651. The Ultimate Dance Partner

Summary

Freakonomics Radio Episode 651: "The Ultimate Dance Partner"

Date: October 31, 2025
Host: Stephen J. Dubner

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Overview

In this lively episode, Stephen J. Dubner explores the fascinating world of horses and their economic, historical, and cultural role, particularly in the U.S. This is the first in a series on "Equinomics"—the hidden markets and enduring partnerships between humans and horses. With help from economists, historians, breeders, and riders, Dubner traces how horses evolved from essential technology to luxury companions, delving into the opaque economics of sport horse trading and his own personal foray into the saddle.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The U.S. Horse Population and Sectors

[07:02]

• ~7 million horses in the U.S.
  • Recreation (personal use, lessons, trail rides): ~3 million
  • Traditional jobs (farming, ranching, policing): ~0.5 million
  • Racing: ~1 million
  • Competition/Sport horses (e.g., Olympic equestrian events, rodeo): ~1+ million
• Typical sale prices:
  • Work/recreation horses: a few hundred to a few thousand dollars
  • Competition/racehorses: much higher, often six or even seven figures

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2. Buying, Selling, and Valuing Sport Horses

Guest: Constance Hunter, Chief Economist & Equestrian
[08:05], [12:52]

• Affluent buyers (“billionaire class”) are dramatically impacting the amateur sport market, pushing prices for top sport horses into the millions.
• Most purchases are opaque private transactions, similar to private equity deals.
• Quote:

  "Most humans don’t volunteer information. You have to draw things out."
  – Constance Hunter [08:51]

• Buying a horse is often more about matchmaking than commodity trading—each horse’s value is highly subjective.

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3. The Enduring Human–Horse Partnership

[13:49], [14:43]

• Horses live up to 30 years, often becoming long-term companions or “dance partners.”
• Quote:

  "They need us for absolutely nothing and yet they’re willing to partner with us."
  – Constance Hunter [13:49]

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4. Horses in History: Technology and Empire

Guest: Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History, Oxford
[14:52], [16:09]

• Horses transformed empires—vital for speed, communication, and military power.
• Quote:

  "It’s quite hard to understand human historical civilizations...without placing the horse somewhere within that human story."
  – Peter Frankopan [15:07]

• Horses were markers of status (Tang Dynasty China, ancient Egypt) and central to military campaigns and state-building globally.
• In North America, reintroduced by Europeans post-1492, horses also enabled Native groups to expand and resist colonial encroachment.

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5. The Infrastructure and Peak of Horse Power in America

Guest: Ann N. Greene, Historian & Author
[20:23], [20:45]

• Peak U.S. horse population: ~30 million (circa 1910-1915)
• Integral to cities (500 horses per square mile in 1900s Philadelphia!): delivery, streetcars, factory work
• “Living machines”—horses as urban infrastructure and energy source
• The transition to cars and electric streetcars relieved cities from “public health problems” caused by horse manure and congestion
• Fun Fact: Teamsters Union logo = horse (from “teaming”—hauling)

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6. Today’s Sport Horse Market: Opacity and Opportunity

Guest: Mark Paul, Economist & Horse Trader
[25:57], [36:58], [37:12]

• The sport horse market lacks Zillow-style transparency; prices and sales info are rarely public.
• Quote:

  "There’s no Zillow for horses. And I think that this is a huge problem."
  – Mark Paul [06:00], [36:58]

• Sport horse industry (U.S.):
  • Estimated value: $75 billion to GDP, ~6.7 million horses
  • Dressage-specific: ~15,000 U.S. riders, 175,000 worldwide
• Mark and his partner boost transparency by listing full prices on their website—a rarity in the industry.

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7. Types and Economics of Modern Horses

[27:13], [29:19], [30:23]

• Quarter Horses: most common in U.S.; small, reliable, family-friendly (“the golden retrievers of horses”)
• Thoroughbreds: built for speed; heart of American racing (especially Kentucky)
• Warmbloods: hybrids prized for sport (e.g., dressage, jumping); athletic, increasingly refined

  “They’ve been transformed into world-class athletes through modern horse breeding.” — Mark Paul [31:29]

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8. The Business of Importing and Selling Sport Horses

[33:45], [35:01], [37:40], [45:31]

• Mark and Elizabeth’s business (AVO Dressage):
  • Started to afford top horses by buying, training, selling imports (mostly from Europe)
  • Three business segments by age/training:
    • Young, up-and-coming (4-5 yrs): ~$60K sale price
    • Medium training: $100–150K
    • International quality: $200K–700K+
  • 2024: Sold 33 horses, revenues ~$3 million
  • Industry has high variable costs: “Horses are kind of like owning a finicky sports car, maybe quite a bit worse...maybe owning a finicky boat is a better analogy.” — Mark Paul [48:22]

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9. Inside the Saddle: Training, Talent, and the Equestrian Lifestyle

Guest: Elizabeth Bortuzzo, Professional Rider & Trainer
[50:46], [54:55], [55:15], [56:07]

• European-born, now trains/rides/competes in U.S.; rides up to 25 horses a day.
• Memorable moment: Elizabeth recounts rehabilitating a dangerous horse with a broken neck, now performing at international levels.
• Quote:

  “...It requires a lot of stupidity or, others call it bravery. Depends how you see it.”
  – Elizabeth Bortuzzo [54:55]

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10. Riding Reveal: Dubner Takes the Reins

[63:13], [64:44], [65:21]

• Dubner tries riding for the first time, coached by Elizabeth and Mark.
• Experiences the partnership, physicality, and view from atop a world-class dressage horse.
• Quote:

  “What’s the word I’m looking for—unified. I feel like the horse knows what to do with me on top of him. And because he does, it makes me feel as if I know what to do on top of him, even when I don’t.”
  – Stephen Dubner [65:21]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Constance Hunter, on horse value:

  "Whereas if I look at my horse Jasper...who’s perfect for me as this amateur, Henrik von Eckermann would have no use for Jasper, right?" [12:52]

• Ann N. Greene, on urban horse life:

  “If you walk down a street in the 1880s, it would have been mobbed with horses. One of my favorite statistics is that in about 1900 there were 500 horses per square mile in Philadelphia…” [20:45]

• Peter Frankopan, on horses in history:

  “To have horses gives you high status, and above all that’s to do with the fact you’ve got an effective military.” [17:23]

• Mark Paul, on business transparency:

  “The most we can do to keep horses on the affordable side of unaffordable, the better.” [45:48]

• Elizabeth Bortuzzo, on professional riding:

  “I ride more horses in a day than most people would ride in a full month…I ride 25 horses a day on average.” [56:14]

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Episode Highlights & Timestamps

• Intro & Setting the Scene at Chester Racecourse: [00:00 - 07:00]
  • Reflections on horses as old vs. new technology.
• Horse Market Breakdown & Economics: [07:02 - 12:52]
  • Sectors, values, the role of private sales, and matchmaking.
• Historical Roles of Horses: [14:52 - 24:44]
  • Peter Frankopan and Ann N. Greene on empire, technology, and urban horsepower.
• Modern Horse Trading & Business Transparency: [25:53 - 39:06]
  • Mark Paul explains the business model, lack of a “Zillow for horses.”
• Horse Types and Modern Breeding: [29:03 - 31:26]
  • Quarter horses, thoroughbreds, and warmbloods.
• Training, Competing, and Life with Horses: [50:46 - 56:07]
  • A day in the life of professional rider Elizabeth; dangers and dedication of the sport.
• Stephen Dubner Rides a Dressage Horse: [63:13 - 65:49]
  • Personal, humorous, and insightful reflection on the experience.

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Conclusion

This episode pulls back the curtain on the enduring, evolving partnership between humans and horses—from their ancient role as tools of empire to today’s status as expensive, specialized athletes and beloved companions. It spotlights the complexity and opacity of the modern horse market, the deep emotional and physical connections between riders and their “dance partners,” and Dubner’s firsthand discovery of what it feels like to join this age-old partnership—even briefly.

Stayed tuned for Part Two, where the story moves to racetracks, thoroughbred economics, and the world of high-stakes gambling and breeding.

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Transcript

[Mark Paul]

Our nation has always counted on us to win, to fight for what better could be, to secure our future together.

[Stephen Dubner]

We are Marines. We were made for this. Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. Before we get to today's episode, we need your help for an upcoming episode. It's about supplements, brain supplements in particular. Do you take supplements to improve your memory or focus or any other brain function? Or do you know someone who does? If so, we would like to hear about it. What do you take and why? What kind of effects do you think the supplements have had? I'd also like to know where you got the information that led you to take those supplements. Please make a voice memo using the app on your phone and send it to radioreconomics.com make sure you record this voice memo in a quiet place. If you're willing, I'd love you to include your name, age, what you do and where you live. Thanks for that. Also, one more thing, if you would like to come see me in person talking about 20 years of Freakonomics and what's next, I will be in Washington D.C. on November 2nd and in New York City on November 13th. Tickets are available at Freakonomics.com liveshows I hope to see you there. And now, here is today's episode. Earlier this year I was visiting Chester, a mid sized city in the northwest of England, a few miles from the Welsh border. Chester was founded nearly 2,000 years ago as a Roman fortress and most of those old Roman walls are still standing, a rough rectangle that surrounds the city center. Chester also has a large and beautiful cathedral, parts of which date back nearly one. It was a cathedral that brought me and some colleagues to Chester. We were retracing the steps of the 18th century Composer George Friedrich Handel and his groundbreaking Messiah. You will hear those episodes eventually, but that's not what today's episode is about, because Chester is not only a cathedral city and a city with the most complete Roman walls in all of Britain, it is also home to the Chester Racecourse, which dates back nearly 500 years, which makes it the oldest continuously operating horse track in the world. And we happened to be visiting Chester on the first day of the summer racing season. So we strolled down the high street toward the track. We passed a bunch of people sitting on top of those old Roman walls which gave them a free view down into the racetrack and we made our way inside. The Chester course is a beautiful little turf track built on top of what used to be a riverbed long silted over. It is a gloriously sunny day on one side of the oval racetrack is a grandstand. Inside the track, there's a cluster of private and corporate suites. Over there, the men wear dapper suits. The women wear colorful dresses and even more colorful fascinators, those very three dimensional hats that British ladies like to wear to festive occasions between races. Everyone there goes into the suites for champagne and nibbles. Then, after placing their bets, they gather on the inside rail to watch the horses thunder past. For all the spectacle, for all the joy and drinking and gambling, this is the centerpiece of the day. These gorgeous animals flying past at more than 40 miles an hour, weighing over 1,000 pounds. Their jockeys weighing maybe 150, 15 pounds. Many of the jockeys here are Irish and quite a few are female. Before each race, they meet up with their horses in the parade ring where the owners and trainers are closely watching Gamblers too, looking for any edge, real or imagined. Up close, you can see the intricate designs shaved into the hair on the horse's hindquarters. Diamonds and stripes, half moons and. And their workout sweat makes the designs glisten in the sunshine. The horses are led down to the starting gate and then once again, they're off. As I stood there watching the horses run, I had two thoughts. The first one was basically, wow. Seeing such big animals run so fast, so fluidly and rhythmically. It is an astonishingly pure piece of old fashioned analog entertainment. It's a thing that happens in a real place and time, time with other people and not some digital facsimile. The second thought I had was that the most likely place to see a horse these days is a racetrack. When Chester Racecourse was built, horses were one of the world's foremost technologies, if you want to call them that, which historians like to do. Back then we used horses for just about everything. For transportation and manufacturing, for agriculture and warfare. We use them for companionship and for entertainment, like racing. All that, of course, changed over time. New technologies came along to handle most of those horsey functions. But the horse did not disappear. There used to be some 30 million horses in the U.S. but today there are still nearly 7 million. And so, standing in the sunshine in Chester that day, I got to wondering, who is riding those 7 million horses? Who's breeding and training them, buying and selling them? I was especially eager to know what the horse market or markets might look like. Equinomics, I guess you'd have to call it. So today on Frequenomics Radio and for the next couple of weeks on the show, we will get into those markets.

[Mark Paul]

There's no Zillow for horses. And I think that this is a huge problem.

[Stephen Dubner]

We'll hear how specialized breeding has turned the horse into a world class athlete.

[Ann N. Greene]

I can remember my dad saying after I'm gone, never let him do artificial insemination and thoroughbreds. It'll ruin the breed.

[Stephen Dubner]

We will meet some of the most valuable horses in the world.

[Ann N. Greene]

How do I say this without a hit being put out on me?

[Stephen Dubner]

And we may, just may put one reluctant rider on top of a horse. Let's see, what am I signing? Indemnify. Hold harmless. New Jersey law. Okay.

[Mark Paul]

Yeah, yeah.

[Stephen Dubner]

Wait, I do see death.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Keep going. There's more.

[Mark Paul]

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Explores the hidden side of everything with.

[Mark Paul]

Your host, Stephen Dubner.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, let's start with a basic breakdown of the nearly 7 million horses in the U.S. horses aren't as easy to count as you might think, but we'll go with what are considered the most reliable numbers. There are roughly 3 million horses grouped into what's called the recreation sector. That's personal use, lessons, trail rides, etc. Another half million horses are used for traditional jobs like farming, ranching, carriage pulling, policing, and so on. A horse in any of these categories will typically sell for somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars. Then there are the racehorses, about a million of them in the US and they sell for much more. We will hear about that in part two of this series. Another big category with a million plus are the so called competition horses. This covers everything from rodeo horses to the sport horses that you'll see in equestrian events in the Olympics. And how much do those sport horses go for? And where can you buy one?

[Constance Hunter]

I happen to have just gone through this process. It's theoretically easier if you have an unlimited budget.

[Stephen Dubner]

That is Constance Hunter in her day job. She is chief economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research division of the Economist Publishing Group. But she is also an avid equestrian. I met Hunter not long ago at an economics conference and when she told me that a promising young sport horse would sell for the lowish six figures, I must have looked surprised because then she said something like, you have no idea. She said the amateur sport has been increasingly impacted by the billionaire class people who will spend a million dollars or 2 million on a well trained horse for their kids to compete on. Even more interesting, she said that most sport horse sales are private transactions with no public record. She said this reminds her of the private equity industry.

[Constance Hunter]

If you acquire a company, the idea is that you're going to create more value than you bought it for. And for people who are in the horse business, they're obviously buying because they see a potential that they can extract and then sell it for more money. Sometimes that's just because they have capital to put to work. Right. And you are going to deploy my trainer, who's an excellent horse picker, to go around the world, buy horses that you would work with for a year or two and then sell. Right. And just like private equity, there's not that much transparency until the final transaction takes place. There is more transparency with private equity because you have investors that want to know what did it cost originally? But amateurs, for whatever reason, don't seem to ask these questions. And therefore there's not really the norm to disclose information. It's interesting. I think it's a quality of humans. Most humans don't volunteer information. You have to draw things out.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, so let's draw things out. Constance Hunter grew up in Philadelphia.

[Constance Hunter]

My parents never bought me a pony or a horse, but they did give me riding lessons and I was hooked. I rode all the way through high school. I was on the equestrian team at nyu. We used to ride out in Long island in Old Westbury.

[Stephen Dubner]

These days, Hunter competes in an event known as Hunter Jumper, no relation.

[Constance Hunter]

That is a course that is meant to mimic the hunt field. Sometimes it happens on grass. Very often it happens in a ring with a fence around it. And the jumps are constructed to evoke memories of what an open field in a hunt course might look like. You're technically judging the horse, and I say that with sort of air quotes around it, because how well the horse expresses itself depends a lot on the quality of the rider on its back. But the holy Grail in this competition, especially for amateurs, is to have what we call a push button horse. Horse that will express itself perfectly in spite of the rider on its back.

[Stephen Dubner]

In the equestrian world, amateurs and professionals mix it up and often compete against one another much more than in most other sports. Constance Hunter owns two horses. The one she bought more recently, she says is one of those forgiving horses. She shares a photo of an athletic looking brown horse with big black eyes.

[Constance Hunter]

This is my baby. This is Jasper de la Tour, who heretofore has displayed none of the attitudinal arrogance of my other horse.

[Stephen Dubner]

That other horse is called Beaulio's Cool Eric, but we're still talking about Jasper here.

[Constance Hunter]

He's sweet. He's equally beautiful, equally athletic, equally what we would call scopey. The jumps at the level I'm doing are easy for him if I make a little bit of a mistake, if I'm too soon to the jump or too late to the jump, it's no problem for him to compensate for my errors. He's sort of has this how can I help attitude. Both of them are very cuddly when you're in the stall with them or grazing them. Jasper's learning to love ear scratches. He puts his head down like a dog, like, please scratch my ears.

[Stephen Dubner]

Friendliness is a nice attribute in a horse, but athleticism is what makes a given horse valuable.

[Constance Hunter]

I know of a horse that was given to a very experienced jumper rider and some people went in on it as an investment. So this is where competition was a $500,000 purse split amongst the top, I think 10 winners. So if you have a horse that can place consistently in those top competitions, and let's say you enter them in 10 or 15 of them a year, that's part of what determines the price. There was an offer for $5 million for this horse.

[Stephen Dubner]

$5 million is a lot for one horse, even in the elite equestrian world, but it's hardly unheard of with such. Some amateurs prefer to lease their horses. But Hunter says that even leasing has some risk, since the true value of a given horse can be elusive.

[Constance Hunter]

Everybody knows what a masterpiece is, right? But the big difference is that a Van Gogh masterpiece is a Van Gogh masterpiece to everybody. Whereas if I look at my horse Jasper, who I love and who's perfect for me as this amateur, Heinrich von Eckerman would have no use for Jasper, right?

[Stephen Dubner]

Henrik von Eckermann is a Swedish jumping rider, one of the best in the world.

[Constance Hunter]

So not the same value to him. Many of the horses I tried when I was looking were perfectly fine horses just weren't quite the right fit for me. It is, I think, a little bit more like a headhunter or a matchmaker in terms of that relational and long term view.

[Stephen Dubner]

When Hunter says long term view, it's pretty long. Domesticated horses typically live 25 to 30 years. Her baby Jasper is 6 years old. Beaulio's cool. Eric, meanwhile, is 20 and still going strong.

[Constance Hunter]

He's got a huge personality. If I'm away for a while and I try to ride him into a ring to work, he'll have a little temper tantrum, which involves him rearing, spinning, bucking, occasionally trying to crash me into walls. I used to be scared and then I realized, wait, if he wanted me dead, I would already be dead. So I just kind of like calm him down. What's amazing, I think, about horses is they're these huge, powerful animals, and yet they let us train them to do all of these things. And they're prey animals. They're not like a dog, which is a predator. If you feed the dog, the dog feels like, okay, you're the leader of my pack. You provided me this food. I didn't have to go out and hunt it. But no blade of grass ever ran away from a horse, Right? So they don't need us. They need us for absolutely nothing, and yet they're willing to partner with us.

[Stephen Dubner]

That partnership between horses and humans goes back several thousand years. So let's speak with someone who can explain that history.

[Peter Frankopan]

My name is Peter Frankopan, and I'm professor of global history at Oxford University.

[Stephen Dubner]

And, Peter, how much of a horse person are you, scale of 0 to 10?

[Peter Frankopan]

As a rider, I'm a 0. As a historian, I'm pushing 10 on this one.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay.

[Peter Frankopan]

It's quite hard to understand human historical civilizations going back thousands of years from deep antiquity right through into the modern period without placing the horse somewhere within that human story. You can't understand the history of empires and of the way in which the world has been knitted together without putting the horse pretty high up that list of factors.

[Stephen Dubner]

I want to just bring up a parallel that I was reading about this morning. This is an economics paper that I didn't know about. It was probably 20 years old. It's by a guy named Nathan Nunn. He wrote this paper that you probably know, I just didn't, about the centrality of the potato shipped from the New World back to the Old World during the Colombian exchange. And he makes the argument that without the potato, that, let's say, most of Europe wouldn't have developed as it had, or at least that it supercharged a certain kind of development because it was high calorie, sturdy, tradable, et cetera, et cetera. So if we were thinking of that as a sort of parallel, just how central was the horse? And maybe you can get into some uses of the horse.

[Peter Frankopan]

I love that paper about potatoes. Because calorie provision becomes easier. People don't need to work in the fields either for so long in such quantities, so it drives urbanization. Horses, they're everywhere. Number one, horses move 10 times faster than human beings. That means you can ship goods, information faster if you can rely on animals than if you don't. Second, horses plug obviously quite clearly into military endeavors, because if you have the ability to move things quickly, then quite soon you think, how do I use competitive advantage? And so horses are absolutely central in the ways in which the first state start to grow, the ways in which competition plays out.

[Stephen Dubner]

Frank Kapan has written several books about the ancient world. His best known, published in 2015, is called the Silk Roads, A New History of the World.

[Peter Frankopan]

The Silk Road is a shorthand used by historians and has been for the last couple of hundred years. Originally to look at connections between China, Central Asia and India, but broadly speaking, now to think about connected regions, connected peoples and flows and exchanges of all kinds.

[Stephen Dubner]

Frankopan, by researching these trade routes, inevitably came to see how central horses were to various cultures and empires.

[Peter Frankopan]

There's a market for the Arabian stallions. Two and a half thousand years ago, you have texts being written saying the best horses come from Persia, they come from Gandahara, they come from Punjab. Don't buy horses and get sold a dud by looking at horses without inspecting them properly. In the Chinese world more than two and a half thousand years ago, you have an official position called the Director of the studs, which today's world sounds like it might be something a bit more to do with fraternity houses, perhaps, but working out which was the right combination of which horse for which rider, but also how many you needed, which ones were most valuable. There were war horses, there are courier horses, there are hunting horses, there are coach horses. In different periods, in different Chinese dynasties. The horse is incredibly important in art and sculpture. The Tang Dynasty, from the early 600s until about the early 900s, is very famous for producing these incredibly beautiful terracotta animals, camels, Bactrian and so on. But the horse is the king of all of the animals. And that's because to have horses gives you high status, and above all, that's to do with the fact you've got an effective military. The horse is so important that you have poems written in Chinese which celebrate individual horses. Emperors are buried alongside statues of their favorite horses. And it's not just a Chinese thing. Tutankhamun, the superstar of the Egyptian world, is buried alongside six full working chariots, all ready to be harnessed to the best horses the Egyptians could find.

[Stephen Dubner]

Let's take it into North America for just a moment. Give me a bit on when and to what degree horses came here and whether they shaped the North American culture, economy, political landscape, et cetera, in similar ways as they had shaped earlier civilizations. Or was it different?

[Peter Frankopan]

Well, we know there were horses in North America about 20,000 years ago. Those seem to have died out. That meant that the ways in which people communicated across all the Americas. North, Central and South had different valences. It meant that people moved in different timescales. It meant that their capacities to build things quickly was different. So when the Europeans arrived with Columbus and after him in 1492 onwards, horses were decisive in Europeans ability to conquer large empires. Indigenous peoples very quickly understood how powerful and important horses were. So horses became central to, for example, groups like the Cherokee, the Sioux, the Navajo or the Apache. And also the ways in which those horses helped build build confederations that themselves became incredibly powerful, created challenges, questions, problems for what the United States would look like as the 13 colonies eventually expanded westwards. How did you compete against indigenous peoples? And that competition to have access to horses and technology and power and rewarding military valor plays an important role in the modern United States. It just happened in the Americas a couple of thousand years after it starts in Asia.

[Stephen Dubner]

Once horses were reintroduced into North America, their numbers grew and grew and grew. In the US we hit Peak Horse somewhere around 1910 or 1915.

[Ann N. Greene]

I think it peaks around 27 to 30 million. It's always a little hard to know.

[Stephen Dubner]

That is Ann N. Green. She is a historian of the American 19th century and retired professor at the University of Pennsylvania. We wanted to speak with Greene because of a book she wrote called Horses at Wilson Work. Harnessing Power in Industrial America.

[Ann N. Greene]

If you walk down a street in the 1880s, it would have been mobbed with horses. One of my favorite statistics is that in about 1900 there were 500 horses per square mile. In Philadelphia there would have been horse drawn streetcars, two wheeled carts, big heavy wagons. If you move over to factory areas, you're going to see horses coming and going, bringing stuff in, taking stuff out. And you might see horses inside the factory pulling things or powering things. There were two main urban herds. One was for teaming any kind of hauling. That's why the symbol of the Teamsters Union is a horse. The other urban herd were streetcar horses. Streetcar companies would own hundreds of horses and house them in multi story stables that kind of resembled parking garages. The railroads owned lots of horses. And as you get operations like big department stores, they own lots of horses. Why delivery?

[Stephen Dubner]

So this is how it starts to add up to something like 30 million throughout the country. It's a massive reliance on this one animal.

[Ann N. Greene]

Yes, the cities, the populations are really dense and the cities move via horsepower. The biggest illustration of that was the great epizootic of 1872, when horses got sick with horse flu. It started someplace up near Toronto. It Spread along transportation routes and in major city after major city, you had several days where nothing was moving on the streets. The horse mortality wasn't terrible, but the horses got pretty sick and it hurt city services. There would be a fire and literally people were harnessing themselves to fire engines to pull them because the horses were too sick to work.

[Stephen Dubner]

Tell me what you can about the market, the buying and selling of the horses. Was it purely a domestic market? Were people imported, hoarding a lot of horses? How big and prominent were the firms that were breeding and selling horses and so on?

[Ann N. Greene]

There's some big horse markets, New York and Chicago. There are certainly firms that deal in selling horses. There are market classifications for horses. Some are by weight and configuration and some are by job function. One of the changes in the last part of the 19th century is that you really start getting a concern with horse breeds that doesn't exist that much before the Civil War. To have a horse breed, to have a breed of any animal takes a fair amount of paperwork and policing. My guess is that the major part of the American horse population was a mid sized, strong, not necessarily terribly, terribly fast, kind of all purpose horse.

[Stephen Dubner]

Like a Honda Civic.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Stephen Dubner]

You use a phrase I want you to define and explain. Living machines is what you call horses. What do you mean by that?

[Ann N. Greene]

That's a phrase that comes out of the work by two colleagues of mine, Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, who wrote a book called Horse in the City. That makes you think about the horse functionally. And it brings this kind of power, which humans have been using for centuries, into the same space as other kinds of energy sources. It was a way, I think, for all of us to get away from this notion of progress that always said, oh, well, horses. Everybody was just sitting around waiting for something, something better to come along.

[Stephen Dubner]

But most people today, I would argue, think that something better did come along. There was the internal combustion engine which powered cars and trucks, and the electric streetcar, which made cities much easier to get around in. And the horse, for all its virtues, wasn't really designed for dense urban living. New York City at one point had an estimated 200,000 horses. All that manure created massive public health problems. The noise of horseshoes on cobblestones was deafening. So there were all sorts of reasons to move away from horsepower and embrace new technologies. And yet the horse did not disappear. Coming up after the break, I will be frank.

[Mark Paul]

We were expecting to import and sell maybe four or five horses a year. Last year we sold 33 horses.

[Stephen Dubner]

I'm Stephen Dubner this is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. In the early 1900s, horses were everywhere and it didn't take much effort to buy one. These days it can be more complicated.

[Mark Paul]

It's a very strange market, I'll say that.

[Stephen Dubner]

That is Mark Paul. He is an economics professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

[Mark Paul]

My main interests are addressing the causes, consequences and potential solutions to inequal throughout the United States. For decades the North Star has been quote unquote, free markets. And we've seen that that's really been a farce. It hasn't actually delivered the supposed freedom and opportunity that we had hoped.

[Stephen Dubner]

So it sounds like by day you are an economist who is trying to create better economic equality and then by night you're a horse trader. Do I have that about right?

[Mark Paul]

You do, you do. I should say this is a hobby that has turned into a part time job on the side.

[Stephen Dubner]

Mark Paul helps run a business that imports, trains and sells sport horses.

[Mark Paul]

I grew up with horses ever since I was 6 years old and just fell in love with these majestic creatures.

[Stephen Dubner]

Where'd you grow up?

[Mark Paul]

I grew up in Massachusetts. There was a horse farm down the road and every weekend I'd go muck out stalls, pick up the horse manure in exchange for lessons. I was really privileged that my parents were able to buy me my first horse. Actually, my best friend and I split our first horse when we were kids that we went and picked at a cowboy auction for a couple hundred bucks.

[Stephen Dubner]

Tell me about that horse. Name, size, kind, et cetera.

[Mark Paul]

Yeah, he was what's called an appendix quarter horse. He was a gray horse and he liked to roll around in the dirt and get covered in mud. We were quite original. So we named him Dusty. My friend Lydia and I got to share him for a number of years and learn with him. It was a real joy.

[Stephen Dubner]

Now, if you were like me, you may have heard of a quarter horse, although you don't quite know what it means to say nothing of an appendix quarter horse. Even though there are far fewer horses today than there used to be. As we heard earlier from Ann N. Greene, there are more horse breeds. Some have their pedigrees closely monitored in registries that are called stud books. For others, the breeding standards are more relaxed.

[Mark Paul]

Quarter horses are the most prevalent horse here in the United States. They tend to be on the smaller side. Horses are measured in hands, which is a system that most Americans are probably not familiar with.

[Stephen Dubner]

This is the old fashioned thing where you would literally extend your hand from thumb to pinky and measure up.

[Mark Paul]

You got it. Each hand is about 4 inches. So the average quarter horse is about 15, 2 hands. So that's about 60 or 62 inches tall.

[Stephen Dubner]

That's from what to what? Not from hoof to head, is it?

[Mark Paul]

It's not from hoof to head. It's from hoof to what's called the wither, which is at the top of the horse's shoulder.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, so that's about five feet to the shoulder.

[Mark Paul]

That's right. Quarter horses are on the smaller size and they're often used for western riding, things like reining or working cattle farms. So when people turn on their horse drama series like Yellowstone, they're looking at quarter horses in general. Quarter horses are kind of like the golden retrievers of horses. They're chill, they're family friendly.

[Stephen Dubner]

So when you're describing a quarter horse, what I'm hearing is not on average a prima donna. Correct?

[Mark Paul]

That is right. Do not think about the person all done up walking down fifth Avenue.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, what do you have for prima donnas in the form of horses then? Can we talk about thoroughbreds?

[Mark Paul]

Thoroughbreds are the sprinters, probably the second most prevalent horse here in the United States. Horse racing has a long and storied history in America, though at times quite troubling as well. Thoroughbreds were bred to do one thing, and that is run fast over fairly short distances. Thoroughbreds are a lot leaner than a quarter horse. Quarter horses have some nice bulk to them, whereas a thoroughbred is very narrow and refined. Most thoroughbreds are bred here in the United States, Kentucky being the heartland of the thoroughbred and the racing industry.

[Stephen Dubner]

But Mark Paul lives in New Jersey, not in Kentucky, and the horses he specializes in are neither thoroughbreds nor quarter horses. The horses he deals in are called warmbloods and they're most commonly used, used as sport horses. The two horses that Constance Hunter owns, Jasper de la Tour and Beaulio's Cool Eric, are warmbloods. They're called that because they're a cross between hot blooded breeds like thoroughbreds and Arabians and slower, more cold blooded breeds like draft horses.

[Mark Paul]

I will say within the idea of warmbloods, there are many, many sub breeds as well. Name some Hanoverians, Oldenburgs, Dutch warmbloods, Belgian warmbloods. Most of these are coming from Europe. A lot of the warmbloods are, you know, more in the 64 to 70 inch range for their height.

[Stephen Dubner]

Convert that to hands for me then.

[Mark Paul]

Often there can be 16 to 17 hands. One of mine is actually 18 hands. So he is just absolutely Massive. I need a stepladder to brush the thing.

[Stephen Dubner]

What about characteristics and uses of the warmblood?

[Mark Paul]

Now, this is a fascinating question. Cause this has really changed over time. 20, 30 years ago, warmbloods were fairly heavy, a little bit slow, kind of on the docile side. They had more of that draft horse blood in them. More recently, as the equestrian sport has evolved, warmbloods have become hotter, more energetic, they're more sensitive, they're a little bit lighter and more refined.

[Stephen Dubner]

It sounds like you're saying they've become more athletic. Would that be the right word?

[Mark Paul]

That is exactly right. They've been transformed into world class athletes through modern horse breeding.

[Stephen Dubner]

Paul competes in the sport called dressage, one of three equestrian events in the Olympics. The others are jumping and eventing. Dressage is sometimes called horse ballet because of the subtle and complicated ways the horse and rider move about the arena, often accompanied by music. But these moves originally come from military training that developed in Europe, particularly in France, and specifically from field drills that were used to turn soldiers and horse into one unit, joined at the tailbone, ready for battle. Training a horse in dressage takes years. The sport today is much more popular in Europe than the U.S. but there is a dedicated American dressage community.

[Mark Paul]

In the United States, we have roughly 15,000 dressage riders. Globally, we're talking about 175,000. That has grown substantially over the past few decades, both in number of athletes, but also in spectators, becoming far more exciting to watch. Part of this is thanks to the Olympics and how it has highlighted the beauty and passion in the sport. It's also just the fact that people have more money and more time to enjoy leisure. Yes, this is a sport, but it's also a hobby for the vast majority of people who participate in it. And so as we become a wealthier world, people are able to dedicate more of their time and resources to building out those hobbies. And some of us choose horses as that hobby.

[Stephen Dubner]

So would you consider dressage horses especially? But just about any of these warmblood horses, are they essentially a luxury good in general?

[Mark Paul]

They are. And that's, to be frank, the tension I struggle with most between my two different jobs. As you heard me earlier talk about, I'm a researcher focused on inequality. And here I am engaging in a luxury sport, and it's something that bothers me each and every day. But as I tell my kids and my students, we have to struggle with the differences between the worlds we want in the world we exist in.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, so you compete in dressage, but you also have this business that's connected to your hobby. Tell me about that.

[Mark Paul]

So my partner Elizabeth Bortuso and I started our business AVO Dressage about two years ago. The main reason we started it was to be able to own and compete and grow with world class horses. One of the challenges in our sport is horses that actually have the talent and skill to make it to the Olympic level are extraordinarily expensive. And neither of us quite had the six or seven figures to go pick up one of those horses. So we thought how can we make this happen? We said let's start by buying a horse, training it a little bit, learning with it and then hopefully selling it for a significant profit. Rinse and repeat.

[Stephen Dubner]

When you say the buying and the training and the selling, are you more of the buyer and seller and she is more of the trainer?

[Mark Paul]

Elizabeth and I co own our business and co own all of the horses we buy. So it's a shared business. She is the primary trainer. She is an extraordinarily skilled athlete. She is the one with the serious Olympic aspirations and I have full faith that she will get there. I do hope to compete at the top international level. Less focused on trying to make the Olympics though.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, tell me how the company started. Maybe the first horse you bought together.

[Mark Paul]

We bought a horse from Germany, we imported him together. We each rode him about 50% of the time. Elizabeth being the primary trainer and me getting to learn from both Elisabeth and the horse.

[Stephen Dubner]

Were you a good student?

[Mark Paul]

I sure try to be. I probably backtalk more than I should. I'm an external processor. What can I say?

[Stephen Dubner]

What's the size of your company now?

[Mark Paul]

Now we have about 15 horses. A lot of them we bring over for resale, but we also keep quite a few and so on our team. We now have personal horses. What we do essentially is we go to Europe, we find horses. Usually we're buying horses that are in the age range of 4 years old to about 12 years old. Horses really start to hit the peak of their career around 11 or 12. The average horse lives about 30 years, but their peak competitive career is about 12 to 16. We import those horses here to the United States, which is a process all in of itself where they fly on a plane and they come to JFK UK and go through a quarantine process. We bring them to our farm out in Frenchtown, New Jersey and we get them acclimated and make sure they're set up and happy and then we start training those horses. Our goal is to continue advancing their education and career as dressage horses. The ultimate goal is to then sell those horses into the US market and improve the quality of horses here for the sport of dressage, but also to really help people find their right dance partner.

[Stephen Dubner]

So let's talk about that market. How not only big a market is it, but how organized a market is it. Because I have looked around a little bit and I have to say it's nothing like a stock market. It's nothing like a lot of markets we're used to where all the buyers and all the sellers can congregate and all the prices are listed there. Unless I'm really bad at the Internet, I'm not seeing that, you know, there's.

[Mark Paul]

No Zillow for horses. And I think that this is a huge problem. There's actually quite a ripe market opportunity for somebody to create a highly transparent, well functioning app or marketplace for horses.

[Stephen Dubner]

Somebody like you, I would assume.

[Mark Paul]

Perhaps. I keep talking to my brother in law who's a software developer about this and he is happily expecting a baby this weekend. But maybe when he gets back from parental leave, this will be our next endeavor. The horse market globally is about a $400 billion market. It's a sizable market here in the United states. We have 6.7 million horses and it contributes about $75 billion on an annual basis to GDP.

[Stephen Dubner]

And this is all horses, not just.

[Mark Paul]

Sport horses, this is all horses. When it comes to sport horses, one of the challenges that Elizabeth and I saw was precisely what you identified, that there's no good clearing house for horses in the United States. There's not a lot of market information out there. So if somebody wants to buy a horse, where do they start? A lot of people scratch their heads. Unfortunately, similar in some ways to real estate or art, the market doesn't have a huge amount of transparency. And that's something that we thought should be questioned and something that we ourselves are really trying to upend.

[Stephen Dubner]

How are you trying to do that?

[Mark Paul]

What we do is we have a website and when people go to our website, we have all of our horses listed. We have photos, videos, descriptions of them. But importantly, we are fully transparent about all of our horses prices. In general, the price is the price, but that's the biggest piece missing. For most sellers, prices are often hidden. And the reason prices are often hidden is because there's often two or three agents involved. Again, similar to real estate transactions where agents are getting fairly large commissions, those commissions aren't always fully conveyed to buyers and sellers. The price actually paid for the horse often is not the price paid to the seller themselves, which both is a problem from a transparency standpoint, but also leads to inflated prices.

[Stephen Dubner]

What's the median price in the US for a sport horse transaction?

[Mark Paul]

There's not great data on this. For a sport horse in dressage, I'd take an educated guess that we're probably talking around 40 to $50,000.

[Stephen Dubner]

40,000 to 50k for a horse that is how well trained and how well regarded.

[Mark Paul]

It's just such a big can of worms that you're asking. Horses are just so variable. You can think of cars, right? You can go pick up a used car that has a couple issues and that is getting up there in, in the horse market, you might be looking at paying 5 to $10,000 for an older horse that doesn't have very much training. On the flip side, if you want a horse that's been trained up to the international level, that's not going to go to the Olympics, but that is a highly educated trained horse, you easily could be paying a quarter million dollars. So much of it depends on the horse's potential. The other main component is the horse's training. So you'll see six figure horses that are, you know, one or two years old and you'll see six figure or seven figure horses in the prime of their career.

[Stephen Dubner]

Considering the lack of transparency in the market, I'm curious how much fraud there may be in the market. Have people paid several hundred thousand dollars for a horse and found out that it's actually not as good a horse as they thought?

[Mark Paul]

I mean, unfortunately in any marketplace you have bad actors, but that's really not the norm in the horse industry. I think the bigger struggle in the horse industry is knowing should this horse be $50,000 or 75,000 DOL? That's a large swing in price, but it's not always very clear how to price a horse.

[Stephen Dubner]

You mentioned the agents who take a cut. Who are they? Are you essentially an agent since you're buying and selling, or are there actual sales agents who come in between you and the buyer or seller?

[Mark Paul]

Yeah, it's a great question. So we don't function at all as agents. We buy all of our own horses, we own the horses, we bring them to the US we get to know them and that way we can really represent the horse fairly. On the flip side, agents are a little bit more like used car salesmen or real estate agents where often they barely know a horse and they're just sending around videos trying to represent this horse and sell it to be able to make often the commission, the standard rate is 10%.

[Stephen Dubner]

Wow, that's a pretty big cut.

[Mark Paul]

It's a very hefty cut.

[Stephen Dubner]

Could I set myself up as an agent and could I go onto, let's say, the website of your company, which I'm looking at now, and say, oh, I'm going to, to pick the three horses from this company that I think are a good sales opportunity and market them. And then if I get bites on them, then I come to you and say, hey, I've got a buyer and I'll take my 10%. Is that the way I could do it?

[Mark Paul]

So you could try that. But in general, the way this would work would be that sellers approach agents who have large networks or large books of business and try to get them to help represent their horse. I do want to be clear, agents often do provide some services. So they might take really nice photos and videos, they might run ads for the horse. We don't work with agents. We work very hard to represent all of our horses ourselves and to work directly with our clients. We kind of have two different classes of clients. We have what we would call the adult amateurs, which are really hobby riders. And then there are professionals who are professional athletes. Often the hobby riders will come with their trainer who will help them determine, is this horse an appropriate fit for you? Does it have enough training for your needs? Does it have the potential to go where you want to go as a horse enthusiast? And things along those lines. What often happens is the trainer will want to be paid something. What we do is we say, listen, this is the price, it's fully transparent. If your trainer needs to be paid, we let the client work that out between them and their trainer. That way the transaction is just as transparent as possible.

[Stephen Dubner]

And here's what Constance Hunter, the first horse owning economist we spoke with, thinks about the role of the trainer in a horse transaction.

[Constance Hunter]

They do add a lot of value. And even though I'm a well informed amateur, I'm always amazed at something that my trainer will point out that I just didn't notice because it's not my profession. It's not what I'm doing 10 hours a day. The other thing is that it's a hard business to scale. So if you're a trainer, you can have people who work for you, but you as the expert can only get physically on so many horses in a day. The people who combine these three key skills, being a teacher, being a rider, and then being good at selecting horses, I would say those are three distinct but interrelated skills and, and to have someone who's really good at all three of those. There's some scarcity value in that.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, let's go back to Mark Paul. He told me that trainers typically charge between 100 and $150 an hour for.

[Mark Paul]

Either giving lessons or training a horse. But those fees can vary depending on the trainer's reputation and experience.

[Stephen Dubner]

How do you find buyers for your horses?

[Mark Paul]

Most of our clientele tend to be women in their 40s through 60s, which is a fairly prime demographic for. So a lot of the horse industry takes place through Facebook groups. When we get a horse in and we're preparing to sell that horse, we'll put the horse up in a variety of dressage groups across Facebook and try to raise awareness of the horse there. This is part of the problem I alluded to earlier is that there's not like a nice Zillow for horses. There are a handful of websites out there that try to do something like that, but most of them are pretty clunky, have fairly low traffic and really haven't caught on.

[Stephen Dubner]

So I gather you and or your partner go to Europe to essentially scout and pick horses that you want to buy, correct?

[Mark Paul]

That's right. We have a lot of long term relationships we've now built throughout Europe. We're often bringing horses from Germany and the Netherlands are the main places, but also from Norway and France and Portugal and Spain.

[Stephen Dubner]

And you're buying directly from the people who foal the horses or no, a combination.

[Mark Paul]

Sometimes we're buying directly from the breeders and other times we're buying directly from the individuals who bought the horses from the breeders and then started training them the past couple years themselves.

[Stephen Dubner]

How would you identify, like your sweet spot of a horse, how old, how well trained and at what cost that you're trying to buy?

[Mark Paul]

We work across different price points in the market. We have three different segments. One are young, up and coming horses. Those are going to be our four and five year olds. And for the amateurs, we're often selling them for around $60,000.

[Stephen Dubner]

And what are you buying them for?

[Mark Paul]

We usually try to make a reasonable profit on them, but in general we are not engaging in huge markups. It's an expensive industry and so the most we can do to keep horses on the affordable side of unaffordable, the better.

[Stephen Dubner]

So you've got your one segment which is the relatively affordable.

[Mark Paul]

The relatively affordable horses are usually in the 60 to $70,000 range. The horses that have a medium amount of training often again for the Amateur market are going to be more in the 100 to $150,000 range.

[Stephen Dubner]

Again, these are the sell prices, not your purchase prices.

[Mark Paul]

Yeah, these are rough sale prices. And then we start getting up into the more international quality horses. And sometimes those are $200,000, sometimes those might be six or $700,000.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, so you've got your three tiers of horses that you're buying, training and then selling. You mentioned earlier that you, quote, have about 15 horses, but you also told me that you've kept about seven, right?

[Mark Paul]

Yeah, Elizabeth and I have seven together at the moment. And then we have eight additional sail horses.

[Stephen Dubner]

No offense, but it sounds a little bit like you're running a restaurant, but you're eating a lot of your own food. Am I wrong on the that.

[Mark Paul]

No, you're exactly right. But that's why we got into this in the first place. The goal is to have the most amazing horses possible to ride, to learn from, and to compete with. As I just highlighted, often these horses are half a million dollars plus. And so how do. Elizabeth is a horse trainer. Your average horse trainer is probably making something like $80,000 in the United States, maybe a little less. I am a professor at a public university. I can tell you the salaries are mediocre. How do you afford to get into that kind of sport? And so we've done that through creating this business where we can buy and train horses and that allows us to own the horses.

[Stephen Dubner]

Can I just say, I think it's awesome. I mean, it's very smart. And I'm very happy for you that it's working out. Right? I assume it is working out. You sell enough, especially at the high end, to support your habit.

[Mark Paul]

To support our habit is a great way to put it. So far, we've been extremely lucky. I will be frank. When we started this, we were expecting to import and sell maybe four or five horses a year. Last year we sold 33 horses. We imported more than 40 horses from Europe. And we're still kind of in our infancy of this endeavor.

[Stephen Dubner]

Can you give me any top or bottom line revenues there?

[Mark Paul]

Our revenue last year was about $3 million.

[Stephen Dubner]

And expenses.

[Mark Paul]

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it's a great question. Horses are kind of like owning a finicky sports car, maybe quite a bit worse. As a matter of fact, maybe owning a finicky boat is a better analogy. Your average person is paying probably something range of twelve to fifteen hundred dollars a month in what's called board, just to keep Their horse at a competitive sport facility. You can think of it like a gym. If you want to be a competitive athlete, your horse needs proper turnout. They need, you know, an area to go relax outside in. They need a stall. They need arenas to exercise.

[Stephen Dubner]

So I have to say, Mark, and I certainly mean no offense, in fact, I admire the skill that it takes to do what you do with dressage. But when I watch dressage, I really don't get it. And I'm 100% sure this is my shortcoming in that I don't understand it. I don't understand what's going on. I don't understand why it's difficult. I don't understand why it's desirable to do it or watch it. So please disabuse me of my absurd naivete and tell me what dressage is, why it's exciting, et cetera.

[Mark Paul]

I mean, most importantly, I just have to get you out to the farm and put you on a horse, and I think I'll be able to change your mind. We'd love to host you.

[Stephen Dubner]

Coming up after the break.

[Mark Paul]

I think it's time to get Steven to sign a release form and hop on Vital here. He's ready for him.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Let's do this.

[Stephen Dubner]

Steven, I think it's time to delete that part of the tape and pretend we never came here. I'm Stephen Dunn Dubner. This is freeconomics Radio. We'll be right back. Before the break, I was speaking with Mark Paul, an economics professor at Rutgers who also co owns a business that imports European horses for dressage. He told me that we should come visit his farm out in western New Jersey on the Hunterdon Plateau. So we did. It was a cool day for June, Cloudy and damp. Inside the barn. I said hello to one of the horses. Okay, I didn't do very well. I got a little distracted by your tongue. Your tongue is very tonguey. And I met Mark Paul's partner.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

My name is Elizabeth Portuzzo and I am a professional rider. I ride, I train, I teach my students, and I then compete professionally. And our team is called Evo dressage.

[Stephen Dubner]

Evo. The name comes from. What is it in national, actually.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Amor Vincit Omnium. Love conquers all.

[Stephen Dubner]

Bertutto grew up in the northeast of Italy.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

I actually had to beg my parents to ride until I was seven years old. It took a full year of literally begging to ride. And then at 7, I said, Sat on my first horse, and it was actually quite a big horse, and there was no getting me off of a horse.

[Stephen Dubner]

There are 20 horses in the barn today and Bertuzzo is here to work with them. She mounts a horse named Kobis, a 10 year old Dutch warmblood who's being trained up for elite competition. Bortuzzo rides him into the dressage arena, which is a large fenced in rectangle with mirrors at one end so that riders can watch themselves practice. Mark, Paul and I gather on the rail to watch that there was a.

[Mark Paul]

Pirouette to the left, so she did the full 360 degree turn. And so here she's preparing the horse to do another one. It looks like the horse is slowing down, but the rhythm hasn't actually changed. It's just that he's making less forward progress because the horse is putting more of the weight onto the hind legs and taking smaller steps.

[Stephen Dubner]

And she's communicating, communicating all these commands.

[Mark Paul]

Exactly how with the pirouette, she's communicating this, what's called a half halt with her seat, which is telling the horse to collect with her seat.

[Stephen Dubner]

You kind of dig your tailbone in.

[Mark Paul]

Exactly. You kind of dig your tailbone in a little bit and tighten your core a little bit and lower back. She's directing the horse with her lower leg to tell the horse to bend around that right lower leg. And then she's using her outside reinforcement, which in this case is her left rein, to control and turn the shoulders in that very tight circle that you see her executing in the pirouette.

[Stephen Dubner]

When I've tried to watch dressage on TV with my untrained eye, I'll be honest, the horse just looks confused, like it's trying to figure out what to do and where to go in slow motion. I have to say, it is much better in person. You get drawn into the rhythm, you see the grace, you feel the harmony between the two athletes.

[Mark Paul]

And here you start seeing him start to dance. He's elevating his diagonal pairs in the trot and suspending those in midair. And here she sent him forward again and now she's asking him for the passage again where he starts dancing.

[Stephen Dubner]

I have to say they both look incredibly athletic.

[Constance Hunter]

They are.

[Mark Paul]

Elizabeth is in phenomenal shape, although to my frustration, she essentially lives off of Lucky Charms and chocolate. And the horses here, just the sheer quantity they eat is quite impressive. But yeah, he's an extremely well conditioned top international athlete.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Welcome to dressage. There's always more to strive for, but that was pretty good for where he's at.

[Stephen Dubner]

If you put a metronome on him, how steady was he that?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Oh, those were good. Those were very good. They were straight, they were precise, they were in the beat. Nothing went wrong. His carriage, where his balance was, was good. Those would probably score a seven and a half.

[Stephen Dubner]

Kobus is now brought back into the barn to get hosed down and to eat some lunch. Beet pulp and alfalfa pellets like rabbits might eat, except a lot more. Seven quarts per meal, three meals a day, plus unlimited hay. By the way, one reason that horses got replaced as a technology for transportation and manufacturing is that they're not very efficient when you compare them to modern energy sources. It takes a lot of fuel in the form of food and water to generate a relatively modest amount of energy. Anyway, in the barn there is a chalkboard listing the horses Bortuzzo will ride next. There's Night Light. Nexty Finest Star. I'm guessing that even though you're a professional rider, that as a profession goes to make your living in the States would be very, very hard. And that the training is a big part of your income or is professional riding enough?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

From myself, I get paid to have horses in training and technically that could be plenty. But I'm known as a rider that can ride just about any and solve horse issues. It requires a lot of stupidity or other call it bravery. Depends how you see it.

[Stephen Dubner]

When you say you can solve a lot of horse issues, can you give me a recent example?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Yeah. I was just this morning at a farm where a student of mine imported the horse before I came to know her. And the horse has a neck that is broken in two spots.

[Stephen Dubner]

How'd that happen?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Probably a rotational fall. So it fell over its own neck. It's a very reactive horse, not very easy to ride. Massive. And I ended up riding it because nobody else wanted to ride it.

[Stephen Dubner]

They didn't want to ride it because why?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

It was a little dangerous. It had caused a couple of accidents.

[Stephen Dubner]

Caused a couple of accidents, meaning through a rider or. That's a yes, definitely.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

And I ended up riding it. And now three years later, it's doing intermediary one, so the second international level. And he's doing quite beautifully.

[Stephen Dubner]

So what are you able to do in that case? Like, I'm not asking you to brag about yourself, but like, why can you do that and others couldn't.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Well, let me not brag. Let me actually go with this is all I do. Literally. I ride horses from 7am to 8, 9, 10pm night. And I ride more horses in a day than most people would ride in a full month. I ride 25 horses a day on average. So literally experience hours in the saddle feeling the horses helps you communicate with them, get feedback back from them and help them solve what they need.

[Stephen Dubner]

Do you get thrown or fall now and again?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Oh, every now and then.

[Stephen Dubner]

You ever broken serious bones?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Oh, a few.

[Stephen Dubner]

You wear a helmet.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

That's actually a point of contention.

[Stephen Dubner]

Elizabeth Bortuzzo, in addition to being Mark Paul's business partner, is also his trainer. He too, you will remember, has been riding since he was a kid. And the whole reason he started a horse importing business was to be able to afford a good horse so that he can keep advancing as a rider. And now it's his turn in the arena. Let the record show that that Mark Paul is dressed for riding. Helmet. Crop. Right? Is that what that is, a crop?

[Mark Paul]

This is a whip. A crop is a short version of a whip.

[Stephen Dubner]

All right, who's your horse here?

[Mark Paul]

This is vital Hit. He is a six year old bred in Scotland that we actually ended up purchasing from Germany. He's been with us for about six months now. He is one of the top rated six year olds in the nation. Elizabeth's going to be bringing him to Festival of Champions to come.

[Stephen Dubner]

Pete.

[Mark Paul]

And he's a. Yeah, very special young, upand cominging superstar.

[Stephen Dubner]

Describe his look.

[Mark Paul]

He is a chestnut, which means he's essentially a redhead. He has this beautiful white star, which is the marking you see on his forehead. He does not have any socks. He just has straight chestnut colored legs. And he's a fairly tall but lean horse. We're still trying to muscle him up, fatten him up a little bit. I'd love for him to gain a, you know, a nice 100 or 200 pounds, but it takes time.

[Stephen Dubner]

What does he weigh now?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

1200 probably. But for a horse that tall, he should be bulkier.

[Mark Paul]

If you stand next to him, you'll see he's quite tall. But this is the one that we're hoping to put you on, Steven.

[Stephen Dubner]

Good luck with that.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

No, no, no. So he's for a six year old actually, for any type of horse. He's actually a very calm horse.

[Stephen Dubner]

What's his price?

[Mark Paul]

He's not for sale. He's one the of our team horses.

[Stephen Dubner]

But you said if I walked in with a $400,000, we would consider 400,000. But is there any horse that's not for sale?

[Mark Paul]

I hate to say it, but it's capitalism. They're all for sale. I mean, most people in this business have very wealthy financial backers which are called sponsors who actually own the horses and sponsor the athlete. Elizabeth and I have take a different approach. We own all of our horses, and as newcomers in some respects, to the business, business, we have to have every horse for sale until we have enough security that we can financially afford to hold on to one or two ourselves.

[Stephen Dubner]

Paul leads. Vital hit. Over to the arena, mounts him, and the two of them start warming up. In dressage, you're not allowed to verbally communicate with the horse. It's all done with your legs, your seat, your hands and the reins and occasionally the whip. All right, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, tell me you don't have to do it loudly.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Yes.

[Stephen Dubner]

How's Mark doing?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

So Mark is doing wonderfully, actually. Mark now is a silver, bronze, and gold medalist in dressage. His riding is coming along very nicely. We would love to just see him with his chin up and heel down. Do you want to yell out to him, heel down, chin up, chin up, heel down. Yeah, go for it.

[Stephen Dubner]

You sure?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.

[Stephen Dubner]

Hey, Mark, chin up, heels down. There you go. There you go, buddy. Looking good.

[Mark Paul]

I gotta work on looking the part.

[Stephen Dubner]

At the end of the day, what is the community of competitive riders like with each other? Because I've no competitors in different sports, and sometimes there's a lot of camaraderie and collegiality, but it's also your competing.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

It's funny you say that. There are three Olympic disciplines. Dressage, show jumping, and eventing. Eventing. I feel like it's very group oriented and you're a friend with everybody because the amount of stuff that can go wrong is a lot. So I feel like there's a lot more camaraderie in it and dressage. I feel like it's a little more.

[Stephen Dubner]

Standoffish you as a competitor, though, especially with the operation that you have here, which is you guys are self funded, you train your own horses. You must seem like a bit of an outlier in the competitive landscape.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Yes, definitely. And, you know, we go out there with a lot of very nice horses and.

[Stephen Dubner]

And you're competing often with the daughters and sons of billionaires, I'm guessing.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Yes, it definitely happens. I try to think of competing as, you're not competing against anybody else. I'm competing against myself. And for me, a lot of competing is a measuring bar of, okay, where are we? What have we accomplished? What do we need to still work on? Where is everything going? Are we going on the right track? How are the horses feeling?

[Stephen Dubner]

What other sports have you competed?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

I've actually done quite a bit of eventing, and I Still do quite a bit of show jumping.

[Stephen Dubner]

You do?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Yes. It makes me happy. You know, the dressage can be at times a little boring. You know, you ride 20 horses and you're working on very similar things. And every now and then I need something to break it up because as I've said, I spend all day on a horse, so I need something different on a horse.

[Stephen Dubner]

Your life must be, I mean, fun, but exhausting, I would imagine. Yeah, it is like it's. It's the life of an athlete.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

It is. And I go away once a year for seven days and I sleep the first three days.

[Stephen Dubner]

Do you feel when you'd sit down, do you feel like the world is moving a little bit though, since you're used to.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

I feel like I could fall asleep, but I have found myself driving in the car and saying, like talking to nothing.

[Mark Paul]

I think it's time to get Steven to sign a release form and hop on Vital here. He's ready for him.

[Stephen Dubner]

Now that Mark Paul is done working with Vital hit, it is apparently my turn. I don't recall ever having actually ridden a horse, even though I grew up in the countryside on a little family farm and even though a couple of my friends had horses. But I was always a little bit scared of them. And then when I had kids, some of their friends started riding and competing in equestrian events at school pickup. One day I got to talking to the father of one girl who rode and he told me that when he watched his daughter compete that he could barely breathe. He was so scared that she would break her back or crack her skull. Horseback riding is an inherently dangerous sport. There are a lot of serious injuries, even deaths. Talking to that horse dad reminded me of some conversations I've had with the moms of NFL players who watch from the stands as their babies risk who they are in order to do what they look love. But here I was now with a world class athlete of a horse standing in front of me saddled up. Elizabeth Bertu is holding the reins.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Off you go.

[Stephen Dubner]

Do we want to talk about what I'm going to do before I get on or no get on?

[Mark Paul]

Okay.

[Stephen Dubner]

All right.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Less you think the better. So you're going to now put your.

[Stephen Dubner]

I'm going to put this one in.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

You're going to hold on to the reins by holding both reins with one hand and holding on to something like the saddle pad there.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay. Yeah.

[Ann N. Greene]

Left foot in the.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

The syrup. And now you're going to swing on and land on the saddle. Not like a pack of potatoes.

[Stephen Dubner]

Vital Hit as promised, is gentle and calm.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

All right, and now let your elbow be in front of you. Hand out a little bit. There you go. And it carries itself. Now squeeze your heels. You got it? And now elbow moving with him every stride. So your elbow. Look at me. Goes slightly back and forth to let him walk. How are you doing?

[Stephen Dubner]

The view from here is fantastic.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

I know. Isn't it spectacular?

[Stephen Dubner]

Excellent.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

How are you doing?

[Stephen Dubner]

Oh, yeah. Great.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Now you're getting it.

[Stephen Dubner]

What a horse.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Okay, now we're gonna start steering. You're gonna follow me. We're gonna go slightly left. So you're gonna.

[Stephen Dubner]

You're not holding on to the horse.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

You're holding on. God damn it.

[Stephen Dubner]

Yeah. Okay, good.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Okay, and now you're gonna just follow me. And we're gonna head slightly right. So you're gonna just bring both hands ever so slightly to the right.

[Mark Paul]

Whoa.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

It's all good. It's all good. You ready?

[Stephen Dubner]

Yeah.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Okay, you're gonna squeeze your heels ever so slightly. And we're gonna let him try. Up, down, up, down. Now start posting your up and your down. How are you doing?

[Stephen Dubner]

I'm doing okay. I'm doing okay.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

I didn't see the posting there, Steven.

[Stephen Dubner]

I'm just trying to hang on a little.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

I know. Isn't it fun?

[Stephen Dubner]

I'm having this weird. Like a burning on the inside of the cabs. Is that just friction?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

No, that's your. Your caps working.

[Stephen Dubner]

Seriously?

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Yep.

[Stephen Dubner]

It feels really.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Yep. So what we use in horseback riding is a lot of the calf and a lot of the inner thigh, which you don't use for much of anything else. Now keep looking to the right and looking at where you're going. So both hands guide him to the right. If not, he's going to just exit the arena. Shoulder back. There you go. And now we're going to ask him to stop by pressing your heel down and stretching your elbow back ever so slightly.

[Mark Paul]

Slightly.

[Stephen Dubner]

Good horse.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Okay, so how was it up there?

[Stephen Dubner]

It feels weirdly. What's the word I'm looking for? Unified. I feel like the horse knows what to do with me on top of him. And because he does, it makes me feel as if I know what to do on top of him even when I don't. This is just like the natural scene symbiosis of humans and horses. It's been around for thousands of years, Right. It just kind of works. Plus, I didn't really realize how good it is to be able to see up high. So if I'm looking for the barbarians at the Gate. This is now.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Now we're on it.

[Stephen Dubner]

And then I need my lance here and my swords.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

You got it. So that's actually why we get on always from the left side of the horse, because you would have your sword through your left leg, and that's how you would pull it out. So that's part of the military tradition of you get on from that side.

[Stephen Dubner]

Amazing. I thank you so much. I mean, thank you, humans. But really, you, boy, you did just great. Coming up next time in part two of our series, the guys that handle the stallions are the best in the world.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

Cause, you know, these are horses that.

[Ann N. Greene]

Are worth 50, $100 million.

[Stephen Dubner]

We head back to the racetrack and we talk thoroughbred, easy economics. We will hear from one of the best jockeys in recent history. Horses are very much like people. If a horse is generous, he's generous.

[Ann N. Greene]

If he's kind, he's kind.

[Elizabeth Bortuzzo]

If he's lazy, he's lazy.

[Ann N. Greene]

The difference between horses and people is a horse will never hide their true identity from you.

[Stephen Dubner]

We'll talk about gambling, of course.

[Peter Frankopan]

I've had good years. I turned a $7,500 bankroll into, I think, $170,000 over the course of two days.

[Stephen Dubner]

And we will hear from one of Kentucky's top breeders and consignors. I'm glad to be here because the.

[Ann N. Greene]

Thoroughbred horse world is Freakonomics.

[Stephen Dubner]

That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. [e-mail] where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Augusta Chapman and edited by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Eleanor Osborne with help from Jasmine Klinger and Jeremy Johnston, and thanks to Nick Nevis, who handles our field recording. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Coleman, Dalvin Abuaji, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Hilaria Montenacourt, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly, Teo Jacobs, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. What is steeplechase?

[Mark Paul]

I know nothing about steeplechase.

[Stephen Dubner]

It's a whole separate thing.

[Mark Paul]

Steeplechasing is this thing that crazy English people do. The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of every everything.

[Stephen Dubner]

Stitcher. The wrongs we must write, the fights we must win, the future we must secure together for our nation. This is what's in front of us. This determines what's next for all of us. We are Marines. We were made for this.