Freakonomics’ Stephen Dubner on why long-form podcasting isn't dead yet

26:16Turns 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 OK. But I thought I made a really good one. Yeah, she absolutely hated both of mine, which is good for TV. It was slightly bad for my soul. And then 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 going to take you to a place nearby that I think has a really poor slice of New York City pizza.

26:50Then 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. 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.

27:36for marketers, does everybody then just take January and February off? So famously, Tom Brady won one of his Super Bowls and was supposedly spotted at 6am in the gym the next day. I don't know if that's totally true, but no, marketers are not taking January off. There is such a massive amount of data, insight and learning and performance that you can glean from all of 2025, but especially from Q4. Marketers are in the gym working hard to mine that data to actually set themselves up well for 2026 and on. And how do you turn, I guess, holiday data into value? So three things I think smart marketers are doing.

28:19First, they're being really intentional about retention. You just spend a huge amount of effort and money to get new customers. You need to understand who they are, when they might purchase again, and how to intercept them. You want to turn that new customer into a repeat purchaser, a second time, a fifth time, a 15th time. And actually, Google's got some new AI tools which will help you understand your customer and actually understand your CRM and do more retention marketing. Second, you really want to acquire customers based on value, not just volume. It's kind of easy to spray and pray and just get low-quality customers in, people who are going to churn off or are not going to repeat buy.

28:59Actually, what you want to find is your customers who are high value. That's what we do a lot of analysis of right now and it's going on inside of Google Marketing and every marketer could be doing it. Third, you've just got to activate your data. What you learn today will inform what you learn tomorrow and that is a continuous loop of optimization and performance improvements and little nudges today can make a big difference going forward. So mining the data and optimizing today because already what happened in Q4 is a little stale. what's happening today is fresher and can inform tomorrow. And where can people learn more about this?

29:34Our head of retail, Courtney Rose, has written a great piece. It's all about putting data to work to maximize customer lifetime value. You can see it at thinkwithgoogle.com. Thanks, Josh. Thanks, Ben.

29:57one of your the kind of big for economics crusade slash i think at least suggestion for journalism was to get away from anecdotes and to rely more on data and i and you've been doing this for 20 years next i'm curious if you feel it's worked at all uh i think it's worked for me i don't know if it's changed anything. Do you feel like we've gotten away from the kind of three anecdotes make a trend form of journalism 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.

30:31So, I mean, I'm embarrassed to say, I don't know if the Times still operates its kind of standalone section called the upshot. Do they? I think so. Yeah. Nate Cohen still writes for it. So I think the whole instinct to blend And, you know, scientific thinking, if you want to call it that, with journalism is 100 percent 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 it could be, you know, if you're interviewing the nuclear engineers at a nuclear power plant, it's about to be restarted.

31:12It 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. 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 an opportunity. Sometimes you're trying to extract information. If you can pretend that you know 40 percent of it, you might get the other 60 percent.

31:50But 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.

32:41But I feel that we often settle for the anecdote instead of that. The newest form of data that I think a lot of journalists are obsessed with is prediction markets. Yeah. Which are getting kind of interwoven with the things they predict in a certain way. The election markets in particular are, 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 think about that form of data? 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.

33:16They say, well, you know, the people in that sample must not be representative. But if you go back over time, so there's 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, there are all kinds of things that may scare some people off of these, especially when they're crypto-first betting markets, right?

33:54Then 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.

34:36And 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 Hanson, I believe it's done this, is 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 going to be great and that it's going to work immediately.

35:18So 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. I guess having insiders in them. you know, is it makes them more accurate? Yeah, 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, you know, 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.

35:54But 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 going to 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. Yeah. 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.

36:32But 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, like, how has the show changed in that time? Or has it not changed? 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, you know, 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.

37:22And 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.

38:06And 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.

38:42We'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've never paid any attention to. I knew the Hallelujah Chorus from like the Oscar Mayer Bologna 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 moved me a great deal. And I began to wonder where this piece of music came from, who was this guy Handel 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.

39:26I realized that it was really the story of a musical entrepreneur, Handel, who was writing opera and producing opera and going broke doing it because 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 still got the beauty and the grandeur? And Handel was a great, great, great composer. 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.

40:07He was 57 years old. 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 much. I try to be pure to my appetites and curiosities. I try to work hard.

40:47I try to be respectful of people's time and all that, not make a 12-hour, because God knows Messiah could have 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 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 taken. Why would we be offended by that? Do you think – 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 like things are not what they seem.

41:29You 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? 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.

42:04I went to graduate school. 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 want to do that. 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 where, as 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.

42:44And 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.

43:26I'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. So I know we're going way over time here. I love going way over time, Max. Oh, fantastic. Good. I'm sure Ben, who has a very, very busy schedule, also loves that. But I do have another question here, which is, you know, you make 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.

44:08You were saying you have two 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? Is it a change in taste? Or is it a change in what people can afford, like in terms of making a show like yours? 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?

44:46So there was that period where Spotify spent, what was it? Was it almost a billion dollars buying 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. Did they try to buy you? We've been approached by many nice people over the years. And I'm not lying. 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. So I do think there's been a fall off in investment on that.

45:23In 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 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 20, 40, 80, 100 years ago about things like this turn out to be totally wrong.

46:08Because we can't see the next technology. We can't see the next change in taste and culture. You know, 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, that we elected Barack Obama, who has not only a vowel, but a parent from Africa.

46:49I mean, come on. Cuomo was thinking of a different vowel. 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 going to be? And I love how everybody has a prescription for what's going to happen and who it's going to be good and bad for. I think we just have to be a little humbler about it. 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.

47:26But 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 just going to keep doing what I'm doing until I die. I'm very, very happy with it. Well, I guess we hope that that's not anytime soon. I guess we hope, Max. It's all I get. I guess we hope that it's not anytime soon. Well, you know, we try to be objective here at the show.

48:02I appreciate it. We don't want to come in on whether— That was some kick-ass journalism right there, Max, and the objectivity. 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. I appreciate it. Very nice to talk to both of you guys. Yeah. Thank you, Stephen. And wish you all the best for your health as well. Thanks. Okay. Take care, guys. Bye. Thank you. Thanks.

48:37We spent 2025 talking to people who channeled the excitement and belief in AI in media and marketing. A lot of that conversation in 2026 will be about the hard work of building with those tools. Think with Google is here to bridge the gap between inspiration and implementation. This isn't fluff. It's a rigorous look at the mechanics of growth to help CMOs solve the hard problems, like navigating complex consumer journeys and proving value through better measurement. Make this the year you turn potential into performance. Visit thinkwithgoogle.com.

49:13So, Ben, 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 series that later became a popular podcast that now is going to become a popular podcast for television? What does that say about the trajectory of media and what people want and where people want to consume it in 2026? 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.

50:00You know, a book becomes audio, becomes video. And, you know, although with Freakonomics, I'm just not totally sure I buy it. Like, it was an incredible book, a really good, a sort of definingly amazing 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 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.

50:41What do you think? 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 a podcast that was formerly a popular podcast goes to video. Either one, 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 maybe a little bit more of what we do on the show with some video, though video has been a nice little tool for us on YouTube for some audiences. I think it's discovery.

51:20I 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 will be able to travel around the web. Maybe that's not exactly what Steven is thinking, but I think that ultimately that will 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 they travel far and wide, 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, these little kind of factoids.

51:56And that is the kind of stuff that does really well in these short-form video clips. Yeah, but I actually don't think that's what Stephen was talking about. I think he has basically creative ambition. and is, you know, this is, 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.

52:26I just think, I'm not, I don't know. I'm not sure that's always going to work. Well, that feels like a great place to leave it. Thank you so much for listening 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 Billinson. With special thanks to Anna Pizzino, Jules Zern, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Tori Kaur, Garrett Wiley, and Daniel Haift. 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 podcasts 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