← Mixed Signals from Semafor Media
Mixed Signals from Semafor Media
Freakonomics’ Stephen Dubner on why long-form podcasting isn't dead yet
00:52:47
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- [00:11]
A
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore, where we are talking to the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tawney, I'm the co host of the show. And with me as always from across the world, from the slopes of Davos, is our editor in chief, Ben Smith. Ben, you're in Davos. What's the media story there this year? We know all about the fancy parties and about the hors d' oeuvres and about the big long lines and about Trump. But what's the media takeaway for the listeners of this podcast?
- [00:46]
B
You know, the most interesting media conversation I've had is with one of the kind of far right media provocateurs hanging around the promenade, trying to like ambush the Pfizer CEO, you know, or to ask Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, if he's a freemason. Anyway, I am, as I saw, as I saw it just happen. Anyway, I went up to this guy who works for a British far right, British outlet and I was asking him, you know, how is Davos going for him? Was he having fun? And he said, honestly, it was a lot more fun when we were in opposition. And it's true broadly here, like the far, you know, the kind of right wingers, the Trump administration, our friend Sarah Rogers, they're here. They, they seem to actually be having quite a good time. Like every CEO here is rushing to accommodate these Trump people. But you know, they really were looking for conflict. They were looking to take on the globalists. And it almost feels a little disappointing the degree to which they've been kind of welcomed. It undermines their narrative.
- [01:42]
A
Yeah, that's definitely true. Though the other thing that they do have going for them is the fact that they're not self hating like many of the people who go to Davos. Oh, yeah, I guess I gotta go this year. Oh, I hate it. It's so crowded.
- [01:54]
B
No, they just hate everyone else. That's true.
- [01:56]
A
Yes, exactly, exactly. Well, this week on the show, we were really excited to have a guest that we recorded just before Ben went to Davos, and that's Stephen Dubner, the host of Freakonomics. It's been a really interesting moment for this book series turned podcast, which is soon to be turned into actually a TV series. Ben, you booked Stephen for the show. Why did you think it was interesting for us to have him on right now at this moment in Freakonomics history?
- [02:25]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting because in Part because he has sort of, you know, he's actually very davos y. I'm sure he's been here and is a real figure in the way, you know, the way people think about global economics is kind of very rational, very data driven, very like, well, you know, don't trust your gut approach which they really, Freakonomics really help popularize, help drive. It's sort of sometimes the opposite of Trumponomics, right, Which is like, which is the truth is what is what's in your gut. But also he's had this arc, right, this media arc that had brought him from being this kind of quirky podcaster to essentially a standalone media company himself, taking, I don't know, a lot of the opportunities and chasing the changes in this medium.
- [03:07]
A
Well, the truth is not in my gut. The numbers are telling me the data is all, are all showing that Steven is a much better talker than us. And we have a lot of really interesting stuff that we want to get to him. So we'll be back with Stephen right after this.
- [03:27]
B
Hey, mixed signals listeners. There's a new podcast we thought you'd enjoy. It's called Frontier cmo, hosted by our friend Josh Spanier, Google's VP of marketing. It's about the forces driving innovation and reshaping the marketing landscape today. Whether it's AI's impact on the industry or creators role in culture, Josh is getting into the weeds with the people who are actually shaping what's next. These are your notes from the Frontier. You'll hear from CMOs, agency legends, brand visionaries and brilliant thinkers. Search for Frontier CMO from Think with Google wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us.
- [04:08]
C
It's good to be here. Thank you.
- [04:10]
B
And congratulations on 20 years of Freakonomics.
- [04:13]
C
Thanks.
- [04:14]
B
And I reread the book and I've listened to your show many times through the years and your range is very broad. But the thing that we sort of mostly obsess about here is media. And I think of like a lot of the core of what you do is sort of putting statistics up against anecdotes and sort of questioning our intuitions about the world. And so I guess I wanted to start off by asking you kind of what you've learned about our intuitions about media. Like I think there's a sense right now that we live in this media age where politics is shaped by social media, whereas people's lives are being reshaped and you know, in some cases really ruined by mobile technology. How Real, is it? How real are those intuitions?
- [04:58]
C
I would argue they're probably significant, for sure. I mean, I think back to what was, for me, a bigger realization, which came probably right at the beginning of even, like, the digital revolution. Forget about the social media revolution, but the digital revolution. Like, I was working at the New York Times when the Internet was starting to really happen. Like when we had Google. Google was the best tool that any journalist had ever had. Until, of course, it started getting worse. And, you know, the new tools would come along. I remember when Slate magazine was due to launch. This is way before you guys, but I remember we literally had like, slate.com in the URL, just like, refresh, refresh for all day. We're waiting for it. Like, the idea that you could deliver something like that instantly was very exciting. I remember we did the first time the New York Times Magazine, which was where I was working, put up different assets online. I edited an issue of the magazine about the new kind of American jazz revolution being led by Wynton Marsalis. And we thought, wouldn't it be cool if we could post music on, like, AOL or whatever it was that was accompanying the online version of the magazine? So I always liked the idea of using all the tools available. The thing that sort of bummed me out when I was at the Times was recognizing that journalism is as market driven as everything else. That was really my big awakening because I'd always just been like, I think most people who get into journalism or writing or creating anything of any kind, I'd always been a little bit of a free agent. I just liked having ideas, chasing down stories that were appealing to me. I was never really a beat reporter, and I didn't really like that idea of being captured in a certain environment and never getting to stray from that. But then when I realized that the Times and the Journal and everywhere else sort of prospered by carving out their audience, figuring out who their audience was, then feeding them stuff that aligned with them, that made me a little bit uneasy. So to me, the social media magnification and agglomeration and all that is just an acceleration of that fact. It's just a lot easier to do it now. But I also think, you know, I mean, my career the last 15 years with making podcasts and radio, this is literally a free, global, instant distribution system that we have for podcasting. I think mostly because Steve Jobs decided at some point that he thought the iPhone should have a podcast app on it. And that literally created for people like me and you and A lot of other people. I mean, we don't.
- [07:41]
A
We don't.
- [07:42]
C
It's easy to forget how much infrastructure it used to take to distribute your writing. I was at the New York Times. We owned trucks, they owned newsprint factories, they owned forests in Canada. And so I think it's very easy to get sucked into one of the bad narratives about the digitalization and the concentration of media. And there is a lot of bad things within it, but there are a lot of terrible things about, you know, robber barons 150 years ago owning all the means of media production. So I think it's, you know, I think history keeps rolling on, honestly.
- [08:13]
A
You know, I'm curious, Stephen, I was listening to you on Armchair Expert, one of your most recent appearance. You've been on there a few times, and you were talking kind of about this desire for people to kind of break out of these silos that you're talking about, much of which is kind of driven by the algorithm. Is it possible, do you think, for people to kind of break out of these silos at a. Particularly at a moment where they're so good at keeping us in them?
- [08:40]
C
Yeah, I think it's really, really hard. I mean, I don't mean to applaud my own perspective, but it's the show that I make now for Economics Radio. It's what I try to do every week. We have, I would argue, I mean, this is probably empirically hard to prove, but I would argue we have one of the most heterogeneous and just diverse media audiences going now. We're not gigantic. We're, you know, let's say we're about two and a half million unique listeners a month. So, you know, compared to big media audiences, that's relatively tiny. But for me, as one person that feels like a really big audience. And because we hear from them a lot, I know that they're all over the place in terms of their politics, their economics, geography and all that. And so on. The way that I think about it is I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm not trying to promote anything. I'm just trying to find out stuff. And I find that that's. If that's my silo, I'm happy to live in that silo of people who are just trying to find out the way the world actually works. And I would argue, I mean, I think you see this when you see political polling, too. Even in the midst of a big election, even in the middle of a presidential, you see the majority of people really don't give much of a crap about the gossip, about the inner stuff, about the infighting, about the name calling and so on. They mostly just want to have a life where they can do the thing that they want to do and, you know, make things work for their family, raise their kids, send them to college, yada, yada, yada. So maybe it's the difference between a sort of exploratory form of journalism, which is more what I like to do, or a curiosity driven journalism, as opposed to a proclamation type of journalism like the New York Times, which I still like, I still read it all the time, but I feel like the Times over the past bunch of years has become much less about telling me a lot of stuff I didn't know every day and much more about telling me how I should think about. The five things that they've decided that day are kind of on the, on the docket. And I don't know, this is also probably a, a product of me getting older. When you get a little bit older and you've actually read a lot and you've lived through a lot and you know how wars start and end, I don't really need the journalists telling me what I should feel in my heart about this leader or that despot or that, you know, congressional hang up or whatnot. I think most smart people who actually do consume media and look, we should be grateful so many people are consuming media, whatever form it's in. I think most of them just want to learn stuff so that they can figure out what to do with it in their lives. As opposed to join the team that says you have to believe in this to be on our team, and if you believe in that, then you have to be on the other team. I think it's idiotic that so many of us have allowed ourselves to be divided into teams that are in an industry, the political industry, which is thriving, it's doing incredibly well. It's just like if MLB kicked out everybody but the Yankees and the Red Sox and they just get to go on in, in perpetuity, bashing each other on the heads. And it's great for them, but it's not really that great if you're a fan.
- [11:57]
A
Ben, sorry, just to go back for a second. You also, like Stephen, worked at the New York Times. I'm curious if you agree with what he said about the New York Times, more telling you how to think these days than, than it used to, because I heard he also said that on another podcast. And I, I was very, I'm. I was Curious what your perspective is on that.
- [12:12]
C
Ben might have been one of the people telling us what to think, though.
- [12:15]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [12:16]
B
Ben was guilty of this. I mean, actually, no, Stephen was. Was pandering incredibly effectively to me because that is also sort of my critique of the. Of the. Of the media. And a lot of kind of why we started Semaphore that sense of. When I read a journalist, I want to know what I do kind of want. I'm interested in what they think. And I mentioned them being transparent about what they think, but I do not want them to tell me what to think. And there is some kind of. Kind of smarmy line there that you could.
- [12:41]
A
What's the difference? Yeah. Wait, what's the difference? What's the difference there?
- [12:43]
B
From my perspective, it's acknowledging that you might be wrong, honestly, and being very open to hearing voices that disagree with you. I don't know, Steven, what about you? How do you know when somebody's, you know, not trying to feed you a line?
- [12:54]
C
I mean, to be fair, I think for people who aren't in journalism, although I gather that most people who are listening to this care at least somewhat about journalism, we over index with that crowd, for sure. Yeah. Okay, so look, there are. How many different categories of journalism could we name right now? There are a lot, right? There's like, something happens, a public event happens, and you cover it. There's a fight, and then there's gonna be five days of gossip afterwards. There is a business takeover like we're in the middle of now. There's reporting on a series of events that add up to something bigger. And then there's exploratory, there's profiling, and so on. So there's a lot of different ways to do journalism. I just think that the cleanest way to do it is to come in with an open mind and a deep curiosity and a bunch of questions and ask somebody who actually knows what's going on and then write it down and comment. You know, it's one of the reasons I wanted to do a podcast way back when is because when I was writing, like, magazine profiles for the New York Times, the majority of the words that would end up in, let's say an 8,000 word piece were not words spoken by the subject. And I like the idea of flipping that script so that in a podcast, you actually hear primarily from the person that you're featuring.
- [14:06]
B
Yeah, it's funny, we had this conversation with Ken Burns, which I keep going back to on this show, where he was like, it takes you know, I spend months on every word in my script, and the thing takes 10 years. And then you guys just go on and publish unedited nonsense from people.
- [14:21]
A
Okay, but Steven. But I actually think Stephen does something closer to what Ken would respect than. Than what we do, which is get on here and just kind of spew, you know, whatever we kind of are thinking in that exact. That very exact moment. But listening to Freakonomics, there's actually. There's a lot of deep reporting there that I'm sure Ken. Ken would respect.
- [14:39]
C
I mean, I'm. I'm probably right in the middle of you guys. I mean. No, you're right. It takes him how long to make one of those films? I have 10 years. Yeah, so. So I'm doing as much as I can in a week. And you're right. Like, every tape cut is poured over, over. And again, we edit, we script. We, you know, we script the narration. I rewrite that five times. We record it. We end up editing that. Then you're adding sound and all that. So it is one version of it, but, like, it's all journalism, so just take your pick. Whatever it is, you want to do it. Well, I have nothing. I have no problem with the spewing form of journalism as long as the people spewing mostly know what they're talking about. And when they make mistakes, they catch it late. Like, I've done a couple shows now where we've had a live fact checker. We used to do a live quiz show or game show called Tell Me Something I Don't Know. We would have a live fact checker on stage, which was really good. We did. I did a show called no Stupid Questions with Angela Duckworth of University of Pennsylvania, wrote the book Grit. And there we had a fact check session after each recorded session. And like, I like that in freak radio, sometimes people will write in and say, why on Freakonomics radio don't you have a fact checking section at the end? It's because we fact check all week long. I mean, that's the way it works. So I'm not saying one form is necessarily better, but there's a big audience out there and they can find the one they want. I'm actually struggling is maybe not exactly the right word right now with a new project that we're piloting right now, or we're shooting a pilot season of a TV show. It's like a TV talk show. It's a little bit like old Dick Cavett. It's a little bit like Freakonomics Radio. But it is. It's shot live to tape with, like six cameras. It's a real TV show. But I can't then go back and edit myself, and I can't go back and rewrite the narration around it the way I do for Freakonomics Radio.
- [16:36]
A
So that's.
- [16:37]
C
It's frightening because you're trying to be your best in the moment with someone face to face on a topic that I may have a great interest in, but not mastery in. So, like I said, there are many, many different forms of it. I just think if you do it as, you know, honestly, as you can, work as hard as you can, you have a chance.
- [16:57]
B
You know, it's funny that you mentioned the Dick Cavett, like, show we had the comic Adam Friedland on, who was talking also about building a set that was meant to look like the Dick Cavett show. Part of, I think, in some sense, this moment in which everything is becoming television. And I wonder if you worry that, like, there's some. There was something about podcasting that gets lost in that transition that I think everybody is right now in the middle of.
- [17:18]
C
Yeah, I wonder too. So I came at this a little backwards. So I am aware is Adam. Adam Freeland is his name.
- [17:25]
B
Yeah.
- [17:25]
C
Yeah, I watched a little bit of it. I liked it.
- [17:27]
B
Slightly different genre from you.
- [17:28]
A
Yeah. I think you guys are a little bit. Doing a little bit of a different thing.
- [17:31]
C
Yeah. But I watched a little bit of him. I thought he was really smart and really funny. I liked what he's doing a lot. But my thing grew out of this. So I really like making a studio show. That's what Freakonomics Radio is for the reasons that I just described. I was a musician way back when, and you'd write a song and then you could record it 40 times and overdub and keep working at it. And if you weren't good enough, you could bring in someone else to play some guitar part or whatever. Right. So Freakonomics Radio is a little closer to that, where we're producing a thing over the course of months, even though we release one every week. We've got. Always got episodes in the pipeline. I mean, we're putting out something like right now that has been in production for over a year. And I like that. I like kind of assembling things over time. We also do, however, some live shows. And we did this live show in LA earlier this year, and there was a series of technical snafus and the theater failed to record the event. And that was a big bummer. And one of our guests was Ari Emanue, was RJ Cutler, the documentary filmmaker.
- [18:37]
B
And so you claim.
- [18:39]
C
So. So I claim that it wasn't recorded. You followed.
- [18:41]
B
No, no. So you claim that those are your guests. There's no evidence.
- [18:43]
A
Oh, well, actually there is. It was in the New York Post, I believe. There was a. There was a nice write up of that because you. He. You actually ended up in the middle of a Justin Baldoni, Blake Lively tabloid incident. I guess one footnote in that saga, which was. Which was very amusing to me.
- [19:00]
B
It was.
- [19:00]
C
It was slightly less amusing for me, Max. But yeah, it was. It was a little bit amusing. Cause when you get sucked into a weird gossip vortex, a Hollywood gossip vortex, it's odd because our recording had failed, but there was, you know, I think a Wall Street Journal reporter had recorded Ari's part on his iPhone. We actually were in touch with the guy, seeing if it was usable, and it wasn't usable, but it was enough to feed the conspiracy theory that somehow Ari Emanuel had forced me to scrap the episode so that he wouldn't be sued, even though he was already being sued. So anyway.
- [19:34]
A
Okay, wait. So the Baldoni Stans came after you guys as a part of the fallout from this?
- [19:41]
C
I think so. But honestly, I don't really know the teams well enough. I think Candace Owens was one that was saying that we were not a real. I mean, you know, you know how these things happen. All of a sudden Freakonomics is part of a conspiracy theory to support Blake Lively, which.
- [19:59]
A
Ah, I see.
- [20:00]
C
So anyway, after that show failed to record, I was bummed because you work really hard preparing for a show. You kind of script your questions to some degree, but then you're live and there's whatever, a thousand people and a guest and you're trying to do your best, doesn't record. And I thought, you know, I like the energy of live, but doing a big theater show is too hard. There are too many variables that you can't even hear well, et cetera, et cetera. So I thought it'd be fun to do something live, but really controlled. And I've now come to the point where I like producing everything as much by myself as possible. So I've got a little production company for Freakonomics Radio, and we've taken that company and expanded it a bit and are now self producing, self funding and producing a pilot season of this kind of slightly dick cavity TV show where we've taped, I guess, eight or ten guests by now. We're finishing up shooting in a week. And then we're gonna edit. We're gonna have a season, a pilot season of TV that we have made, and then we'll take it to market and figure out what to do with it. So I guess that aligns, Max, with what you were saying about, like, the video necessity for every podcast. But my video appetite actually came from a slightly different appetite, which was, I know how good it feels to sit knee to knee with somebody that you're really interested in and really try to talk with them with some witnesses, even if the witnesses are mostly cameras and a small invited audience. That's what we're doing. So it's less a video version of our Freakonomics radio podcast, which would be hard because we usually interview 3, 4, 5, 6 people per episode, then edit it together. It's doable, but it wouldn't look very good. Also, you know, most video podcasts are like this. We're sitting here looking at a camera, which is not really, you know, it leaves something to be desired. So we're trying to create something that essentially is a TV show that's being launched from within a podcast. It's kind of like building a spec house. If you're a contractor, or maybe, you know, you could think of it as, I'm laundering podcast money to make tv. And then we'll see what happens with it.
- [22:19]
A
Okay, Stephen? Well, I actually, you're completely wrong. We are not looking into cameras. I'm looking directly at you. I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm actually kind of. I'm kind of curious. So, you know, we're kind of doing this all backwards. But, you know, the TV show point. What's the talk a little bit more about that? Are you guys going to be. Is it going to be like Freakonomics? Is it going to be. What's the uniting? What's the theme between each of the guests and kind of the overall pilot? Is there, like a central idea, or is it just these are some people who are interesting and let's talk about them in a. In a live setting.
- [22:55]
C
I mean, that question is so painful, Max, because that's exactly the question we're asking ourselves every day. So mostly it's the slightly looser version that you just gave at the end, as opposed to the tight version of this is what the show is. But I'll tell you what, I can. The show is called Better in Person because, you know, I was remote long before COVID Cause I've been a writer and musician my whole life. And I love to work mostly by myself at home or in some home office. And then when Covid happened and you didn't have to go anywhere for anything ever, I was like, this is the best. No meetings of all of any kind, no part, you know, nothing. And I thought I would love it. And instead I probably, like most people, just like couldn't wait to get back to people. And then we did that live show in LA that I mentioned that was a disaster. But my appetite was to find people that I. I wouldn't say necessarily admire, but someone that I'm. I'm really someone that is very compelling to me and have a conversation with them that has some elements of what I've been doing with Freakonomics Radio. But if Freakonomics radio is essentially trying to explain how things work, might be a piece of employment policy, might be a piece of healthcare, something, could be anything, then better in person is sort of meant to explain how people work. And so I'm picking people that, as it turns out, I love them like I pick people that I thought would be good, but by the end of it, I love them so much. So we usually shoot a little bit outside of the studio ahead of time just for me to spend some time with them. For instance, there's a chef at Cisiamo named Hilary Sterling who I think is probably gonna be a big deal within a year. Cause she's amazing and she's got a book, her first book coming out, maybe wants to do a TV show herself. So I spent some time with her in her kitchen and then head her over to my place and we talked for a few hours and I made her some food which she hated by the. Oh my God, she hated my kids so much.
- [25:00]
A
What did she make? Chisiamo's amazing, I'm sure. I think some of our listeners probably in the. Particularly those who work over, you know, maybe those who work in CNN have been. Have been there because it's right over there at Hudson Yards.
- [25:13]
C
Yeah, Chisiamo is great. She made what she made for me. There is something that is not on their menu. The reason it's not on their menu is it's just a cacio e pepe. But it's not on their menu because she had invented this or she had cooked this cacio e pepe at a previous restaurant. And she is a chef who does not believe in taking her culinary IP from her old place to her new place, which in and of itself was interesting. So when you learn something like that, it starts to become a little Bit like a Freakonomics radio conversation about IP and who owns it and how do you monetize X, Y, and Z. But then it becomes about her own biography and whatnot. In terms of what I cooked for her, it's hard to even say the words now because she hated it so much, and this was only a couple days ago, but I just made for her what I make for myself in the winter, which is I'm working alone. I'll make a big pot of fish chowder, which, you know.
- [26:09]
B
Okay, that seems risky.
- [26:11]
C
Yeah, it was extremely risky in retrospect. But then, not only that, but I doubled down. I made a second soup. Turns out she hates all soups, but I made a second soup, which was a fruit soup, which is derived from a fruit soup that's sold at Zabar's, which, Ben, is right near the neighborhood where you grew up. And their fruit soup is okay, but I thought I made a really good one. Yeah, she absolutely hated both of mine, which was good for tv. It was slightly bad for my soul.
- [26:37]
B
And then.
- [26:38]
C
But then we talked for a few hours, and then we started talking about pizza. Then we said, hey, should we go get a slice? She said, yeah. And I said, well, I'm gonna take you to a place nearby that I think has a really poor slice of New York City pizza. Then we'll go to a good one after. But then by the time we got to the one with the bad slice, we kind of started thinking that maybe we should buy the place and make it a good slice place. So I'm not sure what this TV show is going to lead to. It may lead to me being a pizzeria owner.
- [27:08]
A
Well, we've got a lot more that we want to get to with Stephen, but we have to take a short break. So we'll be right back after this.
- [27:23]
B
In this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I spoke with Google's VP of marketing, Josh Spanier, about what he saw at ces. So, Josh, you were at CES at the beginning of this year. Why does that event matter for CMOs?
- [27:36]
D
So CES gives us a real view into how people are going to be living their lives and spending their money in two, five, even ten years time. And I know from the outside, it looks like a giant toy show. There's smart rings and foldable laundry robots and flying cars. But I was chatting with Shelly Palmer, who I interviewed for my new podcast. He's an AI visionary and tech leader, and he swears by, and I agree with him, that the ability to see patterns amongst all the gadgets is actually really, really compelling for near term and in the future.
- [28:12]
B
So what did you learn from that conversation?
- [28:14]
D
Well, the gadgets aren't really the thing. Stuff gets announced. Some of it launches, some of it doesn't launch. What you're really looking for are business model changes, the new paradigms that are emerging. So two that I saw and we spoke about, one is around agentic commerce. Google announced during CES and just after ces, a whole bunch of partnerships with Shopify, with Walmart, with Target, around agentic commerce. Super interesting. Building the new protocols for machines, doing the shopping for you where appropriate. And then separately, I also saw a lot of expansion of what you might call intelligent ecosystems. These are technologies from different companies coming together, meshing together to enable you to do more interesting and engaging things. And again, with Google and Gemini leading the way, they're really fascinating forerunners of where we're all going to be in the near and medium term.
- [29:08]
B
And where can people listen to the whole thing?
- [29:10]
D
You can listen to my conversation with Shelley Palmer in my new podcast, Frontier CMO on YouTube or wherever you download podcasts, or you can sign up for my weekly newsletter over on LinkedIn.
- [29:22]
A
Great.
- [29:23]
B
Thanks, Josh. One of your the kind of big freakonomics crusade slash, I think at least suggestion for journalism was to get away from anecdotes and to rely more on data. And you've been doing this for 20 years. Next. I'm curious if you feel it's worked at all.
- [29:50]
C
I think it's worked for me. I don't know if it's changed anything.
- [29:53]
B
Do you feel like we've gotten away from the kind of three anecdotes make a trend form of journalism?
- [29:58]
C
In general, I would say, in general, I would say no. But I think there are plenty of examples where there are more and more journalists who do kind of respect what the data has to say. So, I mean, I'm embarrassed to say I don't know if the Times still operates its kind of standalone section called the Upshot.
- [30:15]
B
Do they? I think so.
- [30:16]
A
They do. Yeah. Nate Cohen still writes.
- [30:18]
B
Yeah.
- [30:18]
A
Writes for it.
- [30:18]
C
Yeah. So I think the. The whole instinct to blend, you know, scientific thinking, if you want to call it that, with journalism, is 100% the way to move in the right direction. But I think a lot of times what that means is not the journalist having to become some kind of scientist or even become a data scientist, it's just learning to become more numerate or data literate so that when you interact with People. It could be, you know, if you're interviewing the nuclear engineers at a nuclear power plant that's about to be restarted, it could be talking to people at a social media firm about the way the algorithms work, how often they change, how much data goes into it, et cetera.
- [30:58]
A
Just.
- [30:58]
C
It's just learning to ask a different category of question and a different depth of question. And also, you know, one thing that I think a lot of journalists are forced to do is act as if you know a lot more than you do. And there are many different circumstances in which that may present itself as a. As an opportunity. Sometimes you're trying to extract information. If you can pretend that you know 40% of it, you might get the other 60%. But I also. So I get that. I also think, however, that one of the journalists most powerful tools is to find someone who knows what's going on and say to them really directly, listen, I'm writing this story about an area that is granted complicated and often obscure from public view. And so I don't know that much about it. And I really want you to explain it to me as best as you can. And I find that the smartest people I've ever encountered, whether they're CEOs, whether they're academics, whether they're bench scientists, whatever, if you really ask them to take you on the whole journey of how they had an idea, how they went to start looking for data to support the idea, how they entertained other plausible explanations, how they gathered the data and how they analyzed it, and so on, you will get much, much, much deeper than you typically do. But I feel that we often settle for the anecdote instead of that.
- [32:23]
B
The newest form of data that I think a lot of journalists are obsessed with is prediction. Yeah. Which are getting kind of interwoven with the things they predict in a certain way. The election markets in particular, you know, one of the really big pools, elections and sports seem to be the main things people want to gamble on. How do you. How do you think about that form of data?
- [32:43]
C
I mean, I love it. I think it's. I mean, the evidence shows that it is remarkably robust data. And a lot of people have a hard time believing that. With some good reason. They say, well, you know, the people in that sample must not be representative. But if you go back over time. So there is an economist at Wake Forest named Coleman Strumpf who's looked at prediction markets recently, but he's also gone back. There were some. There was some betting markets in. On elections, I want to say in the San Francisco area or California generally going back to the early 20th century. And it just turns out that when the stakes are real, the information is often much better. So I know that, you know, Kalshi and Polymarket, they're. There are all kinds of things that may scare some people off of these, especially when they're crypto first. Betting markets. Right. Then you have to think, well, how representative are those markets? Because anybody who's using crypto to bet in a prediction market like that is certainly not representative of the median voter, let's say. Okay. But it turns out that their predictions are often quite a bit better than pundits and quite a bit better than polls. We know that polling is really hard to start with, so maybe that's not so surprising. But I think there are many, many, many applications for prediction markets that go beyond public betting on sports and politics, for instance. So if you're running a firm and you've got a big project, let's say that involves 5,000 people across 10 locations, and you're really trying to figure out, a, is it going to be done on time? B, is it going to be any good? C, are rivals working on different versions of it? D, how might we be sued? E, how might our data not be representative of what we were thinking? One of the best things I think you can do, this has been shown by people like Robin Hansen. I believe it's done. This is get set up an anonymous internal prediction market. So I think any kind of company can do this because then what you're doing is you're actually harnessing the best inside information. But this is often information from people in the firm who would be too scared to go, like, the boss just wants to hear that it's gonna be great and that it's gonna work immed. So it's a way to actually harness the better information that is not always in the public eye. And I think that's what prediction markets generally can do. And that's why their outcomes are generally pretty good.
- [35:06]
B
I guess having insiders in them makes them more accurate.
- [35:10]
A
Yeah.
- [35:10]
C
I mean, it is absurd that, quote, insider trading is technically banned in the United States, except if you're in Congress, for instance, where if you look at the trading patterns of people in Congress, it's absurd how. And I know this is controversial, I know that some people maintain that their stuff is in blind trust and so on, but the fact that you can be sitting in a meeting in which you can help decide the path of a firm or an industry and be buying and Selling individual stocks in that industry. I mean, come on, who are we trying to kid? So there have been economists, for instance, who've argued over the years that what would be better for the regular stock markets is to allow as much insider information as possible because then you're actually gonna have a more transparent market. I don't know enough about the markets to know if that's true, but it's an interesting idea.
- [36:01]
A
So, Stephen, we've asked you some questions about, you know, we've asked you a lot of big, broad, open ended questions that we think about all the time here on this show. But we're really curious to kind of get back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, which is, you know, your own career. Freakonomics, the book, first book, came out 20 years ago. How long has the show has been running for the podcast radio show? It's been 15 years, over 600 episodes, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe a lot more than that, I'm not sure. And I'm kind of curious how has the show changed in that time or has it not changed?
- [36:39]
C
Yeah, I think it's changed a lot. I think it's changed to the delight of some people and to the chagrin of others. So I think Freakonomics, the book, became a conversation point for a lot of people who liked to find out that things weren't the way they seem on the surface. And that was indeed a big component of what we were doing. In Freakonomics, on the other hand, you know, life is pretty robust and the world is variegated. And so coming up with example after example after example of that kind of thing, you know, I wouldn't have been interested in doing that for 20 years or 15 years. And so I don't know a way to describe it other than I've been a writer essentially my whole life. I've written music for a while, like I mentioned, and every kind of article. We had a family newspaper when I was a kid, I was the youngest of eight, we had a family newspaper. So I would try to get an article in there and started the high school paper, did the college paper, the whole thing. And so when you're a writer, all you really have are your ideas. Like that's what makes, that's what gets you excited. I never was the kind of writer that loved getting assignments from editors just because, you know, sometimes they were good, but often they'd be things that I didn't really care about that much. So what I've been doing really the whole time on Freakonomics Radio is just. Look, I mean, I don't have a job. This is what I do. I just walk around the world, I read a lot, I talk to people and I try to get excited about an idea. And if I do, then I start chasing it. So we're putting out this series on Freakonomics Radio right now we're in the middle of it. It's a three or four part series. It's about the making of Handel's Messiah, which is this piece of music that I'd never paid any attention to. I knew the Hallelujah Chorus from like the Oscar Meyer baloney ad. I really didn't know very much about it at all. And then I saw the concert, the whole thing in concert a few years ago. And it just, it just kind of, it just moved me a great deal. And I began to wonder where this piece of music came from, who was the sky handle, who wrote it. And then what we discovered by chasing it, including talking to many musicologists and going to Europe, going to Dublin and Chester, England and London, where Handel had kind of made this trip up to debut Messiah. Talking to all these people there, I realized that it was really the story of a musical entrepreneur, Handel, who was writing opera and producing opera and going broke doing it cause it was so expensive. And then he kind of like a podcaster of his day thought, wait a minute, what if I write a piece that's still got the beauty and the grandeur? And Handel was a great, great, great composer like he was. His melodies were astonishingly memorable and very moving. He wrote great vocal parts and all this stuff. And he decided that he was going to write a piece that's an oratorio which is much smaller, no costumes, no sets, four soloists. And that became the beginning of his kind of late in life rebirth. He was 57 years old, so. So that's how in Freakonomics Radio we end up with a four part series on the making of a piece of music that debuted in 1742. If you had told me or someone listening to Freakonomics Radio 15 years ago that that was going to end up being what I was doing, they would have said, well, that's not Freakonomics Radio. But the beauty of being my own company and my own self is that I get to do what I want to do. And there seems to be enough of an audience that likes it. And so I try not to question that too. I try to be pure to my appetites and curiosities. I try to work hard, I try to be Respectful of people's time and all that. Not make a 12 hour. Because God knows Messiah could have been easily been a 12 hour series. I am thinking of expanding it into an audiobook, but. So, yeah, I pretty much just chase my own curiosities. But I will say I have fairly varied curiosities, so. So I really do like business, I like sports, I like the arts. I don't like politics all that much. No offense, it's just none take.
- [40:54]
A
Why would we be offended by that, do you think?
- [40:58]
B
I mean, it's interesting though, do you think that? I mean, it sort of sounds like that you feel like in the end that kind of basic Freakonomics move of that, like things are not what they seem, you know, the anecdote isn't borne out by the data. That that was a bit of a gimmick. And actually often things are what they seem, basically. Or things are a little more. The big story is a little more complicated than that.
- [41:17]
C
You know, I think what Freakonomics really was for me was like, I've been in graduate School for 20 years with Steve Levitt and a bunch of other really, really smart people, most of them economists, but some psychologists and many others. And I really feel like as a writer, it was just an unbelievably lucky place for me to land among a bunch of academics. Like, I didn't want to be an academic. I went to Gradu. I was poised to write novels and teach English for a living. That's what I was about to do. And I taught English for one year up at Columbia, which was amazing. The students were very brilliant, much smarter than me. And I was like, I don't wanna do. I did not like spending all my time working on other people's writing. I was more selfish than that. I just wanted to do my own. So I left that and went into journalism, which I love. But there were areas of journalism. Whereas we discussed earlier, there's not as much rigor as I would have liked. Hanging out with academics excited in me this pursuit of deep and broad research. And I really do love that. Now if I were to try to do deep and broad research myself on a topic in a given week for a weekly radio show, that's impossible. Then you're in the Ken Burns area, where it takes 10 years. But if I could learn the language of these academics and really understand how to extract from them the beauty or the ugliness or whatever of their research and then render it in a common language, that's sort of what I did. So freakonomics the book and my partnership with Steve Levitt. I mean, to this day he just remains a very, very good friend, but a great teacher. And I've always been, I don't know, I've always been the kind of person who's looking for great teachers sometimes, you know, they may be 30 years younger than you. I just really love learning interesting things. It's as simple as that.
- [43:15]
A
So I know we're going way over time here, but I love going way over time. Matt, fantastic. Good. I'm sure Ben, who is a very, very busy schedule, also loves that. But I do have another question here, which is, you know, you make these, these deeply reported produced episodes of the show, and at a moment where it seems like there are. That a lot of people are moving away from the kind of long form reported narrative podcasting, you know, which resembles essentially what you're doing. You were saying you have 2 million monthly listeners, which is big and, you know, quite amazing. How have you thought about podcasting kind of moving out of that direction? And have you seen like a drop off in terms of the people who are listening to your show? Change in taste or is it a change in what people can afford, like, in terms of making a show like yours?
- [44:08]
C
Yeah, that's a really good question. I think there's definitely been a fall off in people trying to make produced shows like this because, I mean, there was just a ton of money flowing in during the aggregation wars within podcasting. Right. So there was that period where Spotify spent. What was it, was it almost a billion dollars buying like, like five, six companies of which I think the ringer turned out to be the best. You know, Parcast kind of went away, Gimlet went away and so on. They bought some tech as well.
- [44:38]
B
Did they try to buy you?
- [44:39]
C
We've, we've been approached by many nice people over the years and, and I'm not, I'm not lying. I, I just really like being a small independent company that is my own employer and stuff. We get to make things the way we want to make it and we still have a broad audience. So I have zero complaint about that. I. So I do think there's been a fall off in investment on that in terms of consumption. Like, our audience is not declined. I know that the gospel is that long form is endangered and that short firm has superseded or is in the middle of superseding. But, you know, I just, I honestly don't pay that much attention to it. And there are two reasons why. A, I'm making what I want to make. So I don't really care that much if. If it stops being consumed at some point, that'll be my problem to deal with. The other thing is, you know, people trying to assess not only the current media landscape, but the future media landscape. It's really hard to do. Almost all predictions you read from 2040, 80, 100 years ago about things like this turn out to be totally wrong because we can't see the next technology, we can't see the next change in taste and culture. You know, now I think about in political forecasting, I don't know if you guys are old enough to remember when Mario Cuomo used to perennially be talked about as running for president, and he had a plane waiting on the tarmac, theoretically, to take him to his announcement, and then he ended up never running. And one line that he liked to say is that America will never elect a president with a vowel at the end of his name. And then it was like, eight years later, maybe we elected Barack Obama, who has not only a vowel, but a parent from Africa. I mean, come on.
- [46:27]
B
Cuomo was thinking of a different vowel.
- [46:30]
C
He was maybe thinking of a different vowel. So I just think you need to be humble when thinking about, you know, like, right now we're in the middle of the Netflix, wbd, Paramount, who's it gonna Be? And I love how everybody has a prescription for what's going to happen and who it's gonna be good and bad for. I think we just have to be a little humbler about it. In that, on the other hand, it's easy for me to say because I don't make my living by making bets on that kind of stuff. I think it's really hard to make your living on making bets by that kind of stuff. But I just prefer to operate in my own little shop making my stuff. And I feel like if I'm in my little shop making my stuff and it's good, then I'll continue to have a large enough audience where I'm part of the landscape, whatever the landscape is, and then, you know, at some point I'll die and I won't have to worry about it. So I'm. I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing until I die. I'm very, very happy with it.
- [47:28]
A
Well, I guess we hope that that's not anytime soon, but I guess we really hope.
- [47:33]
B
Max.
- [47:34]
C
That's all I get. I guess I hope that it's not anytime soon.
- [47:36]
A
Well, you know. Well, we try to be objective here at the Show. We don't want to. We don't want to come in on.
- [47:42]
C
Whether that was some kick ass journalism right there. Max objectivity.
- [47:46]
A
Exactly. Well, Stephen, we really appreciate you letting us pepper you with every question under the sun about the future of media and you making predictions without making predictions and staying humble. So we really appreciate it.
- [47:59]
C
I appreciate it. Very nice to talk to both of you guys.
- [48:01]
B
Yeah, thank you, Stephen, and wish you all the best for your health as well.
- [48:04]
C
Thanks. Okay, take care, guys. Bye.
- [48:08]
B
Thank you.
- [48:08]
A
Thanks.
- [48:15]
B
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- [48:50]
A
So, Ben, when you're in Davos, the noisy members of the global elite are all bustling around you hurrying to get to the Semaphore house. They're all headed there. But what did you think about what Stephen had to say? And honestly, what do you think about this trajectory and what it says about us that Freakonomics was first a popular book book series that later became a popular podcast that now is gonna become a popular podcast for television? What does that say, trajectory of media and what people want and where people want to consume it in 2026?
- [49:29]
B
You know, I mean, it very much matches, of course, the trend that we're always talking about here, that you almost sort of have media getting richer and richer. You know, a book becomes audio becomes video. And yet, although with Freakonomics, I'm just not totally sure I buy it. Like, it was an incredible book, a really good, sort of definingly amazing book book, a really, really good podcast. But it's so. Honestly, it's so heady, it's so intellectual, it's numerical, it's ideas driven. Do I really want all those, all that, all that video, all that richness, all that I have to pay attention with all my senses to it. I mean, I don't know, actually. And maybe I think actually this is the first one of these where the person is sort of walking that path and saying, this is sort of the logical conclusion where I'm not totally sure I Buy it.
- [50:17]
D
What do you.
- [50:18]
B
You think?
- [50:19]
A
Yeah, it feels to me like. And I think that this is the case for many video podcasts. I think that there are two things happening when. When a podcast that was formerly a popular podcast goes to video. Either one, they've got. They're getting a huge check for the few years. That's the barstool model. That's the Bill Simmons on Netflix model, where it's just that the money is just right up front is too hard to ignore. I think the other is the kind. Is maybe a little bit more of what do on the show with some video. Though video has been a nice little tool for, for us on YouTube for. For some audiences. I think it's discovery. I think it's for clipping and it's for discovery. I really think that the video version of this show is kind of meant to be chopped up into little segments that'll be able to travel around the web. Maybe that's not exactly what Stephen is thinking, but I think that ultimately that'll be its main utility. I mean, that's the utility of the video version of this show. Our clips are some of the most popular bits that we generate and, and they travel far and wide, much, much further than just a regular download of the show. And I think Freakonomics is kind of built for that because it is built around these little data points of these little kind of factoids, and that is the kind of stuff that does really well in these short form video clips.
- [51:36]
B
Yeah, but I don't actually don't think that's what Stephen was talking about. I think he has a basically creative ambition and is, you know, this is bought with a. There's not a lot of formal innovation in audio. There's not none. And there are people doing like pretty amazing audio dramas and things, but that's really around the margins and that's not what Freakonomics has been. And I think, I mean, I totally understand that you would want to, if you're communicating with people in this broadcast medium, to do something richer and more complex, you know, until ultimately you're Christopher Nolan. I just think I'm not. I don't know. I'm not sure that's always gonna work.
- [52:08]
A
Well, that feels like a great place to leave it. Thank you so much for listening to to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore. Our show is Produced by Chris McLeod from Blue Elevator Productions and Josh Billenson, with special thanks to Anna Pizzino, Jules Zern, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim Tori Kaur, Garrett Wiley, and Daniel Haft. Our theme music is by Steve Bone, and our public editor is Ari Emanuel. Ari, come on the show. We won't create fake news about you. And if you like mixed signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcast. And feel free to leave us a five star review. Don't leave us anything less than five stars. I mean, who are we kidding? This show couldn't get any better. It's a five star show, and if you want more, you can always sign up for Semaphore's media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.