Steve Levitt
speaker
962 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 31 Jul
Steve Levitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
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 college student 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 and
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 that
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.
Well, 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.
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