Notes From An Imperfect Paradise (Ep

Notes From an Imperfect Paradise (Ep. 380) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.
com/podcast/live-los-angeles/
freakonomics.com
Notes From an Imperfect Paradise (Ep.

380) - Freakonomics
by Stephen J. Dubner
43-54 minutos
Recorded live in Los Angeles. Guests include Mayor Eric Garcetti,

the “Earthquake Lady,” the head of the Port of L.A., and a scientist
with NASA’s Planetary Protection team. With co-host Angela
Duckworth, fact-checker Mike Maughan, and the worldwide debut
of Luis Guerra and the Freakonomics Radio Orchestra.
Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or

elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for
readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the
episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.
Stephen DUBNER: This week, Freakonomics Radio being recorded

live at the Theater at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Our
show is typically produced in a studio. Tonight, not only do we have
the pleasure of working with a live audience, but also live music. So
would you please welcome, in their worldwide debut, the composer
behind the music you hear on our show every week: Luis Guerra
and the Freakonomics Radio Orchestra. And also joining us tonight
as co-host: the University of Pennsylvania psychology professor —
she’s also the author of the great book Grit: the Power of Passion
and Perseverance — would you please welcome Angela
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Notes From an Imperfect Paradise (Ep. 380) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/live-los-angeles/
Duckworth. Angela, hello.
Angela DUCKWORTH: Hi Stephen.
DUBNER: I’m dying to know what you’re working on that we should

all know about.
DUCKWORTH: I recently did an eight-minute intervention. We

asked students to give advice to other students. So we didn’t give
them money, we didn’t give them information, we simply asked
them to help other kids. They answered questions about how not to
procrastinate, how to stay off their cell phone, in eight minutes. And
then we followed them for a full marking period. And the students,
just by being asked for their advice got more motivated and did
better in school.
DUBNER: So just telling other people what they should do with

their lives makes you better off?
DUCKWORTH: It’s not intuitive because everyone does that all the
time. But in this particular case, the way we asked the questions,
yeah.
DUBNER: I like it. Angela, as you know, we sometimes play a

game during these live shows, called “Tell Me Something I Don’t
Know.” And what we do is we bring onstage a series of guests from
various backgrounds and disciplines. And we will ask them to tell us
something particularly interesting about their field. You and I will
then ask them some questions. And then later on, our live audience
will pick a winner.
The criteria are very simple. No. 1: did they tell us something we
truly did not know? No. 2: was it worth knowing? And No. 3: was it
demonstrably true? And to help with that demonstrably true part,
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would you please welcome our real-time fact checker. He is the

head of Global Insights at Qualtrics, he’s the co-founder of Five for
the Fight, the campaign to eradicate cancer: Mike Maughan. Hey
Mike, first time in L.A. for us doing the show. Do you want to tell us
some little-known facts about L.A.?
Mike MAUGHAN: So, L.A. is a unique place. It is illegal to drive

more than 2,000 sheep down Hollywood Boulevard. A shocking
number of people have been arrested for that in the last two
centuries. The L.A. coroner’s office has a gift shop — just weird.
And while San Francisco probably wants to own it, L.A. is regarded
as the birthplace of the internet because the first transmission was
sent from U.C.L.A. up to Menlo Park in 1969. Now, unfortunately,
this is also the birthplace of the Kardashians and animatronic
robots.
DUBNER: Win some, lose some. Mike Maughan, thank you so

much. I think it’s time to get started. Our first guest tonight, would
you please welcome — he is your mayor: Eric Garcetti.
Eric GARCETTI: Wow. Welcome to the City of Angels. Great to

have you guys here.
DUBNER: Mayor Garcetti, we New Yorkers feel that we’ve got a

pretty accurate picture of life in California, especially southern
California. It’s basically earthquakes, wildfires, and Kardashians. So
I’m just curious: is there anything else going on here, generally?
GARCETTI: Well, we are looking into getting an animatronic

Kardashian, so the two things will come together soon. But, no,
That’s pretty much the full sum of this amazing city. It is a very
simple place, but I like to call it sort of an imperfect paradise.
DUBNER: What in your view are the imperfect parts that you are
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most concerned about?
GARCETTI: I think our biggest challenges are around poverty;

housing connected to that especially, homelessness; traffic and
transportation. And then I’d say the third thing that we are faced
with is trying to figure out how we can take our pluralism and make
that work. I think we do a pretty darn good job compared to other
places. Los Angeles I like to say, it’s a place where everybody feels
like they belong. A lot of people like “diversity” and “inclusion” as
words, I think they’re less good. You know, the hometown buffet is
diverse. “Inclusion” implies someone’s powerful and is including
you. But “belonging” is a great equalizer.
DUBNER: So let’s talk about transportation a bit. Most people from

not here, like us, when we think about L.A. — I think of it as a
geographically massive place which therefore requires a big
dependence on cars, which therefore means a lot of congestion.
And then when it comes to public transport we think of slow buses
and not many trains. So tell me where that perception is right and
wrong and what you’re doing about it.
GARCETTI: Well, we used to have the best public transportation

system probably in the country. The red car and the yellow cars.
We can go through the conspiracies of whether it was the car
companies and the oil companies who killed them off.
DUBNER: Go through those conspiracies.
GARCETTI: Well, okay. Speaking of Roger Rabbit. It’s mostly not

true that there was some conspiracy behind it. We’ve always been
on the cutting edge of transportation, and freeways actually worked
for a long time. It was 20 minutes anywhere. We were building the
future, the way people talk about autonomous vehicles now, the
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way they talked about subways before that. We thought for a while,
rail cars are so yesterday, let’s just get rid of all them because cars
will be here forever. That led to a problem or two.
But we’re changing that. I mean, we just passed the largest

transportation initiative in American history at the local level. We’re
going to be building 15 rapid transit lines at once. Today, we’re
already the third largest light rail line. But it’s like winning the lottery
today in L.A. Like, if you’re lucky enough to live on that line and
work over there and it might take you— you’re like, “Wow, I won.”
We want to make that more than 5 percent, which is what it is
today.
Second, I think we’re solving it by trying to plan better communities.

We used to segregate away where we work, where we play, where
we live. And now we’re trying to build communities where you can
actually walk. And third, we’re on the cutting edge of technology we
are saying yes to testing things here whether it is connected cars
and autonomous vehicles, whether it’s things like Hyperloop or the
Boring Company.
DUBNER: Was that Elon whooping?
GARCETTI: Yeah, that was Elon Musk. If you look under your seats
right now there’s actually a free Tesla key for everybody. You’re a
winner. You’re a winner.
DUCKWORTH: It’s inspiring to listen to you. But if there is one

secular trend that is indisputable when you look at generations of
young people who grew up in the ’60s compared to the ’70s, and
then on to the millennials, that young people are getting more
cynical and less trusting of politicians and political institutions. What
is your message to the young people today?
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GARCETTI: Well two things. You diagnose it exactly right. I think

it’s— I’m going to get fact checked on this, shoot. There’s some
polling company that every year polls America’s trust in institutions
— there’s 15 different institutions and only three in America are
above 50 percent. Police just barely, military, and small businesses.
So journalism, way underwater. Not surprisingly, the White House,
way underwater. Congress way underwater.
People don’t trust big institutions because we’ve read so many

stories of folks letting them down. “Oh I believed in God, but then I
read a story about priests. Oh I believed in journalists, and then I
came on this podcast.” Stories like that where your faith is just
fundamentally challenged. But anyway, my message is that
something like politics isn’t something that people — like I own. It’s
not about mayors or members of Congress or your president or
your governor; it’s about you. You either exercise the power you
have, or you cede that to someone else.
And every day at the local level, I have this great brotherhood and
sisterhood of mayors both in the United States and globally, who
don’t have the option to argue about stuff. We have to address
global warming because there’s fires right next to us. We have to
deal with inequality because it’s on our streets. So don’t just leave it
up to elected leaders, get engaged get involved, and don’t cede the
power to Washington before you even exercise it.
DUBNER: Mr. Mayor, I understand that your administration moved

L.A.’s city mail to Gmail, making it the first, I guess, major city to
have their email in the cloud. Is that true?
GARCETTI: Yes.
DUBNER: Is it also true that you required all city workers to use the
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same password, which was “awesomemayor12345”?
GARCETTI: Yeah, I mean it’s just the default password, you can
change it afterwards. But 92 percent of them haven’t. So, I enjoy
reading their emails.
DUBNER: Now, speaking of you knowing so well the data — L.A.

was recently acknowledged, I believe, as the best U.S. city at using
data to drive governance.
GARCETTI: It’s like being the tallest building in Wichita, but I’ll take
it. No, all kidding aside, we’re proud of opening up our data and
sharing it with journalists and hackers and people who can use this
data. I mean the positive sense of hackers who can come in and do
things to empower the city.
DUBNER: Can you tell us something that you learned through the
use of administrative data that otherwise — either the identification
of a problem or the idea of a solution — that you wouldn’t have
known?
GARCETTI: So everybody’s watched Chinatown, the great movie,

how we stole water from Owens Valley.
DUBNER: Owens Valley is what — who administers it?
GARCETTI: It’s a number of counties up there that are run by those

supervisors, but Los Angeles, the City of Los Angeles — I learned
this — our land holdings in Owens Valley are larger than the entire
city of L.A. And I realized we need to do something special because
of the drought. And I found out, here’s the statistic, that 260 million
gallons of water a day was going from our toilets and our sinks to
the Hyperion water treatment plant right next to LAX. And we were
cleaning it up to no longer be contaminated and then flushing it out
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to the ocean. And that was about three times the equivalent of the
L.A. Aqueduct.
So what William Mulholland had engineered to come to L.A., we

could essentially quadruple the amount of water in this town from
those two sources by simply recycling 100 percent of that, which
we announced two months ago after working on this for a few years
we would do, and we will accomplish. But yeah I mean I think
literally was one of those moments where if I hadn’t read that
number I don’t think I would’ve made that decision and I don’t think
we would have done the biggest infrastructure change to our water
in a hundred years.
DUCKWORTH: So what were you like when you were 16 years

old? What was your social group?
GARCETTI: My social group was theater nerds.
DUCKWORTH: You were a theater nerd.
GARCETTI: Yeah. There’s ten of us here and we all keep in touch.

Thanks for coming.
DUCKWORTH: Like stage crew?
GARCETTI: No, I was on the stage. And I was a budding activist, I

would say. I mean, I was this weird mix that’s reflective of this city.
I’m your average Angelino — I have an Italian last name, I’m half-
Mexican, half-Jewish. I was really into human rights, and I found my
place in those two things, being in and of the world, trying to pursue
human-rights stuff and getting on a stage when you’re scared as —
I don’t know, can we swear here?
DUBNER: Sure.
GARCETTI: Scared as s—.
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DUBNER: I mean, it’s your city. You shouldn’t be asking us if you

can swear.
GARCETTI: You guys can all swear tonight.
DUBNER: Thanks. Appreciate it. Oh speaking of favors, Luis

Guerra, our bandleader, apparently has a few parking tickets.
GARCETTI: Oh, I know. And I thank him for those. Keep on doing
it, man. We need that revenue. More firefighters, longer hours at
our library. Keep parking.
DUBNER: So let me ask you this. There are roughly half a million
Democratic candidates running for president in 2020, one of which
is not you. Many of which are less prominent than you, however. So
why not? And don’t, please, if you don’t mind, give me the standard
answer about loving your current job and wanting to serve out your
term. Because we know that that stops no one else.
GARCETTI: I can only speak for myself, but it should. Look, in

politics, people live so much of their careers oftentimes in the future
that they ignore the present and what they have. And that’s not just
for politicians, that’s all of us. We’re always like, “Cool, I got an
Apple iPhone 8, when’s 9 coming out?” It is something that we have
to discipline ourselves, and I went through it and I thought I had
something I still would have something to add to it. But it’s very
difficult to be the C.E.O. of a city — and if you have a conscience,
not run that city. If a teachers strike, like we had in January, breaks
out or an earthquake comes, God forbid. Life’s long and we’ll figure
out the future, I would say.
DUBNER: So from what I’ve read, your style of governance seems

to be really collaborative as opposed to the command-and-control
or shout-and-scream that we see in Washington a lot. If you could
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sort of magically invoke one change in federal government that

would produce more collaboration, or at least less outright
intransigence, what would you do?
GARCETTI: So in D.C. we have this repeal-and-replace mentality.

As soon as I can get into government I’m gonna just repeal
everything that the last folks did and replace it with my philosophy.
And we see compromise as some sort of dirty word, and I think
that’s really toxic. At the local level, we can’t afford to do that.
You know, we raised the minimum wage here in L.A., but we also
reduced our city’s business tax. Think about that for a second. If
you’re a Democrat, you’re supposed to raise both of those things. If
you’re Republican, you’re supposed to lower both of them. But we
know putting more money in the pocket of folks who are gonna
spend it on Main Street is good for the economy, as is lowering the
city’s business tax that we have based on gross receipts, which is
anti-business.
So if I could change one thing in Washington this is totally radical

but I would maybe get rid of political parties altogether. I think our
founders envisioned factions, not parties, and it’s the most
destructive thing we have right now.
DUBNER: Yeah. Sign me up for that. So let me just ask you — this
is an even less palatable idea to most people than yours. But even
if the people going in have the best intentions — which I truly
believe they often do, they want to serve the public good — that
once you get into the system your incentives change, that rather
than long-termism, which we want for policy, you get involved in a
lot of short-termism, in terms of consolidating power and getting re-
elected. So, from an economic perspective, I could see perhaps
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aligning incentives better by, let’s say, rewarding elected officials

financially by setting up some revenue-share that pays off over the
long term if the projects that they work on actually work out.
GARCETTI: Here’s a way that you could sell that. Instead of talking
about redistribution, talk about the idea of pre-distribution. The idea
is sovereign-wealth funds. So maybe it’s not a reward for the
politician or the elected official but for all of us in which I would have
a stake too. That if we are able to do something that has some
payoff, we put 20 percent of that into some public good.
But it’s not just a check that’s after the fact. It would say we’d go
back to state universities having free tuition. Not just something that
we figure out afterwards by taking more money from the super
wealthy or from corporations, but actually something that’s an
investment at the front end. So then I would have an incentive.
Because I do think it’s a caricature that people who are elected get
more and more disconnected. I mean, we pursued the Olympics
and won the Olympics and Paralympics for 2028. And people are
like, “Oh well, you don’t care about the Olympics, you’re not going
to even be mayor then if there’s cost overruns.” And I say, “No, I’m
going to be worse than a mayor. I’m going to be a taxpayer living
here in Los Angeles.”
DUBNER: Most economists argue that when cities or regions go for

a big public event like the Olympics or conventions, World Cup and
so on, that usually, fiscally, it turns out not to be good for the city. I
know L.A. has successfully done the Olympics before. Obviously
you think it can work well here again. Why? Why is L.A. different —
is it because of the existence of the infrastructure?
GARCETTI: It’s our infrastructure, and the way we do the Olympics.
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So we’ve had it twice before. In 1932, we turned a million-dollar

profit. In 1984, we introduced a whole new model with sponsorship
and kind of saved the Olympics. The U.S. Olympic Committee was
broke, and we made hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s the
infrastructure. And people do things like build a new railway to
Sochi. Well that’s not the Olympics. That was a $50 billion or
whatever it was railway that people put into the Olympics as if that’s
an inherent cost of the Olympics—
DUBNER: It’s a boondoggle. And you’re getting your boondoggles

in early now so they can—
GARCETTI: Better, better than that. We delayed until 2028, let

Paris go first in 2024 and we negotiated $160 million up front. So
$16 million a year has been going into doubling the number of kids
who get swim classes. And African-American, Latino kids, over half
of them don’t know how to swim and it’s the second-leading
accidental killer of kids under 12. So we are putting into public good
now.
And the main reasons why L.A. can get away with it and other
places are right to avoid it is we’re not building an Olympic village,
we’re using U.C.L.A., so we’re just renting those rooms. We’ve got
all the infrastructure, the most expensive stadium in human history
has been built without public subsidy in Inglewood here for the
Rams and the Chargers, we’re going to use that. We have the
Coliseum, we have the Staples Center, so we’re just renting the
incredible sports facilities we already have here. We have a
velodrome, we’ve got tennis courts. So, most other cities are smart
to not bid, but we hope to get the Olympics to chill out on needing
to build so many new things.
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DUBNER: So the moral of the story is the Olympics should only be

held in Los Angeles.
GARCETTI: Correct.
DUBNER: There’s one question I want to ask you, and we ask this
to a lot of substantial people: What’s something that you believed
for a long time to be true until you found out that you were wrong?
GARCETTI: Well, I mentioned it a bit already. I think that I was one

of those Democrats who always thought you can never lower taxes.
And I think that I’ve seen in practice that businesses do make their
decisions based on what their taxes are. That’s definitely one.
I think the other thing— I used to think you could dismiss people’s
fears, and let’s say in a town hall meeting where people don’t want
a homeless shelter in their neighborhood, that it was okay to just
say, “You’re wrong,” or that somebody is racist about something, or
this, that, and the other. And I realized over time you have to
understand people’s fears, that they usually come from a real place,
and until you understand that, you can’t transform it.
DUBNER: Mike Maughan, the mayor told us a lot of things about

Los Angeles. Any facts we need to be concerned with?
MAUGHAN: So a couple of things that are interesting. He was

rated one of the top five most dateable mayors in America, despite
the fact that he’s married to the incredible Amy Wakeland.
GARCETTI: Thank you. I was going to say, I’m not dateable at all.
MAUGHAN: I did want to say one one thing about diversity which
was interesting. There is a large study that just came out that ranks
L.A. itself, not greater Los Angeles, as the 63rd most diverse city in
terms of racial and ethnic diversity. It moves up to the eighth most
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diverse city when you take into account income, education,

language, industry, class, age, religion. etc.
The most interesting thing I think you talked about was how
hometown buffets also have diversity. You’ll be interested to know
that in Canada, some buffets offer jellied moose nose. In Japan,
you can get tuna eyeballs. But most impressive was a man in
Springfield, Massachusetts, who ate all the diversity and was
kicked out of a buffet after spending more than seven hours on site
eating more than 50 pounds of food. So it is possible to get all the
diversity at once.
DUBNER: Thank you Mike Maughan, and thanks especially to

Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles. Our next guest is a
seismologist at Caltech, and she’s a leading authority on
earthquake risk. Would you please welcome Lucy Jones. It was so
interesting to me that people clapped for earthquakes. So tell us
something we don’t know about earthquakes, let’s start there.
Lucy JONES: I think most people think of California as a place with

a lot of earthquakes. The reality is we don’t have enough. Now
maybe that’s only something a seismologist is going to say, but we
can look at the geology and see how many we should have, and
especially the last couple of decades have been particularly quiet.
We call it an earthquake drought, and the only downside of it is it
leads to complacency. People think that this is what we have to be
ready for and we need to remember that in the long run we get
more.
DUBNER: Very interesting. So for 20 years, that timescale is

probably just not significant when you’re thinking earthquakes, yes?
JONES: On the larger ones. That’s right. And actually if you want to
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see some really interesting debates, watch geologists try to do

statistics. A lot of us struggle on how to do it correctly and we argue
over it. But if you go to small enough earthquakes then you have a
lot of them and it’s statistically significant that the last 20 years is
quite a bit quieter than the previous century.
DUBNER: So quick two-part question. I want you to tell us about

earthquake prediction and how it’s changed over recent decades.
And then related to that, what can you tell us about the probability
of a big bad earthquake, let’s say in California in the next let’s say
10, 20, and 50 years?
JONES: Okay. I’ll start with the last one and just say, the big
earthquake on the San Andreas 7.8, 8, something like that, is
absolutely inevitable. Just give me enough time.
DUBNER: Enough time, we’re talking decades, centuries, what?
JONES: Well all right. So we average 150 years—
DUBNER: Can I just say, you sound a little too excited about the
probability.
JONES: I don’t get to create my own experiments I have to wait for

what the earth is going to give me. And I came in here in my first
decade, we had a lot of earthquakes. We had Whittier Narrows, we
had Northridge, we had Loma Prieta, and then for the next 25 years
at the end of my career, nothing. I miss them. But I realize that not
everybody else does.
The problem is that the pattern really is random. I can give you a
rate. I can do the earthquake climate if you will. But what we don’t
have is the particular storm. You know when the rain’s coming in
tonight and my iPhone says there’s a 50 percent chance of rain
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starting at 11:00, that’s because they can measure the clouds

coming in. There’s nothing that has to come in for the earthquake to
happen, or if there is, it happens for every earthquake and there’s
— there’s an average an earthquake once every three minutes in
Southern California.
DUCKWORTH: So what do you mean that it’s random? Do you

really mean that it’s random?
JONES: Yeah, statistically as far as we can tell it really is random.

Now you think, okay, we’re building up the stress on the fault. The
earthquakes should happen when the stress is built up. The
problem is that the earthquakes actually happen at stresses much
smaller than the breaking strength of the fault, and it’s like if it goes
unstable then we go into a different mode, and dynamic friction is
much weaker than static friction. And so the timing is controlled by
when you happen to get a little break just somewhere on the fault
and it goes unstable. We aren’t actually building up to the full
strength of the fault.
DUCKWORTH: So does that mean there will never be a time where

we can really predict earthquakes?
JONES: I believe we will never predict earthquakes. Now notice my

qualifier, I’m a scientist, I don’t say absolutes. The fundamental is:
do magnitude ones and magnitude sevens begin in exactly the
same way? If they do, there’s nothing to predict. You don’t want me
to predict the ones. And as far as we can tell at this point, the ones
and the sevens start in the same way.
DUBNER: I know you’re excited for the next big earthquake

because it’ll keep you busy, which is not a bad reason to want an
earthquake. But most people I would say would probably rather not
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have a big earthquake for obvious reasons: loss of life and damage
and on and on. So let’s talk a little bit about, I guess what you’d call
earthquake risk management. Tell us one smart thing and one
dumb thing that California has done to manage earthquake risk.
JONES: So the really smart thing that Mayor Garcetti did is listen to
me. He invited me to City Hall. We had a long discussion. We
ended up creating a cooperative project where the U.S. Geological
Survey, who was my employer at the time, put me in City Hall and
together we created the resilience plan. The two biggest things
generally — we know which are the bad buildings that are going to
fall down, and we have mandated repairs. The owners have to
spend the money to fix those buildings, so they don’t kill people.
DUBNER: What kind of money are we talking about for retrofitting?
JONES: Billions. I mean there’s about 15,000 buildings involved.
DUBNER: And it’s paid by the owners, right?
JONES: And if it’s a rent-controlled apartment, then it’s split 50/50

with the tenants, but they’re not allowed to put the whole cost onto
the tenants. The concrete or commercial buildings, the owner pays
for it and he can change his rent as needed or he can choose to
tear it down.
DUCKWORTH: Can I ask, you said that the seven is inevitable?

Like Superman, the first movie — I mean what does this look like?
JONES: I actually watched that movie with a class of geologists.

We got thrown out of the theater. We can look at the geology, and
Los Angeles is moving to San Francisco. In just five million years
we will be a suburb of San Francisco. And that is inevitable. And it’s
not going to be stopped. Plate tectonics goes on. The question is,
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are we going to take the next step in it tonight or next year or 50

years from now.
DUCKWORTH: And these policies that are building the right

infrastructures, do these apply to seven-level earthquakes?
JONES: Absolutely. We do pretty well in a magnitude six. All right.

We have had sixes that don’t kill people. So we are gradually
building it up. I mean it’s all a relative thing. We absolutely could
have a city resilient to it. We can’t stop all damage. We could do a
better job with our water system and all that. That Los Angeles
Aqueduct he was talking about, it crosses the San Andreas fault in
a wooden tunnel built in 1908. And the tunnel is nine feet in
diameter and the expected fault offset will be 12 feet, so it won’t
exist after the earthquake.
DUBNER: Okay, Mr. Awesome Mayor, what have you done about
that?
JONES: They are planning the engineering solution now.
DUBNER: S—. How much greater is the risk of dying in an

earthquake in California versus, let’s say New York?
JONES: Not much. We have a lot more earthquakes, but you have
a lot worse buildings. There was a study that said what’s the
expected money to be lost in the different urban areas. Los Angeles
is No. 1, San Francisco’s No. 2, Seattle’s No. 3, and New York is
No. 4.
DUBNER: I understand that earthquake insurance is not required in

California and that roughly just 15 percent of property owners have
it. Should it be required?
JONES: Oh, that’s a different policy question than science, but it is
18 of 30 28/06/2019 14:08
going to hurt our economy very badly. You can look at what
happened to San Francisco in 1906. It was the only city that
mattered on the West Coast in 1905. That earthquake happened
and essentially destroyed the whole city. The next decade is the
biggest growth decade in the history of Los Angeles. People gave
up on San Francisco and came south. Their economy went down
for decades, and you can argue that San Francisco never regained
its position.
DUBNER: Mike Maughan, Lucy Jones says the big one is coming,
and she can’t wait. Did you turn up any facts that are worth
revisiting?
MAUGHAN: There is in theory this sliver of land between the fault

in the ocean where that will break off and then L.A. would slide past
San Francisco, so that’s a real thing. I’d bet on that.
JONES: In five billion years.
MAUGHAN: Yeah, well sure. But what’s time? On a positive note,

earthquakes are the only natural disaster not affected by climate
change. Lucky us. A few things to add: we are in this earthquake
drought. We’re also in a drought of moral leadership, human
intelligence, and good Nicolas Cage movies.
DUBNER: Mike, thank you and Lucy Jones, thank you so much for
joining us.
* * *
DUBNER: Welcome back to Freakonomics Radio Live. My co-host

is Angela Duckworth. Our live fact checker is Mike Maughan and
we’ve got live music tonight from the Freakonomics Radio
Orchestra, which includes composer and bassist Luis Guerra; on
19 of 30 28/06/2019 14:08
drums, Mike Longoria; on guitar, Jimmy Messer; on horns and

strings, Dan Weinstein; and on keys and good vibes, Kahlil
Sabbagh.
Our next guest is executive director of the Port of Los Angeles:

Gene Seroka. Gene, I understand the Port of L.A. is the biggest
container port in the U.S., bringing in about 37 percent of imports.
Is that about right, for starters?
Gene SEROKA: Combined with Long Beach, we bring in 37

percent, but we account for about a fifth of all the traffic that moves
in the United States.
DUBNER: Okay, so I’d love you to tell us something we don’t know

about the Port of L.A. and us being neither port people nor L.A.
people, that could be pretty much anything.
SEROKA: One of our biggest exports is air.
DUBNER: Air.
SEROKA: Empty containers.
DUBNER: Oh, is this about China?
SEROKA: We’re pretty dependent as a nation on imports. So we’ve

got a balance of about two imports to every one export, and the
balance of those containers we work around the clock to get back
to Asia so they can get the next round of imports.
DUBNER: So this is containers deadheading their way back to

China to fill up to send us more stuff.
SEROKA: That’s exactly it.
DUBNER: Gotcha. Okay, so what are the mechanics, let’s say, and
logistics and costs of shipping full stuff vs. air.
20 of 30 28/06/2019 14:08
SEROKA: Well if you’re shipping a lot of air you’re losing money. So

you want to make sure you have round-trip economics, bringing
imports in and exports out. And even if you have to overreach and
get a little more market share in an area that you may not have the
relative strength in.
DUBNER: I am curious about the empty versus full ships. How has
that ratio changed over the last whatever, five or 10 years?
SEROKA: It’s remained pretty consistent. We as a country have

outsourced our manufacturing since the late ’70s, early ’80s, and us
as consumers want to go find the product as quickly as we can, and
we’re going to keep doing that because the price points are so
great. But what we’ve seen is that right now, the largest export from
the United States to Asia is waste paper.
DUBNER: I thought that was changing — that China is accepting

much less waste from us for recycling.
SEROKA: Yeah, the Green Fence Policy, this predated all the
debates that are happening between Washington and Beijing today.
But the idea is exactly as you said, Stephen, to try to clean up the
waste products that we ship back to China. Now wastepaper goes
back, gets refined, and it makes those corrugated boxes that ship
our TV’s and our washing machines back here to the U.S.
DUBNER: Big question. We’re in the middle, maybe, of a historic

confrontation between the U.S. and China on trade and tariffs. I’m
curious to know how this whole political chapter has been affecting
business at the port.
SEROKA: The numbers at the port today are at record highs. You
look under the hood, it’s a little bit different recently. We’ve seen a
lot of imports advanced to get underneath the tariffs or taxation,
21 of 30 28/06/2019 14:08
and we’ve seen a paucity of exports — or really a precipitous drop

of exports — because the retaliatory tariffs and the fact that those
goods aren’t as marketable as they have been in the past.
DUBNER: A drop in the exports because they don’t want the stuff
to get there with the uncertainty of knowing what the retaliatory
tariffs will be, or just because it’s already taken effect here?
SEROKA: A little bit of both.
DUBNER: Yeah. When things are going on in D.C. or Beijing, when

there’s disagreements and so on. Your logistics must run on a very,
very, very long time frame. And I’m curious to know when the
butterfly flaps its wings in one of those places, how long it takes to
get to you.
SEROKA: Yeah. Realistically speaking, it takes about six months of

thought that goes into bringing cargo back here to Los Angeles. So
there’s a merchandiser somewhere with a big retailer in the
Midwest that says I want to buy 20 million widgets. They put an
order into a factory. Those goods are manufactured. They’re put
into the supply chain and moved all the way through and get here
to L.A. So when you and I decide that we want to go online and buy
something and get next-day delivery, all of that has taken about six
months of thought beforehand.
DUBNER: I understand that the port caught more than 1,500 kilos
of meth that was being smuggled to Australia. So my first question
is: Isn’t meth really easy to make and shouldn’t Australians be able
to make their own? Was that question not in your purview as a—
SEROKA: No, I wouldn’t claim to be an expert there.
DUBNER: Okay. Let’s talk about contraband generally. I’m curious
22 of 30 28/06/2019 14:08
about port security. So tell us what you’re what you’re willing to

about people doing what they shouldn’t be doing with your ships
coming in or out.
SEROKA: Yeah. Port security is one of the biggest aspects of what

we do on a daily basis. We have one of the nation’s only sworn-in
civilian police forces. They work directly with all the allied agencies
and imagine, from the F.B.I. to the C.I.A., Secret Service, all kinds
of folks, to share intelligence and try to stop the bad guys. There
could be anything from getting into our systems to find out where
our money is flowing, how bank accounts are used both here and
overseas, to get ships to move in the wrong direction and cause
havoc. All of the above and much more.
DUBNER: And who’s doing that?
SEROKA: Bad guys.
DUBNER: Mike Maughan, Gene Seroka, who runs the Port of L.A.
SEROKA: America’s port, Stephen.
DUBNER: Oh, America’s port. Gene Seroka has been telling us

about the ins and outs of the port. Anything worth calling our
attention to?
MAUGHAN: So you mentioned that in January, the port caught a lot

of meth that was being smuggled to Australia. The drugs were
hidden in metal boxes labeled as loudspeakers. Now to Stephen’s
point, making meth apparently isn’t that hard. Don’t worry, I opened
an incognito browser to look at this. There are four primary ways to
make meth in the U.S., but they have a totally different method that
the Mexican cartels use. So it all depends on the flavor you like.
Last month, a large Australian newspaper ran a headline that says,
23 of 30 28/06/2019 14:08
“Meth remains our country’s illicit drug of choice!” Exclamation

point; they’re very thrilled about it. So there you have it.
DUBNER: Gene Seroka, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It

is time now for our final guest. She works at the Jet Propulsion Lab
in Pasadena. And she is specifically with a NASA division called
Planetary Protection. Would you please welcome Moogega
Stricker. Moogega, welcome.
Moogega STRICKER: Thank you.
DUBNER: It would seem that your division, Planetary Protection,

has something to do with fighting off— let’s say potential asteroid
strikes that would devastate the earth. Is that true?
STRICKER: That is the actual number-one thing that people usually

think. But it is wrong. So what I do is I focus on the microbial scale,
and protecting other planets from humans, making sure when we
explore other planets, bodies, asteroids, that we don’t contaminate
it with life that we find on Earth. Especially if there may be life that
exists there.
DUBNER: It is so interesting that we’re more concerned about

polluting other planets than ours.
DUCKWORTH: Did we do anything wrong with the previous moon

landings?
STRICKER: You know, the astronauts when they came back from
the moon, they splashed down in the ocean and if there was
something on the outside of the container that really could harm
humans, we would have been dead right there at splashdown.
DUCKWORTH: But what do you do, though? Like, you can’t go

through a car wash on your way back down from space.
24 of 30 28/06/2019 14:08
STRICKER: What you need to do when you bring something back

—humans back or samples back — you need to do a lot of great
creative engineering to have capsules within capsules or a
sterilization device so that you can prevent anything bad to come
back to Earth.
DUBNER: So is this mostly about Mars 2020, what you’re working

on?
STRICKER: Yeah, so my job is specifically focused on Mars. Mars

2020 is going to go to the surface of Mars, collect samples, and for
the very first time, package them in a way that they can come back
to Earth. We’ve never had a sample return mission from Mars.
DUBNER: Okay, so let me ask you this. You don’t sound like a very
excited person, I have to say — but what would really, really super-
duper excite you about Mars and getting stuff back?
STRICKER: Yeah. The most exciting and ultimate goal is, we’re
searching for life. And to be able to find signs of life and actually
definitively find a smoking gun, that would be just an exciting dream
come true, because it would answer the question: Are we alone in
the universe?
DUBNER: So what do you actually do in your job?
STRICKER: So a day in my life would be sitting in a very small

room with a bunch of engineers, scientists, and say, “Okay we’re
going to plug in the face of the rover onto the body of the rover,”
and before we do that, planetary protection, do you need to sample
the hardware? So we would go in with our sterile swabs, our wipes,
and we would actually scrub or swab the actual surface and go to
the lab and see what microbes are present on this component.
25 of 30 28/06/2019 14:08
DUBNER: What do you think about the microbes that you may
encounter elsewhere? And what are the either dangers or
potentially benefits of those?
STRICKER: So part two of my job, planetary protection, is when we

bring samples back, we have to make sure that it doesn’t harm
humans.
DUCKWORTH: So how do you do that? How can you tell?
STRICKER: So one method that was actually done is — for the

moon rocks — is feeding it to chickens. I’m not sure why they
selected chickens but it’s just one of those tests. How do you prove
that you’re not going to kill anybody?
DUCKWORTH: So I imagine that this is such a specific career that

not a lot of girls and boys think that they’re going to grow up to be
part of the planetary protection lead for Mars. So how did you end
up here?
STRICKER: I actually didn’t know planetary protection existed until

I was working on my Ph.D. So I was working on plasma
sterilizations and they had a project that used plasma to sterilize
spacecraft surfaces. Because it’s really tough. You can imagine
when you’re innovating these new materials and new spacecraft, a
lot of these aren’t capable of going through high-temperature heat
sterilization processes. So they need other alternative methods.
Plasma was one of those alternatives. So as an undergrad I studied
physics, and before that I was just the little kid that watched Carl
Sagan‘s The Cosmos and that really put me on the trajectory of, I
want to be an astrophysicist, this is what I want to do. And instead
of playing in the summertime, I would take classes. Started college
at 16 and I’m just like this is what I want to do. So, get out of my
26 of 30 28/06/2019 14:08
way.
DUBNER: So can I ask you, though, just to be clear, there are

some people at NASA who are protecting us from the asteroids?
STRICKER: Yes. Don’t worry, they exist. They’re doing their things.
DUBNER: Can you give me some detail on that, when you say
they’re doing their things. And also you’re called Planetary
Protection. Which I find to be a very misleading title, I’m not going
to lie to you. So what are what are they called?
STRICKER: They’re called Planetary Defense.
DUBNER: Yeah. All right.
STRICKER: Because they’re defending against the asteroids, the

impacts.
DUBNER: So let me ask you this. When you find microbes —

whether in your lab or maybe somewhere where a spacecraft is
being assembled, whatever, and you try to identify the microbes, do
you ever find something that hadn’t been previously identified?
STRICKER: Yeah, it’s really great. So the old-school days, back

when Planetary Protection started, it was very culture-based. That
means we would take a sample. We would grow it up in the lab and
based on whatever grew, we would identify it. And now that we’ve
fast forwarded to DNA-based analysis, we’ve seen so much more.
If you look at the soil, 0.1 percent of microbes in the soil are even
able to be grown in a lab. So it’s just a tiny sliver what exists. So
yeah, we discover so many new things there are actually hundreds
of new species that were discovered just in our assessment in this
spacecraft assembly facility.
DUBNER: No kidding.
27 of 30 28/06/2019 14:08
STRICKER: Over a hundred.
DUBNER: And then, once you make that discovery, do you try to
find it elsewhere on the earth?
STRICKER: Yeah. That’s the beauty of DNA sequencing and

databases that are accessible worldwide. There was one
microorganism we found in our clean room and the same type
popped up in some lake or a cave in China. So we’re 23andMe-ing
all of the bacteria that exists around the world.
DUBNER: And what does linking that information actually get you?
How does it advance the science, or what does that enable you to
do that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible?
STRICKER: So for example, a lot of the medical-devices industry,

when you go in and you get a colonoscopy or an endoscopy, and
you want to make sure that they clean it off and everything is kept
nice. We discovered that in the process of sterilizing these devices,
they use something called a biological indicator. This is the
hardiest, strongest champion of microbes that if we kill that, we’ve
killed everything else. And so this biological indicator has changed
over time because we’ve discovered these new microbes. And in
our clean room, we’ve discovered a microbe that knocked off that
biological indicator, that gold standard.
DUBNER: So I’ve read that you once appeared on a reality TV

show called King of the Nerds. This is true?
STRICKER: You have a really great researchers.
DUBNER: And we’ve also read that part of the competition was to
compose and perform a nerd anthem, and that your anthem was
called “Nerds are King.” Is this all true?
28 of 30 28/06/2019 14:08
STRICKER: Yes.
DUBNER: So I believe that our band has found “Nerds are King”
online, and they’re willing to back you up if you are willing to sing it.
Are you good with that?
STRICKER: That sounds great.
Singing: You call me a nerd like it’s a bad thing, but the world is our
kingdom, and nerds are king. Representing for the geeks who get
put down. Nerds are the new cool and we run this town.
DUBNER: Mike Maughan, fact-check that.
MAUGHAN: That was good. Okay, so, I think the most interesting
thing I found was just the way to apply for a job in Planetary
Protection. Under job qualification it lists the following things:
frequent travel, it doesn’t mention that it’s to Jupiter and Saturn.
There are only three technical qualifications that you need: one is
advanced knowledge of planetary protection; two, demonstrated
experience planning, executing and overseeing elements of space
programs of national significance; three, demonstrated skills in
diplomacy, probably because you never know when you have to
negotiate with aliens.
DUBNER: Thank you so much, Moogega Stricker. That was just

great, thank you, and could we please have one more round of
applause for all our guests tonight. It is time now for our live
audience to tell us who their favorite guest was tonight. Maybe it’s
the guest that you would most like to hear from in a future studio
episode of Freakonomics Radio. Let’s remember the criteria: Did
they tell you something you did not know? Was it truly worth
knowing? And was it demonstrably true? So who’s it going to be?
29 of 30 28/06/2019 14:08
Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles,
Lucy Jones, who both calmed and frightened us with her

earthquake expertise,
Gene Seroka, who runs the Port of L.A., America’s port, or
Moogega Stricker, who helps protect various planets from various

microbes and also composes anthems to nerds.
Okay, the audience vote is in. Once again, thank you so much to all
our guests presenters. And our grand-prize winner tonight for telling
us about planetary protection, Moogega Stricker. Congratulations.
Moogega, to commemorate your victory we’d like to present you
with this Certificate of Impressive Knowledge. It reads, “I, Stephen
Dubner, in consultation with the great Angela Duckworth and Mike
Maughan, do hereby attest that Moogega Stricker told us
something we did not know for which we are so grateful.” And that’s
our show for tonight. I hope we told you something you did not
know. Huge thanks to Mike and Angela, to our guests, to Luis
Guerra and the great Freakonomics Radio Orchestra. Thanks
especially to all of you for listening this week and every week to
Freakonomics Radio. Good night.
30 of 30 28/06/2019 14:08

Notes From An Imperfect Paradise (Ep

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Notes From an Imperfect Paradise (Ep. 380) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.

Notes From an Imperfect Paradise (Ep.

Recorded live in Los Angeles. Guests include Mayor Eric Garcetti,

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or

Stephen DUBNER: This week, Freakonomics Radio being recorded

Duckworth. Angela, hello.

Angela DUCKWORTH: Hi Stephen.

DUBNER: I’m dying to know what you’re working on that we should

DUCKWORTH: I recently did an eight-minute intervention. We

DUBNER: So just telling other people what they should do with

DUBNER: I like it. Angela, as you know, we sometimes play a

would you please welcome our real-time fact checker. He is the

Mike MAUGHAN: So, L.A. is a unique place. It is illegal to drive

DUBNER: Win some, lose some. Mike Maughan, thank you so

Eric GARCETTI: Wow. Welcome to the City of Angels. Great to

DUBNER: Mayor Garcetti, we New Yorkers feel that we’ve got a

GARCETTI: Well, we are looking into getting an animatronic

most concerned about?

GARCETTI: I think our biggest challenges are around poverty;

DUBNER: So let’s talk about transportation a bit. Most people from

GARCETTI: Well, we used to have the best public transportation

DUBNER: Go through those conspiracies.

GARCETTI: Well, okay. Speaking of Roger Rabbit. It’s mostly not

But we’re changing that. I mean, we just passed the largest

Second, I think we’re solving it by trying to plan better communities.

DUBNER: Was that Elon whooping?

DUCKWORTH: It’s inspiring to listen to you. But if there is one

GARCETTI: Well two things. You diagnose it exactly right. I think

People don’t trust big institutions because we’ve read so many

DUBNER: Mr. Mayor, I understand that your administration moved

same password, which was “awesomemayor12345”?

DUBNER: Now, speaking of you knowing so well the data — L.A.

GARCETTI: So everybody’s watched Chinatown, the great movie,

DUBNER: Owens Valley is what — who administers it?

GARCETTI: It’s a number of counties up there that are run by those

So what William Mulholland had engineered to come to L.A., we

DUCKWORTH: So what were you like when you were 16 years

GARCETTI: My social group was theater nerds.

DUCKWORTH: You were a theater nerd.

GARCETTI: Yeah. There’s ten of us here and we all keep in touch.

DUCKWORTH: Like stage crew?

GARCETTI: No, I was on the stage. And I was a budding activist, I

GARCETTI: Scared as s—.

DUBNER: I mean, it’s your city. You shouldn’t be asking us if you

GARCETTI: You guys can all swear tonight.

DUBNER: Thanks. Appreciate it. Oh speaking of favors, Luis

GARCETTI: I can only speak for myself, but it should. Look, in

DUBNER: So from what I’ve read, your style of governance seems

sort of magically invoke one change in federal government that

GARCETTI: So in D.C. we have this repeal-and-replace mentality.

So if I could change one thing in Washington this is totally radical

aligning incentives better by, let’s say, rewarding elected officials

DUBNER: Most economists argue that when cities or regions go for

GARCETTI: It’s our infrastructure, and the way we do the Olympics.

So we’ve had it twice before. In 1932, we turned a million-dollar

DUBNER: It’s a boondoggle. And you’re getting your boondoggles

GARCETTI: Better, better than that. We delayed until 2028, let

DUBNER: So the moral of the story is the Olympics should only be

GARCETTI: Well, I mentioned it a bit already. I think that I was one

DUBNER: Mike Maughan, the mayor told us a lot of things about

MAUGHAN: So a couple of things that are interesting. He was

diverse city when you take into account income, education,

DUBNER: Thank you Mike Maughan, and thanks especially to