EconTalk

The Department of War wanted to deploy Anthropic's Claude for "all lawful use." What begins as a policy dispute between a tech company and the Department of War quietly unfolds into something far more unsettling. Listen as Dean Ball and EconTalk's Russ Roberts trace the collision between Anthropic and the federal government over Claude's use in classified military operations, exploring thorny questions about autonomous weapons, dom...

What can Adam Smith teach us today? In this conversation between Ross Levine of Stanford's Hoover Institution and EconTalk's Russ Roberts, Smith emerges as a penetrating psychologist who understood that our deepest hunger isn't for wealth but for respect--and that this hunger, left unexamined, leads individuals and societies alike into serious trouble. The discussion moves from the personal (why do highly successful people keep gri...

He arrived in America as a child with no English. He was mistakenly sent to a school for juvenile delinquents. He faced rampant prejudice--yet Jensen Huang, the under-the-radar CEO of NVIDIA, became a catalyzing figure behind the AI revolution and built the most valuable company in the world. Listen as journalist Stephen Witt speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about how Jensen pivoted from manufacturing processing units for video ...

What does a lone sailor circling the globe have to do with the fall of empires, the Model T, and the rise of AI? Everything--because maintenance, the quiet act of keeping things going, turns out to be the hidden force behind success and failure in nearly every domain of human endeavor. EconTalk's Russ Roberts speaks with Stewart Brand --creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, founder of the Long Now Foundation, and one of the great con...

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 ab...

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 Hungari...

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 returnin...

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 sm...

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 ...

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 p...

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. F...

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 Chilea...

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...

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 i...

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 signifi...

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 ...

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 irration...

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 Da...