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Freakonomics' top 10 neighbors span journalists, authors, academics, and news publishers — with no single standout pulling away from the pack, and only one fellow podcast in the set.
Similarity here measures how closely two entities' audiences resemble each other in composition. The shape is flat: scores run from 0.99 down to 0.98 across all ten neighbors, a band so tight that no single entity dominates. Malcolm Gladwell leads at 0.99, followed by Nate Silver at 0.98 and Andy Slavitt at 0.98 — but the gap between first and tenth is smaller than the gap between any two positions in a spike-shaped graph. The neighbor set is overwhelmingly drawn from Celebrities and Influencers, with journalists the most represented subcategory: Dave Wasserman, Ronald Klain, and Jonathan Swan all appear alongside authors like Tim Ferriss. Rounding out the ten are Room Rater (Humor Memes and Satire, 0.98), Five Thirty Eight (Websites, 0.98), and Everytown (Activism, 0.98). NPR's Planet Money is the only other podcast in the top 10, appearing well outside the top five. No other Podcasts and Radio entity appears in the top 10 besides Planet Money.
The flat shape and cross-kind composition together suggest Freakonomics draws an audience defined less by its format than by a consistent appetite for data-driven, policy-adjacent content — one that overlaps as readily with political journalists and public-health professionals as with fellow podcasters.
