Freakonomics Radio

The software our publishers provided when we were proofreading the galleys of this book was so Sludgeriden that Sunstein gave up and typed up a list of changes.

what is Sludge literally? It's this thick, gooey byproduct of some industrial process that just gunks up the works.

Governments both create and reduce Sludge. In recent years, the United States government has imposed a whopping 11 billion hours in annual paperwork burdens on the American people.

Cass Sunstein, Thaler's coauthor on Nudge, wrote a book called Sludge, what stops us from getting things done and what to do about it.

April Henning, along with her coauthor Paul Dimeo, has written about all this in a book called Doping, A Sporting History.

Your denial was pretty robust. You wrote a book, right? Positively False. The real story of how I won the Tour de France, which was not a truthful account.

Within a few minutes of speaking with Wachter, you get a sense of how his brain works. He is drawn to categorical sorting and operational competence, all of which has been particularly useful in his latest extracurricular endeavor. It's a book, his sixth, called A Giant Leap, how AI is transforming health care and what that means for our future.

We have not embraced it as a mechanism to make care better and safer and less expensive. You call your book A Giant Leap.

I want to understand this concept of the giant leap. My sense is you're arguing that health care has failed to take advantage of technological progress to the degree that most industries have and that you're hoping that AI in all its many forms will help us kind of leap over that sluggish period into a next better phase.

I wrote a book 10 years ago called The Digital Doctor, which was really about our transition from paper to digital. That book is a very grumpy book. It's like, how the hell did we go from paper to digital and in some ways make things worse, in some ways make the lives of both patients and doctors harder?

Got rid of doctors' handwriting, the kind of perennial joke. You know, when I do an electronic prescription, it can land at Walgreens or CVS. That is massively better and safer. Two people can look at the chart at the same time. There are lots of good things about it, but it was not enough to transform medicine.

But the book we're talking about today has a title that may seem out of sync with the current wellness trends. Eat Your Ice Cream is the name.

Okay, the full title of your book is Eat Your Ice Cream, Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life. Tell me how this book came into being and why.

I began doing work on this book... I became much more convinced of the importance of dairy... I wrote about the benefits of ice cream and how it fits into a sensible wellness approach.

Again, his new book is called Eat Your Ice Cream, Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life.

We had books like The Manual of Hygiene, which was an exercise book, or The New Science of Healing.

We had books like The Manual of Hygiene, which was an exercise book, or The New Science of Healing.

We had books like ... My System, a 15minute daily workout.