CSPI Podcast

Aaron Sibarium is a recent graduate of Yale University (2018) and journalist who writes for the Washington Free Beacon . He joins the podcast to discuss his work covering identity politics issues from a conservative perspective, along with his dream of eventually synthesizing his reporting with his own opinion writing. Aaron and Richard share many of the same frustrations with right-wing media and...

Rob Henderson recently received his PhD in psychology at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Zach Goldberg is a former research fellow at CSPI and currently affiliated with the Manhattan Institute. They both join the podcast to talk about Rob’s idea of “luxury beliefs” and Zach’s new paper testing the theory in the context of attitudes towards criminal justice policy. Richard wonders about the ext...

Eric Kaufmann is a distinguished researcher and a fellow at CSPI. He joins the podcast to talk about his latest CSPI report, “Diverse and Divided: A Political Demography of American Elite Students.” The data indicates that we can expect a future in which elites continue to be heavily divided by race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation. Richard and Eric discuss what this means for our politics,...

Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He joins the podcast to talk about his involvement in Operation Warp Speed, a uniquely successful federal government project. Richard asks how broadly applicable its lessons are, whether or not we could do something similar for cancer, and why economists and public health officials had such divergent opinions on the need to spee...

Bryan Caplan joins the podcast to talk about his new book Don’t Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice . The lead essay is written as a letter to his daughter in the hopes that she will reject an ideology that is wrong on the facts and psychologically damaging. Richard asks whether Bryan grants too much to feminists in the first place by treating the relevant issue as whether society treats men...

Tyler Cowen needs no introduction. He joins the podcast to talk about his new book, co-authored with Daniel Gross, called Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World . Richard asks him about whether intelligence is overrated or underrated, the idea of “State Capacity Libertarianism” as an improvement over old-fashioned libertarianism, cultural differences between Ch...

Amy Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She joins the podcast to talk about the ongoing attempt to cancel and possibly fire her for making politically incorrect remarks. Usually there is some pretext that a professor actually engaged in forbidden conduct in these kinds of investigations, but this is as clear an example as one can find of a univ...

Stephen and James Grugett are programmers, entrepreneurs, and cofounders of the website Manifold Markets , which hosts user-created prediction markets. They join the podcast to discuss the CSPI/Salem Tournament on Manifold Markets , which launched last week. The Grugetts and Richard talk about the origins of Manifold, what differentiates it from other prediction markets, and how their version of c...

On this week’s CSPI Podcast, Richard interviews the top three winners of the CSPI Essay Contest: Policy Reform For Progress . The first interview is with contest winner Andrew Kenneson, a program navigator at a public housing authority in Kodiak, Alaska and former reporter. In “ Gathering Steam: Unlocking Geothermal Potential in the United States ,” Andrew explains why exempting geothermal explora...

Richard Lowery is an Associate Professor of Finance at The University of Texas at Austin and a senior scholar at the Salem Center for Public Policy. He joins the podcast to talk about his recent article “ How UT-Austin Administrators Destroyed an Intellectual Diversity Initiative ,” which details what went wrong with plans to build the Liberty Institute. Lowery and Hanania discuss the politicizati...

David Bernstein is a Law Professor and Executive Director of the Liberty and Law Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. He joins the podcast to talk about his new book  Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America . David and Richard discuss the history of racial conflict and classification in America, the political construction of ethnic identities...

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a data scientist, author, and keynote speaker. He holds a PhD in economics from Harvard and is a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times . He joins the podcast to talk about his two books, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are (2017) and Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life...

Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, a CSPI research fellow, and the author of several books, including Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities . He returns to the podcast to discuss his new report for CPSI, Born This Way? The Rise of LGBT as a Social and Political Identity . He and Richard talk about the factors underlying...

Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a visiting senior scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of several books, including The Myth of the Rational Voter and The Case Against Education . He returns to the podcast to talk about his two new collections of essays released as books, Labor Econ Versus the World: Essays on the World’s Greatest Market...

Eron Wolf is the founder of Yahoo! Games, a WhatsApp seed investor, and the founder and CEO of FUTO, an Austin-based organization dedicated to developing technologies to fight the centralization and consolidation of the tech industry. He and Richard talk about the business model of Big Tech and how machine learning and algorithms can shape human behavior. Eron discusses his plans for FUTO, and how...

Jordan Lasker is a PhD student at Texas Tech University and a bioinformatician. He joins the podcast to discuss his recent report for CSPI, “ About Those Baby Brainwaves: Why ‘Policy Relevant’ Social Science is Mostly a Fraud .” The report critically examined a recent study claiming small cash transfers to the parents of newborns improved their babies’ brain activity. The study was lauded in the m...

Philippe Lemoine returns to the CSPI Podcast to discuss his prediction for the 2022 French Presidential election. This episode was recorded on April 22nd, two days before Macron’s victory on April 24th, because Philippe was so confident in his forecast that he didn’t think it was necessary to wait until after the election to discuss the results.  He and Richard talk about the differences between F...

Gail Heriot is a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law and a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She joins the podcast to explain the connections between civil rights law and wokeness, how disparate impact criminalizes everything and leads to arbitrary government power, and the real-world consequences of these laws in corporate and university settings. S...

Noah Carl is an independent researcher, writer, and free speech advocate. He invited Richard on his new podcast (which you can find at Noah’s Substack ) to discuss whether the West is to blame for the conflict in Ukraine. We’re re-releasing that episode, which originally came out on March 1st. Although much has happened since then, the topics discussed in the conversation remain relevant for under...

Steve Hsu is a Professor of Theoretical Physics and Professor of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. He returns to the CSPI Podcast for a wide-ranging discussion of various personal, political, and technical topics, including his attempted cancelation from Michigan State, thoughts on Russia-Ukraine, affirmative action, macroeconomics, and why top physi...

Jimmy Soni is a biographer and speechwriter. He joins the podcast to talk about his new book, “ The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley ,” which explores the early days, history, and legacy of PayPal. It also outlines the unique qualities, business savvy, and technological vision that led to the founders’ success at PayPal and elsewhere. Jimmy and Richard...

Stephen Hsu is a Professor of Theoretical Physics and Professor of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. He is also a serial entrepreneur and has published on genomics, in addition to blogging on a wide range of topics from econometrics and geopolitics to mixed martial arts. Hsu joins the Podcast, where he and Richard begin by talking about the Russia-Uk...

Alec Stapp is co-CEO of the Institute for Progress , a new think tank that focuses on accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress. He joins Richard to talk about why he started his think tank and what policymaking looks like in DC behind the scenes. They also discuss the idea of Secret Congress, the backgrounds of DC staffers, meta-science, biosecurity and immigration as policy...

Freddie deBoer joins the podcast to talk about his book “ The Cult of Smart ,” which argues that many problems in the education system and American society are due to the failure to grapple with the fixed nature of individual differences in intelligence. He and Richard discuss the effectiveness of charter schools vs. public schools, how the economic value of traits changes over time, if American d...

Jonah Davids is CSPI’s director of communications. He joins Richard to talk about his essay on leaving academia , how social science is mostly storytelling, and what CSPI accomplished in 2021. They also discuss why reaching out to people is underrated, the recent study on racial discrimination in emailing, reasons to stay in or leave academia, the effectiveness of advertising, why CSPI has been su...