Steve Levitt

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 online.

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.

Oh, I couldn't do it.

It was ruining my life when I had to do it every week.

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.