Stephen Dubner

Yeah.

So I will say that what Malcolm said is pretty close to a lot of the things that I feel about Freakonomics in that.

You're a much younger person, but also, like he said, the time was different.

So I did go back and read the book.

I liked it.

I was very pleasantly surprised.

Our main incentive was to be truthful and be interesting.

It was really simple as that, and to have fun.

Both Lev and I don't take ourselves too seriously.

We reported and researched and fact-checked and dotted every I.I.,

So I wasn't concerned about that.

We did have one thing shortly after publication that we found out had been wrong, which was a kind of terrible thing.

This guy that we wrote about as having heroically gone undercover in the Ku Klux Klan and exposed them.

And he did do a lot of that type of work, but he kind of conflated his own identity with that of another guy who did the undercover stuff.

And he wrote books about it.

We interviewed him.

He'd been in all these histories of civil rights movement and Klan.

It turned out that he had exaggerated.

So I'd never heard or read a word about any claims like this.

But when we published our book for Economics 2005, someone wrote to us who had been a collaborator of that guy much later, working on a book together.