Hey there podcast listeners, this week's episode is a variety show recorded in front of a live audience.

Our guests include the president and co-founder of a huge ride share company that recently went public,

in which isn't named Uber. You'll also hear from a futurist, a hydrologist, a microbiologist,

and a psychologist with a very interesting sidekick. It begins right now.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the host of Freakonomics Radio, Steven Dubner.

Thank you so much. This week we are coming to you from San Francisco with live music by Luis Guerra

Freakonomics Radio Orchestra and as co-host, would you please welcome the University of Pennsylvania Psychology professor and the author of grit Angela Duckworth.

Angela, I understand that you before you were super gritty taught math here in San Francisco is that true?

That is the correct statement I taught at Lowell High School.

One thing that's interesting about math is that unbeknownst to most students, actually girls get higher report card grades in math than boys on average.

It's really a striking advantage and yet boys are dramatically more confident than girls in that subject.

Good to know we'll see if we can extend that stereotype tonight.

Angela, for these live recordings, we sometimes play a game called Tell Me Something I Don't Know, where we bring onstage a series of guests from various disciplines and we ask them to tell us about their work.

You and I asked some questions and ultimately our live audience will vote for their favorite guest. Maybe it's someone they'd like to hear more from in a future episode.

The voting criteria are very simple. Number one, did they tell us something we truly did not know? Number two was it worth knowing and number three was it demonstrably true and to help with that demonstrably true part, we've hired a real time fact checker.

He is the head of global insights at Qualtrics and he's co-founder of Five for the Fight the Campaign to eradicate cancer, which please welcome Mike Maughan.

Mike Maughan.

Mike, do you have any San Francisco connections as well?

I grew up in Utah, which is where Steve Young went to college. Interestingly, a lot of us were 49ers fans when we were young and when we were memorizing our times tables as we got to like seven times seven instead of just saying 49, everyone would be like 49ers.

When we got to seven times six, we would say Jerry Rice because he was 42.

Wasn't Jerry Rice number 80?

Yeah, yep. So to Harkin, the angeles thing about men having misplace confidence in their math abilities, we were really sure he was number 42, big fans out there, big fans.

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