E EconTalk

Podcast

EconTalk

EconTalk: Conversations for the Curious is an award-winning weekly podcast hosted by Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford's Hoover Institution. The eclectic guest list includes authors, doctors, psychologists, historians, philosophers, economists, and more. Learn how the health care system really works, the serenity that comes from humility, the challenge of interpreting data, how potato chips are made, what it's like to run an upscale Manhattan restaurant, what caused the 2008 financial crisis, the nature of consciousness, the conflicts and history of the Middle East, and...

Website ↗ Last published 2 November 2026 1,074 posts collected by Sputnik

Said on EconTalk

“I asked a question I've never heard anyone ever ask at a seminar. … I said, how many regressions did you run? And the reason I asked was because you can always run some more. … We run a lot of regressions until we find something that's publishable or that we think we can defend. And that's the wrong way to do econometrics in my view, but it's the way it's done.” — Russ Roberts, EconTalk
Russ Roberts · 2 Nov 2026 Listen →
“I found it on page 45 of their online statistical appendix, where they actually showed that their corrections kind of eliminated all those effects. Those negative effects on living standards. But they never mentioned it in the actual paper.” — Joseph Francis, EconTalk
Joseph Francis · 2 Nov 2026 Listen →
“The idea that agency extends beyond the mind. I think we're still stuck in the received wisdom that you can't change your situation, but you can change how you respond to it. And I think that's wrong. I don't think that's good advice for young people or any of us.” — Angela Duckworth, EconTalk
Angela Duckworth · 26 Oct 2026 Listen →
“When people say, as you mentioned earlier, no one says on their deathbed that they would spend more time at the office. I don't know how much we weight the deathbed over the rest of one's life. Because if you gave that person 30 more years, my guess is they would end up spending a lot of time in the office again.” — David Wolpe, EconTalk
David Wolpe · 19 Oct 2026 Listen →
“Why is Italy's soccer team so bad lately? Well, because there are just so much fewer Italians. So, if you are trying to select the best 22 soccer players when you have 300,000 Italians being born every year, you are going to have a much worse team than when you used to have 1 million Italians being born every year.” — Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, EconTalk
Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde · 12 Oct 2026 Listen →
“If as a society your default is two, you are going to end up with 1.4. Why? Because you are going to have a percentage of women that, for whatever the reason, don't have children, maybe biological or maybe by choice. And you are going to have also a non-trivial percentage of women that are going to stay at one. And you are going to have next to nobody with three or more.” — Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, EconTalk
Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde · 12 Oct 2026 Listen →
“The great thing about having a taboo is that you don't waste all of this mental energy constantly negotiating. … Whereas if you just have a hard rule, you can stop thinking about it and it frees up an enormous amount of space in the mind.” — Meghan O'Gieblyn, EconTalk
Meghan O'Gieblyn · 5 Oct 2026 Listen →

Hosts

EconTalk is hosted by Russ Roberts .

Recent Episodes

  1. 2 Nov 2026

    Revisiting the China Shock (with Joseph Francis)

    With Joseph Francis

  2. 26 Oct 2026

    How Your Situation Shapes You (with Angela Duckworth)

    With Angela Duckworth

  3. 19 Oct 2026

    Lives Wasted and Well-Lived: David Wolpe on The Death of Ivan Ilyich

    With David Wolpe

  4. 12 Oct 2026

    The Great Fertility Collapse (with Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde)

    With Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde

  5. 5 Oct 2026

    Addiction, Faith, and the Limits of Willpower (with Meghan O'Gieblyn)

    With Meghan O'Gieblyn

  6. 28 Sep 2026

    Public Choice and Politics Without Romance (with Mike Munger)

    With Mike Munger

  7. 21 Sep 2026

    The Death of Reading (with James Marriott)

    With James Marriott

  8. 14 Sep 2026

    Incentives Are for Losers (with Adam Mastroianni)

    With Adam Mastroianni

  9. 7 Sep 2026

    Meritocracy, Exams, and the Knowledge That Matters (with Daisy Christodoulou)

    With Daisy Christodoulou

  10. 31 Aug 2026

    Hamas and the Future of Gaza (with Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib)

    With Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

  11. 24 Aug 2026

    Are We Alone? Cosmic Loneliness and the Longing to Believe (with Adam Kirsch)

  12. 17 Aug 2026

    The Hidden Cause of the Industrial Revolution (with Ben Southwood)

Guests

Michael Munger (49 episodes), Tyler Cowen (20 episodes), Arnold Kling (18 episodes), Don Boudreaux (15 episodes), Richard Epstein (11 episodes), Nassim Nicholas Taleb (10 episodes), Peter Boettke (9 episodes), Bryan Caplan (8 episodes), Megan McArdle (8 episodes), Robert Frank (7 episodes), Paul Bloom (7 episodes), Scott Sumner (6 episodes), and 650 more.