logo
episode-header-image
Jul 2021
52m 9s

37. Sendhil Mullainathan Thinks Messing ...

Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher
About this episode
He’s a professor of computation and behavioral science at the University of Chicago, MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, and author. Steve and Sendhil laugh their way through a conversation about the importance of play, the benefits of change, and why we remember so little about the books we’ve read — and how Sendhil’s new app solves this problem. 
Up next
May 30
24. Are We Under Threat from a New Kind of Terror? (Replay Ep. 24)
Amaryllis Fox is a former C.I.A. operative and host of the Netflix show The Business of Drugs. She explains why intelligence work requires empathy, and she soothes Steve’s fears about weapons of mass destruction. This episode originally aired on April 16th, 2021 and was replayed ... Show More
44m 8s
May 23
23. Greg Norman & Mark Broadie: Why Golf Beats an Orgasm and Why Data Beats Everything
Steve Levitt is obsessed with golf — and he’s pretty good at it too. As a thinly-veiled ploy to improve his own game, Steve talks to two titans of the sport: Greg “The Shark” Norman, who was the world’s top-ranked golfer for more than six years; and Mark Broadie, a Columbia profe ... Show More
42m 15s
May 16
22. Sal Khan: “If It Works for 15 Cousins, It Could Work for a Billion People.”
Khan Academy grew out of Sal Khan’s online math tutorials for his extended family. It’s now a platform used by more than 115 million people in 190 countries. So what does Khan want to do next? How about reinventing in-school learning, too? Find out why Steve nearly moved to Silic ... Show More
43m 54s
Recommended Episodes
Nov 2009
#32 Books and Ideas: "Unscientific America"
Episode 32 of Books and Ideas is an interview with Sheril Kirshenbaum, co-author of "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future." Our emphasis is on the importance of scientists learning to communicate about their work to political leaders and fellow cit ... Show More
52m 54s
May 2022
196 | Judea Pearl on Cause and Effect
To say that event A causes event B is to not only make a claim about our actual world, but about other possible worlds — in worlds where A didn't happen but everything else was the same, B would not have happened. This leads to an obvious difficulty if we want to infer causes fro ... Show More
1h 16m
Sep 2021
164 | Herbert Gintis on Game Theory, Evolution, and Social Rationality
How human beings behave is, for fairly evident reasons, a topic of intense interest to human beings. And yet, not only is there much we don't understand about human behavior, different academic disciplines seem to have developed completely incompatible models to try to explain it ... Show More
1h 29m
Oct 2022
Mariátegui, Critical Thinking, and Andean Futures
Alexander Scott speaks with renowned intellectual and LAP contributing editor Professor Ronaldo Munck to discuss the July 2022 issue of LAP. Topics covered include the ideas and life of twentieth-century Marxist intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui, the critical thinking of some c ... Show More
34m 33s
Feb 2022
494. Why Do Most Ideas Fail to Scale?
<p>In a new book called <i>The Voltage Effect</i>, the economist John List — who has already revolutionized how his profession does research — is trying to start a scaling revolution. In this installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, List teaches us how to avoid false posi ... Show More
48m 54s
Nov 1980
The New Magicians
<p>British academic lawyer Professor Sir Ian Kennedy explores the concepts of modern medicine in the second Reith lecture in his series entitled 'Unmasking Medicine'.</p><p>In this lecture entitled 'The New Magicians', Sir Ian Kennedy compiles a list of the inappropriate directio ... Show More
28m 47s