The Economics of Scarcity and the UNC-Duke Basketball Game (with Michael Munger)
March 16, 2026
The allocation of highly scarce, zero-price tickets for the Duke-UNC basketball game at Cameron Indoor Stadium is managed through an elaborate, student-generated system of queuing, trivia exams, and strict monitoring (Kayville), which serves as a loyalty filter and community-bonding mechanism, despite forfeiting millions in potential revenue.
How We Tamed Ourselves and Invented Good and Evil (with Hanno Sauer)
March 9, 2026
The evolution of human morality involves a "reverse theodicy problem" in a Darwinian framework: explaining the emergence of cooperation and altruism despite selfish gene pressures, which Sauer suggests was achieved through mechanisms like self-domestication via the systematic killing of aggressive group members.
The Power of Introverts (with Susan Cain)
March 2, 2026
Introversion and shyness are distinct concepts, where introversion relates to energy levels derived from stimulation (solitude vs. social interaction), while shyness is rooted in the fear of social judgment.
The Man Who Would Be King of Saudi Arabia (with Karen Elliott House)
February 23, 2026
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) rapidly consolidated power upon his father's ascension, immediately moving to dismantle established structures by sidelining the religious police and launching a high-profile anti-corruption campaign against elites at the Ritz-Carlton.
Seiko, Swatch, and the Swiss Watch Industry (with Aled Maclean-Jones)
February 16, 2026
The near-collapse of the Swiss watch industry due to Japanese quartz innovation forced a radical redefinition of the watch's value away from mere timekeeping utility toward craftsmanship and luxury.
A Military Analysis of Israel's War in Gaza (with Andrew Fox)
February 9, 2026
Andrew Fox believes the widespread physical devastation in Gaza was a direct, unavoidable consequence of the IDF systematically detonating tens of thousands of IEDs and booby traps embedded in nearly every structure while conducting combined arms maneuver operations.
How to Flourish (with Daniel Coyle)
February 2, 2026
Flourishing is defined as the experience of joyful, meaningful growth shared with others, rooted in the natural world rather than being a predictable, machine-like process.
Zionism, the Melting Pot, and the Galveston Project (with Rachel Cockerell)
January 26, 2026
Rachel Cockerell's book, *
Nature, Nurture, and Identical Twins (with David Bessis)
January 19, 2026
The widely cited studies of twins reared apart, which suggest genetics are destiny regarding traits like IQ, suffer from significant methodological flaws, including small sample sizes and a lack of necessary control groups, undermining their strong claims about heritability.
The Mattering Instinct (with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)
January 12, 2026
The human species is fundamentally defined as "creatures of matter who long to matter," where this longing is an essential drive rooted in the biological need to resist entropy.
Conversation, Interintellect, and Arcadia (with Anna Gat)
January 5, 2026
Anna Gat founded Interintellect to revive the French salon model in the digital age, aiming to foster intellectually open conversations free from culture war toxicity by employing structure and hosting authority.
In Defense of Intuition (with Gerd Gigerenzer)
December 29, 2025
Intuition is defined as a fast feeling based on years of experience, which is not arbitrary, not a sixth sense, and available to everyone with domain expertise, contrary to historical gendered associations.
David Deutsch on the Pattern
December 22, 2025
David Deutsch posits that the core phenomenon, which he terms "the pattern," is not the occasional pogroms, but the persistent, global impulse to legitimize hurting Jews, with stated reasons shifting across eras.
Free Will Is Real (with Kevin Mitchell)
December 15, 2025
The debate between free will and determinism is often flawed because it incorrectly assumes physics dictates a deterministic universe, whereas physical laws, especially at the quantum level, allow for inherent indeterminacy that opens causal slack for agency.
Colonialism, Slavery, and Foreign Aid (with William Easterly)
December 8, 2025
The central theme of the EconTalk episode "Colonialism, Slavery, and Foreign Aid (with William Easterly)" is that material progress (like GDP or poverty reduction) cannot ethically justify the violation of human agency, dignity, and consent, a principle illustrated by historical examples like colonialism and slavery.
The Perfect Tuba: How Band, Grit, and Community Build a Better Life (with Sam Quinones)
December 1, 2025
The pursuit of fulfillment through the tuba and band participation is presented as the direct opposite of drug addiction, emphasizing discipline, community, and hard work over consumerist gratification.
The Status Game (with Will Storr)
November 24, 2025
The fundamental human drive, beyond survival and reproduction, is the subconscious need for status, which is a score of our perceived value to the cooperative human community.
The Wonder of the Emergent Mind (with Gaurav Suri)
November 17, 2025
Intelligence, both in human minds and machines, emerges from the interaction of simple, non-intelligent processing units (like neurons or ants) following simple rules, a property present in the whole system but not in the components.
Shampoo, Property Rights, and Civilization (with Anthony Gill)
November 10, 2025
The enforcement of property rights relies significantly on unwritten social norms, trust, and moral sentiments, rather than solely on government legislation and enforcement.
Primal Intelligence (with Angus Fletcher)
November 3, 2025
True human intelligence, or "primal intelligence," is defined by the ability to invent new plans and improvise in low-information environments, contrasting with the modern focus on data-driven logic.
A Mind-Blowing Way of Looking at Math (with David Bessis)
October 27, 2025
The core of mathematics is not logic, but intuition, which mathematicians continuously train by toggling between mental images and formal proofs.
Twenty Years of Freakonomics (with Stephen Dubner)
October 20, 2025
The collaboration leading to *
The Magic of Tokyo (with Joe McReynolds)
October 13, 2025
Tokyo's dynamism and attractiveness stem from emergent order arising from bottom-up, micro-level citizen choices, contrasting sharply with the sterile, less distinctive areas designed top-down by the government.
The Invisible Hierarchies that Rule Our World (with Toby Stuart)
October 6, 2025
Social status is not fixed but is actively transferred through 'anointments,' which are vital in distributing opportunity, resources, and attention across society.
Eating with Intelligence (with Julia Belluz)
September 29, 2025
The Biggest Loser study revealed that participants who lost the most weight experienced the greatest degree of metabolic slowing, and this slowing persisted even years later, contrary to expectations that exercise would mitigate it.
Steven Pinker on Common Knowledge
September 22, 2025
Common knowledge, defined as a state where everyone knows something and knows that everyone else knows it, is crucial for coordination and social interactions, and its psychological realization involves a sense of public salience rather than infinite recursive reasoning.
How Did America Build the Arsenal of Democracy? (with Brian Potter)
September 15, 2025
The extraordinary scale-up of U.S. aircraft production during World War II was a complex, multi-stage process that required significant government investment, organizational innovation, and adaptation of manufacturing methods, rather than an immediate switch-over.