668. Do Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny Have Blood on Their Hands?

Summary

Freakonomics Radio Episode 668: “Do Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny Have Blood on Their Hands?”

Date: March 27, 2026
Host: Stephen J. Dubner
Guests: Bapu Jena, Vishal Patel, Chris Worsham, Donald Redelmeier

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Episode Overview

This episode investigates the surprising link between massive music album releases (such as Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny) and spikes in fatal car crashes. Drawing on a brand-new working paper co-authored by doctors and an economist, Stephen Dubner explores natural experiments, the public health costs of distraction, and what music streaming might reveal about our national crisis of road fatalities. The central question: Do major album releases contribute, however unintentionally, to loss of life on the road?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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Context: Why Are U.S. Traffic Deaths So High?

• Risk of Driving vs. Flying: The U.S. sees about 40,000 traffic deaths per year, far more than other high-income countries ([01:00–04:00]).
• Distraction as a Factor: Bigger, faster cars and increased distraction are among the explanations. Previous Freakonomics episodes examined how flying has become safer due to the aviation industry’s commitment to collaboration and safety ([02:36–03:25]).
• Design Choices: Streets are mainly designed for car movement rather than pedestrian safety.

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Natural Experiments in Medicine and Public Health

• What Are Natural Experiments? Bapu Jena and his team specialize in finding real-world events that act like randomized trials ([05:18–06:21]).
  • Example: Higher heart patient survival rates when top cardiologists attend national conferences.
  • Example: More speeding tickets near theaters after “Fast and Furious” movies versus no increase after non-action films.

Quote [06:21] — Bapu Jena:
“There is this question of whether art mimics life or vice versa. You need some sort of natural experiment.”

• Track Record: Research on distraction and stress (e.g., tax day spikes in traffic deaths) can reveal subtle population-level effects.

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The Research: Major Album Releases and Traffic Fatalities

Where Did the Idea Come From?

• Vishal Patel’s Anecdote [15:02–15:40]:
  Patel, usually a silent driver, receives a text from his wife urging him to listen to a new Taylor Swift song while driving. As he tries to find it on Spotify, he nearly drifts out of his lane.

  “I started fumbling through Spotify to try to find the specific song she was talking about. I looked up and I realized I was starting to drift out of my lane. A few more seconds and I probably would have been in a serious accident.” —Vishal Patel [15:26]

• Hypothesis: Album release days act as natural experiments—sudden surges in music streaming could mean millions interact with their phones while driving ([16:14–16:51]).

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The Study: What Did They Find?

• Data Used: Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS, 2017–2022).
• Methodology: Matched the 10 most-streamed album release days against neighboring days and placebo days ([18:24–19:00]).
• Key Findings:
  • Streaming volume increased by 40% on release days.
  • Traffic deaths rose by 15%—about 18 extra deaths per release day.
  • The effect was most pronounced in younger drivers and in solo drivers, not at night nor associated with drinking ([28:01–29:23]).

Quote [18:24] — Stephen Dubner:
“Streaming volume on those record release dates increased by 40%, and there was a 15% increase in traffic deaths. Which translates into roughly 18 extra deaths on each of those days.”

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Ensuring the Result Was Robust

• Placebo Tests: The spike was only seen on real album release days, not on random or false “album days” ([26:15–27:53]).
• Day of Week Adjustment: Most big albums drop on Fridays (already a higher-risk day), so analysis compared to surrounding Fridays.
• Confounding Factors: Ruled out partying/drinking (“increase more pronounced among sober drivers”—Patel [28:01]), time of day, and looked for (but didn’t find) alternative explanations like weather ([33:21–34:07]).

Quote [28:32] — Vishal Patel:
“The fact that it held for both day and nighttime crashes was reassuring.”

• Solo vs. Passenger: The presence of a passenger was “protective” ([35:23–36:45]).

Quote [36:05] — Bapu Jena:
“What I'll call the album release effect is larger when there is a solo person in the car... having a passenger in the car makes you less susceptible to an increased car crash when an album is released.”

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How Big Is This Problem—And What Should Be Done?

• Magnitude: The effect is real and robust, but relatively small in the overall traffic death crisis ([40:31–41:30]).
• Scientific Value: The study illuminates how new technology interacts with behavior and road safety—it’s a “quasi-experimental” insight into distraction ([40:31–41:30]).
• Policy Levers: The number of deaths is too small for drastic regulatory changes specific to album releases ([47:53–48:06]).

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The Data Dilemma: Why Can't We Get Better Info?

• Telematics and Privacy:
  There is frustration with the limited data on what actually happens in cars, due to privacy barriers and proprietary data held by auto makers/insurance ([48:49–55:46]).
  • EHR privacy vs. auto telematics—parallels are insightful.
  • Levitt & Dubner’s past with “black box” fob studies.
  • “We are very often making lemonade out of lemons because there’s only lemons as far as the eye can see.” —Chris Worsham [52:45]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Natural Experiment Logic:

“Album release days are basically natural experiments. They're moments where millions of people suddenly now have a reason to pick up their phone and interact with it, sometimes while driving.” —Vishal Patel [16:45]

Magnitude and Real-World Impact:

“I think the number of deaths here is so small relative to the average daily number of deaths, and it doesn't add up to a lot... so I don’t know that I would change anything.” —Bapu Jena [47:53]

On Telematics and Data Barriers:

“We are very often making lemonade out of lemons because there’s only lemons as far as the eye can see. … If researchers like us could work with a lot of data that is hiding behind obvious proprietary barriers, we could do a lot with it.” —Chris Worsham [52:45–55:46]

On the Album Release Effect Waning:

“My guess is that the album release effect will be less and less over time ... the solution isn’t to not have Taylor Swift albums ... it is to make cars safer.” —Bapu Jena [44:08]

Dubner’s Summation:

“I love what you've done with this paper, but I feel like you are using sort of, no offense, caveman tools in a world where things are running much bigger, faster, and deeper. I would like better tools and better data.” —Stephen Dubner [51:49]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:00–04:00]: Stats and dangers of U.S. road fatalities
• [06:21]: Natural experiments in data science
• [15:02]: Vishal Patel's ‘aha’ moment while driving
• [18:24]: The core finding: Album releases, streaming, and fatal crashes
• [26:15]: Ruling out confounding factors with robust statistical tests
• [28:01]: Not just a nightlife/party effect—distraction is key
• [35:23]: Younger and solo drivers most at risk
• [40:31]: Interpreting the effect’s magnitude and significance
• [48:49]: The limitations and necessity of better driving data
• [52:45]: Frustrations with data access and public health research
• [55:55]: Final thoughts on the meaning of the research

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Takeaways & Broader Implications

• Not about Taylor Swift or Bad Bunny’s intentions: The artists, clearly, don’t intend harm—this research is a lens into the side-effects of our hyper-connected, distracted, and music-obsessed driving world.
• Distraction Is the Real Culprit: The big picture is about how new technologies (smartphones, music streaming, connected cars) shape risk on the roads.
• Policy and Tech Evolution: While specific interventions may not be warranted based on this effect alone, the push for safer cars (autonomous vehicles, better UI/UX) and better, more granular data (telematics) will likely do far more to combat preventable deaths.
• Research as a Flashlight: Studies like this don’t just quantify risk; they spotlight how subtle shifts in culture and behavior reverberate through real-world health outcomes.

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Closing Reflection [55:55] — Vishal Patel:
“The real message here is not to change album release days or to prevent artists from releasing their albums. The bigger message is it's really all about distraction. And so understanding how new technologies interact with human behavior on the road. It's probably going to be one of the most important traffic safety questions for decades to come.”

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For More:

• Contact the researchers, review the working paper, or find transcripts at Freakonomics.com.

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End of summary.

Transcript

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[Stephen Dubner]

SmallBusiness Freakonomics radio is sponsored by Claude from Anthropic. Enjoy finding the hidden logic underneath things. Claude is built for that kind of thinking. It doesn't hand you a tidy answer and move on. It helps you work through the complexity, challenges your assumptions and surfaces what the data actually says. Research digs across dozens of sources so you can trace the reasoning yourself. Try Claude for free at Claude AI Freakonomics and see why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner with a quick announcement. We have just published an audiobook called Making How Handel Got His Mojo Back and Created a Masterpiece. The publisher is Simon and Schuster and the audiobook is adapted from our recent Freakonomics radio series about the history, legacy and economics of George Friedrich Handel's Messiah. You can buy Making Messiah now wherever you get your audiobooks. For more information, go to makingmessiah.com. Over the years we've made a bunch of Freakonomics radio episodes about the risk of that comes with an activity that billions of us do every day. Get in a car. Those risks have fallen over time, but because more people drive more miles than ever, the number of deaths from traffic crashes is very high. More than a million people per year globally. And that's just deaths. There are many more injuries and the financial costs are massive. Traffic deaths are more likely in low income countries, but among high income countries, the US is an outlier with more than 40,000 deaths a year. That works out to roughly one death by car crash every 13 minutes in the US. Why so many? Well, it's complicated. Here's what we heard in an episode we published a few years ago called why Is the US so Good at Killing Pedestrians? The cars we're driving are bigger, harder, faster.

[Vishal Patel]

The problem of distraction has gotten much

[Bapu Jena]

worse in the United States.

[Stephen Dubner]

We've decided that car movement is really

[Nuun Hydration Representative]

the supreme consideration when it comes to designing our streets.

[Stephen Dubner]

And in another episode we made called why Is Flying Safer Than Driving? We learned how the aviation industry devoted itself to safety.

[Chris Worsham]

If you go back 30 or 40 years, air crashes were not uncommon. It was something the industry spent an enormous amount of time collaborating together, sharing information, sharing learnings, working closely with the FAA to understand best practices and how. We have an open book with our

[Stephen Dubner]

regulator and in our last couple episodes, our friends at the search engine podcast looked at the contested future of driverless cars. Personally, I've believed for a long time that driverless cars will save a lot of lives. But until that's the norm, we drivers are still behind the wheel. And why is that a problem?

[Vishal Patel]

We've engineered a world where the most distracting device ever made is also the one that we use to listen to music in the car.

[Stephen Dubner]

Today on Freakonomics Radio, we talk about a new research paper that looks at traffic deaths on a very specific set of days.

[Vishal Patel]

Album release days are basically natural experiments.

[Stephen Dubner]

So what'd they find? That's coming up. For now, eyes on the road, please.

[Freakonomics Radio Announcer]

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

[Stephen Dubner]

The study we are talking about today was just published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research. There are four authors, all of whom are medical doctors and one who is also a PhD economist. So let's start with him.

[Bapu Jena]

My name is Bob Ujena. I'm an economist, physician and professor at Harvard Medical School.

[Stephen Dubner]

Jenna used to make a podcast with us called Freakonomics, Maryland. Back when he got his econ PhD at the University of Chicago. He studied under my Freakonomics friend and co author Steve Levitt. So Jenna is well trained in using data to find what's hiding in plain sight. In 2023, he published a book along with his co author Christopher Worsham called Random Acts of Medicine. The random in the title isn't just random. It refers to the kind of experiments that people like Papu, Jenna and Steve Levitt often use to make these connections. Sometimes they're called natural experiments.

[Bapu Jena]

Natural experiments have taken a while to take hold in medicine and their origins are actually in epidemiology. And then economists several decades ago started popularizing their use and they're almost certainly most widely used in economics compared to any other discipline.

[Stephen Dubner]

In one early paper, Jenna used a natural experiment to see what happens to high risk heart patients when their cardiologists are out of town. And what was the random act of medicine that allowed him to measure this? A few times a year there are big national cardiology conferences. So Jenna and his co authors, authors looked at what happened back home during those conferences and they found that mortality actually fell. Why? The best explanation is that these conferences are primarily attended by the most senior cardiologists and that senior cardiologists are more likely to opt for more invasive and riskier treatments. Jenna also used a natural experiment to study the behavior of drivers.

[Bapu Jena]

Five years ago we had this piece in the New York Times, the upshot where we showed that after Fast and Furious movie releases, there was an increase in speeding behavior. There is this question of whether art mimics life or vice versa. You need some sort of natural experiment. You do not see an increase in speeding behavior when the Hunger Games movies come out or Harry Potter movies come out. The movies are called Fast and Furious, not Slow and Deliberate. We had the GPS coordinates of where the person was pulled over for speeding, and what you see is the people are being pulled over on highways that are adjacent to where the movie theaters are.

[Stephen Dubner]

A conclusion like this requires some serious faith in the robustness of the data and of the analysis itself. The good news here is that there has come to be a significant body of research like this, and the track record is pretty strong. Donald Redelmeier, a physician and epidemiologist, epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, has produced a number of these studies. One of them, done in collaboration with Danny Kahneman, used data from colonoscopies to illustrate something called the peak end rule. They found that when people look back on an experience like a colonoscopy or even a vacation, they tend to judge it largely by the peak moment of the experience and the end of the experience. So if a bad family vacation ends well, it may generate a better overall memory than it might deserve. In another study, Redelmeier used three decades of driving data to show that April 15 tax day led to a roughly 6% increase in traffic deaths. The best explanation is that the psychological burden of a stressful deadline spills over into the car. And the paper we are talking about today by Bapu Jenna, Vishal Patel, Chris Worsham, and Michael Lu also looks at a hidden risk of driving. It is called smartphones, online music streaming, and traffic fatalities. So where does an idea like this come from?

[Chris Worsham]

We devote an inordinate amount of time, I think, compared to most other researchers, to simply brainstorming research projects.

[Stephen Dubner]

That is Christopher Worsham, Jenna's longtime research partner.

[Chris Worsham]

Because there's so many data sources out there that anybody can do basically anything with data.

[Stephen Dubner]

Worsham's job description also has some hyphens in it.

[Chris Worsham]

I'm a pulmonary and critical care physician at Mass General Hospital, and I'm a health policy and public health researcher at Harvard Medical School.

[Stephen Dubner]

I envision you having a day outfit and a night outfit, or at least a hat that you switch. Your day job is keeping people alive in the icu.

[Chris Worsham]

That's what I was doing yesterday. Today I'M here talking to you about my research. And the broader term is a physician scientist. Most people imagine a physician scientist as someone doing something in a lab with pipettes, test tubes and petri dishes that they're then going to bring to the patients that they work with. And a number of my colleagues are that type of physician scientist. And then there are folks like me who the science is more public health and data science and studying our broader healthcare system.

[Stephen Dubner]

Do your bench science colleagues think that you're a little bit kooky?

[Chris Worsham]

Probably. There are a number who just don't get it at all and some who don't care to get it. Then there are some who don't get it completely, but get enough of it to think it's cool. I am lucky enough to be a pulmonary and critical care doc who also gets to do this type of research because I am supported by people who, even if they don't fully get it, understand that these types of analyses can be incredibly powerful.

[Stephen Dubner]

If you were forced to do just one of your two functions, which would you choose?

[Chris Worsham]

Oh, God. Probably be the regular doctor. I spend about 20, 25% of my time being a doctor who sees patients, and then the rest of my time doing research and writing and trying to figure out what are the best things we can do to improve our health as a nation. When you are practicing medicine, you are face to face with the outcomes of our deeply flawed healthcare system and our flawed public health system. Every time I'm seeing patients, it fuels a new set of ideas.

[Stephen Dubner]

Can you maybe give an example?

[Chris Worsham]

So I'll give you an example of something we're working on right now. As an ICU doc working at Mass General, which is a big referral center for much of New England, we have patients who are extremely sick that sometimes hospitals with less resources are just, we have to get him out of here and get him to you. And so we'll fly this patient on a helicopter. I've had patients med flighted who come in just unbelievably sick. And I am glad that we did not waste a single minute getting them to a hospital like Mass General where we have every resource under the sun. And then I have patients who have come in on a helicopter who are smiling and waving at me when something like that happens. You just wonder like, is this the best use of our resources? The way I have been able to avoid burnout professionally is that I have some tools to try to address some of these problems.

[Stephen Dubner]

Several years ago, Chris Worsham and Papu Jenna set up A working group to help find good research ideas. They found that a good idea can come from anywhere.

[Chris Worsham]

We actually had a ninth grader who has shown up to some of our ideas meetings, all the way up to tenured professors and CEOs of companies who kind of drop in.

[Stephen Dubner]

Where are you guys meeting?

[Chris Worsham]

Online. We were doing this before the pandemic.

[Stephen Dubner]

And is this a regular set meeting

[Chris Worsham]

Three times a week?

[Stephen Dubner]

Three times a week.

[Chris Worsham]

Three times a week.

[Stephen Dubner]

What would you say is the median number of people on this three times a week meeting?

[Chris Worsham]

Probably four or five. Most of these ideas that come in are pretty half baked, even quarter baked. I was just in the hospital and this thing happened to my patient, and I think there might be something here. Let's talk it out to see. Is there an idea here? Okay, well, that's a good idea. Is there data available that we could use to try to answer the question? And if so, is the data good enough to actually do it?

[Stephen Dubner]

But even ideas that look good may turn out to be impotent once you dig into the data. Here again is bapujenna.

[Bapu Jena]

I thought that after HBO fight nights, you might observe increases in domestic violence. We don't observe that. We thought that when it snows a lot, when it's really cold outside, you see an increase in ADHD diagnoses because kids are unable to go outside for recess and they're stuck in schools. We don't see any evidence of that. You know how your phone rings when there's an Amber Alert? It's crazy. Right? Now imagine being in the car when that thing goes off. You might think it would transiently distract you a because of what it represents, but also because that noise is really loud. We looked at this. We don't find any evidence that traffic fatalities increase when there's an Amber Alert. We even thought to look at surgeons who are operating. Imagine you're in the zone operating, and that thing goes off. Surgical mortality doesn't change. Hard to know what to make of this line of questioning about distraction. Probably some matter, some don't. We have a lot of these really interesting ideas that just don't pan out, but once in a while they do. And this was an example of one of them that did.

[Stephen Dubner]

This idea being the new paper about streaming music.

[Bapu Jena]

So Vishal came to us with this idea.

[Stephen Dubner]

He's talking about Vishal Patel, who is 28 years old.

[Vishal Patel]

I am a surgery resident at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a researcher at Harvard Medical School.

[Stephen Dubner]

Patel is also a physician hybrid.

[Vishal Patel]

I did a master's in public health when I was in medical school. A lot of those courses expose you to some of these economics methods. When I came to Boston and I started my residency, you know, I saw that Bapu and Chris were working at the intersection of ethics and real world data, and that drew me to working with them.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, let's get into this new paper first. Just describe where the idea came from.

[Vishal Patel]

I'm typically the type of person who drives with the radio off. I kind of like to just get lost in my thoughts, maybe think about work. But my wife, she's the complete opposite. She's a singer, so music's her whole world. A couple years ago, the new Taylor Swift album came out, and my wife texted me saying, oh, you have to listen to these songs.

[Stephen Dubner]

You're driving. And your wife texts you while you're driving, telling you that you need to listen to the new Taylor Swift record.

[Vishal Patel]

I don't think she knew I was driving, but I was like, okay, fine, I'll try it. So I started fumbling through Spotify to try to find the specific song she was talking about. I looked up and I realized I was starting to drift out of my lane. A few more seconds and I probably would have been in a serious accident.

[Stephen Dubner]

Did you blame anyone for this near miss? Did you blame yourself, Your wife, Taylor Swift?

[Vishal Patel]

Well, I blamed myself. I shouldn't have done that. I was like, I'm never gonna do this again. And then a day later, I did the same thing. Probably everyone uses their smartphone while driving. It's just so ingrained in our society nowadays. We've engineered a world where the most distracting device ever made is also the one that we use to listen to music in the car.

[Stephen Dubner]

One of the first things Patel did was to dig into a federal database called fars. That's the Fatality Analysis Reporting System.

[Vishal Patel]

It's been used for decades to study traffic fatalities. There's actually like a whole genre of research just built around the data set. For example, do car crashes go up on Super Bowl Sundays or on U.S. tax income days or even on full moons? Well, I had that near miss on the road. It kind of clicked, and I was like, well, album release days are basically natural experiments. They're moments where millions of people suddenly now have a reason to pick up their phone and interact with it, sometimes while driving. And nobody had really looked at whether or not that spike in potential smartphone use translates into more fatal car crashes.

[Stephen Dubner]

Your suspicion was that it would?

[Vishal Patel]

I thought so, given my personal experience. But we test a lot of ideas and a very Small percentage of them actually work out. So I wasn't very hopeful that I would find a signal, but it was something where I had to try. When I thought of this idea, I actually didn't share it with Bapu initially. I went home and I did the analysis because I was so curious.

[Bapu Jena]

He sent me this picture which showed an increase in traffic fatalities when these major music albums are released on Spotify. I'm thinking to myself, all right, what does he have in mind? I immediately thought that the mechanism was big music album release. People are fiddling with their phones. That's what he's thinking. But I just pick up the phone and I call him and say, eric, what did you do? How did you get to this finding? And do you think it's real?

[Stephen Dubner]

And what did he say? What did he do and how did he get that finding?

[Donald Redelmeier]

So what he did is he used

[Bapu Jena]

this really terrific data that's publicly available. It includes all traffic fatalities in the United States. He's been working with that data in a number of different projects. And all he did was he looked at the dates of major music album releases on Spotify. You can actually look at Spotify data to see how streaming volume changes when these albums are released. He had seen that and showed that there was a large increase in streaming volume on the days these music albums come out. Then he paired that with analyses of traffic fatalities and showed that on those same days, there seems to be this spike in traffic fatalities. That's sort of the starting point. Once you see that, you gotta do a lot more to make sure that that's a robust finding and get to the mechanism.

[Stephen Dubner]

The spike in the data was significant. Patel looked at all fatal crashes in the US between 2017 and 2022. And then he laid on top of that the release dates of the 10 records during that timeframe with the most first day streams on Spotify. We're talking about artists like Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Drake, Kendrick Lamar. Streaming volume on those record release dates increased by 40%, and there was a 15% increase in traffic deaths. Which translates into roughly 18 extra deaths on each of those days.

[Bapu Jena]

Correct. On a base of about 130 deaths per day nationally. When you see a finding like this, where the magnitude is large, you gotta ask yourself, is it implausibly large? To me, this feels like it could be in that area where it's larger than I would expect. But then how do we know what to expect?

[Stephen Dubner]

But when you see the big spike and you think you understand what may be causing that, the release of these New records, I think of a spectrum of excitement on the one hand and devout skepticism on the other hand. Where do you lie in that spectrum? And then how do you go about trying to make sure that your excitement is justified?

[Donald Redelmeier]

I'm like 99% excitement, 0% skepticism. I'm easy to please in my world. When I see a paper from a

[Bapu Jena]

journal that sends me to referee a

[Donald Redelmeier]

paper, if the paper is really interesting to me, I'm usually not very skeptical, whereas a lot of people are very skeptical. I just love the idea.

[Stephen Dubner]

I love the idea too. But I also just want to say we've lived through a few years here where a lot of research findings, especially from social psychology, have come under question and for very good reason and turned out to be either exaggerated or fraudulent and so on. I'm just curious if it's changed the dynamic for you. When you're investigating and checking the robustness of an idea, are you a little bit more skeptical or at least careful than you used to be?

[Bapu Jena]

I would say I have the same level of care. I appreciate why there's a lot of concern about findings that don't replicate. What I think that we miss so much of in science is we're very outcome oriented. At the start of our conversation, I gave you two ideas that I thought were really clever for which we didn't find anything, the world would never hear about them. This could have been an example of that as well. Where we looked at music album releases and find no increase in traffic fatalities. To me that was independently an interesting question. The fact that we find a positive outcome that seems to be robust to various things is important to me. Of course you've got to do the things to try to convince the world that the finding is correct, but I'm most interested in the idea personally.

[Stephen Dubner]

Coming up after the break, Jenna and his co authors try to convince us at least that their finding is correct. Also, if you want to hear more about some of the academic fraud I just mentioned, you could start with our episode number 572, which is called why is there so Much Fraud in Academia? I'm Stephen Dubner, this is Freakonomics Radio and we will be right back. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Adobe Acrobat. You need to make a huge presentation in an hour. Luckily, Adobe Acrobat uses AI to take all your documents and generate a presentation in a few clicks, building slides faster than ever before. So if you need a last minute pitch deck, do that with Acrobat. Need to level up your presentation design, do that with acrobat, you have 30 plus documents that need to be simplified into a proposal. Do that, do that, do that with Acrobat. Learn [e-mail] Dothat with Acrobat,

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[Stephen Dubner]

When I first saw this new research paper that we're talking about today which found that traffic deaths spike on the day of big record releases, I was curious, as I expect you would be, and also a bit skeptical, as I also expect you would be. So I sent the paper to an elder statesman in the field who I mentioned earlier, Donald Redelmeier. He wrote right back. I read the materials and liked what I saw. He said best single aspect was focus on traffic fatalities. I was also impressed by nifty nuance of in car infotainment, objective data on volume of streaming online audio and several diligent falsification tests. If easy, he wrote, would be great to update data from 2023 which is now available from NHTSA, that's the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And here's how Redelmeier ended his Overall I believe the concept is exactly correct. Namely, a moment of inattention can cause a fatal traffic crash. Furthermore, exciting new music can be enchanting to some listeners and indirectly causes some potentially lower their guard. I doubt this is what the artists intended. I also doubt this is what the artists intended. And so, with Don Redelmeier's seal of approval, I pressed on. Here again is Vishal Patel talking about how using public federal data is a sort of insurance policy While doing this kind of research.

[Vishal Patel]

One of the benefits of using publicly available data is, well, there's a benefit for both the researcher and for the public. For the researcher, the benefit is that if there is any doubt that anyone has as to the validity of the results, the data is publicly available and it can be replicated by anyone. That's a common thread. Through a lot of my research, I actually have only had access to publicly available data. In the back of my head, anytime I'm doing something, I'm like, oh, okay, this is great. If there is a mistake, someone will catch it. The research questions that I'm interested in are research questions that a lot of people are interested in.

[Stephen Dubner]

One of Patel's concerns with this research project is that the album release dates are not random. For years it has been common practice to release albums at midnight Eastern time on Fridays. This used to be driven by anti piracy concerns, but now it's a way to globally synchronize day one streams. Vishal Patel understood that he would have to factor that in because most of

[Vishal Patel]

these albums dropped on Fridays and Fridays already have higher traffic fatalities than, say, Tuesdays. We had to design the study to compare each album release day to the same weekday in the week before and after. The window of the Study period included 10 days before the album release drop and 10 days after, which would ensure that regardless of which weekday it was released on, we would include the Friday before and after or the weekend before and after. The main analysis, by definition, accounts for the Friday effect because you can always compare to the Friday before and after. We then also performed some falsification tests. The first falsification test that we performed is we randomly selected 10 placebo dates and then again 10 separate random Friday placebo album release dates. We repeated the analysis a thousand times so our real effect was larger than what you'd get by Chance alone. In 98 to 99% of iterations of this placebo test. Then what we did, we took each album's calendar date and applied it to other study years. For example, if a album came out on, let's say May 5th was a Friday of 2020, we went to the same day in 2019, 2018, 2017, so on and Then the years subsequently where there was no album release and we did the same analysis, we picked the closest day to the same day of the week to that calendar date, and the album release saw no spike in traffic fatalities.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, then you started looking at some of the particular components of this spike in deaths. Walk me through that.

[Vishal Patel]

One of the questions is, well, could it just be that people are drinking more at album release parties? The increase was actually more pronounced among sober drivers than among those with alcohol involvement. And separately, it wasn't more pronounced at nighttime. So if this was primarily a partying effect, nightlife effect, or alcohol effect, you'd expect the opposite pattern.

[Stephen Dubner]

A lot of crashes happen at night. Plainly that must have made your spike look even more interesting and anomalous.

[Vishal Patel]

Exactly. The fact that it held for both day and nighttime crashes was reassuring.

[Stephen Dubner]

What caused you the biggest concern? That your conclusion was correct.

[Vishal Patel]

The main signal is really what we felt had to be backed by robustness and falsification tests because simply we just didn't have a control group. All we had is on the days of these album releases, traffic fatalities go up. It could be coincidence. Looking at who is most affected, you would expect that younger Americans, who are much more likely to stream audio in the car, are more likely to be affected by this album release effect. We stratified the effects by age and we found exactly that. That the effect size increased with younger age.

[Stephen Dubner]

The data that you use goes up through 2022. I wondered why you didn't include whatever is available beyond that. This is data from far as the Fatality Analys reporting system. Tell me why 2022 is your cutoff.

[Vishal Patel]

Fars data lags behind a couple years. It's not like the mortality data that we have from the cdc. There's a lot more granular data in it and so it usually takes several years for all of that to be reflected. Currently the data goes up to 2023. When we had done the study, that was the most recently available data that was out there.

[Stephen Dubner]

Our producer, Teo Jacobs, out of curiosity, used Claude code to reproduce your results from 2017 to 2022 and he did and they replicated and then he reran the analysis using 2023 far as data and says that the effect sizes went away with the 2023 album releases. The result was no longer significant. First of all, his analysis is nowhere near as detailed as your team's. But I am curious to know what you think about that back of the envelope finding.

[Vishal Patel]

That is interesting and I have two comments for that one. It's possible. There's only 10 album releases that we use, and I'm not sure how many more albums were actually released that met that top 10 of all time criteria in the year 2023. But even if there were one or two new albums that were in that group, it's possible now 20 to 30% of the dates have changed and now are probably more contemporary dates. It's possible that autonomous vehicles and driving safety might be changing the signal that we saw before. The other thing is, I think that that is actually a very interesting use of CLAUDE code and AI in general. I think it is so useful to use these technologies as they are, not only to brainstorm new ideas, but to go back and check old ideas and make sure that they were what we intended them to be. Because in the same way that humans can make errors while driving, humans can certainly make errors while analyzing data sets.

[Stephen Dubner]

We sent those Claude code results to Patel and the rest of his team with some time to dig into our analysis. Here's what Papujena had to say when

[Bapu Jena]

you replicate it with Claude.

[Donald Redelmeier]

I'm happy to say that our original

[Bapu Jena]

findings do replicate, which is good. When do you include an additional year of data both on traffic deaths and on album releases? As you said, the effect goes away. And the reason the effect goes away is because when you include 2023 albums, it turns out that's like five out of the 10 most downloaded albums are coming in from 2023. Three of those albums fall on consecutive Fridays. What that does is it makes the treatment and control basically the same. So if there's a Friday album release, and then the previous and the following Friday, there's another album release. You're now comparing a big streaming day to other big streaming days. The way to deal with that is to say, all right, let's look at albums from, let's say 2017 to 2023, which is what you did, and look at the top 10 albums that are not overlapping in their dates when you do that, but you get the same sort of picture as we originally found.

[Stephen Dubner]

Let's talk a little bit about the circumstances of these fatal crashes in your data set and how they compare to the median fatal crash. What can you tell us about highway driving versus not how typical or atypical were these crashes?

[Bapu Jena]

We didn't look at the location of the crashes. That's a good thought. That's something that we could try to figure out, is like, what is the nature of the crash? We mostly looked at circumstances. Did the crash involve alcohol? Did it occur at Nighttime. Were the visibility conditions any better or worse?

[Stephen Dubner]

Tell me what other potential confounding factors there may have been. Maybe these 10 album releases that you measured happened to coincide with bad weather, with something going on in the world, et cetera, et cetera.

[Bapu Jena]

Correct. Maybe these are happening around holiday weekends. Let's say it's Memorial Day or Labor Day. We account for that as well. The other thing might be. All right, maybe it's possible that weather or other things are just happening randomly on those 10 days. What you could have done, and we didn't do this, we could have looked at actual weather patterns on the day of the Albert release compared to every day around it and shown that the weather is stable. I didn't think to do that because I thought it just on its face. It would be highly, highly unlikely that that would be the case because weather happens to be random already.

[Stephen Dubner]

Let's say you index record streams on day one of these big records, and in your data set you picked the 10 biggest out of these several years. Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, a few others. Let's assume that those are 10 on your index. Did you test this effect against releases that ranked maybe an 8 on that index or an 8 and a half or a 9?

[Bapu Jena]

What we don't do is look at it album by album, like the most downloaded versus the least downloaded. And the reason why is because there's just not enough power to do that. What we can do is say, all right, let's look at 10, 20, 30, 40, 50. And as you move further down in terms of albums, the effect falls, which to me makes sense because I think most of the effect is happening with these very large music album releases. For small album releases, you're not going to really see an increase in streaming volume. Another way to get at this is that suppose that we found this effect in traffic deaths, but we didn't see anything going on with streaming. I'd be a little bit worried about what might be going on. That's a harder story to explain than one where we can clearly see that there is a large increase in actual streaming volume around the day of the album release.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, what did you learn about the characteristics of the drivers?

[Bapu Jena]

That's a good one. So the two things that I think were interesting to us. One is that the effect is a little bit larger in younger drivers than older drivers.

[Stephen Dubner]

Which fits your thesis.

[Bapu Jena]

Yes, which fits the thesis. And the other thing that to me was interesting when Vishal was talking to me and you get excited when you have these insights, and I said, oh, Vishal, we should look and see whether or not the effect is any different when there's one driver versus a driver plus a passenger under the theory that if there's a passenger in the car, maybe they are operating the device or maybe they're just talking and not listening to the music and we actually find that the effect is larger. What I'll call the album release effect is larger when there is a solo person in the car, just the driver. It's smaller when there's a passenger in the car.

[Stephen Dubner]

You're saying that of those who do have a passenger in the car, the rate of fatality is a little bit lower there, which suggests to you that that second person is kind of an insurance policy because the driver isn't having to fiddle with the phone. Yeah, correct.

[Bapu Jena]

I go one step further. What we're doing is we're looking at whether on album days the presence of that person is protective relative to all the other days surrounding it. And there what we find is that it might be protective. So having a passenger in the car makes you less susceptible to an increased car crash when an album is released compared to the surrounding days.

[Stephen Dubner]

Coming up after the break, the federal safety agencies do produce a lot of good data, but when it comes to what drivers are actually doing before they get in a crash, that is much trickier. We will get into that right after this. I'm Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Square, the business platform that helps sellers become neighborhood favorites. Whether you're gearing up for a busy season or keeping up with demand, Square keeps your business running smoothly so you can focus on customers, not your to do list. Square brings payments, pos, inventory, staffing, and online sales together in one system so business owners don't juggle multiple tools. Square AI turns real time data into insights, helping sellers uncover trends and make smarter decisions. The hardware and software are designed to be easy to use. Whether selling in store or online, Square helps you run your business more smoothly, bringing payments, operations and insights together in one place so you are ready for whatever's next. Right now, listeners can get up to $200 off square hardware when you sign up at square.com go freakonomics again. S Q U-A-R-E.com start with square and build a setup that grows with your business. Get started with Square and build a setup that works the way you do. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Cigna Healthcare. For many men, mental health challenges aren't recognized until they've already taken a toll. Work pressure, financial stress, changing relationships, and traditional expectations around masculinity can quiet wear men down, often without clear warning signs. In season three of the Visibility Gap, Dr. Guy Winch and his guests explore how these pressures show up, how to spot them earlier, and how men can access meaningful support. Listen to the new season of the Visibility Gap, a podcast presented by Cigna Healthcare.

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[Stephen Dubner]

Welcome back to the third and final act in our exploration of a new working paper just released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It is called Smartphones, Online Music Streaming and Traffic Fatalities. One of the authors is Bapu Jenna. He is a longtime friend of Freakonomics, and more important, he is both a physician and a PhD economist. Here is more of my conversation with him. So in the case of the record release dates and the spike in traffic fatalities, I guess there's a couple ways you could look at it. You know, 15% up one day and anything is quite a lot. But overall, 18 extra fatalities and these big record release dates only happen one, two, maybe three times a year. So it's not a massive loss of life. On the other hand, you've identified what seems to be a pretty direct cause. How do you think about the meaning and importance of this finding? Is it a big enough effect to do something about?

[Bapu Jena]

This individual finding is not big enough to do something about because it only shows up when you look at the most downloaded albums, most music that people listen to or download outside of, let's say the top 10 music albums. You're not going to see an album day release effect. What that means is that when there's a lot of attention on this, you might see a mortality effect as a source of explaining why we have traffic fatalities in this country and whether or not this can move the needle. The answer is no, it can't because they're very small relative to the total number. But why I think this is interesting, and these kinds of studies are interesting, is because they give us some scientific insight into what are the types of factors that cause people to have problems on the road, it identifies it in a quasi experimental way, because it really is hard to know what are the magnitudes we're talking about. Like, how big of a problem could distraction be? You can't randomly distract people on the road and study the effects of that on their behavior.

[Stephen Dubner]

When you see these data and you interrogate it the way you do and you believe the effect as you do, what do you make of the mechanisms by which these crashes are happening? And maybe within that answer, you could talk about the fact that. But we don't really know much about driver behavior in cars at this relatively advanced stage in our civilization, which you might think we would. You could certainly gather that data if it were encouraged and allowed, but it's not really. So people like you are left to guess a little bit. So what do you guess about as to the mechanism?

[Bapu Jena]

Yeah. So let me tell you what we guess about. We're thinking, all right, is this person literally manipulating the phone or the infotainment system like. Like Apple CarPlay? We find that in cars with CarPlay, the album release effect seems to be greater, which might be counterintuitive because you would think that CarPlay is something that should reduce issues in the car because

[Stephen Dubner]

it's supposed to be hands free.

[Bapu Jena]

Yes, supposed to be hands free, but it does lower the barrier to accessing everything. You can just touch the screen very easily and go from one song to the other. So you're probably doing it more than you otherwise would have. You adapt in that way. So one mechanism is that the drivers are just fiddling around with something. The second mechanism might be that they're just playing it louder than they normally might play it, and so they're not aware of other environmental signals that they might normally be aware of. You know, someone who is honking at them or any sound that might clue their attention into something being wrong on the road.

[Stephen Dubner]

A lot of people listen to this show and other shows while they're driving. I wonder if you have any advice for us. We already exclude the sound of just about anything that sounds like you would hear it on the road. Like sirens. We don't use whistles, car horns. We try to eliminate all that because we know it can be distracting. But maybe, I don't know, I should speak more slowly or more monotonically or something. Do you have any advice for how I can not join the ranks of Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift as killers?

[Donald Redelmeier]

Well, you have a very nice radio voice, so I wouldn't change anything there. But, I mean, Steven, you're Literally giving me an idea. Now I'm thinking to myself, can I figure out which popular podcasts have sirens in the background and see what happens on those? Like if Joe Rogan ever had an ambulance on his show, how many people have died?

[Stephen Dubner]

When you look at this constellation in its entirety, I'm curious what it makes you think. What it makes me think is bring on the friggin autonomous cars already. Because I think humans are just pretty bad at driving on average. What do you think of this?

[Bapu Jena]

I think that's right. I gotta say two things, and Vishal is going to kill me when I say the second thing. The first thing is that if we were to replicate this study, let's say using 2024, 2025 data and go forward, my guess is that the album release effect will be less and less over time. And the reason why is that the cars are changing, the safety features are changing. The solution here isn't to not have Taylor Swift albums. That might be the solution for some, but it is to make cars safer. And I think that you would find that the effect of any given distraction over time will wane as the vehicles become better. The second thing, and this is what Bashal will tell me about, is a few months ago I had this idea related to teslas. Sometime in 2024, in the spring, Tesla made the Autonomy feature free for Tesla owners. I presume what happened is at that time a lot more self driving was happening. We will use this fars data, this fatal accident reporting data, which has the make and model of the vehicles involved in the crash, to see what happened to traffic fatalities around that time with Teslas versus other electric vehicles.

[Stephen Dubner]

Why will Vishal hate that? Does he drive a Tesla?

[Bapu Jena]

No. Vishal will hate it because part of

[Donald Redelmeier]

why we are successful is that when we have ideas we don't broadcast into the world, we do them first. But I have enough papers so I'm not worried.

[Stephen Dubner]

Now I take your point about car safety and highway safety, and there are many elements of the whole traffic ecosystem that theoretically should have made us much safer over the years. And of course it has. But in the last 10 years or so, US traffic crashes contra other developed countries have risen again. So what do you think is going on in this country in particular?

[Bapu Jena]

It's hard to know, but there is an economic explanation, or at least there's probably many economic explanations. The first one that I think of when I hear a pattern like that where safety and technology is improving but the outcomes are getting worse is this compensating behavior model that Was initially popularized by the Chicago economist Sam Peltzman. What happens with CarPlay, you now have the ability to use your car in a way that you perceive to be safer, and you compensate. Your ultimate safety might be actually worse because you're using your phone in a way that you thought was safe. But it turns out it's not as safe as it was.

[Stephen Dubner]

We are in this moment now where people are seeing waymos driverless taxis. In some cities, people are having more and more autonomous features on their cars. How do you think about this transitional period we're in and what else should we maybe watch out for as our tech becomes better, but we're still the driver.

[Bapu Jena]

I was actually just in San Francisco watching these waymos go around and they're all over the place. The person I was with made this observation because we were talking about whether waymos are safer and they made the observation. They said, well, I bet waymos themselves aren't just safer, but they reduce accidents of those around them because they go so damn slow. You can imagine a world in which driver behavior is affected by other drivers behaviors. If autonomous vehicles are on the road and they're driving slower, then people behind them will probably necessarily drive slower. There'd be this spillover effect, which I think is interesting and I'm curious to sort of anticipate if you had the

[Stephen Dubner]

authority to mandate one policy change based on this research finding. Maybe it's a policy change for Spotify or Apple, maybe it's for the automakers, maybe it's for nhtsa, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. What would it be?

[Bapu Jena]

At first I was gonna say to,

[Donald Redelmeier]

you know, turn the music down. Like I was thinking when a new album is released to mandate on the phone that the volume can't exceed a certain level.

[Bapu Jena]

Honestly, I think. I think the number of deaths here is so small relative to the average daily number of deaths, and it doesn't add up to a lot nationally over the course of the year. So I don't know that I would change anything.

[Stephen Dubner]

There is one policy solution that might seriously improve traffic death research. I talked about this with Chris Wersham. Let me just admit that when I read a paper like yours, There's a lot of following a daisy chain here. Like, what about the telematics revolution that we've been promised for a long time that automobiles would be able to tell you a lot about driver behavior, like exactly what's happening in that vehicle during the whole trip and then at the moment of impact. I would much rather base an argument on data that's first order like that. Rather than do this really nice daisy chain analysis, you've done that, do you think about better classes of data for this kind of research?

[Chris Worsham]

Absolutely. If only we could get our hands on those data. The study design has allowed us to create this connection between the release of these very popular music albums and traffic fatalities. Our study design inherently does not tell us exactly how that happens. You're left with what could plausibly be the link between these two, this logical explanation that it's through smartphone use. But if the folks at any of these automobile manufacturers who have these data, if you're using Android auto or Apple CarPlay, I don't believe that Apple or Google holds onto that data long term. But presumably as part of a traffic investigation, one could collect the telematics data. On the flip side, I certainly understand why there would be reluctance from car owners.

[Stephen Dubner]

Reluctance stemming from privacy concerns.

[Chris Worsham]

Exactly right. If you're a car owner and you get in a fender bender and your insurance company doesn't want to pay for it, and they can interrogate your car and say, see, you were blasting Taylor Swift at the time of this accident. I certainly understand why folks would not be interested in that.

[Stephen Dubner]

I've heard this argument for a long time now, including in medical records. Right? That was the whole idea with why electronic health records will never work is because people don't want their personal health records exposed. And lo and behold, they mostly do work and mostly people have gotten over it. Don't you, as a physician and as a taxpayer and as someone who drives on these same roads with other people who might not be paying as much attention as you, don't you want telematics to be the norm? Doesn't that seem like a sensible level of invasion of privacy to protect the public?

[Chris Worsham]

As I think there's multiple versions of privacy concerns in the example you give of health records, the inherent idea is we digitize these health records so that Dr. A at this doctor's office can easily communicate with Dr. B. Or that when a patient ends up in the hospital with me, I can easily pull up all of their records without having to go to a file room and waiting for someone to bring it up. The data sharing is there for the benefit of the patient. And then there are these concerns about what happens to a data breach and someone could use their data maliciously. And you don't have to look far for examples of people abusing that data. But I think when it comes to telematics, there are potential negative consequences to you directly from that data being kept. Who's going to bother looking at your telematics until you get in a car accident? It's either going to be your insurance company or the police. What's the value to you as an individual? It's less obvious than in the case of health data.

[Stephen Dubner]

Whether it is the police or insurance. I'm just in favor of good data. I'm just in favor of transparency. So when I hear these arguments about, oh, we have to protect the privacy of behavior in, let's say, your automobile, I totally get that. Like, I might not want video recording by a third party in my car, but if I'm involved in a crash, whether I'm the one at fault or not, whether I'm the one that's hurt or not, I would certainly think it's a baseline expectation that you'd have transparent data about what may have contributed to that. We just don't have it. And I find that to be a bizarrely massive failing. So when we talk about the magnitude of traffic fatalities around the world, I love what you've done with this paper, but I feel like you are using sort of, no offense, caveman tools in a world where things are running much bigger, faster and deeper. I would like better tools and better data. That's all.

[Chris Worsham]

I absolutely hear what you're saying. This, in many ways, is part of a larger story about public health research. Why we do studies like this is we are very often making lemonade out of lemons because there's only lemons as far as the eye can see. It's hard to find telematics research anywhere. When we were doing the background research for this study, there's occasional academic papers published by universities that work closely with auto manufacturing. Those groups who publish some of these studies about distracted driving. And they are usually on test tracks because of the obvious ethical concerns there. We're always saying we have real world data. The real world data is out there, and so much of it is beyond our grasp because it is proprietary. We asked multiple times for data from the federal government and we'll get FOIA requests denied on absurd grounds. There's plenty of data out there that if it was available to researchers like us, we could do tremendous public health research. And we can't. We try, but we can't.

[Stephen Dubner]

You're saying the federal government doesn't give you what you want? What about private firms? I remember years ago, Steve Levitt and I, we spent a bunch of time with an insurance company and they, as part of this research that we were doing, they gave each of Us a little fob that plugged into a port in my car that I did not know existed. You plug in this little thumb drive, essentially, and it produced telematic data on acceleration, braking, idling, et cetera. And I loved it. And I wanted to know, like, am I a decent driver, bad driver? Am I changing lanes too quickly? Am I braking too frequently? I thought that was the beginning of a movement. I assumed that we were just entering this wave where the data would be much, much, much better and where traffic crashes would fall and fall and fall. And instead, as you point out in your paper, we're one of the few rich countries where traffic crashes have been rising lately. So it's a really big problem, traffic fatalities. And I guess I'm just sharing with

[Chris Worsham]

you my frustrations and I share it completely. If researchers like us could work with a lot of data that is hiding behind obvious proprietary barriers, we could do a lot with it. I reach out to companies all the time saying, hey, I've got a cool research idea. Your data would be perfect for it. There have been a number of companies who are actually willing to have that conversation. This is what we're willing to share with you because some companies actually do want to use their data for things like this and try to be helpful with it, but they're so anxious about their business concerns that they never share data that is sort of at the level of granularity that we could do an analysis like this.

[Stephen Dubner]

So what is the real message of this paper that we've been talking about today? Here is Vishal Patel, the man who had the idea.

[Vishal Patel]

The real message here is not to change album release days or to prevent artists from releasing their albums. The bigger message is it's really all about distraction. And so understanding how new technologies interact with human behavior on the road. It's probably going to be one of the most important traffic safety questions for decades to come. There's an evolving landscape of smartphone and smart car technologies. For example, autonomous, semi autonomous driving features. They're being rolled out at scale. There's some safety implications that may be protective from these smart technologies. There's also a lot of potential to create distraction and a false sense of security.

[Stephen Dubner]

My thanks to Vishal Patel, Bapujena, Chris Worsham, and the fourth co author, Michael Liu. Thanks also to Don Redelmeier. If you want to let us know what you were thinking about this episode, Our email is radioreconomics.com and if you have any ideas for Bapujena's merry band of health policy researchers. He is also happy to hear from you. His email is Jena that's J E N A at HCP Med Harvard. Edu. Coming up next time on the show, 95% of bourbon made in the world is made within a 45 minute drive of the house I live in. And why is bourbon production so concentrated? You could say it has benefited from some soft protectionism.

[Chris Worsham]

Well, I can defend every single one

[Vishal Patel]

of those components components as to why they are positive for flavor.

[Stephen Dubner]

And is that whole new charred oak barrel idea really that important or is it more of a marketing message?

[Justworks Representative]

You do have to admit it's a bit convenient.

[Stephen Dubner]

The bourbon trade uncorked. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's [e-mail] where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Teo Jacobs and edited by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abuaji, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Hilaria Montenacort, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thank you for listening.

[Bapu Jena]

I had this paper years ago which showed that when marathons happen in a city, more people die because ambulances can't get to people's homes. And whenever I threaten to write a paper about what happens when Taylor Swift

[Donald Redelmeier]

comes to town, everybody tells me I can't write that paper.

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