EconTalk
Russ Roberts
EconTalk: Conversations for the Curious is an award-winning weekly podcast hosted by Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford's Hoover Institution. The eclectic guest list includes authors, doctors, psychologists, historians, philosophers, economists, and more. Learn how the health care system really works, the serenity that comes from humility, the challenge of interpreting data, how potato chips are made, what it's like to run an upscale Manhattan restaurant, what caused the 2008 financial crisis, the nature of consciousness, the conflicts and history of the Middle East, and more. EconTalk has been taking the Monday out of Mondays since 2006. All 1000+ episodes are available in the archive. Go to EconTalk.org for transcripts, related resources, and comments.
Recent Episodes
20 episodesAI, Employment, and Education (with Tyler Cowen)
Tyler Cowen is bullish on the integration of AI into higher education. He's also not worried about its effects on the future workplace. Listen as Cowen speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the reasons for his optimism, and argues that college classes should devote significant time to learning how to use AI. They discuss the future of writing (and thinking) in an academic context, and Cowen's solution to dealing with worries about cheating. Cowen also shares how he personally has adapted to AI, and whether he thinks there's value to a college education designed not to ensure mastery of a subject, but instead to help students become the kind of people they want to be.
The Match That Lit the Flame: Hannah Senesh and the Creation of Modern Israel (with Matti Friedman)
Why would a group of young Jews who escaped the Holocaust choose to parachute back into Nazi-occupied Europe? How did they become heroes despite the failure of that mission? Author Matti Friedman joins EconTalk's Russ Roberts to unravel these mysteries through his book Out of the Sky, revealing why a failed mission became one of Israel's most powerful founding myths. At the heart of the story is Hannah Senesh, a 23-year-old Hungarian poet who traded her Budapest life for a kibbutz, then traded the kibbutz for a parachute and a near-certain death sentence--and whose poems, scribbled on scraps of paper in forests near the Hungarian border, became some of the most famous texts in modern Hebrew.
The Economics of Scarcity and the UNC-Duke Basketball Game (with Michael Munger)
Duke University leaves millions of dollars on the table every year by giving away free tickets to the most sought-after game in college basketball. The bizarre ticket allocation system includes weeks of camping in tents, a 58-question trivia exam, border guards with air horns at 3 AM, and a 50-page student-written constitution with its own appeals court. In this special 20th-anniversary episode, EconTalk's Russ Roberts and returning favorite Michael Munger (appearance #51!) use the legendary Duke-UNC rivalry to explore the fundamental economics question: how do you deal with a world when there isn't enough of something to go around? Along the way, they ask why a university that squeezes students on every other margin, might deliberately forgo a fortune on ticket sales. The answer has everything to do with community, belonging, and the same psychology that bonds fighter pilots and elite military units.
How We Tamed Ourselves and Invented Good and Evil (with Hanno Sauer)
What if humanity's capacity for cruelty was actually one of our greatest moral achievements? That's just one of the provocative ideas philosopher Hanno Sauer explores in this conversation about his book The Invention of Good and Evil with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Sauer tackles a fundamental puzzle: in a Darwinian world of selfish genes, how did humans become so extraordinarily cooperative? Sauer traces a fascinating journey from small hunter-gatherer bands to modern civilizations, revealing surprising mechanisms along the way--including the systematic killing of the most aggressive tribe members over millennia, which made humans the "golden retrievers of the primate kingdom." The conversation ranges from whether agriculture was history's worst mistake, to a spirited debate about religion and morality between Sauer (a German atheist who doesn't know any believers) and host Russ Roberts (a person of faith living in Israel).
The Power of Introverts (with Susan Cain)
Introverts are underrated. So says Susan Cain in her conversation with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about her book, Quiet. She explains why introversion isn't the same thing as shyness and she speaks of the many benefits of solitude and silent contemplation. They also discuss why modern schools and workplaces' obsession with extroversion is problematic, and the reasons for the shift from a culture of character to our current culture of personality. Cain concludes by sharing how the book has changed her own life and helped other introverts navigate a world that can't seem to stop talking.
The Man Who Would Be King of Saudi Arabia (with Karen Elliott House)
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been dragging Saudi Arabia into the modern world over the last decade. Journalist and author Karen Elliott House lays out the Saudi leader's motivations, hopes, and contradictions. Listen as she and EconTalk's Russ Roberts explore the crown prince's mix of cultural liberalization and political dominance and where his balancing act might lead his country in the future.
Seiko, Swatch, and the Swiss Watch Industry (with Aled Maclean-Jones)
How did an industry survive a technology that should have made it obsolete? Aled Maclean-Jones explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts how Japanese quartz watches nearly wiped out Swiss watchmaking with cheaper, more accurate alternatives--and how the Swiss redefined the value of a watch to recover market dominance. Maclean-Jones discusses the Japanese innovations that led to the Swiss industry's collapse; the brilliant decision by a pair of Swiss mavericks to change the narrative around mechanical watches; and the consolidation and standardization of Swiss watchmaking undertaken by Swatch founder Nicolas Hayek.
A Military Analysis of Israel's War in Gaza (with Andrew Fox)
What does war look like when fought under the harshest scrutiny? Veteran soldier and military researcher Andrew Fox talks about his first-hand experience in Gaza with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. He and Roberts explore the challenges of reporting and understanding the war amid the challenges of disinformation, and why Fox believes that the IDF had few tactical alternatives to destroying infrastructure and buildings in the Gaza Strip. Fox also addresses the claims that Israel deliberately targeted Gazan children and wielded starvation as a weapon, and explains why he believes that Israel succeeded in achieving its strategic war goals.
How to Flourish (with Daniel Coyle)
Author Daniel Coyle talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts on the art of flourishing: why it's a natural phenomenon rather than mechanical; how taking life's "yellow doors"--or detours from a straight, expected path--is often the key to a flourishing life; and why true flourishing can only occur in the context of relationships. They also discuss how the basic principles of flourishing have empowered people--from men trapped in a Chilean mine to senior citizens reliving their youth--to achieve remarkable things. Finally, they offer an exercise you can do for recognizing the ways that others have helped us to thrive.
Zionism, the Melting Pot, and the Galveston Project (with Rachel Cockerell)
What happens when a writer discovers her "boring" great-grandfather was actually a household name across the Russian Empire who helped 10,000 Jews escape to Texas? Rachel Cockerell's The Melting Point traces this forgotten history through an audacious technique: she removed herself entirely, letting only primary sources--newspaper articles, diaries, letters--speak across time. Her journey uncovers great-grandfather David Jochelmann's partnership with Israel Zangwill, the "Jewish Dickens" and their ambitious Galveston Project to divert Jewish refugees from overcrowded New York to Texas. The conversation with EconTalk's Russ Roberts spans the early Zionist movement's schism over the right location for a Jewish homeland, 1920s New York experimental theater, and one family scattered across London, New York, and Jerusalem.
Nature, Nurture, and Identical Twins (with David Bessis)
Are your genes your destiny? Despite famous studies of identical twins that seem to answer in the affirmative, mathematician David Bessis says: Not so fast. He and EconTalk's Russ Roberts take a deep dive into the "twins reared apart" literature, showing how multiple flaws in those studies undercut their claims about heritability. Bessis demonstrates why the natural experiments are never perfect, and why differences across people in a particular time and place are no guarantee of what will happen to any one human being. They also discuss psychologist Eric Turkheimer's three laws of behavior genetics, emphasizing the role of unique experiences in shaping who we become.
The Mattering Instinct (with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)
Philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein discusses her new book, The Mattering Instinct, which argues that our lives are a quest to validate our inherent self-centeredness. Tracing this essential longing from physics and biology through to ethics and politics, she explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts why material success alone can never satisfy our deep-seated need to matter. She describes the four ways people seek significance--through transcendence, social connection, excellence, or competition--and explains how the unmet need to matter is at the heart of some of the biggest problems afflicting modern societies: loneliness, extremism, and polarization.
Conversation, Interintellect, and Arcadia (with Anna Gat)
If technology is ruining the art of conversation, maybe it can save it, too. Anna Gat--poet, screenwriter, playwright, and founder of Interintellect--talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts on how she's reviving the French salon in the digital age. They discuss why authority, moderation, and clear formats make conversation freer, not more constrained. They also explore why one of the greatest of modern plays--Tom Stoppard's Arcadia--is so resonant not only as a live theatrical performance, but also when read aloud, both alone and in a group. They conclude the episode by connecting Arcadia's themes to Gat's mission at Interintellect: Namely, preserving the value of thinking together across generations, disciplines, and worldviews.
In Defense of Intuition (with Gerd Gigerenzer)
Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer explains the power of intuition, how intuition became gendered, what he thinks Kahneman and Tversky's research agenda got wrong, and why it's a mistake to place intuition and conscious thinking on opposing ends of the cognition spectrum. Topics he discusses in this wide-ranging conversation with EconTalk's Russ Roberts include what Gigerenzer calls the "bias bias"--the overemphasis on claims of irrationality, why it's better to replace "nudging" with "boosting," and the limitations of AI in its current form as a replacement for human intelligence and intuition.
David Deutsch on the Pattern
A world-class physicist makes a shocking claim: across 2,500 years and every kind of society, there has been a recurring moral exception carved out just for Jews--the idea that hurting Jews is, in some sense, legitimate. Most of the time, this doesn't erupt into pogroms. Instead, it lives as a background permission: a readiness to excuse, minimize, or rationalize hurting Jews when it does occur. Listen as Russ Roberts talks with David Deutsch of Oxford University about what Deutsch calls "the Pattern": a persistent, global impulse not primarily to attack Jews, but to justify attacks on Jews--socially, politically, or physically. The stated reasons shift with the era--deicide, moneylending, "cosmopolitan elites," Zionism--but the underlying permission structure remains disturbingly constant. Unsettling, challenging, and clarifying, this conversation may change how you understand antisemitism--and the moral fault lines of our civilization.
Free Will Is Real (with Kevin Mitchell)
Are we truly characters with agency, or are we just playing out our programming in the great video game of life? Contrary to those in his field who claim that free will is an illusion, neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell insists that we're agents who wield our decision-making mechanism for our own purposes. Listen as the author of Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts why the debate between free will and determinism rests on a flawed foundation, and how the evolution of the ability to make choices and take actions provides the best argument for human agency. Topics include why habits, rather than simply limiting our freedom, also help us live better lives, and the role emotions such as guilt, shame, and regret play in building our character.
Colonialism, Slavery, and Foreign Aid (with William Easterly)
Can the promise of economic progress ever justify conquest, coercion, and control over other people’s lives? Economist William Easterly joins EconTalk's Russ Roberts to argue no--and to rethink what "development" really means in theory, in history, and in our politics today. Drawing on his new book, Violent Saviors: The West's Conquest of the Rest, Easterly explores how colonial powers and later regimes like the Soviet Union claimed to increase people's material well-being while stripping them of freedom, dignity, and any say in their own fate. Russ and Easterly dig into the idea of agency--the ability of people to choose for themselves--through the lens of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Kant, Frederick Douglass, and modern debates over foreign aid, autocrats, and technocratic "solutions" imposed from afar.
The Perfect Tuba: How Band, Grit, and Community Build a Better Life (with Sam Quinones)
Journalist and author Sam Quinones talks about his newest book, The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Brass Horn, Band, and Hard Work with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Known for his reporting on the opioid crisis, Quinones turns to a more uplifting subject--the world of tuba players and high school marching bands. What begins as curiosity about an unusual instrument evolves into a moving exploration of how discipline, community, and devotion to craft can restore meaning and purpose in people's lives.
The Status Game (with Will Storr)
Will Storr talks about his book The Status Game with EconTalk host Russ Roberts, exploring how our deep need for respect and recognition shapes our behavior. The conversation delves into how we constantly judge others and compare ourselves to them, the pain of losing status, and the freedom of escaping judgment. Storr and Roberts discuss how status drives everything from workplace hierarchies to social media, and how aging can shift the games we choose to play. They also examine tribalism, moral outrage, and politics through the lens of status, suggesting that much of what we call morality or justice reflects our desire for recognition.
The Wonder of the Emergent Mind (with Gaurav Suri)
How is your brain like an ant colony? They both use simple parts following simple rules which allows the whole to be so much more than the sum of the parts. Listen as neuroscientist and author Gaurav Suri explains how the mind emerges from the neural network of the brain, why habits form, why intuition often knows before language does, and why our post-hoc explanations can mislead us. The conversation then grapples with free will and responsibility without mysticism. Ultimately, Suri remains in awe of the emergent mind and at the end of the conversation makes the case for the essential importance of kindness and forgiveness.