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Thank you. I'm Adi Ignatius.

I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR Ideacast.

Thank you. I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR Ideacast. Alison, it's been interesting to live through the evolution in economics.

You know, in the 70s and the 80s, you had this early explosion of behavioral economics, right, led by people like Daniel Connman, Richard

Thaler. And then 20 years ago, we had the Freakonomics phenomenon. So you had Stephen Levitt,

an economist and Stephen Dubner, a journalist who wrote a book that popularized all of this

thinking that attempted to show the hidden side of everything, what truly motivates us as

economic actors. And the field took off behind this basic tagline that conventional wisdom is wrong.

Are you a fan? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was the book that made economics cool. Everyone

wanted to read it. Everyone wanted to replicate it. And I do think it changed the way that companies think about consumer behavior and also the way that managers thought about getting the best out of their employees.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think it opened our eyes to a lot of phenomena that were not immediately clear. I think it also changed academia in some ways that professors saw the success

of Malcolm Gladwell's books, of Freakonomics, and thought, well, wait a minute, I can do

research that is also broadly relevant, that has popular appeal, and I can make a name for myself.

So I think the book has actually had a profound impact. So 20 years later, I spoke to Stephen

Dubner, the journalist, part of the duo, and we talked about the book's legacy. We talked about

what they got wrong, what they got right, and why and how we could find the hidden side of

everything. So here's that conversation. All right, so Stephen, welcome to the HPR

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