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by Russ Roberts
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Latest episodes

  • Lives Wasted and Well-Lived: David Wolpe on The Death of Ivan Ilyich

    October 19, 2026 · 1 hr 9 min

    What if you did everything right and discovered on your deathbed that you've wasted your life? Rabbi and author David Wolpe talks about Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Weaving Rabbi Wolpe's own brushes…

  • The Great Fertility Collapse (with Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde)

    October 12, 2026 · 1 hr 11 min

    For the first time in human history, we're not having enough children to keep the world's population from falling. And fertility is collapsing fastest not in rich nations but in places like Colombia, Thailand, and Guatemala, upending…

  • Addiction, Faith, and the Limits of Willpower (with Meghan O'Gieblyn)

    October 5, 2026 · 1 hr 9 min

    Why do we keep doing things we know we shouldn't? And is that really a failure of will? Author Meghan O'Gieblyn spent years trying to answer that question, first in response to her struggle with alcoholism and her loss of faith, and then…

  • Public Choice and Politics Without Romance (with Mike Munger)

    September 28, 2026 · 1 hr 20 min

    Before you give the government new powers, try the Munger Test: cross out "government" and insert the name of the politician you trust least. Then see if you still like the idea. In his 52nd EconTalk appearance, Mike Munger talks with host…

  • The Death of Reading (with James Marriott)

    September 21, 2026 · 1 hr 5 min

    Are we living in the new Dark Ages? Despite vast technological advances, our societies are increasingly looking like those that preceded the advent of literacy. So argues journalist James Marriott, who sees in our abandonment of reading a…

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  • Incentives Are for Losers (with Adam Mastroianni)

    September 14, 2026 · 1 hr 5 min

    Incentives matter, sure. But what should you do when following the incentives means quietly participating in something wrong? Psychologist Adam Mastroianni argues that obeying bad incentives--shading a headline for clicks, keeping the…

  • Meritocracy, Exams, and the Knowledge That Matters (with Daisy Christodoulou)

    September 7, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min

    What does a failed 19th-century Chinese civil exam and one of the deadliest wars in history have to do with how we hire, educate, and test people today? In this EconTalk conversation, Russ Roberts and education expert Daisy…

  • Hamas and the Future of Gaza (with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib)

    August 31, 2026 · 1 hr 23 min

    He lost his childhood homes, dozens of family members, and most of his hearing in his left ear to Israeli bombs, yet Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib insists that Palestinians must also take responsibility for Gaza's destruction and for peace. Most…

  • Are We Alone? Cosmic Loneliness and the Longing to Believe (with Adam Kirsch)

    August 24, 2026 · 1 hr 12 min

    Has the earth been visited by extraterrestrials? Are we alone? Despite no formal evidence for conscious life outside of earth, the belief that we are not alone has become more common among both scientists and everyday people. Listen as…

  • The Hidden Cause of the Industrial Revolution (with Ben Southwood)

    August 17, 2026 · 1 hr 14 min

    What if the Industrial Revolution wasn't sparked by the steam engine, but by a quiet legal revolution in how England handled property rights? Ben Southwood of Works in Progress argues that the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s unleashed…

  • Ben Sasse on Faith, Family, and Facing Death

    August 10, 2026 · 1 hr 21 min

    Six months into a stage-four pancreatic cancer diagnosis that gave him 90 days to live, Ben Sasse sits down with EconTalk's Russ Roberts for a conversation that refuses easy comfort. The former U.S. senator and University of Florida…

  • The Political Economy of Palestine (with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour)

    August 3, 2026 · 1 hr 28 min

    Most discourses about Israel or Palestine are morality plays of good guys vs bad guys. Egyptian-born Hussein Aboubakr Mansour takes a different approach, seeing the conflict as a self-reproducing system of political and economic extraction…

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About the show

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.