Michael T. Roberts

speaker

180 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 10 Apr

Michael T. Roberts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · 670. Beeconomics 101 · 10 Apr 2026 podcast

And then I do my best not to answer the question, but here you are forcing me to answer the question I always ask.

I've taken a lot of fraudulent food products to the FDA, and the first question, invariably,

is, is there a safety problem?

And if you have an authenticity problem and you don't have an unsafe problem, then you're probably not going to get much attention from regulators.

So you can look at it that way and say, yeah, okay, I can see.

That makes sense.

If I'm eating sushi and it's really tilapia disguised as tuna or whatever, it doesn't hurt me.

That's fine.

I'm enjoying the experience.

Life is okay.

But there's all kinds of unintended consequences.

So what about the honest farmer, the producer of a food?

And they can't compete.

And so we're losing our domestic producers.

Does that mean anything to us?

Might.

That's a different issue, right?

I wrote a piece about honey fraud from a different angle years ago, and I actually followed European thought on this.

And that is that honey fraud actually can contribute to us losing our pollinator bees.

And if that happens, we're all in trouble.

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