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668. Do Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny Have Blood on Their Hands?

March 27, 2026·54 min·4 clips

Traffic deaths surge 40% on days when Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny release new albums, according to a new study.

The risk starts in the car. Dubner frames driving as something billions of people do every day, even though it still carries huge costs in deaths, injuries, and money. The U.S. comes off badly here. Among high-income countries, he says, America is an outlier, with more than 40,000 traffic deaths each year, about one death every 13 minutes. The question is not whether Taylor Swift or other artists mean harm. It is whether attention can drift at the wrong second. Don Redelmeyer gives that idea a careful yes: a moment of inattention can cause a fatal crash, and exciting new music can indirectly make some listeners drop their guard. From there, Patel turns a grabby premise into a research problem. He leans on public federal data because other people can inspect it and catch mistakes. That matters when the setup sounds a little loaded. Timing is the tricky part. Album release dates are not random, since many albums arrive at midnight Eastern Time on Fridays, and Fridays already behave differently from Tuesdays. So Patel compares each release day with the same weekday in the week before and the week after. The window stays tight on purpose. Ten days before and ten days after catches the nearby Friday or weekend on both sides, which helps account for ordinary calendar patterns. The episode stays skeptical rather than accusatory. By the end, it is really about unintended consequences, like research on marathons delaying ambulances. Popular culture can grab attention at scale. The episode asks whether traffic data can see the aftershock.

As heard by us

A strange pop-music question becomes a disciplined look at traffic risk, public data, and everyday economic costs.

Freakonomics Radio turns a pop-culture provocation into a measured look at traffic risk, public cost, and the difficulty of testing distraction at national scale.

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Why you'd press play

Someone actually ran the numbers on whether Taylor Swift album releases might be linked to fatal traffic crashes.

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