651. The Ultimate Dance Partner

0:00:04 Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner.
0:00:08 Before we get to today’s episode, we need your help for an upcoming episode.
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0:01:08 And now here is today’s episode.
0:01:22 Earlier this year, I was visiting Chester, a mid-sized city in the northwest of England, a few miles from the Welsh border.
0:01:26 Chester was founded nearly 2,000 years ago as a Roman fortress.
0:01:32 And most of those old Roman walls are still standing, a rough rectangle that surrounds the city center.
0:01:38 Chester also has a large and beautiful cathedral, parts of which date back nearly 1,000 years.
0:01:43 It was a cathedral that brought me and some colleagues to Chester.
0:01:49 We were retracing the steps of the 18th century composer George Friedrich Handel and his groundbreaking Messiah.
0:01:54 You will hear those episodes eventually, but that’s not what today’s episode is about.
0:02:01 Because Chester is not only a cathedral city and a city with the most complete Roman walls in all of Britain.
0:02:11 It is also home to the Chester Racecourse, which dates back nearly 500 years, which makes it the oldest continuously operating horse track in the world.
0:02:16 And we happened to be visiting Chester on the first day of the summer racing season.
0:02:20 So we strolled down the high street toward the track.
0:02:28 We passed a bunch of people sitting on top of those old Roman walls, which gave them a free view down into the racetrack.
0:02:30 And we made our way inside.
0:02:38 The Chester Course is a beautiful little turf track built on top of what used to be a riverbed, long silted over.
0:02:41 It is a gloriously sunny day.
0:02:44 On one side of the oval racetrack is a grandstand.
0:02:48 Inside the track, there’s a cluster of private and corporate suites.
0:02:51 Over there, the men wear dapper suits.
0:02:55 The women wear colorful dresses and even more colorful fascinators.
0:03:00 Those very three-dimensional hats that British ladies like to wear to festive occasions.
0:03:05 Between races, everyone there goes into the suites for champagne and nibbles.
0:03:12 And then, after placing their bets, they gather on the inside rail to watch the horses thunder past.
0:03:23 For all the spectacle, for all the joy and drinking and gambling, this is the centerpiece of the day.
0:03:29 These gorgeous animals flying past at more than 40 miles an hour, weighing over 1,000 pounds.
0:03:33 Their jockeys weighing maybe 115 pounds.
0:03:37 Many of the jockeys here are Irish, and quite a few are female.
0:03:44 Before each race, they meet up with their horses in the parade ring, where the owners and trainers are closely watching.
0:03:49 Gamblers, too, looking for any edge, real or imagined.
0:03:54 Up close, you can see the intricate designs shaved into the hair on the horse’s hindquarters.
0:03:57 Diamonds and stripes, half moons.
0:04:01 And their workout sweat makes the designs glisten in the sunshine.
0:04:06 The horses are led down to the starting gate, and then, once again, they’re off.
0:04:12 As I stood there watching the horses run, I had two thoughts.
0:04:15 The first one was basically, wow.
0:04:25 Seeing such big animals run so fast, so fluidly and rhythmically, it is an astonishingly pure piece of old-fashioned analog entertainment.
0:04:33 It’s a thing that happens in a real place and time, with other people, and not some digital facsimile.
0:04:40 The second thought I had was that the most likely place to see a horse these days is a racetrack.
0:04:49 When Chester Racecourse was built, horses were one of the world’s foremost technologies, if you want to call them that, which historians like to do.
0:04:52 Back then, we used horses for just about everything.
0:04:57 For transportation and manufacturing, for agriculture and warfare.
0:05:02 We used them for companionship and for entertainment, like racing.
0:05:05 All that, of course, changed over time.
0:05:09 New technologies came along to handle most of those horsey functions.
0:05:11 But the horse did not disappear.
0:05:18 There used to be some 30 million horses in the U.S., but today, there are still nearly 7 million.
0:05:23 And so, standing in the sunshine in Chester that day, I got to wondering,
0:05:26 who is riding those 7 million horses?
0:05:30 Who’s breeding and training them, buying and selling them?
0:05:35 I was especially eager to know what the horse market or markets might look like.
0:05:37 Equinomics, I guess you’d have to call it.
0:05:44 So, today, on Frequinomics Radio, and for the next couple of weeks on the show, we will get into those markets.
0:05:48 There’s no Zillow for horses, and I think that this is a huge problem.
0:05:53 We’ll hear how specialized breeding has turned the horse into a world-class athlete.
0:05:59 I can remember my dad saying, after I’m gone, never let them do artificial insemination and thoroughbreds.
0:05:59 It’ll ruin the breed.
0:06:03 We will meet some of the most valuable horses in the world.
0:06:06 How do I say this without a hit being put out on me?
0:06:11 And we may, just may, put one reluctant rider on top of a horse.
0:06:13 Let’s see, what am I signing?
0:06:14 Indemnify, hold harmless.
0:06:16 New Jersey law.
0:06:16 Okay, yeah, yeah.
0:06:18 Wait, I do see death.
0:06:19 Keep going.
0:06:20 There’s more.
0:06:38 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:06:51 Okay, let’s start with the basic breakdown of the nearly 7 million horses in the U.S.
0:06:56 Horses aren’t as easy to count as you might think, but we’ll go with what are considered the most reliable numbers.
0:07:00 There are roughly 3 million horses grouped into what’s called the recreation sector.
0:07:04 That’s personal use, lessons, trail rides, etc.
0:07:11 Another half million horses are used for traditional jobs like farming, ranching, carriage pulling, policing, and so on.
0:07:17 A horse in any of these categories will typically sell for somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars.
0:07:22 Then there are the racehorses, about a million of them in the U.S., and they sell for much more.
0:07:25 We will hear about that in part two of this series.
0:07:30 Another big category with a million plus are the so-called competition horses.
0:07:37 This covers everything from rodeo horses to the sport horses that you’ll see in equestrian events in the Olympics.
0:07:42 And how much do those sport horses go for, and where can you buy one?
0:07:44 I happen to have just gone through this process.
0:07:48 It’s theoretically easier if you have an unlimited budget.
0:07:51 That is Constance Hunter.
0:08:00 In her day job, she is chief economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research division of the Economist Publishing Group, but she is also an avid equestrian.
0:08:14 I met Hunter not long ago at an economics conference, and when she told me that a promising young sport horse would sell for the lowish six figures, I must have looked surprised because then she said something like, you have no idea.
0:08:25 She said the amateur sport has been increasingly impacted by the billionaire class, people who will spend a million dollars or two million on a well-trained horse for their kids to compete on.
0:08:32 Even more interesting, she said that most sport horse sales are private transactions with no public record.
0:08:35 She said this reminds her of the private equity industry.
0:08:41 If you acquire a company, the idea is that you’re going to create more value than you bought it for.
0:08:50 And for people who are in the horse business, they’re obviously buying because they see a potential that they can extract and then sell it for more money.
0:08:54 Sometimes that’s just because they have capital to put to work, right?
0:09:02 And you are going to deploy my trainer, who’s an excellent horse picker, to go around the world, buy horses that you would work with for a year or two and then sell, right?
0:09:10 And just like private equity, there’s not that much transparency until the final transaction takes place.
0:09:15 There is more transparency with private equity because you have investors that want to know what did it cost originally.
0:09:21 But amateurs, for whatever reason, don’t seem to ask these questions.
0:09:25 And therefore, there’s not really the norm to disclose information.
0:09:27 It’s interesting.
0:09:29 I think it’s a quality of humans.
0:09:31 Most humans don’t volunteer information.
0:09:33 You have to draw things out.
0:09:36 Okay, so let’s draw things out.
0:09:39 Constance Hunter grew up in Philadelphia.
0:09:47 My parents never bought me a pony or a horse, but they did give me riding lessons and I was hooked.
0:09:48 I rode all the way through high school.
0:09:51 I was on the equestrian team at NYU.
0:09:54 We used to ride out in Long Island in Old Westbury.
0:09:59 These days, Hunter competes in an event known as Hunter Jumper.
0:09:59 No relation.
0:10:04 That is a course that is meant to mimic the hunt field.
0:10:06 Sometimes it happens on grass.
0:10:09 Very often it happens in a ring with a fence around it.
0:10:15 And the jumps are constructed to evoke memories of what an open field in a hunt course might look like.
0:10:17 You’re technically judging the horse.
0:10:26 And I say that with sort of air quotes around it because how well the horse expresses itself depends a lot on the quality of the rider on its back.
0:10:38 But the holy grail in this competition, especially for amateurs, is to have what we call a push-button horse, a horse that will express itself perfectly in spite of the rider on its back.
0:10:46 In the equestrian world, amateurs and professionals mix it up and often compete against one another much more than in most other sports.
0:10:48 Constance Hunter owns two horses.
0:10:53 The one she bought more recently, she says, is one of those forgiving horses.
0:10:58 She shares a photo of an athletic-looking brown horse with big black eyes.
0:10:59 This is my baby.
0:11:07 This is Jasper de la Tour, who heretofore has displayed none of the attitudinal arrogance of my other horse.
0:11:13 That other horse is called Bolio’s Cool Eric, but we’re still talking about Jasper here.
0:11:14 He’s sweet.
0:11:19 He’s equally beautiful, equally athletic, equally what we would call scoppy.
0:11:22 The jumps at the level I’m doing are easy for him.
0:11:29 If I make a little bit of a mistake, if I’m too soon to the jump or too late to the jump, it’s no problem for him to compensate for my errors.
0:11:32 He sort of has this how-can-I-help attitude.
0:11:36 Both of them are very cuddly when you’re in the stall with them or grazing them.
0:11:39 Jasper’s learning to love ear scratches.
0:11:42 He puts his head down like a dog, like, please scratch my ears.
0:11:49 Friendliness is a nice attribute in a horse, but athleticism is what makes a given horse valuable.
0:11:58 I know of a horse that was given to a very experienced jumper rider, and some people went in on it as an investment.
0:12:05 So this is where competition was a $500,000 purse split amongst the top, I think, 10 winners.
0:12:15 So if you have a horse that can place consistently in those top competitions, and let’s say you enter them in 10 or 15 of them a year, that’s part of what determines the price.
0:12:18 There was an offer for $5 million for this horse.
0:12:25 $5 million is a lot for one horse, even in the elite equestrian world, but it’s hardly unheard of.
0:12:30 With such high prices, some amateurs prefer to lease their horses.
0:12:36 But Hunter says that even leasing has some risk, since the true value of a given horse can be elusive.
0:12:40 Everybody knows what a masterpiece is, right?
0:12:46 But the big difference is that a Van Gogh masterpiece is a Van Gogh masterpiece to everybody.
0:12:56 Whereas if I look at my horse, Jasper, who I love and who’s perfect for me as this amateur, Heinrich von Eckermann would have no use for Jasper, right?
0:13:01 Heinrich von Eckermann is a Swedish jumping rider, one of the best in the world.
0:13:03 So not the same value to him.
0:13:10 Many of the horses I tried when I was looking were perfectly fine horses, just weren’t quite the right fit for me.
0:13:18 It is, I think, a little bit more like a headhunter or a matchmaker in terms of that relational and long-term view.
0:13:22 When Hunter says long-term view, it’s pretty long.
0:13:26 Domesticated horses typically live 25 to 30 years.
0:13:29 Her baby, Jasper, is six years old.
0:13:33 Folio’s cool Eric, meanwhile, is 20 and still going strong.
0:13:35 He’s got a huge personality.
0:13:46 If I’m away for a while and I try to ride him into a ring to work, he’ll have a little temper tantrum, which involves him rearing, spinning, bucking, occasionally trying to crash me into walls.
0:13:48 I used to be scared.
0:13:52 And then I realized, wait, if he wanted me dead, I would already be dead.
0:13:55 So I just kind of, like, calm him down.
0:14:05 What’s amazing, I think, about horses is they’re these huge, powerful animals, and yet they let us train them to do all of these things.
0:14:07 And they’re prey animals.
0:14:09 They’re not like a dog, which is a predator.
0:14:13 If you feed the dog, the dog feels like, okay, you’re the leader of my pack.
0:14:14 You provided me this food.
0:14:16 I didn’t have to go out and hunt it.
0:14:19 But no blade of grass ever ran away from a horse.
0:14:20 Right?
0:14:21 So they don’t need us.
0:14:26 They need us for absolutely nothing, and yet they’re willing to partner with us.
0:14:32 That partnership between horses and humans goes back several thousand years.
0:14:36 So let’s speak with someone who can explain that history.
0:14:40 Peter Frankopan, my name is Peter Frankopan, and I’m professor of global history at Oxford University.
0:14:46 And Peter, how much of a horse person are you, scale of zero to ten?
0:14:48 Uh, as a rider, I’m a zero.
0:14:51 As a historian, I’m pushing ten on this one.
0:14:52 Okay.
0:15:04 It’s quite hard to understand human historical civilizations going back thousands of years from deep antiquity right through into the modern period without placing the horse somewhere within that human story.
0:15:12 You can’t understand the history of empires and of the way in which the world has been knitted together without putting the horse pretty high up that list of factors.
0:15:15 I want to just bring up a parallel that I was reading about this morning.
0:15:17 This is an economics paper that I didn’t know about.
0:15:19 It was probably 20 years old.
0:15:21 It’s by a guy named Nathan Nunn.
0:15:31 He wrote this paper that you probably know, I just didn’t, about the centrality of the potato shipped from the new world back to the old world during the Colombian exchange.
0:15:45 And he makes the argument that without the potato, that let’s say most of Europe wouldn’t have developed as it had, or at least that it supercharged a certain kind of development because it was high calorie, sturdy, tradable, et cetera, et cetera.
0:15:51 So if we’re thinking of that as a sort of parallel, just how central was the horse?
0:15:53 And maybe you can get into some uses of the horse.
0:15:55 I love that paper about potatoes.
0:16:02 Because calorie provision becomes easier, people don’t need to work in the fields either for so long in such quantity, so it drives urbanization.
0:16:03 Horses, they’re everywhere.
0:16:07 Number one, horses move 10 times faster than human beings.
0:16:13 That means you can ship goods, information, faster if you can rely on animals than if you don’t.
0:16:24 Second, horses plug, obviously, quite clearly into military endeavors, because if you have the ability to move things quickly, then quite soon you think, how do I use competitive advantage?
0:16:31 And so horses are absolutely central in the ways in which the first states start to grow, the ways in which competition plays out.
0:16:36 Frankopan has written several books about the ancient world.
0:16:42 His best-known, published in 2015, is called The Silk Roads, A New History of the World.
0:16:59 The Silk Roads is a shorthand used by historians and has been for the last couple of hundred years, originally to look at connections between China, Central Asia, and India, but broadly speaking, now to think about connected regions, connected peoples, and flows and exchanges of all kinds.
0:17:08 Frankopan, by researching these trade routes, inevitably came to see how central horses were to various cultures and empires.
0:17:12 There’s a market for the Arabian stallions two and a half thousand years ago.
0:17:18 You have texts being written saying the best horses come from Persia, they come from Gandhara, they come from Punjab.
0:17:23 Don’t buy horses and get sold a dud by looking at horses without inspecting them properly.
0:17:34 In the Chinese world, more than two and a half thousand years ago, you have an official position called the Director of the Studs, which in today’s world sounds like it might be something a bit more to do with fraternity houses, perhaps.
0:17:42 But working out which was the right combination of which horse for which rider, but also how many you needed, which ones were most valuable.
0:17:47 There were war horses, there are courier horses, there are hunting horses, there are coach horses.
0:17:53 In different periods in different Chinese dynasties, the horse is incredibly important in art and sculpture.
0:18:03 The Tang dynasty, from the early 600s until about the early 900s, is very famous for producing these incredibly beautiful terracotta animals, camels, bactrian, and so on.
0:18:05 But the horse is the king of all of the animals.
0:18:11 And that’s because to have horses gives you high status, and above all, that’s to do with the fact that you’ve got an effective military.
0:18:17 The horse is so important that you have poems written in Chinese, which celebrate individual horses.
0:18:20 Emperors are buried alongside statues of their favorite horses.
0:18:21 And it’s not just a Chinese thing.
0:18:28 Tutankhamun, the superstar of the Egyptian world, is buried alongside six full working chariots,
0:18:32 all ready to be harnessed to the best horses the Egyptians could find.
0:18:35 Let’s take it into North America for just a moment.
0:18:46 Give me a bit on when and to what degree horses came here and whether they shaped the North American culture, economy, political landscape, etc.,
0:18:50 in similar ways as they had shaped earlier civilizations, or was it different?
0:18:53 Well, we know there were horses in North America about 20,000 years ago.
0:18:55 Those seem to have died out.
0:19:01 That meant that the ways in which people communicated across all the Americas, North, Central, and South, had different valences.
0:19:04 It meant that people moved in different timescales.
0:19:07 It meant that their capacities to build things quickly was different.
0:19:17 So when the Europeans arrived with Columbus and after him in 1492 onwards, horses were decisive in Europeans’ ability to conquer large empires.
0:19:21 Indigenous peoples very quickly understood how powerful and important horses were.
0:19:27 So horses became central to, for example, groups like the Cherokee, the Sioux, the Navajo, or the Apache.
0:19:33 And also the ways in which those horses helped build confederations that themselves became incredibly powerful,
0:19:40 created challenges, questions, problems for what the United States would look like as the 13 colonies eventually expanded westwards.
0:19:43 How did you compete against indigenous peoples?
0:19:51 And that competition to have access to horses and technology and power and rewarding military valour plays an important role in the modern United States.
0:19:55 It just happened in the Americas a couple of thousand years after it starts in Asia.
0:20:02 Once horses were reintroduced into North America, their numbers grew and grew and grew.
0:20:08 In the U.S., we hit peak horse somewhere around 1910 or 1915.
0:20:12 I think it peaks around 27 to 30 million.
0:20:14 It’s always a little hard to know.
0:20:16 That is Anne N. Green.
0:20:22 She is a historian of the American 19th century and a retired professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
0:20:29 We wanted to speak with Green because of a book she wrote called Horses at Work, Harnessing Power in Industrial America.
0:20:36 If you walk down a street in the 1880s, it would have been mobbed with horses.
0:20:43 One of my favorite statistics is that at about 1900, there were 500 horses per square mile in Philadelphia.
0:20:48 There would have been horse-drawn streetcars, two-wheeled carts, big heavy wagons.
0:20:57 If you move over to factory areas, you’re going to see horses coming and going, bringing stuff in, taking stuff out.
0:21:04 And you might see horses inside the factory pulling things or powering things.
0:21:07 There were two main urban herds.
0:21:10 One was for teaming, any kind of hauling.
0:21:14 That’s why the symbol of the Teamsters Union is a horse.
0:21:18 The other urban herd were streetcar horses.
0:21:28 Streetcar companies would own hundreds of horses and house them in multi-story stables that kind of resembled parking garages.
0:21:32 The railroads owned lots of horses.
0:21:37 And as you get operations like big department stores, they own lots of horses.
0:21:39 Delivery.
0:21:43 So this is how it starts to add up to something like 30 million throughout the country.
0:21:45 It’s a massive reliance on this one animal.
0:21:46 Yes.
0:21:48 The cities, the populations are really dense.
0:21:53 And the cities move via horsepower.
0:22:01 The biggest illustration of that was the great epizootic of 1872 when horses got sick with horse flu.
0:22:05 It started someplace up near Toronto.
0:22:07 It spread along transportation routes.
0:22:15 And in major city after major city, you had several days where nothing was moving on the streets.
0:22:19 The horse mortality wasn’t terrible, but the horses got pretty sick.
0:22:22 And it hurt city services.
0:22:31 There would be a fire and literally people were harnessing themselves to fire engines to pull them because the horses were too sick to work.
0:22:35 Tell me what you can about the market, the buying and selling of the horses.
0:22:37 Was it purely a domestic market?
0:22:40 Were people importing a lot of horses?
0:22:46 How big and prominent were the firms that were breeding and selling horses and so on?
0:22:49 There’s some big horse markets in New York and Chicago.
0:22:54 There are certainly firms that deal in selling horses.
0:22:57 There are market classifications for horses.
0:23:01 Some are by weight and configuration.
0:23:04 And some are by job function.
0:23:17 One of the changes in the last part of the 19th century is that you really start getting a concern with horse breeds that doesn’t exist that much before the Civil War.
0:23:24 To have a horse breed, to have a breed of any animal, takes a fair amount of paperwork and policing.
0:23:37 My guess is that the major part of the American horse population was a mid-sized, strong, not necessarily terribly, terribly fast kind of all-purpose horse.
0:23:39 Like a Honda Civic.
0:23:40 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:23:44 You use a phrase I want you to define and explain.
0:23:46 Living machines is what you call horses.
0:23:47 What do you mean by that?
0:23:54 That’s a phrase that comes out of the work by two colleagues of mine, Clay McShane and Joel Tarr,
0:24:12 who wrote a book called Horse in the City, that makes you think about the horse functionally, and it brings this kind of power, which humans have been using for centuries, into the same space as other kinds of energy sources.
0:24:21 It was a way, I think, for all of us to get away from this notion of progress that always said, oh, well, horses.
0:24:28 Everybody was just sitting around waiting for something, something better to come along.
0:24:33 But most people today, I would argue, think that something better did come along.
0:24:42 There was the internal combustion engine, which powered cars and trucks, and the electric streetcar, which made cities much easier to get around in.
0:24:47 And the horse, for all its virtues, wasn’t really designed for dense urban living.
0:24:51 New York City at one point had an estimated 200,000 horses.
0:24:54 All that manure created massive public health problems.
0:24:58 The noise of horseshoes on cobblestones was deafening.
0:25:04 So there were all sorts of reasons to move away from horsepower and embrace new technologies.
0:25:08 And yet, the horse did not disappear.
0:25:09 Coming up after the break.
0:25:11 I will be frank.
0:25:16 We were expecting to import and sell maybe four or five horses a year.
0:25:19 Last year, we sold 33 horses.
0:25:20 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:25:21 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:25:22 We’ll be right back.
0:25:35 In the early 1900s, horses were everywhere, and it didn’t take much effort to buy one.
0:25:38 These days, it can be more complicated.
0:25:40 It’s a very strange market.
0:25:41 I’ll say that.
0:25:43 That is Mark Paul.
0:25:46 He is an economics professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
0:25:55 My main interests are addressing the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to inequality throughout the United States.
0:25:58 For decades, the North Star has been, quote-unquote, free markets.
0:26:00 And we’ve seen that that’s really been a farce.
0:26:05 It hasn’t actually delivered the supposed freedom and opportunity that we had hoped.
0:26:13 So, it sounds like, by day, you are an economist who is trying to create better economic equality.
0:26:15 And then, by night, you’re a horse trader?
0:26:17 Do I have that about right?
0:26:18 You do.
0:26:18 You do.
0:26:24 I should say, this is a hobby that has turned into a part-time job on the side.
0:26:30 Mark Paul helps run a business that imports, trains, and sells sport horses.
0:26:36 I grew up with horses ever since I was six years old and just fell in love with these majestic creatures.
0:26:37 Where’d you grow up?
0:26:38 I grew up in Massachusetts.
0:26:45 There was a horse farm down the road, and every weekend, I’d go muck out stalls, pick up the horse manure in exchange for lessons.
0:26:51 I was really privileged that my parents were able to buy me my first horse.
0:26:58 Actually, my best friend and I split our first horse when we were kids that we went and picked up at a cowboy auction for a couple hundred bucks.
0:26:59 Tell me about that horse.
0:27:02 Name, size, kind, etc.
0:27:05 Yeah, he was what’s called an appendix quarter horse.
0:27:10 He was a gray horse, and he liked to roll around in the dirt and get covered in mud.
0:27:12 We were quite original, so we named him Dusty.
0:27:17 My friend Lydia and I got to share him for a number of years and learn with him.
0:27:18 It was a real joy.
0:27:28 Now, if you were like me, you may have heard of a quarter horse, although you don’t quite know what it means to say nothing of an appendix quarter horse.
0:27:36 Even though there are far fewer horses today than there used to be, as we heard earlier from Ann N. Green, there are more horse breeds.
0:27:41 Some have their pedigrees closely monitored in registries that are called stud books.
0:27:44 For others, the breeding standards are more relaxed.
0:27:49 Quarter horses are the most prevalent horse here in the United States.
0:27:52 They tend to be on the smaller side.
0:27:58 Horses are measured in hands, which is a system that most Americans are probably not familiar with.
0:28:04 This is the old-fashioned thing where you would literally extend your hand from thumb to pinky and measure up?
0:28:05 You got it.
0:28:13 Each hand is about four inches, so the average quarter horse is about 15-2 hands, so that’s about 60 or 62 inches tall.
0:28:15 That’s from what to what?
0:28:16 Not from hoof to head, is it?
0:28:17 It’s not from hoof to head.
0:28:22 It’s from hoof to what’s called the wither, which is at the top of the horse’s shoulder.
0:28:25 Okay, so that’s about five feet to the shoulder.
0:28:26 That’s right.
0:28:34 Quarter horses are on the smaller size, and they’re often used for Western riding, things like reining or working cattle farms.
0:28:40 So when people turn on their horse drama series like Yellowstone, they’re looking at quarter horses.
0:28:44 In general, quarter horses are kind of like the golden retrievers of horses.
0:28:46 They’re chill.
0:28:47 They’re family-friendly.
0:28:55 So when you’re describing a quarter horse, what I’m hearing is not, on average, a prima donna, correct?
0:28:56 That is right.
0:28:59 Do not think about the person all done up walking down Fifth Avenue.
0:29:02 Okay, what do you have for prima donnas in the form of horses, then?
0:29:04 Can we talk about thoroughbreds?
0:29:10 Thoroughbreds are the sprinters, probably the second most prevalent horse here in the United States.
0:29:15 Horse racing has a long and storied history in America, though at times quite troubling as well.
0:29:22 Thoroughbreds were bred to do one thing, and that is run fast over fairly short distances.
0:29:25 Thoroughbreds are a lot leaner than a quarter horse.
0:29:30 Quarter horses have some nice bulk to them, whereas a thoroughbred is very narrow and refined.
0:29:37 Most thoroughbreds are bred here in the United States, Kentucky being the heartland of the thoroughbred and the racing industry.
0:29:47 But Mark Paul lives in New Jersey, not in Kentucky, and the horses he specializes in are neither thoroughbreds nor quarter horses.
0:29:52 The horses he deals in are called warm bloods, and they’re most commonly used as sport horses.
0:29:59 The two horses that Constance Hunter owns, Jasper de la Tour and Bolio’s cool Eric, are warm bloods.
0:30:07 They’re called that because they’re a cross between hot-blooded breeds like thoroughbreds and Arabians and slower, more cold-blooded breeds like draft horses.
0:30:13 I will say within the idea of warm bloods, there are many, many sub-breeds as well.
0:30:14 Name some.
0:30:19 Hanoverians, Oldenburgs, Dutch warm bloods, Belgian warm bloods.
0:30:21 Most of these are coming from Europe.
0:30:29 A lot of the warm bloods are, you know, more in the 64 to 70-inch range for their height.
0:30:30 Convert that to hands for me then?
0:30:33 Often there can be 16 to 17 hands.
0:30:37 One of mine is actually 18 hands, so he is just absolutely massive.
0:30:39 I need a stepladder to brush the thing.
0:30:43 What about characteristics and uses of the warm blood?
0:30:48 Now, this is a fascinating question because this has really changed over time.
0:30:56 20, 30 years ago, warm bloods were fairly heavy, a little bit slow, kind of on the docile side.
0:30:59 They had more of that draft horse blood in them.
0:31:06 More recently, as the equestrian sport has evolved, warm bloods have become hotter, more energetic.
0:31:07 They’re more sensitive.
0:31:11 They’re a little bit lighter and more refined.
0:31:13 It sounds like you’re saying they’ve become more athletic.
0:31:14 Would that be the right word?
0:31:15 That is exactly right.
0:31:20 They’ve been transformed into world-class athletes through modern horse breeding.
0:31:27 Paul competes in the sport called dressage, one of three equestrian events in the Olympics.
0:31:29 The others are jumping and eventing.
0:31:39 Dressage is sometimes called horse ballet because of the subtle and complicated ways the horse and rider move about the arena, often accompanied by music.
0:31:53 But these moves originally come from military training that developed in Europe, particularly in France, and specifically from field drills that were used to turn soldier and horse into one unit, joined at the tailbone, ready for battle.
0:31:57 Training a horse in dressage takes years.
0:32:04 The sport today is much more popular in Europe than the U.S., but there is a dedicated American dressage community.
0:32:09 In the United States, we have roughly 15,000 dressage riders.
0:32:12 Globally, we’re talking about 175,000.
0:32:19 That has grown substantially over the past few decades, both in number of athletes, but also in spectators.
0:32:23 It’s becoming far more exciting to watch.
0:32:29 Part of this is thanks to the Olympics and how it has highlighted the beauty and passion in the sport.
0:32:34 It’s also just the fact that people have more money and more time to enjoy leisure.
0:32:40 Yes, this is a sport, but it’s also a hobby for the vast majority of people who participate in it.
0:32:47 And so as we become a wealthier world, people are able to dedicate more of their time and resources to building out those hobbies.
0:32:50 And some of us choose horses as that hobby.
0:32:58 So would you consider dressage horses especially, but just about any of these warm-blood horses, are they essentially a luxury good?
0:33:00 In general, they are.
0:33:05 And that’s, to be frank, the tension I struggle with most between my two different jobs.
0:33:09 As you heard me earlier talk about, I’m a researcher focused on inequality.
0:33:16 And here I am engaging in a luxury sport, and it’s something that bothers me each and every day.
0:33:23 But as I tell my kids and my students, we have to struggle with the differences between the world we want and the world we exist in.
0:33:29 Okay, so you compete in dressage, but you also have this business that’s connected to your hobby.
0:33:30 Tell me about that.
0:33:36 So my partner, Elizabeth Bortuzzo, and I started our business, Avo Dressage, about two years ago.
0:33:44 The main reason we started it was to be able to own and compete and grow with world-class horses.
0:33:54 One of the challenges in our sport is horses that actually have the talent and skill to make it to the Olympic level are extraordinarily expensive.
0:33:59 And neither of us quite had the six or seven figures to go pick up one of those horses.
0:34:02 So we thought, how can we make this happen?
0:34:11 We said, let’s start by buying a horse, training it a little bit, learning with it, and then hopefully selling it for a significant profit, rinse and repeat.
0:34:18 When you say the buying and the training and the selling, are you more of the buyer and seller and she is more of the trainer?
0:34:24 Elizabeth and I co-own our business and co-own all of the horses we buy.
0:34:25 So it’s a shared business.
0:34:27 She is the primary trainer.
0:34:29 She is an extraordinarily skilled athlete.
0:34:34 She is the one with the serious Olympic aspirations, and I have full faith that she will get there.
0:34:41 I do hope to compete at the top international level, less focused on trying to make the Olympics, though.
0:34:44 Okay, tell me how the company started.
0:34:45 Maybe the first horse you bought together?
0:34:48 We bought a horse from Germany.
0:34:50 We imported him together.
0:34:53 We each rode him about 50% of the time.
0:34:58 Elizabeth being the primary trainer and me getting to learn from both Elizabeth and the horse.
0:34:59 Were you a good student?
0:35:01 I sure try to be.
0:35:03 I probably backtalk more than I should.
0:35:05 I’m an external processor.
0:35:06 What can I say?
0:35:08 What’s the size of your company now?
0:35:10 Now we have about 15 horses.
0:35:15 A lot of them we bring over for resale, but we also keep quite a few.
0:35:18 And so on our team, we now have seven personal horses.
0:35:23 What we do essentially is we go to Europe, we find horses.
0:35:30 Usually we’re buying horses that are in the age range of four years old to about 12 years old.
0:35:34 Horses really start to hit the peak of their career around 11 or 12.
0:35:41 The average horse lives about 30 years, but their peak competitive career is about 12 to 16.
0:35:52 We import those horses here to the United States, which is a process all in of itself where they fly on a plane and they come to JFK and go through a quarantine process.
0:36:00 We bring them to our farm out in Frenchtown, New Jersey, and we get them acclimated and make sure they’re set up and happy.
0:36:02 And then we start training those horses.
0:36:08 Our goal is to continue advancing their education and career as dressage horses.
0:36:22 The ultimate goal is to then sell those horses into the U.S. market and improve the quality of horses here for the sport of dressage, but also to really help people find their right dance partner.
0:36:24 So let’s talk about that market.
0:36:28 How not only big a market is it, but how organized a market is it?
0:36:33 Because I have looked around a little bit, and I have to say, it’s nothing like a stock market.
0:36:40 It’s nothing like a lot of markets we’re used to where all the buyers and all the sellers can congregate and all the prices are listed there.
0:36:42 Unless I’m really bad at the Internet, I’m not seeing that.
0:36:47 You know, there’s no Zillow for horses, and I think that this is a huge problem.
0:36:57 There’s actually quite a ripe market opportunity for somebody to create a highly transparent, well-functioning app or marketplace for horses.
0:36:59 Somebody like you, I would assume.
0:36:59 Perhaps.
0:37:06 I keep talking to my brother-in-law, who’s a software developer, about this, and he is happily expecting a baby this weekend.
0:37:09 But maybe when he gets back from parental leave, this will be our next endeavor.
0:37:14 The horse market globally is about a $400 billion market.
0:37:16 It’s a sizable market.
0:37:25 Here in the United States, we have 6.7 million horses, and it contributes about $75 billion on an annual basis to GDP.
0:37:27 And this is all horses, not just sport horses?
0:37:28 This is all horses.
0:37:40 When it comes to sport horses, one of the challenges that Elizabeth and I saw was precisely what you identified, that there’s no good clearinghouse for horses in the United States.
0:37:42 There’s not a lot of market information out there.
0:37:44 So if somebody wants to buy a horse, where do they start?
0:37:47 A lot of people scratch their heads.
0:37:56 Unfortunately, similar in some ways to real estate or art, the market doesn’t have a huge amount of transparency.
0:38:02 And that’s something that we thought should be questioned and something that we ourselves are really trying to upend.
0:38:03 How are you trying to do that?
0:38:09 What we do is we have a website, and when people go to our website, we have all of our horses listed.
0:38:11 We have photos, videos, descriptions of them.
0:38:16 But importantly, we are fully transparent about all of our horses’ prices.
0:38:35 And the reason prices are often hidden is because there’s often two or three agents involved, again, similar to real estate transactions, where agents are getting fairly large commissions.
0:38:38 Those commissions aren’t always fully conveyed to buyers and sellers.
0:38:50 The price actually paid for the horse often is not the price paid to the seller themselves, which both is a problem from a transparency standpoint, but also leads to inflated prices.
0:38:55 What’s the median price in the U.S. for a sport horse transaction?
0:38:57 There’s not great data on this.
0:39:04 For a sport horse in dressage, I’d take an educated guess that we’re probably talking around $40,000 to $50,000.
0:39:09 $40,000 to $50,000 for a horse that is how well trained and how well regarded?
0:39:12 It’s just such a big can of worms that you’re asking.
0:39:14 Horses are just so variable.
0:39:16 You can think of cars, right?
0:39:23 You can go pick up a used car that has a couple issues and that is getting up there in age.
0:39:28 In the horse market, you might be looking at paying $5,000 to $10,000 for an older horse that doesn’t have very much training.
0:39:42 On the flip side, if you want a horse that’s been trained up to the international level, that’s not going to go to the Olympics, but that is a highly educated, trained horse, you easily could be paying a quarter million dollars.
0:39:45 So much of it depends on the horse’s potential.
0:39:48 The other main component is the horse’s training.
0:39:56 So you’ll see six-figure horses that are, you know, one or two years old, and you’ll see six-figure or seven-figure horses in the prime of their career.
0:40:01 Considering the lack of transparency in the market, I’m curious how much fraud there may be in the market.
0:40:07 Have people paid several hundred thousand dollars for a horse and found out that it’s actually not as good a horse as they thought?
0:40:13 I mean, unfortunately, in any marketplace, you have bad actors, but that’s really not the norm in the horse industry.
0:40:20 I think the bigger struggle in the horse industry is knowing, should this horse be $50,000 or $75,000?
0:40:26 That’s a large swing in price, but it’s not always very clear how to price a horse.
0:40:29 You mentioned the agents who take a cut.
0:40:30 Who are they?
0:40:37 Are you essentially an agent since you’re buying and selling, or are there actual sales agents who come in between you and the buyer or seller?
0:40:38 Yeah, that’s a great question.
0:40:40 So we don’t function at all as agents.
0:40:42 We buy all of our own horses.
0:40:43 We own the horses.
0:40:45 We bring them to the U.S.
0:40:49 We get to know them, and that way we can really represent the horse fairly.
0:41:05 On the flip side, agents are a little bit more like used car salesmen or real estate agents, where often they barely know a horse, and they’re just sending around videos trying to represent this horse and sell it to be able to make, often, the commission, the standard rate is 10%.
0:41:07 Wow, that’s a pretty big cut.
0:41:09 It’s a very hefty cut.
0:41:24 Could I set myself up as an agent, and could I go on to, let’s say, the website of your company, which I’m looking at now, and say, oh, I’m going to pick the three horses from this company that I think are a good sales opportunity and market them.
0:41:30 And then if I get bites on them, then I come to you and say, hey, I’ve got a buyer, and I’ll take my 10%.
0:41:31 Is that the way I could do it?
0:41:45 So, you could try that, but in general, the way this would work would be that sellers approach agents who have large networks or large books of business and try to get them to help represent their horse.
0:41:46 I do want to be clear.
0:41:50 Agents often do provide some services, so they might take really nice photos and videos.
0:41:53 They might run ads for the horse.
0:41:54 We don’t work with agents.
0:42:01 We work very hard to represent all of our horses ourselves and to work directly with our clients.
0:42:04 We kind of have two different classes of clients.
0:42:12 We have what we would call the adult amateurs, which are really hobby riders, and then there are professionals who are professional athletes.
0:42:21 Often, the hobby riders will come with their trainer who will help them determine, is this horse an appropriate fit for you?
0:42:24 Does it have enough training for your needs?
0:42:29 Does it have the potential to go where you want to go as a horse enthusiast and things along those lines?
0:42:34 What often happens is the trainer will want to be paid something.
0:42:37 What we do is we say, listen, this is the price.
0:42:38 It’s fully transparent.
0:42:44 If your trainer needs to be paid, we let the client work that out between them and their trainer.
0:42:47 That way, the transaction is just as transparent as possible.
0:42:56 And here’s what Constance Hunter, the first horse-owning economist we spoke with, thinks about the role of the trainer in a horse transaction.
0:43:07 They do add a lot of value, and even though I’m a well-informed amateur, I’m always amazed at something that my trainer will point out that I just didn’t notice because it’s not my profession.
0:43:10 It’s not what I’m doing 10 hours a day.
0:43:13 The other thing is that it’s a hard business to scale.
0:43:21 So if you’re a trainer, you can have people who work for you, but you as the expert can only get physically on so many horses in a day.
0:43:34 The people who combine these three key skills, being a teacher, being a rider, and then being good at selecting horses, I would say those are three distinct but interrelated skills.
0:43:39 And to have someone who’s really good at all three of those, there’s some scarcity value in that.
0:43:41 Okay, let’s go back to Mark Paul.
0:43:46 He told me that trainers typically charge between $100 and $150 an hour.
0:43:55 For either giving lessons or training a horse, but those fees can vary depending on the trainer’s reputation and experience.
0:43:57 How do you find buyers for your horses?
0:44:06 Most of our clientele tend to be women in their 40s through 60s, which is a fairly prime demographic for Facebook.
0:44:11 So a lot of the horse industry takes place through Facebook groups.
0:44:21 When we get a horse in and we’re preparing to sell that horse, we’ll put the horse up in a variety of dressage groups across Facebook and try to raise awareness of the horse there.
0:44:26 This is part of the problem I alluded to earlier is that there’s not like a nice Zillow for horses.
0:44:34 There are a handful of websites out there that try to do something like that, but most of them are pretty clunky, have fairly low traffic, and really haven’t caught on.
0:44:41 So I gather you and or your partner go to Europe to essentially scout and pick horses that you want to buy, correct?
0:44:42 That’s right.
0:44:46 We have a lot of long-term relationships we’ve now built throughout Europe.
0:44:54 We’re often bringing horses from Germany and the Netherlands or the main places, but also from Norway and France and Portugal and Spain.
0:44:57 And you’re buying directly from the people who foal the horses or no?
0:45:08 A combination. Sometimes we’re buying directly from the breeders and other times we’re buying directly from the individuals who bought the horses from the breeders and then started training them the past couple of years themselves.
0:45:16 How would you identify like your sweet spot of a horse? How old, how well trained, and at what cost that you’re trying to buy?
0:45:21 We work across different price points in the market. We have three different segments.
0:45:30 One are young up-and-coming horses. Those are going to be our four- and five-year-olds. And for the amateurs, we’re often selling them for around $60,000.
0:45:32 And what are you buying them for?
0:45:49 We usually try to make a reasonable profit on them, but in general, we are not engaging in huge markups. That’s an expensive industry. And so the most we can do to keep horses on the affordable side of unaffordable, the better.
0:45:52 So you’ve got your one segment, which is the relatively affordable.
0:46:07 The relatively affordable horses are usually in the $60,000 to $70,000 range. The horses that have a medium amount of training, often, again, for the amateur market, are going to be more in the $100,000 to $150,000 range.
0:46:09 Again, these are the sell prices, not your purchase prices.
0:46:23 Yeah, these are rough sale prices. And then we start getting up into the more international quality horses. And sometimes those are $200,000. Sometimes those might be $600,000 or $700,000.
0:46:36 Okay. So you’ve got your three tiers of horses that you’re buying, training, and then selling. You mentioned earlier that you, quote, have about 15 horses, but you also told me that you’ve kept about seven, right?
0:46:42 Yeah. Elizabeth and I have seven together at the moment. And then we have eight additional sale horses.
0:46:49 No offense, but it sounds a little bit like you’re running a restaurant, but you’re eating a lot of your own food. Am I wrong on that?
0:47:11 No, you’re exactly right. But that’s why we got into this in the first place. The goal is to have the most amazing horses possible to ride, to learn from, and to compete with. As I just highlighted, often these horses are half a million dollars plus. And so how do, you know, Elizabeth is a horse trainer. Your average horse trainer is probably making something like $80,000 in the United States, maybe a little less.
0:47:26 I am a professor at a public university. I can tell you the salaries are mediocre. How do you afford to get into that kind of sport? And so we’ve done that through creating this business where we can buy and train horses, and that allows us to own the horses.
0:47:37 Can I just say, I think it’s awesome. I mean, it’s very smart, and I’m very happy for you that it’s working out, right? I assume it is working out. You sell enough, especially at the high end, to support your habit?
0:47:59 To support our habit is a great way to put it. So far, we’ve been extremely lucky. I will be frank. When we started this, we were expecting to import and sell maybe four or five horses a year. Last year, we sold 33 horses. We imported more than 40 horses from Europe, and we’re still kind of in our infancy of this endeavor.
0:48:03 Can you give me any top or bottom line revenues there?
0:48:05 Our revenue last year was about $3 million.
0:48:06 And expenses?
0:48:18 I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but it’s a great question. Horses are kind of like owning a finicky sports car. Maybe quite a bit worse, as a matter of fact. Maybe owning a finicky boat is a better analogy.
0:48:28 Your average person is paying probably something around the range of $1,200 to $1,500 a month in what’s called board, just to keep their horse at a competitive sport facility.
0:48:41 You could think of it like a gym. If you want to be a competitive athlete, your horse needs proper turnout. They need an area to go relax outside in. They need a stall. They need arenas to exercise.
0:48:54 So, I have to say, Mark, and I certainly mean no offense. In fact, I admire the skill that it takes to do what you do with dressage. But when I watch dressage, I really don’t get it.
0:49:07 And I’m 100% sure this is my shortcoming in that I don’t understand it. I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t understand why it’s difficult. I don’t understand why it’s desirable to do it or watch it.
0:49:17 So, please disabuse me of my absurd naivete and tell me what dressage is, why it’s exciting, etc.
0:49:25 I mean, most importantly, I just have to get you out to the farm and put you on a horse. And I think I’ll be able to change your mind. We’d love to host you.
0:49:27 Coming up after the break.
0:49:34 I think it’s time to get Stephen to sign a release form and hop on Vital here. He’s ready for him.
0:49:35 Let’s do this, Stephen!
0:49:39 I think it’s time to delete that part of the tape and pretend we never came here.
0:49:44 I’m Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We’ll be right back.
0:50:01 Before the break, I was speaking with Mark Paul, an economics professor at Rutgers who also co-owns a business that imports European horses for dressage.
0:50:09 He told me that we should come visit his farm out in western New Jersey on the Hunterdon Plateau. So, we did.
0:50:19 It was a cool day for June, cloudy and damp. Inside the barn, I said hello to one of the horses.
0:50:27 Okay, I didn’t do very well. I got a little distracted by your tongue. Your tongue is very tonguey.
0:50:30 And I met Mark Paul’s partner.
0:50:42 My name is Elizabeth Bortuzzo and I am a professional rider. I ride, I train, I teach my students and I then compete professionally. And our team is called Evo Dressage.
0:50:44 Evo, the name comes from what? Is it initials?
0:50:46 Martin, actually. Amor Vincit Omnia. Love conquers all.
0:50:49 Bortuzzo grew up in the northeast of Italy.
0:51:04 I actually had to beg my parents to ride until I was seven years old. It took a full year of literally begging to ride. And then at seven, I sat on my first horse and it was actually quite a big horse. And there was no getting me off of a horse.
0:51:24 There are 20 horses in the barn today and Bortuzzo is here to work with them. She mounts a horse named Kobus, a 10-year-old Dutch warm blood who’s being trained up for elite competition. Bortuzzo rides him into the Dressage Arena, which is a large fenced-in rectangle with mirrors at one end so that riders can watch themselves practice.
0:51:28 Mark Paul and I gather on the rail to watch.
0:51:48 That there was a pirouette to the left. So she did the full 360-degree turn. And so here she’s preparing the horse to do another one. It looks like the horse is slowing down, but the rhythm hasn’t actually changed. It’s just that he’s making less forward progress because the horse is putting more of the weight onto the hind legs and taking smaller steps.
0:51:51 And she’s communicating all these commands exactly how?
0:51:58 With the pirouette, she’s communicating this one, it’s called the half halt with her seat, which is telling the horse to collect with her seat.
0:52:00 You kind of dig your tailbone in?
0:52:05 Exactly. You kind of dig your tailbone in a little bit and tighten your core a little bit and lower back.
0:52:11 She’s directing the horse with her lower leg to tell the horse to bend around that right lower leg.
0:52:22 And then she’s using her outside rein, which in this case is her left rein, to control and turn the shoulders in that very tight circle that you see her executing in the pirouette.
0:52:29 When I’ve tried to watch dressage on TV with my untrained eye, I’ll be honest.
0:52:35 The horse just looks confused, like it’s trying to figure out what to do and where to go in slow motion.
0:52:39 I have to say, it is much better in person.
0:52:45 You get drawn into the rhythm, you see the grace, you feel the harmony between the two athletes.
0:52:48 And here you start seeing him start to dance.
0:52:53 He’s elevating his diagonal pairs in the trot and suspending those in midair.
0:52:55 And here she sent him forward again.
0:52:59 And now she’s asking him for the passage again where he starts dancing.
0:53:02 I have to say, they both look incredibly athletic.
0:53:03 They are.
0:53:10 Elizabeth is in phenomenal shape, although to my frustration, she essentially lives off of Lucky Charms and chocolate.
0:53:15 And the horses here, just the sheer quantity they eat is quite impressive.
0:53:18 But yeah, he’s an extremely well-conditioned, top international athlete.
0:53:24 Welcome to dressage.
0:53:25 There’s always more to strive for.
0:53:28 But that was pretty good for where he’s at.
0:53:32 If you put a betronome on him, how steady was that?
0:53:33 Oh, those were good.
0:53:34 Those were very good.
0:53:34 They were straight.
0:53:36 They were precise.
0:53:37 They were in the beat.
0:53:38 Nothing went wrong.
0:53:41 His carriage, where his balance was, was good.
0:53:45 Those would probably score a seven and a half.
0:53:50 Cobus is now brought back into the barn to get hosed down and to eat some lunch.
0:53:55 Beet pulp and alfalfa pellets, like rabbits might eat, except a lot more.
0:54:00 Seven quarts per meal, three meals a day, plus unlimited hay.
0:54:05 By the way, one reason that horses got replaced as a technology for transportation and manufacturing
0:54:10 is that they’re not very efficient when you compare them to modern energy sources.
0:54:16 It takes a lot of fuel in the form of food and water to generate a relatively modest amount of energy.
0:54:21 Anyway, in the barn, there is a chalkboard listing the horses Bortuzzo will ride next.
0:54:24 There’s Nightlight, Nexty, Finestar.
0:54:35 I’m guessing that even though you’re a professional rider, that as a profession goes to make your living in the States would be very, very hard,
0:54:39 and that the training is a big part of your income, or is professional riding enough?
0:54:46 Generally, for myself, I get paid to have horses in training, and technically that could be plenty.
0:54:52 But I’m known as a rider that can ride just about anything and solve horse issues.
0:54:57 It requires a lot of stupidity, or rather call it bravery.
0:54:59 Depends how you see it.
0:55:05 When you say you can solve a lot of horse issues, can you give me a recent example?
0:55:05 Yeah.
0:55:12 I was just this morning at a farm where a student of mine imported the horse before I came to know her,
0:55:17 and the horse has a neck that is broken in two spots.
0:55:18 How’d that happen?
0:55:20 Probably a rotational fall.
0:55:22 So it fell over its own neck.
0:55:26 It’s a very reactive horse, not very easy to ride, massive.
0:55:32 And I ended up riding it because nobody else wanted to ride it.
0:55:35 They didn’t want to ride it because why?
0:55:36 It was a little dangerous.
0:55:38 It had caused a couple of accidents.
0:55:43 Caused a couple of accidents, meaning through a rider, or that’s a yes?
0:55:43 Definitely.
0:55:50 And I ended up riding it, and now three years later, it’s doing Intermedia 1, so the second international level.
0:55:51 And he’s doing quite beautifully.
0:55:55 So what are you able to do in that case?
0:55:59 I’m not asking you to brag about yourself, but why can you do that and others couldn’t?
0:56:00 Well, let me not brag.
0:56:03 Let me actually go with, this is all I do.
0:56:08 Literally, I ride horses from 7 a.m. to 8, 9, 10 p.m. at night,
0:56:13 and I ride more horses in a day than most people would ride in a full month.
0:56:16 I ride 25 horses a day on average.
0:56:22 So literally experience, hours in the saddle, feeling the horses helps you communicate with
0:56:27 them, get feedback back from them, and help them solve what they need.
0:56:29 Do you get thrown or fall now and again?
0:56:30 Oh, every now and then.
0:56:32 You ever broken serious bones?
0:56:33 Oh, a few.
0:56:34 You wear a helmet.
0:56:37 That’s actually a point of contention.
0:56:43 Elizabeth Bortuzzo, in addition to being Mark Paul’s business partner, is also his trainer.
0:56:46 He too, you will remember, has been riding since he was a kid.
0:56:52 And the whole reason he started a horse importing business was to be able to afford a good horse
0:56:55 so that he can keep advancing as a rider.
0:56:57 And now it’s his turn in the arena.
0:57:01 Let the record show that Mark Paul is dressed for riding.
0:57:02 Helmet.
0:57:03 Crop.
0:57:04 Right?
0:57:04 Is that what that is?
0:57:05 A crop?
0:57:05 This is a whip.
0:57:08 A crop is a short version of a whip.
0:57:08 All right.
0:57:09 Who’s your horse here?
0:57:10 This is Vital Hit.
0:57:16 He is a six-year-old bred in Scotland that we actually ended up purchasing from Germany.
0:57:19 He’s been with us for about six months now.
0:57:22 He is one of the top-rated six-year-olds in the nation.
0:57:26 Elizabeth’s going to be bringing him to Festival of Champions to compete.
0:57:29 And he’s a, yeah, very special young up-and-coming superstar.
0:57:31 Describe his look.
0:57:35 He is a chestnut, which means he’s essentially a redhead.
0:57:41 He has this beautiful white star, which is the marking you see on his forehead.
0:57:43 He does not have any socks.
0:57:45 He just has straight chestnut-colored legs.
0:57:49 And he’s a fairly tall but lean horse.
0:57:52 We’re still trying to muscle him up, fatten him up a little bit.
0:57:54 I’d love for him to gain a, you know, a nice 100 or 200 pounds.
0:57:56 But it takes time.
0:57:57 What does he weigh now?
0:57:58 1,200, probably.
0:58:03 But for a horse that tall, he should be bulkier.
0:58:06 If you stand next to him, you’ll see he’s quite tall.
0:58:08 But this is the one that we’re hoping to put you on, Stephen.
0:58:09 Good luck with that.
0:58:10 No, no, no.
0:58:15 So he’s, for a six-year-old, actually, for any type of horse, he’s actually a very calm horse.
0:58:16 What’s his price?
0:58:17 He’s not for sale.
0:58:18 He’s one of our team horses.
0:58:20 But you said if I walked in with a…
0:58:22 $400,000, we would consider.
0:58:23 $400,000.
0:58:25 But is there any horse that’s not for sale?
0:58:27 I hate to say it, but it’s capitalism.
0:58:28 They’re all for sale.
0:58:37 I mean, most people in this business have very wealthy financial backers, which are called sponsors, who actually own the horses and sponsor the athlete.
0:58:39 Elizabeth and I take a different approach.
0:58:40 We own all of our horses.
0:58:52 And as newcomers, in some respects, to the business, we have to have every horse for sale until we have enough security that we can financially afford to hold on to one or two ourselves.
0:58:58 Paul leads Vital Hit over to the arena, mounts him, and the two of them start warming up.
0:59:02 In dressage, you’re not allowed to verbally communicate with the horse.
0:59:08 It’s all done with your legs, your seat, your hands, and the reins, and occasionally the whip.
0:59:11 All right, Elizabeth, tell me, you don’t have to do it loudly.
0:59:12 Yes.
0:59:13 How’s Mark doing?
0:59:15 So, Mark is doing wonderfully, actually.
0:59:19 Mark now is a silver, bronze, and gold medalist in dressage.
0:59:21 His writing is coming along very nicely.
0:59:25 We would love to just see him with his chin up and heel down.
0:59:26 Do you want to yell out to him?
0:59:27 Heel down, chin up.
0:59:28 Chin up, heel down?
0:59:29 Yeah, go for it.
0:59:30 You sure?
0:59:30 Me?
0:59:31 Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
0:59:33 Hey, Mark, chin up, heels down.
0:59:36 There you go.
0:59:36 There you go, buddy.
0:59:38 Looking good.
0:59:41 I got to work on looking the part at the end of the day.
0:59:45 What is the community of competitive riders like with each other?
0:59:51 Because I’ve known competitors in different sports, and sometimes there’s a lot of camaraderie and collegiality, but it’s also you’re competing.
0:59:52 So, it’s funny you say that.
0:59:55 There are three Olympic disciplines, dressage, show jumping, and eventing.
1:00:05 Eventing, I feel like it’s very group-oriented, and you’re a friend with everybody because, ooh, the amount of stuff that can go wrong is a lot.
1:00:08 So, I feel like there’s a lot more camaraderie in it.
1:00:11 And dressage, I feel like it’s a little more standoffish.
1:00:22 You, as a competitor, though, especially with the operation that you have here, which is you guys are self-funded, you train your own horses, you must seem like a bit of an outlier in the competitive landscape, yes?
1:00:27 Definitely. And, you know, we go out there with a lot of very nice horses.
1:00:31 And you’re competing often with the daughters and sons of billionaires, I’m guessing?
1:00:33 Yes, it definitely happens.
1:00:37 I try to think of competing as you’re not competing against anybody else.
1:00:40 I’m competing against myself.
1:00:44 And for me, a lot of competing is a measuring bar of, okay, where are we?
1:00:45 What have we accomplished?
1:00:46 What do we need to still work on?
1:00:48 Where is everything going?
1:00:49 Are we going on the right track?
1:00:51 How are the horses feeling?
1:00:53 What other sports have you competed in?
1:00:58 I’ve actually done quite a bit of eventing, and I still do quite a bit of show jumping.
1:00:58 You do?
1:01:00 Yes, it makes me happy, you know?
1:01:03 The dressage can be, at times, a little boring.
1:01:11 You know, you ride 20 horses, and you’re working on very similar things, and every now and then I need something to break it up, because, as I’ve said, I spend all day on a horse.
1:01:14 So, I need something different on a horse.
1:01:18 Your life must be, I mean, fun, but exhausting, I would imagine, yeah?
1:01:18 It is, it is.
1:01:19 Like, it’s the life of an athlete.
1:01:25 It is, and I go away once a year for seven days, and I sleep the first three days.
1:01:31 Do you feel, when you’d sit down, do you feel like the world is moving a little bit, though, since you’re used to sitting?
1:01:33 No, I feel like I could fall asleep right then.
1:01:37 But I have found myself driving in the car and saying, brrrr, oh.
1:01:43 I’m like, sh**, talking to nothing.
1:01:50 I think it’s time to get Stephen to sign a release form and hop on Vital here.
1:01:51 He’s ready for him.
1:01:56 Now that Mark Paul is done working with Vital Hit, it is apparently my turn.
1:02:05 I don’t recall ever having actually ridden a horse, even though I grew up in the countryside, on a little family farm, and even though a couple of my friends had horses.
1:02:08 But I was always a little bit scared of them.
1:02:14 And then when I had kids, some of their friends started riding and competing in equestrian events.
1:02:24 At school pickup one day, I got to talking to the father of one girl who rode, and he told me that when he watched his daughter compete, that he could barely breathe.
1:02:28 He was so scared that she would break her back or crack her skull.
1:02:31 Horseback riding is an inherently dangerous sport.
1:02:34 There are a lot of serious injuries, even deaths.
1:02:47 Talking to that horse dad reminded me of some conversations I’ve had with the moms of NFL players who watch from the stands as their babies risk who they are in order to do what they love.
1:02:54 But here I was now with a world-class athlete of a horse, standing in front of me, saddled up.
1:02:56 Elizabeth Bortuzzo is holding the reins.
1:02:57 Off you go.
1:03:01 Do we want to talk about what I’m going to do before I get on or no?
1:03:01 No, get on.
1:03:02 Okay, all right.
1:03:03 Lest you think, the better.
1:03:05 So you’re going to now put your left.
1:03:06 I’m going to put this one in.
1:03:11 You’re going to hold on to the reins by holding both reins with one hand and holding on to something like the saddle pad there.
1:03:12 Okay, yeah.
1:03:13 Left foot in the syrup.
1:03:17 And now you’re going to swing on and land on the saddle, not like a sack of potatoes.
1:03:18 Thanks.
1:03:21 Vital hit, as promised, is gentle and calm.
1:03:24 All right, and now let your elbow be in front of you, hand out a little bit.
1:03:24 There you go.
1:03:26 And it carries itself.
1:03:27 Now squeeze your heels.
1:03:28 You got it.
1:03:31 And now elbow moving with him every stride.
1:03:34 So your elbow, like I mean, goes slightly back and forth to let him walk.
1:03:36 How are you doing?
1:03:37 The view from here is fantastic.
1:03:38 I know.
1:03:38 Isn’t it spectacular?
1:03:40 Excellent.
1:03:40 How are you doing?
1:03:41 Oh, yeah, great.
1:03:41 Fantastic.
1:03:42 Now you’re getting it.
1:03:43 What a horse.
1:03:45 Okay, now we’re going to start steering.
1:03:46 You’re going to follow me.
1:03:47 We’re going to go slightly left.
1:03:48 So you’re going to just…
1:03:49 Oh, you’re not holding on to the horse anymore, are you?
1:03:50 No, you’re holding on.
1:03:50 God damn it.
1:03:51 Yeah, okay, good.
1:03:54 Okay, and now you’re going to just follow me and we’re going to head slightly right.
1:03:57 So you’re going to just bring both hands ever so slightly to the right.
1:03:58 Whoa, what was that?
1:03:59 It’s all good.
1:03:59 It’s all good.
1:04:00 You ready?
1:04:00 Yeah.
1:04:01 Okay.
1:04:04 You’re going to squeeze your heels ever so slightly and we’re going to let them try.
1:04:07 Up, down, up, down.
1:04:09 Now start posting your up and your down.
1:04:09 How are you doing?
1:04:11 I’m doing okay.
1:04:12 I’m doing okay.
1:04:13 I didn’t see the posting there, Steven.
1:04:17 I’m just trying to hang on a little bit.
1:04:17 I know.
1:04:18 Isn’t it fun?
1:04:23 I’m having this weird, like a burning on the inside of the calves.
1:04:24 Is that just friction?
1:04:24 Nope.
1:04:26 That’s your calf’s working.
1:04:27 Seriously?
1:04:27 Yep.
1:04:29 No, it feels…
1:04:30 Really?
1:04:30 Yep.
1:04:34 So what we use in horseback riding is a lot of the calf and a lot of the inner thigh, which
1:04:36 you don’t use for much of anything else.
1:04:39 Now keep looking to the right and looking at where you’re going.
1:04:43 So both hands guide him to the right.
1:04:45 If not, he’s going to just exit the arena.
1:04:45 Shoulder back.
1:04:47 There you go.
1:04:54 And now we’re going to ask him to stop by pressing your heel down and stretching your elbow
1:04:55 back ever so slightly.
1:04:57 Good horse.
1:05:04 Okay.
1:05:05 So how was it up there?
1:05:08 It feels weirdly…
1:05:09 What’s the word I’m looking for?
1:05:10 Unified.
1:05:13 I feel like the horse knows what to do with me on top of him.
1:05:19 And because he does, it makes me feel as if I know what to do on top of him, even when I
1:05:20 don’t.
1:05:23 This is just like the natural symbiosis of humans and horses.
1:05:25 Because it’s been around for thousands of years, right?
1:05:26 It just kind of works.
1:05:30 Plus, I didn’t really realize how good it is to be able to see up high.
1:05:34 So if I’m looking for the barbarians at the gate, this is fantastic.
1:05:35 Now we’re on it.
1:05:37 And then I need my lance here and my swords.
1:05:38 You got it.
1:05:41 So that’s actually why we get on always from the left side of the horse.
1:05:45 Because you would have your sword through your left leg and that’s how we would pull it
1:05:45 out.
1:05:48 So that’s part of the military tradition of you get on from that side.
1:05:49 Amazing.
1:05:50 I thank you so much.
1:05:51 I mean, thank you humans.
1:05:55 But really, you boy, you did just great.
1:06:01 Coming up next time in part two of our series.
1:06:06 The guys that handle the stallions are the best in the world.
1:06:11 Because, you know, these are horses that are worth $50, $100 million.
1:06:15 We head back to the racetrack and we talk thoroughbred economics.
1:06:18 We will hear from one of the best jockeys in recent history.
1:06:21 Horses are very much like people.
1:06:22 If a horse is generous, he’s generous.
1:06:24 If he’s kind, he’s kind.
1:06:25 If he’s lazy, he’s lazy.
1:06:30 The difference between horses and people is a horse will never hide their true identity
1:06:30 from you.
1:06:32 We’ll talk about gambling, of course.
1:06:34 I’ve had good years.
1:06:41 I turned a $7,500 bankroll into, I think, $170,000 over the course of two days.
1:06:45 And we will hear from one of Kentucky’s top breeders and consigners.
1:06:49 I’m glad to be here because the thoroughbred horse world is Freakonomics.
1:06:51 That’s next time on the show.
1:06:53 Until then, take care of yourself.
1:06:56 And if you can, someone else too.
1:07:00 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
1:07:03 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app.
1:07:08 Also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes.
1:07:13 This episode was produced by Augusta Chapman and edited by Ellen Frankman.
1:07:17 It was mixed by Eleanor Osborne with help from Jasmine Klinger and Jeremy Johnston.
1:07:21 And thanks to Nick Nevis, who handles our field recording.
1:07:26 The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Cullman, Dalvin Abouaji, Elsa Hernandez,
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1:07:33 Lipinski.
1:07:36 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers.
1:07:38 And our composer is Luis Guerra.
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1:07:46 I know nothing about steeplechase.
1:07:47 It’s a whole separate thing?
1:07:49 Steeplechasing is this thing that crazy English people do.
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