Freakonomics Radio

Sapiens took the world by storm, selling over 23 million copies in 65 languages.

It became one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 21st century.

It's absolutely amazing that you write such intelligent books and you get people to read them.

This is your story as a human being. What does it mean to be human?

As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has no meaning.

It is a book that has changed how millions of people think about history and themselves.

Sapiens took the world by storm, selling over 23 million copies in 65 languages.

And it became one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 21st century.

It's your story as a human being. What does it mean to be human?

The agricultural revolution was history's biggest fraud.

Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind. It is a book that has changed how millions of people think about history and themselves.

And if you haven't, well, prepare yourself for a treat and perhaps to have your mind blown.

which tells the entire history of our species in under 450 pages.

It came out of this university course. I worked in Hebrew originally, and I was struck by the fact that there was no book in Hebrew which tells the history of the world to the Israeli audience.

So I write for them. And there was no competition because there was no other book available.

And I took a risk and I said, hey, I loved your book. But actually, I don't know why anyone else likes it because it's missing the key feature that everybody likes. ... I read his amazing book, Sapiens, there is not a character in the entire book.

So he violates your first rule of storytelling. How can this book sell millions of copies when it doesn't have anything that people like? And so very early on in the interview, I took a risk and I said, hey, I loved your book. ...

He came to our attention because of a book he has got coming out soon called The Truth About Immigration. The book includes a quiz and we thought it might be interesting to have some Freakonomics Radio listeners take this quiz.

And Zeke is going to quiz you on some immigration facts and statistics. Is that sound okay?

Zee Krenandez who's a business professor at the Wharton School at Penn and he's the author of a forthcoming book called The Truth About Immigration.

And Zee K is going to ask you some questions and we'll see how much you know does that sound okay?

I study how movement affects businesses in the economy, particularly the movement of people.

I think any immigration policy should have as a key goal keeping families intact and reuniting families if they've been separated.

I prefer a model that's more balanced. I think family-based immigration, it's really important for social reasons, families staying together.

How are you going to be happy and integrate into the country if you can't live with the people you love?

It's kind of ironic to me that a lot of people who for years pointed at the Soviet central planning system and laughed at how inefficient it was and used that to be so proud of our market system in the US are totally fine with a centrally planned system for managing talent.

That's Zika Hernandez. He's a professor of management at Wharton and the author of a forthcoming book called The Truth About Immigration.

I call one of them the villain narrative, which is the idea that immigrants heard us because they steal our jobs, they threaten our national security, they threaten the rule of law, the evidence contradicts that.

But then interestingly on the pro-immigrants side, the most common narrative was what I call the victim narrative, which is the idea that immigration is good for immigrants.

And I thought, boy we're giving up so much because the evidence so overwhelmingly shows net positive benefits for us, not for immigrants.

I understand it and so I don't want to be on compassionate for that kind of concern.

It is called The Truth About Immigration.

It is a book full of research and facts.

In my world of business schools, when I started becoming interested in the relationship between the movement of people and the movement of companies or their investments across the world, a lot of people in my field, bulked at the idea they thought, why are you studying this?

It's not that I thought I'm going to be an immigration scholar and try to make sense of this life decision I made.

The research in Hernandez's book tells the long and rather volatile history of American immigration.

He recently published a book called Complicit, How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop.

And he's working on another book about social science fraud.

The first review of my book, Misbehaving came out in the Times of London.

And in particular, I homeschooled them for the last six years.

I am Brian Kaplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, and I'm the father of Aidan and Tristan.

In that one, he argues that parenting should be fun and that parents are less influential than most people think.

In addition to writing about the education system, he also wrote a book arguing in favor of open borders to boost the global economy, as well as a book called Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.

In that one, he argues that parenting should be fun and that parents are less influential than most people think.

I am Brian Kaplan...and I am the author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.

Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think.

I am the author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. Why being a great parent is less work and more fun than you think.

At one point I was going to call the book Toblerone for 10 billion. That was vetoed by my editor for some reason.

His current interest is the modern environmental movement.

The Prophet sounds the alarm and wants us all to cut back.

The Wizard urges us to charge forward, confident that technology will solve our problems.

Its subtitle is Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World.

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.

The Prophet sounds the alarm and wants us all to cut back. The Wizard urges us to charge forward, confident that technology will solve our problems.

The Prophet encourages a return to nature. We need to replant and save rainforests. The Wizard finds the Prophet's suggestions naive.

Its subtitle is Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World.

So you called your book The Wizard and the Prophet, not The Wizard versus The Prophet.

But in some ways it is asking us as readers to judge the two men and the movements that they helped create against each other.

when a previous book that I wrote called Pre-Suasion.

there's a simple trick from Bob Cialdini, the great social psychologist, author of the book Influence, that if you tell people truthfully, most people pay their taxes on time.

There's a simple trick from Bob Cialdini, the great social psychologist, author of the book Influence, that if you tell people truthfully, most people pay their taxes on time.

Years back, Cialdini wrote a book that became a classic in business circles. It's called Influence.

Sudhir Venkatesh is a sociologist at Columbia University who during the first couple decades of his career embedded himself with drug gangs and gunrunners and sex workers. He then wrote a fascinating book called Gang Leader for a Day.

One person who read the book was Mark Zuckerberg. He asked Sudhir to come work at Facebook.

Also, please keep your ears open for the newest podcast to join the Freakonomics Radio Network It's called Sudhir Breaks the Internet Featuring the Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh He is also the author of Gang Leader for a Day

Mark Zuckerberg put Gang Leader for a Day, the book that I wrote on his monthly reading list in 2015.

He wrote Gang Leader for a Day. It's a great book. I read it.

So Sudhir is amazing. And I love the notion that someone who thinks the way he saw as an academic and as a writer and a scholar, his insights are being applied to something like this, which is accessible to everybody.

He just published his first cookbook, a massive thing called The Food Lab, which went on to win a James Beard Award.

He just published his first cookbook, a massive thing called The Food Lab, which went on to win a James Beard Award.

So J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has published a big, beautiful doorstop of a book. It's almost a thousand pages. It's pretty big. It's called The Food Lab, Better Home Cooking Through Science.

But as Lopez-Alt writes in The Food Lab, I discovered that in many cases, even in the best restaurants in the world, the methods that traditional cooking knowledge teaches us are not only outdated, but occasionally flat out wrong.

So J. Kenji Lopez Alt has just published a big, beautiful doorstop of a book. It's almost a thousand pages. It's pretty big. It's called The Food Lab, Better Home Cooking Through Science.

But as Lopez all writes in The Food Lab, I discovered that in many cases, even in the best restaurants in the world, the methods that traditional cooking knowledge teaches us are not only outdated, but occasionally flat out wrong.

a lot of the recipes in The Food Lab nod toward those 70s staples but are improved upon through science.

The name of my book is More Work For Mother, the ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave.

The name of my book is More Work For Mother, the Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave.

The name of my book is More Work For Mother, the Ironies of Household Technology from the open hearth to the microwave.

I started out with the assumption that technological change in the household, mainly the electrification of households, had reduced women's labor so much that they could enter the workforce, married women's labor, and entered the workforce. And it took me about three years to discover that I was wrong.

The name of my book is More Work For Mother, the Ironies of Household Technology from the open hearth to the microwave.

I started out with the assumption that technological change in the household, mainly the electrification of households, had reduced women's labor so much that they could enter the workforce, married women's labor, and entered the workforce. And it took me about three years to discover that I was wrong.

We have just published a new Freakonomics book. It is called When to Rob a Bank and 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants.

Publishers Weekly calls it an energetic, charming assortment of posts, thematically arranged on topics as varied as terrorism, restoration of the draft, getting rid of the penny, car seat safety, obesity,

Leavitt & Dubner return with more of their signature humor and economic perspective on everyday life and they predict that quote, this book will be a hit with fans of Freakonomics.

The best book published since the Bible.

When to Rob a Bank is the new book. Go get your copy right now and then drop us a line at radio at Freakonomics.com.

On May 5th, Steve Levitt and I are publishing a new book. It's called When to Rob a Bank and 131 other warped suggestions and well-intended rants.

It is, how should I say this, the best book in the history of the printed word.

So find the pause button on this podcast and go order When to Rob a Bank.

If you want to learn more about the book or keep up with our media appearances for the book, just go to Freakonomics.com or keep up with us on Twitter, Facebook.

And if you decide based on the advice in our new book, When to Rob a Bank, to actually rob a bank, let us know how that worked out. We do accept collect calls from prison.

So if you're a hardcore Freakonomics fan, you should circle on your calendar Tuesday, May 5th. That's the day we release our latest book. It is called When to Rob a Bank and 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants. It's a compilation of our favorite posts from 10 years of blogging at Freakonomics.com among the questions we try to answer. Why don't flight attendants get tipped? If you were a terrorist, how would you attack? And why does KFC always run out of fried chicken?

And remember, on May 5th, Steve Leavitt and I publish our latest Freakonomics book. It's called When to Rob a Bank.

On Tuesday, May 5th, we're publishing a book called When to Rob a Bank and 131 more warped suggestions and well-intended rants.

It is a compilation of the best blog posts from 10 years worth of writing at Freakonomics.com.

We ask questions like why don't flight attendants get tipped? If you were a terrorist, how would you attack? And why does KFC always run out of fried chicken?

It is a big, fat, fun book. So please spread the word. Pre-order yours now.

Once he started working on this book with me, he just wanted to talk on and on, which was great.

He also said, you know, I'm famous for being brutally honest with people. I want you to be brutally honest in this book.

I read Steve Jobs' book pretty much the day it came out.

Once he started working on this book with me, he just wanted to talk on and on, which was great.

He also said, you know, I'm famous for being brutally honest with people. I want you to be brutally honest in this book.

I read Steve Jobs' book pretty much the day it came out.

Twilight would be number one you think?

No, Harry Potter was way better than Twilight.

I kind of had a love-hate relationship with the Twilight series.

I was obsessed with them.

How Leavitt got obsessed with the Twilight books and what we would do if we won the lottery.

If I tallied up the number of books I read over a 20year period before I started this podcast, maybe I read 30 books in 20 years. ... they were almost all young adult fiction because mostly I just read the books that my kids were reading, like Harry Potter and the Twilight series.

I haven't read. I've flipped through the book Fighting Traffic by Peter D. Norton, which is all about the early years of the car industry.

I am only basing my evidence on Mr. Norton's book, but he tells a very clear story that the relationship between the American Automobile Association and the National Safety Council got closer.

If I say, what's a street for? Somebody's going to say car right away. It's like free association in psychology.

You know, it's just automatic. And I think that's really interesting because if you had asked that same question to a random person a hundred years ago, I think they would have had more different answers, like a variety of different answers and none of them would have said that a street is for cars even though there were a lot of cars then.

I'm the author of Fighting Traffic, The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.

To Norton, there is no mystery here. A street's for cars. It's automatic. If I say what's a street for? Somebody is going to say car right away. It's like free association in psychology.

Friedrich Hayek's famous book The Road to Surftom, which described how liberal societies, if they weren't careful, could slide into totalitarianism.

His whole idea was, I need something that could stack really neatly, that's going to hold onto the heat, and it's not going to cost so much.

This material just landed in my lap and I really did think when I was writing it, I never had more fun writing a book than I had writing this one.

I knew that some people were going to be a little bit upset with the book, but I thought basically it was going to be taken as a thrill ride and it would just be a fun read for everybody. What I wasn't prepared for was just the sheer volume of the anger.

I first heard about Sam Bankman-Freed at the end of 2021 from a friend who, oddly enough, wanted me to help him figure out who he was.

The argument that McCaskill put to Sam and a small group of Harvard students in the fall of 2012 went roughly as follows. You, student at an elite university, will spend roughly 80,000 hours of your life working.

The biggest success story from earning to give is Sam Bankman-Fried, who's now the richest person in the world under the age of 35. And he's publicly stated he's giving away 99% of his wealth or more and is already ramping up his giving.

That Michael Lewis book on Sam Bankman-Fried has just been published. It's called Going Infinite, The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.

I'm curious whether Michael's information was helpful to you in any way?

So, John, it turned out that the writer Michael Lewis had been hanging around with Sam Bankman-Fried when FTX went under and he was writing a book about him.

That Michael Lewis book on Sam Bankman-Fried has just been published. It's called Going Infinite, The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.

We are actually planning to interview Lewis about that book sometime soon.

Liars poker is part memoir and part expose of the money harvesting industry

Lewis had done what a lot of smart kids from good schools did back then He got a job at an investment bank in his case Solomon Brothers

How many times have you read Moby Dick? 50 is probably reasonable. I'm 50 years old. I read Moby Dick for the first time at the age of 17.

At some point you may have read Moby Dick or pretended to.

I'd like to say that Moby Dick is a book about whaling, I mean, we have been doing this three part series on the history and economics of whaling. Moby Dick isn't really about whaling.

The Essex was a real-life inspiration for Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the whale of all whaling books.

Don't worry, we will hear much more about Moby Dick later in this series.

For my money, Moby Dick is America's Bible. It contained everything that makes us Americans. You know, the diversity, the brutality, the spirituality, its delivery. It's a great, I think, I think it's a great Athenian poem about whaling. It is just one of the great books of all time. For me, it's something I take up continually. I've read it at least 12 times. It became the novel that led me to the reality, the history of Nantucket.

The ship in Moby Dick isn't called the Essex. It's called the Pequod. It's the name of the whale that maimed him on an earlier voyage. Several hundred pages after the Nantucket departure, the Pequod finds a whale which, spoiler alert here, sinks the ship and kills nearly everyone on board other than the narrator, the one who in the book's first line instructs us to call him Ishmael. Where Moby Dick ends is really where the real-life story of the Essex begins.

Just about every kid in America was learning the story of this ship that was rammed by a whale and Melville would use for the climax of Moby Dick.

Melville articulated it in his book Moby Dick.

there are books You know Thaler has published a book Misbehaving on it

So the book is called Misbehaving the making of behavioral economics

Misbehaving is Thaler's very entertaining chronicle of how he came to recognize that the standard Economists model of human behavior is beyond the reach of most of us

...thus the title of my book

I'm a professor at the Wharton School and I'm also the author of the book How to Change.

I got extra emails about, oh, thank goodness it's finally 2021. I'm so excited. That's Katie Milkman. I'm a professor at the Wharton School and I'm also the author of the book How to Change.

I'm a professor at the Wharton School and I'm also the author of the book How to Change.

You can read more about this research in her book, How to Change.