The Podcast Reader
Issue 4Welcome to The Podcast Reader, a new publication for the intellectually curious and those open to new ideas, featuring selected transcripts of the world’s best longform podcasts. From the overwhelming volume of podcast content, we’ve chosen the highlights for you. Longform podcasts are an important new media, but the excellent content they create is underappreciated. It’s easy to be distracted when listening to them. Interesting details can be missed, especially when episodes are long, and if you’re finding part of a conversation uninteresting, there are no practical ways to ‘skim’ the material. Our printed podcast transcripts make it easier to focus on key points and follow complex ideas
in this issue
in this edition
GUESTS Graham Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University and was the founding Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School. His latest book Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap? was published in 2017. Nicolai Tangen is CEO at Norges Bank Investment Management, responsible for managing the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. He holds degrees in finance from the Wharton School, the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art and in Social Psychology from the London School of Economics. Roya Hakakian is an author and Persian poet. She is a founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. Roya is the author of two collections of poetry in Persian and A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious. David Sinclair is a Professor in…
the spectre of havoc
GRAHAM ALLISON JOLLY SWAGMAN PODCAST 2021 Joe Walker: This is an episode about China-US relations with one of the world’s leading authorities on the topic. It’s a serious episode and I want to set it up properly. To quote Lee Kuan Yew, ‘China is the biggest player in the history of the world.’ But China’s rise has happened like a thunderclap, to paraphrase former Czech president, Václav Havel. It has happened so quickly we’ve not yet had time to be astonished. Measured in terms of purchasing power parity, China’s economy has grown from being 45 per cent the size of the US economy in 2004, to surpassing it in 2014, to being one-sixth larger last year, and it’s expected to be 135 per cent its size by 2024. China’s meteoric rise has created…
everyone should study social psychology
NICOLAI TANGEN MONEY MAZE 2021 Simon Brewer: If I asked our listeners which country has the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund at over $1.3 trillion, quite a few, reasonably, would think it could be a Middle Eastern country. But if I then said this country has won more winter Olympics than any other, invented skiing and introduced salmon sushi to the world, you would pivot northwest. You would, of course, know it’s Norway: prosperous, peaceful and phlegmatic. Its wealth, in large part, is courtesy of its oil riches and its sovereign wealth fund known as the Government Pension Fund Global. Today, we’re very fortunate to have Nicolai Tangen, its chief executive officer and seasoned investor, who’s taken on this formidable challenge of managing such a vast pool of assets. So Nicolai Tangen,…
a beginner’s guide to america
ROYA HAKAKIAN ECONTALK 2021 Russ Roberts: Welcome to EconTalk: Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. Today my guest is author and poet, Roya Hakakian. Her latest book is, A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious. Roya, welcome to EconTalk. Roya Hakakian: I’m delighted. Thank you for having me on. RR: Let’s start with your own story, which is the backstory of your book. Your book is written for any immigrant, and any non-immigrant curious about understanding more about the immigrant experience. It is a fascinating set of observations about America and what it’s like to come to America. But what is your story, your particular perspective? What’s it based on? RH: I was born and raised in Iran. I came of age exactly when Iran…
how long would you like to live?
DAVID SINCLAIR THE GOOD LIFE 2018 Andrew Leigh: Welcome to The Good Life, a politics-free podcast about living a happy, healthy and ethical life. In this podcast, we seek out wise men and women who have lessons to teach us about living life to the full, with humour, pleasure, meaning and love. For millennia, humans have been obsessed with the idea of longevity. From the legend of Methuselah to the Fountain of Youth, we seem drawn to myths about eternal life. One strategy is calorie restriction, which researchers have been exploring since the 1930s. Eating a lot less seems to make humans and animals live a lot longer. Many people say they’d rather live a shorter life and eat well than a long and hungry one. Today, a growing group of scientists…
to make the world safe for mediocrity
MALCOLM GLADWELL CONVERSATIONS WITH TYLER 2017 Tyler Cowen: Most of my questions will be quite short, but my first question will be really, really long. Since everyone knows you and your work so well, I asked myself, ‘Who is Malcolm Gladwell?’ And I tried to come up with an answer. I’ll give you my answer, and then you can correct me or add to that, and this will take a little while. So, I think of you as a figure set, really, coming out of the post-war Caribbean Enlightenment. I put you in a context with, say, Sylvia Wynter, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon. A common theme in their work is the notion that science is something potentially liberating and emancipatory. You’re picking up on that, with one of the channels…
