How is the cable industry like crack cocaine? If you’re one of the millions of readers who made a surprise bestseller out of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, then you’re probably not fazed by such an outlandish question. And you won’t be surprised by the co-author’s reasoning on the parallels between our industry and the illicit drug trade. Dr. Steven D. Levitt, the rogue economist himself, addressed the CTAM Summit today, delivering what was likely his canned (but nevertheless intriguing) speech, peppered with some of the more interesting examples from his phenomenally popular book.

“It seems to me that Cable is the crack cocaine of media,” he told the crowd of marketers, adding that the two otherwise dissimilar enterprises capitalize on an efficient delivery mechanism to distribute a product into people’s brains more inexpensively. He added that, like crack, Cable’s success or failure rides largely on government enforcement and “regulation.”

How does a scholarly economist from Minnesota know so much about the crack biz? Levitt first explained that he turned what would surely be a career-stunting liability for most economists—he’s horrible at math—into an asset, because he eschews typical economics and instead tackles questions that no other economist would touch. He mines economic realities from seemingly economics-free real-world situations. His knowledge of the economics of crack came via a colleague who, as a sociology grad student in the 1980s, inadvertently infiltrated a Chicago gang and spent seven years entrenched in their operation, exploring the sociology and business of crack, which are surprisingly similar in structure to legal businesses like fast food or Cable, Levitt said. (He even described crack, like Cable, as a “franchised” business.)

He pointed out that successful businesses must perfect the power of incentives and determine what motivates customers to do the things the business needs them to do. Along the way, he managed to address the economics of prostitution.

Levitt admitted that, although his book spent a year on The Wall Street Journal’s list of top-selling business books, “I really don’t know anything about business.” Nevertheless, following the success of his book, many big corporations have asked him to evaluate their businesses, although most have ignored his subsequent recommendations. For instance, he noted that he had “never been rebuffed so hard” as he was when he recommended to a major movie studio that they modify the process of screening movies to advance audiences, showing them to people one at a time instead of to a full auditorium. That way, Levitt reasoned, the resulting responses would be more pure and personal, and not influenced by any “confederates” in the audience whose strong reaction one way or the other could influence others.