People I (Mostly) Admire
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People I (Mostly) Admire
Freakonomics co-author Steve Levitt tracks down other high achievers for surprising, revealing conversations about their lives and obsessions. Join Levitt as he goes through the most interesting midlife crisis you’ve ever heard — and learn how a renegade sheriff is transforming Chicago's jail, how a...
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34. Maya Shankar Is Changing People’s Behavior — and Her Own
She used to run a behavioral unit in the Obama administration, and now has a similar role at Google. Maya and Steve talk about the power (and limits)...
33. Travis Tygart Is Coming for Cheaters — Just Ask Lance Armstrong
He’s the C.E.O. of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), which, under his charge, exposed the most celebrated American cyclist as a cheater. A...
32. Angela Duckworth Explains How to Manage Your Goal Hierarchy
She’s the author of the bestselling book Grit, and a University of Pennsylvania professor of psychology — a field Steve says he knows nothing about. B...
31. Peter Leeson on Why Trial-by-Fire Wasn’t Barbaric and Why Pirates Were Democratic
He’s an economist who studies even weirder things than Steve. They discuss whether economics is the best of the social sciences, and why it’s a good i...
30. Dambisa Moyo Says Foreign Aid Can’t Solve Problems, but Maybe Corporations Can
The African-born economist has written four bestselling books, including Dead Aid, which Bill Gates described as “promoting evil.” In her new book abo...
29. Bruce Friedrich Thinks There’s a Better Way to Eat Meat
Levitt rarely interviews advocates, but the founder of the Good Food Institute is different. Once an outspoken — and sometimes outlandish — animal-rig...
28. Professor Carl Hart Argues All Drugs Should Be Legal — Can He Convince Steve?
As a neuroscientist and psychology professor at Columbia University who studies the immediate and long-term effects of illicit substances, Carl Hart b...
27. Daniel Kahneman on Why Our Judgment is Flawed — and What to Do About It
Nobel laureate, best-selling author, and groundbreaking psychologist Daniel Kahneman is also a friend and former business partner of Steve’s. In discu...
26. Memory Champion Nelson Dellis Helps Steve Train His Brain
He’s one of the world’s leading competitors, having won four U.S. memory tournaments and holding the record for most names memorized in 15 minutes (23...
25. Sam Harris: “Spirituality Is a Loaded Term.”
He’s a cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher who has written five best-selling books. Sam Harris also hosts the Making Sense podcast and helps peop...
24. Are We Under Threat from a New Kind of Terror? (Replay Ep. 24)
Amaryllis Fox is a former C.I.A. operative and host of the Netflix show The Business of Drugs. She explains why intelligence work requires empathy, an...
23. Greg Norman & Mark Broadie: Why Golf Beats an Orgasm and Why Data Beats Everything
Steve Levitt is obsessed with golf — and he’s pretty good at it too. As a thinly-veiled ploy to improve his own game, Steve talks to two titans of the...
22. Sal Khan: “If It Works for 15 Cousins, It Could Work for a Billion People.”
Khan Academy grew out of Sal Khan’s online math tutorials for his extended family. It’s now a platform used by more than 115 million people in 190 cou...
21. Pete Docter: “What If Monsters Really Do Exist?”
He’s the chief creative officer of Pixar, and the Academy Award-winning director of Soul, Inside Out, Up, and Monsters, Inc. Pete Docter and Steve tal...
20. John Donohue: “I'm Frequently Called a Treasonous Enemy of the Constitution.”
He’s a law professor with a Ph.D. in economics and a tendency for getting into fervid academic debates. Over 20 years ago, he and Steve began studying...
19. Marina Nitze: “If You Googled ‘Business Efficiency Consultant,’ I Was the Only Result.”
At 27— and without a college degree — she was named chief technology officer of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Today, Marina Nitze is trying to r...
18. Robert Sapolsky: “I Don’t Think We Have Any Free Will Whatsoever.”
He’s one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, with a focus on the physiological effects of stress. (For years, he spent his summers in Kenya, alone...
17. Emily Oster: “I Am a Woman Who Is Prominently Discussing Vaginas.”
In addition to publishing best-selling books about pregnancy and child-rearing, Emily Oster is a respected economist at Brown University. Over the cou...
16. Joshua Jay: “Humans Are So, So Easy to Fool.”
He’s a world-renowned magician who’s been performing since he was seven years old. But Joshua Jay is also an author, toy maker, and consultant for fil...
15. Tim Harford: “If You Can Make Sure You're Not An Idiot, You've Done Well.”
He’s a former World Bank economist who became a prolific journalist and the author of one of Steve Levitt’s favorite books, The Undercover Economist....
13. Yul Kwon: “Don't Try to Change Yourself All at Once.” (UPDATE)
He has been a lawyer, an instructor at the F.B.I. Academy, the owner of a frozen-yogurt chain, and a winner of the TV show Survivor. Today, Kwon works...
12. Sue Bird: “You Have to Pay the Superstars.”
She is one of the best basketball players ever. She’s won multiple championships, including four Olympic gold medals and four W.N.B.A. titles — the mo...
11. Paul Romer: “I Figured Out How to Get Myself Fired From the World Bank.”
For many economists — Steve Levitt included — there is perhaps no greater inspiration than Paul Romer, the now-Nobel laureate who at a young age redef...
10. Suzanne Gluck: “I'm a Person Who Can Convince Other People to Do Things”
She might not be a household name, but Suzanne Gluck is one of the most powerful people in the book industry. Her slush pile is a key entry point to t...
8. Peter Attia: “I Definitely Lost a Lot of IQ Points That Day”
He’s been an engineer, a surgeon, a management consultant, and even a boxer. Now he’s a physician focused on the science of longevity. Peter Attia tal...
7. Caverly Morgan: "I Am Not This Voice. I Am Not This Narrative."
She showed up late and confused to her first silent retreat, but Caverly Morgan eventually trained for eight years in silence at a Zen monastery. Now...
6. Nathan Myhrvold: “I Am Interested in Lots of Things, and That's Actually a Bad Strategy”
He graduated high school at 14, and by 23 had several graduate degrees and was a research assistant with Stephen Hawking. He became the first chief te...
5. Susan Wojcicki: “Hey, Let’s Go Buy YouTube!”
She was the sixteenth employee at Google — a company once based in her garage — and now she's the C.E.O. of its best-known subsidiary, YouTube. But de...
4. Ken Jennings: “Don’t Neglect the Thing That Makes You Weird”
It was only in his late twenties that America’s favorite brainiac began to seriously embrace his love of trivia. Now he holds the “Greatest of All Tim...
3. Kerwin Charles: “One Does Not Know Where an Insight Will Come From”
The dean of Yale’s School of Management grew up in a small village in Guyana. During his unlikely journey, he has researched video-gaming habits, comm...
2. Mayim Bialik: “I Started Crying When I Realized How Beautiful the Universe Is”
She’s best known for playing neurobiologist Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory, but the award-winning actress has a rich life outside of her act...
1. Steven Pinker: "I Manage My Controversy Portfolio Carefully”
By cataloging the steady march of human progress, the Harvard psychologist and linguist has become a very public intellectual. But the self-declared “...
173. Steve Levitt Says Goodbye to People I (Mostly) Admire
In the last episode of the podcast, Stephen Dubner turns the microphone on Steve Levitt. They talk about Levitt’s favorite — and least favorite — mome...
Ninety-Eight Years of Economic Wisdom (Replay)
The late Robert Solow was a giant among economists. When he was 98 years old he told Steve about cracking German codes in World War II, why it’s so ha...
172. A New Kind of University
Michael Crow is the president of Arizona State University, which U.S. News & World Report has called the most innovative school in the country for 11...
171. Measuring Pollution on Parallel Earths
Michael Greenstone knows it’s corny, but he wants to make the world a better place — by tracking the impact of air quality, developing pollution marke...
Suleika Jaouad’s Survival Mechanisms (Replay)
Suleika Jaouad was diagnosed with cancer at 22. She made her illness the subject of a New York Times column and a memoir, Between Two Kingdoms. She an...
170. Finding the God Particle
Physicist and former pop star Brian Cox tells Steve about discovering the Higgs boson, having a number-one hit, and why particle physics research will...
169. Decoding the World’s First Writing
Irving Finkel is an expert on cuneiform — the oldest known writing system. He tells Steve the amazing story of how an ancient clay tablet unlocked the...
Is There a Fair Way to Divide Us? (Update)
Moon Duchin is a math professor at the University of Chicago whose theoretical work has practical applications for voting and democracy. Why is strivi...