I tend to forget how old I am.

I've been fortunate to have good health,

and between having young kids and not looking in the mirror very often,

I still feel young.

One thing, though, that always makes me feel old

is when people I know who are a lot younger

than me rise to positions of power.

In that regard, nobody makes me feel older than my guest today, Jonathan Levin.

I had already finished graduate school before he even arrived.

I still think of him as a kid, but they do not appoint a kid to be the present of Stanford,

perhaps the most influential and impactful job in all of higher education.

So much of what drives behavior at a university and drives the quality of dialogue and

discourse is just people's thinking about why am I here, what am I fundamentally involved in.

Campuses should be places with deep curiosity about ideas, and they should be places where you

can take chances and test things out.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

John Levin started his career as an assistant professor at Stanford before making his way up the ranks of academic leadership.

And in that regard, he's following in the footsteps of his father, Richard Leffin, who is also an economist and who served as president of Yale for 20 years. But I met John

way back in grad school when he was part of a class in the MIT Economics PhD program that may turn

out to be the best economics PhD class of all time. In addition to John, it included Esther DeFlo and Emmanuel Sias.

All three of them have won the John Bates-Clark Medal that's given annually to the most

influential economist in America under the age of 40.

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