You have a problem. It's a big professional problem. The problem is that Tom Hanks is busy.

Imagine that you're a producer of a big Hollywood motion picture.

Pre-production is wrapped.

You're about to go into production.

It's expensive.

Two weeks from now, you're going to start filming.

It's a psychological thriller, a lightweight one, maybe with a few laughs in it, about a psychiatrist and a patient.

The patient has problems and only the psychiatrist is able to help.

And yes, Tom Hanks would sign on to be the psychiatrist, but now Tom Hanks is busy.

Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of

akimbo.

Professor and author Scott Page has posed this question to lots of people, well-meaning

people, and the list that they come up with of the folks who might be eligible to take Tom Hanks's

place is pretty short. What if I put some boundaries on it? What if I say that the

person you need to pick has to have been in movies that did more than $2 billion in

total at the box office, a big name star.

And what if I told you that that person, it would be a bonus, had won an Academy Award or two?

Well, who would you come up with?

I'm wondering how many people listed Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheetle, Kate Blanchette, or

Merrill Streep, because all of them meet one or both of those requirements. If we go with our knee-jerk reaction to the easy obvious

choices, the short list, it's much harder to solve our problem. We learned this from Moneyball when we discovered

that a low capitalized baseball team could come in second place simply by drafting

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