The Podcast Reader

Annie Duke is an author, corporate speaker and decision-making consultant. She is a Special Partner at First Round Capital Partners, and a former professional poker player. Her most recent book is Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Floover Institution, Stanford University and senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center at Harvard University. He is managing director of Greenmantle. His latest book is Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. Jonathan Haidt is Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business. His latest book is The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. George Osborne was UK Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 until 2016. He is currently…

Ted Seides: Every time we talk about one of your books, you and I agree that neither one of us is going to write another book. So here we are again. What was the path to coming up with the idea for Quit? Annie Duke: After the last book, I really did say that I wasn't going to write another book. What I realised though was that sometimes you need to write a book. I think that was true with my first general audience book, Thinking in Bets. It was something that I'd been thinking about for a decade before I actually made the decision to sit down and write it. That was something that had been brewing in me for a long time. When I wrote How to Decide, it…

Russ Roberts: My guest is philosopher Will MacAskill of Oxford University. He first appeared on EconTalk in 2015, talking about effective altruism and his book Doing Good Better. His latest book and our topic for today is, What We Owe the Future. Your book opens with a rather fascinating thought experiment that you took from Georgia Ray's 'The funnel of human experience.' The opening of your book goes like this: 'Imagine living, in order of birth, through the life of every human being who has ever lived. Your first life begins about three hundred thousand years ago in Africa. After living that life and dying, you travel back in time and are reincarnated as the secondever person, born slightly later than the first. Once that second person dies, you are reincarnated as…

Andrew Leigh: Jonathan Haidt is a Professor at New York University, originally focused on cultural psychology, who moved into political and moral psychology in recent decades. His three big books, The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff, explored big questions in modern psychology. Let's start with the three untruths that you say are at the heart of The Coddling. Tell us about what those three untruths are. Jonathan Haidt: So, my first book was called The Happiness Hypothesis. It was about ten ancient ideas and whether or not they're true. It seems as though students on some American college campuses have read that book and then decided to do exactly the opposite of ancient wisdom. The first great untruth that Greg Lukianoff…

Tyler Cowen: Thomas Piketty has a new book out, A Brief History of Equality, which, in my opinion, is the very best introduction to his overall views. Thomas, welcome. Let me start with some questions about France. As you've pointed out, France adopted a progressive income tax relatively late in its history. Just how egalitarian, as a country, do you think France actually is? Thomas Piketty: Well, as I stress in my new book, there's been a long-run movement towards more equality in history, together with a movement towards more economic prosperity, and I argue that the two movements really came together. France is part of this movement. Each country has its own limitations and its own hypocrisies with equality and inequality. France has lots of limitations, lots of hypocrisy in the…

Andrew Roberts: Peter Robinson was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, and is the author of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. Peter's a Fellow of the Hoover Institution and the presenter of Uncommon Knowledge. He understands more than almost anyone else alive today about Ronald Reagan's secrets of statecraft. Peter, you say in your book, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, that speech writing is one-third research, one-third writing and one-third staffing. Please can you tell us a little about each of those stages in the process? Peter Robinson: Sure. Speech writing varies from White House to White House, of course. I joined the staff of Vice President, as he was then, George H. W. Bush, before going to work for President Reagan. I was 25 years old. They hired me…