Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner, and welcome to this special bonus episode.

If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know that Steve Levit, my Freakonomics

friend and co-author, is an economist at the University of Chicago.

You also know that when I was starting this podcast 10 years ago, Levit thought it was

a pretty dumb idea.

Now, to his credit, probably was a dumb idea back then, but over time, podcasting became

a real thing, and Freakonomics radio became my real job.

Levit, meanwhile, kept doing all the things an economics professor does.

This includes writing academic papers.

And you may recall that Levit recently checked out how often his three most recent papers

have been cited by other researchers.

And I got on to Google Scholar and the sum of the citations across those three papers

was six.

And I sat down to myself, wait a second, I just spent three years pouring my heart into

something that has basically been read by six academics and nobody else in the world.

What am I doing?

It was around this time that Levit decided that maybe podcasting wasn't so dumb after all,

because whenever you talk about one of his new papers on a Freakonomics radio episode,

he'd hear from a lot more than six people.

This show has a global audience of more than four million people.

So Levit, being a pretty great fellow and an economist, he decided that he should probably

take his supply to where the demand is.

...