For the past five years, my Freakonomics friend and co-author, Steve Levitt, has been hosting his own podcast, which is called People, I Mostly Admire.
The bad news is Levitt has decided to stop making new episodes of that show.
The good news is that Levitt will be hosting the occasional Freakonomics Radio episode.
The other good news is that, starting now, we are going to republish the entire People.
I Mostly Admire archive from the beginning.
So if you never heard it... or if you missed some episodes, now is the time to get on board.
Just go follow People I Mostly Admire in your podcast app.
You will not regret it.
In the meantime, I thought that today you might like to hear, as a bonus episode, the final installment of People I Mostly Admire, or PEMA as we call it.
It's a sort of exit interview with Levitt conducted by me.
And it starts now.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
Hey, Dubner.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
So this is the final new episode of People I Mostly Admire, at least for now.
Does that mean you've run out of people you admire?
No, there are endless people I admire.
I always thought it would get easier and easier to get people to come to the podcast, because my own rule when I'm asked to come on a podcast is is I look at who's been on it before and if they're way more interesting and important than I am, then I'm going.
I better do it because those people know better than me.
I believe in markets.
So I thought as we got this list, it got more and more impressive.
Everyone would just come, but they don't.
Other than Taylor Swift, who's on the top of your wishlist?
I've always wanted Joel Osteen, the radio TV evangelist.
I just find the way he speaks to be so remarkable.
So even before I started the podcast, one day shortly before my birthday, my wife Suzanne said I have a surprise for your birthday.
We're going to go on a trip.
And my reaction was, oh, no.
There's nowhere I want to go.
There's nothing I want to do.
And I was so afraid it was going to be a party or something.
Thank God it wasn't a party.
How about a silent retreat?
Would that have been better?
That would have been better than the party, but it still would have been pretty bad.
But she took me to Houston to go watch Joel Osteen in person.
Those few hours... in the Compact Center, which is where he does the preaching.
It was truly magical.
I would recommend it to anyone, atheist, whatever.
It was a community of people coming together in a way that was so powerful.
And I always wanted to talk to him about that.
And I tried pretty hard to get him to talk to me, but it never made any headway.
What would you have wanted to ask him?
I wanted to express to him how powerful I found his message, even though I don't even believe in God.
So when I listen to his sermons I just substitute the word universe for Jesus and for God and treat it more like some kind of new agey thing.
But he seems to really feel what he's saying.
And he preaches this gospel of empowerment.
And at the same time, it's so counter to what many people associate with religion.
He lives in a really fancy house, and I'm sure he has tons and tons of money.
I was just curious to see if I could get him at all to talk like a regular person, which I'm sure I couldn't.
But that was my goal.
I was wondering what it was like to talk to Joel when he wasn't on stage.
It'd be interesting to know what would happen if you could substitute the word universe for every time he said Jesus Christ, your God.
I would like to see the results of an experiment where a whole bunch of people watch or read a sermon, where you do that.
What do you think would be the effect?
I think a regular person.
If you substitute the word universe, they'd be like what are you talking about?
It doesn't make any sense.
But I kind of believe or at least I have at times in my life believed that somehow the universe seemed to be taking care of me.
I think I don't really believe that anymore, but certainly it's a much easier concept for me to grasp the idea that the universe is taking care of me than that Jesus or some kind of Christian God is looking over me.
You have to have been around new agey people for a long time.
My mom was new agey.
My wife, Suzanne, is new agey.
Which is kind of odd, considering maybe not so odd that you married someone who had that in common with your mom, just because that's what some psychologists say is common.
But I've never known anyone to be more disdainful of everything new agey than you.
No, that's not true.
So clearly.
I'm a rationalist through and through and I believe more than anything in the power of science.
But I think as a kid, I was willing to listen to my mom's very odd takes on the world.
And I didn't really believe it.
But as I got older and older, I've seen enough evidence.
You know, the power of placebo.
I think some of the nicest and best and most interesting people I know just have a faith in the universe and believe in stuff that's a little bit out there.
When Suzanne and I, we went to India for a month.
I talked about it on the Sam Harris episode of this podcast, but I went so grudgingly.
I really only went because she doesn't have a lot of common sense.
And I thought if she was alone in India for a month, she probably wouldn't come back alive.
And so I went in.
Part of the deal was, she said, we couldn't use our phones, which I don't know why I ever gave into that.
I guess that when you're first dating people, you do things that you wouldn't do later.
But the first two weeks of that trip, I was miserable and I was angry and I was frustrated.
And eventually I did have something like a spiritual awakening.
And it came because she would say, well, what do you want to do in India?
And I would rack my brain and I'd say, actually there's not a single thing that I would like to do here.
I'm indifferent to everything.
And suddenly, everything was as good as anything else.
I'd be on a crowded bus, stinky and rattling around, stuck in traffic.
And I think, well...
There's nothing I want to do when I get there.
So it's not really different being on a bus than being someplace.
And suddenly I just opened up to a kind of friendliness with the universe and everything was good and I was peaceful.
And it lasted for months after I came back.
And every once in a while I can tap into it again.
And it really was, I think, very much a Buddhist thing, this idea that when you're always striving for something, it's the not ever being able to get there that gets you upset.
So if you're not striving for anything, then everything is hunky-dory.
As I have gotten older, I've gotten much, much more open-minded about the power of spirituality, spiritual things that, when we first met, I would have thought were bunk.
So you did People I Mostly Admire for five years, which surprised me when I looked it up.
It went fast, at least for me.
I don't know.
Maybe the five felt like 20 years to you.
But can you just describe the arc of it from your perspective?
I don't have a very good memory.
So I don't know how you tricked me into doing it in the first place, because I know that I wouldn't have done it on my own volition.
I know that you had to be at the heart of tricking me.
I think what happened was you said hey, why don't you try doing one guest host on Freakonomics Radio?
And I did.
I did two of them.
And those were amazing experiences because...
One was on the rainforest and the other was on math and education.
And the impact that especially the math and education went at.
It was just really surprising how much people cared.
So then I think you were going to interview Rahm Emanuel.
That's right.
And you said, well, why don't you just do it?
And God, I don't know why.
I think I was still on the high of having done those other two ones that everyone cared about.
So I did the Rahm Emanuel interview.
And all I remember from that is it was incredible, incredibly stressful, because Rahm is a tough guy and he was in the worst mood that day.
And I just remember feeling bad.
I was bad at what I was doing.
I was nervous.
Anyway, that was hard, but it couldn't have been that bad because it was- It couldn't have been that bad for you to say yes.
Yeah.
I guess I figured, if I could interview Rahm Emanuel on a bad day, I could probably interview other people.
And what's been great about the podcast is is it facilitated a really important change in my own life.
For so many years as an academic, I was laser focused on the creation of knowledge and trying to come up with ideas.
And I was tired of that.
And by the end, I didn't have any good ideas.
And it was so useful for me to pivot into a role of being someone who was a consumer of ideas.
If I tallied up the number of books I read over a 20-year period before I started this podcast, maybe I read 30 books in 20 years.
And honestly they were almost all young adult fiction because mostly I just read the books that my kids were reading, like Harry Potter and the Twilight series.
I hadn't read anything that was about science or about psychology, since I was in grad school, maybe.
And it's been great for me to just spend time reading what smart people are thinking and then having to pull that all together with the discipline of deadlines.
The other thing that's been great for me about Pima is I have almost no deadlines in my life.
And really my entire adult life.
I haven't had deadlines because as an academic, you almost never have to do anything on time.
But it's the tension that comes with actually having deadlines and feeling pressure and knowing you have to deliver.
That's been a good source of discipline for me, a good reminder of what you can do.
I would frequently be up until three or four in the morning trying to pull together some kind of set of themes I'd be able to talk with people about.
Well, I'll share a secret with you.
The reason that a lot of writers, and especially journalists, become journalists is because it forces you to do the work.
Which was good and bad, especially if there's a quota that you have to fill, it can get sloppy.
But well, to that point, Pima was every week originally to every other week.
What was that change about?
Oh, I couldn't do it.
It was ruining my life when I had to do it every week.
I love how three minutes ago you said, it's the best thing that ever happened to me.
And now it's ruining your life.
Well, every week was bad because at first it was kind of exciting.
But I really maybe because I'm insecure or maybe because I felt such an obligation to these amazing guests to do a good job but I would invest.
I learned it from you, really.
I learned it from you to invest an enormous amount of time in preparation for these interviews.
So If somebody had written books, I tried to read every one of their books and I tried to read their academic articles and figure out whatever I could about their personal life.
It was a real tax on my time and doing it every week.
It felt like a pressure cooker, but every other week was perfect, because it was just enough to make me feel like I always had a little pressure on me, but not so much that I had to be grumpy and mean to everyone else in my life to get it done.
So if it was perfect, why do you want to stop?
My dilemma is that I have so many amazing possibilities out there for things to do that I never get done a third or a tenth of the things that I could do.
I started this one school called the Levitt Lab, and I fought so hard not to have it called Levitt.
I win many battles, but that one I did not win.
And the first one is located in the middle of the Arizona State campus in Tempe, Arizona.
And we're going to start two more in the fall of 2026.
One outside Boston and one in L.A., And I have found that to be a uniquely rewarding experience.
I can't even explain why, because, you know, I'm not a people person in any way, shape or form.
But there's something about the students, about the learners when I'm on the campus and how engaged these learners are with it.
I'm not sure why that touches me so deeply, but it really.
It feels almost like When my grandchildren come.
This is the thing I'll talk to them about.
Obviously, Freakonomics has been awesome and it's had a big impact, but it feels to me like if I could actually make a dent in the way that we teach and change education, that would really feel like I did something.
When did you start getting as driven as you are by that appetite?
Was it always in you or is it more recently?
No, it wasn't in me at all.
And the first hint of it came when I did that guest spot on Freakonomics Radio and we talked about math education.
And that was just a lark.
I was just doing that because I was angry because I thought that my kids were suffering so much.
The response to it kindled a little bit of a spark, but it was really on my podcast talking with Sal Khan.
And Sal Khan is the first person who introduced me to what's called mastery learning.
It's just the idea that the model of how we teach kids in a classroom with a teacher and 30 kids all being taught the same thing And then moving on to the next topic as soon as that one's over and ignoring whether the kid has learned it or whether the kid already knows it.
It's just a terribly inefficient way of doing things.
And once Sal Khan told me about mastery learning and showed me the data, which is really shocking how much faster kids can learn, suddenly it changes the way you think about education, because if you can actually do mastery learning, you free up three or four hours in a school day that you can spend however you want with the kids.
And then it becomes this flood of imagination about what do you do with the kids that will change their lives, that will get them engaged with the learning.
So that's when the spark came.
And still, it was kind of just a spark.
Just during COVID, I tried to encourage Sal Khan to start an online school.
And so I kept on emailing him over and over saying, hey, we should start an online school.
We should start an online school.
And then, maybe the 10th time, I wrote to him.
He called me five minutes later and said hey, I am starting an online school.
Do you want to help me out with it?
And that was the Khan World School.
And I had to say on the podcast two more times to talk about that.
And then it just felt like if you can have a big impact in an online school well, just imagine what you might be able to do in person.
And even then I was excited about it.
But it wasn't until I actually was on the ground at the school in Arizona that it fully hit me how powerful it is to see young people engaged.
When you're trying to recruit students, how are you communicating to students and their parents?
Like it's this kind of school and this is what's going to happen.
Actually the way I pitch it was deeply affected by another one of the guests that we had on the show, David Yeager, who's a psychologist at University of Texas at Austin.
It's interesting when you can get a set of parents and kids into the room who are potentially interested in going to your school.
I talk only to the students.
Everyone else in the room talks only to the adults.
But I just turn to the kids and I say hey, I'm really embarrassed to have to say this, but my generation me, your parents, we all have been telling you a complete set of lies.
We've been telling you that if you work hard and you get good grades and you do a little bit of volunteering, then you'll get into a great college and you'll go to college.
And after you graduate, you'll have a great career.
And it's all a set of lies.
Because it is.
What we're teaching kids doesn't make sense.
By the time they get to high school, nobody's engaged.
And the saddest part for me is watching some of my students at the University of Chicago.
These are the students who've won the high school lottery, right?
They've done all the things right.
They've been valedictorian and they've gotten great SATs and ACTs.
And they get to the U of C, one of the most exclusive schools in the world.
And they don't want to learn.
They don't care the slightest bit about learning.
All they want to do is get A's.
They want to check boxes.
To me, that is about the most discouraging thing I can imagine.
These are such talented kids who have been given an incentive scheme which has beaten all the life out of them.
What were you like at 22, let's say?
Oh, God, I was exactly like that.
I was the worst cause to an imaginable.
I was way ahead of my time because I was exactly like these box checkers before anyone else was.
So at Harvard...
I had no intrinsic interest in anything.
My way of choosing classes was to say I'm going to take all the biggest classes because as long as there's 800 students in it, I'll be completely faceless.
I'll never have to talk to a professor.
They'll be really easy because they always grade the big classes easy.
And Mostly I was at Harvard to play wiffle ball and street hockey and video games and drink a lot.
I got straight A's at Harvard, basically, but without ever trying to learn anything.
It was only when I graduated and went and worked in consulting that I realized that I actually liked ideas and I was curious about ideas.
Do you tell that story to these would-be high school students of yours?
I have not told that story to the high school students.
Because it's a little bit like a scared straight story.
Here comes this guy, Steve Leavitt, accomplished economist, taught at University of Chicago for many years, PhD from MIT, went to undergrad at Harvard, and he's here to tell you that it's all a facade, or mirage, or whatever you want to call it.
If i were working with you on this project, i would encourage you to open up like that, especially since you were, as you put it, ahead of the curve on just ticking the boxes, because I just wonder how the message that you're selling gets received otherwise.
Because I just don't know how many people are really frustrated about the status quo that you're describing.
It seems like everybody's bought into it.
You're right.
It's really hard to convince people.
And the only people who really came to our school were people who were so deeply dissatisfied with traditional education, mostly because they were bullied or they felt like they didn't fit in.
But I think really the people who will ultimately benefit the most from my approach to education, if it ever takes off, are the talented people, because this rat race that is taking such a toll on the mental health and on the creativity and on the joy of the people who are succeeding is really destructive.
And the subtle thing that we do at our school that I think is maybe the single most powerful thing we do is we celebrate a much wider array of accomplishment.
So in a typical school, there's only one way to succeed.
You get straight A's, you get to be the valedictorian, and that is the key to the elite schools.
But at our school, kids are writing their own music and producing it, or making stop motion films where they're building with their hands devices to measure particulates, with mechanisms to turn on a fan that sucks the air pollution out.
Or a novella.
One of our students is writing a novella.
You can write an awesome novella and everyone else around you can cheer and say, that is fantastic.
I'm so glad you did that.
Without having at the same time, each student think, oh no, I didn't write a novella.
That means I'm going to be a failure because I'm doing my stop motion film.
And as long as you open the aperture and make it so that there are lots of ways to succeed, suddenly you go from a world in which it's us versus them.
The us is me and my parents, and the them is the other kids at the school.
To the us is all the kids at the school who are being empowered to do great stuff.
And I think if we could transform schools so that every kid felt like who they were was enough and that they should be trying to be who they are instead of trying to be valedictorian kids, It would change everything.
And that's what gets me so excited about it.
One thing I wonder about is how the mainstream introduction of a certain kind of AI let's just consider chat GPT, the median AI that most people are exposed to and either love or fear, or hate, or whatever.
How do you see what you're trying to do intersect with this moment?
Because I could see it going both ways.
I could see some people, and I would raise my hand here, thinking wow, if knowledge like that is at the touch of everyone's fingertips so easily, that's awesome, because I don't have to spend all my time teaching that to kids if I'm a teacher, or memorizing it if I'm a kid, and I can actually just know that I live – with a big foundation of amazing knowledge and I can actually now think more deeply, more creatively, et cetera.
And then I could imagine there are people who take the exact opposite, which is to say, if you let AI become a major component.
I hear both sentiments expressed.
So I'm curious.
A I have a feeling I know where your sentiment lies would be in position one that I just argued.
I'm guessing.
But B I really want to know how you see it being a tool that's used in a learning environment like yours.
I'm going to surprise you with my answer.
I think both of those groups are exactly right.
If you are an engaged learner and you want to learn something, like you and I when we're trying to prepare for an interview.
There's never been a tool like AI, like Gemini ChatGPT, for learning quickly when you need to learn something.
If you are unengaged and you are trying to find a way not to learn anything.
There has never been a tool as effective as AI.
And I think the problem is and why both are right if students are not engaged, They can get by without learning a single thing.
Where you talked about oh, but AI lets me think deeply and critically about all sorts of issues without having to learn a bunch of silly facts.
That's true, but you also have a basis for thinking about the world, because you've learned a lot of stuff along the way.
It is a tremendous fear, and a rightful fear.
The idea that the standard way we teach, where students are unengaged AI has undone that.
And I watch my own kids skirt through life, learning nothing, letting AI do everything for them.
This is why, over and over, I'm stressing engagement and how, when you see the kids engaged, it's so powerful and so emotional as an adult to watch it.
I think it's because engagement has become the thing that is the linchpin to education right now.
Because when kids are engaged, They're empowered, through AI and everything else, to learn in a way that you and I couldn't have learned when we were kids because we had to go to the library.
It took forever to get our hands onto the keys to knowledge.
If you look at engagement levels of kids as they go through the educational system, Kids in elementary school are, by and large, really engaged.
And through junior high and high school, there's a sharp drop off.
I honestly think that's going to be the key on which everything turns.
If we can get students engaged, we will have unbelievable results.
And if we don't, we are facing disaster.
Coming up after the break, who were Steve Levitt's favorite guests on People I Mostly Admire?
I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is a special bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio.
We will be right back.
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.
Back now to my conversation with Steve Levitt, who has been talking about the new schools he's starting.
Levitt, I have to say I have not heard you this excited since.
Well, maybe when you visited me in New York maybe a month ago, I had Clamato for you.
You were excited by that.
But outside of Clamato, this is the most excited I've heard you in a long time.
And it strikes me. that you are the one that's engaged now, plainly.
And it also strikes me that the way that you got engaged in this project at least, was by actually I hate the cliche phrase but like going out of your comfort zone to actually become an interviewer.
Because when we first met, that was one of your least favorite things to do.
So I feel like you, having done People I Mostly Admire for the last five years, it feels like it changed you fundamentally.
Yeah.
Oh, it did for sure.
I mean every idea that I have just put out there.
I have stolen from one of my guests and repackaged it in my own words.
There's no doubt about that.
As it should be.
That's what knowledge transfer is supposed to be.
David Eagleman came on my podcast and he works on... the plasticity of the brain.
That was such a good episode.
I love him.
He introduced me to this phrase of just-in-case learning versus just-in-time learning, which has transformed my way of thinking about the world.
Because everything we do in school is oh well, we're going to teach you proofs about triangles, because maybe you're going to, in 15 years, be an architect and somehow need this course.
That doesn't work because no one remembers it for five minutes.
Versus just-in-time learning, where somebody really needs to know something to solve some problem so they learn it.
For me, I spent 16 years failing to learn any math at all.
And then when I got admitted to MIT and I looked in those first syllabi at what I was Five years of math in three weeks because I needed to learn it.
I didn't have the words for it then, but I realized what just-in-time learning was.
Or another example I fiddled around all through high school, didn't care about anything, did all my box checking.
And then when they opened a racetrack in Minnesota Canterbury Downs and I was losing all my money trying to bet on horses.
I need to be better.
And that's when I decided I would really learn how to computer program.
And so I would stay up all night doing something that had never occurred to me that would have any value, but it was with the purpose of trying to win at the racetrack.
I've lived these things that I'm now preaching.
But going back to your question, it is true that being an interviewer was roughly the last thing that I ever should have done.
You and I have been on book tours.
And there's nothing better for me than going on a book tour with you, because you are the ultimate extrovert and you love to talk to people.
And I can spend the entire time just sitting there looking around.
I say that I deeply dispute that.
For instance, we recently had a little 20th anniversary Freakonomics party and I made a little speech and then I said Levitt, would you like to say a few words?
And you literally said no.
Yeah.
And then I keep going because it felt like it was too short.
And then five minutes later, you start telling the story and it was great and you're just going.
So I think you have this image of yourself that as less, I don't know whatever you want to call it, adept or excited about.
Look, I've known you a long time now.
I know what I feel is pretty much the real you, the inside you, the always you.
And I think you give yourself not enough credit for what's the inside always you.
Well, that's kind of you to say, but like my wife would say, what do you want for your birthday?
And the answer I don't say because it's too rude is I would like everyone to go away and I have a week where I didn't talk to a single person and nobody bothered me for a week.
That would be my dream.
And I might get tired after a week, but I can't remember a time where I was alone and I ever thought geez, I wish I weren't alone.
Why are you not going to a silent retreat every week?
The problem with silent retreats is they actually have a lot of routine.
They make you work.
You have to clean the dishes and stuff like that.
I literally just want to be alone.
Let me ask you this.
Over the five years you were doing People.
I Mostly Admire interviews who were your three, I want to say the most memorable, let's say, for you.
Just name the three and why.
Okay.
So my own daughters, Amanda and Lily.
That was a great episode.
Number 46 for anyone who hasn't heard it, if you want to look it up.
Just because it was so surprising to me.
I haven't had a good conversation with my daughters in a decade, but something about being locked up in a studio.
We were face-to-face in the studio and my having had to prepare, just let it to be really magical.
I think it was unexpected for everyone.
Another episode that has really stuck with me was an interview I did with a doctor who focuses on end of life care.
BJ Miller.
BJ had a terrible accident when he was at Princeton and he lost his legs and arm.
He was trying to jump on a train or something.
They have this electric train, the little putt-putt train that goes from the Amtrak train to the campus.
And he touched the electrified wire in a terrible accident.
And so I've seen a lot of interviews with BJ.
And when people see him, they can see that he's had limbs amputated.
And he always explains to people how that happened.
And And I had a thought of, well, this is radio, this podcast, so people can't see him.
So I want to have a conversation with BJ in which nobody who doesn't know him is going to understand that he's had this accident.
And if you re-listen to the episode, at first he's kind of stuttering and stammering around a little bit, I think, because he just so expected me to start by.
Could you tell me by?
And then only towards the end of the interview do we get into it.
And he tells his story in such a heartfelt way, with so much more emotion and detail than he does in his typical public setting.
For me, that really worked.
We talked a lot about death.
I think the episodes where we talk about death are often the ones that stick with me most, the most because there's so little discussion, real discussion, of death.
And BJ talks about death in a way that I've never heard anyone talk about it.
My favorites almost always involve episodes that have a human connection because, as we've been hinting at, I have very few human connections outside of this podcast.
This has really been my primary way of making real connections.
One of the most unexpected episodes that was really powerful for me was Wendy McNaughton.
She's an artist.
That was a beautiful episode.
I mean, beautiful makes it sound softer than it is somehow, but that was a really good episode.
I realized, as I prepared to talk to her, that I hadn't talked to an artist maybe more than once in the last 20 years.
And she hadn't talked to an economist, I think, in her whole life.
And the meeting of the minds.
I'm not exaggerating that.
I came out of that and I said this is my soulmate.
Which sometimes happens when you interview people.
You get this deluded feeling that you're really close to them, even though they walk out and never think of you again.
But then when I reached out to Wendy later, she said the same thing back.
Somehow we really connected in a deep way.
I remember that in the interview, you said something to her like, I see you as being not constrained by the two things that almost everybody worries about, which is that the thing that you want to do might end up taking a lot of time and it may end up not making you any money.
And you said that to her.
She's like, oh, my God, nobody's ever recognized that except my therapist.
And that's when I realized that you had become just a very astute interviewer.
Not that you weren't always astute about the world, but there's a different component to bringing it out in someone like that.
A lot of preparation.
And again, I learned that from you.
When you first interviewed me back 20 some years ago, you showed up my door and you had read or at least could credibly convey to me that you had read all 60 or 70 of my papers.
It was shocking.
And we had amazing conversations because you had invested so much.
And I think that's one thing that you just can't get around.
If you show someone that you care about their work, they want to talk about it.
They do.
There's no substitute for hard work.
You can have very little talent for interviewing, but I think if you've really prepared, it can still go pretty well.
I'll tell you another interview that was really special for me was with Yuval Noah Harari.
And I really, again, I stole it from you.
It was an observation you had made many years ago.
Yuval, in general, Yuval Noah Harari is a tough nut to crack.
I'd watched a lot of interviews with him and he plays it very close to the vest.
And he's really serious and sometimes argumentative.
You had taught me something many years ago.
You had said the only thing that anyone ever likes to read are stories.
The only good stories are are about people and personalities and you have to make it very personal and build up the character of them and there's gotta be tension and whatnot.
And so, what was interesting as I read his amazing book Sapiens, there is not a character in the entire book.
So he violates your first rule of storytelling.
How can this book sell millions of copies when it doesn't have anything that people like?
And so very early on in the interview I took a risk and I said hey, I loved your book, but actually I don't know why anyone else likes it, because it's missing the key feature that everybody likes.
And he had very self-consciously left out any characters.
It wasn't like he didn't know he did it, but I don't think any interviewer had ever brought that up.
And so when I did that, I felt a complete change in his attitude and we ended up having a really amazing open, conversation.
I think that's the most downloaded episode that we've ever had was that one.
I do remember that point he made about how, When politicians get in trouble for saying something in private that could be considered offensive or whatever antisocial he was saying, you have to let people have a private life, especially public people.
I mean, that's one thing that I remember from a conversation I heard four years ago, which I think is probably on average pretty good, because I remember mostly zero from a week ago.
He surprised me because honestly, before I interviewed him I wondered whether he wasn't fraud's too strong a word, but like a faker.
There are these public intellectuals who have written a book.
It contains everything they know.
Yeah, and if you ask them a real question, they just start dissembling.
They don't actually know anything.
Yeah, or you get exactly the same thing over and over.
Yeah, yeah.
He really surprised me because every time I asked him a question and I had read everything he had written and I had watched every interview he would give a novel answer.
That was just really, really smart, like the examples you just gave.
That I would stop in my tracks and say wow, that's really right.
Now, I don't ever like to say bad things about people, but should I make one exception, just for contrast?
Because I had interviewed Jared Diamond before I had talked to Yuval.
And Jared Diamond, I think, fell more into that other camp where I felt like if you had read his books, Then when you talk to him he would tap into chapter 7, page 38, and he would just da-da-da-da-da-da.
And it was really interesting to me, the difference in the way those two who ostensibly are the same person in a public sense,
Their books have a lot of similarities, and yet talking to them was a completely different experience.
Was that a big disappointment for you, that conversation?
The Jared Diamond one?
Yeah.
Did it upset you?
Did you feel you wasted your time?
No.
It was interesting for me to see it.
I've always cared a lot more about process than outcome.
And so when I do an interview and it turns into an amazing episode, that feels good.
But I'm also almost equally as intrigued when I do an interview, and it's bad because I feel awful when it's me.
I feel such a tremendous obligation to my guests.
And if I do a bad job, it's very hard for me to shake.
It really haunts me.
What share of interviews would you say that you actually did a bad job?
A bunch of times I missed the boat.
I'll tell you one where I didn't miss the boat, but it would eventually cause me to miss a boat on a later occasion.
It was with Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins was an interesting interview for me.
First because he's legendary and he's such a huge thinker.
The other problem is that he has written, what, 20 books?
It was really hard to try to tackle his whole canon of knowledge that he had created.
And the easiest and the best interview is always one. were with Freakonomics fans.
There's this power dynamic that happens in interviews where the interviewer is way below the interviewee.
And it's really hard to have a normal conversation because of that power dynamic.
But because so many of the guests knew Freakonomics and liked it, we could have different kinds of conversations.
Well, Richard Dawkins was not one of those people.
He had no idea who I was or why he was talking to me.
But over the course of 60 or 70 minutes I surprised him enough times that by the end he said wait, who are you again?
Didn't he then invite you to do a live event with him?
He did.
So that felt really good to me, because at the end he said will you be the interviewer for a live event that I'm doing in Washington DC?
And that felt really great that he bestowed that honor on me.
And then I totally blew it because when we went to the live event I really thought of it as being an extension of people I mostly admire.
And my interview with him had been almost all about the science, because what's interesting to me is what he's done in science.
But it turns out that the kind of people who will pay 75 to come see Richard Dawkins talk are not interested in his science.
They're interested in his social ideas about science. atheism and whatnot.
And I totally missed the boat and the entire session fell totally flat until Richard managed to successfully steer the conversation towards atheism.
People started clapping and cheering.
It's a horrible feeling to be sitting in an auditorium knowing that everybody is really angry at you because you're doing such a terrible job.
I haven't quite had that pleasure, but I look forward to one.
What other guests on Pima were either difficult, unfun, disappointing to you?
You mentioned to me that the Arnold Schwarzenegger interview is frustrating.
Oh my God, that was hard work.
It was difficult because he wouldn't put on headphones.
Because he didn't want to mess up his hair because he was going on TV afterwards.
So he couldn't hear me talking and I couldn't get him off his script.
He has a script.
He has a life story.
He was just giving a kind of stump speech.
Yeah.
Did you think about not publishing it then after?
Well, it was such a coup to get Schwarzenegger and it was so exciting.
I did finally have one moment where I got him off of his stump speech, which was really fantastic.
I brought up something that happened when he was running for governor of California and someone had thrown eggs at him and his suit was covered in eggs.
And I'd seen the video of it and it was really fascinating to watch, because he got slammed with eggs and he didn't even change the expression on his face.
He just kept on walking as if it hadn't happened.
And then he went to a press conference And he gave maybe the best press conference I've ever heard in my life, because he said well, what about this person who threw eggs at you?
And he said something like well, I hope next time he'll throw some bacon too, so I have a whole breakfast.
Who says something like that?
It was awesome.
And somehow in reliving that story, he changed his tone completely.
So, if nothing else, for that one minute of the podcast, I felt like I would not throw it away because that felt like such a triumph.
Coming up after the break, Steve Levitt's new assignment.
I'm Stephen Dubner, and you're listening to a bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio.
We'll be right back.
So I can imagine that people listening to this to them this sounds like all bad news, in that people I mostly admire is going away, but actually there's a massive silver lining.
Well, I have to say, one of the frustrations with people I mostly admire is that podcasting is such a competitive world.
There's so much great content out there that it's hard to get a really big audience.
And it has a big audience, but nothing like your Freakonomics radio podcast.
And so you've been kind enough to say that I might have the opportunity to guest host.
Oh, it wasn't kindness, it's exhaustion.
I'm like, please come in, help.
No, seriously.
I just want to say when we started having this conversation about you maybe shutting down Pima and starting to do whatever, a handful of episodes of Freakonomics Radio a year.
Who knows how many it might be.
It coincided with me really wanting to.
You know it's a weekly show, Freakonomics Radio, which is really hard to do, high quality all the time.
And I do love it, but it's grueling and exhausting sometimes.
So I think this is like getting the band back together 20 years after we wrote the first book.
I mean selfishly for me I think it's great, but also Editorially.
I don't mean to flatter you so much, but I'm just really impressed with what a good interviewer you've become over the past five years, doing people I mostly admire.
So I think you're going to make great Freakonomics Radio episodes.
Do you want to just give a preview of one or two that you're working on already?
I'd more like to keep the secret.
I think it's better to keep them secret.
But let me say this.
What I love about the format of Freakonomics Radio is that you tackle issues and policy.
And maybe there is a way in this long-form interview Pima format of actually trying to make headway on policy, but I never figured out how to do it.
I agree with you.
I feel like there are two basic types of conversation.
One is about a person and one is about a thing.
And yeah, you can knit them in, but it's hard sometimes.
I have a handful of policy ideas that I think are really important.
And I love the idea of pursuing them through the Freakonomics radio format with the hope that really I can make an impact.
For example, AI and education.
We talked for one minute in this episode today about AI and education, but I think it's a really important issue that isn't being treated in the right way.
And because of these two very different camps, people who think AI is the best thing in the world, people who think AI is the worst thing in the world, Understanding how it is, both at the same time, but in a really sensible and thoughtful way.
I think that's the kind of message I want to have people talking about.
There's just gross mistakes that we're making in terms of the incentives that we're applying to say, pharmaceutical development.
There's stories to tell there that matter.
I don't think of myself as a journalist at all.
So what I have done at Pima, I don't think of that as journalism.
I think of that as just me having conversations with people.
What you do on Freakonomics Radio is actually journalism.
And I'm excited to try my hand at being a journalist for a little while.
I think it's going to be great for Freakonomics Radio.
I think it's going to be great for me.
I hope it's great for you.
I think it's going to be great for listeners.
Listen, you did a wonderful job the last five years with people I mostly admire.
So congratulations and thanks for letting yourself be talked into it.
Well, you know, one thing I'm glad is that I finally quit something on time, because I always wait until too long, like everybody else does.
And when people say, have you ever quit something at the right time?
I'm going to say, well, I might have quit too early, but at least I didn't wait too long.
That again was Steve Levitt.
Remember, we are going to replay the entire archive of Levitt's show from the beginning.
Just go to your podcast app and follow people I mostly admire.
And all you have to do to hear new Steve Levitt is to keep following Freakonomics Radio right here.
You should hear his first new episode in just a few weeks.
So big thanks to Levitt for five years of Pima.
Thanks also to Morgan Levy for her great production work on Pima.
And thanks to the rest of the team that made it happen over the years, including Daniel Moritz-Rabson, Greg Rippin, Lyric Bowditch, Jasmine Klinger, Julie Canfor and Matt Hickey.
Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
You can find our entire archive on any podcast app.
It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes.
This episode was produced by Morgan Levy and edited by Gabriel Roth.
It was mixed by Greg Rippin.
The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Alina Kullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Ilaria Montenacourt, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Tao Jacobs and Zach Lipinski.
Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra.
We will be back very soon with a regular episode of Freakonomics Radio.
Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else too.
He's a very unusual human, don't you think, Clement?
That's why I thought it would be such a good episode, because he is bizarre.
Stitcher.
