Freakonomics Radio
Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)
Wed, 22 Jan 2025
Stephen Dubner, live on stage, mixes it up with outbound mayor London Breed, and asks economists whether A.I. can be “human-centered” and if Tang is a gateway drug. SOURCES:London Breed, former mayor of San Francisco.Erik Brynjolfsson, professor of economics at Stanford UniversityKoleman Strumpf, professor of economics at Wake Forest University RESOURCES:"SF crime rate at lowest point in more than 20 years, mayor says," by George Kelly (The San Francisco Standard, 2025)"How the Trump Whale and Prediction Markets Beat the Pollsters in 2024," by Niall Ferguson and Manny Rincon-Cruz (Wall Street Journal, 2024)"Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation," by Aidan Toner-Rodgers (MIT Department of Economics, 2024) EXTRAS:"Why Are Cities (Still) So Expensive?" by Freakonomics Radio (2020)
Full Episode
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. Every once in a while, we get out of our recording studio and take Freakonomics Radio on the road. We recently put on a live show in San Francisco at the historic Sidney Goldstein Theater. If you were in the audience that night, thank you. We had a blast. Hope you did too. If you were not there, this bonus episode is for you.
It is a recording of that show edited down to podcast length. We have got another live show coming up in Los Angeles on February 13th. L.A. has been through so much with the wildfires, so much destruction and death and fear. All of us who love that place are eager for its recovery. And we are hoping to do our tiny part just by showing up. A portion of our ticket sales will go to relief efforts.
I hope you'll join us if you can. You can get tickets at Freakonomics.com slash live shows. One word. That's Thursday, February 13th in Los Angeles. One of our guests will be the inimitable Ari Emanuel. Okay, here now is what happened in San Francisco. As always, thanks for listening. There are so many of you. This does not seem like a fair fight. There's one of me and all of you.
I'm sure it'll work out okay, but... Okay, yeah. The hecklers begin. Okay. So in case it's not clear, this is not what we typically do. I assume most of you know Freakonomics Radio. You wouldn't be here otherwise. The show that we make is the opposite of a live show. OK, the show we make is really I'm a writer and it's a writer's show. We come up with an idea. We do a bunch of research.
We figure out what kind of people to interview. Then we prepare for the interviews. We do a lot of interviews. We start to put together a script, a draft script. We rewrite it. We start to mix the tape. It takes many, many, many, many hours to make one episode. And you know, that's the way we like it. Tonight, we've got like an hour and a half or two hours. That's it. We have no pause button.
We have no reconsideration. It's just us here together. So if you're up for that, I think we're going to have a very good time together. That's the intention, at least. When I was a kid, I was very shy. I still am, truthfully. I had another problem in addition to shyness, which was that I really was curious. I wanted to find out stuff. In the old days, it took a lot of effort to find out stuff.
You'd have to go to the library, or you would have to ask an adult. And when you're shy, asking a stranger questions was not so easy. My solution to all of that was to become a journalist, where... Okay, I've never heard journalism applauded before, so thank you.
So becoming a writer, becoming a journalist really solved both problems, because all of a sudden you have permission to ask anybody any question, and you're getting to find out stuff all the time. Now, in the old days, writing for newspapers and magazines, and I wrote books for a while, it was old-fashioned, fun, physical, analog labor.
You'd go out with people, might be writing a piece about one person over many weeks or months. You'd follow them around, might be a whole scene. And you'd come back after those weeks or months with a whole bunch of cassette tapes that you would then transcribe yourself as a writer. That's how you got to really know the material. You'd come back with all these notebooks full of stuff.
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