Coleman Strumpf
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
I, in fact, did with the rest of my family. And I will only say if you spend a whole day drinking Tang, if you even know what that is, you will not feel so good the next week.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
Yeah. Sports betting. Not the stuff you do on your phone, but the guy in the corner. I've done some work on cannabis, which we might talk a little bit more about. File sharing. File sharing, like stealing digital products.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
It's not as hard as you'd think. I'll tell you about sports betting. I was very interested in sports betting. And I one time went to Las Vegas, which was about the only place you could do sports betting. And I tried to wrangle up with one of the bookmakers. I was like, can you give me some information about what you guys do? And he laughed at me.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
So maybe kind of as a way of getting revenge on the guy, I ended up making a friend in Brooklyn's district attorney's office. And now I have a bunch of records on illegal bookmakers. So I still don't know a lot about what the guys in Las Vegas do, but I can tell you about a lot of guys in New York. So you blackmail people, essentially.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
Those of you who in the audience who are interested in cannabis might know a website.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
You might know an app called. You might know an app called Weedmaps. Those of you who have never used it, it's maybe like Yelp for pot. Fired up on your phone, put on the GPS, tells you all the stores near you. So I saw this app and I said, hmm, it'd be kind of cool if you could just get everything that's on that site and stockpile it.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
And if you spend a little time kicking around in the background, you can figure out a way of doing that. So I always have a lot of computers running. I had a bunch of computers for several years just pulling stuff off this site. So I have a list of all the stores. Now, how do I know who's legal and how do I know who's illegal? So the state of California publishes a list of the legal stores.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
So I could start using that, but the information's a little bit incomplete. So I had to look at different online sources, including Google Maps, to see stores magically turning from a kid's store into a weed store in Los Angeles. And you can kind of figure out through a lot of sweat Which ones are legal and which ones are not?
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
Yeah, they either make up a number, go down the street, look at the legal store, take a picture of that and use that number, or sometimes they just put up stuff that isn't even a valid number.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
Yeah, that's a great question. There's not a lot of... I guess, will among policymakers to do it. The people who would be doing the enforcement, the police, think about how hard this job is. If I say arrest people who are doing some activity, well, I just see somebody doing this activity. Now you need to say not just to somebody who
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
selling cannabis, but is it somebody who's licensed or unlicensed? They're literally doing the exact same thing. Some people are doing it legally. Some people are not doing it. It's not so easy.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
In the wake of prohibition, actually, you did see things like that for 15 years through the 1950s. You would have lots of arrests of people having illicit stills and things of that sort. Today, in cannabis, the illegal people are pretty sophisticated. So one of the things in this weed map state I have is I have a list of all the products. What are some of your favorites?
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
Yeah, well, I like to observe. Honestly, I'm a little out of date on them. Is that true? Yes. You're not a big... I took you for a big... Yeah, I definitely have that, yeah. But at any rate, so I am familiar with some of the big brands.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
Yeah, right. Well, maybe it's a gateway drug to being an economist. I don't really know. But at any rate, if you're... wanting to sort of pretend you're running a legitimate place, you'll take a name brand and you'll just switch a letter. And they literally get old containers or wrappers from legal stuff and they'll put it around the legal stuff.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
Yeah, and these are from a few years back, but I would say the number is probably still about whole.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
And on top of that, there's the social norm. I live in North Carolina where it's not so different from what I remember growing up. In New York, in San Francisco, all California, the norm about how acceptable is cannabis as a thing to be using, much more accepted today than it used to be. It's going to spill over to the illicit side as well. So I would argue demand is probably much higher.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
in the next, you know, five, 10 years? I usually, when I try to make a forecast, I look at these markets to answer the question rather than try to answer it on my own. Things look pretty promising, but everything is going to be governed by what a judge will maybe say about these things. There was a lot of enthusiasm about these markets this time.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
They did a pretty good job at forecasting the election. You argue they do, on average, better than polling, yes? Yeah, definitely. There's a fundamental difference between polls and these markets. The way a poll works, which is probably what most people in the audience are familiar with, is you talk to a bunch of people, the representative of all voters, and you see what they're thinking.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
These markets are supposed to work in a totally different way. You step outside your own experience and say, look, my goal presumably is to make some money at forecasting the election. Well, that has nothing to do with what I think in terms of who I like. I'm trying to guess what other people like.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
Everywhere and anywhere.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
This election was probably the best case example I could give of that. So when people are polled about certain candidates, they tend not to always say who they support. So traditionally, Donald Trump underperforms in polls.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
Right. So let me tell you about the person who was the most successful batter in 2024, who was a French citizen. He had a very similar view. He said, I don't think these polls are working very well, but I'm going to run my own poll. And so he asked a slightly different question, which was not, who do you support? Who do you think your neighbors support?
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
There's a little bit of work that suggests that people are a little bit more realistic about thinking about that question than what they themselves think. Anyway, he was so confident in what he found from this poll that he put down $80 million on Donald Trump to win. And yeah, he made $80 million today.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
I'm pretty skeptical of pollsters getting into the 21st century. Forget about what I've just been saying. Being a pollster is infinitely more difficult today than it was 40 years ago. Absence of landlines. Yeah. You know, and I know who's calling and my phone doesn't equate to where I physically am. It's just very hard to do polls.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
The kind of advancements that they've made are relatively marginal, in my opinion.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
San Francisco definitely had their own markets, many of which were relatively big money, millions of dollars in today's dollars. They would take place in like cigar stores and things like that. We're talking 1900, a long time ago. Some people had money, but a lot of people didn't have money. But there were fewer things to bet on back then. So people were really into betting on elections.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
And so they would do these non-monetary bets if you didn't have the cash. They called them freak bets. I don't know. Freak? Freak bets. I don't know. F-R-E-A-K? As in a certain book that I'm familiar with, yes.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
1916. So this is Woodrow Wilson getting reelected. And two people were betting, and the loser had to get dressed as a woman. These are two men. In public and private? In public and within a mile of here. And go out and parade around? And they would parade around. And so this one guy did. Apparently it was not legal to dress as a woman at that point in time.
Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
This guy got arrested and then his friends came and bailed him out apparently.