EconTalk

What does a lone sailor circling the globe have to do with the fall of empires, the Model T, and the rise of AI? Everything--because maintenance, the quiet act of keeping things going, turns out to be the hidden force behind success and failure in nearly every domain of human endeavor. EconTalk's Russ Roberts speaks with Stewart Brand --creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, founder of the Long Now Foundation, and one of the great connective thinkers of the last half-century--to explore why some people and civilizations thrive while others collapse. From the 1968 Golden Globe Race, where three sailors' radically different attitudes toward maintenance determined their fates, to the M-16's deadly design flaws in Vietnam, to the cultural reasons Israel excels at crisis response but struggles with prevention, Brand ranges across history, warfare, technology, and philosophy. Along the way, they discuss John Deere's war against its own farmers, the Model T as democratic revolution, and what AI might mean for human vigilance and connection. A wide-ranging, endlessly surprising conversation about the unglamorous work that holds everything together.

Tyler Cowen is bullish on the integration of AI into higher education. He's also not worried about its effects on the future workplace. Listen as Cowen speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the reasons for his optimism, and argues that college classes should devote significant time to learning how to use AI. They discuss the future of writing (and thinking) in an academic context, and Cowen's solution to dealing with worries about cheating. Cowen also shares how he personally has adapted to AI, and whether he thinks there's value to a college education designed not to ensure mastery of a subject, but instead to help students become the kind of people they want to be.

Why would a group of young Jews who escaped the Holocaust choose to parachute back into Nazi-occupied Europe? How did they become heroes despite the failure of that mission? Author Matti Friedman joins EconTalk's Russ Roberts to unravel these mysteries through his book Out of the Sky, revealing why a failed mission became one of Israel's most powerful founding myths. At the heart of the story is Hannah Senesh, a 23-year-old Hungarian poet who traded her Budapest life for a kibbutz, then traded the kibbutz for a parachute and a near-certain death sentence--and whose poems, scribbled on scraps of paper in forests near the Hungarian border, became some of the most famous texts in modern Hebrew.

Duke University leaves millions of dollars on the table every year by giving away free tickets to the most sought-after game in college basketball. The bizarre ticket allocation system includes weeks of camping in tents, a 58-question trivia exam, border guards with air horns at 3 AM, and a 50-page student-written constitution with its own appeals court. In this special 20th-anniversary episode, EconTalk's Russ Roberts and returning favorite Michael Munger (appearance #51!) use the legendary Duke-UNC rivalry to explore the fundamental economics question: how do you deal with a world when there isn't enough of something to go around? Along the way, they ask why a university that squeezes students on every other margin, might deliberately forgo a fortune on ticket sales. The answer has everything to do with community, belonging, and the same psychology that bonds fighter pilots and elite military units.

What if humanity's capacity for cruelty was actually one of our greatest moral achievements? That's just one of the provocative ideas philosopher Hanno Sauer explores in this conversation about his book The Invention of Good and Evil with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Sauer tackles a fundamental puzzle: in a Darwinian world of selfish genes, how did humans become so extraordinarily cooperative? Sauer traces a fascinating journey from small hunter-gatherer bands to modern civilizations, revealing surprising mechanisms along the way--including the systematic killing of the most aggressive tribe members over millennia, which made humans the "golden retrievers of the primate kingdom." The conversation ranges from whether agriculture was history's worst mistake, to a spirited debate about religion and morality between Sauer (a German atheist who doesn't know any believers) and host Russ Roberts (a person of faith living in Israel).