Levitt in particular says he feels like his research can have a bigger impact if it’s shared broadly with people than if it reaches 10 other academics and that’s it. We’re not talking about likes on social media, we’re talking about breadth of audience for academic research and how scientists can do better than chasing meaningless citation stats.

Levitt talks about his thought process in this wonderful episode of Freakonomics. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/math-curriculum/

You did.

> Dubner went went down the podcaster route. 15 years later, Dubner has reached millions of people [...]

I assume this is measured in terms of subscribers or listen counts.

I'm not saying the Freakonomics Stevens have/haven't had quality contributions to the world, I'm not even saying anything w.r.t. average podcast quality vs. average academic paper quality. I'm only saying that people often measure impact along only one dimension.