Dartmouth College anthropology professor Sergei Kan was born in the Soviet Union just a few months after the death of Stalin. He came to the United States in 1974 at the age of 21 and received his undergraduate degree from Boston University and his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He teaches courses at Dartmouth on the native peoples of Alaska, on the Jewish diaspora, and on Russia. Next year—the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Gulag Archipelago—Dr. Kan wi...
Aug 24, 2022•42 min•Ep. 375
Roland Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard University. Fryer's research combines economic theory, empirical evidence, and randomized experiments to help design more effective government policies. His work on education, inequality, and race has been widely cited in media outlets and congressional testimony. Rafael Mangual is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and head of research for its Policing and Public Safety Initiative. He is also the author of a new book, Criminal (In)Justice: Wh...
Aug 03, 2022•57 min•Ep. 374
If there were a Mount Rushmore of American Black intellectuals, the three guests on this show would certainly be on it: Glenn Loury is a professor of the social sciences in the Department of economics at Brown, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the host of his wildly successful podcast, The Glenn Show . Ian Rowe is the cofounder of Vertex Partnership Academies and the author of the new book Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for ALL Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrativ...
Jul 25, 2022•59 min•Ep. 373
Matthew Continetti is the author of the new book The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism , an extensively researched and reported history of the conservative movement in America. Chris DeMuth is a former president of the American Enterprise Institute and currently a fellow at the Hudson Institute. In this conversation, DeMuth states that national conservatives (or “NatCons”) “are conservatives who have been mugged by reality. We have come away with a sense of how to recover fro...
Jul 13, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 372
Yoram Hazony is the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and president of the Herzl Institute. His 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism , established Hazony as one of the leading proponents of a new kind of “national conservatism.” His new book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery , has set off a passionate debate among intellectuals on the Right to determine what “national conservatism” actually means and why conservatism needs to be rediscovered. We put those questions and many more to Hazony in th...
Jun 23, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 371
William P. Barr is one of only two people to have served as attorney general of the United States under two presidents and the only one to have done it in two different centuries (under George H. W. Bush from 1991 to 1993 and under Donald Trump from 2019 to 2020). In his new book, One Damn Thing after Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General , Barr goes into great detail about the chaos, the troubles, and the triumph that occurred during the time of his service under President Trump. This wide-ra...
Jun 08, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 370
The political philosopher Harvey Mansfield first arrived at Harvard University in the fall of 1949. He has remained at that august institution of higher education and is still teaching at age 90. In this special edition of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, recorded in the Baker Library at Dartmouth College, Dr. Mansfield answers five questions about America today from his perspective of observing and writing about the country for more than half a century. Recorded on April 15, 2022...
May 24, 2022•53 min•Ep. 369
By any measure, Dr. Jordan Peterson is the most famous (now former—as is discussed in this interview) Canadian professor of clinical psychology in the world. He’s also a deep thinker and a best-selling author of multiple books, and has amassed a huge following through podcasts, YouTube videos, and public speaking. Today, Jordan Peterson is one of the most influential voices in the “anti-woke” movement and this powerful interview demonstrates why. Recorded on April 20, 2022, as part of a Classica...
Apr 29, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 368
Amy Zegart is a fellow at the Hoover Institution , a professor of political science at Stanford University, and the author of a new book, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence . In this frank conversation, Zegart grades American intelligence-gathering operations, recent and historical, and compares them to their counterparts in China and Russia. Professor Zegart also discusses Silicon Valley’s crucial role in these operations and how they often conflict wit...
Mar 30, 2022•59 min•Ep. 367
Recorded on February 15, 2022 Bari Weiss began her career as a mainstream media prodigy, landing coveted positions at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times in her early twenties. In 2020, she famously resigned from the Times when conditions there became intolerable for her, famously writing in a public resignation letter that “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.” Now Weiss is the publisher of Common Sense , her wildly popular...
Mar 15, 2022•57 min•Ep. 366
Last month, Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson asked Princeton Professor and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin 5 questions , all in the foreign policy and history realm. Since then, the world has changed in ways that were unimaginable just 3 weeks ago. So we asked Professor Kotkin to come back for a second round of questions, this time all dedicated to one topic: the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And as usual, his answers are concise, incisive, and analytic. If you want to under...
Mar 04, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 365
Stephen Kotkin is a professor of history at Princeton and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of nine works of history, including the first two volumes of his planned three-volume history of Russian power and Joseph Stalin, Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 and Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 . The premise of this show is simple: Peter Robinson poses five questions to Dr. Kotkin: what Xi Jinping, the president of China believes; what Vladimir Putin believ...
Feb 04, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 364
In what has now become an annual tradition on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, law professors John Yoo and Richard Epstein join the show to opine on a newly minted Supreme Court. For the first time in decades, today’s court is dominated by a majority of originalist justices—justices who believe the Constitution means today just what the document meant when it was ratified more than 200 years ago. The professors discuss and analyze Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (the case tha...
Jan 26, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 363
In his long and distinguished career, British historian Andrew Roberts has produced world-class biographies of Winston Churchill , and Napoleon , several histories of World War II and the men who led the countries who fought that war, and other great conflicts in world history . Roberts’s new book is The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III , a biography of the monarch who led England during the American Revolution and who has been made into something of a caricature by Am...
Jan 11, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 362
It’s the last show of the year for Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, and as is our tradition (for the last two years, anyhow), we’ve invited two of our favorite journalists — Ross Douthat of the New York Times and Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal— to look back, discuss, and analyze the year that was. We delve, discuss, and predict politics, the law, COVID, the future of Roe v. Wade, and much more. Recorded on December 13, 2021...
Dec 16, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 361
Peter Thiel is a Silicon Valley founder and investor, and quite a successful one at that: he co-founded PayPal, was an early investor in Facebook, and started and serves as the chair of Palantir. Lately, Thiel has become more active in politics. He supported President Trump in the 2016 election and has been a force in several House and Senate races in the 2020 cycle. In this wide-ranging conversation, Thiel discusses his politics, his campaign, and the scourge of totalitarian conformism in the U...
Dec 14, 2021•52 min•Ep. 360
Professor Glenn Loury is in social sciences and economics at Brown University and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Prior to that, he became a tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of 33. How he got from there to here is an inspiring and fascinating story of hard work and accomplishment that is explored in great detail in this interview. Professor Loury also explains the crucial role his parents and his extended family played in his education and his opini...
Nov 23, 2021•38 min•Ep. 359
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie began his political career as a teenager watching Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford joust for control of the Republican Party at the 1976 GOP convention. From there, he soon entered the University of Delaware and then received his JD degree from the Seton Hall University School of Law. He served as US attorney for New Jersey from 2002 to 2008 and as governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2018. Gov. Christie ran for president briefly in 2018. The governor guides...
Nov 12, 2021•59 min•Ep. 358
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution. His new book is The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America . As is typical whenever Dr. Hanson joins us, this interview covers a wide spectrum of topics and references, including the Acts of the Apostles, immigration, Jim Crow laws, primary tribal identities, the suburban everyman, the shrinking middle class, and JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. It’s a ...
Nov 03, 2021•49 min•Ep. 357
From the very beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has been on the front lines of analyzing, studying, and even personally fighting the pandemic. In this wide-ranging interview, Dr. Bhattacharya takes us through how it started, how it spread throughout the world, the efficacy of lockdowns, the development and distribution of the vaccines, and the rise of the Delta variant. He delves into what we got right, what we got wrong, and what we got really wrong. Finally, Dr. Bhattachar...
Oct 22, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 356
i General H. R. McMaster and military historian Victor Davis Hanson are both senior fellows at the Hoover Institution. In this frank, no-holds-barred conversation, they discuss the United States’ mission in Afghanistan: how it began, how it was conducted, and its ignominious end. McMaster and Hanson debate what worked and what failed, how social issues in the United States may have influenced our mission in Afghanistan and our decision to leave, and whether or not the United States should have c...
Sep 20, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 355
Joe Felter is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the William J. Perry Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He also served as an officer in the US Army special forces, where he saw combat in Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan. During the Trump administration, Dr. Felter served as deputy secretary of defense for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Felter discusses the ever growing threat to Taiwan from the People’s Rep...
Aug 04, 2021•42 min•Ep. 354
Amy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where she chairs the Working Group on Technology, Economics, and Governance. She’s also a professor of political science at Stanford, and an expert on intelligence, cybersecurity, and big tech. In this wide-ranging conversation, Professor Zegart discusses the US relationship with China and how she views that country’s aggressive stance toward Taiwan; why big tech companies are a potential threat not only t...
Jul 14, 2021•50 min•Ep. 353
Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights , Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book on the explosion of sexual violence and harassment in Europe, was published in early 2021. Since then, the book has sparked a worldwide discussion online and offline about the immigration of huge numbers of mostly young Muslim men (more than 3 million, by some reports) to European cities and its effect on the women who live there. To discuss this phenomenon, explain why many of these young men feel empowered to ...
Jul 02, 2021•49 min•Ep. 352
Thirty-four years ago, on June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan stood before the Berlin Wall to deliver an address. Just over two years later, on November 9, 1989, the East German government suddenly announced that it had decided to permit free passage between East and West Berlin—the Berlin Wall had ceased to function. To commemorate one of the seminal events of the 20th century, the Reagan Institute invited Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson to participate and record a panel discussion featuring Pe...
Jun 17, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 351
Tyler Goodspeed is the former director of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and currently the Kleinheinz Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University . He has published three volumes on economic history and holds undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. He has also studied at Cambridge and Oxford Universities and taught at King’s College London. Goodspeed explains why he pursued a job in the Trump administration, gives his thoughts on the econo...
Jun 14, 2021•49 min•Ep. 350
Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley has just published Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell , the definitive account of the life of Hoover senior fellow Thomas Sowell. In this wide-ranging interview, Peter Robinson and Riley discuss the events and people that helped Sowell become one of the most important American voices on cultural, economic, and racial matters of the last 50 years. Recorded on May 13, 2021...
May 26, 2021•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 349
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe , his new book on the decisions made by governments and public health officials around the world during the COVID pandemic. In this wide-ranging discussion, Ferguson describes what governments and leaders got right and got wrong—very wrong—over the 15 months since the coronavirus spread from China. Were the lockdowns instituted around the world prudent and life saving,...
May 04, 2021•58 min•Ep. 348
China is a nation with 1.3 billion people, an economy projected to become bigger than the United States’ in just a few years, and a rapidly growing military. Hong Kong has already fallen under its authority. Meanwhile, Taiwan looms in the distance—with a population of almost 24 million, it’s a technology hub and the world’s leading manufacturer of microchips and other items essential to high tech. What are China’s ambitions toward Taiwan? And if they are ominous, what should the US response to C...
Apr 13, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 347
Dr. Stephen Meyer directs the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He returns to Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson to discuss his newest book, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe . In this wide-ranging and often mind-bending interview, Dr. Meyer explains the God Hypothesis; makes his continuing and evolving case for intelligent design; describes how Judeo-Christian theology gave rise to science;...
Apr 07, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 346
