Freakonomics Radio
Notes From an Imperfect Paradise
Recorded live in Los Angeles. Guests include Mayor Eric Garcetti, the “Earthquake Lady,” the head of the Port of L.A., and a NASA planetary protection scientist.
Why is Los Angeles so good at hosting the Olympics? Does California actually have too few earthquakes? What’s in all those container ships we send back to China? Who’s protecting us from alien life — and alien life from us?
On this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, our guests addressed those questions and more in a live show recorded in Los Angeles. The show featured four guests: Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles; Lucy Jones, a seismologist at Caltech; Gene Seroka, the executive director of the Port of Los Angeles; and Moogega Stricker, who works in the planetary protection division at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
Here are the four most fascinating things we learned this week.
1. Los Angeles is really good at hosting the Olympics.
Garcetti, who was first elected in 2013, describes himself as an “average Angeleno”: He’s half-Mexican and half-Jewish with an Italian last name. Under his leadership, the city has passed a big…
