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Episode 128

Are Our Tools Becoming Part of Us?

Google researcher Blaise Agüera y Arcas spends his work days developing artificial intelligence models and his free time conducting surveys for fun. He tells Steve how he designed an algorithm…

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Episode 191

Can You Change Your Personality?

Are you the same person you were a decade ago? Do we get better as we age? And is your sixth-grade class clown still funny?…

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Episode 50

Self-Checkout

Grocery stores have turned shoppers into cashiers. Zachary Crockett runs two bags of chips and a Gatorade over the scanner….

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EXTRA

People Aren’t Dumb. The World Is Hard. (Update)

You wouldn’t think you could win a Nobel Prize for showing that humans tend to make irrational decisions. But that’s what Richard Thaler has done. In an interview from 2018,…

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Episode 204

What Happens When You’re Cut Off From All Human Contact?

How is the brain affected by solitary confinement? How would you deal with being stranded on a deserted island? And do baby monkeys make the best therapists?…

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Episode 17

Truffles (Replay)

It takes fungi-sniffing dogs, back-room deals, and a guy named “The Kingpin” for the world’s most coveted morsel to end up on your plate. Zachary Crockett picks up the scent.

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Episode 210

What Makes a Good Sense of Humor?

What is the evolutionary purpose of laughter? What’s the difference between Swedish depression and American depression? And why aren’t aliens interested in abducting Mike?…

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Episode 64

Sushi Fish

How does a fresh tuna get from Japan to Nebraska before it goes bad? And how does its journey show up in the price of your spicy tuna rolls? Zachary…

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Episode 148

How to Have Good Ideas

Sarah Stein Greenberg runs Stanford’s d.school, which teaches design as a mode of problem solving. She and Steve talk about what makes her field different from other academic disciplines, how…

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Episode 151

Neurobiologist, Philosopher, and Addict

Owen Flanagan’s newest book details his 20-year dependence on alcohol and pills — and outlines his research on what addiction can tell us about the nature of consciousness….

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Episode 156

A Solution to America’s Gun Problem

Jens Ludwig has an idea for how to fix America’s gun violence problem — and it starts by rejecting conventional wisdom from both sides of the political aisle.

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Episode 633

The Most Powerful People You’ve Never Heard Of

Just beneath the surface of the global economy, there is a hidden layer of dealmakers for whom war, chaos, and sanctions can be a great business opportunity. Javier Blas and…

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Episode 27

The Most Powerful People You’ve Never Heard Of

Just beneath the surface of the global economy, there is a hidden layer of dealmakers for whom war, chaos, and sanctions can be a great business opportunity. Javier Blas and…

Freakonomics in the Tube

…near the top of the non-fiction charts. (Last I saw, the only other American book on the charts was Daniel Coyle’s Lance Armstrong’s War — retitled in the U.K. as…



Loss Aversion in the N.F.L.

…can get you fired. In the jargon of behavioral economics, coaches are “loss-averse”; this concept, pioneered by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, holds that we experience more pain with a…




The Benefits of a Bubble, Even When Burst

Daniel Gross is a very good and quite prolific writer on the economy, from his “Moneybox” columns in Slate to his “Economic View” columns in the New York Times; soon,…




Cut God Some Slack

…books on Amazon released in the last year with “bullshit” in the title. Now, it seems that going after God is the hip thing to do. Daniel Dennett started the…





What Do Synagogues and Airplanes Have in Common?

They’re two of the only places a modern business columnist can escape the round-the-clock news cycle. But there’s no true refuge from the business cycle, as Daniel Gross reminds us….



The Priesthood

The IMF profiles psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his contributions to behavioral economics. The article discusses Kahneman’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Paris,…



The Magic Income Number

What’s the magic income number? According to Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, it’s about $75,000, at least when it comes to day-to-day happiness. “As people earn more money, their day-to-day…



Should We Hope Congestion Gets Worse?

…you. I know this sounds fishy. Don’t drivers complain about traffic in poll over poll? Isn’t congestion a huge drain on our economy? Haven’t Daniel Kahneman (a Nobel laureate) and…



Radio in Progress: One Upside of Aging

We’re working on a Freakonomics Radio episode about pain. One component is the very interesting research by Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier about how colonoscopy patients remember the pain of…



Is Blogging Dangerous for Your Academic Health?

Maybe, maybe not. But here’s the story of how Daniel Drezner, an assistant professor in political science at the University of Chicago (and an active blogger) was just denied tenure….





How to Fix College Coaching?

…behavior is effective. And there is reason to think such an approach would not work. Daniel Kahneman – who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 (for his work…