Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchHow Your Situation Shapes You (with Angela Duckworth)
Episode 1073
Sure, you can use willpower or grit to break bad habits and build new ones. But maybe the key to success is simpler: change your situation. Psycholog…
12 hours ago
Lives Wasted and Well-Lived: David Wolpe on The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Episode 1072
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 "Th…
1 week ago
The Great Fertility Collapse (with Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde)
Episode 1071
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 fastes…
2 weeks ago
Addiction, Faith, and the Limits of Willpower (with Meghan O'Gieblyn)
Episode 1070
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 que…
3 weeks ago
Public Choice and Politics Without Romance (with Mike Munger)
Episode 1069
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 se…
4 weeks ago
The Death of Reading (with James Marriott)
Episode 1068
Are we living in the new Dark Ages? Despite vast technological advances, our societies are increasingly looking like those that preceded the advent o…
1 month ago
Incentives Are for Losers (with Adam Mastroianni)
Episode 1067
Incentives matter, sure. But what should you do when following the incentives means quietly participating in something wrong? Psychologist Adam Mastr…
1 month, 1 week ago
Meritocracy, Exams, and the Knowledge That Matters (with Daisy Christodoulou)
Episode 1066
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 tod…
1 month, 2 weeks ago
Hamas and the Future of Gaza (with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib)
Episode 1065
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 tha…
1 month, 3 weeks ago
Are We Alone? Cosmic Loneliness and the Longing to Believe (with Adam Kirsch)
Episode 1064
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…
2 months ago