Will Inboden is a man of many talents: author, academic, and national policy maker, holding positions within the State Department and the National Security Council before returning to academia. He currently serves as executive director of the Clements Center for National Security and as associate professor of public policy and history at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, both at the University of Texas–Austin. In this wide-ranging two-part interview, Inboden discusses in great detail Reagan’s st...
Mar 31, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 390
Will Inboden is a man of many talents: author, academic, and national policy maker. He held positions with the State Department and the National Security Council before returning to academia to serve as executive director of the Clements Center for National Security and associate professor of public policy and history at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, both at the University of Texas- Austin. In this wide-ranging two-part interview, Inboden discusses in detail Reagan’s strategy and tactics in ...
Mar 16, 2023•58 min•Ep. 389
John Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution and the author of a new book, The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level . In this wide-ranging conversation, Cochrane discusses the root causes of inflation, what we can (and can’t) do about it, the economists who influenced his thinking, and how his father inspired him to become an academic.
Feb 28, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 388
Historian Stephen Kotkin became the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2022. He taught at Princeton for more than 30 years, and is the author of nine works of history, including the first two volumes of his biography of Joseph Stalin, Paradoxes of Power, 1878 to 1928 and Waiting for Hitler, 1929 to 1941. He is now completing the third and final volume. Since the war in Ukraine broke out a year ago, Kotkin has appeared regularly on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson to offe...
Feb 14, 2023•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 387
Michael Behe, John Lennox, and Steven Meyer are three of the leading voices in science and academia on the case for an intelligent designer of the universe and everything in it (including us). In this wide-ranging conversation, they point out the flaws in Darwin’s theory and the increasing amount of evidence uncovered by a rigorous application of the scientific method that points to an intentional design and creation of the physical world.
Feb 01, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 386
Does God exist? Something—a being, a power—that’s supernatural? That is, an entity that we’re unable to perceive with our five senses but that’s still real? Ever since the Enlightenment, the knowing, urbane, sophisticated answer has been, “Of course not.” Now a historian, a scientist, and a journalist talk it over and reveal new threads in the debate around science and theism.
Jan 10, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 385
Benjamin Netanyahu is the past and soon to be again prime minister of Israel. In his new book, Bibi: My Story , Netanyahu describes how he went from an Israeli American high school student in Philadelphia to a member of the Israeli Defense Force, detouring along the way to study architecture and get a master’s degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1976. His studies were interrupted when his brother Yoni was killed in the raid on Entebbe, Uganda, which inspired Bibi to return to Israe...
Dec 09, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 384
Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and the 24th president of the United States, the only man to win nonconsecutive terms in the Oval Office. In his new book, Man of Iron , author Troy Senik discusses Cleveland’s improbable rise from obscure lawyer in upstate New York to mayor of Buffalo, governor of New York, and finally, in 1885, president of the United States; followed by his subsequent loss of the White House in the election of 1888 to Benjamin Harrison, and his unprecedented—and as yet unrep...
Dec 06, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 383
John Cogan and Kevin Warsh are both Senior Fellows at the Hoover Institution who have spent the careers in and out of government trying to make it more efficient and cost effective. On this show, they discuss their newest white paper, Reinvigorating Economic Governance: Advancing a New Framework for American Prosperity, which is intended to provide a framework to revitalize the governance of economic policy based on our nation’s foundational system of natural liberty. In addition, they also disc...
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 382
With his many varied interests in technology, politics, and culture, Peter Thiel has often been described as a Renaissance man. So perhaps it was only fitting that we traveled to Florence, Italy— where the Renaissance originated and thrived for hundreds of years —to speak with him. In this wide-ranging interview, we cover several topics, including his support for candidates across the country who are running as outsiders, why technology has not fulfilled many of its early promises, and why Calif...
Nov 09, 2022•48 min•Ep. 381
Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) has served in the US Senate since January 2011. Before that, he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush from 2006 to 2007, and as a member of the US House of Representatives from 1993 to 2005. He also served as White House director of legislative affairs under President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1991. In this wide-ranging interview conducted a couple of months prior to his leaving office, Senator Portman discusses...
Nov 03, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 380
Current Hoover Institution director and former secretary of state and national security advisor to President George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice is the only person in the world who can speak knowledgeably about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the threat from China . . . and the Denver Broncos and why college sports must be saved from itself. And that’s exactly what she does in this must-hear conversation.
Oct 11, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 379
The summer of 2022 saw record temperatures recorded all over the world. Bjorn Lomborg acknowledges that climate change is here, it’s real, and humans are largely responsible for it. He also says that it is survivable and manageable. In other words, climate change is not the extinction-level event it is often characterized as. Lomborg also discusses practical ways to lower our carbon footprint and emissions, pointing out why “carbon free by 2050” probably isn’t achievable and why we should make n...
Sep 23, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 378
In 1970, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published a famous book, The Population Bomb , in which he described a disastrous future for humanity : “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” That prediction turned out to be very wrong, and in this interview American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt tells how we are in fact heading toward the opposite problem...
Sep 15, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 377
Historical biographer Walter Stahr has given us definitive biographies of William H. Seward and Edwin Stanton, two of the ablest and most influential members of President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. Earlier this year, Stahr followed those books with the definitive biography of Salmon P. Chase, Treasury secretary under Lincoln and one of the country’s most important antislavery lawyers, one of the few who defended fugitive slaves against state and federal prosecutors. After his stint as a lawyer, ...
Sep 01, 2022•59 min•Ep. 376
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 w...
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 popula...
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
