Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Design Matters Media

Stephen J. Dubner

September 15, 2025·1 hr 25 min·5 clips

Stephen Dubner's fourth-grade teacher secretly submitted his poem to Highlights magazine, changing his life forever.

Stephen Dubner comes in through the long afterlife of Freakonomics. Debbie Millman puts the conversation in the book's twenty-year public run, then keeps tugging at a quieter thread: how people adapt, how thinking changes, and how the mind can be trained when change feels hard. The book is not treated like a trophy on a shelf. It sounds more like something that kept walking around after publication, picking up new meaning as people argued with it, used it, and remembered it. Dubner's best story is messier and better than a tidy career lesson. He remembers going to Pittsburgh because Franco Harris invited him and promised to pick him up at the airport. That already has the setup of a strange little movie. They drive past statues of young George Washington and Harris making the Immaculate Reception, with the public myth sitting right there beside the living man. Then the shine wears off. Dubner wants to tag along, watch, listen, and turn the access into a book. Harris wants to know if he can sell, because his own work involves taking nutritional baked goods into schools, prisons, and other places. Dubner says he cannot sell. What he can do is hang back, pay attention, and try to understand the awkward deal he has been handed. The access never becomes simple. Harris lets him in, then pulls away. He leaves town before one planned visit. He keeps Dubner close enough to write, but not close enough for comfort. Somehow, the book still happens. Later, Harris invites him to a Super Bowl party, and the connection still feels half business pitch, half guarded friendship. Millman gives that story enough room to breathe. It stops being just a sports anecdote and becomes something stranger: a portrait of what reporting feels like when permission comes in pieces. The episode ends by returning to Freakonomics, with a new edition named for November 12 and Millman closing in a nod to Dubner's own language of care.

As heard by us

A patient conversation about Freakonomics, change, and the work of revising yourself.

Stephen Dubner and Debbie Millman spend this episode circling the long afterlife of Freakonomics and the more interesting question under it: how people change, and how much of that change can actually be trained.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a calm Design Matters conversation with Stephen Dubner about Freakonomics, reporting, and how people change.

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