681. How to Host a Talk Show, with Dick Cavett

**Stephen Dubner** (0:01)
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I have a confession to make. Back in 2020, when COVID hit and the world shut down, I saw a silver lining. The death and illness and uncertainty, those were all horrible. Early on, we had a bad COVID case in my family, and things were touch and go for a while. But once we got through that, I was excited about spending every day in solitude. That's just the way I'm built. I've been a writer since I was a kid, and writing requires you to be comfortable with long hours all by yourself. So I just focused on making the best Freakonomics episodes we could, and I did all my recording from a makeshift home studio. For a while, this isolation did make me happy. There was no obligation to go anywhere or see anyone. But the happiness faded, and I thought of something the economist Gary Becker once said. Becker had studied the economics of addiction, and when he was asked to name the most addictive thing on the planet, Becker's answer was people.
I never would have thought of that, but it makes sense. We are a social animal. We need other people the way we need food and water. So when the COVID restrictions lifted, I decided to get out of my home studio and take Freakonomics Radio on the road for some live shows.
Those shows were fun, but I didn't find the connection I was looking for. When you're having a conversation on a big stage with a thousand people in the audience, the tendency is to scale up. Conversations get broader, but not deeper. There's more performance and less intimacy.
Then one night in San Francisco, just before curtain time, I was looking through a big overstuffed bookshelf in the green room, and I found an old biography of the talk show host, Dick Cavett. I'd seen bits and pieces of the Dick Cavett Show over the years, and these days you can find it on YouTube. He is smart, funny, and just the right amount of weird. So I decided to steal the Cavett book. I finished it on the plane home, and I fell in love. Not with Dick Cavett per se, but with the idea of making some kind of a TV talk show myself, with a different kind of conversation than we have on Freakonomics Radio, and a wider set of guests, and rather than filming it in a big theater, we would make it in my living room, because I was looking for connection, not spectacle. It wasn't long before this show had a name, Better in Person. If Freakonomics is about how things work, Better in Person would be about how people work. I didn't want celebrities necessarily, or people promoting their latest projects. I just wanted people who have done remarkable things, and are willing to think out loud. I wanted to let the conversation be steered by curiosity, mine and theirs. We would talk, we'd eat and drink, we'd get out and play, maybe make some trouble together.
And now that YouTube has become the world's TV, that's where we would put this show. So yeah, all of that actually happened. Took us about a year and a half. Next week, Better in Person will launch on the Freakonomics YouTube channel. Trailer is already up. Go check it out and subscribe. And today, on this episode of Freakonomics Radio, I pay a visit to the man who accidentally inspired the whole thing.