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2 weeks ago | 
freakonomics.com | Stephen Dubner
Episode Transcript
Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. We’ve all been hearing a lot lately about international trade and especially the restrictions on trade, in the form of tariffs.
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4 weeks ago | 
freakonomics.com | Stephen Dubner |Austan D. Goolsbee |Steven D. Levitt |Chad Syverson
Episode Transcript
I first met the economist Austan Goolsbee around 20 years ago. I was out at the University of Chicago, spending time with another Chicago economist, Steve Levitt, who would become my Freakonomics friend and co-author. Levitt could be shy and soft-spoken; Goolsbee was neither.
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1 month ago | 
freakonomics.com | Stephen Dubner |Daniel Ammann |Javier Blas
For the past couple years, I’ve been letting a very good book collect dust on my shelf. A friend had told me about the book, and I did read the introduction — a wild introduction, about the C.E.O. of a British company who flies his private jet into the middle of the Libyan civil war to make an oil deal with the rebel army, an army which happened to have the covert support of the governments of Britain, Qatar, and the U.S. So, yeah, I probably should have kept reading.
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1 month ago | 
freakonomics.com | Angela Duckworth |Stephen Dubner
Episode Transcript
Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. Today we’re continuing our update of a series on failure we published a couple years ago, called “How to Succeed At Failing.” In this episode, you’ll hear some personal stories from people who tried something new and failed. One of those people is Travis Thul, who thought what the world really needed was a new way to make instant ramen.
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1 month ago | 
freakonomics.com | Amy C. Edmondson |Jillian Peterson |James Densley |Stephen Dubner
Episode Transcript
Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. I’m sure you’ve heard people say that failure is a great teacher — but how? How does that work? What do we learn from failure that prevents more of the same? How do we not let fear of failure keep us from trying things? We tried to answer those questions, and many more, in a series we first published in 2023. I thought it was worth publishing again — so today, you’ll hear part one.
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1 month ago | 
freakonomics.com | Stephen Dubner
Episode Transcript
Over the past few episodes of Freakonomics Radio, we dug into the economics of live theater, and we followed one show on its long journey toward Broadway. In that series, we learned that live theater has become very expensive to produce, so ticket prices have also risen — and, at the same time, attendance is falling. So, if fewer people are watching plays and musicals, what are they watching?
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2 months ago | 
freakonomics.com | Stephen Dubner |Michael Rushton
Episode 631
It’s been in development for five years and has at least a year to go. On the eve of its out-of-town debut, the actor playing Lincoln quit. And the producers still need to raise another $15 million to bring the show to New York. There really is no business like show business. (Part three of a three-part series.)
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2 months ago | 
freakonomics.com | Stephen Dubner
Episode Transcript
Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. We are in the middle of a new series on the economics of live theater. It got me thinking about another episode we made, way back in 2012, about the psychology of one particularly fascinating piece of theater — such a fascinating piece that it only closed, finally, in early 2025. The episode also gets into one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology.
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2 months ago | 
freakonomics.com | Stephen Dubner
Episode Transcript
Making something out of nothing is hard. In the beginning, all you have is your imagination; it’s your only tool, your only muscle. But if you are determined — and lucky — that thing in your imagination can become real. And then, if you’re very lucky, people will pay to see it. Rocco LANDESMAN: There’s been theater since the beginning of man, really. What is theater?
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2 months ago | 
freakonomics.com | Stephen Dubner
Episode Transcript
Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner. We just published a two-part series on what some people call sludge — meaning, all the frictions that make it hard to fill out tax forms or find a healthcare provider or even cancel a subscription. One part of our series involved government sludge, and how it interferes with getting policy done.
