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 over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Freakonomics Radio · Steve Levitt Quits His Podcast, Joins Ours · 21 Jan 2026 podcast

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

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.

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, it would change everything.

And that's what gets me so excited about it.

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