SPEAKER_13: Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Twizzlers. No matter the situation, Twizzlers is the perfect candy to relieve your boredom. And in a world where other candy is just too sweet and overpowering, Twizzlers is the perfect level of sweet and comes in the perfect chewy twist. Twizzlers are an enjoyable relief from the monotony of everyday life, and they taste great too. Head to the store and enjoy Twizzlers today. Freeconomics Radio is sponsored by Capital One Bank. With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply, see capitalone.com slash bank, Capital One, N-A, member FDIC. Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. As we like to remind you now and again, Freeconomics Radio is part of the Freeconomics Radio Network. The other shows in our network are No Stupid Questions, People I Mostly Admire, and our latest edition, The Economics of Everyday Things. It is a short weekly show about the everyday things that often go unnoticed and unnoticed. And it's a show that's a little bit different than the ones that we've seen in the past. Unnoticed and unexplained, even though they deserve better. The special episode you're about to hear gathers up three of these short pieces so that you can hear just how good and fun the show is. And then you can go to your podcast app and follow the show because what I'd really like you to do is to make The Economics of Everyday Things a regular part of your podcast diet along with Freeconomics Radio. Again, just search for The Economics of Everyday Things in your podcast app and start listening to every episode. Thanks in advance.
SPEAKER_02: When you go to a baseball game, there are a few things you can count on. You'll hear the vendors hollering over the din of the crowd. You'll smell the peanuts, the hot dogs, the ludicrously overpriced beers. And if you're at Citizen's Bank Park in Philadelphia, you'll see a six and a half foot tall fuzzy green beast waddling across the field in search of trouble. Even if you're not a sports fan, you've probably heard of the Philly fanatic. Sports Illustrated called him the best mascot in history. He has sold millions of dollars worth of merchandise and he brings families to the ballpark at a time when fewer people are going to baseball games. How exactly does he do that? Well, it has a lot to do with the guy who originally wore the costume.
SPEAKER_15: I could throw, I could catch, I could do cartwheels, not a lot of gymnastics, but I could dance, could move really well. I kind of fancied myself as being the secret weapon.
SPEAKER_02: This is The Economics of Everyday Things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Let's talk about sports mascots.
SPEAKER_03: The secret weapon you just heard from, that's Dave Raymond.
SPEAKER_02: His story starts back in the late 1970s. As a sophomore in college, he landed a summer internship with the Phillies.
SPEAKER_15: I was in the promotions office and my dad had said, look, when you get this job, you do whatever they ask you to do. Don't say no to anything. So I was stocking shelves, I was cleaning bathrooms and the executive offices. And then I might be taking the national anthem singer to dinner, but that all changed in the spring of 78.
SPEAKER_02: At the time, the Phillies had a problem on their hands. Attendance wasn't too hot. And the promotions department was trying to get more butts in the seats. On the other side of the country, someone had an intriguing solution. More chickening around here
SPEAKER_00: as we go to the bottom of the sixth inning.
SPEAKER_11: The famous San Diego Chicken, change the dancing partners here.
SPEAKER_02: Out in California, a 20 year old kid named Ted Giannullis was making waves at San Diego Padres games by dressing up as a chicken and cavorting around the field.
SPEAKER_15: The chicken kind of had a raunchy routine. He actually chugged a beer through his beak. This chicken character is just out of his mind and people are actually coming to the game cause they're hearing about him.
SPEAKER_02: Professional sports mascots were not a new idea. The Phillies even had their own. Philadelphia Phil and Philadelphia Phyllis, a pair of twins in revolutionary war outfits. But they weren't designed to entertain. They were like walking logos or symbols.
SPEAKER_15: The performer would wear these big heavy bodysuits made out of some pieces of wood. They had no mobility.
SPEAKER_02: The Phillies saw the impact that this chicken was having in San Diego. And they decided to up their mascot game with a new character. So they went straight to the best people in the business.
SPEAKER_07: My name is Bonnie Erickson and I was the designer of the Philly Phanatic.
SPEAKER_02: Erickson had been a part of the original design team for the Muppet Show. Let's just say you've seen her work.
SPEAKER_07: The two old men, Statler and Waldorf. I also did George the Janitor, probably the most famous is Ms. Piggy. She had just started a character design firm
SPEAKER_02: with her husband, Wade Harrison. And the Phillies wanted some of that Muppet mojo.
SPEAKER_07: The rationale the Phillies gave us was they needed to encourage younger people to become baseball fans. I'd watched baseball games, but I certainly didn't know that much about the whole process. So one of the first things we did was go down to Philly and ask them about their audience. And what did you find out? Well, we heard a lot about the fans. We heard that they'd booed Santa Claus. So that was pretty daunting.
SPEAKER_02: Erickson mocked up some sketches of a curious creature. With a megaphone snout and a pear shaped body, the fanatic was designed to be on the move.
SPEAKER_15: He's a green bird from the Galapagos Islands. He's 300 plus pounds, depending on what day of the week you weigh him.
SPEAKER_07: I wanted something that would be funny if you just watched it walk. Mascots are non-speaking characters. They have to transfer everything that they want to say through their body motion. That's why the fanatic has feather eyebrows, feather tail, things that are showing some action.
SPEAKER_02: When Erickson sold the character to the Phillies, she gave them a choice. They could buy the costume and the copyright to the character for 5,200 bucks, or they could just buy the costume for 3,900. Phillies executive Bill Giles chose the latter. So once you have a bespoke mascot costume, how do you find the right performer to bring it to life? Well, if you're the Philadelphia Phillies, you ask the guy in the office who never says no to anything, Dave Raymond.
SPEAKER_15: I get a phone call and said, you need to go to New York right away and get fitted for the costume. I went to West 39th Street. I walked into Geppetto's puppet studio. There were disembodied arms and foam and eyeballs. Then I just went, oh my gosh, I'm getting paid to be a Muppet.
SPEAKER_02: The fanatic made its debut on April 25th, 1978. The Phillies beat the Chicago Cubs seven to nothing. Maybe it was the win or the ballpark beer, but the fans loved him from the start. That first year alone, the Phillies sold fanatic plush toys, t-shirts, pins, coloring books, and the mascot was making the team money from appearances off the field too. A lot of car dealerships wanted me.
SPEAKER_15: At least for the next three years, there were just enormous crowds at all of the local events.
SPEAKER_02: Raymond says he was paid a pretty decent base salary for this work. And Bonnie Erickson, well, she was paid too. Remember, the Phillies had bought the costume, but not the rights to the character, which meant Erickson got a hefty cut of the merchandising sales.
SPEAKER_07: I think the first year of merchandising, we did over $2 million.
SPEAKER_02: Bill Giles, the Phillies executive who passed on the fanatic copyright, he later called it the worst decision of his career. A few years later, the team bought the character from Erickson for $215,000. That's about 650,000 in today's money. For Erickson, the fanatic was the start of a very successful career in the mascot world.
SPEAKER_07: It's a small group of people who own these baseball teams. So word gets around pretty fast. And once this was out, it spread beyond baseball.
SPEAKER_02: She and Harrison went on to design more than a dozen other mascots across the major sports leagues. Yuppie for the Montreal Expos, Big Shot for the Philadelphia 76ers, Stuff the Magic Dragon for the Orlando Magic, Casey Wolf for the Kansas City Chiefs. Around half of their characters are still active today. But not every team is suited for a mascot. In 1979, the Yankees commissioned Erickson to make one. He was a bulbous, pinstriped fellow named Dandy. According to Bonnie Erickson's partner, Wade Harrison, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner hated Dandy so much that he was sentenced to roam the nosebleed seats. They didn't allow him lower than the second deck.
SPEAKER_00: He had a security guard with him because that could be a rough area sometimes. The performer came to us and said his mother would not allow him to do that anymore because they were gonna take away the security guard. So we did not renew the lease.
SPEAKER_02: Erickson and Harrison eventually got out of the mascot business in the 90s. And after 16 years performing as the fanatic, Dave Raymond moved on too. He passed the duties to his backup performer and started his own mascot firm. Since then, Raymond has created more than 130 mascots from scratch, mostly for minor league and college teams. His biggest success came a few years ago when he was hired by the Philadelphia Flyers pro hockey team. The result was Gritty, a seven foot tall orange brute with bulging eyes and a maniacal grin. One reporter described him as a nightmarish frat boy on an acid trip. Raymond was undeterred.
SPEAKER_15: Overcome the negativity because there'll always be negativity there. I mean, that's what I told the Flyers to expect. I told them to expect six months. It took like three days for it to change.
SPEAKER_02: Philadelphia, the city that once booed Santa Claus embraced Gritty with open arms. In his first month alone, the character got the Flyers around $160 million worth of media exposure. That makes the cost of a modern mascot sound downright reasonable. Raymond says the creative process of designing a character like Gritty might set a team back between $80,000 and $300,000. That's the base fee he charges. Then there's ongoing work, creating duplicate costumes, taking care of repairs, and perhaps most importantly, regular cleanings.
SPEAKER_15: You wanna try to make sure that the body odor does not get baked into the costume. You mix one part vodka with two parts water and at the end of every appearance, you spray the inside of the costume to kill the bacteria. The joke was two for the costume, one for the performer.
SPEAKER_02: ["Jingle Bells"] But Raymond's core business is the thing he knows best. He is a bona fide mascot headhunter. Every year, he runs a mascot bootcamp where aspiring performers learn the tricks of the trade.
SPEAKER_15: A performer needs to have a full bio to work from. What motivates this character? What does this character scare the death of? What will this character always do? What will this character never do? And then you give them all that backstory and you say, go have fun.
SPEAKER_02: It's not exactly that simple though. For starters, you can't be claustrophobic. You can't be afraid of a little sweat. You need to be pretty physically fit. And of course, you have to have either a natural ability
SPEAKER_15: or a trained ability to communicate non-verbally through movement and dance. The ones that are gonna be ultimately a high level of success, you see that right away.
SPEAKER_02: The chosen few that make it to the big leagues can do pretty well. Raymond says the NBA pays most mascots a starting salary of 85 to $100,000. There's also incentive pay. According to the Sports Business Journal, mascots at the very top of the food chain, like the Denver Nuggets' Rocky the Mountain Lion, can earn more than $600,000 per year. But those superstar wages are few and far between.
SPEAKER_15: It's a minor fraction of 1% of the environment that gets those jobs. And there are many minor league characters tolling away for 50 to $100 a game and doing great work.
SPEAKER_02: In his trainings, Raymond emphasizes good, clean, safe fun. It's to keep the crowds, owners, and sponsors happy, but also to ward off the threat of litigation. The same boisterous spirit that made the fanatic an icon also got him in trouble. The Phillies have been sued at least six times over the years for fanatic misbehavior, including hugging a fan too hard, accidentally kicking a pregnant woman, and shooting a fan in the face with a hot dog gun. Settlements have set the Phillies back nearly $3 million. And there's one last thing that teams have to watch out for when they buy a mascot.
SPEAKER_03: The copyright law says that after 35 years,
SPEAKER_07: if something is still viable, the original copyright owners have the opportunity to renegotiate. That 35-year clock recently expired on the fanatic,
SPEAKER_02: and Bonnie Erickson came knocking. She and the team settled out of court. The Philly fanatic is still very dear to my heart.
SPEAKER_07: I hope you enjoyed our look at sports masking. I'm
SPEAKER_02: Zachary Crockett. After the break. The luxury cashmere sweater today is not the same as what it was 20 years ago. That's coming up.
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SPEAKER_02: Take a trip to the Gobi desert region of Southern Mongolia, and you'll see vast expanses of open land.
SPEAKER_06: It's endless open space.
SPEAKER_02: That's Miagmarjav Sarchu, Miga for short. She spoke to us from Mongolia's capital, Ulaanbaatar.
SPEAKER_06: You can see sunset. It's just like you watching sunset in the ocean. You can see the sand dunes and the camels, birds.
SPEAKER_02: You can see something else too. Goats. Lots and lots of goats. The country is home to around 27 million of them. They outnumber people eight to one. These goats are critically important to the Mongolian economy and to the apparel industry. That's because once a year, they produce a substantial share of the world's cashmere. When you touch it, it's very soft.
SPEAKER_06: Some people say it's like a baby butt.
SPEAKER_02: It used to be that you could only find cashmere in high-end clothes, like a $2,000 Loro Piana turtleneck. Today, it's everywhere. Direct-to-consumer companies like Quince and Everlane sell $60 cashmere sweaters by the truckload. That's good news for the folks in Mongolia who make a living raising goats.
SPEAKER_06: Cashmere is a primary income source for herders. It's also an important pillar of the country's economy. But it's come at a cost.
SPEAKER_03: This is the economics of everyday things.
SPEAKER_02: Now, cashmere. If you are a goat in Central Asia, every winter, you grow a second coat of hair underneath your outer coat. It's soft, it's fluffy, and it's around six times finer than human hair. This wool is called cashmere.
SPEAKER_04: The softness is on the belly and the little areas under the arms and the chin.
SPEAKER_02: Carolyn Yim runs PliKnits, a boutique knitwear company based in New York and Hong Kong. Her family has been in the textile business for three generations.
SPEAKER_04: I think the reason it's so prized is because it's beyond a functional product. It is a good that is associated with luxury and an elevated sense of style.
SPEAKER_02: That association, she says, started back in the 1960s.
SPEAKER_04: I would say a lot of the association is with old money cashmere. Like the cashmere is worn at Ivy Leagues and the cashmere sweaters with cigarette burns into it. And then in the 2000s, there was a lot more democratized cashmere that started to happen. And that's when we really started to see that everyone wanted a cashmere sweater.
SPEAKER_02: These days, around 40 to 50 million pounds of raw cashmere are harvested each year all over the world. In Afghanistan, Tibet, Iran, Australia, New Zealand. But most of the world's supply comes from just two countries. China makes up 50% of the market and Mongolia controls another 40%. In Mongolia, where Miga lives, herding was once a collectivist enterprise. But when the country's communist system was replaced by a democracy in 1990, the goat herds were privatized and families flooded into the herding business. Today, herding cashmere goats is Mongolia's largest profession.
SPEAKER_06: We have over 3 million population and one third of the population are herders.
SPEAKER_02: Miga manages the Mongolian sustainable cashmere platform for the United Nations. In short, she spends a lot of time working with the country's nomadic herders, who migrate across vast distances in search of food for their goats.
SPEAKER_06: They are land connected people. They love their animal and livestock. They also love their nature. Early in the morning, they herd the animals and take them out to the pasture. They move a lot. They always go seeking for a better pasture for their animals. The cashmere is harvested with metal combs every spring and weighed out in grams.
SPEAKER_02: That's the standard used for international trade. On average, a goat might produce 250 grams of raw cashmere each year. The price that it fetches is governed by its color and its quality. But in general, Miga says that one goat might yield around $10 worth of cashmere. That means that it takes a herd of 500 goats to earn Mongolia's median household income of $5,000. Most herders breed new goats to ensure they have a sustainable cashmere business each season. Springtime they collect the cashmere. Then when it comes to slaughter season in November or early December,
SPEAKER_06: they slaughter the animal and sell the meat to the market.
SPEAKER_02: Mongolia has seen tremendous inflation over the past 30 years. An item that cost the equivalent of a dollar in 1993 costs around $95 today. So even with supplemental income, it's hard to make ends meet. Economic return is not sufficient enough to cover their financial demands.
SPEAKER_06: Herder family, for instance, have five children, four of them gone to the school. And the herders have to pay all the expenses in the capital city, which is now very expensive.
SPEAKER_02: In theory, herders could make more money if they sold their cashmere directly to processing mills. But their options are limited by Mongolia's geography.
SPEAKER_06: It's a vast country. You can imagine how much effort needs to be to collect all the raw material.
SPEAKER_02: Traders from China travel through the far reaches of Mongolia on motorbikes, collecting bags of cashmere from herders. These middlemen clean the cashmere and sell it to mills for around $100 per kilogram, more than twice what they paid for it. A portion of this raw cashmere stays in Mongolia, where it's knitted into goods by local companies. The bulk of it leaves the country. Mika wishes Mongolians could keep more of that production at home. Mongolia don't fully benefit from the cashmere industry
SPEAKER_06: because of this insufficient processing capacity in the country. Some higher-end brands like L'Oreal Piana export the material to Italy,
SPEAKER_02: where it's knitted in local factories. But 80% of Mongolian cashmere ends up in China, where full-scale milling operations turn it into yarn. It goes through a process called carding, which draws the fibers out into strands. It's really nice and fluffy. It is like a really, really long Santa's beard.
SPEAKER_04: Carolyn Yim, the third-generation knitter, has visited the factories in China many times.
SPEAKER_02: This then is taken into the spinning machine,
SPEAKER_04: where the hair is twisted in two ways, kind of like a DNA structure, until it becomes a really long yarn that is finally then put onto the cone and becomes usable for knitting. By the end of this process, the cashmere is about 50% smaller.
SPEAKER_02: So it can take a lot of goats to make a single article of clothing. At the end of the production cycle, each sweater takes about one pound of yarn.
SPEAKER_04: If you're just measuring grams, it's about five or six goats for one sweater. Yim's company, Plinitz, uses this yarn to produce all kinds of cashmere goods,
SPEAKER_02: cardigans, leggings, shirts, most of which cost a few hundred dollars apiece. But not all cashmere is created equal. The gold standard is pure white, with strands that are 14 microns wide and 36 millimeters long. And buyers like Yim have to develop a sixth sense for sniffing it out. I think over time, my sensitivity with my hands has really grown.
SPEAKER_04: It's sort of like being a perfumer with a nose. A really good cashmere sweater will feel peachy or creamy, plush. Whereas a bad cashmere sweater is dry, cardboardy, papery, thin. Cashmere goods were once a luxury, produced in small batches and priced out of reach for most consumers.
SPEAKER_02: But in recent years, cashmere has entered an era of mass production. A new crop of companies sells 100% cashmere sweaters for well below $100. Supposedly by buying the material directly from herders and cutting out the middleman. But Yim says some brands keep prices down by using less material. Or by making their sweaters from lower quality fibers. You're taking not just the hair from the belly, you're taking areas that you wouldn't have before to make up for that demand.
SPEAKER_04: And then using methodology afterwards, such as different ways of bleaching. I think this is happening a lot now, even with high-end brands. The luxury cashmere sweater today is not the same as what it was 20 years ago.
SPEAKER_02: Mongolia has responded to this boom in demand by cranking up cashmere production. Since 1990, the country's goat population has grown from 5 million to 27 million. That's had an impact on the landscape. Goats consume up to 11% of their body weight in grass, shrubs, and weeds every day. They eat close to the roots, preventing plants from regrowing. Their sharp hooves damage topsoil. Scientists have found that overgrazing has contributed to the degradation of 70% of Mongolia's grasslands. Miga says Mongolian officials have attempted a number of things to combat these issues. Including livestock taxes to fund revegetation. They know that the land is the foundation for everything.
SPEAKER_06: Their livelihood and their animals. They're not stupid. They are willing to pay that money and they realize the issues. In northern China, measures have been more drastic.
SPEAKER_02: Most herding operations have been confined to farms. In recent years, the Chinese government has a very particular approach to how the flocks can live.
SPEAKER_04: The goats are in corrals, so they are not roaming around free.
SPEAKER_02: And the region faces an even graver threat. Climate change. Most of Mongolia's landscape is made up of dry lands that are prone to becoming deserts. Temperatures are up, rainfall is down, and factories that produce cashmere garments are under pressure to adapt new sustainability standards. Environmental permits can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even the most diligent operations are struggling to comply. I do not have the hoovers to claim I have 100% sustainability because it's completely impossible.
SPEAKER_02: Together, increased demand, overgrazing, and climate change mean that cashmere is getting worse. I'm unable to find the quality that we had 20 years ago.
SPEAKER_04: In inner Mongolia, the cashmere fiber width has been steadily increasing and that's not a good thing. You can't just increase yield of goat hair so quickly to meet up with demand. These are prickly issues for something as soft as a baby's butt.
SPEAKER_02: But for Mongolians like Miga, the stakes of solving these problems are high. Because cashmere is more than a material used to make really soft sweaters. It's a part of the country's identity.
SPEAKER_03: This nomadic way of herding practice has been in the country hundreds, hundreds of years.
SPEAKER_06: The international demand is going up. The country has to control in terms of impact, environmental impact, social impact, and also economic impact for that commodity. That's a lot of challenges.
SPEAKER_02: That's it for cashmere. After the break, we were approached by a museum that said, can you get us a dinosaur skeleton?
SPEAKER_12: And although I'd never found a dinosaur skeleton, I said, sure, of course we can. This is a special episode of the economics of everyday things from the Freakonomics radio network.
SPEAKER_02: We'll be right back.
SPEAKER_13: It's Unspoken Past, Magnificent Jerk, the true story of a fake story about a real life. Magnificent Jerk is an Apple original podcast produced by Pineapple Street Studios available on Apple podcasts.
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SPEAKER_02: In October of 2020, there was a hotly anticipated auction at Christie's in New York City. It included paintings from some of history's most venerated artists, Picasso, Rothko, Cezanne. But the lot that fetched the highest price was not a painting.
SPEAKER_14: Lot number 59. Really? 27. Yes, really. Sorry. 27-1, please.
SPEAKER_14: We're all waiting with bated breath. $27,100,000. $27,500,000. $27,500,000. Fair warning. I am happy to sell this. And sold. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_02: The object on the block? A Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton named Stan. With fees, it went for just under $32 million, more than five times its minimum estimated sale price. For the man who helped discover Stan, it was validation of a job well done. Stan was 25,000 person hours. That's a lot of work. And, you know, somebody has to pay for that.
SPEAKER_02: This is the economics of everyday things. We're looking at T-Rex skeletons. You've probably seen a T-Rex, or at least part of one, at a natural history museum. So how did it get there? Well, if you want to find one in the ground, your best bet is to head to the Hell Creek Formation, a stretch of rock that runs through Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. It dates back to the early 1900s, when the rock was found in the The first documented T-Rex discovery was made in the Hell Creek Formation in 1902. And nearly all of the T-Rex excavated since then, that's around 140 of them, were also found there. A lot of that land is publicly owned. And here in the United States, the T-Rex is a very large, large, large, large, large, large, large, large, large, large, large, large, large, large, large, large, large, large, large. And here in the United States fossils on public land are protected by law. You need permission from the Bureau of Land Management to conduct searches. In most cases, you also have to be a credentialed scientist, someone like this guy. Carl Carr, PhD, I study the growth and evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex and its closest relatives.
SPEAKER_10: Steve McLaughlin Carr is a paleontology professor at Carthage College in Wisconsin.
SPEAKER_02: He's one of the country's foremost experts on Tyrannosaurus rex, and he is not in it for the money. Carl Carr, PhD, I study the growth and evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex and its closest
SPEAKER_10: relatives. The purpose of collecting fossils on public land is to collect them for science and education. No point is contact made with the market. You know, it would just defeat the purpose entirely. When you find fossils on public land, you're not allowed to sell them. Once they're out
SPEAKER_10: of the ground, they have to go into a public trust. At the end of each year, we are responsible for submitting a field report, which includes a catalog of all the fossils that we found.
SPEAKER_02: But a fossil found on private land? That's a different story. It's really a free-for-all
SPEAKER_10: on private land. If a person finds a dinosaur, they can do whatever they want with it.
SPEAKER_02: That includes selling it on the open market. At annual gatherings like the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, you'll find dozens of fossil hunters selling things like Spinosaurus teeth and bone fragments of Triceratops. If you ask around, it won't be long before you come across this guy. My name is Peter Larson. I'm president of Black Hills Institute of Geological Research
SPEAKER_12: in Hill City, South Dakota, the place where museums go to shop for such strange things as dinosaur skeletons. Larson started out in the 70s, selling small fossils at trade shows. One day,
SPEAKER_02: that all changed. We were approached by a museum that said, can you get us a dinosaur skeleton?
SPEAKER_12: And although I'd never found a dinosaur skeleton, I said, sure, of course we can. He ended up finding that dinosaur, and then he found a hell of a lot more of them,
SPEAKER_02: specifically T-Rex skeletons. We've collected now, I think we're at number 13. That's quite a few.
SPEAKER_02: When Larson wants to go look for dinosaur bones, the first thing he has to do is get permission to conduct a search on private land. This involves cutting the ranch owner in on any future discoveries. We come up with a value based upon market prices at the time. That can be anywhere
SPEAKER_12: from 10% of something that's hard to sell to as much as 50% if you've got a nice T-Rex skeleton on your ground. Fossil scouting isn't as romantic as it sounds. Larson walks around for months over
SPEAKER_02: craggy terrain, his eye trained to the ground for the faintest bone fragments. Many times, he won't find anything at all. When he does find evidence of a skeleton, he begins a lengthy and extremely intensive excavation process. From start to finish, getting a dinosaur fossil out of the ground and into a buyer's hands can take two to three years. Let's say it's a T-Rex skeleton,
SPEAKER_12: it's a 40 foot long skeleton. You're going to have an investment of in excess of a million dollars to get that ready for exhibit. Larson will strike a deal with a potential buyer before the fossil
SPEAKER_02: is removed. So he has to approximate his overhead costs in advance. Sometimes you win and sometimes
SPEAKER_12: you lose. We've done projects where we've actually lost money on them just because we underestimated the amount of time it was going to take. When everything goes smoothly, he nets a profit of
SPEAKER_02: around 20% of the sale price of the skeleton. Now, what a fossil commands on the market depends on a few factors, its size, its condition, and most importantly, its completeness. There are around 380 bones in a T-Rex skeleton. No one has ever found a fully intact specimen. But Larson came close. On a scorching summer day in 1990, just outside the city of Faith, South Dakota, Larson and his team uncovered the most complete T-Rex skeleton in history, 90% by bone volume. They named it Sue. Sue came with some drama. After the excavation, it came out that the fossil had actually been found on land that was part of the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. Federal agents seized it and a legal battle broke out. In the end, the landowner, a man named Morris Williams, who was a member of the Sioux tribe, was awarded full ownership. And he took the dinosaur straight to auction. Up to that point, no fossil had been sold for a million dollars. All of a sudden,
SPEAKER_12: it went to two million, to three million, to four million, to five million, seven million. Sue sold for around $8.4 million to the Field Museum in Chicago, with financing from corporate
SPEAKER_02: sponsors like McDonald's and the Walt Disney Company. It was the start of a new age in the market for dinosaur fossils. Everybody said, huh, these fossils could be worth a lot of money.
SPEAKER_12: It brought a number of what I call dinosaur dreamers into the business. I'm Clayton Phipps and some folks call me the dinosaur cowboy. Before I became a fossil hunter,
SPEAKER_11: I really was a cowboy. That's all I'd ever really done. Phipps grew up on a ranch in remote Montana. His family were homesteaders going back generations,
SPEAKER_02: scraping a living off the land. But around the time Sue was discovered, he realized he might be sitting on a gold mine. A kid came by and asked if he could look for fossils. And it was right
SPEAKER_11: after the movie Jurassic Park came out. The dinosaur craze was high and it just really piqued my interest. And I started spending every free minute I had learning what I could about dinosaurs. In 2003, he nabbed his first big find, the skull of a Stygimoloch, a rare horned dinosaur
SPEAKER_02: that roamed the North American plains around 70 million years ago. I ended up selling that. It gave me about a year's wages as to what I was making as a cowboy to see if I could maybe
SPEAKER_11: quit my job and make fossil hunting more of a way to earn a living for my family. And I had to go out and find something or we didn't get to buy groceries. A few years later on a neighboring ranch, Phipps stumbled across the discovery of a lifetime.
SPEAKER_02: The remains of a young T-Rex and a Triceratops entangled in what is thought to be a deadly brawl, which raised a question. How exactly does an amateur paleontologist get a 20-ton fossil out of the ground? There were no YouTube videos out there on how to do it at that time,
SPEAKER_11: so we started out with some rancher ingenuity. Phipps dug around the massive fossil, slipped a
SPEAKER_02: pallet underneath it, and dragged it down the road with a tractor trailer. While the excavation method was less than scientific, the fossil itself was one of a kind. But in the dinosaur market, even the best fossils can be hard to sell. And that's because finding a buyer is a good thing. A buyer can be almost as hard as finding a dinosaur. We went to most of the major museums in the US and some overseas museums and tried to get somebody interested.
SPEAKER_11: And you know, it kept me broke for years.
SPEAKER_02: Phipps spent nearly two decades trying to sell his prized fossil. In 2020, he finally secured a buyer. The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences bought it for $6 million. After paying off the landowner and accounting for expenses, Phipps says the deal didn't make him as rich as he'd hoped. If I had a dollar for every step I've ever taken looking for a dinosaur, or even probably a dime, I may be better off.
SPEAKER_11: Now I'm back to, yep, let's find another one.
SPEAKER_02: Peter Larson, our other fossil hunter, knows better than anyone that a big sale doesn't always result in a big payday. Remember Stan, the dinosaur that fetched $31.8 million at Christie's? It ended up in Abu Dhabi, where it will be the star of a new museum in a few years. Larson didn't see a penny from that sale. In the years leading up to the auction, he had a dispute with his brother over the ownership of their company. They agreed on an unorthodox settlement. His brother got Stan's bones. He kept the firm. But he did get to keep the intellectual property rights to Stan.
SPEAKER_12: No two people prepare a bone the same. And, you know, there's the artistry where you reconstruct, where you're putting the pieces back together, where you're creating the parts that are missing. It's all art. And so we have a registered copyright and we trademark the name Stan.
SPEAKER_02: Larson's company now makes extremely accurate plastic casts of Stan, right down to the serrations in the teeth. Those casts have become his bread and butter.
SPEAKER_12: A Stan full-mounted cast sells for $120,000. And then that's plus whatever shipping and creating that would have to go in that.
SPEAKER_02: That's a bargain compared to, you know, $32 million. Yeah, that's right. Not everyone can afford a cast of Stan, but a lot more people can afford an original Stan skeleton.
SPEAKER_12: Larson says he has sold around 100 casts to museums all over the world.
SPEAKER_02: There are stands in Washington, DC, Korea, Japan, India, France, Spain, Germany, England.
SPEAKER_12: Stands all over the place.
SPEAKER_02: There are even a few stands floating around in private homes. Dwayne The Rock Johnson has a plastic Stan skull in his home office. It set him back around $12,000. And if you take a boat down Lake Washington in Seattle and you peer into the glass atrium of one of those waterfront mansions, you might catch a glimpse of a full-scale Stan skeleton. People will say, well, how much did your cast cost? Like they want to see how much money I blew in that.
SPEAKER_05: And I said, look, the truth of it is if you build a living room big enough to hold the dinosaur, that cost you way more than a dinosaur.
SPEAKER_02: That's Nathan Myhrvold. He was the first CTO at Microsoft. He's the founder of a private equity firm called Intellectual Ventures. And he's also very into dinosaurs.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, yeah, I've got so Archaeopteryx is a very famous fossil. I have a megalodon jaw. I have an ancient fish called Xiphactinus, which is a fish that used to live in the inland sea. But Myhrvold isn't just a collector of fossils. He's accompanied paleontologists on digs.
SPEAKER_02: He's written a number of peer-reviewed papers, including one on dinosaur vomit. And he's played a critical role in funding scientific expeditions, which are chronically under-resourced.
SPEAKER_05: A huge amount of paleontology, it's people spending $20,000 a year to take a few of their students on a camping trip for a couple of weeks in one place. One of the bigger line items? Renting porta-potties for the campground. For the past two decades, Myhrvold has granted around $500,000 per year to paleontologists.
SPEAKER_02: Those grants have resulted in at least 10 T-Rex discoveries, all on public land for academic research. It's an effort to level the playing field for scientists who simply can't compete with the budgets of commercial fossil hunters. Thomas Carr, the paleontology professor in Wisconsin, says that the commercial market for dinosaurs has had a devastating impact on scientific research. He and many other paleontologists adhere to a code of ethics established by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. That code says that they can only study fossils in the public trust. Anything sold on the open market is strictly off limits. And that's a problem, because to date, more than 60% of all known T-Rex fossils have been found by commercial fossil hunters.
SPEAKER_10: It took only 33 years for the commercial folks to collect more T-Rexes than public trust collected in 130 years. It's an existential threat. Our natural heritage is just being auctioned off for top dollar. And that's a problem for science, because to really understand nature, particularly organisms, we have to have a high sample size.
SPEAKER_02: This problem is not exclusive to T-Rex fossils.
SPEAKER_10: Triceratops shows up on the market, duck-billed dinosaurs. In the past year, a very rare example of a bird-like dinosaur called Deinonychus was auctioned to a private individual. And Deinonychus is known from very few specimens, like there's only six or seven good ones. It's gone, and there's nothing we can do about it.
SPEAKER_02: Commercial fossil hunters like Larsen see it differently. They often argue that exposed fossils will eventually succumb to the elements.
SPEAKER_12: The scientists should be happy that these other fossils are being saved, because you cannot leave a fossil in the ground and expect it to survive. I cannot fault someone for capitalizing an asset that they might have. And especially farmers and ranchers, they need to be paid for these things.
SPEAKER_02: Last summer, after many fruitless searches, paleontologist Thomas Carr finally found something that had been eluding him for years. Bone fragments from a rare juvenile T-Rex. They may not be worth $32 million, but the real value, he says, is what they can teach us about the inhabitants of the Cretaceous era. He hopes to return next year to look for a full skeleton. That is, unless someone else gets there first.
SPEAKER_02: For the Economics of Everyday Things, I'm Zachary Krakat.
SPEAKER_13: And I'm Stephen Dovner. I hope you liked this sampling of the newest show from the Freakonomics Radio Network. We put out a new episode every week, so go to your podcast app right now and follow the show. Coming up next time here on Freakonomics Radio, every driver in America is used to traffic lights at intersections. But considering that most crashes and most traffic injuries and deaths happen at intersections, maybe those traffic lights aren't doing such a great job.
SPEAKER_15: A traffic signal is not efficient at all. Would you, therefore, consider the traffic roundabout?
SPEAKER_15: And I said, what's a roundabout?
SPEAKER_13: That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. This special episode of the Economics of Everyday Things was produced by Sarah Lilly with help from Lyrich Bautich and was mixed by Jeremy Johnston and Greg Rippon. Special thanks to Ryan Kyloth and Patrick McNamee. Our staff also includes Alina Coleman, Daria Clenert, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Jasmine Klinger, Julie Canfer, Morgan Levy, Neil Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Ryan Kelly and Zach Lipinski.
SPEAKER_05: How many times do you get to meet the world's foremost expert on dinosaur vomit? It's truly an honor.
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