Steve Levitt, Ph.D.: A rogue economist's view on climate change, mental health, the ethics of experiments, and more

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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My guest this week is Steve Levitt. Steve is an economist and coauthor of the bestselling book Freakonomics and its two sequels. He is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago.
He is also the founding partner of TGG, or the Greater Good Group Consulting Firm. In 2003, Steve won the John Bates Clark Medal, which is one of the two highest honors someone can win in the field of economics, the other being the Nobel Prize. This award is given to the most outstanding economist in America under the age of 40 In 2006, Steve was named one of Time Magazine's 100 people who shape our world. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard and his PhD from MIT before heading to Chicago, where he is currently a professor. In this episode, we talk about a lot of things, Steve's path through the world of economics, why he chose it, and how unlikely a candidate he was for such study.
Then we get into the limitations of economics. We talk about one of the more controversial things that Steve has written about, along with his co-author for Freakonomics, which was climate change and some of the confusion around what they wrote and the implications of it and how things have changed in the decades since they wrote it. We talk about some of the tragedies that Steve has endured in his life and how his very unique disposition has allowed him to not only tolerate these things, but actually thrive through them. We talk about Steve's recent appreciation for mental health and the importance that he believes it plays in our education world. And we get off onto a couple of interesting tangents around things like golf and horse racing, which even if you're not fond of either, I think you'll get a kick out of. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Steve Levitt.
Hey, Steve, it's awesome to see you today. Although I was really hoping we were gonna be able to figure out a way to do this in person if we waited long enough, but at some point I just thought, we just need to sit down and do this, and video's almost as good. So anyway, thanks so much for making time.

**Steven Levitt** (3:11)
So excited to be here.

**Peter Attia** (3:12)
We're here.

**Steven Levitt** (3:20)
Yours. It was the last time that I was with you. The little tiny thing that made so much noise.

**Peter Attia** (3:26)
Yes, I sure do.

**Steven Levitt** (3:26)
It didn't go very fast, but it made a lot of noise for going slow.

**Peter Attia** (3:31)
I think a lot of listeners probably are familiar with you. Of course, they're familiar with you through obviously your books, podcasts, things like that. But maybe it's worth actually telling people a little bit about how you got interested in the study of economics. And obviously it's through that study that your work became available to a much broader swath of the population than just sort of economists. So what got you interested in studying economics?

**Steven Levitt** (3:55)
So I was never interested in economics. I'm probably still not interested in economics, but the way I became an economist was really through the back door.
I was the worst kind of student in college. I mean, I got good grades. I got into Harvard, I got good grades at Harvard, but I didn't care about learning at all. All I really cared about was gaming the system. And I had learned that the best way to pick classes was to find the classes that everybody took because it turned out those were both really good classes in general and really easy.
And it just happened that at Harvard, Act 10, the introductory economics course was exactly one of those courses. So I took it not because I was interested in economics, but just because my rule of thumb was to take classes like that.