyperloops and Mars missions, Dyson has worked on wheelbarrows and hand dryers and, most profitably, vacuum cleaners. It turns out he’s been fairly obsessed with the vacuum cleaner since childhood.

DYSON: I mean, I remember using my vacuum cleaner at home in the early ‘50s and it screaming away, making a sort of nasty, stale smell of dust and not really picking things up. And I remember it wasn’t a very good machine. Although I was very pleased to use it and I think it was the only electrical device we had in the house. We didn’t have sockets on the walls in those days. So you had to take out the light bulb, stand on a chair, and connect into the light bulb socket. And not pull too hard at the cord.

Later on, Dyson had his own family, and a home with its own dust.

DYSON: And I bought what was supposed to be the most powerful vacuum cleaner ever made. And I noticed I had the same old problem. And by now it had paper bags rather than cloth bags but same screaming noise, same smell of stale dust. And it’s not picking things up. And now being an engineer, I took it to bits, and realized that all the airflow had to go through the bag. And of course the bag has little holes in it, and they get blocked by the very first dust that goes into the bag. So the vacuum cleaner bag is full not because it’s full but because it’s got a little bit of dust in it that blocks the little holes in it. And I was a bit angry about this actually, I thought: this is bad. You know, a light bulb gives you 100 watts until it goes pop. Your car goes along at 70 miles an hour, whatever it is you want to go, until it breaks down. But a vacuum cleaner has a reducing performance. And that’s not really very satisfactory.

Dyson didn’t act on his frustration immediately. At the time, he was busy manufacturing a different invention of his, called a ballbarrow. A ballbarrow is a wheelbarrow but, rather than the small wheel up front that can be hard to maneuver and gets stuck in the mud, it had a spherical wheel — a ball — atop its metal frame.

DYSON: And we had to put in a powder-coating plant to coat the frames, and we had a screen, a cloth screen rather like a vacuum cleaner bag, that kept getting clogged with the powder. And I discovered efficient factories used a thing called a cyclone, which is about 30-foot-high, which spun the powder out by centrifugal force rather than having a clogging filter. So I decided to make one over a couple of weekends.

DUBNER: I understand you copied one from a sawmill, yes?

DYSON: That’s it. Yes, and it worked brilliantly. It collected the very fine powder all day long. Clean air appeared to come out of the chimney at the top of it and the clogging problem had gone away. And I wondered as I was welding this thing up, whether in miniature you could put one in a vacuum cleaner. So I raced home and ripped the bag off from my vacuum cleaner and made a cardboard one, actually. With gaffer tape and cardboard. And pushed it around my house, and it appeared to work.

It appeared to work, but not yet well enough. Dyson says he built 5,127 prototypes over five years. Today, the Dyson vacuum is one of the world’s best-sellers; the Dyson company, which also makes air purifiers and hair dryers, has annual revenues of more than $3 billion, and Dyson himself has a net worth of more than $5 billion. He’s also been knighted. So that worked out pretty well for him. But what if you don’t have five years to tinker with an idea? What if you have more like five days? Or five hours?

DUBNER: Hello.

Christoph NIEMANN: Hi there.

DUBNER: Good to see you.

NIEMANN: Come on in.

DUBNER: Yeah. How’s family?

NIEMANN: They’re good, growing like mad.

That’s an old friend of mine, an old collaborator.

NIEMANN: My name is Christoph Niemann, and I’m an illustrator and author.

Niemann is German, but lived in New York for years. Now he’s back in Berlin, and so was I last summer, visiting his studio. You might recognize his work: more than two dozen New Yorker covers; his “Abstract Sunday” column, and much more, from The New York Times. Also, children’s books. His illustrations often turn on a clever transformation — a pair of bananas that represent a horse’s hindquarters; a poppy-seed bagel is repurposed into a man’s chin, mid-shave. Even when the topic is serious, Niemann has a playful streak. Like the New Yorker cover he made after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Against a black background, Niemann drew the branches of a cherry tree; the blossoms, a familiar pink, were in the shape of the international radiation symbol, the trefoil.

NIEMANN: Well, when I started out it, was fairly easy, easy in a sense of simple. I would get a call from a magazine or newspaper and they would say, “We have a story on the stock market, some political event. We have a certain space. Here’s the headline, here’s the article. We need a visual equivalent to the headline.”

DUBNER: In how many hours?

NIEMANN: My record was 45 minutes for the New York Times Op-Ed page, because the Pakistanis decided to test their nuclear weapons at 3:30, and the paper went to print at 5. So once they had the decision, I had I think 30 minutes to actually do the entire drawing. Usually from a day to a week sometimes it’s actually years for very open assignments.

DUBNER: Give me just an example — could be short, long, big, small — of a particularly difficult problem that you had to solve with an illustration.

NIEMANN: Well, for me the difficult but, also the fun problems, were always the ones where you have to tell a boring story through an interesting visual. When you have an interesting story — let’s say somebody cures cancer, or aliens land on Times Square, there is no — you can’t add a great layer with visuals because with the aliens, you just want a photo of the aliens. There’s no smart metaphorical illustration to be done. If somebody were to cure cancer, I just want a big fat headline. There’s no smart image — of somebody celebrating? There is nothing to add there.

So I think these visuals often work the best when you have a subtle story, or maybe even a boring story, or a story that’s been told a million times. The equivalent in pop music would be “I love you.” It has been said and sung a gazillion times. The question is can you do it interesting again. So I often found that boring economic stories were — no, there was a great way to tell an interesting story. Not by saying, “This is completely new information,” but to say, “Well, think about that in a different way.”

And for years I was illustrating The New Yorker financial column by James Surowiecki, brilliant column. And I remember one that was about how small companies updating their technical machinery, how that is an indicator for something. And of course that’s not a very sexy thing. It was really about kind of a small accounting firm buying new computers and how often they would do that. And of course I didn’t want to draw accountants or computers, so I actually drew the Grim Reaper and he looks into a shop window. And at the shop window there is a big sickle, and then there’s a lawnmower and then an electric lawnmower. So it’s him kind thinking about whether he should finally upgrade, and of course you have to know the metaphors and it requires a bit of a leap, but with a story like that, it’s much more interesting to kind of then add a visual layer.

So Niemann routinely needs to generate ideas on demand, often on a tight deadline. How does that happen?

NIEMANN: I guess with these kind of metaphoric illustrations, what I do is I try to — these images are like words, and like written language, it requires did the writer and the reader speak the same language. So when I think of a symbol I have to think of what symbol is known. And when you have Sisyphus pushing up the rock, I have to assume people know that image. If they don’t, any pun I would make based on that won’t work. And I think that’s a very important skill set for designers to be very aware of visual language and what’s known and also, especially, what’s not known. So basically then what I do is I try to go — it’s almost like running through a wheel of every possible symbol, and then starting a second wheel, with how you can twist that image, and then trying to combine two symbols.

Let’s say you do something on money and then you go dollar sign, a graph, the physical dollar bill, and then maybe it’s about money in sports, it would go basketball, football, baseball. And you try to take all these symbols and mix them together, and then 999 times it means nothing and then all of a sudden there’s tennis and the graph. And you go, “Hmm, what if I take the graph and weave it into a tennis racket?” Which is, I’m sure, been a done gazillion times. It’s not a great idea. But so basically it is running these two wheels against each other and then being very, very attentive and seeing what clicks. And this usually happens in the process of drawing. I need to have that in the paper because in the act of drawing things, they turn out a little different than you would imagine in your head. And then all of the sudden you go, Wait a minute, like that’s — I had the idea in my head but now that I put down on paper, something is off. And that moment where it’s off, usually only then an interesting new solution comes to life.

There’s a point we should make about the kind of ideas that Niemann was coming up with. They were generally in response to a commission: basically, a buyer contacting him with a request to generate a sellable idea. So his ideas were for the most part extrinsically motivated; he wasn’t sitting around and intrinsically dreaming up ideas that turned him on. What do we know about the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation when it comes to creativity? There’s a lot of research — we went over it in detail earlier in this series, Episode No. 355, if you want to hear it — research showing that extrinsic motivation tends to diminish creativity, both in quantity and quality. Christoph Niemann, interestingly, has been able to shift over the years, from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation. That’s partly because he’s been so successful, which gave him more opportunities to create what he wanted to create. But also: the shift was necessitated by changes in technology and the economy.

NIEMANN: My approach has changed but also because media has changed. This whole deadline-driven imagery is not that relevant anymore. And I feel it’s more about storytelling. It’s more about a subjective point of view. And that’s why I’ve started doing a lot more work that’s originating with me. So it’s not me waiting for a cue from a story, but me going out there and creating the story and then finding the images for it. It involves a lot of letting go, trusting myself a lot more. With my traditional work, on the one hand it’s harder because you have the time pressure, you have a lot more restrictions to fight against. The good thing is, I like to call it the Stockholm Syndrome for art.

When you have a lot of restrictions, you also have something to struggle with, to fight against, and that is it’s almost like holding you up, you can lean on these restrictions. When you have no brief, — it’s on one hand fantastic, on the other hand is really disorienting. It’s this kind of creative freedom where you just sit down as a kid and you start drawing because you want to draw. It was more about unlearning something.

Michael BIERUT: All designers in my experience, almost regardless of what the field is, sort of feel that they have some sort of intrinsic urge for self-expression.

That’s the graphic designer Michael Bierut. He’s done a lot of work you’d recognize — for MasterCard, the New York Jets, Saks Fifth Avenue, many others. So most designers, he thinks, have a strong intrinsic urge. What about Bierut?

BIERUT: Sometimes when I’ve actually examined myself really honestly, I’ve come to think that I’m really on the extrinsic side of that spectrum. I don’t actually have ideas that I want to get out that I think are personal, that I’m motivated by some need to get them in front of the world.

Bierut thrives on getting a brief from a client; those briefs do, however, range from specific to amorphous.

BIERUT: In one case, I might have an assignment where I’m doing signs in a building that identify the bathroom or the fire exits. Now those things are meant to be functional. They can be attractive, they can be aesthetic, they can even be playful sometimes. But getting to the bathroom is an urgent matter. Getting to the fire exit in some cases is a life-or-death matter. And those have to really do their job very, very efficiently. On the other hand, sometimes people will ask me to design a logo for their business or enterprise.

And in those cases, a logo can be more open-ended. It can be in many ways more creative. It can be open to interpretation, people can impose different meanings on it. And I think at the very heart of it indeed is that moment where you make something from nothing. There’s a moment where you sort of have to do the magic bit of alchemy that transmutes all that into something interesting, compelling, and memorable. And that’s actually the moment that all creative people live for. And I think many of them are reluctant sometimes to admit how rarely that moment comes. If that connection really happens three times a year, that’s like a landmark year for me.

And there is a quote from Chuck Close that I’ve heard many people quote, which is “Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work.” And I think that that’s really true. You sort of have to just be ready so that when you kind of encounter that magic moment you’ve got the muscle memory and the experience and the instincts to let you grab that opportunity.

So Bierut and Niemann have given us some views from the creator’s side of the commissioning process. What’s a commission look like from the commissioning side? We spoke with Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum, one of the oldest and most prestigious art institutions in the United States.

PASTERNAK: Hi Stephen.

At a museum like the Brooklyn Museum, Pasternak doesn’t get to do much commissioning. But in her previous job, she ran a big public-art group called Creative Time, which did lots of big and audacious commissions. Among the best known: “Tribute in Light,” a 9/11 memorial made up of two shafts of light projected into the night sky.

PASTERNAK: I mean, there were probably altogether about 120 giant lights that had come from Italy. It was new technology. Think about a searchlight but a really mega searchlight. It was actually a very enormous installation. It takes weeks to actually set up the lights. And then you also need volunteer birdwatchers to make sure that birds are safe and that they’re not disoriented and flying into buildings. And there was a lot of stuff that was invisible to the public that had to be realized.

Pasternak had another opportunity for a big commission when she was contacted by the owners of an enormous old building — the former Domino Sugar factory, on the Brooklyn waterfront. It was going to be turned into a park; and the owners thought Creative Time might like to do something with the space before it was time for demolition.

PASTERNAK: I immediately reached out to an artist I’d always wanted to work with, Kara Walker, who was never interested in any of the ideas that I ever presented to her, Grand Central Station, whatever spaces I was working in. And Kara was not so interested. And I said Kara, “Come out and see this space, you don’t live far away. And at the very least you’ll see this incredible historic site.” And it was just about eight inches of molasses on the floor, molasses dripping from the ceilings. It was such an incredibly intense experience, it just activated all of your senses: your sight, your touch. I mean literally, you had to wear big rubber boots when you went in there and they would fall off because they would get stuck in the floor. And the smell, the smell and the heat and the moisture — anyway.

So I thought that the space was so enormous that maybe Kara — we would do a group exhibition. But I wanted to bring Kara there first. And Kara said to me at the end of it: “Well, I want the whole space,” and I just laughed at her. I thought there was no way one artist on the micro-budgets that Creative Time was working on could actually do something that would really work within that space. And the next morning I woke up and I think there were over 60 different proposals that she had sent to me. Literally all these drawings just — she must have stayed up all night long, just one drawing after another. And I loved every single one of them. And I said, “Okay, whichever one you want to do.”

But over the next four or five months, she just kept coming up with more ideas. And finally the idea of the big giant sugar sphinx that she created was that one idea I didn’t understand. I wasn’t really sure what it was or what it meant, but I trusted the artist so much, I said, “If this is the one you want to do, then we’re going to do it.

DUBNER: Kara Walker titled this piece “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby.” She described it as “an homage to the unpaid and overworked artisans who have refined our sweet tastes from the cane fields to the kitchens of the New World, on the occasion of the demolition of Domino Sugar refining plant.” It became a sensation. Did you come to understand it differently or better?

PASTERNAK: Oh yeah. Once I was in the space and I saw the great sugar Sphinx, that if she was standing tall she would have been as tall as the Statue of Liberty. And I realized she was this great symbol of an African woman of great power and vulnerability and strength. And it was just so heartbreaking, so powerful, and now I see it’s about how we don’t see, and we do see black women in all of their beauty and all of their power and all of their courage. Quite frankly, I was in tears over and over again.

So the Sugar Sphinx wasn’t Anne Pasternak’s idea; but she was the commissioner, the facilitator; she had an idea about what kind of artist might respond well to that kind of space. And that, to me at least, seems like a creative act in itself.

PASTERNAK: Well, I guess — that sounds maybe a little narcissistic on my part, but I think maybe that’s true, about having a sense of who are really great artists who say something I believe important about the times in which we live and my desire to want to work with them and being able to pick out what is a good idea. And one of the things I have learned is that artists tend to, like everybody else, like some structure. Sometimes I would turn to artists and say, “Oh, so-and-so, you’re just such a brilliant artist. I’d do anything to work with you. What do you want to do?” And that’s just too open for them.

So let’s say you are not commissioning massive public works of art; let’s say you’re, maybe, a middle manager, in charge of a team that has to produce some creative ideas. Let’s say the team has 10 people on it.

AMABILE: First of all, you want to get rid of five of those 10 people because 10 is too many people to have on a team.

*      *      *

Okay, here’s where we left off. Let’s say you manage a team of 10 employees — maybe they’re marketers or educators or engineers. And your job is to inspire them to think creatively.

AMABILE: Okay.

Teresa Amabile is a social psychologist at the Harvard Business School.

AMABILE: I study motivation, creativity, innovation and inner work life.

Amabile has done a lot of research inside firms to see how creative work actually gets done. So for a team of 10, what’s the best approach? Gather all 10 to brainstorm? Send them all off to come up with ideas on their own? Or maybe some combination?

AMABILE: First of all, you want to get rid of five of those 10 people because 10 is too many people to have on a team. There’s a lot of research on that. Five to seven tends to be the best size to really solve a complex problem. Later on, when you have to implement the solution, obviously can have much larger teams when you need them. So let’s say you’ve got five people. They’re all good. They have skills. You’d probably do best to have them work together initially and talk about the problem and explore that problem and what some different angles might be. Make sure they kind of understand what mountain they’re trying to climb. And then let them go off and individually try to figure out different routes for climbing the mountain. But then bring them back together and have them share their ideas. And ideally they will have that level of trust and openness to each other that they can they can really bring together the best pieces of thinking and you’ll sometimes see solutions emerge that later literally cannot be traced to any one individual, but they were true hybrids of the ideas of multiple individuals.

And what about brainstorming? Is that indeed an effective way to generate good ideas? The practice of brainstorming seems to have originated with an advertising executive named Alex Osborn — he was the “O” in the famous advertising firm BBDO. Osborn wrote about brainstorming in a 1942 book called How to Think Up.

Charlan NEMETH: Popular opinion often is that brainstorming is just sort of sitting around and saying whatever comes to your mind, but it’s not.

That’s Charlan Nemeth, a University of California psychologist who’s studied creativity in organizations.

NEMETH: When Osborn talked about the brainstorming technique, it had four very specific rules to it, and he thought they were very important ways to stop things that tended to get in the way of generating original ideas. And so one of them, for example, was emphasizing quantity — namely, you just go for as many ideas as you can, and don’t stop and analyze whether they’re good or not en route. The notion that you should build on others ideas. But the one I paid attention to, and that’s the one which many people have treated as the critical rule, was “do not criticize the ideas of others.” And that has an intuitive plausibility, because you think if someone’s going to criticize you, you think, “I’ll just shut down. I’m not going to say anything.”

As a scholar, Nemeth is particularly interested in the role of dissent in organizations. So this cardinal rule of brainstorming — no dissent, essentially — intrigued her. She designed an experiment to test whether the criticism that Osborn warned against actually does shut down creativity in a group.

NEMETH: What we did is we essentially changed that one rule and in one condition we had the regular rules, “do not criticize,” and in the other one we basically encourage them to debate, even criticize, the ideas of others. They thought that there would be no creativity, it would be worse than no rules at all. And the reverse was the case. When you permit debate, even criticism, you open that up. There were more ideas, and they were better quality ideas, when you welcomed this criticism and debate.

Nemeth also investigated the role of dissent in jury deliberations.

NEMETH: As I listened to these tapes over, and over, and over, and over again, what became clear is that when there was a dissenting viewpoint, particularly one that persisted, is that the nature of the deliberation was just much better. They considered more evidence, they considered more ways of looking at the same so-called facts, they were more inclined to look at the downside as opposed to the upside of a particular position that someone was espousing, and they evidenced all the things that really define good decision-making and that, you kind of hope you can train people to do, and dissent was doing that.

Nemeth argues that dissent is valuable in a decision-making process even when the dissenter turns out to be demonstrably wrong.

NEMETH: Because even when it’s wrong, it actually improves the quality of thought in decision-making. Dissent isn’t important for the information that it gives. It’s important because it challenges your thinking. When you’re interacting with someone who honestly believes something very different than yourself, and they’re willing to persist, and to even pay a price, you can’t easily dismiss them. Their challenge gets you to reassess your own position

Charlan Nemeth has a name for this kind of dissenter: “troublemaker.” Her most recent book is called In Defense of Troublemakers. A lot of the creatives we’ve been interviewing for this series embrace the troublemaker title; for some, it seems to be their animating principle. Like the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. He grew up in a labor camp, his family having been sent into exile because of his father’s poetry. Weiwei has been one of his generation’s most outspoken critics of China; he’s been arrested, beaten, detained — and finally gained his own sort of exile, a much more comfortable one than his father’s. He now lives in Berlin, which is where we spoke with him.

Ai WEIWEI: So I always want to break the borders and to open a new area, even walking to could be dangerous or difficult areas. So I was born like this. Someone called it contrarian. You don’t want to follow the rules that much.

DUBNER: You’ve always been that way.

WEIWEI: Since I was born I would be seen as a son of the — enemy of the people. They see you are dangerous. They see you are someone who could have a potential to make big trouble.

DUBNER: They were right.

WEIWEI: They’re perfectly right. But I try to live up to that kind of conditions, too. I can — I am not satisfied with what I did.

DUBNER: Your brother, is he a troublemaker like you or no?

WEIWEI: No, no. I’m their — they’re often worried about one troublemaker in every family.

But when I asked Weiwei about where his ideas come from … he didn’t have much to say.

WEIWEI: It only comes to me when interviews like this come. Yeah, I don’t really think that much about it.

Maybe that’s because he’s been dissenting since he was a young child; it may be that troublemaking, and the idea generation that comes along with it, are by now second nature. There was another artist I visited in Berlin; her name is Jorinde Voigt.

Jorinde VOIGT: Hello.

DUBNER: Hey. Hi. Stephen. Nice to meet you.

VOIGT: Good Morning. Jorinde. Come in.

DUBNER: How do you do? Yeah.

VOIGT: So let’s go that way.

DUBNER: Danke.

VOIGT: You’re welcome.

Voigt is a star on the German art scene. Her work combines painting, drawing, collage, and more — including musical and scientific notation. For years she was a serious musician and she’s got a mathematical streak too. Her pieces are breathtakingly original, and engaging. I wanted to know where her ideas originate, so I started by asking about her daily routine.

VOIGT: On a typical day I get up at 5:00 a.m. And then I for one hour I sit in my kitchen and in my garden and drink coffee and think about the day, the upcoming day. Then, I wake up my son and help him getting up, get dressed, get breakfast.

DUBNER: How old is he?

VOIGT: Seven. Almost. By 7:30 a.m. we leave the house. I bring him to school and then I drive down to the studio, so I’m shortly before 8:00 a.m. at the studio.

DUBNER: So can we go back to that hour in the morning when you just sit and think about the day?

VOIGT: Yeah.

DUBNER: Are you thinking about how to execute your ideas, or are you trying to think about what ideas you’ll work on?

VOIGT: No it’s more, it’s being awake but also waiting for myself, and observing myself and observing the pictures which come up in me. And then, also questioning them, a riddle, like that. It’s like I get riddles from — I always have pictures or abstractions in my head. I wake up with that. And then I have to find out why, and what it is, and how which questions I can ask, or how, what kind of actions, I could do to find out what it is.

DUBNER: So, where did those images come from?

VOIGT: I can only guess. I think they are kind of language, like a kind of communication from the intuition, I guess.

DUBNER: Do you think everyone could have such images, or do you feel that’s a talent of yours?

VOIGT: I haven’t had this always. When it started, that I have it, I was very irritated, and I thought something is wrong with me. But then friends told me just it let go, don’t be afraid. And then I just accepted it. And then it started to be really interesting.

Maira KALMAN: You really have to listen very strongly to those moments.

That’s the painter and illustrator Maira Kalman. She too relies on her subconscious for ideas.

KALMAN: I think that plays an incredible role. And it’s a little bit inexplicable. It’s kind of the instinct and intuition, what you feel in your gut that nobody can explain, that you don’t know where it came from. An idea that appears from nowhere while you’re taking a shower or wandering down the street.

Kalman’s work is, on the surface, whimsical: old-world ladies in plumed hats; clever dogs with knowing eyes; but beneath the whimsy there’s a reservoir of deeper feeling.

KALMAN: Coming upon things, stumbling upon things — and that’s a very big part of my day, and my work is autobiographical, and it’s really about what happens to me. And I don’t know what’s going to happen during the day, but I’m keenly aware that many things might happen and do happen that will delight me and amaze me and enter into my work. Whether it’s somebody that I see on the street or some kind of meeting of someone or the chance of things —

DUBNER: Well, it sounds like you’re trying to, as they say, create your own luck. You’re trying to create your own serendipity, which is a good way to be.

KALMAN: Yeah, and I don’t want to try.

DUBNER: So that sounds like a tricky balance to strike, though: you want to be open and observant and curious, but you don’t want to try too hard to be open, observing and curious.

KALMAN: No, you can’t do that, you’d fall down and never get up again. You just have to kind of allow that it’s going to happen, and say, that’s great.

So Maira Kalman gets her ideas from serendipitous encounters that she prepares herself to receive — but not too much preparation. Jorinde Voigt gets her ideas from images that present themselves in the early morning. I recently spoke with someone who needs to come up with multiple ideas every day.

Conan O’BRIEN: Hello, I’m Conan O’Brien and I am theoretically an entertainer.

DUBNER: Among your entertainment products are what at the moment?

O’BRIEN: I have a podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend. And I also just finished an 18-city live tour that healed the nation And I have a program on T.B.S. at 11 p.m. called Conan. Don’t ask me how I came up with the name. It was — it’s a long story. And it involves narcissism.

O’Brien has been hosting a late-night show since the early 1990s. Before that, he was a comedy writer — for The Simpsons and one season on Saturday Night Live. In every case, there’s a writer’s room: a bunch of people, throwing around ideas, shooting down most of them and building up the good ones. Coming up with ideas is a job; really, it is the job. Like all jobs, it can get a little routine. But lately, O’Brien’s been stretching himself — with a travel series called Conan Without Borders.

O’BRIEN: There was a period of time when President Obama was interested in friendlier relations with Cuba. And we saw this opportunity to jump in there, and I don’t think a late-night host had been to Cuba since Jack Paar. And our head writer Mike Sweeney said, “What if we went to Cuba?” And the minute I — when I do hear a good idea, I — it’s almost like an intuitive “yes.” Not only “let’s go” but “let’s go right now.” So we went with very little preparation.

O’BRIEN: Over here, I guess that’s Jesus on the left, is that correct?

RESTAURANT OWNER: Yes, you’re right. That’s Cristo.

O’BRIEN: Jesús.

RESTAURANT OWNER: And you know who’s this guy?

O’BRIEN: Uh.

RESTAURANT OWNER: That’s Karl Marx.

O’BRIEN: Wait, Jesus Christ and this is Karl Marx?

RESTAURANT OWNER: Yes, yeah.

O’BRIEN: That’s incredible. Because I don’t think Marx was a big fan of religion

O’BRIEN: And I think what you can see there is me really in the act of discovering things, discovering this place I’d never been to before, discovering these people. As a comedian I’m probably funniest when I’m reacting in the moment. And that’s where I’m most comfortable. I like to kind of know — not know what’s going to go on. And it’s this crazy yin-yang of my career, where I am very cerebral. And I started my career as a writer, but I really — what I probably love most is being out of control and unprepared. So when you go to a foreign country, you’re often forced into situations where you can’t really know what’s going to happen.

I think as a comedian and as a personality I have a lot of humility, and it’s well-earned. Some comics, they come from a place of high status so they — they’re telling us and lecturing us about what the right way to think is. I think I come from the opposite side of things, which is I like to be in situations where I’m not in the power position, and where the other person has the authority. So if I’m in Cuba and I’m literally in a factory where they roll cigars all day, I will sit with one of the women and she will try and teach me, and I’ll be incompetent, and she gets the laugh. She’s in the high-status position and that’s the kind of —It’s not in my bones to want to go to countries and laugh at them.

So Conan O’Brien gets fresh ideas by going to Cuba, or Israel, or Haiti. The musician and writer Rosanne Cash sometimes gets her ideas in museums.

Rosanne CASH: Problems can be inspiring. If I can’t work something out in my life, I take it to language. I take it to melody. And sometimes, well, it all can be going to the Met and standing in front of that painting of Joan of Arc. That painting has inspired me. Sometimes they come out of nowhere, you think, and then it turns out that they came from the future. And I call those songs postcards from the future.

Can we have an example?

CASH: My song “Black Cadillac.” I wrote this song, and it was about a funeral and death, and as soon as I wrote it I said to myself, “Oh no.” It’s like I knew. I wrote it in March. And my stepmother died in May and then my dad died in September.

Her dad was the country-music legend Johnny Cash.

CASH: Actually, before my dad died that year, I wrote a song called “September When It Comes.” I wrote the lyrics and then he died in September. And there have been other times. I’m not saying that I’m prescient or that it’s some kind of new-age peek into the future. But I’ve always thought that creativity happens in a non-linear way. Creativity is a lot of moving parts and you don’t necessarily go from A to B in a direct line. You might go to H and Z first, and then come back.

Jennifer EGAN: What I love about watching baseball is that I get a lot of ideas for fiction while doing it.

That’s the novelist Jennifer Egan. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Visit From the Goon Squad, a sharp and spiky novel with multiple narrators. And which has absolutely nothing to do with baseball. But Egan has kids. So she started going to baseball games.

EGAN: We were just at the Beloit Snappers last week. Baseball is — I was just reading, actually, about how there’s this wish to speed up baseball — which I think is, I mean in my humble, very uneducated opinion, a terrible idea because the whole point of baseball is that it’s slow. And it’s great people watching, watching baseball all over the country. Just watching the people who go to the games. It’s totally fascinating.

Just to be clear: baseball is not Egan’s only source of ideas for her writing.

EGAN: I try to imbibe material that feels interesting to me and then I’m sort of trusting to some unconscious part of me to respond to that in a way that will hopefully be fresh. So I guess I’m sort of trusting to both my unconscious in the sense of just leading me through a story, leading me through characters first and then a story, and then my conscious mind to recognize what feels familiar and what doesn’t. The way I think about the relationship of my work to that other work is as a conversation. I’ll think, okay, this book is in conversation with these other books. A Visit from the Goon Squad, looking back, is really in a conversation with certainly In Search of Lost Time, also serialized television like The Sopranos, which had a big impact on me, and frankly concept albums that I grew up on like Quadrophenia, Ziggy Stardust. I mean, beautiful stories told in pieces that sounded very different from each other. So there are all kinds of things that a work can be in conversation with — and should be, really. But ultimately, sheer repetition is not only not desirable; it is absolutely the thing that I can’t tolerate from myself.

People-watching at minor-league baseball games. Museum visits or putting yourself in strange surroundings. All sorts of ways to generate ideas, or let ideas come to you. Or maybe you like to ask the really big questions, like “what is the underlying geometry of the universe?” That’s what got the astrophysicist Margaret Geller going. The same sort of question can also work for a poet.

Tracy K. SMITH: I am Tracy K. Smith.

Smith is the current Poet Laureate of the United States. Her father was an optical engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. Smith’s best-known poetry collection is called Life on Mars.

SMITH: I usually have a large — I mean, a particular question in mind. Maybe it isn’t, “What is the answer to this thing?” but: “Why do we do this to one another? Why is it so hard to really love another person — not just strangers but the people we love? Why is it so hard to keep loving them sometimes? Why is it so hard to love ourselves?” Those kinds of questions. You can’t get an answer to that, but it can certainly set you in motion. And then the way I often tend to write is to sort of speculate, “What if?” I mean, my book Life on Mars is really just a bunch of hypothetical questions: “What if the universe is like this? What if it’s like that?” I found that kind of pointing those questions back down at Earth can be useful in thinking about the real world, the social or the political world.

Saul PERLMUTTER: I was one of those kids who just always wanted to know how the world worked. See the owner’s manual. How does this whole operation happen?

That’s Saul Perlmutter, who also wanted to ask big questions.

PERLMUTTER: And I guess the places that looked like they were asking those kinds of questions were physics and philosophy. And at the beginning I always thought that I might study the two of them, until I discovered of course that either one of them would take up all your time.

And which did he choose?

PERLMUTTER: I’m a professor of physics and I study cosmology.

Perlmutter’s at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. In 2011, he won a Nobel Prize for helping to discover, contra the belief of earlier physicists, that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. One possible explanation for this acceleration? Dark energy, a largely unknown force that may make up 70 percent of the universe. And this is meaningful to know … why?

PERLMUTTER: So this is one of these really weird aspects, I think, of basic science, that almost every time we’ve learned something really deep about how the world works, it’s ended up not only providing us with a huge philosophical satisfaction, but somehow it makes us more capable. We seem to be able to do things differently as we learn these odd ways in which the world is actually built and constructed. I mean, a good example of this is Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. It was talking about things like what happens when clocks travel near the speed of light.

I mean we’re never going to get one of our clocks — well, at least as far as we know — we’re not going have any of our clocks near the speed of light. And it seems like these were the most abstract concepts that you could have been working with. And yet, every cell phone in our pocket that uses G.P.S. all those measurements are being corrected by what we learned from Einstein’s theory of relativity, because of those explorations. And you could never have guessed it. Right now, we cannot think of anything that dark energy is likely to affect except our poetic vision of the world.

DUBNER: Doesn’t — I mean especially for someone who started out thinking about studying philosophy, I’m just curious whether that fact alone, that dark energy comprises, you say, roughly 70 percent of our universe, and we have no idea what it is. Isn’t that — does that present you with a bit of a, if not an existential dilemma, at least a kind of mind-scrambling question that is a little unsatisfying to go to bed every night not knowing what it is?

PERLMUTTER: Well —

DUBNER: I mean, it didn’t bother me until you told me, because I didn’t know anything about it. But now I feel like, wait a minute: 70 percent, we really don’t know? And you actually know this stuff so I’m curious whether it weighs on you in some way.

PERLMUTTER: I mean, weirdly enough, I think for me it’s one of the real pleasures of life. The idea that there are huge unknowns for us to to explore. A lot of what you do in cosmology is mind-boggling, and you have to enjoy having your mind completely boggled — that just the idea of imagining infinite space is already something that I think we just have a very hard time getting our heads around. And then having an infinite space expand so that it’s not that it’s expanding into anything. It’s just that there is more distance between everything in that space. And that’s bizarre too. And for some of us, that’s just a scary feeling to — I have, one of my siblings doesn’t like to even think about this stuff. It just gives her the willies.

Whereas for me, I just find there’s a real pleasure in feeling like us puny humans working with the bit of the senses that we have and living in this sort of a happy medium somewhere in between the huge and the really really microscopically and subatomic tiny, have been able to use our little senses to figure out stuff that’s happening on this ridiculously big scale. And then on this ridiculously tiny scale. And that the two have something to do with each other. I just find that it makes it feel like we’re right in the mix — in the thick of things, that we’re getting to play with the universe.

DUBNER: I’m convinced now. I love your way of looking at it because you’re right there is a — potentially — downside of that puniness but the way you’ve expressed it, we’re punching way above our weight by being able to even ponder what’s going on so many dimensions beyond. So, that’s encouraging.

I was encouraged by Saul Perlmutter’s ability to somehow blend the incomprehensibly vast and the incomprehensibly tiny into some sort of porridge that feels just right. I was also inspired by something else he talked about: his willingness to have his mind boggled. That’s his route to coming up with creative ideas. As we heard today, there are many routes. Asking big questions, sure, but also paying attention to the tiny, serendipitous details in your world. Keeping an ear out for the dissenting voice — and sometimes being that voice. Figuring out how the limits that are placed on you might actually free up your creative thinking. All of these are good ideas for generating ideas; there’s no formula. But, as we noted earlier: the idea is just the beginning.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica and Stephanie Tam. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, and Zack Lapinski; we had help this week from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Teresa Amabile, psychologist and professor emerita at the Harvard Business School.

Michael Bierut, graphic designer.

Pat Brown, chief executive and founder of Impossible Foods Inc.

Rosanne Cash, singer-songwriter.

James Dyson, inventor, industrial design engineer and founder of the Dyson company.

Jennifer Egan, novelist and journalist.

Margaret Geller, astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Maira Kalman, illustrator, writer, artist, and designer.

Charlan Nemeth, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Christoph Niemann, illustrator.

Conan O’Brien, television host, comedian, and writer.

Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum.

Saul Perlmutter, astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Tracy K. Smith, 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States.

Ai Weiwei, contemporary artist and activist.

RESOURCES

Creativity In Context by Teresa Amabile (Routledge 1996).

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf 2010).

In Defense of Troublemakers by Charlan Nemeth (Basic Books 2018).

EXTRA

“How to Be Creative,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)?,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

The post Where Do Good Ideas Come From? (Ep. 368) appeared first on Freakonomics.

Over 40 percent of the land in the contiguous U.S. is used for cow farming. Can scientists build a more sustainable burger? (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty)

Global demand for beef, chicken, and pork continues to rise. So do concerns about environmental and other costs. Will reconciling these two forces be possible — or, even better, Impossible

?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Let’s begin with a few basic facts. Fact No. 1: a lot of people, all over the world, really like to eat meat — especially beef, pork, and chicken.

Jayson LUSK: If you add them all together, we’re actually higher than we’ve been in recent history.

That’s Jayson Lusk.

LUSK: I’m a professor and head of the agricultural economics department at Purdue University. I study what we eat and why we eat it.

DUBNER: In terms of overall meat consumption per capita in the U.S., how do we rank worldwide?

LUSK: We’re the king of meat eaters. So, compared to almost any other country in the world, we eat more meat per capita.

DUBNER: Even Brazil, Argentina, yes?

LUSK: Yes, and part of that difference is income-based. So, if you took Argentina, Brazil, and adjusted for income, they would probably be consuming more than us, but we happen to be richer, so we eat a little more.

The average American consumes roughly 200 pounds of meat a year. That’s an average. So, let’s say you’re a meat eater and someone in your family is vegetarian: you might be putting away 400 pounds a year. But, in America at least, there aren’t that many vegetarians.

LUSK: I probably have the largest data set of vegetarians of any other researcher that I know.

DUBNER: Really? Why?

LUSK: I’ve been doing a survey of U.S. food consumers every month for about five years, and one of the questions I ask is, “Are you a vegan or a vegetarian?” So, over five years’ time and about 1,000 people a month, I’ve got about 60,000 observations.

DUBNER: Wow. And is this a nationwide data survey?

LUSK: It is. Representative in terms of age and income and education. I’d say on average, you’re looking at about three to five percent of people say “yes” to that question. I’d say there’s a very slight uptick over the last five years.

So, again, a lot of meat-eating in America. What are some other countries that consume a lot of meat? Australia and New Zealand, Israel, Canada, Russia, most European countries. And, increasingly, China.

LUSK: One of the things we know is that when consumers get a little more income in their pocket, one of the first things they do is want to add high-value proteins to their diets.

DUBNER: What is the relationship generally between G.D.P. and meat consumption?

LUSK: Positive, although sort of diminishing returns, so as you get to really high income levels, it might even tail off a little bit. But certainly at the lower end of that spectrum, as a country grows and adds more G.D.P., you start to see some pretty rapid increases in meat consumption.

Meat consumption is of course driven by social and religious factors as well; by health concerns, and animal welfare: not everyone agrees that humans should be eating animals at all. That said, we should probably assume that the demand for meat will continue to rise as more of the world keeps getting richer. How’s the supply side doing with this increased demand? Quite well. The meat industry is massive and complicated — and often heavily subsidized. But, long story short, if you go by the availability of meat and especially what consumers pay, this is an economic success story.

LUSK: So prices of almost all of our meat products have declined pretty considerably over the last 60 to 100 years. And the reason is that we have become so much more productive at producing meat. If you look at most of the statistics, like the amount of pork produced per sow. And we’ve taken out a lot of the seasonal variation that we used to see, as these animals have been brought indoors. And you look at poultry production, broiler production: the amount of meat that’s produced per broiler has risen dramatically — almost doubled, say — over the last 50 to 100 years, while also consuming slightly less feed.

That’s due largely to selective breeding and other technologies. The same goes for beef production.

LUSK: We get a lot more meat per animal, for example, on a smaller amount of land.

As you can imagine, people concerned with animal welfare may not celebrate these efficiency improvements. And then there’s the argument that, despite these efficiency improvements, turning animals into food is wildly inefficient.

Pat BROWN: Because the cow didn’t evolve to be meat. That’s the thing.

Pat Brown is a long-time Stanford biomedical researcher who’s done groundbreaking work in genetics.

BROWN: The cow evolved to be a cow and make more cows and not to be eaten by humans. And it’s not very good at making meat.

Meaning: it takes an enormous amount of food and water and other resources to turn a cow or a pig into dinner — much more than plant-based foods. And as Pat Brown sees it, that is not even the worst of it.

BROWN: The most environmentally destructive technology on earth: using animals in food production. Nothing else even comes close.

Not everyone agrees that meat production is the environment’s biggest enemy. What’s not in dispute is that global demand for meat is high and rising. And that the production of meat is resource-intensive and, at the very least, an environmental challenge, with implications for climate change. Pat Brown thinks he has a solution to these problems. He’s started a company—

BROWN: —a company whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology by 2035.

The meat industry, as you can imagine, has other ideas:

Kelly FOGARTY: We want to keep the term “meat” to what is traditionally harvested and raised in the traditional manner.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: everything you always wanted to know about meat, about meatless meat, and where meat meets the future.

*      *      *

What determines which food you put in your mouth every day? There are plainly a lot of factors: personal preference, tradition, geography, on and on.

LUSK: So, take something like horse consumption. It’s almost unheard of to even think about consuming a horse in the United States.

Jayson Lusk again, the agricultural economist.

LUSK: Whereas, you go to Belgium or France, it would be a commonly consumed dish.

But there’s another big factor that determines who eats what: technology. Technology related to how food is grown, preserved, transported. But also: technology that isn’t even related to the food itself. Consider the case of mutton. Mutton is the meat of an adult sheep. The meat of a young sheep is called lamb. I am willing to bet that you have not eaten mutton in the last six months, probably the last six years. Maybe never. But if we were talking 100 years ago? Different story.

LUSK: It’s certainly the case that back in the 1920’s and 30’s that mutton was a much more commonly consumed product.

Mutton was a staple of the American diet; one of the standard items shipped to soldiers during World War II was canned mutton. But shortly after the war, mutton started to disappear. What happened?

LUSK: A sheep is not just meat. These are multi-product species and they’re valuable not just for their meat but for their wool.

Oh yeah, wool. And unlike leather, which can be harvested only once from an animal, you can shear wool from one sheep many times, over many years.

LUSK: So anything that affects the demand for wool is also going to affect the underlying market for the rest of the underlying animal.

And what might affect the demand for wool? How about synthetic substitutes? Nylon, for instance, was created by DuPont in 1935, and became available to the public in 1940. A year later, polyester was invented.

LUSK: So, you know, any time you had new clothing technologies come along, that’s going to affect the underlying demand for sheep and make them less valuable than they would have been otherwise.

So an increase in synthetic fabrics led to a shrinking demand for wool — which meant that all those sheep that had been kept around for shearing no longer needed to be kept around. Also, wool subsidies were repealed. And America’s sheep flock drastically shrank: from a high of 56 million in 1942 to barely 5 million today.

LUSK: It is amazing. I’ve worked at several agricultural universities across the U.S. now, and often the largest sheep herds in those states are at the university research farms.

And fewer sheep meant less mutton for dinner. Is it possible Americans would have stopped eating mutton without the rise of synthetic fabrics? Absolutely: if you ask a room full of meat-eaters to name their favorite meat, I doubt one of them will say “mutton.” Still, this is just one example of how technology can have a big effect on the meat we eat. And if you talk to certain people, it’s easy to believe that we’re on the verge of a similar but much larger technological shift.

BROWN: My name is Pat Brown. I’m currently the CEO and founder of Impossible Foods, whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology.

Brown grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., as well as Paris and Taipei — his father worked for the C.I.A. He studied to be a pediatrician and in fact completed his medical residency, but he switched to biochemistry research.

BROWN: I had the best job in the world at Stanford. My job was basically to discover and invent things and follow my curiosity.

Brown did this for many years and was considered a world-class researcher. One of his breakthroughs was a new tool for genetic mapping; it’s called the D.N.A. microarray—

BROWN: —that lets you read all the words that the cell is using and effectively kind of start to learn the vocabulary, learn how the genome writes the life story of a cell, or something like that. It also has practical applications, because — what it’s doing, in a sort of a deterministic way, specifies the potential of that cell, or if it’s a cancer cell.

Some people think the DNA microarray will win Pat Brown a Nobel Prize. When I bring this up, he just shakes his head and smiles. It’s clear that his research was a deep passion.

BROWN: For me, this was the dream job, it was like in the Renaissance, having the Medicis as patrons or something like that.

But after many years, Brown wanted a change. He was in his mid-50’s; he took a sabbatical to figure out his next move.

BROWN: It started out with stepping back from the work I was doing and asking myself, “What’s the most important thing I could do? What could I do that would have the biggest positive impact on the world?” And looking at what are the biggest unsolved problems in the world? I came relatively quickly to the conclusion that the use of animals as a food-production technology, is by far. And I could give you endless reasons why that’s true, but it is absolutely true. By far the most environmentally destructive thing that humans do.

There is indeed a great deal of evidence for this argument across the entire environmental spectrum. The agricultural historian James McWilliams, in a book called Just Food, argues that “every environmental problem related to contemporary agriculture … ends up having its deepest roots in meat production: monocropping, excessive applications of nitrogen fertilizer, addiction to insecticides, rain-forest depletion, land degradation, topsoil runoff, declining water supplies, even global warming — all these problems would be considerably less severe” if people ate meat “rarely, if ever.”

LUSK: You know, there’s no doubt that meat production has environmental consequences. To suggest that it’s the most damaging environmental thing we do is, I think, a pretty extreme overstatement.

But what about the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with raising meat — especially in the U.S., which is the world’s largest beef producer?

LUSK: Our own E.P.A. — Environmental Protection Agency — suggests that all of livestock contributes about 3 percent of our total greenhouse-gas emissions. So, I mean, 3 percent is not nothing, but it’s not the major contributor that we see. That number, I should say, is much higher in many other parts of the world. So the carbon impacts per pound produced are so much smaller here than a lot of the world that when you tell people, “the way to reduce carbon emissions is to intensify animal production,” that’s not a story a lot of people like to hear.

DUBNER: Because why not, it sounds like it’s against animal welfare?

LUSK: Well, two reasons: Exactly, one is there are concerns about animal welfare, particularly when you’re talking about broiler chickens, or hogs — less so about cattle — and the other one is, there are concerns about when you concentrate a lot of animals in one place you can get all this waste in a location, that you have to think about creative ways to deal with that don’t have some significant environmental problems.

DUBNER: So, the E.P.A. number, livestock contributing three percent, does that include the entire production chain, though? Because, some of the numbers that I see from environmental activists is much, much higher than that.

LUSK: The U.N. estimate that you often hear from — originally was created in this report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” is something around 19 percent. But that 19 percent, roughly, number, is a global number. Actually, there was a study that came out pointing out some flaws in that, so they reduced it somewhat.

In any case, there is a growing concern in many quarters over the externalities of meat production.

LUSK: Over the last 5–10 years, there’s been a lot of negative publicity — stories about environmental impacts, about carbon emissions, about animal welfare. And if you just look at the news stories, you would think, “Boy, people must be really cutting back, given the sort of frightful stories that you see on the front pages of the newspapers.” But if you look at the data itself, demand looks fairly stable. And that suggests to me it’s hard to change people’s preference on this.

There’s something about meat consumption. Some people would argue that we’re evolved to like meat, that it’s a protein-, vitamin-packed, tasty punch that we’ve grown to enjoy as a species. There are some people that even argue that it’s one of the reasons we became as smart as we did, the vitamins and nutrients that were in that meat allowed our brains to develop in certain ways that it might have not otherwise.

Pat Brown saw that same strong preference for meat when he decided that the number-one scientific problem to solve was replacing animals as food.

BROWN: And it’s a problem that nobody was working on in any serious way. Because everybody recognized that most people in the world, including most environmental scientists and people who care about this stuff, love the foods we get from animals so much that they can’t imagine giving those up.

Brown himself was a longtime vegan.

BROWN: I haven’t eaten meat for decades, and that’s just a personal choice that I made long before I realized the destructive impact of that industry. That was a choice I made for other reasons. And it wasn’t something that I felt like I was in a position to tell other people to do. And I still don’t feel like there’s any value in doing that.

Brown makes an interesting point here. Many of us, when we feel strongly about something — an environmental issue or a social or economic issue — we’re inclined to put forth a moral argument. A moral argument would appear to be persuasive evidence of the highest order: you should do this thing because it’s the right thing to do. But there’s a ton of research showing that moral arguments are generally ineffective; people may smile at you, and nod; but they won’t change their behavior. That’s what Brown realized about meat.

BROWN: The basic problem is that people are not going to stop wanting these foods. And the only way we’re going to solve it is not by asking them to meet you halfway and give them a substandard product that doesn’t deliver what they know they want from meat or fish or anything like that. The only way to do it is, you have to say, “We’re going to do the much harder thing,” which is we’re going to figure out how to make meat that’s not just as delicious as the meat we get from animals, it’s more delicious and better nutritionally and more affordable and so forth.

In other words: a marginal improvement on the standard veggie burger would not do.

BROWN: It’s been tried. It just doesn’t work. It’s a waste of effort.

So Brown start fooling around in his lab.

BROWN: Doing some kind of micro experiments just to convince myself in a way that this was doable.

Those early experiments were fairly encouraging.

BROWN: I felt like, okay, there’s a bunch of things I thought could be useful, and then I felt like I could just go in with a little bit more confidence to talk to the investors.

“The investors” meaning venture capitalists. Remember, Brown’s at Stanford, which is next door to the biggest pile of venture capital in the history of the world.

BROWN: And basically my pitch them was very naive from a fundraising standpoint, in the sense that basically I mostly just told them about how there’s this absolutely critical environmental disaster that needs to be solved and—

DUBNER: And they’re probably expecting to hear something now about carbon capture, or—

BROWN: Yeah, that’s the thing. And most people still are. So I just told these guys, “Look, this is an environmental disaster. No one’s doing anything about it. I’m going to solve it for you.”

So how does the almost-pediatrician-who-became-a-freewheeling-biochemist build a better meat from the ground up? That amazing story after the break:

BROWN: Okay, bingo, this is how we’re going to do it.

*      *      *

It’s estimated that more than half of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with all animal agriculture comes from cows.

LUSK: And that is due to the fact that beef are ruminant animals.

The Purdue economist Jayson Lusk again.

LUSK: Their stomachs produce methane. It comes out the front end, not the back, as a lot of people think. And as a consequence — we look at carbon consequences — it’s mainly beef that people focus on, not pork or chicken, because they don’t have the same kind of digestive systems.

There has been progress in this area. For instance, it turns out that adding seaweed to cattle feed drastically reduces their methane output. But the scientist Pat Brown is looking for a much bigger change to the animal-agriculture industry.

BROWN: If I could snap my fingers and make that industry disappear right now — which I would do, if I could, and it would be a great thing for the world.

It is very unlikely to disappear any time soon; it is a trillion-dollar global industry, supported in many places by government subsidies, selling a product that billions of people consume once, twice, even three times a day. Pat Brown’s desire would seem to be an impossible one; the company he founded is called Impossible Foods. It’s essentially a tech startup, and it’s raised nearly $400 million to date in venture capital.

BROWN: So, we’ve only been in existence for about seven years and we have about 300 people. We started by basically building a team of some of the best scientists in the world to study how meat works, basically. And by that, I mean to really understand at a basic level the way, in my previous life, when I was a biomedical scientist, we might be studying how, you know, a normal cell of this particular kind becomes a cancer cell, understanding the basic biochemical mechanisms.

In this case, what we wanted to understand was: what are the basic biochemical mechanisms that account for the unique flavor chemistry and the flavor behavior and aromas and textures and juiciness and all those qualities that consumers value in meat? And we spent about 2.5 years just doing basic research, trying to answer that question, before we really started working on a product. And then decided for strategic reasons that our first product would be raw ground beef made entirely from plants.

DUBNER: Because burger is what people want?

BROWN: Well, there’s a lot of reasons why I think it was a good strategic choice: the largest single category of meat in the U.S., it’s probably the most iconic kind of meat in the U.S., it seemed like the ideal vehicle for communicating to consumers that delicious meat doesn’t have to come from animals, because it’s sort of the uber-meat for a lot of people.

DUBNER: Uber, lower-case “u.”

BROWN: With a lower-case, yes.

DUBNER: People are not hailing burgers, riding them around?

BROWN: No, thank God. And beef production is the most environmentally destructive segment of the animal agriculture industry. So, from an impact standpoint, it made sense as a choice.

So Pat Brown set about repurposing the scientific wisdom he’d accrued over a long, fruitful career in biomedicine. A career that may improve the health and well-being of countless millions. And now he got to work on a truly earth-shaking project: building a better burger. A burger that doesn’t come from a cow. An Impossible burger. So how did that work? What ingredients do you put in an Impossible burger?

BROWN: That’s an interesting aspect about the science, which is that we didn’t look for, “What are the precisely specific choices of ingredients that would work?” We studied, “What are the biochemical properties we need from the set of ingredients?” And then we did a survey of things available from the plant world that matched those biophysical properties of which there were choices.

So what are the main components of this burger?

BROWN: I can tell you what it’s made of right now. What it’s made of right now is different from how it was made two years ago, and that was different from how it was made two and half years ago and the next version we’re going to launch is a quite different set of ingredients.

We first interviewed Brown several months ago. The main ingredients at the time included:

BROWN: A protein from wheat; a protein from potatoes — not a starch from potatoes, but a protein from potatoes, it’s a byproduct of starch production. Coconut oil is the major fat source. And then we have a bunch of other small molecules, but they’re all familiar things: amino acids, vitamins, sugars. Nutrients.

But all these ingredients did not make Pat Brown’s plant-based hamburger meat taste or act or look like hamburger meat. It was still missing a critical component. A component called heme.

BROWN: Heme is found in essentially every living thing and heme in plants and human animals is the exact same molecule, okay? It’s just one of the most ubiquitous and fundamental molecules in life on Earth, period. The system that burns calories to produce energy uses heme as an essential component, and it’s what carries oxygen in your blood. And it’s what makes your blood red.

And none of this we discovered — this has been known for a long time and — so animals have a lot more heme than plants. And it’s that very high concentration of heme that accounts for the unique flavors of meat that you would recognize something as meat. It’s the overwhelmingly dominant factor in making the unique taste of meat and fish.

DUBNER: Is it involved in texture and mouthfeel and all that as well, or just taste?

BROWN: Just taste. Texture and mouthfeel are really important and there’s a whole other set of research around that. Super important — it kind of gets short shrift, because people think of the flavor as sort of the most dramatic thing about meat. But you have to get that other stuff right, too.

Brown and his team of scientists, after a couple years of research and experimentation, were getting a lot of that stuff right. But without heme — a lot of heme — their meatless meat would never resemble meat.

BROWN: So there is one component of a certain kind of plant that has a high concentration of heme, and that is in plants that fix nitrogen, that take nitrogen from the air and turn it into fertilizer. They have a structure called the root nodule, where the nitrogen fixation takes place and for reasons that are too complicated to explain right now they, that has a high concentration of heme and I just happened to know this from way back.

And if you slice open the root nodules of one of these plants:

BROWN: They have such a high concentration of heme that they look like a freshly cut steak, okay? And I did a calculation about the concentration of that stuff — soy leghemoglobin is the protein, which is virtually identical to the heme protein in muscle tissue, which is called myoglobin — that there was enough leghemoglobin in the root nodules of the U.S. soybean crop to replace all the heme in all the meat consumed in the U.S. Okay? So, I thought, “Genius, okay. We’ll just go out and harvest all these root nodules from the U.S. soybean crop and we’ll get this stuff practically for free.” Well, so I raised money for the company and we spent half the money trying to figure out how to harvest these root nodules from soybean plants, only basically to finally convince ourselves it was a terrible idea.

But if you’re a veteran scientist like Brown, a little failure is not so off-putting.

BROWN: You know you’re going to be doing things that are pushing the limits and trying entirely new things and a lot of them are going to fail. And if you don’t have a high tolerance for that and realize that basically, the way you do really really important, cool stuff is by trying a lot of things and not punishing yourself for the failures, but just celebrating the successes, you know, you’re not going to accomplish as much.

And the idea of buying up all the root nodules of the U.S. soybean crop wasn’t a complete failure.

BROWN: I mean, we got enough that we could do experiments to prove that it really was a magic ingredient for flavor. But then we had to start all over, and then what we did was: we said, ”Okay, we’re going to have to engineer a microorganism to produce gobs of this heme protein. Okay”? And since now we weren’t bound by any natural source, we looked at three dozen different heme proteins, everything from, you know, paramecium to barley to Hell’s Gate bacteria, which is like this —

DUBNER: That’s a plant? Hell’s Gate?

BROWN: It’s a bacteria that lives in deep sea vents near New Zealand that survive with temperatures above the boiling point of water that we mostly just looked at for fun, but funny thing about that, the reason we rejected it is that it’s so heat-stable that you can cook a burger to cooking temperature and it still stays bright red, because it doesn’t unfold. But anyway — and then we pick the best one, which turned out to be, just coincidentally, soy leghemoglobin, which is the one we were going after—

DUBNER: So your terrible idea was actually pretty good.

BROWN: It wasn’t really a brilliant idea, it accidentally turned out to be the right choice.

Through the magic of modern plant engineering, Pat Brown’s team began creating massive stocks of heme. And that heme would help catapult the Impossible burger well beyond the realm of the standard veggie burger — the mostly unloved veggie burger, we should say. The Impossible Burger looks like hamburger meat — when it’s raw and when it’s cooked. It behaves like hamburger meat. Most important, it tastes like hamburger meat.

Alison CRAIGLOW: I would like the American with an Impossible Burger.

WAITER: And how would you like that cooked?

CRAIGLOW: Oh, I didn’t realize — I’ll have it medium … medium. Is it pink in the middle when it’s … it is?

The Freakonomics Radio team recently ate some Impossible burgers in a restaurant near Times Square.

Zack LAPINSKI: I mean, I actually can’t taste the diff —

CRAIGLOW: It tastes like a burger

Ryan KELLY: Good day for the Impossible Burger

Greg RIPPIN: Yeah, approved by Freakonomics.

Their meal happened to coincide with the release of Impossible Burger 2.0 — an updated recipe that uses a soy protein instead of a wheat protein and has a few more tweaks: less salt, sunflower oil to cut the coconut oil, and no more xanthan gum and konjac gum. In my own tasting experience: Impossible Burger 1.0 was really good but a little slushy; 2.0 was burger-tastic.

These are of course our subjective observations. Here’s some actual evidence: Impossible Burgers are already being served in roughly 5,000 locations, primarily in the U.S. but also Hong Kong and Macau. These include very high-end restaurants in New York and California as well as fast-food chains like Umami Burger and even White Castle. This year, Impossible plans to start selling its burger meat in grocery stores.

BROWN: We’ve grown in terms of our sales and revenue about 30-fold in the past year. And our goal is to completely replace animal as a food technology by 2035. That means we have to approximately double in size and impact every year for the next 18 years.

DUBNER: Are we to understand that you are taking aim at pigs and chickens and fish as well?

BROWN: Yes, of course. So when we first started out, we were working on a technology platform and sort of the know-how about how meat works in general; we were working on understanding dairy products and cheeses and stuff like that. And then we decided, okay, we have to pick one product to launch with, and then we have to, from a commercialization standpoint, just go all in on it for a while.

DUBNER: As the scientist, or as a scientist, were you reluctant to kind of narrow yourself for that commercial interest, or did you appreciate that this is the way in this world things actually happen?

BROWN: Both. I mean, let’s put it this way: I would like to be able to pursue all these things in parallel, and if I had the resources I would. But if we launched another product right now, we’d just be competing against ourselves for resources for commercialization, so just doesn’t make any sense.

We put out an episode not long ago called “Two (Totally Opposite) Ways to Save the Planet.” It featured the science journalist Charles Mann.

MANN: How are we going to deal with climate change? There have been two ways that have been suggested, overarching ways, that represent, if you like, poles on a continuum. And they’ve been fighting with each other for decades.

The two poles are represented by what Mann calls, in his latest book, The Wizard and the Prophet. The prophet sees environmental destruction as a problem best addressed by restoring nature to its natural state. The wizard, meanwhile, believes that technology can address environmental dangers. This is, of course, a typology, a shorthand; a prophet doesn’t necessarily fear technology any more than a wizard fears nature. That said: if there were ever an embodiment of the wizard-prophet hybrid, a person driven by idealism and pragmatism in equal measure, I’d say it’s Pat Brown. Which means his invention has the capacity to upset people all across the spectrum.

The consumers and activists who might cheer a meatless meat are often the same sort of people who are anti-G.M.O. — genetically modified organisms. And the Impossible Burger would not have been possible without its genetically modified heme — which, by the way, the F.D.A. recently declared safe, after challenges from environmental groups like Friends of the Earth. Another group that might object to Impossible Foods? The meat industry. You know, the ones who use actual animals to raise food.

FOGARTY: My name is Kelly Fogarty and I serve as the executive vice president for the United States Cattlemen’s Association. And I am a fifth- generation beef cattle rancher here in Oakdale, California.

DUBNER: I’m just curious, as a woman, do you find yourself ever wishing the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association would change their name or are you okay with it?

FOGARTY: You know, it’s funny you mention that. There’s always a little bit of a notion there in the back of my mind of, you know, of course being in the industry for so long. I take it as representing all of the livestock industry. But you know, definitely having a special nod to all the female ranchers out there would be nice to have as well.

DUBNER: And what is the primary difference between the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association?

FOGARTY: As the United States Cattlemen’s Association, we are made up primarily of cattle producers. So your family ranches. You know, cow-calf operations run by producers and kind of for producers is what U.S.C.A. was built on. Whereas National Cattlemen’s Beef Association does include some more of packer influences as well as you know some of the processing facilities as well.

DUBNER: Can you just talk generally for a moment: how big of a threat does the beef industry see from alternative, “meat”?

FOGARTY: So from our end you know, in looking at the “meat” — and I appreciate you using those quotes around that term — from our end, we’re not so much seeing it as a threat to our product. What we are really looking at is not a limit on consumer choice or trying to back one product out of the market. It’s really to make sure that we’re keeping the information out there accurate and that what is available to consumers and what is being shown to consumers on labels is accurate to what the product actually is.

In 2018, Fogarty’s organization filed a petition with the U.S.D.A. to prevent products from being labeled as “beef” or “meat” unless they come from a cow.

DUBNER: Does that mean that your organization thinks that consumers are confused by labeling? Is that the primary objection?

FOGARTY: So the primary objection from the United Cattlemen’s Association is that we want to keep the term “meat” to what is traditionally harvested and raised in the traditional manner. And so when we see the term “meat” being put on these products that is not derived from that definition, what our producers came to us and really wanted us to act on was what we saw happened in other industries, specifically when you look at the dairy industry and where the term “milk” has now been used.

“Almond milk,” for instance. Which comes from almonds, not animals. Which led the National Milk Producers Federation to argue that it should not be sold as “almond milk.” The FDA agreed; its commissioner pointed out that “an almond doesn’t lactate.” There are important differences between so-called “milk” that doesn’t come from animals and so-called “meat” that doesn’t come from animals. Almond milk has very different nutritional content than cow’s milk; the Impossible Burger, meanwhile, has a similar nutritional profile to hamburger — including the iron content, which vegans can have trouble getting enough of. That’s another reason why Kelly Fogarty and the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association might not want the Impossible Burger to be labeled “meat.”

DUBNER: I am just curious about the mental state of your industry because I was looking at your Facebook page and one post the other day led with the following: “Eat or be eaten. Be at the table or on the menu. Fight or be forgotten.” So that sounds — it would make me believe that the future of meat is one in which cattle ranchers feel a little bit like an endangered species or at least under assault.

FOGARTY: I think that speaks to a lot of misconceptions that are out there regarding the U.S. beef industry. Whether it be in terms of you know nutrition, environment, animal welfare. We’ve really been hit from a lot of different angles over the years.

DUBNER: Okay, well, according to some scientific research, meat production and/or cattle ranching are among the most environmentally damaging activities on earth, between the resource-intensiveness, land but especially water, and the externalities, the runoff of manure and chemicals into groundwater.

FOGARTY: I think one of the first points to make is that cattle are defined as what is termed as upcyclers, and cattle today, they’re turning plants that have little to no nutritional value just as-is into a high-quality and a high density protein. And so when you look at where cattle are grazing in the U.S., and then also across the world, a lot of the land that they are grazing on are land that is not suitable for crops or it would be you know kind of looking as a highly marginal type of land. And the ability of livestock to turn what is there into something that can feed the world is pretty remarkable.

Fogarty believes her industry has been unfairly maligned; that it’s come to be seen as a target for environmentalist groups and causes.

FOGARTY: I would absolutely say, the livestock industry and to that matter, the agriculture industry as a whole I think has really been at the brunt of a lot of disinformation campaigns.

Fogarty points to that U.N. report claiming that the global livestock industry’s greenhouse-gas emissions were shockingly high. A report that was found to be built on faulty calculations.

FOGARTY: So, it was really an inequitable and grossly inflated percentage that really turned a conversation.

The inflated percentage of around 18 percent was really around 14.5 percent — so, “grossly” inflated may be in the eye of the aggrieved. Fogarty says that even though the error was acknowledged, and a revised report was issued.

FOGARTY: Folks have not forgotten it as much as we wish. It’s still something that it’s hard to have folks kind of un-read or un-know something that they initially saw.

The fact is that the agricultural industry is massive and massively complex. Without question, it exacts costs on the environment; it also provides benefits that are literally the stuff of life: delicious, abundant, affordable food. As with any industry, there are tradeoffs and there is friction: activists tend to overstate their claims in order to encourage reform; industry defenders tend to paper over legitimate concerns.

But in the food industry especially, it’s clear that a revolution is underway — a revolution to have our food be not just delicious and abundant and affordable but sustainable too, with fewer negative externalities. Some startups, like Impossible Foods, focus on cleverly engineering plant matter to taste like the animal flesh so many people love. Other startups are working on what’s called lab-grown meat, using animal stem cells to grow food without animals. This is still quite young technology, but it’s very well-funded. I was curious to hear Kelly Fogarty’s view of this.

DUBNER: One of the investors in the lab “meat” company Memphis Meats is Cargill, which is a major constituent of the big meat industry. I mean, another investor, for what it’s worth, is Bill Gates. But I’m curious what’s your position on that. Because the way I think about this long-term, presumably a firm like Cargill can win the future with alternative “meat” in a way that a cattle rancher can’t. So I’m curious what the position is of ranchers on this kind of investment from a firm like Cargill or other firms that are sort of hedging their bets on the future of meat.

FOGARTY: You know it’s a really interesting point, and it’s been a bit of a tough pill for producers to swallow, the fact that some of the big three, some of these big processing plants that have been so obviously heavily focused and have been livestock-dominant are now kind of going into this alternative and sometimes the cell-cultured lab meats, alternative proteins. And it really has been a point of contention among a lot of producers who are kind of confused, unsure, feel a little bit — I don’t want to say betrayed by the industry, but a little bit so…

Others may soon feel betrayed as well. A company called Modern Meadows is using similar technology to grow leather in the lab, without the need for cattle. The Israeli company SuperMeat is focused on growing chicken. And then there’s a company called Finless Foods.

Mike SELDEN: Finless Foods is taking the seafood back to basics and creating real fish meat entirely without mercury, plastic, without the need for antibiotics or growth hormones, and also without the need for fishing or the killing of animals because we grow the fish directly from stem cells.

That’s Mike Selden, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Finless. He’s 27 years old; he started out as a cancer researcher. Like Pat Brown, you could call him a wizard-prophet hybrid. He does take issue with the idea of “lab-grown” food.

SELDEN: The reality is, labs are by definition experimental and are not scalable. So this won’t be grown in a lab at all. It’s prototyped in a lab in the same way that snacks are prototyped in a lab. Doritos are prototyped in a lab by material scientists looking at different dimensions of like crunch and torsion and all these other sort of mechanical properties. So what our facility will look like when we’re actually at production scale is something really a lot closer to a brewery. Big steel tanks that are sort of allowing these cells space in order to divide and grow into large quantities of themselves, while accessing all of the nutrients that we put inside of this nutritional broth.

The fishing industry, like the meat industry, exacts its share of environmental costs. But like Pat Brown, Mike Selden does not want his company to win on goodwill points.

SELDEN: So, the goal of Finless Foods is not to create something that competes on ethics or morals or environmental goals. It’s something that will compete on taste, price, and nutrition — the things that people actually care about.

Right now, everybody really loves whales and people hate when whales are killed. What changed? Because we used to kill whales for their blubber in order to light lamps. It wasn’t an ethical movement, it wasn’t that people woke up one day and decided, “Oh, killing whales is wrong.” It was that we ended up using kerosene instead. We found another technological solution, a supply-side change that didn’t play on people’s morals in order to win. We see ourselves as something like that. You know, why work with an animal at all if you don’t need to?

Indeed: you could imagine in the not-so-distant future a scenario in which you could instantly summon any food imaginable — new foods, new combinations, but also foods that long ago fell out of favor. How much fun would that be? I asked the agricultural economist Jayson Lusk about this.

DUBNER: If we had a 3D printer, and it, let’s say, had, just, we’ll be conservative, 100 buttons of different foods that it could make me. Does anyone press the mutton button?

LUSK: Well, you know, one of the great things about our food system is that it’s a food system that, yes, makes food affordable, but also has a whole awful lot of choice for people who are willing to pay it. And I bet there’s probably at least one or two people out there that will push that will mutton button.

I also asked Lusk for his economic views on the future of meat, especially the sort of projects that inventors like Mike Selden and Pat Brown are working on.

LUSK: I have no problems with what Dr. Brown is trying to do there, and indeed I think it’s very exciting, this technology. And I think ultimately it’ll come down to whether this lab-grown meat can compete on the merits. So, there’s no free lunch here. In fact, the Impossible Burger — I’ve seen it on menus — it’s almost always higher-priced than the traditional beef burger. Now as an economist, I look at that and say, “Those prices, to me, should be signaling something about resource use.” Maybe it’s imperfect; maybe there’s some externalities. But they should reflect all the resources that were used to go in to produce that product. It’s one of the reasons that beef is more expensive than, say, chicken — it takes more time, more inputs, to produce a pound of beef than a pound of chicken.

So, why is it that the Impossible Burger is more expensive than the regular burger? Now, it could be that this is just a startup, and they’re not working at scale; and once they really scale this thing up, it’ll really bring the price down. It could be they’re also marketing to a particular higher-income consumer who is willing to pay a little more. But I think if the claims about the Impossible Burger are true over time, one would expect these products to come down significantly in price and be much less expensive than beef production. You know, this is not going to make my beef friends happy, but if they can do that, good for them; and consumers want to pay for, this product, they like the way it tastes and it saves some money, which means it’s saving some resources; I think in that sense, it’s a great technology.

Whether or not you eat meat; whether or not you’re interested in eating these alternative meats, from plant matter or animal stem cells — it’s hard not to admire the creativity that someone like Pat Brown has exercised: the deep curiosity, the ability to come back from failure, the sheer cleverness of putting together disparate ideas into a coherent scientific plan.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Zack Lapinski. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, and Harry Huggins; we had help this week from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Pat Brown, founder and c.e.o. of Impossible Foods.

Kelly Fogarty, executive vice president for the United States Cattlemen’s Association.

Jayson Lusk, economist at Purdue University.

Mike Selden, co-founder and c.e.o. of Finless Foods.

RESOURCES

“Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock,”  Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (2013).

Just Food by James McWilliams (Little, Brown, 2009).

“Changes in the Sheep Industry in the United States,” The National Academies (2008).

EXTRA

“Two (Totally Opposite) Ways to Save the Planet,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

The post The Future of Meat (Ep. 367) appeared first on Freakonomics.

The economist Raghuram Rajan is gravely concerned by the rise of populism around the world — on both the left and the right. (Photo: Ella87/Pixabay)

In 2005, Raghuram Rajan said the financial system was at risk “of a catastrophic meltdown.” After stints at the I.M.F. and India’s central bank, he sees another potential crisis — and he offers a solution. Is it stronger governments? Freer markets? Rajan’s answer: neither.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Stephen DUBNER: In 2005, you attended the U.S. Federal Reserve’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And it was essentially a celebratory send-off for Alan Greenspan, the outgoing Fed chairman. But you, going quite against the grain, gave a talk based on a paper you’d written that was called “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?” And your answer was a firm “yes.” You argued that financial engineering and skewed incentives in banking and elsewhere could create“a greater, albeit still small, probability of a catastrophic meltdown.” Again, this is 2005.

Raghu RAJAN: Yeah, well let me put it this way: it was clear there was a reason for concern, but what was comforting was that we hadn’t had a crisis in major economies for 70 years.

DUBNER: What lessons are we to draw, we non-economists, from that severe miscalculation — or mischaracterization, at least — by most economists?

RAJAN: I think there was a sense of complacency. Put differently, we were living in well-run houses where the plumbing was not a problem. And the reality was the plumbing was actually getting corroded by poor incentives in that system, and we didn’t realize it until it backed up in a really big way, and we said, “What is that smell?”

I’d like you to meet today’s guest.

RAJAN: My name is Raghu Rajan. I am a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School.

  Raghuram Rajan at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2011. (Photo: Michael Wuertenberg/Flickr)

Rajan is more than just a professor, as we’ll hear. That said, it’s likely you’ve never heard of him. You should have. And not just because he was one of the very few people who foresaw the risk of a “catastrophic meltdown” that indeed came to pass — in the form of a global financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed. You probably remember this:

    CBS: Lehman Brothers, bankrupt; Merrill Lynch, sold in haste.

And then this:

CNN: Breaking news here: stocks all around the world are tanking because of the crisis on Wall Street.

And then this:

CBS: The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion.

George W. BUSH: The house of cards was … much bigger.

CBS: The President’s plan would allow the Treasury to buy up to $700 billion worth of bad loans.

The U.S. Senate held some investigations:

Carl LEVIN: How much of that shitty deal did you sell to your clients?

Susan COLLINS: How do you account for all of these references to “the big short?”

David VINIAR: I feel — I think that’s very unfortunate to have on email.

But the damage had been done. The recession caused by the financial crisis cost the U.S. alone nearly 9 million jobs and more than $8 trillion in household wealth. But of course the recession spread around the world; it had massive economic, social, and political ramifications, many of which are still being felt today, a decade on. The crisis was all the more distressing because the political and economic elite had been so badly blind-sided; in fact, they’d been basking in what they called “the Great Moderation,” an almost magical era in which financial crises were inconceivable.

RAJAN: During the Great Moderation, there was a general sense that the system worked and that the plumbing was all fine, incentives were all fine. I remember after I gave my speech at Jackson Hole, two very senior people in the Federal Reserve System came up to me and said, “This is not a problem, because the private sector knows how to take care of itself. These are very smart people who are very well paid. They would simply not take these risks that you’re talking about.”

Raghu Rajan draws a straight line between the financial crisis and what he sees as one of the biggest dangers in the world today: the rise of populism, on both the right and left, driven by a deep distrust of those same elites who told everyone not to worry the last time around. Rajan has developed this perspective while serving as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, as well as the head of India’s central bank.

RAJAN: If you start thinking about the responsibility, it becomes overwhelming. So you try not to think about it.

Rajan’s prescription for addressing the risks of runaway populism? That may surprise you, especially coming from an economist:

RAJAN: In this anonymous world, with anonymous markets, and anonymous bureaucracy, what allows you to have meaning in your life is really the people around you.

*      *      *

DUBNER: Professor Rajan, can you hear me okay? This is Stephen.

RAJAN: I can, and please do feel free to call me Raghu.

DUBNER: Very good. I will. Thank you. Let’s do a very quick biography: you were born in India but then moved about quite bit with your family, returned for university in India, got an M.B.A. in India, and then a Ph.D. in finance at M.I.T., and you ultimately took up what turned out to be a very lengthy residence at the University of Chicago, where you still are now. In 2003, after several years in academia and zero years in policy, you became chief economist of the International Monetary Fund in D.C. You were the youngest economist ever in that post, also the first non-Western economist. You also weren’t known for doing macroeconomics at all. So why did you get that job and why did you take it?

RAJAN: Well, I think the I.M.F. realized that it needed to understand finance a little better, that they were composed largely of macroeconomists. They were interested in getting somebody who knew finance, and I had met the deputy managing director Anne Krueger at a number of conferences and I’d sent her my first book, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists. It happened to arrive at the time they were looking for a new chief economist, so she called me and she said, “Why don’t you interview for this post?” I said, “Anne, I don’t know any macroeconomics.” She said, “That makes two of us.” So, I was sold.

DUBNER: Many people who are not economists, when they hear these different sections of economic thinking and research — macroeconomics, finance, microeconomics, etc. — it’s all a little bit murky to them. What would you say that your finance background brought to an institution that did macroeconomics that maybe was missing?

RAJAN: So, the difference between these various streams is like the difference between various streams in engineering. The civil engineer knows how to build bridges, but doesn’t fully understand the motors that drive the machines he uses to build the bridges, and so on. So, the electrical engineer knows more about the motors. Similarly in economics, the macroeconomist worries about monetary policy, fiscal policy. And what the financial economists — especially somebody who has experience in banking and so on — does is brings an understanding of the financial system and how it interacts with these other pieces. To give you an example: one reason we have financial crises is because in a period of moderation, perhaps interest rates are kept really low. With plentiful liquidity around, people are willing to take on more debt, and as they take on more debt, it increases the risk that when the environment changes, when growth slows, when liquidity dries up, these companies and these banks that have taken on more debt will be left high and dry. And that’s what often happens in these crises.

Rajan here is essentially describing the risks he warned about back in 2005 at the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole symposium — in front of the financial system’s architects: Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and the Fed chairman himself, Alan Greenspan. Rajan was at the I.M.F. at the time.

RAJAN: I was asked to give this talk because I was a finance guy and I would probably end up saying all these wonderful things that have happened in finance over the last 20 years in Greenspan’s time, and that was also my expectation when I agreed to give the talk. But then, as I started writing, I said, “This is standard, sort of, conventional wisdom. What is it that I’m missing? Why am I writing this?” And as I started probing, and I looked at the numbers on the risk of bank equity, for example, I started wondering whether the conventional wisdom was in fact right.

Rajan learned, for instance, that credit default swaps, a relatively new and potentially volatile financial instrument, were surging; in 2001, they made up just 5 percent of private-sector bank credit; by 2004, they made up more than 30 percent. So he told the symposium about that. He also warned that investment managers were concealing “tail risks” — that is, adverse events that had a very small probability but, if they did come to pass, would have catastrophic consequences.

RAJAN: And it was a strange paper to give in the midst of a conference where the question was whether Mr. Greenspan, a really formidable central banker, was either the best central banker in history or the second-best central banker in history. And it was, a little bit, sort of raining on a parade of compliments.

DUBNER: You were “heavily criticized.” As you recall later yourself, “I felt like an early Christian who had wandered into a convention of half-starved lions.” And yet, just a couple years later, the catastrophic meltdown that you warned could happen did happen. And it was largely caused by the very factors that you had identified. I am curious whether — over the years, as the financial meltdown happened and the recession deepened — I am curious how the academic economist community responded to you over time: did people call or write to you, or say to you, “I thought you were nuts, but you really called it, explain to me how and why.” Did that kind of thing happen?

RAJAN: No, I think you see more of the, “I also thought it wasn’t working and agree that we could have done more.” I mean, the reality is that in a period of fairly peaceful growth, there are a lot of people who warn about problems. Today, there are people who are warning about problems, say, with leveraged loans, which I am worried about also. But for a policy maker who’s at the receiving end of all this advice, you have to ask, “What do I really want to pay attention to and what do I want to dismiss?” If you take all the warnings to heart, you will never ever let the system grow. You will never ever let the system take risks, because everything could actually implode. So, it is a tough act for regulators to figure out what they should pay attention to and what they should not.

In 2010, Rajan published a book, called Fault Lines, about what he saw as the underlying causes of the financial crisis. One big factor was a rise in income inequality, coupled with weaker social-safety nets. Rajan paid particular attention to what he called the “college premium” for workers — or, really, the “non-college penalty”: that is, the median high-school graduate was earning 72 percent less than the median college graduate. He also identified the many components of the housing bubble — financial profiteering, consumer overreach, and a federal government that pushed home ownership too far, in both Democratic and Republican administrations. All this led to too much credit that was too easy to get, which led to too many bad loans that were too aggressively commodified and ultimately blew up like — well…

RAJAN: We said, “What is that smell?”

Rajan also warned that these underlying problems — societal, financial, and political problems — would need to be addressed to prevent a recurrence.

DUBNER: Here we are roughly 10 years out from the crisis. Talk to me about the degree to which you believe these underlying factors have or have not been addressed.

RAJAN: Well, I think I was talking at two levels. One was the deeper underlying societal problems. And I thought that that was an important factor in why credit was emphasized so much in Western economies as the answer. Because once you can see your house as an A.T.M. from which you can take out the home equity and spend, you’re much less worried about your stagnant income, and consumption inequality went up much less than income inequality.

DUBNER: The easy credit was kind of a compensation for the lack of wage growth, then, yes?

RAJAN: Absolutely. And far too many politicians ran away from the problem, saying they were nowhere near it when, in fact, the whole political system was pushing for easier credit in the years preceding the crisis. Now, that said, I think there was a second level which was — given these broader incentives I think the financial system also went haywire. It’s very easy to look for scapegoats, for a few bad apples. Much more worrisome is when the whole system is part of the problem, and then you have to do much more careful work. I think we’ve done some of that. I think mandating banks to carry more capital was part of the answer. But we mustn’t become complacent and think that solved everything, because even as you ask banks to carry more capital, they still have to make profits, and they have to find new ways of making profits, because the old ways don’t work. But my sense is also that risks in the system don’t necessarily go down. They get shifted. So even as we’ve made the banks safer, there are parts of the system which may in fact have taken on some of those risks.

DUBNER: Can you give some details? What do you mean — where do those risks lie now, or where do you suspect they may lie now?

RAJAN: Okay, let me give you an example. The problem before the financial crisis in the United States was: households levered up too much with this home equity line of credit and on. Right? I think households have become more, sort of, careful given their experience during that crisis. But corporations, which didn’t lever up that much before the crisis, have levered up more. In private equity, the kind of leverage ratios you see today for transactions that are done are approaching the ones that were done before the crisis. Also, loans without covenants, loans without controls for the lender. And who’s holding these loans? Well, it turns out the pension funds, insurance companies. All those entities.

Here’s some data to consider: U.S. corporate debt grew from around $5 trillion in 2007 to more than $9 trillion in 2018. At the same time, about 60 percent of the activity in the leveraged-loan market now falls under what’s called “covenant-lite” terms — that is, with fewer restrictions on collateral, payment terms, and income levels, and fewer protections for the lender. Given Rajan’s history of correctly identifying risks in the past, it’s probably worth hearing him out today. That said, it’s one thing for an academic or an I.M.F. economist to point out risks in the system and quite another for a policymaker to strike the proper balance. As it happened, Rajan soon got his turn in the policymaker role too, back in India. He was an economic consultant to the federal government — and then, in 2013, he was installed as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, the R.B.I.; his job was the equivalent of Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the U.S.

DUBNER: Your appointment was met with devout enthusiasm, I guess I’d call it. The rupee immediately rose 2 percent against the dollar, there was a big rally in the Sensex, the stock market. One commentator said that you “put the sex back into the limp Sensex.” You were cast as a sort of economic superhero. And, additionally, a homecoming hero. Can you — before we get into the policy and the things that you actually did — tell me a bit about the state of the Indian economy when you first began consulting. Because, as I understand it, there was a rather deep crisis, multi-level crisis. I’m very curious to see what you saw and what you thought policy should do to help correct that.

RAJAN: Well, we were one of the countries that essentially was growing quite strongly before the global financial crisis, and then growth started dropping off very sharply post-crisis. So, as growth started dropping off, the government did what governments naturally do, which is expand spending so that growth would keep up. And the central bank essentially was more easy on policy. And before we knew it, first, growth had picked up after the recovery in Western economies and growth was actually very strong. But we had all the sort of problems of an overheating economy. We were running large fiscal deficits. We had very high inflation. We had the classic symptoms of a country which was going towards financial difficulty. As we went into 2013 with all these numbers really large and alarming, when Ben Bernanke speculated about ending the era of easy money, money started leaving the Indian economy, and our exchange rate started plummeting. So that was a really difficult period, because we had elections coming in 2014, and usually the uncertainty created by elections creates more anxiety amongst investors. And that, coupled with our bad numbers, meant we really had to do something to build confidence.

DUBNER: Had you had Ben Bernanke’s job at that moment and India said to you, “Listen, if you do this the wrong way, it’s going to punish us unduly,” what would you have done? Would you have changed the method or rate at which you pulled the money back?

RAJAN: No. Look, I think every central bank has a mandate of its own, and it has to respect that mandate. I think given the mandate of the Federal Reserve, I think you really don’t have the ability to take significant cognizance of the effects of your policies on other countries — except to the extent it feeds back onto your own country.

DUBNER: You once said in an interview, during the time that you were governor of the R.B.I., you said, “Central bankers have had enormous responsibilities thrust on them to compensate essentially for the failings of the political system, and my worry is we don’t have sufficient tools to do that but we’re not willing to say it. And as a result we push as hard as we can on the existing tools and they may create more risk in the system.” Can you talk about that for a moment: what do you mean by central bankers compensating for the failings of the political system?

RAJAN: I think the problem was that governments weren’t even doing some of the basic stuff that governments do in recovery. And as a result, monetary policy was — as Ben Bernanke once said — the only game in town. Moving interest rates up and down is not going to improve the quality of education or the ability of the fired worker to essentially retrain himself or herself. Yes, you can recreate some of the old jobs, but they may not be what the worker needs or wants. So that’s the sense in which — what, really, industrial countries need is structural change.

DUBNER: So, in retrospect, what would you say were some of your best decisions?

RAJAN: Well, I think to stabilize the currency. We needed to bring inflation down.

DUBNER: Which you did.

RAJAN: We moved to creating a structure which would create credibility that we would do it, and that structure’s in place today. We have an inflation-targeting framework, we have a monetary policy committee, and inflation is still low — in fact, it’s probably where we wanted it be: 4 percent. This is a problem India has grappled with for decades. To my mind, the fact we could bring it down is very important. But, of course, this was not all that we needed to do — liberalizing the markets; we licensed 23 new banks in an environment where there was enormous worry that this process would be corrupt. The Economist ran a feature saying people were selling these licenses for $75 million apiece. I said, “Where’s that money. I don’t see any of it.” No, we created a really transparent process with three layers of committees to ensure that no single person controlled the process and gave away licenses, and nobody has raised a peep about how those licenses were granted.

So, on the payments system, we transformed the payment system from — especially on the retail level. Now in India you can send money from my bank account to your bank account without knowing anything else. You just tell me where your bank is and I can zap it across. And I’m not locked into a monopoly provider, one of the big tech companies. It’s done over public bridge.

DUBNER: Now, shortly after your departure as governor of the R.B.I., Prime Minister Modi executed a sudden, controversial plan to abolish 500- and 1,000-rupee banknotes, hoping to crack down on the shadow economy and tax evasion. I understand you had not been in favor of that idea, correct?

RAJAN: Absolutely. It didn’t make sense. I was asked for my opinion, and I said, “Look, it is taking away money that people use in transactions. It’s going to create enormous disruption unless we replace it overnight with freshly printed money.” And it’s very important that we have all that in place, difficult to maintain secrecy, and then the fundamental sort of objective of this, which was to get people to bring out the money that they hoarded in their basements and pay taxes on them — I said, “That’s probably not going to work out, because they’re going to find ways to infuse the money back into the system without paying those taxes.”

DUBNER: It’s been roughly two years now. What have been the effects of this demonetization?

RAJAN: Well, I think more than the numbers suggest, because India was growing at that time. And we had numbers which were in the 7.5 percent growth range at that point, at a time, in 2016, when the world was actually growing quite slowly. When growth picked up in 2017, instead of going along with the world, which we typically do and we exceed world growth significantly, we went down. That suggests it had a tremendous effect on growth, but that, the numbers don’t capture it all, because what actually got killed was the informal sector — the people who were doing work with notes rather than with checks, who didn’t have formal bank accounts. And when you look at the job numbers that some private-sector people estimate 10, 12 million jobs were lost in that episode. And, of course, we haven’t recovered them yet. It was one of those places where more economic thinking would have helped.

DUBNER: Was it a coincidence that Prime Minister Modi went ahead with the plan only after you’d left?

RAJAN: Well, I can’t speak on that. I can only say that I made my objections very, very clear.

DUBNER: Some of your comments as governor were not well received by some members of the political class, and you did not seek a second term as governor of the R.B.I. Could you just describe that decision for us, please?

RAJAN: Well, I think that was relatively straightforward. I had a three-year term that came to an end. I think we — the government and I — talked about whether I could be useful for a little more while. And I think we really didn’t agree on an extension. I mean, they didn’t want to extend it, and I didn’t, at that point, on those terms, want an extension.

DUBNER: Your name has been mentioned as a potential Prime Minister of India. What sort of probability would you assign to that?

RAJAN: Pretty close to zero. Look, I’m not a politician. That requires enormous capabilities in a very different direction, which I don’t have. I certainly will stick to what I know, which is advice and policy. If I can have some influence on public policy in the future, I certainly would think about it, but I’m perfectly happy where I am.

For what it’s worth: the man who succeeded Rajan at the Indian central bank didn’t even last his full three-year term, resigning over frustration with the government. And the Modi government, heading into a reelection campaign, was recently accused of having suppressed troublingly high unemployment numbers. It’s really too soon to judge Rajan’s term as India’s central banker. It is worth noting he did help stabilize a fragile economy; it was also an economy that, over the past decade or so, had gravely disappointed a lot of global investors. India had been one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, but as India faltered, China started running away with the race. Over the past few years, that dynamic has been reversed; the Indian stock market has absolutely crushed the Chinese markets, and it’s outperformed the U.S. markets by a good bit too.

If your job was to look around the world and hire a central banker with crisis experience, a good track record, and the sort of equanimity that is rare among the political and economic elite, you’d almost inevitably cast your eye on Raghu Rajan. So what’s he worried about now?

RAJAN: The kind of disruption we are seeing, the rise of strong authoritarian regimes across the world — too many strong leaders around, if you will, for a peaceful world.

*      *      *

Raghuram Rajan is a professor of finance at the University of Chicago; he’s also been chief economist for the International Monetary Fund and head of India’s central bank. His first book, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, helped get him his I.M.F. job. His second book, Fault Lines, performed a post-mortem on the Great Recession and the underlying financial crisis — a crisis that Rajan was nearly alone in warning about. This month, he’s publishing a new book, called The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind. It’s a fairly radical argument for an economist. To understand where Rajan is coming from, and where his economic and political views developed, it’s maybe best to go back to his beginnings.

DUBNER: You were born in India. I understand your father worked in intelligence for the Indian government. He was a spy, although you didn’t know it at the time, and that you moved around a lot: India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Belgium, back to India. Talk about what that experience and what your family was like.

RAJAN: Well, it was a very warm childhood. We were four siblings, and our parents tried to give us the best education they could. Part of that education was moving to really interesting places. We were in Indonesia during The Year of Living Dangerously, when there was a coup. And I remember gunfire in the evenings as the army executed — some people say — over 250,000 communist sympathizers. And we were at home worrying about what was happening, but it was still a very warm and loving environment. We went to Sri Lanka. There was an insurgency there. We had a year off because the rebels were on the streets.

DUBNER: A year off from school, yes?

RAJAN: Yeah, a year off from school, and my parents were really worried that we weren’t really getting any education. The next place we moved to was really staid and boring Belgium.

DUBNER: You got back to India in time for what’s referred to as “The Emergency.” For those who don’t know about it, just describe what the Emergency was, and I’m particularly interested to hear how it affected you and your family.

RAJAN: Well, India is a democracy, and Indira Gandhi, who was the Prime Minister at that time, in 1975, the courts ruled against her and said that she had won her seat illegally. Instead of accepting the ruling of the court, Indira Gandhi declared an emergency where she basically shut down all questioning of her authority. And this was a two-year period where she attempted to run India on authoritarian lines. And as with such regimes, initially people were very happy. The trains ran more on time. But then some of the excesses started showing up. For example, to control population, there were camps where people were forcibly sterilized. There was heavy censorship of the press, and there’s, of course, the jailing of the opposition. She eventually, two years later decided to go for elections. There’s a lot of controversy about why she did that. Some people say it was because she was going back to a democratic instinct; some people say it was just that in that authoritarian regime, the domestic intelligence agencies basically told her, “You’re going to win for sure,” and they were being sycophantic and she actually believed them.

Gandhi lost that election, but she ran again and won in 1980, in what was considered a free and fair election. Four years later, she was assassinated by her own bodyguards.

RAJAN: It was an interesting time, because that is when India realized how fragile its democracy was.

The fragility of democracy is essentially the theme of Rajan’s new book, The Third Pillar.

RAJAN: The book emphasizes a society held up by three pillars.

The first pillar is:

RAJAN: Markets, which ensure that society is productive and efficient by allocating resources to the right place, and taking them away from places where their resources aren’t being used well.

The second pillar is:

RAJAN: The state, which is the composite of the executive, the judiciary, the legislature, and its role, really, is security.

And the third pillar?

RAJAN: It’s the third pillar which has been underemphasized; that is, the social aspects. We’ve talked about economic. We’ve talked about political. The social aspects; that is, the community, which ultimately offers meaning in our lives.

The Third Pillar is an interesting book, and an odd book. It’s largely a work of economic history, even though Rajan isn’t an economic historian. It covers a lot of politics and sociology even though he’s not a political scientist or sociologist either. More than anything, it’s a plea to reset society — a cri de coeur, really, although given Rajan’s rather moderate bearing, it’s a somewhat moderate cri de coeur. His main argument is that the markets and the state have grown so big and powerful and institutional that they’re choking off the lifeblood of actual communities. That we’ve gotten so good at scaling up that it’s time for a concerted effort to scale down. Because when communities erode, when people feel the state and the markets are running their lives, the result is often an angry populism.

CNN: Breaking news: the far-right candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, has won Brazil’s presidential race.

BBC: A four-point lead for leaving the EU, and that’s the result.

Channel 4 News: The shock result was the AfD, which became the third-largest party.

CBS: There are more protests in France today, even after President Emmanuel Macron promised concessions to angry demonstrators.

AUDIENCE: USA! USA! USA!

Donald J. TRUMP: Thank you. Thank you very much everyone. Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business.

RAJAN: Most people actually are quite frightened. We see strong political movements around the world which are looking to disrupt the kind of system we’ve had for the last 70 years. And people are asking, “Why now? What’s going on?” and “What’s the future hold for me?” At the same time, they see technological disruption create threats to the jobs they have, and they worry whether their children will have as good a life as they’ve had, let alone a better life.

The populism Rajan’s talking about exists on both the left and right wings of the political spectrum. In each case, there’s deep dissatisfaction and distrust of political institutions. It wasn’t always thus.

RAJAN: The balance before was what one might call liberal market democracies, which essentially created the prosperity that we’ve seen post-World War Two. Now, that is under threat, and part of the reason for that threat is because the community in many parts of the developed world is imploding under the pressure of both global markets, as well as technological change, as well as a government which isn’t doing the right things to support both the opportunities that people should have as well as the safety nets that they should have.

DUBNER: What you’re describing sounds foreboding to the point of dangerous. How much danger do you think we’re in?

RAJAN: Well, I think there is a danger for sure and I think we’ve seen these kinds of environments before. It’s all too easy to point to the 1930’s and say it looks like that. Nothing really looks like the past in exact detail, but the kind of disruption we are seeing, the rise of strong authoritarian regimes across the world, too many strong leaders around, if you will, for a peaceful world. I think all this makes you wonder if the risks have gone up. And I think they have.

DUBNER: In the book you write that “a populist movement believes that ruling elite are corrupt and undemocratic, that the masses have been treated poorly, and that the system ought to be changed because the general will of the people demands it.” That sentence to my ear doesn’t sound nonsensical, especially given the fact that governments and markets can both be fairly punishing to the median person. So why does populism — or maybe it’s Populism — have such a terrible reputation at the moment?

RAJAN: I don’t think the problem is identifying what’s going wrong. I absolutely think populists are necessary to jolt the establishment, to say, “Look, this is not reaching so many people.” It’s the answers they provide which often are too easy and wrong at the same time.

So, let’s take a standard answer which has appealed to both sides, the left and the right. Let’s close down trade. Free trade is very problematic, right? Or let’s put constraints on it. So what do we do? We raise steel tariffs, right? The economist would tell you, “Okay, but be aware of the unintended consequences.” As you raise steel tariffs, the price of steel domestically goes up. As the price of steel goes up, car companies find it harder to compete because they buy a lot of steel. Now, remember, they are competing with car companies abroad, who don’t have the tariffs that you just put on your steel. They are buying steel cheap, in fact even cheaper, because steel that used to come to the States now is going elsewhere. Their prices actually are much more competitive than car companies in this country. So G.M. announces it’s going to close down a bunch of plants. That is the consequence of the easy solution. The cost of saving a steel job could be jobs lost in other industries, and typically, economists say, more than the jobs that you save in steel — and you’re increasing costs overall for the consumer, also, to boot.

DUBNER: You argue that communities have been left behind, often, by technological change and globalization, and that the solution lies in restoring power to communities. Now, what do you mean by that, restoring power to communities?

RAJAN: One of the tendencies with the growth of markets is for government to also grow, and then in order to maintain uniformity across which markets can operate, there’s a tendency to take more decisions into the government. There’s also the problem when markets implode — again, government grows to bail out individual communities, right? And what I’m arguing is: this essentially leaves people in the community frustrated. There’s much less to engage on when, for example, your school is being paid for largely out of state or federal grants, and the state or federal bureaucracy is what decides what will be taught and how it’ll be taught and how teachers will be compensated. The school no longer pays attention to the local community. Similarly, if regulations on how you can produce locally are determined elsewhere, then, I think, you have a sense of disempowerment. Why bother about the local ward elections when the ward does pretty much nothing?

DUBNER: So, when community is successful — and it’s not always — but when it is, how important is simply the fact that it operates in much smaller units than the typical government or market? You write about a poverty-relief program in Germany called the Elberfeld system. Talk about how that worked and why you think it worked.

RAJAN: This was in the first flush of industrialization in Germany. Germany was one of the first countries to put together some kind of social support in an explicit way, as in the town of Elberfeld. And there what they did was: they got volunteers from each ward who would come together under an overall structure run by the city. They would go into the homes of people who were not doing well and ask them what their needs were, and essentially approve very quickly some kind of financial support for those families, but also give them contacts, give them opportunities: here is where there might be jobs — they were essentially acting as voluntary counselors, and a lot of people volunteered.

The engagement helped, in a sense, tie people back into the community, and helped them stand on their feet. And these were people volunteering to do this, rather than part of a bureaucracy. This was what they did in their spare time. And therefore, you got engagement and enthusiasm and people doing this got local, social prestige. As we go forward into a more technologically enhanced world, it’s the people around us who are going to be much more important. In this anonymous world, with anonymous markets, and anonymous bureaucracy, what allows you to have meaning in your life, is really the people around you.

DUBNER: I have to say, some of these words that you’re using now, Raghu, “community” and “meaning,” if I did not know better, I would not think that you were an economist at all. I’m curious whether this represents an evolution for you as a human and an economist, or was this always who you were and economics was just a route that helped you further your thinking.

RAJAN: I think, as you sort of progress in life more, you understand a little more, and to some extent, I think, as you read outside your field, you learn what’s been done elsewhere. You realize there are many parts which are missing. I mean, look: to be fair to economists, they’ve expanded what they focus on so much.

DUBNER: You do argue in the book that community has long been undervalued as the third pillar of a society, and especially undervalued by economists. I’m curious why you think that is?

RAJAN: Well, I think it’s harder to analyze. I think that we are very comfortable with explicit contracts. We understand prices. But in a community, many of these transactions are not priced. You may do more favors than you get. You may not even get greater status as a result of something you do. But sometimes you do it because it’s ingrained in your sense of who you are, that you have to help the community. And I mean, think of it as almost seared in your utility function. I think some of these features are hard for economists to analyze. For example, we don’t have a good theory of what sometimes is called “the norm of reciprocity,” that when people get a favor, they feel almost compelled to return it at some point. And why do we feel that that norm so strongly? Unclear.

DUBNER: Have you lost some faith in the markets, or would you not put it that way?

RAJAN: I would say the capacity of markets to take care of themselves — which I was much more convinced about — I’ve lost some faith. Now, the automatic answer doesn’t mean that you replace them with governments. It’s all about balance.

DUBNER: In some ways your book is frightening, and it describes the potential for — really — disaster. You, however, sound in this conversation, and in some moments in the book, to be quite hopeful. Can you just distill your, kind of, over/under for the hope factor, in terms of the global economy and society continuing to enjoy prosperity and progress versus potentially backsliding?

RAJAN: Look, I think the potential for progress is certainly there. I mean, if you look at what’s happening across the world — certainly in many of the emerging markets — how tremendous changes have happened in the last few decades. You have to be really happy that a country like Vietnam, which was enmeshed in war 50 years ago, is now where it is.

The dangers, well, we see them when we read the papers every day. I mean, this fight between China and the United States just now on trade — but there are geopolitical concerns. If we have another Cold War, or potentially, even places of hot war — here are two enormously rich countries. If they go at each other and use all the capabilities that they have for new technologies in fighting each other, rather than building a common sort of world, I think the path down could be very, very steep. We need to engage with each other for the good. And we need to figure out ways to do that. So I am worried, but what gives you some confidence is: we’ve always figured it out.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Zack Lapinski. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, and Harry Huggins. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Raghuram Rajan, economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School.

RESOURCES

Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists by Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales (Crown Business 2003).

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan (Princeton University Press 2010).

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan (Penguin Press 2019)).

“Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?” Raghuram Rajan (2005).

EXTRA

“Cash and the Economy: Evidence from India’s Demonetization,” Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Gita Gopinath, Prachi Mishra, and Abhinav Narayanan (2019).

“Why Larry Summers Is the Economist Everyone Hates to Love,” Freakonomics Radio (2017).

The post This Economist Predicted the Last Crisis. What’s the Next One? appeared first on Freakonomics.

Domonique Foxworth began his career in the N.F.L. in 2005 — a torn A.C.L. in 2010 set him on a different path. (Photo: Ronald Martinez/Getty)

Stephen Dubner’s conversation with the former N.F.L. player, union official, and all-around sports thinker, recorded for our “Hidden Side of Sports” series.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. 

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This a Freakonomics Radio extra, our full interview with Domonique Foxworth, who appeared in bits and pieces in our “Hidden Side of Sports” series. I’ve known Foxworth for a while now; he’s one of the most thoughtful athletes I’ve ever encountered. But this conversation surpassed my already high expectations — not just his thoughtfulness but his willingness to wrestle with contradiction, and his hardcore candor. As you’ll hear in this episode, he was an N.F.L. player for several years, then served as president of the N.F.L. players’ union and, after getting an M.B.A. from Harvard, was the C.O.O. of the N.B.A. players’ union. It turns out he didn’t like that job too much; you’ll hear why. As the conversation begins, Foxworth is talking about his belief that the professional sports players’ unions should be dissolved. I asked why …

FOXWORTH: Yeah, where we are at, with professional athletes and how big a business it’s gotten, and how well they are compensated, I think it’s a product of sacrifices made by players coming up. And many players lost long seasons, were black-balled out of the league and had their careers really torn apart by their ambitions of free agency and pensions, and all those things. And they never really got to fully reap the benefits from that. And back in those days, the unions — the player unions were a lot like what we think of as traditional labor unions. But we’ve got to a point now where it’s not like that. And with the length of a player’s career, and how much money they could stand to make in a season, it’s really not in their best interest. Mathematically, logically, if you go through the numbers, it’s not in their best interest to actually withstand a lockout or to initiate a strike. They will not make that money back. It’s just physically impossible.

The reason why they would do it is to further the cause, I guess, for players in the future. But since you can’t hand your position down to your son or daughter, then it really doesn’t seem to make sense. So for me, I can use me as an example, I sacrificed from the time I was — I don’t know — probably in high school, is when I started to forgo other opportunities or other decisions to focus more on football. Then I’m in college and I wanted to be a computer — I did computer graphics and some computer science in high school, and then in college I wanted to be a computer science major, at University of Maryland. And my academic adviser was like, “That course load is going to make it very difficult for you to make our practices, there are labs, and blah, blah, blah, blah.” So I was like, “No, not going to do that.” During the summers, when there was —

DUBNER: So instead, you did — was it American Studies?

FOXWORTH: Yeah, I did American Studies.

DUBNER: And journalism, right? Which just shows how easy what I do is, that you could do it and another major while playing football. But anyway, go ahead.

FOXWORTH: No, I enjoyed those. And it was good, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. And in the summers when people were getting internships or whatever, I was working out and getting ready for football. And I say all that to say, once I got to the league, then I got drafted and I was in the third round, so that’s — it’s money, it’s good money, but it’s not life-changing money. It doesn’t makeup for all the things that you have given up through the course of your life. And then I come up on free agency, and that’s when I got a pretty nice deal. I can’t imagine if somebody was like, “No, you’ve got to sit out right now.”

And then when you think about it, it’s competition obviously, because you are competing in this lockout or strike with the owners, whereas it does make sense for them to withstand a lockout, because they own their teams into perpetuity so if they win a lockout for a tenth of a percentage point or even a whole percentage point of revenue split, that is something that will maybe $3 million a franchise, for this season. And it will go up as things grow, and it goes on and on and on. So if you are in the old fashioned mindset of labor strikes is the only way to get anything, you are — players in all sports are severely mismatched.

DUBNER: It’s interesting to hear you say, though, that that would be the reason to maybe not have players unions, because a lockout or strike I guess — the lockout is what the owners do, a strike what the players can do — even a strike threat is rarely — is pretty rare. Once every whatever, five to 10 years, depending on when a given union’s collective bargaining agreement is up, right? so you I know — you were playing football in the N.F.L. when the lockout happened. It was 2011, right? And I know that the N.F.L. Players Association was basically telling you guys, “Put away as much money as you can, and maybe you might want to switch to regular gas from unleaded,” all this stuff. Can you talk about that experience and how you were thinking that might happen?

FOXWORTH: Yeah, I was heavily involved in the negotiations, so I remember that. I remember trying to get all the players ready. But the fact of the matter is, the players are severely outmatched if you’re going to try to match up with money, with owners. We’re not going to be able to outlast how long they can go without making money. As far as influence on the media, they have that also. And trying to fight them in that traditional way — you’re destined for failure. It would seem. The point of decertification is, as long as we have a union, we have to agree over collective bargaining. Once you dissolve the union, then you expose the league to anti-trust law, which frankly, the N.F.L. existed for several years very lucratively for the players without a union. And the league was exposed to antitrust law. That’s what precipitated free agency in football.

And the only reason why the N.F.L. Players Association was reconstituted was because the N.F.L. made it a stipulation of the settlement. You must reform a union to allow us to operate as a legal cartel/monopoly. That’s only reason why we exist, frankly and I was the president of the union. I was the C.O.O. of the N.B.A. Players for a time. And I recognize the union provides a great deal of value. But I think frankly that protection is more value to the leagues than it is to the players. In whatever job anyone has, in your job, they can’t institute a salary cap. They can’t do a draft and say like, “Hey, all the doctors that graduate this year, we’re going to draft you and tell you where you go.” You have some say in those things, because they are forced to abide by the regular laws that everyone else abides by.

DUBNER: Regular labor laws, not union provisions. Wow. So how would you have the scenario look? Every league’s different. But obviously, college football is this weird, unpaid, high risk — that’s a whole other financial ecosystem. Why don’t we just start with talking about how N.C.A.A. football works as a feeder system for the N.F.L., and what that does for or to the athletes.

FOXWORTH: I think we’re at a point now where most people kind of understand that college sports is professional sports. In select cases. So obviously, the vast majority of college sports are not professional sports. But the two kinds of big money sports, in the power five conferences, they generate a substantial amount of revenue, and that revenue goes to lots of people who are not the labor. So it goes to supporting other sports, it goes to building bigger and better facilities, it goes to paying college presidents and coaches and funding the N.C.A.A. It goes a lot of different places, but it doesn’t go to the people who are the labor on the field.

And another thing that complicates that — it would be a problem if that was the end of the story and every player then went on to have N.F.L. careers. It would be unfair, but whatever, you’re not going to lose any sleep for those guys. But the vast majority of the guys — and I have several teammates who, because it is not considered work, they’re not privy to workers compensation. They’re not privy to extended health care. So I have a few teammates who have torn A.C.L.s, separated shoulders, torn labrums and hips and shoulders, lots of injuries that — one of my best friends in college, I think it was a few years ago, his doctor told him that he was going to have to have both of his knees replaced by the time he was 50. And he didn’t play professional sports. He had three knee surgeries while in college. And there’s nothing that any college football team or governing body is going to do for him in that case. And that to me is tragic that a lot of people benefited from that.

And again, he had aspirations to play professional football. So while he was in college, he made all the decisions that people who have those aspirations do, where you don’t necessarily go after the major that you’re most interested in, or the major that’s going to lead to a career. You have the major that’s going to allow you to focus on what’s most important, which is sports, unfortunately. And I know many people would say that maybe that shouldn’t be so important, but it’s hard when that carrot’s out there, it’s hard to convince somebody to try to balance and try to do both things well, when it’s like, “No, I need to do as well as I can at this, because this is a life-changing opportunity, not just your life, but a generational shifting opportunity.” And you have a chance at it, and someone is going to tell you no? “How about you don’t go do that summer workout that’s going to get you closer to — how about you take an internship or something. How about you do take that tougher major.” You’re going to miss a few practices. The coaches may not start you. And it will stunt your development. That just doesn’t make sense.

DUBNER: So, the old fashioned argument for why this was okay and why it was acceptable was that, well, this is like what economists call a tournament model, whenever you got a lot of people competing for the top of the pyramid, whether it’s show-business or sports or, whatever, the bottom of the pyramid, there’s lots and lots and lots and lots of people there willing to do whatever it takes for practically no money. It’s this weird, unpaid apprenticeship. And I guess some people accept that as okay. Others don’t. But what strikes me that’s especially noteworthy about sports is the degree and magnitude of sacrifice, physical and otherwise, is larger, I would argue, than trying to become an actor, trying to become a writer, and whatnot. So can you just talk about that component of it a little bit more, and what you think would be a better solution?

FOXWORTH: Bringing up the tournament model is interesting, because I can understand how some people would look at that and say that it fits here and that’s why this is fair. But as a country, we’ve decided that that wasn’t fair a long time ago. That’s not — there are plenty of jobs where that’s true, just about every job. The barista at Starbucks. There are plenty of people out there who are capable of being baristas, and you could probably allow Starbucks to pit them against each other and negotiate down, down, down, down, down. But that’s not the case. We’ve instituted minimum wages and instituted lots of other laws to protect American people or American workers from these type of capitalistic urges run amok.

And the thing that’s frustrating to me is, we’ve instituted rules in professional sports, that happen to take place on college campuses. We instituted rules that are to the advantages of the institutions. But we are not interested in instituting any rules that are — that are things that we accept as just facts and fair. You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone in our society that’s like, “No, let’s eliminate the minimum wage and allow this tournament model to run amok for low wage workers.”

DUBNER: Well the other argument though, in colleges, is — again this may be a purely specious argument from your perspective, maybe partially specious. But the other argument is, wait a minute. Free education, four years of college. What’s that worth?

FOXWORTH: So there’s two major issues that jump out for me from the education. The players are brought to the school because of their athletic prowess. There are many players who I’ve been around and I know that were not prepared to benefit. So, what they’re receiving is, steps 10, 11, and 12 when what they’re building on is steps 1, 2, and 3, if that makes any sense. So that education, frankly, is worthless to them. They’re in there trying to get eligible. And then there is the other people who show up who are prepared like me and like other people that then make all these decisions.

Because you’re not even getting the same education as the people around you, because you have to travel on Thursdays and Fridays, and you are not allowed to do certain majors because they conflict with your schedule. And three times a week, during the winter session or the spring session, you have to go to 5:00 a.m. workouts and that changes your academic experience. There are all these things that are mandatory because your scholarship is year to year, and you don’t have any power to negotiate with your coach and say things like, “I want to take this so I’m not going to able to go there.” That’s just not a thing that is available. So the education that they’re receiving is not the education that people think it is.

DUBNER: This is a gigantic question and it’s such a big industry already that there’s obviously no easy, quick solution that would satisfy even close to everybody, but what solution or solutions do you think are most viable that would, let’s say, keep big-time college sports intact in a way that the market would need them to be intact — in other words, there’s massive audiences out there that really like it — but all those dollars, as you’ve noted, don’t flow to the people who actually produce the labor. So what would be a way to equilibrate that a little bit, or make more people less unhappy at least?

FOXWORTH: The thing that frustrates me about that conversation is you’re always asked to add something, to change a rule to fix it. Whereas I feel we should blow it up altogether and follow, frankly, the model that this country has followed up until now, is that you strive for a free market and then you institute rules to make it fairer. So that’s where we should go. Let’s not try to add a rule or provide a stipend for players. No, let the schools go after these players the same way anyone else would go after any other employee. And then if we notice that there are issues along the way, then we can add rules to fix those. I think trying to inch our way back is not the way to get to the fairest possible system.

DUBNER: If you were going to blow up the system, would you even connect that pre-professional sports league, meaning college, would you even connect that to universities at all, or is that an accident of history that is the root of the problem, essentially?

FOXWORTH: I think it’s definitely an accident of history. I know you and your son are big soccer or footy fans —

DUBNER: You can call it soccer. That’s all right. That’s okay.

FOXWORTH: That’s not the model that they follow. This is a purely American model. This college athletics being a feeder system to professional athletics. And it’s probably — not probably, it is more unnatural, I would think, than these other systems. So I understand that it is the way that our country developed, and I understand the allure of being connected to a college that you went to, or a college you grew up around. And I’m not saying that you — you have to dissolve that altogether. You can allow them to — many of them, obviously they are nonprofit organizations, but they understand how to exist in a for-profit environment, they do go after different professors and they negotiate over those terms, this is something that they are accustomed to.

They negotiate with coaches, they don’t have to go that far — With their coaches and assistant coaches, they understand how the free market works. So Jimbo Fisher is a good example of it. He was the coach at Florida State. He brought them a national championship, and then Texas A&M offered him a better situation and he up and left, and then Florida State went and got Willie Taggart from Oregon. This is not something — while they want to pretend that it is a completely pure system, they know how this works, and every other year Alabama has to pay Nick Saban a little bit more to keep him at the top of the list. This is not something that that is brand new to them. I don’t see why it’s any different from going into a kid’s living room and saying, well, we want you to come here. We can offer you X, Y, and Z. But it just — it makes people feel uncomfortable, but there’s nothing wrong with it.

DUBNER: So it’s interesting — correct me if I’m wrong. I probably am, but it seems like there’s a weird paradox here. You’re calling for the decertification or the blowing up of professional sports’ players unions, because you feel they don’t really work well — work in the interest of the athletes who need to make their money now, careers being so short. But it sounds like college athletes have zero collective representation, and a union for them might actually do some good. Or do you think that’s not a solution?

FOXWORTH: No, I think that they’ve tried and failed. Ramogi Huma at one point was leading that effort, and it hasn’t worked. But I do think that them having a seat at the table with some leverage would be helpful, because any time you have — and this is what’s happened in college sports for a long time now, is you have a bunch of people in a room setting up the parameters of the game. But there’s one group — there’s only one group that’s not allowed in that room. And of course that — it’s just human nature. That group is going to be the group that is perpetually slighted. So I think that college athletes are in a different space than professional athletes. So having a union — if the college athletes could organize to the point where they would just stop showing up to games, and that’s an impossible thing to ask them, because again, it goes back to this is my one chance. But if they were able to at least threaten that, that’s how they could get some significant change.

DUBNER: So given the history and the dollars and the emotions that are attached to college sports overall, how likely do you see any kind of substantial evolution or change, even in the next 10 or 20 years?

FOXWORTH: Yeah, it’s clear that the opinion in public is shifting towards wanting athletes to be fairly compensated. But I don’t know that they’re going to stop watching. So I don’t know where the pressure comes from, honestly. We’re already at a majority of society. I think it’s different across age and in racial demographics, but there will come a point, particularly as some young people get older, where all adults believe and accept that college athletes should be paid. But this ties into the union conversation. What is going to force them to act?

In the same way that a lockout or a strike is not necessarily going to force owners to act, in the same way that antitrusts or antitrust exposure would force them to act. This is true here too. I do think if collegiate athletes just stop showing up to big time games and tournaments, that would force them to act. But I don’t see them doing it because they only have four years of eligibility, which means they only have four years to show professional teams that they’re good enough to play. So it’s, again, not in their interest to do that. The only other thing is if the public stopped watching because of it, and I don’t necessarily see that happening, so I’m not sure how we get to this point.

DUBNER: The other thing that’s tricky is that the guys with the least incentive to change it are the ones for whom the system works, which is to say the stars in the system, right? If you really think that being a college athlete, whether in basketball for one year or football for three or four years, that you are going to have a professional career, you don’t want to rock the boat because you’re there now. So I don’t see how they would have an incentive to even pretend to want a change. Do you?

FOXWORTH: Yeah, I think you linking these two is very important, because it’s pretty accurate — it isn’t in their best interests. Those guys who are on the doorsteps of having professional careers, it’s not really in their best interest to stop this now. And you also bring into account the people who are benefiting most from it who are not on the field, there’s really no benefit to the coaches who — because coaches salaries are inflated because they have extra money, because they are not sending it to the players. And the rest of the teams who are funded by money generated by football and basketball. There’s no incentive there — there’s just the athletes who don’t have much power.

DUBNER: It is interesting that in the N.F.L., a coach might make a quarter or maybe even a tenth of what his top star player is making, right? But in college you make infinitely more because they’re all getting zero. If I were to think of someone who could try to get in there and navigate diplomatically and also bust skulls and who knows what they’re talking about, you’re the guy actually, because first of all, you’ve been a professional football player. You were also president of the Players Union in the N.F.L. But then, you’re the only person I know of at all — correct me if I’m wrong — the only person I know of who’s ever been associated with the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. as this chief operating officer for the N.B.A. Players Union, correct?

FOXWORTH: Right.

DUBNER: So you’ve got the two major college sports — you’ve got those credentials, right? You also happen to have an M.B.A. from Harvard. Yes?

FOXWORTH: That’s a thing.

DUBNER: That’s a thing. Am I wrong to think that you sometimes do think about being the person to try to go downstream from pro sports and into college and say, “Hey, if you actually want to treat people properly, the place to do it is here. And yes, we do need to blow up the system.”

FOXWORTH: I don’t, honestly. And maybe that’s yelling about unfairness from the sidelines and not necessarily getting involved, maybe that’s the wrong way to go about it. But I don’t know. I agree with you, it’s not complicated, but I do think it’s complex, and that can be intimidating, and I don’t know the way. You brought up business school. One of the things we, in the entrepreneurship classes that I took there, talked a lot about how little people know about what their business is going to become, and how many times it pivots and changes and how not knowing what you’re going to do is okay. It’s like you bet on the person more so than the idea. You bet that the person will figure it out.

I don’t have any clue, honestly, where to start with this, and that’s more intimidating. I feel pretty close to 85 percent confident about the idea that unions should decertify in professional sports, because I fully understand that. I’ve been through this and I know that if they operate as trade associations, they can still provide a lot of the services to players that players get from the union, and it doesn’t really hurt them. The scary part is, maybe you no longer have a league minimum for players, and that creates a tournament thing that you’re talking about. I understand the ins and outs, I understand that in a way that I don’t understand the landscape of college sports. I don’t know.

DUBNER: I guess I just look at it as a thought experiment. If you could take someone that doesn’t know anything about sports at all and say, “Hey, what if we have this system where workers are going to perform a set of tasks. Let’s say 50 hours a week, for four years, at this place, and then they’re going to perform essentially the same set of tasks in a different place. And in each case, 80,000 people come and watch them and millions more watch them on T.V. But in one case they get paid, let’s say, an average salary of whatever, $2, $3 million a year, and the other they get paid zero. And they’re the same people.” How — in what universe does that make any sense? That’s the thought experiment that I think would lead to a reassessment that —

FOXWORTH: That’s the thing it’s — another thing that I’ve come to learn in professional life is that logic is useless in some cases. The thought experiment that you just took me through is a wonderful one that proves the example, but people don’t act based on thought experiments. They act in reaction to incentives and pressure, and those sorts of things. So a couple of things that we talked about — and I think creating another place, creating real competition, because the fact that they are a monopsony now, meaning that they can — that’s the only place you can go — that exists in part because of the unions, both professional football and basketball. So basketball forces the players to be one year removed from high school, before they can enter the league, which forces them to then find an alternative. Maybe they can go overseas. But if they want to stay in America, they have to play college basketball.

Football is three years removed, and there is no real, viable, professional football leagues elsewhere, so you have to go to college. What the N.B.A. is doing now with the D-League, and they’ve started something called the Junior N.B.A., they’re building that infrastructure, whether intentionally or not. They are certainly building an infrastructure, infrastructure to create an academy system that is an alternative to college athletics and I know they’ve discussed the idea and they probably are going to remove the one and done rule in the next C.B.A. And some players will start going straight into these N.B.A. academies or into these D-League teams rather than going to college. And that might change the system. In football, I don’t think that there is much hope to change that anytime soon. I guess maybe if basketball changes then football has to change.

DUBNER: Well, what’s to stop me? Let’s say I’m an entrepreneur and I say, “The N.F.L. Players Association,” — which is a sworn enemy of the N.F.L. in many cases, in many instances, but they’re also colluding with them to basically get free labor for three or four years from all these athletes. What to stop me from saying, well, why don’t I work up an alternative and I will create some kind of league, that is pre-professional that would satisfy the N.F.L. draft rules, I guess. On the other hand, they can change those rules at will and put me out of business on day one, I guess, right?

FOXWORTH: Right. They could, but I don’t think they would. The major problem is network effects. You need to have a critical mass of the best players for the other best players to come, because the guys need to hone their skills and they need their skills to be matched up against other players, so that you can know. Maybe for basketball it might be a little different, because it seems to be that often they pick out those guys early on, and they turn out to be really good. But with football, if you get the top 50 players, top 50 incoming freshmen, to go build a league with you, which I think is — would be really hard to do. But if you do that, that’s still not even close to enough. You need them — and again, basketball, everyone plays the same position, everyone blocks, shoots, jumps, plays defense. Football it’s like, “Oh, so we’ve got to get —” It just seems like a really hard thing to do to build a real alternative.

DUBNER: Well let me ask you this: so the alternative to this, the purely cutthroat capitalist version, is the Academy model that soccer clubs around the world practice, right? And there, you’ve often got kids, very young kids, sometimes really — eight, nine, 10. But usually, 11, 12, early teens, going into academies and basically becoming sort of unpaid professionals, although not fully unpaid. And that is an alternative. But A, if you don’t make it into the professional level, which the vast majority, just numbers being what they are, won’t, then you have a weird — you’ve been removed from mainstream education and whatnot for a long time.

But also, I look at the flip side — you as an athlete and as a student, you may think it would have been better for you to have had the choice between professional sports and a career that was not sports. But on the other hand, you went to college and played sports. They went together. And then even though you say this system is not optimal for anyone, and certainly not for you, you graduated from Maryland. You played in the N.F.L. You had a union position, then in the N.B.A. as well. And then you got a Harvard M.B.A. So I could look at that and say man, I’m really glad that Domonique Foxworth was not sent to a football academy at age 13 to become a semi-professional. So now, maybe you’re just an outlier, but who knows.

FOXWORTH: So Jay-Z sold drugs, grew up in Marcy Projects to a single mother. Now he is a multi-multi-millionaire married to Beyonce, the most amazing talent we have today. So, why don’t we set it up so that all young men must sell drugs when they’re kids, and have only their mother and grow up in Marcy Projects in Brooklyn, New York? He had a great talent and to be honest, there’s probably a great deal of luck, he’ll speak to that, in that he happened to not be there when one of his friends got arrested, and his friend didn’t snitch on him. That is a lot of luck. And the same thing is true for me. I can go through the course of my life and look at all the things that happened that were just happenstance that led me to these positions, and I’m not going to say that it’s a model that should be followed. Just — I understand that there are occasional outliers, but trying to build around that seems crazy.

DUBNER: Let me ask you a very narrow specific question, but I’m just curious what you can tell me, because again, you’re one of the few people I know and maybe the only person there is who’s been in both the N.F.L. Players Association, had a position in that union, and a position the N.B.A. Players Union. So the two sports — even though we lump them together a lot— pro football and pro basketball — from a labor perspective, they’re pretty different, right? So there’s 53 on a team in the N.F.L. Just 12 in the N.B.A. But then additionally there’s visibility. We see the N.B.A. player — we see their faces. N.F.L. we usually don’t. And also the salary — average salary is much, much higher in the N.B.A., in part because there are so many fewer players for the money to go around. With all those differences between two sports that we tend to lump in together, what are the differences in either what the union tries to accomplish for those labor forces, or any other related differences?

FOXWORTH: Yeah, the power dynamics are obviously very different between the players in the union and the players in the league, and also consequently, the union and the league. LeBron James, he is more powerful than anybody, in the league, any owner, any team, anybody in the union, any player. He has more power and influence over that league than anybody else. There’s no one like that in the N.F.L. So that is — as are all things — it is a gift and a curse. There is a silver lining and a cloud that comes with having such a concentration of power and influence in any one person. So that changes the dynamics.

Fundamentally the things that the players want and that the union want to accomplish, they’re not very different. Honestly, they’re pretty similar in what you want to accomplish. But how you go about doing it is very different. So obviously, I wouldn’t speak about anything directly that I experienced while I was at either place, but this is one thing that I noticed, that, while working at the N.B.A. Players Association, was, the commissioner and LeBron James — the commissioner and Kevin Durant — they are more peers than anybody else. And they have a relationship, and they have conversations. That’s not something you have to concern yourself with. And frankly, when we were in negotiations, that was — it was nice to be able to actually be that liaison, when I was with the N.F.L. Players Association. The commissioner and the owners, they did not know how the players felt or what the players thought, unless they got it from us.

DUBNER: Do you attribute that difference, then, to the leverage that players have in part because basketball is different from football, or do you attribute that to some kind of either history or philosophy or economic leverage that N.F.L. owners have that is really different from N.B.A. owners?

FOXWORTH: Those all play a part in it. But fundamentally, it comes down to value, and I — while you brought up that there are fewer players in the N.B.A., and that’s part of the reason why the players get paid more. Yeah, that’s true. But LeBron James is more valuable to any single team as a talent or even as a marketing vehicle than anybody in the N.F.L. So that matters. You can go back through history and what Michael Jordan was able to create was a model, and player — he built on players before him, where the best basketball player is something that matters. And the best football player doesn’t matter in that way. I’m not sure that —I would also say that the person who is being most taken advantage of, honestly, in all of this, is probably Lebron James.

DUBNER: How do you mean?

FOXWORTH: The existence of the max salary in basketball — and again, we talk about these relationships and we often just talk about groups as if they’re monoliths, all N.B.A. owners feel like this. All commissioners and people in league offices feel like this. All players feel like this. All unions — it’s not true. The rise of the max salary was in part because the N.B.A. owners wanted to — and this was — max salary came before my time. But N.B.A. owners wanted to be able to control the salaries, because that’s who was driving the salaries up, is the best players — best players drive the salaries up. So N.B.A. owners want to be able to control that. And the middle class of players wanted to make more money.

So those guys’ interests were aligned in that case, let’s cap LeBron James, or let’s cap this guy, because that will take more money out of the system and put — allow the owners to put more in their pockets. But in a cap system if you have a floor, that also forced them to give more of it to us middle guys who aren’t really — so what ends up happening is, a lot of those guys get more than they, frankly, are worth. And LeBron James and people like him get a lot less than they deserve.

DUBNER: This happened in the N.F.L., too, didn’t it, right, with the different value attached to draft picks? Right? That year in the C.B.A., right? So all of a sudden the top draft pick was probably worth about a lot — 30 or 40 percent less than the same person had been a year before. Yeah?

FOXWORTH: I would quibble slightly with the word worth, and — paid, because I think the worth and how much they’re paid are two different things. But if you had a true — and the N.B.A. obviously has — the N.F.L. has a salary cap and the N.B.A. has luxury taxes and a cap which creates a de facto cap. And Major League Baseball, while it is uncapped, they still have instituted a number of rules that, last time I checked, the lowest percentage of league revenue goes to baseball players, while they have these enormous contracts, if you put together all the money that’s going to players, they are lowest of all the three major sports.

DUBNER: So let me ask you this. Let’s say someone listening to you says to themself, “I like sports. I played a little bit in high school, whatever, and I think it’s an amazing endeavor. Right? It scratches some itches that nothing else can. But I also like fairness and treating people with respect and also paying them what they’re worth. How do I reconcile that, as a fan of professional sports, and college sports, where you’re saying there’s all kinds of reasons to be frustrated, if not more than that?”

FOXWORTH: Frankly, you don’t. You don’t have to. It’s an interesting irony in that sports is a place that we consider it a very controlled environment and it’s as close to a meritocracy as we have, and we feel like it is fairness. Whoever wins on the game, on the field, is the better team. You aren’t necessarily — and it’s not — obviously it’s not true in life. The people who win in life are disproportionately people who are from wealthy parents and who have certain connections that — but you look at the field and we convince ourselves that once you step out there, it’s all fair, and it feels that way.

That doesn’t extend to the business of sports. And people who are interested in the business of sports, I certainly encourage them to learn more and to get involved in this, but the business of sports is much more business than it is sport. So I understand that there are lots of people who don’t care about this and aren’t interested in this, and I am not asking them to care or be interested. I just hope that they don’t get in with limited information. I love going to movies but I don’t necessarily want to get into the weeds of all the issues that happen in production.

DUBNER: Right. So talk for a minute about you as an athlete, as a kid, and I’m curious to know what the transition was like, when it went from something that you love to do — for whatever reasons you love to do it, whether it was pure fun or competition, or being good, whatever — the transition to when you realized it was something that was going to be a profession and a career, and how getting into the business of sport changed your view of it.

FOXWORTH: I was eight when I decided I wanted to be a professional football player. Actually, I was younger than that. I Remember because we lived — my dad was in the military, so we lived a couple different places. And I remember being in an apartment we lived in in Indianapolis, and I told my father I wanted to be a professional football player, and he told me, I don’t know if he believed me or not, but I suspect that he didn’t, but he told me, “All right, well, you set a goal, you should do something to get you closer to that goal every day.” And I took that to heart. So I did a bunch of pushups and sit ups that night, until I was throwing up, it’s ridiculous. And then my father — I assume — tried to teach me about moderation the next day. Like, “Hey, why don’t you take some smaller steps?” I was in love with the game, in part because of how violent it was.

Honestly, whatever warped sense of masculinity I had at that age, that probably has not fully left me was like, “Basketball is for the soft kids. Football is for the men. And I want to play football.” And to get back to the original question that you asked, I don’t remember not thinking that I was going to go. It’s weird, I was young enough then to be naive enough to think, “Obviously, I’m going to play in the N.F.L.” And as I got to an age to realize not everyone plays N.F.L., I also was one of the few kids who colleges wanted to talk to.

I think around high school, when — I worked from the time when I was old enough to — I was too old to go to summer camp — I started to work. And that was only two summers before colleges started inviting me to football camps. I would go to those football camps and realize, “Oh shit, this is an audition, this isn’t camp.” This isn’t football camp. I was 13 when I went to Art Monk’s full-pad football camp. And I didn’t get an invitation. I just wanted to go. And I still have the report card that they gave me that said that I maybe could play Division II college football. And then the next two —

DUBNER: How did you feel about that?

FOXWORTH: I was heartbroken and defiant at the same time. But everybody has these — those type of stories.

DUBNER: What position where you playing at the time?

FOXWORTH: I was playing running back and safety, which was probably part of the problem because they — they separated us by age at that point and not by weight. I was very small — too small to be a running back. So after that year, then at 14, I was old enough to work, so I worked the next two or then — yeah, I think I worked for — might have the years off, might have been 12 at Art Monk and then 13, 14, I worked. But anyway —

DUBNER: What kind of work did you do those summers?

FOXWORTH: I worked at a camp for disabled, a sleep away camp for disabled children and adults called Camp Green Top, the first year, which was a hell of an eye-opening experience, where you have to feed, bathe, change diapers of adults, chase them when they run off, and whatever. So that’s a whole nother ball of wax. But then next year I worked at Dragon House Express, the Chinese food restaurant in the mall food court. And then the next year I got — started getting invited to football camps. And that’s when it started to become a business. When I showed up and I was like, “Oh, they’re evaluating me, this is how I can get a scholarship or cannot get a scholarship. This is where the dream either continues to go forward or dies.”

DUBNER: And then how did that realization affect your performance?

FOXWORTH: It worked out, so I guess it helped.

DUBNER: Were you intimidated a little bit, or were you more like, “Oh, now I get it. Now this is my business and I’m going to win.”

FOXWORTH: Yeah, I do my best to be honest and not paint this picture of — I feel it’s easy for me to say, “No, then I turned it up another level.” Which can’t actually be true for a 15-year-old kid who knows that his whole life is riding on how well he does at Duke football camp or whatever. So I’m sure I felt some anxiety and some nervousness. But I pushed it down I guess, and I did well enough to get their attention. But it also felt like the pressure that I wanted, you know? I wanted to be a professional football player — I wanted for my play to matter. And obviously it felt like it mattered in my little Pop Warner games, whatever. I’d cry when we lost. But I knew that nobody cared in the world. But then, those were real stakes. And I was like, “Yeah, this is real.”

FOXWORTH: Were there other kids from those camps that you remember who also went on to play in the N.F.L.?

FOXWORTH: Probably. The one person I remember — I went to Penn State’s football camp and I remember Adam Taliaferro, who was older than me. He was the big guy on campus at the time, and he was their big recruit. They really wanted him. And I remember befriending him. He was a few years older to me, befriending him and looking up to him and being like, “Oh, this is cool. This big time guy who was on the cover of all these newspapers, we’re friends.” And then he ended up going to Penn State and playing safety, I believe, and was paralyzed. And yeah, that’s a whole nother avenue to go down.

DUBNER: Yeah. Well, let’s go down that avenue for a minute. You were relatively injury-free during high school and college. And when you would see other guys getting hurt or in an extreme case like Adam, getting paralyzed, what’s your response to that? How do you react?

FOXWORTH: It goes back to my warped ideas of masculinity, as much as I’ve gotten older and try to suppress them. At that point, it was still there. And probably — not probably, it still is in me at some point. Hopefully I’ve stifled some of it now. But it was like, “Yeah, I play this game, and yeah, people get paralyzed —” I’ve been on the field a couple of times when people have been paralyzed. I played in a preseason game in the N.F.L. where a guy died in a locker room afterwards. I was on the field when Kevin Everett was paralyzed. We had practice at Maryland where a helicopter came to take one player off the field and the coach said, move it down, and we kept doing the drills as a helicopter was taking one of our teammates who couldn’t move to the hospital. He ended up being okay. But these are all things that happened.

And I do remember — I think I was 11 years old. Pop Warner, we were playing against this other team that had a really good running back. We were tackling the running back. I hit him in his leg and it was so many people on him. He hit the ground and it popped, and he screamed, and we all got up and the bone was sticking through his skin, and it was broken, obviously. And we all went to the sideline and we’re broken up and we’re crying and stuff. And it took awhile to get him off the field and the coach was like, “We got to finish the game.” And that always stands out in my mind as a turning point, where I was like, “This is what you’re into, and this is what you’re going to be confronted with. And from that point forward, I don’t think I was aware of those things, but it never really bothered me — if anything it was a badge of honor. Yeah, I know this crazy stuff happens, and I go out there and do it anyway because I’m a man, or something like that.

DUBNER: You go out there and do it and you don’t get hurt doing it. But then you did start to get injured as a pro. Can you talk about your first significant injury there?

FOXWORTH: Yeah, it was tough. From a professional standpoint more than anything. I was fortunate that it didn’t happen a year sooner, or or two years sooner.

DUBNER: Well, this is tied to the money, right?

FOXWORTH: Yeah.

DUBNER: So let’s walk people through this, because a lot of people don’t understand how money works in the N.F.L. You were drafted I believe 2005, third round. Right? So what I’m looking at here, you were paid for that year, including a signing bonus, which was a lot of it, about $660,000 — that sound about right for year one?

FOXWORTH: Sure.

DUBNER: Okay. And then I guess back then, it was a three-year rookie contract. Is that right?

FOXWORTH: Yeah, it was a three-year rookie contract, with the fourth year option, I believe.

DUBNER: Gotcha. Okay, so looks like your first three years paid you a total of about $1.5 million. Most places in the world, that’s amazing. And those first few years were in Denver.

FOXWORTH: Yeah. So I went through the first three years, and then I was coming up on a contract year and I played pretty well in Denver, and I knew that I needed to play well in this year because if you don’t, then the salary minimum goes up for guys after that point. So then they just go get a younger one, and you — and you go on with the rest of your life. So during week one, we’re getting ready for the first week of a season in Denver. They traded me to Atlanta. Atlanta was a terrible football team at that point. It was a year after Vick was gone and they just drafted a rookie quarterback who no one thought was going to be very good. That was the first time when I considered going to business school. My girlfriend at the time, who is my wife now, I remember talking to her then like, “Yeah, this don’t look like it’s going to work out,” and I’m having to think about business school because I got traded on week one. You normally earned your position during training camp. I skipped training camp. This team is going to be terrible. I’m not going to play. And then I’ll be out of the league. But —

DUBNER: That year you got paid a little over $900,000, but you must have a pretty good year, because the next year you signed a contract with Baltimore that paid you in year one, $8 million, year two, $9.2, and year three, $4.4 — does that sound about right?

FOXWORTH: Yeah, it was a four-year, 27, I think. In Baltimore. And then the first year, I struggled at the beginning of the season but I was playing really well towards the end of the season. And Baltimore is the city I grew up in. So it was cool. And then when we have Super Bowl aspirations, and I’m playing well coming into the next season, and I tore my A.C.L. on the first day of training camp, and I was never the same. So that was — it felt like my career, with all the uncertainty and the, frankly, fear that I felt going into year four in Atlanta, I was the most confident that I’d ever been. And I was like, “Oh, this is perfect, I am a Baltimore guy. Back in Baltimore. Playing well. Super Bowl contender. We’re going to win the Super Bowl. I’m going to have a great season. I’m going to go to the Pro Bowl, this is — I’m playing as well as I ever have.” People are starting to recognize that I’m good and everything is starting to fall into place — and then the A.C.L. pops.

Frankly, that’s what led me to take on more leadership in the players association and led me to be involved in the negotiations, which then is what I used, frankly, it was the big piece that got me into business school, because I didn’t have the grades or the background to get into business school. But no one has experience like that, who’s going to business school. So that’s what, frankly, got me into Harvard Business School. So it still turned out to be a good story. But at the time it was — I don’t know. Obviously I would not say that it was a depression by any stretch, but I do remember my wife — and I think she was still my girlfriend then — telling me like, “Go get a haircut,” because I was just sitting around the house, going to rehab twice a day, and coming home and sitting in front of the T.V., just no shave, and no nothing.

DUBNER: What got you out of that?

FOXWORTH: I think it’s the opportunity to do — to be involved in the C.B.A. stuff — it gave me a purpose.

DUBNER: Right. It’s lucky you were near D.C. — did that matter?

FOXWORTH: Oh yeah. That absolutely helped and lucky that I already had relationships there and I was involved, and I was already in a leadership role. But I was given so much more time because of it.

DUBNER: So that four year contract you signed with Baltimore in 2009, it was a four-year, $27.2 million contract. How much of that did you actually collect?

FOXWORTH: All of it.

DUBNER: You did. Did you have it guaranteed even though you didn’t end up playing out the whole contract?

FOXWORTH: So I was on the team for three years, so I got those three years, and then the fourth year I got — I had taken out an insurance policy. So I got the rest of it there. That’s why I said earlier, I was fortunate that the knee injury happened after I signed that deal, because if it would have happened when I was in college, or happened a year earlier, I would have been on an entirely different path, which may have turned out to be great, but I really like where I’m at now.

DUBNER: Let me ask you this: generally, how did the reality as an N.F.L. player match your expectations? You’re a kid who, as you told us, from the age of eight or earlier, was seeing yourself playing in the N.F.L. And then you get there. Now it really, really, really is business. So I’m curious to know about that.

FOXWORTH: My freshman year in college, I started towards the end of the season, we played well, we won the A.C.C. championship. We went to the Orange Bowl and lost, and then immediately after, my head coach got a $10 million extension, and that was when I was like, “Oh, we aren’t a team, we’re a business.” And that was when the light went on for me. I don’t know that I would wish it any different. But that’s the thing that sucks the most, is that when you feel like you’re a part of a team and you still have that camaraderie and love for your teammates, but you also in the back of your mind, you are also thinking like, “Hey, I’m out for myself.”

I remember when — Denver, I had a really good rookie season and then my second year was okay, then I was scheduled to be the starter opposite Champ Bailey, the other corner, the next season. And they went and traded for Dre Bly, and I love Dre. He and I became good friends. But it was not lost on me that Dre was messing with my money, and my opportunity, and that sucks. It’s not fun to be in that situation. It’s not fun to feel that. I didn’t consider that, because I used to watch every Saturday and Sunday morning, they would do these N.F.L. yearbooks on E.S.P.N. and they would run them back to back to back, and I would get up and watch them all the time. And those do such a great job of telling the story of football. And I believed it, which is not to say that it’s not true, but it is incomplete.

DUBNER: Is part of that story when the new kid comes to camp or somebody is traded, that everybody tries to help them fit in, even though there is competition for the job, is that part of the story you’re saying?

FOXWORTH: That’s definitely part of the story, and it’s not untrue, because we do help each other, we do care about each other and we are a fraternity, look out for each other. But we’re also aware that it’s a business. There’s only a certain amount of money on the salary cap — and you recognize as you get — you recognize, “All right, if this doesn’t work out, what am I going to do?” If it didn’t work out in Atlanta, and I was out of the league after a year, I’d have been a 26-year-old with no real experience.

Being a football player does not qualify you to do anything, short of being a bouncer, I guess. And — no real experience, and I’m so far removed from college that it’s like, “What am I going to do?” And I have a bank account that is much larger than most of the other 26-year-olds, but still got a whole lot of life left to live, and it’s not a great situation to be in. It’s not awful, obviously, but you do feel that pressure. You’re thinking about that and you’re thinking about if you have kids at the time, or if you have family members that are depending on you, you’re like, “Oh, well as much as I love this guy, as much as I want him to do well. I need this.”

DUBNER: And what was Ashley — your then-girlfriend, now wife, what was she — what was her position now? Because I know Ashley a little bit, and I know that she’s not one to let things happen as as they’re going to, right? She’s like, “Have a plan. Make it work.” What was her advice to you?

FOXWORTH: I don’t think she gave me much advice at the time. She was in law school at the time. And she’s much smarter than me. I know a lot of people say that because it seems like the nice thing to say.

DUBNER: No offense, I’ll say, it’s pretty obviously true. She’s obviously very smart.

FOXWORTH: She went to — we met at Maryland and she went to the law school at Harvard, well before I went to the business school up there. But she — I was more stressed than she was.

DUBNER: Do you think in the back of her mind, she’s thinking, “It’s okay, because I’m going to be a lawyer and I can carry him if I need to.” Do you think that was part of it?

FOXWORTH: I don’t think so. Honestly. I don’t — as she tells it now, is she knew that I was going to be successful, and that was one of the things that was attractive.

DUBNER: You mean beyond football, or in football?

FOXWORTH: No, just in general. I don’t think she knew that I was going to be successful at football. I don’t think she knew what I would do professionally. But the way that she tells it is, she knew that I would be successful. So that was why she was not concerned. But I didn’t know that.

DUBNER: Does that say more about her or about you? In other words, does it say more about her like, “The kind of man I’m going to pick, I’m not going to pick someone who’s not going to be successful.” You think it was more —

FOXWORTH: You’ve been hanging out with her, because that’s the story that she tells. I think that she — those are things that I think she found most attractive about me, I was mature and focused and the idea that — the example of it is, I was already looking at business schools because I had already — I was obviously going to be all-in on this season. I’m going to make the season work. But I know that there’s a possibility it’s not going to work, and I’m not going to — I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and be like, “Oh, now what?”

DUBNER: Yeah, yeah. What about — did you ever think about politics?

FOXWORTH: I’ve been told that a lot. And I guess I’ve given it some thought. No more than a couple of hours. And I hate it.

DUBNER: Because why?

FOXWORTH: It seems terrible, because it seems you — well, the money in politics is one thing. You’re constantly fundraising. You’re not actually getting to affect any change — and I guess it depends on what level of politics you’re going to, or whatever, but it often feels like a trophy head, and to be a good politician, you are always looking for the next angle, the next office, or the next person who’s going to give you some money. I don’t know, that does not interest me at all.

DUBNER: So you’re a little ways into your athletic afterlife. Now, you’re about 35 years old, is that right Domonique?

FOXWORTH: Yep.

DUBNER: So you’ve been out of football for several years now, Where do you feel you are in your athletic afterlife, are you still at the beginning? And I’m curious to know what you see — how you see it playing out.

FOXWORTH: So I was president of the players association of the N.F.L. while I was playing, and after business school, I went to the N.B.A. Players Association, and I — I am in a weird state, frankly. I don’t know how to — it feels like a state of transition, which — but it feels like I shouldn’t be in a state of transition, if that makes any sense. So my whole life since I was a kid was very — I had a very clear goal and I worked towards that goal. And I made lots of decisions that would get me closer to that goal, but get me further away from other important and interesting things, including friends, including family. And then I was like, “I’m done playing.” So I will be in this state of transition, business school was like, “All right, this is my transition state, and then I’ll take this job at the N.B.A. Players Association and then I’ll be back to a steady state.” But I didn’t like it, and I left.

DUBNER: Because why? The N.B.A. position?

FOXWORTH: Yeah. I was the chief operating officer there, and there was a lot of things going on at the time, a lot of transition there. But being a chief operating officer was something that sounded good and paid well and I was very proud of. But it’s a lot of operating, frankly, which is — I remember living in New York, and my wife was pregnant with our third child, and she was not feeling good, and I was getting up at 6:30 a.m. to ride the subway to work with a bunch of other people who weren’t happy about where they were going to work. And I’d be there until 7:00 p.m. at night working, working, working, working. And I remember being on the subway thinking, “Am I happy? I have enough money that I don’t have to be unhappy. All these people who are on here with me, they have to go to work. And I don’t have to go to work.” So then I quit.

And I started writing for fun, and that’s what landed me at E.S.P.N. But to be completely frank with you, there’s some focus and clarity that scarcity brings to your life, and I don’t say this because I want to go back to a state when I was not sure, financially. I like being in a comfortable financial state. But there’s something to be said for the focus and clarity of, “Oh no, I’ve got to do this, because I got to feed my family.” And when you don’t have that focus and clarity, there’s something a bit frightening, honestly, about always feeling like, “What should I be doing with this gift, frankly, that I have? This gift of of flexibility and independence?” And sometimes in the job that I have now, I went to business school in part because I fancy myself as a smart person who is more than an athlete. And I wanted to get away from this, so there’s parts of me that’s embarrassed that I write about sports. Talk about sports.

But then there’s parts of me that’s like, “This awesome. It’s kind of flexible. I get to do fun things. I get to be — pick up my kids from school and take them to school.” And so it just depends on the day, where sometimes I’m like, “I should be chasing some big professional glory, and I’m wasting time. Or some days I’m doing just exactly what I should be doing, or well, I should be spending more time with my kids and my wife because I have this flexibility.” So when you have that scarcity to focus your thought, it’s very clear what you should be doing. And it’s an interesting thing to happen to somebody at this age. It feels more of a midlife thing. And for athletes it’s a unique thing. Successful athletes, it’s a unique thing, that in your 20s or 30s. You’re like, “Now what?”

DUBNER: Now, everything you said just makes sense to me, but I’m also curious if there’s one more element that plays into that, which is that sports is maybe singularly thrilling to do. And I say maybe — if you play music at a high level — it’s probably silly to say that sports are the only one — but because of the nature of what it is and the competition, it’s thrilling. Look how thrilled people are to watch it. And you guys are the ones who are doing it. And I just wonder if part of what’s contributing to your sort of malaise is just the possibility that that thrill is irreplaceable.

FOXWORTH: I think that’s a reasonable thing to think. But it doesn’t feel like that to me. I don’t feel like I’m missing that thrill, it’s not something that I feel I want. The feeling of uncertainty is the feeling that I have more than anything. It’s not like, “Oh, my life is boring.” It’s like, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the best thing I can with this fortune and situation that I’m in?” And where it is connected to sports in some way, what also exacerbates it, I think, is a feeling of loneliness, honestly, which — I have three kids and my wife, and I’m not alone, obviously. And I love them and have fun with them.

But throughout my life, I have been almost myopically focused on a goal, which — being focused on that goal gave me purpose and I’m sure I’m going to butcher the Nietzsche quote, but it’s something to the effect of, “When a man has a why, he can bear almost any how.” And I don’t drink now, I never drank in my life. I never smoke weed. I was singularly focused on doing everything. Every decision I made was like, “All right, I’m going to get closer to his goal.” And the people I was close with in high school, those aren’t my friends anymore. People I was close with in college, not really my friends anymore. And then at 35, I’m in D.C. where my wife has a bunch of family and friends, friends that she’s been close with since they were in the second grade, and I’m like, “I don’t really have that.” And I was making these choices, which I thought were choices to get me —

DUBNER: What you wanted.

FOXWORTH: Right. And I wasn’t — there were choices that I was making that I was unaware that I was making. I didn’t realize at the time that I was foregoing long lasting relationships. And I think lots of athletes do the opposite and bring their friends and family along with them, and then they are making a decision. And there are a whole other whole mess of problems that you get from that. So there is no right way to do it. And I am very happy with where I’m in my life. And while you’re a professional athlete, you walk around with this skepticism, frankly, of all new people in your life. So even if there was the potential for some great friendships, I wasn’t open to them.

I’d go to these places, people are like, “Oh, football player,” and I’d pretend and be nice to them because that’s what you do, and they pretend or whatever to be into me, because that’s what you do, and then you move on. And then you’re 35, and you’re like, “Hey, you haven’t talked to your best friend from high school in 10 years, or something like that.” So I certainly don’t feel sad or anything, but these are things that I am becoming more aware of now. I said to my wife a couple of days ago that I feel I’m in a perpetual state of transition, which is interesting and uncomfortable at the same time.

DUBNER: What are some of the other things you’ve tried? You mentioned the N.B.A. Players Association job. What are some other things that you tried that you thought would make you excited or happy, and didn’t?

FOXWORTH: So, it’s not that they didn’t, it’s that they — that they don’t. It’s — so I mentioned, it’s no matter — and I’m starting to understand that — and this goes back to the scarcity point, where if there is something there to make the decision for you it feels somewhat easier. But I imagine that everyone can relate to this, that when you’re at work sometimes, you’re like, “Man, I really wish I was with my kids. I really wish I was partying.” Or when you are with your family, you’re like, “Man —” Particularly if you like your job, you want to be at work, or you might want to go on a guys trip or you might want to go on a romantic vacation with your wife, there’s so many things that you want to do. But there are things for so many people that they have to do.

So when I’m in this position where it’s like, “All right, I want to do this and then I’m doing it, but I want to do some of that.” It even breaks down into professional where it’s like, “All right, I want to just chase professional glory. I want to work my way up to the top of some company.” And I’m capable of doing that, I feel like I have the intelligence or charisma and pedigree, academically, to get in those positions, but that requires you to not be home a lot. And there’s part of me that wants that, but then there’s part of me — I want my kids to look back and be like, “Hey, my dad picked me up from school a couple of days a week.” I don’t know.

DUBNER: So this ambivalence, you never had any of this, though, when you were chasing the N.F.L. dream, did you?

FOXWORTH: No, this is brand new. It was quite clear to me that there were two things: I need to get paid, and we need to win. And anything that was not in line with that was like, “All right, obviously I don’t need to do this.” And maybe I was a more extreme version of it than a lot of people, to the point that I don’t drink and stuff. I don’t have some religious thing against drinking, I just never have, and I didn’t — when I was in high school and probably a lot of people start, because I’m like “No, it’s going to make me a worse football player.” And one of my best friends in high school actually sold drugs, and got a little bit of time for it. And when he was selling and occasionally smoking, I was like “No, I’m a football player.” Even our presidents, over the years, have experimented with marijuana. It feels like for me — and some even cocaine. For me it was like, “No, there’s one thing to do”. And now I’m at this point where I don’t really know how to have fun. I don’t really have super close friends, and I don’t really know what to do with my life. But I’m pretty happy still.

DUBNER: So it sounds to me at least that you built an identity that was focused, really strongly focused on football. But there are a million parts of what identity means, it means who you know and what you do with them, and what you put in your body, and so on. And now, you still have the identity, but you don’t have the thing that you built it for. It’s got to be a little baffling in a way. You are the person you made, to succeed, and then you did succeed, and now it’s like, “What next?”

FOXWORTH: Most people’s journeys are so much longer that when they do succeed, they die a few years after or something.

DUBNER: That’s your problem. Yeah. That’s what’s always attracted me about the idea of the afterlife of an athlete, is it’s unnatural. Most people, they pursue something for their whole life, or it’s not so specific that they basically are told to stop doing it when they’re 35, because they’re too slow. And yet, you can’t ask — you got a lot of money in the bank, you can’t ask people to feel sorry for you on that front.

FOXWORTH: I’m certainly like this — to be clear, this conversation is not at all about me wanting sympathy or feeling sorry.

DUBNER: No, no, I didn’t mean to imply.

FOXWORTH: There’s nobody that I want to trade places with. But I just — that doesn’t mean that there aren’t things —

DUBNER: You have a serious case of “grass is greener”-ism, it sounds like.

FOXWORTH: It feels that way, right? To the point that you made about the — I am the person that I’ve made. One of my classes in business school, one of the — it was surprising. I went to business school before — after I finished playing, I went to business school because I was like, “All right, now I’m going to keep competing. I’ll go to the best business school and I’m going to turn this 27 into 200.” And then I got there. And surprisingly, as I’m sure Harvard has a bad stereotype or a bad reputation for creating money-hungry people with low ethics, I’m sure there are plenty of them coming out. But I was surprised with how many mushy, soft classes that we had. That were about our feelings and integrity and all that stuff.

And I do remember one professor who said that — it wasn’t to me directly, it was just to the class, but it felt like he was talking to me directly. And I didn’t really like this professor necessarily, so I hate to give him credit. But he said something to the effect of, “The operating system that you used to get here may not be the operating system that you need going forward.” And that resonated with me, because I feel that’s definitely true for me. But I don’t know, they don’t just release updates for humans. So like, modifying my operating system is a slower and more challenging process.

DUBNER: Right. What was the professor’s name?

FOXWORTH: I don’t remember. I didn’t like him because on the first day he said to me — obviously, I was the football player there, and that was part of my identity. He sized me up and was like, “Aren’t you kind of small for a football player?” I was like, “I will whoop your ass in this classroom.” But he was actually a pretty good professor.

DUBNER: So let me ask you this. You are a scholar, at least an amateur scholar, of the civil-rights movement. Can you just talk for a second about the relationship between the civil rights movement per se and sports, areas where there’s overlap, maybe where one movement is way ahead or behind of the other. And I’ve certainly got in the back of my mind the anthem protests that are a big piece of this conversation right now. I’m curious to know what you have to say about that.

FOXWORTH: At least in America, there’s something black about professional athleticism. The players are largely black and — particularly in the Big Two sports, a lot of the culture that seeps out of the game into our pop culture comes from black players and there’s a lot of people who want to separate race from sports. And they say they want to go back to how it was when race and sports were separate, but it never was. It always has been intertwined — race is probably the most, particularly in America — the most defining characteristic of our country is how we have dealt with race. And it is always involved in everything.

Obviously, there were the ‘60s. Obviously, no one can say that race and sports weren’t connected. But people point to the periods after that from the ‘70s, ‘80s, to the ‘90s, and they would say that those were times when race and politics and social issues were not in sports. But I still think they were, because the players were still dealing with it. Whether the media was putting attention on it or whether people were willing to address it or talk about it, it was a thing that was always there. So that frustrates me. So I don’t necessarily feel — while I do accept that we’re in a state now as a country where it is unavoidable, the intersection, I don’t feel like it ever went away. It’s not a new intersection, it’s just I happened to be on that corner altogether, at once.

DUBNER: It’s funny you say that because the thing that struck me most about when Colin Kaepernick first decided to protest police violence by sitting and then kneeling during the anthem, the thing that struck me is it felt so mild compared to some past protest moves, like the 1968 Olympics. That was a big deal. And then it also struck me — the response also struck me as so overwrought, that again, it felt pre-’60s in a way. Haven’t we done this, and shouldn’t the conversation be way ahead of this? But maybe that’s because it is at the end of the day, all about just race, and not even race in sports, race in politics, etc. Do you think that’s what it’s really about?

FOXWORTH: Yeah. It’s not about the issues, it’s not about the posture you take when you are — when the national anthem is being played. It’s something that I — As a father, I’ve come to recognize that adults aren’t very different from children. Adults learn how to justify and how to validate their actions and decisions. Whereas if my son does something ridiculous and I ask him why he looks at me like I’m crazy like, “How you ask me why?” Or he’ll just say, “I took a cookie.” And, why? “I wanted a cookie.” Okay. Yeah, that’s fair. And I think that people to a certain degree, even if it is subconscious, they do what feels right, or what makes them happy or what makes them feel good, and then they’re like, “All right, now let me concoct this post-hoc justification whether it’s conscious or unconscious.” And I think that’s what’s happening.

And we see it with the anthem stuff. It’s like, “All right, sitting down during the anthem is a problem. And then you move from there to kneeling — so kneeling is then a problem. Raised fist is a problem and now we see that staying in the locker room is a problem.” Let’s just be honest about it. You don’t like these people making any statement and it makes you uncomfortable and you don’t like it. So you’re not going to like it no matter how they get it across. There’s no — and that’s one of the things that’s been most frustrating about this is they’re like, “No, I understand. But this is the wrong time or this is the wrong way.” No, there is no right time. There is no right way.

“You should be more like Martin Luther King.” Martin Luther King was assassinated and a large majority of white society was not happy with him advocating for advanced rights. I don’t know. It just feels like no matter what, there are people. And it’s a trap that we often get caught in, and not just in this case, but just in general, where it’s like, “All right, we’re going to try to satisfy everybody or we’re going to try to satisfy this group.” Some people don’t want to be satisfied. They want to be angry, let them be angry.

DUBNER: If you were still playing in the N.F.L. and first day of the season happens —

FOXWORTH: Yes.

DUBNER: What do you do during the anthem?

FOXWORTH: I think at this point you probably stand up because there’s not much. It’s easy to say now. I don’t know. So I’d like to say that I would be in solidarity with those guys and I would have the courage to expose myself to the hate that they’re receiving. But I don’t know. It’s easy to say now. From the sidelines.

DUBNER: I’m just going to ask one last question if I can. Two part question. No. 1, you played professional and college and high school football. So you can’t not think about long-term brain damage, since that’s a big piece of all conversations about football these days. So I’m curious to know whether you feel a little bit like you’re living with a time bomb in your head. And related to that, I’m curious to know what happens if and when your son wants to play football.

FOXWORTH: So I’ll take the second one first. Slightly easier. He’s only five now and I say no. It’s not a problem that we’re actually facing at this point, but I would say no.

DUBNER: So if he comes to you and says, “Hey Dad, I know before I was born, you were an amazing N.F.L. player, great career, etc. What do you mean, no? What are you talking about?”

FOXWORTH: I think the research wasn’t there. I suspect my parents would not have let me play when I was that age, if there was information available. And it’s not even clear information. But what is clear is that it does put you at a higher risk. Like, my son doesn’t need those things. The best case scenario is that you play professional football and you make a lot of money. I wasn’t — I was far from poor growing up, like middle class, but I went to Baltimore County public schools. That’s not my son’s experience. I didn’t have access to the things that he’ll have access to. So I frankly think that he is starting in a much better place than I am, so he should do much better than banging his head into other people’s heads for money. It seems like a step back to me, honestly.

DUBNER: On a macro scale, does that mean that as football goes forward, and I guess if football goes forward, which obviously in the short term it will, but in long term it’s a question, does that mean that the only people that play it are going to be the people who need to play it to try to make the money that they can’t make otherwise?

FOXWORTH: Feels like outside of the quarterback position, it’s already gravitated to that, both prior to now.

DUBNER: But you’ve got guys, the San Francisco 49ers for instance, they have a few guys who’ve had a lot, there have been a lot in the league, who went to Stanford. So these are football players that go to Stanford to get a Stanford degree. There’s a lot of ways they can now make a living. So there’s obviously more about the appeal of playing at that level than just making the money, yeah?

FOXWORTH: Football players, athletes are still heroes in our society. And it’s something that people, particularly young boys, will aspire to. I understand that. But I do think that the danger is something that’s going to push people away from it in a way that it drew people to it in the past, so it’s not — football is not by any stretch dead, and there is still hope that they could find ways to modify the game or improve equipment or whatever and make it safer, but until they do, I don’t see why my son needs to play. But I don’t judge anybody else. Your son can do what you want your son to do. That’s just not for my son.

DUBNER: And then what about you? Do you worry about your brain? Does your wife worry about your brain?

FOXWORTH: Absolutely. I do. It’s something that I think lots of players talk about and think about. And every time there is — It could just be general aging, you don’t know where your keys are. It’s like you’re living a horror movie honestly, where it’s this thing lurking in the background, that you hear noises but you don’t necessarily know if that’s just a regular noise or if that is a monster. And that’s what I analogize it to, where it’s like all right, I can’t find my keys. That to me feels like “Oh, is this a signal? Or is this just something, whatever?” It’s scary. And what is most frightening is, right now, I would do it all over, because of what it’s done for me and my family.

And I think most players would agree with that, except for the ones who killed themselves. I have been sad before, obviously, but I don’t know that darkness, I don’t know. I’ve never ever in my life gave any realistic consideration to ending my own life and trying to — And I invite you or anybody else to try to wrap your head around how sad, depressed, how dark you must feel to see death as relief, as a way out. And I imagine if I were ever to feel that way, or for people who do feel that way, they don’t say like, “I would go back and do it all over again.” I would imagine in that moment they would give up all the fame, all the money, all the success, all the women, or whatever else, all the trappings of this, to not be in a place where you feel like the only exit is to end your life. So that’s very dark and very difficult to deal with, but I’ve never been there. I hope never to get there. But until then, I feel like I’m happy with the decisions that I’ve made and I will continue to live as happy and productive a life as I can.

DUBNER: Well on that note, let me just thank you for a really great conversation and wish you and your family all the best, and I hope you find the greenest pasture possible.

FOXWORTH: And then find a greener one.

That was Domonique Foxworth; on Twitter, he’s @Foxworth24. Hope you enjoyed this full conversation; he appears throughout our “Hidden Side of Sports” series, including episode numbers 349, 351, and 365. Thanks again to him, and thanks to you for listening.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. Our “Hidden Side of Sports” series was produced by Anders Kelto and Derek John, with lots of help from Harry Huggins, Alison Craiglow, and Alvin Melathe; we also had help from Rebecca Douglas and Nellie Osborne, and our staff includes also Greg Rippin, and Zack Lapinski. The music you hear throughout our episodes was composed by Luis Guerra. Our show can also be heard on NPR stations across the country — check your local station for the schedule — as well as on SiriusXM, Spotify, and even your better airlines!

The post Extra: Domonique Foxworth Full Interview appeared first on Freakonomics.

Patriots quarterback Tom Brady has played 19 seasons in the N.F.L. but the average player only lasts 3.5 years. (Photo: Dustin Bradford/Getty)

If you think talent and hard work give top athletes all the leverage to succeed, think again. As employees in the Sports-Industrial Complex, they’ve got a tight earnings window, a high injury rate, little choice in where they work — and a very early forced retirement. (Ep. 6 of “The Hidden Side of Sports” series.)

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

The Super Bowl is by far the biggest sports event in the United States. It draws the most viewers, the most attention, and of course the most money. As we’ve been discussing in this “Hidden Side of Sports” series, the sports-industrial complex has grown tremendously over the past few decades; it generates roughly $70 billion a year. But once you strip away the massive TV revenues, the increasingly sophisticated arenas and stadiums, all the merchandise — what most people care about is watching the players play. How much do we care about the players themselves? That is a different question. Most of us do profess to care about the livelihood and well-being of employees in various industries. Does this apply to athletes? Or is sports too unlike other industries to think of its employees as just another labor force? Let’s find out; let’s find out what it’s like to be on the labor side of the equation in a business that often seems — and never more than on Super Bowl Sunday — to be nothing but superstars and fat paychecks and game-day glory.

DeMaurice SMITH: Yes, the National Football League generates billions of dollars. But the reality of the facts of our business are rather stark.

That’s DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the the N.F.L. Players Association, the union that represents the athletes.

SMITH: Our players play for approximately three-and-a-half years.

On average, that is; some careers are obviously longer. And every career, at some point, is derailed by pain.

SMITH: The injury rate is 100 percent. Owners tend to own teams for decades, if not generations. What the players have tried to do throughout history is just to make sure that they get what they believe is their fair share.

According to a lot of the athletes we’ve been speaking with, in a variety of sports, a fair share is hard to come by. Many feel they don’t have much control over their destinies — financial and otherwise.

Domonique FOXWORTH: It’s an interesting kind of irony in that sports is a place that we consider as close to a meritocracy as we have, and you look at the field and we convince ourselves that once you step out there, it’s all fair, and it feels that way. That doesn’t extend to the business of sports.

This is true of the biggest sports, like football …

SMITH: The owners are people who are used to getting their way.

And the sports that draw smaller crowds …

Kerri WALSH JENNINGS: The athletes have no leverage. It’s almost like the abuser-abusee relationship, where the abusee gives excuses for being abused. That’s exactly what’s happening with regard to domestic volleyball here in the U.S.

This can happen early in an athlete’s career …

FOXWORTH: Most people understand that college sports is professional sports. They generate a substantial amount of revenue, and that revenue goes to lots of people who are not the labor.

It can happen to athletes at their peak …

Shawn JOHNSON: The way these contracts are structured is these athletes aren’t paid any money upfront. The only way they earn money is by winning medals.

And it extends into retirement — which, for athletes, is an inherently early retirement.

J.J. REDICK: I think about what I’m going to do after basketball on a daily basis. And there’s a level of fear of the other side.]

*      *      *

The seeds of a sports career are typically planted quite early.

FOXWORTH: I was eight when I decided I wanted to be a professional football player.

That’s Domonique Foxworth. He played in the N.F.L. from 2005 to 2011.

FOXWORTH: It’s weird, I was young enough then to be naive enough to think, obviously, I’m going to play in the N.F.L. I started getting invited to football camps. And that’s when it started to become a business. When I showed up and it was like, “Oh, they’re evaluating me.” This is where the dream either continues to go forward or dies.

WALSH JENNINGS: The very first moment I played volleyball, I fell in love with it.

That’s the three-time Olympic gold medalist Kerri Walsh Jennings.

WALSH JENNINGS: And people talk about their “aha moments” and these pivotal times in their lives where things are different. I had that moment when I was 10, in the fifth grade. And I literally just fell in love with the dance of the game and the learning everything that had to do with volleyball. I loved it. I was a geek for it.

Mark TEIXEIRA: I was a sophomore in high school and pro scouts started showing up to my games.

And that’s Mark Teixeira.

TEIXEIRA: And that’s when I was talking to my coaches and talking to my dad and talking to some of these scouts, saying “Wow, I could actually play professional baseball. How cool is that?”

Teixeira wound up playing 14 seasons in the major leagues. He was a three-time All-Star, a World Series champion. But back in 1998, he was just a teenager with a lot of potential.

TEIXEIRA: I was the 12th-rated prospect in the draft that year, my senior year.

He could have played college baseball first or gone straight to the pros through Major League Baseball’s amateur draft. The draft is how teams in the big American sports pick their young players. Unlike other industries, where an employee can choose the city where they want to live and the company they want to work for, in a sports draft the employee can only work for the company that chooses them. Still, for a player like Teixeira, the future was bright.

TEIXEIRA: For all intents and purposes I should have been a top-15 pick, right? The Red Sox that year had the ninth pick.

The Red Sox actually had the twelfth overall pick, not the ninth; Teixeira’s recollection seems a bit off. Anyway …

TEIXEIRA: They called me up before the draft and said, “Hey, we want you to take this signing bonus, it was $1.5 million, we’re going to take you, this signing bonus, agree to this pre-draft deal, we’ll draft you and you’ll get started.” Well you’re not allowed to, at least in those days, you weren’t allowed to pre-negotiate a deal when you’re an amateur. And I said “okay, you know what? I’ll roll the dice. If the Red Sox don’t draft me, some other team will draft me and I’ll be fine.” Well, draft day comes. It was going to be the coolest day of my life, the most exciting day of my life. Not only was I not the ninth pick. I dropped to the ninth round.

DUBNER: Wow. So that’s like 270 spots or something, right?

TEIXEIRA: And who drafts me?

DUBNER: Boston Red Sox?

TEIXEIRA: The Boston Red Sox.

Teixeira wound up going the college route, and played baseball at Georgia Tech.

TEIXEIRA: Best three years of my life.

DUBNER: Met your wife there, I understand?

TEIXEIRA: Met my wife there, had a blast, became a better baseball player.

When Teixeira entered the draft this time, he was picked fifth overall, by the Texas Rangers. So what had happened in that first draft? According to Teixeira, here’s what the Red Sox did:

TEIXEIRA: They called every single team in baseball and said “Teixeira is not signing and he’s going to Georgia Tech. Don’t draft him.”

The Red Sox, we should say, have disputed Teixeira’s account, and claim they did nothing wrong. In any case, here’s what Teixeira took away from that incident.

TEIXEIRA: This was the moment that I realized that baseball is a business.

For Domonique Foxworth, the business side of sports became fully manifest during college, at the University of Maryland.

Domonique FOXWORTH: My freshman year in college, we won the A.C.C. championship. We went to the Orange Bowl and lost and then immediately after, my head coach got a $10-million extension. That was when I was like, “Oh, we aren’t a team, we’re a business.” And that was when the light went on for me.

There is perhaps no more confounding labor market in sports than the one whose organizers insist on saying it is not a labor market. I’m talking about big-time American college sports, run by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or N.C.A.A. College sports — especially basketball and football — have also grown massively over the past few decades; they generate about $13 billion a year — nearly as much as the N.F.L But the labor is essentially free. Aside from room and board and some academic scholarships, college athletes receive no compensation. So where is that $13 billion going?

FOXWORTH: So it goes to supporting other sports, it goes to building bigger and better facilities, it goes to paying college presidents and coaches and funding the N.C.A.A. It goes a lot of different places, but it doesn’t go to the people who are the labor on the field.

Just how much is going to the coaches? The Duke economist Charles Clotfelter looked at compensation data for various personnel from 44 public universities that have big football programs. Over the past 30 years, he found that full professors got a salary increase of 43 percent, adjusted for inflation. Not bad. College presidents got an 89 percent increase over that time. Even better. How’d the football coaches do? Over those 30 years, football coaches’ compensation increased more than 1,100 percent, from an average of around $300,000 to more than $3.6 million a year. Back in 1985, football coaches were earning slightly less on average than the college presidents; now they earn about six times as much. Their athletes, meanwhile, are still playing for free. And if you want a career in the N.B.A. or N.F.L., you pretty much have to play at least some college ball, since both leagues have eligibility requirements that forbid athletes from going pro straight out of high school. Domonique Foxworth again:

FOXWORTH: If that was the end of the story, and every player then went on to have N.F.L. careers, it would be unfair, but whatever, you’re not going to lose any sleep for those guys. But the vast majority of the guys — and I have several teammates who, because it is not considered work, they’re not privy to workers’ compensation. They’re not privy to extended health care. So one of my best friends in college, he had aspirations to play professional football. He had three knee surgeries while in college. A few years ago, his doctor told him that he was going to have to have both of his knees replaced by the time he was 50. And he didn’t play professional sports. And there’s nothing that any college football team or governing body is going to do for him in that case. And that to me is tragic, that a lot of people benefited from that.

DUBNER: So the old-fashioned argument for why this was acceptable was that, this is like what economists call a tournament model, right? Whenever you’ve got a lot of people competing for the top of the pyramid, whether it’s show business or sports or whatever, the bottom of the pyramid, there’s lots and lots and lots and lots of people there willing to do whatever it takes for practically no money. It’s this kind of weird unpaid apprenticeship. Some people accept that as okay. Others don’t. But what strikes me that’s especially noteworthy about sports is the degree and magnitude of sacrifice, physical and otherwise, is larger, I would argue, than trying to become an actor, trying to become a writer, and whatnot. So can you just talk about that component and what you think would be a better solution?

FOXWORTH: I think bringing up the tournament model is interesting, because I can understand how some people would look at that and say that it fits here, and that’s why this is fair. But I think as a country, we’ve decided that that wasn’t fair a long time ago. There are plenty of jobs where that’s true, just about every job. It’s like the barista at Starbucks. There are plenty of people out there who are capable of being baristas, and you could probably allow Starbucks to pit them against each other and negotiate down, down, down, down, down.

But that’s not the case. We’ve instituted minimum wages and instituted lots of other laws to protect American people or American workers from these type of capitalistic urges run amok. And the thing that’s frustrating to me is, we’ve instituted rules in professional sports, that happen to take place on college campuses. We instituted rules that are to the advantages of the institutions. But we are not interested in instituting any rules that are things that we accept as just kind of, facts and fair. You’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone in our society that’s like, “No, let’s eliminate the minimum wage and allow this tournament model to run amok for low-wage workers.”

DUBNER: Well, the other argument though, in colleges, is wait a minute: free education, four years of college, what’s that worth?

FOXWORTH: It could be worth a lot, but you’re not even getting the same education as the people around you. Because you have to travel on Thursdays and Fridays, and you are not allowed to do certain majors because they conflict with your schedule. I wanted to be a computer-science major, and my academic adviser was like, “That course load is going to make it very difficult for you to make our practices, there are labs.” And blah, blah, blah, blah. And three times a week, during the winter session or the spring session, you have to go to 5 a.m. workouts, and that changes your academic experience. There are all these things that are mandatory because your scholarship is year-to-year, and you don’t have any power to negotiate with your coach and say things like, “I want to take this so I’m not going to able to go there.” That’s just not a thing that is available. So the education that they’re receiving is not the education that people think it is.

The Duke economist Charles Clotfelter also looked at graduation rates from 58 universities that have big-time sports programs. For the general population at these schools, the graduation rate was 72 percent. For football players, it was 56 percent; for basketball players, just 42 percent. This is yet another reason that makes some people question the very existence of the N.C.A.A. Here’s the assessment of the entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who owns the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks.

Mark CUBAN: I think it’s worthless.

DUBNER: If you could blow it up entirely what would you do? Would you have football attached to college at all?

CUBAN: I don’t mind having it attached to college, but I would make it an independent entity so that it would operate independently. Let them go get a job, let them practice as much as they need to. If I wanted to create a band I can pay them, and they can stay in school. They can practice together as much as they want. That’s the hypocrisy. If you want to be a professional athlete, you can’t practice your craft as much as you would like. There’s limits to coaching and playing with your teammates. There’s limits on jobs you can take. There’s so many different things that are bound in stone that it just doesn’t make sense.

For years, there’s been talk about reforming the N.C.A.A., but it hasn’t changed much. The Commission on College Basketball, chaired by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is advocating some reforms that can be seen as pro-athlete. But she also said this: “Our focus has been to strengthen the collegiate model — not to move toward one that brings aspects of professionalism into the game.” Which might make more sense if some aspects of college sports weren’t already at the professional level. Like coaching salaries, and TV audiences, and the expectations of the top-tier athletes. So: how likely is a substantial change? Domonique Foxworth is not optimistic.

FOXWORTH: Those guys who are on the doorsteps of having professional careers, it’s not really in their best interest to stop this now. And the people who are benefiting most from it who are not on the field, there’s really no benefit to the coaches — because coaches’ salaries are inflated because they have extra money, because they are not sending it to the players. And the rest of the teams who are funded by money generated by football and basketball. There’s no incentive there, there’s just the athletes, who don’t have much power.

Foxworth, as you’ve probably figured out by now, has thought through the entire athletic ecosystem more than most people. Besides playing in the N.F.L., he’s been an executive at both the N.F.L. and N.B.A. players’ unions, and he also got an MBA from Harvard. So to understand the incentives he’s been describing, and the transition from college to pro, let’s go back to Foxworth’s own transition.

DUBNER: You were drafted, I believe, 2005, third round. So what I’m looking at here, I have no idea if this is accurate, you were paid for that year, including a signing bonus about $660,000 — that sound about right for year one?

FOXWORTH: Sure.

DUBNER: Okay. And it was a three-year rookie contract. Is that right?

FOXWORTH: Yeah, it was a three-year rookie contract, with the fourth-year option, I believe.

DUBNER: Okay, so looks like your first three years paid you a total of about $1.5 million. And then in your fourth year, then you did become a free agent, moved to Atlanta; those first few years were in Denver.

FOXWORTH: So they traded me. So I went through the first three years, and then I was coming up on a contract year and I played pretty well in Denver, and I knew that I needed to play well in this year because if you don’t, then the salary minimum goes up for guys after that point. So then they just go get a younger one, and you — and you go on with the rest of your life. So during week one, we’re getting ready for the first week of the season in Denver, they traded me to Atlanta. Atlanta was a terrible football team at that point. That was the first time when I considered going to business school. I skipped training camp. “This team is going to be terrible. I’m not going to play. And then I’ll be out of the league.”

DUBNER: But you must have a pretty good year, because the next year you signed a contract with Baltimore that paid you in year one, $8 million, year two, $9.2, and year three, $4.4 — does that sound about right?

FOXWORTH: Yeah, it was a four-year, 27, I think. In Baltimore.

DUBNER: How much of that did you actually collect?

FOXWORTH: All of it.

DUBNER: How — did you have it guaranteed even though you didn’t end up playing out the whole contract?

FOXWORTH: I was on the team for three years, and then the fourth year I had taken out an insurance policy. So I got the rest of it there. So I was fortunate that the knee injury happened after I signed that deal, because if it would have happened when I was in college, or happened a year earlier, I would have been on an entirely different path.

So despite an injury that prematurely ended his career, things worked out pretty well for Foxworth. Meaning: he got paid. By the time he was 30, he was set for life — financially, at least. But consider how easily it might have been different. Consider the case of Andre Ingram.

INGRAM: Hey Steve, how are you doing, man?

Ingram spent 10 seasons in the N.B.A.’s minor leagues — today it’s called the G-League, after its sponsor, Gatorade; it used to be the D-League, for “development.”

INGRAM: So I would tell people that yeah I played in the D League and have been playing for years. They usually notice my gray hair and wonder if I’m a coach or whatnot. At some point, they always ask, “Oh, have you ever made the big time?” And I had to tell them the same thing every time: “Well, not yet.”

That finally changed last year. Ingram, at 32 years of age, was promoted to the Los Angeles Lakers for the season’s last two games. Here’s what happened on the first shot he took in the N.B.A.:

ANNOUNCER: Down it goes! Welcome to the N.B.A., Andre Ingram!

ANNOUNCER: Makes his first try! That is awesome!

Ingram went on to score 19 points that night.

INGRAM: My brother and my niece had called told me — they said, “Hey, you are blowing up on Twitter, you’re blowing up on Instagram, you’re everywhere.”

Ingram made a great impression. But still: he was a 32-year-old rookie. Would the Lakers bring him back the following season? When we spoke with Ingram, this past summer, the Lakers had just made news by signing the much-coveted LeBron James to a four-year, $153-million deal. How would Ingram feel about sharing the court with the best player of his generation?

INGRAM: Yeah, I mean, count me along with the hundred percent of players who would love to play with LeBron. So I mean, that’s a no-brainer. You won’t believe how many texts I got when he made the decision. So a lot of people are already assuming that I was going to be back with the Lakers and they were like, “Man, you get to play with LeBron.” In my head I’m like, “Man, I hope so.”

DUBNER: Either that or if he took your roster spot, that’s the the bad way of looking at it.

INGRAM: You know what, some people text me that as well.

Unfortunately for Ingram, the Los Angeles Lakers did not bring him back. He’s playing for the South Bay Lakers of the G-League this year, his 11th season in the minors. And he’s not doing so well, averaging less than 8 points a game, with a career low in three-point shooting, his specialty. Which means that for Andre Ingram, the end of his professional career is probably pretty close.

INGRAM: I don’t sit around complaining about it, thinking it’s unfair. I just would want for people in general who watch basketball and know the game to just know that there are guys out there in the G-League now, and overseas and elsewhere, who just know how to play the game of basketball and can play it in the highest of level, including the N.B.A.

*      *      *

It’s easy to see professional athletes as fortunate beyond belief — getting rich for playing the game they love, yada yada. But that, as we’ve been learning today, is a very simplistic view of a complicated economic ecosystem. For one thing, it’s easy to focus on the handful of athletes at the very tippy-top of the pyramid, at the exclusion of the thousands of athletes below them.

JOHNSON: You don’t make money unless you succeed at the Olympics.

That’s Shawn Johnson. She won one gold and three silver medals in gymnastics at the 2008 Olympics.

JOHNSON: How the majority of Olympic endorsements work is, you sign an Olympic endorsement, such as a Coca-Cola, a McDonald’s, Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, before the Olympics even start. But the way these contracts are structured is these athletes aren’t paid any money upfront. The only way they earn money is by winning medals. So if you sign a deal with Nike that’s, say a million dollars, you go to the Olympics and you don’t win a medal, you don’t earn any money. And when you’re talking about thousands and thousands of athletes who have reached the pinnacle of their sport by just qualifying to the Olympics, the fact that they aren’t getting compensated for their journey that’s gotten them to that point, I think is pretty extreme.

Extreme, perhaps. But also very similar to another population of amateur athletes — all the college football and basketball players who are very, very good but not quite good enough to have a pro career. And if you are that good, and lucky? Then you’re drafted by a pro team — remember, they choose you; you don’t choose them. And now you’re looking at a rookie contract, with pre-determined wages for your first several years. If you last that long. If not, the team can cut you loose. Which means your downside is unprotected at the same time that your upside is limited.

MATHESON: You’re basically stuck at a way-below-market paycheck for your first three years at a minimum.

That’s Victor Matheson, an economist at College of the Holy Cross and president of the North American Association of Sports Economists.

MATHESON: Is that made up for by the fact that you get to make these huge free-agent contracts later? Yeah, but only if you last long enough to actually make it to free agency.

Russell Wilson, the Seattle Seahawks quarterback, did make it that far — actually, he did so well in his first three seasons that Seattle gave him a contract extension worth nearly $90 million before what would have been his final season under his rookie contract. But during those first three seasons, he averaged under $1 million a year despite leading his team to two Super Bowls and winning one. And what if Wilson instead had played Major League Baseball — which he maybe could have; he was drafted by the Colorado Rockies and played some minor-league ball. In baseball, Wilson would have had to put in six years of major league service to become a free agent. Interestingly, the average career length in Major League Baseball is 5.6 years. Also interesting: rookie N.F.L. contracts are for four years, and the average N.F.L. career length?

MATHESON: The typical player plays about three seasons.

This presents a paradox. A clash of incentives that gives the leagues and teams much more leverage than the athletes. As Victor Matheson sees it, this also helps explain why a players’ strike would be very hard to organize.

MATHESON: If I’m working for Verizon on the lines fixing telephone poles, I might be willing to sit out and lose my salary for an entire year if I can get a 10 percent higher salary for the next 20 years I’m working for them. Those numbers kind of work out. But if you’re a Major League Baseball player, if you’re an N.F.L. player, you can’t afford to lose even one season because there’s almost no increase in pay that could possibly justify you losing one season of your very, very short career. And the owners have a huge advantage over them.

FOXWORTH: They will not make that money back. It’s just physically impossible.

Domonique Foxworth again. He was on the N.F.L. players’ union executive committee during its last collective bargaining negotiation, in 2011.

FOXWORTH: With the length of a player’s career, and how much money they could stand to make in a season, it’s really not in their best interest. Mathematically, logically, if you go through the numbers, it’s not in their best interest to actually withstand a lockout or to initiate a strike.

MATHESON: And as a matter of fact, teams themselves have stopped striking completely. All of the last major interruptions in pro sports in the United States have not been strikes, although they look like that to a fan. They’ve been lockouts. Yeah, this is the owners actually going on strike and not paying the players rather than the players refusing to work.

That’s what happened in the 2011 N.F.L. negotiations. The N.F.L. locked out the players for 132 days — although it was during the off-season, so it barely affected the run of play. The owners and the players’ union finally agreed on a 10-year deal, which saw the players’ share of revenue fall from essentially 50-50 to somewhere in the high 40s — although the players did gain some other concessions, like funding for retirement and fewer practices. The most recent N.B.A. and N.H.L. collective bargaining agreements have, similarly, resulted in a smaller share of revenue going to the athletes. That said, those are huge, rich leagues that generate many millions of dollars for even average players. It can be a lot harder to make a living in some other pro sports.

MURPHY: Yeah it’s a pretty typical fighter story to be broke and trying to make it.

Lauren Murphy started fighting in mixed-martial arts matches in 2010; she’s currently a top-ranked flyweight fighter in the U.F.C., or Ultimate Fighting Championship.

MURPHY: There was a time when I was coming up, before I was signed to the U.F.C., where I was traveling a lot to train. I was sleeping on people’s floors. I was sleeping in their guest bedrooms. I would housesit and dogsit for people at the gym. It’s hard to come up in fighting because you spend all your time training so you don’t have a lot of time to work.

MATHESON: If you’re trying to decide what sport to go into man, stay away from U.F.C. because they’re making a lot of revenues but not much of that is going into the athletes.

In the big team sports, Matheson told us, roughly half of the revenues are designated for the players — although, as we just noted, that share has been shrinking a bit. In the U.F.C., meanwhile, that share is much lower.

MATHESON: The amount going to the athletes there is about 10 or 15 percent of revenues.

The chief operating officer of the U.F.C., Lawrence Epstein, disputes that figure.

EPSTEIN: The 15 percent number, I don’t — I don’t think that’s accurate. I mean there certainly is some fluctuation in the percentage of revenue that goes to athletes. But the reason for that primarily is that we have a variable- revenue-stream model in our company.

Meaning: the U.F.C. distributes some of its fights via pay-per-view, whereas the big team sports have bigger, more reliable TV contracts. Still, salary data for U.F.C. athletes is hard to come by, since the company is privately held and the athletes are not unionized, which means there’s no collective bargaining agreement.

MURPHY: The U.F.C. really has all the control. They can cut you on one loss. They can cut you after two losses. They can keep you around for as many fights as they want. They can renegotiate your contract. There’s just — they have a lot of power.

That said, Lauren Murphy is not much of a critic of the U.F.C. Her career may not be all that lucrative but it is a career. Maybe more important, it’s given shape to her life; sports — in Murphy’s case, fighting — it can have that effect on people. And that’s part of the draw.

MURPHY: I struggled with depression and I struggled with addiction and I kind of just became your typical high-school dropout/teenage mom in a small town. And it’s just changed my life in ways that I never could have even dreamed of back then in a small town in Alaska.

In just her third U.F.C. fight, Murphy earned a $50,000 bonus for taking part in the Fight of the Night — a fairly subjective award bestowed by U.F.C. management to the two fighters who deliver the most impressive performance on a given night’s card.

MURPHY: That bonus changed my life. I paid off a bunch of student loans with that. And I got out of debt and it was really a life-changing experience for me.

Murphy’s bonus was a great stroke of fortune. As for her guaranteed pay in the U.F.C.? That’s a different story. Fighters get paid for two things: making weight and winning. The figures vary but the most Murphy’s ever gotten was 12 and 12— $12,000 for making weight and $12,000 for a win — which, obviously, is also not guaranteed. What is guaranteed is that Murphy will train five to six hours a day for months and that U.F.C. fighters get, on average, just 2.3 matches per year.

MURPHY: I’ve only made about $15,000 in the U.F.C. so far this year. But you, know my dream was to see how far I could take this. And for me, at least, if I wanted to be in a profession to make a sh— load of money, I would have been a lawyer or something — a doctor or something like that. I mean yes, I’d like to make more. I think anybody on earth wants to make more. If you ask them, “Do you want to make more money?” everybody’s going to be like, “Yes.” So I would love to make more money. I certainly think I’m worth more money.

MATHESON: It might have more to do with the fact that this is a fairly new sport that may be still trying to find its way.

Victor Matheson again.

MATHESON: But that’s that’s way less than you’re making elsewhere.

DUBNER: Now do you anticipate that changing, if we were to talk in five or 10 years? U.F.C. is making a lot of money and they’ve been growing really fast. Do you think that the athletes will eventually get the leverage to get that share up to 30, 50, 60 percent of revenues?

MATHESON: Well, we did not see that happen in any of the other individual sports until we had those athletes joined together in some sort of important way.

The athletes’ unions — or players’ associations, as they’re often called —negotiate not only pay scales but also work conditions, schedules, health and safety, and various benefits. In other words, they do what labor unions have always done. The N.F.L. Players Association is, in fact, a member of the AFL-CIO, the big federation of unions that include the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Here, again, is DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the N.F.L. Players Association.

SMITH: I think it would be fair to say, and people should understand, that we are labor. And the National Football League and its member teams are our management. And there is no difference in the hostility between us than there would be between management writ large and labor writ large in America. We literally have engaged in hundreds of legal fights with the league and the teams in the 10 years since I’ve been here.

Smith, we should say, is a lawyer who’s worked in private practice as well as at the U.S. Department of Justice.

SMITH: The history of labor and management in the United States has been one for the most part where management has successfully lobbied and changed laws through litigation that have affected a net negative for employees. So we don’t necessarily shy away from making sure that we are aggressive in the way in which we protect our players’ interest. Whether it’s issues of health care, issues of control, issues of free speech, issues of injury care, issues over money, shares of revenue. The league locked us out in 2011, and that means not only cutting off the players’ right to earn a living but they cut off the health insurance for thousands of players’ wives and dozens of players’ wives who were expecting children during the lockout. They’ve issued and engaged in legislative action to take away our players’ right to medical care and certainly we’ve had our skirmishes over commissioner discipline and revenue.

DUBNER: Now as I understand it, some team owners are supporting legislation in a handful of states that would take away worker’s comp from injured players. Do I have that right?

SMITH: Yeah, we’ve probably had somewhere between 10 and 15 state legislature fights with bills supported by team owners to take workers’ comp away from professional athletes, which is terrible.

DUBNER: And their argument then is what? That it shouldn’t be —

SMITH: Their argument is that they are cheap.

DUBNER: And tell me about some of the other legal challenges you’ve filed whether against the league or legislatures whether it has to do with healthcare, revenue share, or whatnot.

SMITH: This show is no way long enough to go down that road.

Considering all the issues that N.F.L. players face — and considering that they play in the richest sports league in the history of the world and have a relatively strong union — you might think athletes in lesser sports would like to emulate them. But not necessarily …

MURPHY: I’ve been contacted a couple times now by people that want to unionize and I just have a really hard time getting on board with it.

That again is U.F.C. fighter Lauren Murphy.

MURPHY: I mean, I would love to see fighters get signed to the U.F.C. and right off the bat they’re making way more money — enough to live off of for an entire year. I think that would be great, but I don’t know if it’s feasible. I don’t know what the U.F.C.’s finances are or how the budgets work out or how any of that works.

Part of that mystery is intentional — the U.F.C., as we mentioned, is privately owned. An investor group led by the WME-IMG agency bought it in 2016 for about $4 billion.

MURPHY: If we unionize, and suddenly WME-IMG says, “OK, well this isn’t what we anticipated when we bought the U.F.C. so we’re going to have to cut out a bunch of divisions so that we can afford to pay the fighters that we have left.” And they get rid of the less popular divisions, say. And now you’re getting rid of the fringe weight classes and the women’s weight classes and stuff like that. Well, now I’ve gone from maybe making a smaller portion of the pie to making nothing.

Murphy’s situation highlights one of the common problems for any sort of collective action, whether in sports labor or anywhere. The people with the most to gain — the Lauren Murphys of the world — usually don’t have much leverage; they can just be replaced. The superstars, meanwhile, do have leverage but often have little incentive to push for collective action. One exception was the tennis champion Billie Jean King, who in 1973 threatened to boycott the U.S. Open unless it awarded equal prize money for women and men. The U.S. Tennis Association met her demands. King also helped found the Women’s Tennis Association, which pushed for equal prize money in all the major tournaments, and has helped turn tennis into one of the few sports in which the women’s competition is arguably as high-profile as the men’s. There’s a movement currently underway in beach volleyball to gain more leverage for the athletes, again with a female superstar leading the charge.

WALSH JENNINGS: For so long, it’s been one top athlete raising their hand saying, “That’s not enough,” and if one top athlete boycotts who cares, and the divide-and-conquer strategy happens all the time.

That, again, is Kerri Walsh Jennings, one of the most decorated and high-profile players in beach volleyball history.

WALSH JENNINGS: The athletes have no leverage because the athletes aren’t unified and we’ve been told for so long about your sport is small, this is what you deserve this is as good as it gets.

In 2017, Walsh Jennings was part of a group of players that tried to negotiate a new deal with the A.V.P., the Association of Volleyball Professionals, which runs the biggest beach-volleyball tour in the country, with eight events a year. It’s not a big money-maker for the athletes.

WALSH JENNINGS: The top player last year made, I think, just under or just over $38,000. We pay for our training, we pay for our coaches, we pay for travel, we pay for hotel. And that was the top player in the country. 

Like many sports leagues and tours, the A.V.P. operates in a way that might make you think “monopoly.”

WALSH JENNINGS: So they own you for 365 days for possibly eight days of work that you’re probably not even — you maybe if you lose your first two, you’re maybe making 500 bucks. And it’s just the athletes are being held hostage. Basically a gun was held to the players’ head, saying, “If you don’t sign this, we’re going to fold the tour.” There was no other alternative. We got calls the night before the deadline. Girls crying, saying, “Kerri, we want to sit with you and fight with you but I can’t pay rent unless I play in this tournament next week.”

In the end, Walsh Jennings refused to sign the contract but she’s sympathetic to the players who did sign.

WALSH JENNINGS: Oh, for sure. And I understand they had no other choice. And some people never agreed with us. They’re like “I believe this is it, and we should be grateful that A.V.P. is giving us these limited opportunities.” I was like, “That’s totally fine.” I’m the C.E.O. of my life. I do not want to give the reins to my life and my success to someone else’s hands and I do not want to be kept small.

As one of the stars of her sport, Walsh Jennings had the leverage to walk away. To her, it wasn’t just about the money; she feels the A.V.P. doesn’t have a vision for growing the sport in a way that will benefit the athletes.

WALSH JENNINGS: I went in October or November of 2016 and said “Can you please lay out the next four years? We have this contract coming up. Please give me your plans for growth for all these things.” There were zero plans for growth. They were going to go away from TV. It was going to be an exclusive contract for eight events, maybe up to 10 by 2020. They would not increase the prize money. That wasn’t in their business model, they said.

So she’s started an alternate tour, called p1440 — the “p” is for “platform” and 1440 for the number of minutes in a day; Walsh Jennings wants to push people to use every minute wisely.

WALSH JENNINGS: We knew in creating p1440 that if we were just to be another volleyball property that hosts events, we would not be a sustainable business. And it’s competition, health and wellness, personal development, and entertainment. So we are a festival, we’re not a volleyball tournament; we are a full-blown festival.

One big problem: a lot of the players that Walsh Jennings would like to play in her events are under an exclusive A.V.P. contract.

WALSH JENNINGS: So the A.V.P. has eight events a year. If you want to play anywhere else you have to ask for dispensation and everyone who’s asked for dispensation to play in our events — even though we scheduled around their events, were not conflicting at all, were in their off-season — they’ve been told no.

Walsh Jennings is 40 years old — fairly ancient for a competitive athlete. She’s preparing now for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, which will likely be her last. If nothing else, her new startup league is a great project to be involved in when her playing days are finally over. There’s a famous saying: every athlete dies twice — once when they draw their last breath, the other when they hang it up. There’s a point at which they’ll stop doing what they’ve been doing since they were kids, the thing that’s driven them and, often, given shape to their lives. It’s inevitable; and it’s dreaded, a sort of living afterlife.

REDICK: I think about the end, meaning the specific moment that it ends. I think about the moment I tell my wife. I think about the moment I tell my family. I think about those moments.

That’s J.J. Redick, who’s playing in his 13th season in the N.B.A., currently with the Philadelphia 76ers.

REDICK: And it’s anxiety-inducing, it’s — sometimes I actually if I’m having a dark moment and I think of that moment, I cry like. I think about what I’m going to do after basketball on a daily basis. And there’s a level of fear of the other side. And my — I hate to say this but so much of my identity and any professional athlete is wrapped up in your sport. Since I was eight or nine years old I’ve been a basketball player, it’s what I’ve done.

MURPHY: I think that’s a question that a lot of fighters really struggle with.

Lauren Murphy of the U.F.C. is 35 years old.

MURPHY: Fighting kind of becomes your whole identity, and because it takes so much of our time it’s our entire lives. It can be hard to move on.

This entwined identity — personal and professional — is something that Sudhir Venkatesh has been studying for years.

Sudhir VENKATESH: I’m a professor of sociology at Columbia University in New York.

Venkatesh tries to understand how individuals operate within groups — in all sorts of settings.

VENKATESH: Yeah, my method is to spend as much time with groups, tribes, people, get to know their world a little bit. I started with street gangs, boy — a long time ago, about 30 years ago. Gun traffickers and prostitutes, people who are doing all sorts of illegal things, And since then I spent a couple of years at the F.B.I. And that’s my chosen profession in life, spend as much time with people and get their story.

He’s had a lot of success getting their stories. But professional athletes are particularly tricky.

VENKATESH: It’s a little difficult for me to just show up on the sideline and put a hoodie on and pretend that I’m a member of the team. So I have to create opportunities to observe.

One such opportunity came via a program he developed to teach athletes, often toward the end of their careers, about business skills or philanthropy. This let him see, up close, how they were adjusting to the afterlife.

VENKATESH: Well, the life of an athlete, from very early in their career is dominated and regimented by people other than themselves.

This kind of all-encompassing, controlled setting has a name in sociology — it’s called a total institution.

VENKATESH: An example of a total institution would be prison. So your day is structured from the moment you get up, they tell you where to go, what to eat, when to eat, when to shower, and so on.

Venkatesh was interested to see how athletes, having spent so much time in a total institution, could adjust to a more fluid setting like an office. He found there were some surprising advantages.

VENKATESH: A lot of professional athletes, I find, handle interpersonal conflict very well, and they are used to it. They are used to being told that they didn’t perform well, they need to perform better, they need to work better in a team, they need to listen better. All the sorts of things that many of us, including me, are very fearful of in an office setting — we’re going to get reviewed, we’re going to get assessed, it’s often done by email late at night. And these folks are really, really good just having someone walk up to them or going up to somebody and not having it out, but just getting past whatever’s in-between and blocking them.

But this upside, Venkatesh discovered, has a downside: most of us non-former athletes aren’t accustomed to having someone get in our face like that! Venkatesh recalls one former football player — he calls him Derrick — who was working in sales at an investment firm.

VENKATESH: He noticed that on the floor, there were no open spaces. He was used to locker rooms — he was used to not having a lot of privacy. And it was difficult for him to work in a team setting when what he was supposed to do was to use telecommunications or e-mail to make appointments or to reach out. And instead he would just be going down, knocking on doors really hard, going to offices, crossing the boundaries. And people just got really scared because here’s this very big guy coming at them. And for Derrick there it was actually the opposite, that when people were closing doors or people were sending him e-mails, he felt like that was impersonal. That was not polite. That was not effective. “Why don’t we just solve the problem immediately and move forward?” So he had to go through a little bit of training. And you can imagine that that’s not part of the normal onboarding that that a company might do.

Transitioning to this living afterlife can present all sorts of challenges. Studies of former N.F.L. and N.B.A. players — even the ones who’ve made a lot of money — show they are grotesquely prone to bankruptcy. And remember: these are the lucky ones who made it. But the demands of their profession can make it really hard to have time to acquire real-world skills. There’s also the long-term health consequences of playing competitive sports: a recent study of athletes from Indiana University found that, by middle age, they were twice as likely as non-athletes to have health problems, including chronic injuries, that affected their day-to-day activities. But even if you make it into middle age with your health, and with your finances intact — there’s still the risk of a full-blown existential crisis.

FOXWORTH: I mean, most people’s journeys are so much longer that when they do succeed, they die a few years after or something. You know?

Domonique Foxworth again.

FOXWORTH: It’s an interesting thing to happen to somebody at this age. It feels like more of a midlife thing. And for athletes it’s a unique thing. Successful athletes, it’s a unique thing, that in your 20s or 30s you’re like, “Now what?”

Part of it is missing the action. Lauren Murphy thinks about the people she trains with.

MURPHY: I was surrounded by a team and I had never experienced anything like that before in my life. We all had this thing in common where we wanted to compete and we all wanted to do well and we supported each other in that. And when you bleed and sweat and cry with somebody every day, you get to be pretty close to them.

There’s also the fear that you’ll never be this good at anything again. Or as relevant. J.J. Redick:

REDICK: Look, the reality is you have a lot more power, a lot more juice, a lot more relevancy when it says your name and it says active N.B.A. player versus your name, retired N.B.A. player. So me as a person, nothing will have changed five years from now. But I won’t have active N.B.A. player next to my name. The thought that crosses your mind is like, “I’m really good at basketball. I’ve done it at a high level for a long time and I’ve had success and it’s provided me a very nice living.” And then you’re like, “What if I try something else and I’m just awful at it?” I feel like I’m as prepared as anyone for the other side of it and it still scares me.

Domonique Foxworth thought he was pretty prepared too. He and his wife had a couple kids. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do — other than keep winning.

FOXWORTH: I went to business school because I was like, “Alright, now I’m going to keep competing.” I’ll go to the best business school and then I got there. And I was surprised with how much mushy, soft classes that we had. That was about our feelings and integrity and all that stuff. And I do remember one of the professors said that — it wasn’t to me directly, it was just to the class, but it felt like he was talking to me directly. But he said something to the effect of, the operating system that you used to get here may not be the operating system that you need going forward. And that resonated with me, because I feel like that’s definitely true for me. But I don’t know, they don’t just like release updates for humans. So modifying my operating system is a slower, more challenging process.

Foxworth thought he’d like being chief operating officer of the N.B.A. players’ union, in New York.

FOXWORTH: My wife was pregnant with our third child, and she was not feeling good, and I was getting up at 6:30 a.m. to ride the subway to work with a bunch of other people who weren’t happy about where they were going to work. And I remember thinking like, “Am I happy? I have enough money that I don’t have to be unhappy.”

For fun, he started writing — about sports. Now he writes and does broadcasting for a variety of ESPN outlets.

FOXWORTH: I went to business school in part because I fancy myself as a smart person who is more than an athlete. And so there’s parts of me that’s embarrassed that I write about sports. Talk about sports. But then there’s parts of me that’s like, “This is awesome.” I get to pick up my kids from school and take them to school. It’s not that like “Oh, my life is boring.” It’s like, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the best thing I can with this fortunate situation that I’m in?” What also exacerbates it, I think, is a feeling of loneliness, honestly, which — and it’s not like — I have three kids and my wife, and I’m not alone, obviously. And I love them and I have fun with them.

But throughout my life, I have been almost myopically focused on a goal, which — being focused on that goal gave me purpose and I’m sure I’m going to butcher the Nietzsche quote, but it’s something to the effect of, “When a man has a why, he can bear almost any how.” And I was — I don’t drink now, I never drank in my life. I never smoke weed. I was singularly focused on doing everything. Every decision I made was like, “Alright, I’m going to get closer to this goal.” The people I was close with in high school, those aren’t my friends anymore. People I was close with in college, not really my friends anymore. And then at 35, I’m in D.C., where my wife has a bunch of family and friends, friends that she’s been close with since they were in the second grade, and I’m like, “I don’t really have that.” So I certainly don’t feel sad or anything, but these are things that I am becoming more aware of now. I feel I’m in a, a perpetual state of transition, which is interesting and uncomfortable at the same time.

Thanks to Domonique Foxworth and all the other athletes we heard from today and throughout our “Hidden Side of Sports” series — also the team and league officials, scholars, and everyone else. If you want to hear my full conversation with Foxworth — it was a long one, and fascinating — we’ll be publishing that soon.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Anders Kelto, Derek John, Alvin Melathe, and Alison Craiglow with help from Matt Stroup and Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Greg Rippin and Zack Lapinski. We had help this week from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Mark Cuban, owner of the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks.

Domonique Foxworth, retired N.F.L. cornerback.

Andre Ingram, N.B.A. G-League player for the South Bay Lakers.

Shawn Johnson, gymnast and American Olympian.

Victor Matheson, economist at College of the Holy Cross.

Lauren Murphy, U.F.C. fighter.

J.J. Redick, N.B.A. player for the Philadelphia 76ers.

DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the N.F.L. players’ union.

Mark Teixeira, ESPN analyst.

Sudhir Venkatesh, sociologist at Columbia University.

Kerri Walsh Jennings, professional beach volleyball player and American Olympian.

RESOURCES

Big-Time Sports in American Universities by Charles Clotfelter (Cambridge University Press 2011).

The Economics of Sports, Sixth Edition by Michael Leeds, Peter von Allmen, and Victor Matheson (Routledge, 2018).

EXTRA

“How Sports Became Us (Ep. 349),” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“How to Stop Being a Loser (Ep. 350),” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Here’s Why You’re Not an Elite Athlete (Ep. 351),” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Think Like a Winner (Ep. 363),” Freakonomics Radio (2019).

“Inside the Sports-Industrial Complex (Ep. 364),” Freakonomics Radio (2019).

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