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Russ Roberts

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Latest Episodes

Free Will Is Real (with Kevin Mitchell)

12/15/2025 • 92 min

Are we truly characters with agency, or are we just playing out our programming in the great video game of life? Contrary to those in his field who claim that free will is an illusion, neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell insists that we're agents who wield our decision-making mechanism for our own purposes. Listen as the author of Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Fr… Play episode

Colonialism, Slavery, and Foreign Aid (with William Easterly)
The Perfect Tuba: How Band, Grit, and Community Build a Better Life (with …
The Status Game (with Will Storr)
The Wonder of the Emergent Mind (with Gaurav Suri)
Shampoo, Property Rights, and Civilization (with Anthony Gill)
Primal Intelligence (with Angus Fletcher)
A Mind-Blowing Way of Looking at Math (with David Bessis)
Twenty Years of Freakonomics (with Stephen Dubner)
The Magic of Tokyo (with Joe McReynolds)
The Invisible Hierarchies that Rule Our World (with Toby Stuart)
Eating with Intelligence (with Julia Belluz)
Steven Pinker on Common Knowledge
How Did America Build the Arsenal of Democracy? (with Brian Potter)
How Teams Succeed (with Colin Fisher)
Humans Are Overrated (with Christine Webb)
Hemingway, Love, and War (with David Wyatt)
Tim Ferriss on Tim Ferriss (and much much more)
Learning to Think Like Someone Else (with David Marquet)
Let Me Be Forgotten (with Lowry Pressly)
Read Like a Champion (with Doug Lemov)
James Marriott on Reading
How to Walk the World (with Chris Arnade)
What Is Capitalism? (with Mike Munger)
The Deceptive Power of Maps (with Paulina Rowinska)
How to Be a Super Ager (with Eric Topol)
Leon Kass on the Wisdom of Rousseau
Two Cheers for Libertarianism and Econ 101 (with Noah Smith)
EconTalk #1000 (with Russ Roberts)
Nature vs. Nurture (with Paul Bloom)
Inside the Mysterious World of Credit Cards (with Patrick McKenzie)
The Past and Present of Privacy and Public Life (with Tiffany Jenkins)
The Economics of Tariffs and Trade (with Doug Irwin)
The Past and Future of AI (with Dwarkesh Patel)
Why Christianity Needs to Help Save Democracy (with Jonathan Rauch)
Rational and Religious (with Ross Douthat)
The Music and Magic of John and Paul (with Ian Leslie)
Do All Creatures, Great and Small, and Made From Silicon, Have Rights? (wi…
Bird Brains, Bird Sex, and All Kinds of Beauty (with Matt Ridley)
How Better Feedback Can Revolutionize Education (with Daisy Christodoulou)
Will Guidara on Unreasonable Hospitality
The Unusual World of Israeli Democracy (with Rachel Gur)
The Struggle That Shaped the Middle East (with James Barr)
Who Won the Socialist Calculation Debate (with Peter Boettke)
Minimalists and Hoarders (with Michael Easter)
Coase, the Rules of the Game, and the Costs of Perfection (with Daisy Chri…
Why AI Is Good for Humans (with Reid Hoffman)
Weep, Shudder, Die: The Secret of Opera Revealed (with Dana Gioia)
Will DOGE and Musk Make a Difference? (with Michael Munger)
Understanding the Settler Colonialism Movement (with Adam Kirsch)

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