Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher
251 episodes listed below
Economist Steve Levitt interviews high achievers, from Survivor winners to physicists, about data and decisions.
People I (Mostly) Admire pairs Steve Levitt with scientists, economists, athletes, magicians, writers, and other high achievers. The conversations favor plain questions, careful definitions, and the useful moment when a confident answer starts to get complicated.
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The show is a one-on-one interview podcast with Steve Levitt as the sole host across every sampled episode. Levitt is an economist and co-author of the Freakonomics books, and he brings a quantitative, incentive-focused lens to guests who work well outside economics as often as within it. A recurring theme is applying data to contested public debates, seen in Emily Oster's work on pregnancy advice, breastfeeding evidence, and school-reopening data, and in Tim Harford's discussion of separating shaky facts from overconfident interpretations. Game theory and strategic decision-making also recur, illustrated through Yul Kwon's use of tit-for-tat reasoning to win Survivor. Unconventional career paths are a running interest, shown in Kwon's stints at Google, the FBI Academy, and Facebook, and in Michael Crow's restructuring of Arizona State University's admissions model. The show covers science communication as well, with Brian Cox explaining the Higgs boson discovery and black hole physics, and covers illness and resilience through Suleika Jaouad's account of leukemia, grief, and identity after cancer. Sports economics appears through Sue Bird's account of WNBA pay negotiations and pay-equity data. Guests are generally established experts, authors, athletes, or public figures with a specific body of work or a personal story tied to data, risk, or an unusual path to success. Episodes are long-form, single-segment conversations without narration, framed around Levitt's questions about how each guest thinks and decides. Listeners drawn to applying analytical or economic reasoning to everyday questions, alongside stories of atypical careers, make up the show's core audience.
Made for: People interested in economics, data literacy, and psychology who enjoy long-form interviews with accomplished guests explaining how they think, decide, and got where they are.
What sets it apart: Unlike single-topic interview shows, the host is an economist who applies a consistent data-and-incentives lens across guests from unrelated fields, sports, physics, magic, reality TV, and higher education, in the same series.
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 biologist is finding the secrets of evolution in the Arctic tundra, and how a trivia champion memorized 160,000 flashcards. To get every show in the Freakonomics Radio Network without ads and a monthly bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio, start a free trial for SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Steve Levitt turns wide-ranging interviews into clear accounts of how people make decisions, test ideas, and respond when their assumptions meet experience.
Steve Levitt approaches guests by finding the point where an impressive life becomes a practical question. People I Mostly Admire builds its portraits through conversation: Brian Cox makes the Higgs boson and black holes intelligible, while Michael Crow explains how Arizona…
Steve Levitt makes the Higgs boson and Survivor strategy feel equally worth your curiosity.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Sapolsky pushes Levitt from baboon ethics to criminal justice, making free will feel practical and morally uncomfortable.
Steve Levitt meets Robert Sapolsky with the energy of a reader who has lived with the work for years, then uses that familiarity to push into harder territory: free will, stress, violence, animal welfare, and punishment.
A careful education-policy conversation about Emily Oster, school reopening, and the uneasy move from gathering data to arguing from it.
Emily Oster comes through here as an economist who applies evidence and tradeoffs to decisions that usually get argued through instinct. Steve Levitt frames her pregnancy and parenting work as part of that same habit, then moves into the more fraught question of school reopening…
A sharp, accessible lesson in how magicians turn uncertainty into control without killing the wonder.
Steve Levitt's conversation with Joshua Jay treats magic as a craft built on preparation, not just mystery. Levitt begins from his own disarming reaction to magic: even an economist trained to look for patterns can leave a performance wondering whether the impossible really…
A clear, practical conversation about checking numbers before trusting the story built around them.
Tim Harford's conversation with Steve Levitt is a useful lesson in being less gullible around numbers. The strongest stretch takes a health-care savings claim about weight loss and reduces it to simple arithmetic: once the figure becomes roughly 50 cents per person per year, the…
Yul Kwon turns strategy into something concrete, from law and tech to the first brutal hours of Survivor.
Yul Kwon's conversation with Steve Levitt works best as a lesson in practical intelligence under pressure. Kwon's resume is unusually wide: Yale Law, FBI teaching, PBS and CNN hosting, Facebook and Google roles, a frozen yogurt chain, and a Survivor win.
Sue Bird turns basketball greatness into a clear lesson on talent, rules, institutions, and competition.
Steve Levitt's conversation with Sue Bird treats basketball as a classroom for incentives, talent, and the design of games. Bird comes in with an almost absurd championship record, but the useful part is how calmly she talks through the machinery around that success: UConn's…
A reflective, theory-heavy conversation with Paul Romer about discovery, institutions, and the trouble with bold development ideas.
Steve Levitt opens this conversation with unusual candor: as a young economist, he once wanted to be Paul Romer, until graduate macroeconomics convinced him otherwise.
Robert Solow turns economics into a lesson in memory, insecurity, and the political limits of what the field knows.
Robert Solow comes across here less as a monument of economics than as a teacher still testing ideas against lived experience. Steve Levitt's admiration is obvious, and useful: as a former student, he can ask about growth, inequality, and labor markets without turning the…
Ira Glass frames weekly theme-driven segments spanning family secrets to Portland's protest conflict.
Shankar Vedantam unpacks the psychology behind relationships, careers, and money through researcher interviews.
David McRaney interviews researchers on cognitive bias, motivated reasoning, and why minds change.
Ryan Holiday pairs daily Stoic lessons with long-form guest conversations at his Texas bookstore.
NHPR's Jason Moon investigates the Bear Brook barrel murders and a New Hampshire wrongful-conviction case.
Robert Sapolsky will not hand Steve Levitt the tidy moral answer.
Emily Oster, a Brown University economist and author of Expecting Better and Cribsheet, explains how pregnancy pushed her from academic research into public advice grounded in data.
Magic makes Levitt feel childlike.
Tim Harford makes economics feel less forbidding.
Yul Kwon has lived a few different lives.
Steve Levitt opens his Sue Bird interview with some doubt.
Steve Levitt begins with admiration.
Steve Levitt interviews literary agent Suzanne Gluck, whom he deeply admires, about her life and career.
Steve Levitt interviews Peter Attia about his self-experimentation and longevity pursuits.
Steve Levitt interviews a former Zen monk who teaches mindfulness to high school students, discussing the transformative power of these practices.
Steve Levitt interviews polymath Nathan Myhrvold about his life, intellect, and diverse interests.
Steve Levitt interviews YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki about her career, life, and optimism for technology's role in improving lives.
Steve Levitt interviews Ken Jennings about his memory and Jeopardy success, exploring how interest drives memory.
Steve Levitt interviews Kerwin Charles, dean of Yale School of Management, about his journey from Guyana to academic success and the complexities of the African-American experience.
Steve Levitt interviews Mayim Bialik about her unconventional path as a neuroscientist and actress, focusing on authenticity and breaking rules.
This episode features an interview with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker discussing human cognitive limitations, societal progress, and his approach to managing controversy as a public intellectual.
In the final episode of People I Mostly Admire, Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner reverse roles as interviewer and interviewee to reflect on the podcast's five-year run and Levitt's personal journey as a reluctant interviewer.
Robert Solow answers with ninety-eight years of hindsight.
ASU wanted a different university model.
Economist Michael Greenstone discusses his research on how air pollution, particularly fine particulates, impacts human health and mortality.
Survival gets a plain look.
Brian Cox took the scenic route into physics.
Steve Levitt interviews Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, about cuneiform and the ancient writings of Mesopotamia.
Mathematician Moon Duchin discusses how her geometric research is applied to detect and combat political gerrymandering.
Steve Levitt interviews Nobel laureate Frances Arnold about her pioneering work in directed evolution and her journey to scientific success.
Steve Levitt interviews Steven Pinker about the need for advocates of science and reason in a polarized world.
Steve Levitt interviews Charles Duhigg about the science of great conversations and his book Super Communicators.
Steve Levitt interviews music producer Rick Rubin about his creative process and life, exploring how he elicits greatness from artists.
Steve Levitt interviews public speaking expert Bill McGowan about effective communication and his new book.
Steve Levitt interviews psychologist David Yeager about his research on motivating young people and the failures of conventional approaches.
Steve Levitt interviews Reginald Dwayne Betts, a former prisoner turned Yale Law graduate and founder of Freedom Reads, about his journey and mission to build libraries in prisons.
Steve Levitt interviews Sarah Stein Greenberg about design thinking and problem-solving, using a student project example.