Uncommon Knowledge
206 episodes - English - Latest episode: 28 days ago - ★★★★★ - 1.8K ratingsFor more than two decades the Hoover Institution has been producing Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, a series hosted by Hoover fellow Peter Robinson as an outlet for political leaders, scholars, journalists, and today’s big thinkers to share their views with the world.
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Episodes
Judging The Justices: Epstein And Yoo On The New Originalist Supreme Court
January 26, 2022 20:17 - 1 hour - 99.9 MBIn 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...
The Last King of America: Andrew Roberts on King George III
January 11, 2022 19:01 - 1 hour - 98.9 MBIn 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...
It Could Have Been Worse: Kim Strassel and Ross Douthat Review 2021
December 16, 2021 05:13 - 1 hour - 93.4 MBIt’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
Make Ticker Tape Parades Great Again: A Conversation With Peter Thiel
December 14, 2021 19:36 - 51 minutes - 71.4 MBPeter Thiel is a Silicon Valley founder and investor, and quite a successful one at that: he co-founded PayPal, was an early investor in Facebook, and started and serves as the chair of Palantir. Lately, Thiel has become more active in politics. He supported President Trump in the 2016 election and has been a force in several House and Senate races in the 2020 cycle. In this wide-ranging conversation, Thiel discusses his politics, his campaign, and the scourge of totalitarian conformism in ...
Glenn Loury’s Journey From Chicago’s South Side to The Ivy League And Beyond
November 23, 2021 05:31 - 38 minutes - 52.3 MBProfessor Glenn Loury is in social sciences and economics at Brown University and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Prior to that, he became a tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of 33. How he got from there to here is an inspiring and fascinating story of hard work and accomplishment that is explored in great detail in this interview. Professor Loury also explains the crucial role his parents and his extended family played in his education and his o...
Boardwalk Empire: Chris Christie’s Unfinished Political Journey
November 12, 2021 00:16 - 58 minutes - 80.4 MBFormer New Jersey governor Chris Christie began his political career as a teenager watching Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford joust for control of the Republican Party at the 1976 GOP convention. From there, he soon entered the University of Delaware and then received his JD degree from the Seton Hall University School of Law. He served as US attorney for New Jersey from 2002 to 2008 and as governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2018. Gov. Christie ran for president briefly in 2018. The governor gu...
Victor Davis Hanson Diagnoses The Dying Citizen
November 03, 2021 23:30 - 49 minutes - 67.5 MBVictor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution. His new book is The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America. As is typical whenever Dr. Hanson joins us, this interview covers a wide spectrum of topics and references, including the Acts of the Apostles, immigration, Jim Crow laws, primary tribal identities, the suburban everyman, the shrinking middle class, and JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. It’s...
What Happened: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya On 19 Months Of COVID
October 22, 2021 01:05 - 1 hour - 58.5 MBFrom the very beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has been on the front lines of analyzing, studying, and even personally fighting the pandemic. In this wide-ranging interview, Dr. Bhattacharya takes us through how it started, how it spread throughout the world, the efficacy of lockdowns, the development and distribution of the vaccines, and the rise of the Delta variant. He delves into what we got right, what we got wrong, and what we got really wrong. Finally, Dr. Bhatta...
A Lost War: A Conversation with Victor Davis Hanson and H. R. McMaster on Afghanistan’s Past, Present, and Future
September 20, 2021 22:14 - 1 hour - 104 MBiGeneral H. R. McMaster and military historian Victor Davis Hanson are both senior fellows at the Hoover Institution. In this frank, no-holds-barred conversation, they discuss the United States’ mission in Afghanistan: how it began, how it was conducted, and its ignominious end. McMaster and Hanson debate what worked and what failed, how social issues in the United States may have influenced our mission in Afghanistan and our decision to leave, and whether or not the United States should have...
Joe Felter On Countering China In Their Own Backyard
August 04, 2021 18:00 - 41 minutes - 57.6 MBJoe Felter is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the William J. Perry Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He also served as an officer in the US Army special forces, where he saw combat in Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan. During the Trump administration, Dr. Felter served as deputy secretary of defense for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Felter discusses the ever growing threat to Taiwan from the People’s...
China, Big Tech, and Cyber Defense: The World According to Zegart
July 14, 2021 21:15 - 50 minutes - 68.8 MBAmy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where she chairs the Working Group on Technology, Economics, and Governance. She’s also a professor of political science at Stanford, and an expert on intelligence, cybersecurity, and big tech. In this wide-ranging conversation, Professor Zegart discusses the US relationship with China and how she views that country’s aggressive stance toward Taiwan; why big tech companies are a potential threat not on...
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Prey: A Panel Discussion on Europe, Islam, and Women’s Rights
July 02, 2021 15:52 - 49 minutes - 67.9 MBPrey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book on the explosion of sexual violence and harassment in Europe, was published in early 2021. Since then, the book has sparked a worldwide discussion online and offline about the immigration of huge numbers of mostly young Muslim men (more than 3 million, by some reports) to European cities and its effect on the women who live there. To discuss this phenomenon, explain why many of these young men feel empowered ...
“Tear Down This Wall” At 34
June 17, 2021 19:15 - 1 hour - 92 MBThirty-four years ago, on June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan stood before the Berlin Wall to deliver an address. Just over two years later, on November 9, 1989, the East German government suddenly announced that it had decided to permit free passage between East and West Berlin—the Berlin Wall had ceased to function. To commemorate one of the seminal events of the 20th century, the Reagan Institute invited Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson to participate and record a panel discussion featurin...
The Trump Economy and the Cost of the Lockdown
June 14, 2021 22:28 - 48 minutes - 66.8 MBTyler Goodspeed is the former director of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and currently the Kleinheinz Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has published three volumes on economic history and holds undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. He has also studied at Cambridge and Oxford Universities and taught at King’s College London. Goodspeed explains why he pursued a job in the Trump administration, gives his thoughts on the e...
Maverick: Jason Riley On The Life And Times Of Thomas Sowell
May 26, 2021 18:01 - 1 hour - 105 MBWall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley has just published Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, the definitive account of the life of Hoover senior fellow Thomas Sowell. In this wide-ranging interview, Peter Robinson and Riley discuss the events and people that helped Sowell become one of the most important American voices on cultural, economic, and racial matters of the last 50 years. Recorded on May 13, 2021
Doom: Niall Ferguson On The Politics And Policies Of The Pandemic
May 04, 2021 18:11 - 58 minutes - 80 MBNiall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, his new book on the decisions made by governments and public health officials around the world during the COVID pandemic. In this wide-ranging discussion, Ferguson describes what governments and leaders got right and got wrong—very wrong—over the 15 months since the coronavirus spread from China. Were the lockdowns instituted around the world prudent and life savi...
Cold War II—Just How Dangerous Is China?
April 13, 2021 23:11 - 1 hour - 102 MBChina is a nation with 1.3 billion people, an economy projected to become bigger than the United States’ in just a few years, and a rapidly growing military. Hong Kong has already fallen under its authority. Meanwhile, Taiwan looms in the distance—with a population of almost 24 million, it’s a technology hub and the world’s leading manufacturer of microchips and other items essential to high tech. What are China’s ambitions toward Taiwan? And if they are ominous, what should the US response...
Stephen Meyer on Intelligent Design and The Return of the God Hypothesis
April 07, 2021 00:36 - 1 hour - 82.6 MBDr. Stephen Meyer directs the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He returns to Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson to discuss his newest book, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. In this wide-ranging and often mind-bending interview, Dr. Meyer explains the God Hypothesis; makes his continuing and evolving case for intelligent design; describes how Judeo-Christian theology gave rise to scie...
Reclaiming Freedom in the UK, with Laurence Fox
March 26, 2021 01:52 - 51 minutes - 47.2 MBInterview with Laurence Fox Thursday, March 25, 2021 A brilliant British actor, Laurence Fox happened to say something mildly controversial on the BBC last year—and suddenly found himself a victim of cancel culture. Instead of retreating or apologizing, Fox made the unusual choice to not just rebel but to do it in the most public way possible: by running for mayor of London. Fox knows his chances of winning are slim, but he is using his candidacy to shine a light on what he considers the h...
Keeping Your Cool on the Climate Debate with Bjorn Lomborg
March 10, 2021 17:12 - 1 hour - 90.4 MBDr. Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School. He’s also been speaking and writing about climate science for almost 20 years. In this wide-ranging discussion with Peter Robinson, Lomborg analyzes the Biden administration’s plan to address climate change, lauds a slew of new clean energy technologies that are coming in the next decade, and discusses the ups...
Prey: Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the Relationship between Immigration and Sexual Assaults in Europe
February 23, 2021 18:35 - 1 hour - 85.3 MBHoover research fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book is Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. It examines the sharp rise in the number of sexual assaults in Western Europe that coincides with the sharp rise in illegal immigration from Muslim-majority countries. The book points out that almost three million people have arrived illegally in Europe since 2009, close to two million in 2015 alone. A majority have come from Muslim-majority countries. Two-thirds are male, and 80...
The Impeachment of a Former President, with Richard Epstein, Andrew McCarthy, and John Yoo
February 09, 2021 07:56 - 1 hour - 108 MBThe second impeachment trial of Donald Trump begins on February 9, 2021, but a fierce debate as to the constitutionality of trying a former president in this manner has been ongoing in the legal community for weeks. To bring some possible clarity and resolution to the matter, we assembled three of best and most cogent legal minds we know: Professor John Yoo of Berkeley Law School, Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago and New York University School of Law, and Andrew McCarth...
Remembering Roger Scruton, With UK Minister Michael Gove
January 26, 2021 18:37 - 45 minutes - 62.7 MBTo mark the first anniversary of the passing of Roger Scruton, Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson was asked by the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation to participate in its Remembering Roger Scruton Memorial Event by interviewing the Right Honourable Michael Gove. Gove is a member of Parliament, a member of Britain’s Conservative Party, and the current chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and minister for the Cabinet Office. Gove began reading Scruton’s work as a teenager, and it had a ver...
The Lord And Lady Thatcher
January 12, 2021 23:05 - 1 hour - 84.8 MBIn 1997, Margaret Thatcher asked Charles Moore (also known as Lord Baron Moore of Etchingham) to write her biography, under two conditions: that she would never read the manuscript and that the work would appear only after her death. Twenty-four years later, Moore has just published the third and final volume of Herself Alone: The Authorized Biography. In this conversation, Peter Robinson and Moore discuss Thatcher’s final years as prime minister and her life out of office. They delve into T...
A Look Back At 2020, A Year We Won’t Miss
December 12, 2020 02:45 - 1 hour - 79.8 MBIt’s our last show of 2020, and we decided to do something a little different: assemble a few of our favorite guests and take a look back at the year that was. Our panel: the Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel, author and columnist Douglas Murray, and Commentary Magazine editor and New York Post columnist John Podhoretz. They discuss the election, the coming Cold War with China, the future of the conservative movement in the United States and abroad, the pandemic, and the political class, an...
Douglas Murray and His Continuing Fight against the "Madness of Crowds”
December 02, 2020 07:38 - 1 hour - 105 MBA little over 18 months ago, we interviewed author and columnist Douglas Murray about his then new book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity. That show was one of our most-watched interviews of 2019, so we thought it was time to sit down with Douglas again and get an update on where things stand with regard to, as Douglas describes in his book, “the interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice,’ ‘identity group politics’ and ‘intersectionalism’ . . . the most a...
Endowed By The Creator: Ayaan Hirsi Ali And Peter Berkowitz On Our Unalienable Rights
October 28, 2020 21:38 - 1 hour - 95.5 MBHoover Fellows Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Peter Berkowitz discuss the final report recently issued by the US State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, of which Berkowitz was the commission secretary. Together they discuss the findings of the report, why Secretary of State Pompeo felt the need for the commission and the report, and the controversy that surrounded both. They compare and contrast the report to the US Constitution, which also prominently mentions unalienable rights, as well ...
Freefall: Larry Kudlow On Managing The US Economy In A Pandemic
October 08, 2020 02:37 - 56 minutes - 51.9 MBLarry Kudlow is the director of the National Economic Council, a position he has held since April 2018. As such, Mr. Kudlow was on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis in its early days, trying to manage and maintain one of the strongest economies in US history and prevent it from falling into a catastrophic depression. Kudlow discusses in detail what those dark days were like for Kudlow and the rest of the Trump administration and, in addition, how it felt to be on the receiving end of wi...
An Empty SCOTUS Seat: Epstein & Yoo on Ginsburg, Barrett, the Hearings, and the Future of the Court
September 28, 2020 20:48 - 1 hour - 105 MBJohn Yoo is a professor at the University of California–Berkeley School of Law and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Richard Epstein is a professor of law at NYU, a professor of law emeritus at the University of Chicago, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. In this wide-ranging discussion, recorded the day after Amy Coney Barrett accepted President Trump’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the professors discuss Barrett’s qualifications and why it was correct and proper to nomin...
H. R. McMaster: The Policy “Battlegrounds” He Has Won, Lost, And Continues To Fight
September 22, 2020 17:14 - 58 minutes - 80.9 MBLt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, US Army, ret., the former national security advisor and the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution discusses his latest book, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, a re-examination of the most critical foreign policy and national security challenges that face the United States, and an urgent call to compete to preserve America’s standing and security. McMaster takes us through a world tour of hot spots and outlines the threats t...
Condoleezza Rice: Director of the Hoover Institution
September 11, 2020 10:45 - 55 minutes - 75.9 MBUncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson is proud to present the first interview with Condoleezza Rice in her new role as Director of Hoover Institution. After a storied career that includes Provost of Stanford University (1993-1999), United States National Security Advisor (2001-2005), and United States Secretary of State (2005-2009), the author of numerous books, and an inaugural member of the College Football Playoff selection committee, on September 1st, 2020 Director Rice became the Hoove...
Faith, Character, Destiny, and Redemption: Jimmy Lai’s Continuing Fight For Hong Kong’s Freedom
September 06, 2020 10:45 - 43 minutes - 40 MBRecorded on September 4, 2020 This is our third conversation with Hong Kong entrepreneur and freedom fighter, Jimmy Lai in less than a year. During that time, Lai has been arrested twice, his family and his employees and colleagues have been harassed and in some cases forced to leave Hong Kong, and Lai himself has been incarcerated. Currently free on bond and facing a trial and an uncertain future, Mr. Lai gets philosophical in this conversation. He describes how his faith has given him str...
Defending the “Defender in Chief”: John Yoo on Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power
August 04, 2020 17:24 - 59 minutes - 81.6 MBRecorded on July 29, 2020 On the occasion of his new book, Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, Hoover visiting fellow and Berkeley Law School professor John Yoo joins the show to make a spirited case against the criticisms of Donald Trump for his supposed disruption of constitutional rules and norms. The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump is a threat to the rule of law and the US Constitution. Mainstream media outlets have reported fresh examples of alle...
Bjorn Lomborg Declares “False Alarm” on Climate Hysteria
July 28, 2020 06:59 - 57 minutes - 78.9 MBRecorded on July 24, 2020 This week, a conversation with Bjorn Lomborg, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and one of the foremost climate experts in the world today. His new book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, is an argument for treating climate as a serious problem but not an extinction-level event requiring such severe and drastic steps as rewiring a la...
An Economist Looks at 90: Tom Sowell on Charter Schools and Their Enemies
July 02, 2020 19:05 - 57 minutes - 79.3 MBThe day before this show was recorded, Dr. Thomas Sowell began his 10th decade of life. Remarkably on one hand and yet completely expected on the other, he remains as engaged, analytical, and thoughtful as ever. In this interview (one of roughly a dozen or so we’ve conducted with Dr. Sowell over the years), we delve into his new book Charter Schools and Their Enemies, a sobering look at the academic success of charter schools in New York City, and the fierce battles waged by teachers unions...
The Case against Revolution with Ayaan Hirsi Ali
June 30, 2020 17:29 - 55 minutes - 75.8 MBAs the United States and the world embark on fraught conversations about race, history, law enforcement, and the underpinnings of our very civilization, Ayaan Hirsi Ali joins Peter Robinson for an enlightening conversation. A refugee from Africa, Hirsi Ali fled to Europe to escape an arranged marriage, becoming an activist, (now former) member of the Dutch Parliament, and now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. With a different set of life experiences and perspective from American-b...
The Doctor Is In: Scott Atlas and the Efficacy of Lockdowns, Social Distancing, and Closings
June 23, 2020 17:12 - 50 minutes - 69.3 MBRecorded on June 18, 2020 Dr. Scott Atlas is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an accomplished physician, and a scholar of public health. For several weeks, Dr. Atlas has been making the case in print and in other media that we as a society have overreacted in imposing draconian restrictions on movement, gatherings, schools, sports, and other activities. He is not a COVID-19 denier—he believes the virus is a real threat and should be managed as such. But, as Dr. Atl...
Jimmy Lai: The Last, Best Hope for Saving Democracy in Hong Kong
June 09, 2020 17:20 - 42 minutes - 58.1 MBRecorded on June 8, 2020 When Hong Kong democracy advocate Jimmy Lai last appeared on Uncommon Knowledge in October of 2019, the situation in Hong Kong was dire but still hopeful. Now, eight months later, the situation has gone from bad to worse, and since that interview, Lai has been arrested twice. In this conversation, Lai explains the widening crackdown the Chinese Communist Party is imposing on Hong Kong, including his interpretation of the recently proposed national security law, whic...
Mitch Daniels: Plain Talk from the President of Purdue
June 05, 2020 02:45 - 49 minutes - 67.5 MBMitch Daniels is the former governor of Indiana (2005–13), former director of the Office of Management and Budget (2001–03), and current president of Purdue University (since 2013). In this wide-ranging conversation with Peter Robinson, Daniels discusses his insistence on keeping Purdue’s tuition below $10,000 and how he does it, his vision for Purdue that includes a mix of online and onsite education, and his efforts to hire an ideologically diverse faculty and recruit students from various...
Ross Douthat’s Decadent Society
June 02, 2020 20:24 - 58 minutes - 80.7 MBRecorded on May 28, 2020 In his new book, The Decadent Society, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat presents a theory: “Western society stopped advancing in the second half of the 20th century, and the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of ‘sustainable decadence,’ a civilizational languor that could endure for longer than we think.” Against this backdrop, Pe...
How Innovation Works, with Matt Ridley
May 19, 2020 01:25 - 1 hour - 88.3 MBRecorded on May 6, 2020 A true Renaissance man, Matt Ridley is a British journalist, a member of the House of Lords, a businessman, and the author of many publications, including The Rational Optimist, his very influential book about the innate human tendency to trade goods and services, which he argues is the source of all human prosperity. Ridley’s new book, How Innovation Works, chronicles the history of innovation and argues that we need to change the way we think about innovation, to s...
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: His new MLB COVID-19 Study and the Dilemma of the Lockdown
May 11, 2020 21:34 - 55 minutes - 50.8 MBRecorded on May 8, 2020 Dr. Jay Bhattacharaya from Stanford Medicine makes his third appearance on Uncommon Knowledge in eight weeks, this time to discuss a new COVID-19 survey of Major League Baseball employees he co-authored. The survey tested more than 5,600 employees across all 26 Major League Baseball clubs across the country. The results are yet another data set showing how COVID-19 spreads across geographical and economic lines. Dr. Bhattacharya also discusses the very real health ri...
The Importance of Institutions, with Yuval Levin
May 08, 2020 16:20 - 34 minutes - 47.6 MBRecorded February 25, 2020 Yuval Levin is director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the America Dream. The book and this conversation lay out the importance of institutions—from the military to churches, from families to schools—as these institutions provide the forms and structures we need to be free. Le...
What’s So Funny about Corona, Politics, the Media, and the Culture? A Conversation with Andrew Ferguson and P. J. O’Rourke
May 02, 2020 01:35 - 52 minutes - 72.2 MBRecorded on April 28, 2020 In this special plague-time episode of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, two of the nation’s most brilliant and accomplished humorists have a good time—and say some serious things. P. J. O’Rourke and Andrew Ferguson on COVID-19, their wasted youth, Trump versus Biden, the state of journalism, and why they’d both bet on the United States over China any old day.
Victor Davis Hanson on Coronavirus, California, and the Classical World
April 24, 2020 21:40 - 1 hour - 83.2 MBRecorded on April 23, 2020 Victor Davis Hanson is both a classical scholar at the Hoover Institution and a farmer in the San Joaquin Valley of California. He’s also a defender of the president (his book The Case for Trump spent weeks on the bestseller lists in 2019) and a close observer of the scientific and medical communities. These disparate interests and fields of study give him unique perspectives and insights on the current COVID-19 crisis. We discuss the current situation with him in...
The Trade-Offs on Tariffs and International Trade, with Professor Douglas Irwin
April 22, 2020 14:08 - 54 minutes - 74.2 MBRecorded on April 15, 2020 Douglas Irwin is the John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. He is the author of a number of books, including the definitive history of American trade policy, Clashing over Commerce. In this sheltering at home edition of Uncommon Knowledge, we delve deep into the issues around the Trump administration’s imposition of huge tariffs on goods from China and elsewhere, and the impact of a health crisis that has businesses across the country re-examinin...
The Fight against COVID-19: An Update from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
April 18, 2020 02:00 - 42 minutes - 57.8 MBRecorded on April 17, 2020 A month ago, we interviewed Dr. Jay Bhattacharya just as the COVID-19 crisis was shuttering the economy and governments were ordering citizens to shelter at home. In that interview, Dr. Bhattacharya mentioned that he himself would soon be conducting tests for COVID-19 in Santa Clara County, California, one of the most active hotspots in the country. Today Dr. Bhattacharya returns to discuss the results of that study and one currently under way in partnership with ...
Kicking and Screaming: WSJ’s Kim Strassel on the Media vs. Trump
April 14, 2020 15:16 - 46 minutes - 63.2 MBRecorded on April 9, 2020 As a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a commentator for Fox News, Kim Strassel is a card-carrying member of the mainstream media. But Strassel is appalled by the media’s treatment of Donald Trump, and not just by journalists from the left. She describes the “resistance” in detail in her recent book, Resistance (at All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America. She and Peter Robinson discuss the Trump administration's handling of the COVID-19 crisis and...
Trump, China, and the Geopolitics of a Crisis
April 07, 2020 17:14 - 36 minutes - 50.4 MBRecorded on April 1, 2020 Stephen A. Kotkin is a professor of history at Princeton and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Kotkin is one of the nation’s most compelling observers of foreign affairs, past and present, and is now working on the third and final volume of his definitive biography of Josef Stalin. From that perspective, Peter Robinson and Kotkin discuss Trump’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, Kotkin’s thoughts on the Chinese leadership class and the advantages they may seek to ...
Questioning Conventional Wisdom in the COVID-19 Crisis, with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
March 31, 2020 15:45 - 32 minutes - 45.1 MBRecorded on March 27, 2020 Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a senior fellow at both the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute. His March 24, 2020, article in the Wall Street Journal questions the premise that “coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines.” In the article he suggests that “ther...