Uncommon Knowledge

Ross Douthat’s Decadent Society

Recorded 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, Peter Robinson and Douthat discuss movies, TV shows, the iPhone, SpaceX, and the 747, with some detours into the COVID-19 crisis and our current political situation.

How Innovation Works, with Matt Ridley

Recorded 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 see it as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than as an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Ridley also discusses the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the world’s economies, the real story of Thomas Edison and why he was one of the greatest innovators in human history, why China may not be the threat it appears to be (at least not technologically), and some predictions as to what the world may look like in 2050

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: His new MLB COVID-19 Study and the Dilemma of the Lockdown

Recorded 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 risks associated with a prolonged lockdown and answers some of the questions raised by his last survey of Santa Clara County. 

 

The Importance of Institutions, with Yuval Levin

Recorded 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. Levin also explains why political correctness is rampant in the culture, why America’s elites have created a closed-off aristocracy in order to transmit privilege generationally, and why it is vitally important that we as a society recommit to rebuilding and maintaining the institutions that provided the foundation for American society for 200 years. Programming note: this interview was recorded before the COVID-19 crisis reached the United States, so it is not mentioned.

What’s So Funny about Corona, Politics, the Media, and the Culture? A Conversation with Andrew Ferguson and P. J. O’Rourke

Recorded 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

Recorded 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 great detail, including the difficulties encountered by farmers and by research scientists and doctors, why some areas of the country are affected more than others, his theories about when the virus actually first appeared in the United States, and, finally, what plagues of the ancient world can teach us about how to best manage and get past the situation the entire world finds itself in.

The Trade-Offs on Tariffs and International Trade, with Professor Douglas Irwin

Recorded 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-examining their investments abroad. Also, what’s the right way to think about international trade? Is free trade still the best policy? We get deep into the weeds of the issues around imports and exports with Professor Irwin.

The Fight against COVID-19: An Update from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

Recorded 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 Major League Baseball. We also discuss some signs of hope, and specifics about how the economy can be restarted safely and efficiently. Dr. Bhattacharya also gives some (unsolicited) advice to Dr. Anthony Fauci, California governor Gavin Newsom, and president Donald Trump.

Kicking and Screaming: WSJ’s Kim Strassel on the Media vs. Trump

Recorded 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 the way the media has covered it and disseminated the information to the public. They also discuss the upcoming presidential election (yes, we are still having one) and the politics of the $2 trillion stimulus bill, with more spending on the way, and the realities of restarting the economy in a post- or partial-post-COVID-19 world. Finally, they discuss the pluses and minuses of Donald Trump’s temperament, and the possibility of something good coming from this current crisis.

Trump, China, and the Geopolitics of a Crisis

Recorded 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 exploit, and which country—China or the United States—will come to represent the more successful or compelling model to other nations.