In People I (Mostly Admire), Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt takes the podcasting reins and interviews some of the most interesting, unorthodox people around.
“The perfect guest for me is someone who's not only wildly intelligent, but also a little bit off the rails,” Levitt says. “Someone who thinks differently and who doesn't care at all how the world perceives him or her.”
Levitt has spent decades as an academic economist, “studying strange phenomena and human behavior in weird circumstances.” Now, in People I (Mostly Admire) he has turned his curiosity to something new: interviewing some of the most interesting, unorthodox people around — from actresses to athletes, authors to inventors.
In a media world where hosts on TV, radio, and podcasts yell louder and announces crazy theories to garner ratings, followers, and attention, Levitt's quiet, diamond-blade sharp intellect has captured enough downloads to qualify the podcast as a hit.
On this week's episode of Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt's new podcast People I (Mostly) Admire, Levitt sits down with Pete Docter, the chief creative officer of Pixar and the Academy Award-winning director of Soul, Inside Out, Up, and Monsters, Inc.
Docter
tells Levitt why it costs two hundred million to make an animated film,
why Steve Jobs was jealous of him, and why they chose toys as the
subject of Toy Story (because the animation technology then made everything look like plastic anyway). Here's a sample:
- "All
the films we've ever done have gone through periods where you're like,
'Who thought of this idea? This is awful. This is just not going to
work.'"
- “For people who ask me, ‘Hey, I really want to
work at Pixar and I want to make films.’ I'm like, ‘Find a smaller place
where you can contribute more,’ cause at a big place, you end up being a
specialist.”
- “The first time I saw Steve Jobs — I think it was like two months in, and he came to fire half the company.”
- “I
think it's really important for those of us in this business to
remember, these movies are not for us. Therapy is cheaper if that's what
you're in it for.”
- "The world is full of all these books, especially in regard to screenwriting. 'Here's what you should do in the three-act structure.' But I feel like if I'm conscious of that stuff when I'm starting out, I'm going to end up somewhere I already know. And that's not very fun. I'd rather get lost."
Take, for example, Levitt's first episode with Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker
where Pinker speaks frankly about enraging people on opposite ends of the
political spectrum.
https://freakonomics.com/
Yale School of Management dean Kerwin Charles
talks about video-gaming habits, communicable disease
and why so many African-Americans haven’t had the kind
of success he’s had:
https://freakonomics.com/
Levitt isn't a flashy interviewer and has a modulated tone and patient speaking cadence along with a willingness to draw out his guests into discussions that reveal something about them personally and a state of the world we live in.
People I (Mostly) Admire premiered on August 21, 2020, and new episodes drop every two weeks.
Listen to the complete episode here and on all podcast platforms: https://freakonomics.com/
Thanks to Ray Padgett
by
Frank Racioppi
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