People I (Mostly) Admire

The late Robert Solow was a giant among economists. When he was 98 years old he told Steve... more

Michael Crow is the president of Arizona State University, which U.S. News & World Report ... more

Michael Greenstone knows it’s corny, but he wants to make the world a better place — by tr... more

Suleika Jaouad was diagnosed with cancer at 22. She made her illness the subject of a New ... more

Physicist and former pop star Brian Cox tells Steve about discovering the Higgs boson, hav... more

Irving Finkel is an expert on cuneiform — the oldest known writing system. He tells Steve ... more

Moon Duchin is a math professor at the University of Chicago whose theoretical work has pr... more

Frances Arnold pioneered the process of directed evolution — mimicking natural selection t... more

Steven Pinker’s new book argues that all our relationships depend on shared assumptions an... more

The Power of Habit author Charles Duhigg wrote his new book in an attempt to learn how to ... more

Seth Berkley used to run the world's largest vaccine funding organization. He and Steve ta... more

Stefanie Stantcheva’s approach seemed like career suicide. In fact, it won her the John Ba... more

From recording some of the first rap hits to revitalizing Johnny Cash's career, the legend... more

More than two decades ago, Adam Riess’s Nobel Prize-winning work fundamentally changed our... more

Uri Simonsohn is a behavioral science professor who wants to improve standards in his fiel... more

Former U.S. Secretary of Education, 3x3 basketball champion, and leader of an anti-gun vio... more

Kate Marvel spends her days playing with climate models, which she says are “like a very e... more

Twenty years ago, before the Freakonomics book tour, Bill McGowan taught Steve Levitt to s... more

Former professional poker player Annie Duke wrote a book about Steve’s favorite subject: q... more

Psychologist David Yeager thinks the conventional wisdom for how to motivate young people ... more

She’s a botanist, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and the author of the bestsel... more

Palliative physician B.J. Miller asks: Is there a better way to think about dying? And can... more

Historian Tom Holland narrowly escaped a career writing vampire novels to become the co-ho... more

John Green returns to the show to talk about tuberculosis — a disease that kills more than... more

Abraham Verghese is a physician and a best-selling author — in that order, he says. He exp... more

Jens Ludwig has an idea for how to fix America’s gun violence problem — and it starts by r... more

Ellen Wiebe is a physician who helps seriously ill patients end their lives in Canada, whe... more

He has been a lawyer, an instructor at the F.B.I. Academy, the owner of a frozen-yogurt ch... more