Philip Wallach ( follow on X ) is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the book Why Congress , which he joins Richard Hanania to discuss. In this conversation, Hanania and Wallach review the historical role of Congress in American politics, focusing on key events from the FDR administration to the present. Wallach explains the important role Congress played in making sure that Roosevelt did not take the country too far down the path of economic statism, a histor...
Mar 13, 2025•1 hr 1 min
Stephen Goldstein ( follow on X ) is a postdoc in Evolutionary Virology at the University of Utah School of Medicine, where he specializes in coronaviruses. In this interview, he addresses common misconceptions about vaccines, particularly the debunked link to autism, and emphasizes the rigorous safety testing that vaccines undergo. The conversation also explores the reactions to COVID-19 vaccines, and the challenges of communicating credible information to the public. Goldstein highlights the n...
Dec 17, 2024•59 min
Eric Kaufmann is a research fellow at CSPI and a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham. He joins the podcast to talk about his new book, Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution . Eric explains its thesis, which holds that the taboos around race that arose in the 1960s expanded into other areas of life and eventually led to modern wokeness. He and Richard debate the plausibility of this idea, its similarities and differences with those put forth in The Origins...
Jul 15, 2024•1 hr 17 min
Bess Stillman ( email ) is a doctor at the Mayo Clinic and writes at Everything Is An Emergency . She is also an excellent storyteller who uses her skills to convey the hectic and at times heart wrenching experiences one faces as an ER doctor. Bess is married to Jake Seliger , who in 2022 was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma. She has written a three - part series about the struggles that she and Jake have faced getting him into clinical trials. On the podcast, Bess describes the maddening ...
Jun 17, 2024•1 hr 8 min
Rob Henderson joins the podcast to talk about his book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class . The conversation starts with a discussion about the recent controversy in which Rob was unable to find a book store that would host his launch. Rob also shares insights into his writing style, which focuses on conveying his experiences in a matter-of-fact way rather than dwelling on his internal emotional state. Richard then questions him about the story of his biological parents,...
May 06, 2024•1 hr 3 min
Romina Boccia is the director of budget and entitlement policy at the Cato Institute, where she writes about government spending, the debt problem, and entitlement reform. She also has a Substack called the Debt Dispatch that you can subscribe to here. Romina joins the podcast to discuss available paths to deal with the coming entitlement crisis. One potential way to get politicians out of making tough choices is to create a debt commission that takes responsibility for unpopular reforms. Romina...
Apr 01, 2024•57 min
Brian Chau writes and hosts a podcast at the From the New World Substack, and recently established a new think tank, the Alliance for the Future. He joins the podcast to discuss why he’s not worried about the alignment problem, where he disagrees with “doomers,” the accomplishments of ChatGPT versus DALL-E, the dangers of regulating AI until progress comes to a halt in the way it did with nuclear power, and more. With his background in computer science, Brian takes issue with many of those who w...
Mar 18, 2024•1 hr 13 min
Andrew Roberts ( website , follow on X ) is a historian, Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a member of the House of Lords. He joins the podcast to talk about his Napoleon: A Life . The conversation begins with a discussion of different counterfactuals regarding ways in which Napoleon might have been able to stay in power, which leads to Roberts explaining his view that the wars of the era could be understood at least in part as resulting from a reject...
Jan 22, 2024•47 min
Brian Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, focusing on budget, tax, and economic policy. His previous jobs include chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), and positions on the Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns. He joins the podcast to talk about the financial future of the United States, with a special focus on entitlements. Medicare is projected to run out by 2031, and Social Security only two years later. Because of politicians kicking the can down the r...
Nov 20, 2023•54 min
Niklas Anzinger is the founder and General Partner of Infinita , the first Próspera-based VC fund, which invests in founders overcoming regulatory capture in crypto, biotech and hardware through network states and startup cities. He’s also one of the 100 or so residents of Próspera. This was quite an optimistic conversation. The title of the podcast comes from the last thing Niklas said, which was that you don’t actually need attention or to talk about grand projects, but just to show the world ...
Oct 30, 2023•58 min
Chris Rufo joins the podcast to talk about his new book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything . Rufo begins by talking about his background and his theory of political change. The conversation then shifts to his new book, the strengths of Ron DeSantis as an administrator, and finally what he’s doing on the board of the New College of Florida. Topics include: * Where did all of the crazy ideas that seem to have taken over institutions in the last few years come...
Jul 24, 2023•1 hr 21 min
In the popular imagination, the AI alignment debate is between those who say everything is hopeless, and others who tell us there is nothing to worry about. Leopold Aschenbrenner graduated valedictorian from Columbia in 2021 when he was 19 years old. He is currently a research affiliate at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford, and previously helped run Future Fund, which works on philanthropy in AI and biosecurity. He contends that, contrary to popular perceptions, there aren’t that many pe...
May 15, 2023•1 hr 2 min
Bryan Caplan joins the podcast to talk about his new book, Voters as Mad Scientists: Essays on Political Irrationality . Bryan begins by explaining why he hates politics. Much of the conversation then centers around Caplan’s simplistic theory of the right and left. This is compared and contrasted with Scott Alexander’s thrive/survive theory of the political spectrum, Robin Hanson’s theory of farmers and foragers , and Hanania’s “Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV.” Near the end, the discussio...
May 01, 2023•1 hr 33 min
This week we’re rereleasing a previous episode with Marc Andreessen, originally released on August 16, 2021. He is co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz. Earlier in life, he was the co-founder of Opsware, Ning, and Netscape. Marc joins the podcast to talk about what’s gone wrong with science, the prerequisites for progress, and how tech has changed our lives and has the potential to disrupt stagnant institutions. Topics also include how the internet has influenced dating, what ve...
Mar 27, 2023•1 hr 57 min
Robin Hanson joins the podcast to talk about the AI debate. He explains his reasons for being skeptical about “foom,” or the idea that there will emerge a sudden superintelligence that will be able to improve itself quickly and potentially destroy humanity in the service of its goals. Among his arguments are: * We should start with a very low prior about something like this happening, given the history of the world. We already have “superintelligences” in the form of firms, for example, and they...
Mar 13, 2023•1 hr 42 min
Nicholas Bagley is a professor of law at the University of Michigan, former Chief Legal Counsel to Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and a former attorney in the US Department of Justice. He joins the podcast to talk about his article, “The Procedure Fetish,” in which he calls for liberals to embrace reforms to make federal government agencies less sclerotic and more capable of addressing social problems. Richard presents Bagley with questions surrounding issues such as why we should trust government a...
Feb 27, 2023•1 hr 4 min
Tim Miller is a former political operative who has worked for Jeb Bush and John Huntsman, and is currently a writer for The Bulwark and an MSNBC analyst. He joins the podcast to talk about his political memoir, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell . With a former insider’s perspective, Miller discusses * Where the Republican Party went wrong * The importance of character in politics * Mistakes made by Clinton and George W. Bush that led us to this point * To what extent r...
Feb 13, 2023•1 hr 19 min
Jobst Landgrebe is a German scientist and entrepreneur. He began his career as a Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, then moved on to become a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Göttingen, working in cell biology and biomathematics. In April 2013, he founded Cognotekt, an AI based language technology company. Barry Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo, with joint appointments in the Departments of Biomedical Informatics, Neurology, and Computer Sci...
Jan 30, 2023•1 hr 10 min
Joe Henrich is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is the author of Why Humans Cooperate , The Secret of Our Succes s, and The WEIRDest People in the World . He joins the podcast to talk about his work. Topics include: * The implications of Henrich’s theories for the debate over AI alignment * The nature of intelligence * Whether genetic differences between populations explain societal outcomes * If the Ancient...
Jan 16, 2023•54 min
Garett Jones is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He joins the podcast to talk about his new book, The Culture Transplant . Richard asks whether IQ is superior to other measures used to predict prosperity, and the relationship between Garett’s new book and Hive Mind . He also presses the author on whether there is a selection effect in data showing that people preserve the traits of their original culture over time. The conversation then gets into issues of causal inference, n...
Jan 02, 2023•1 hr 15 min
Alexander Young is a researcher at the UCLA Anderson School of Management Genomics Department and School of Medicine’s Human Genetics Department, working with the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC). He studies the genetics of cognitive ability and educational attainment, with a particular focus on developing methods to uncover true measures of heritability for important traits. Richard and Alexander talk about why siblings are so useful for this purpose, in the midst of a larg...
Dec 19, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Aaron Sibarium is a recent graduate of Yale University (2018) and journalist who writes for the Washington Free Beacon . He joins the podcast to discuss his work covering identity politics issues from a conservative perspective, along with his dream of eventually synthesizing his reporting with his own opinion writing. Aaron and Richard share many of the same frustrations with right-wing media and conservative journalism. They discuss the problems of the conservative movement, including it being...
Dec 05, 2022•1 hr 20 min
Rob Henderson recently received his PhD in psychology at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Zach Goldberg is a former research fellow at CSPI and currently affiliated with the Manhattan Institute. They both join the podcast to talk about Rob’s idea of “luxury beliefs” and Zach’s new paper testing the theory in the context of attitudes towards criminal justice policy. Richard wonders about the extent to which one can say any individual actually suffers the consequences of their political beliefs...
Nov 07, 2022•1 hr 32 min
Eric Kaufmann is a distinguished researcher and a fellow at CSPI. He joins the podcast to talk about his latest CSPI report, “Diverse and Divided: A Political Demography of American Elite Students.” The data indicates that we can expect a future in which elites continue to be heavily divided by race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation. Richard and Eric discuss what this means for our politics, how conservatives should address identity issues, and what one should be looking for when choosing a...
Oct 24, 2022•1 hr 16 min
Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He joins the podcast to talk about his involvement in Operation Warp Speed, a uniquely successful federal government project. Richard asks how broadly applicable its lessons are, whether or not we could do something similar for cancer, and why economists and public health officials had such divergent opinions on the need to speed up the process of approving and distributing a vaccine. Alex also discusses the Baumol effect, whi...
Oct 10, 2022•1 hr 35 min
Bryan Caplan joins the podcast to talk about his new book Don’t Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice . The lead essay is written as a letter to his daughter in the hopes that she will reject an ideology that is wrong on the facts and psychologically damaging. Richard asks whether Bryan grants too much to feminists in the first place by treating the relevant issue as whether society treats men better than women. The book also contains criticism of the political right’s nationalism and immigra...
Sep 26, 2022•1 hr 17 min
Tyler Cowen needs no introduction. He joins the podcast to talk about his new book, co-authored with Daniel Gross, called Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World . Richard asks him about whether intelligence is overrated or underrated, the idea of “State Capacity Libertarianism” as an improvement over old-fashioned libertarianism, cultural differences between China and India, how optimistic to be about the future of the United States, different kinds of courag...
Sep 12, 2022•1 hr 18 min
Amy Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She joins the podcast to talk about the ongoing attempt to cancel and possibly fire her for making politically incorrect remarks. Usually there is some pretext that a professor actually engaged in forbidden conduct in these kinds of investigations, but this is as clear an example as one can find of a university trying to punish speech. This leads to a conversation about whether higher education is worth...
Aug 29, 2022•1 hr 30 min
Stephen and James Grugett are programmers, entrepreneurs, and cofounders of the website Manifold Markets , which hosts user-created prediction markets. They join the podcast to discuss the CSPI/Salem Tournament on Manifold Markets , which launched last week. The Grugetts and Richard talk about the origins of Manifold, what differentiates it from other prediction markets, and how their version of creating a new Listen in podcast form or watch on YouTube. Links: * Manifold Markets * CSPI/Salem Tou...
Aug 15, 2022•34 min
On this week’s CSPI Podcast, Richard interviews the top three winners of the CSPI Essay Contest: Policy Reform For Progress . The first interview is with contest winner Andrew Kenneson, a program navigator at a public housing authority in Kodiak, Alaska and former reporter. In “ Gathering Steam: Unlocking Geothermal Potential in the United States ,” Andrew explains why exempting geothermal exploration on federally owned lands from NEPA requirements could set off a cascade of energy innovation. T...
Aug 01, 2022•1 hr 33 min
