Life is funny. I think we all know that. And it's unpredictable, but just how unpredictable.

Once in a while, something happens that is so outlandish that you never even considered it possible.

Nassim Talib calls this a Black Swan event. In my case,

I'm going to call it, actually, I don't know what to call it yet. Maybe you can help me name it.

Let me explain. Last Thursday, on February 13th, we were scheduled to do a live Freakonomics

radio show at the Wilshire E Bell Theater in Los Angeles. Now, a live show for us

is both rare and atypical because the episodes we put out here every week are very much not live.

They are the product of many hours of research and recorded interviews and editing and mixing

and so on. And that's the way we like it. That's the

kind of show I like to make. But every now and again, we decide to put on a live show in a theater

with an audience and we record that show to make a podcast episode for later. It's not going to have

the depth or the flow of a regular episode, But there is something thrilling about the live setting,

the interviews that you're not really sure where they're going to go, the response from the audience

that you can't predict, and of course any number of strange things that might happen when

you try to do something that resembles show business. Coming into this LA show, we felt pretty good.

We had two excellent guests

lined up, Ari Emanuel, the super agent and CEO of Endeavor, who was also the model for Ari Gold from

the TV show Entourage. And we had the award-winning filmmaker R.J. Cutler, who got his start on

the Clinton campaign documentary, The War Room, and who's been making excellent

documentaries ever since, including a recent one about Martha Stewart. We also had Luis Gera,

who composes and performs a lot of the music you hear on this show. He had put together a live

band for the evening, which I was definitely looking forward to. I love Luis and his music, and he has a network of

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