Stephen Dubner

1 week 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.

2 weeks 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.

3 weeks 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.

4 weeks 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.

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?