Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He teaches at the University of Chicago.

Hey, so Levitt, we're gonna do something today that we've never done before on this program, which is big.

We've been putting out this podcast for, I think, almost four years, all free, and now we're gonna ask people for some support.

What do you think of that idea? Is that nuts?

Good luck. It's hard to give things away for free, and then ask for money later.

So Levitt, you've worked with some non-profits trying to raise money. What's considered a good response rate?

Let's say I send out a thousand mailers trying to raise money to help poor children around the world. What's a good response rate?

So if you're sending those out cold to people who've never given you money before, I think something like 1% 10 out of a thousand would be a really good number.

Our audience is a little bit different, right? Anybody who's listening to this is not a cold call.

So if we were to ask people to send money to make Freakonomics radio and keep it free, what kind of shots rate you think we'd get here?

You know what's hard here is that the mechanism for getting people to send is more difficult.

I would say once a day someone comes up to me and says, hey, I love the Freakonomics podcast. I listen to it while I jog or while I work out in the gym.

I think if you could actually get someone in mid jog or on the bike at the gym to be able to press a button and send money directly to us, I think you'd actually do okay.

The chance that someone's going to get down with their run, go back and take a shower and then log on to a computer and give you money, I think that's really close to zero.

So you think we'll raise close to zero dollars?

I do actually. All right, so can I just tell you listener not Steve Levitt?

This is a fantastic opportunity to prove a relatively smart person totally wrong.

Prove me wrong, I love to be proved wrong.

From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dupner.

Here's something I'd like you to try. During the course of the next day or week or month, whatever, keep track of how many different people and institutions come at you in one way or another with their hands out, asking for a donation.

They might be raising money to fight pediatric cancer, to protect a forest, maybe to get some Maverick politician elected or even to make a podcast.

Now, why do so many people come at us with their hands out? Because it works. Americans are an extraordinarily charitable people.

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