Brian Lear on WNYC.

So back when I was in school, I took an organic chemistry class, and my professor for that class was named Richard Feynman.

And he started on day one by telling us that he was not the Richard Feynman,

that his name was spelled differently, and there was another difference.

He had no Nobel Prizes to his name.

Well, I had never heard of the Richard Feynman, whoever he was.

I gathered from my chemistry professor that the Richard Feynman was a he was. I gathered from my chemistry professor that the Richard

Feynman was a physicist and had a Nobel Prize. So I thought, okay, fine, but I never thought

about him much since. Until, in the last couple of weeks, two things happened. One, I finally

saw the movie Oppenheimer, and Richard Feynman was portrayed in the film because

he worked on developing the atomic bomb with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. And two, our friend Stephen

Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio, popped up to see if I wanted him to come on the show to discuss

his latest Freakonomic series about Richard Feynman.

Now, Dubner usually explores the relationship between our ordinary lives and economics, right?

Our behavioral psychology around money, you might say. So why has he been doing his podcast

lately on a physicist who died more than 35 years ago. The answer very simply put is that

the Richard Feynman wasn't just a scientist, but also a voraciously curious human being

who was very into puzzles and drumming and lots of other things, and also taught sometimes

at the Esselin Institute in California,

where people explore different kinds of consciousness and humanistic psychology. The bottom line,

Dubner is very, very into him. So I thought between Stephen Dubner and the Richard Feynman,

how could this not be interesting? So hi, Stephen. Always good to have you. Welcome back to the non-free economics part

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