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
I'm going to say, well, I might have quit too early, but at least I didn't wait too long.
That's why I thought it would be such a good episode, because he is bizarre.
Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 3: Grit vs. Quit (Update) · 16 May 2025
podcast
It is a compliment to be called a quitter precisely because we live in a world where so many forces push us to persist far too long at failing endeavors.
Freakonomics Radio · Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update) · 23 Apr 2025
podcast
Continue, please. Continue, please.
You know, I actually never, that's one result I don't believe. I just fundamentally don't believe that if you take undergrads and you put them in the role of the prisoner versus the prison guard, it's just, you know, I've never tried it. But I just don't believe that it's real. And I think to get it, you have to manipulate other things. It just doesn't seem right to me that people are like that.
Now, maybe that's what's so amazing about it is that it really happens. And there was... I don't know if you were with me by the time I was talking to a movie director from the BBC, and he said that he had tried to recreate that for the BBC, and it got so ugly so quickly that he had to cancel the whole thing, and they didn't even do the show. But... I don't know.
But wait, got so ugly so quickly connoting that it did happen, yeah? Yeah, he said it was real too. But a lot of times what I've found is that when I try to do experiments as an economist that work great for psychologists, I cannot get them to work. And I really have come to believe that it's because the people in this study are so keen on doing what the researcher wants them to do
And they think that the psychologist wants them to behave in one way and they think the economist wants them to behave in a different way. And so it's hard to reproduce some of those psychological findings. So I would love to do the prison study and I'd love to do it in a way that was unbiased.
And I just, that's one thing I would bet a lot of money that things wouldn't turn out the way they did in that old Zimbardo study.
So people won't believe me. I've never heard those quotes. I didn't know anyone else thought that way. What I said before was just my intuition that that is not human behavior, what got revealed in those studies.
When I teach my class on the economics of crime to the undergraduates at the UFC, one of the points I stress over and over is that the puzzle is not why is there so much crime? The puzzle is just the opposite. Why is there so little crime? Why does the average person who has literally hundreds of chances to commit crimes in a day and not take advantage of those, right?
Every time you walk past a five-year-old on the street, on the playground, you could bonk them over the head with no repercussions and run off, or you could steal candy. That's a real high-stakes crimes you're talking about, beating up children and stealing candy. But nobody does them, and you don't worry about people doing them.
And even when there are, I mean, I'll be in a big room lecturing, and I'll leave my cell phone and my backpack that has my computer in it. If I lost a computer, I would be beside myself. But I'll have complete faith that no one is going to steal it. And it's really not ultimately because they think they'll be caught. I think that one of the greatest powers of society is,
is the ability to inculcate in people a sense of right and wrong. And so the overwhelming majority of people are trained to not do things that are negative to other people.
I love podcast guests who change the way I think about some important aspect of the world. A great example is my guest today, David Eagleman. He's a Stanford neuroscientist whose work on brain plasticity has completely transformed my understanding of the human brain and its possibilities.
According to Eagleman, the brain is constantly trying to predict the world around it. But of course, the world is unpredictable and surprising, so the brain is constantly updating its model. The capacity of our brains to be ever-changing is usually referred to as plasticity, but Eagleman offers another term, live-wired. That's where our conversation begins.
When I went to school, I feel like they taught me the brain was organized around things like senses and emotions, that there were these different parts of the brain that were good for those things. But you make the case that there's a very different organization of the brain.
So let me pose a question to listeners. Imagine you have a newborn baby and he or she looks absolutely flawless on the outside. But then upon examination, the doctors discover that half of his or her brain is just missing, a complete hemisphere of the brain. It's never developed. It's just empty space.
I would expect that would be a fatal defect, or best the child would be growing up profoundly mentally disabled.
So I first came to your work because I was so blown away by the idea of human echolocation. Yeah. only to discover that echolocation is only the tip of the iceberg. But could you talk just a bit about echolocation, how quickly, with training, it can start to substitute for sight?
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