Uncommon Knowledge

Michael Behe, John Lennox, and Steven Meyer are three of the leading voices in science and academia on the case for an intelligent designer of the universe and everything in it (including us). In this wide-ranging conversation, they point out the flaws in Darwin’s theory and the increasing amount of evidence uncovered by a rigorous application of the scientific method that points to an intentional...

Does God exist? Something—a being, a power—that’s supernatural? That is, an entity that we’re unable to perceive with our five senses but that’s still real? Ever since the Enlightenment, the knowing, urbane, sophisticated answer has been, “Of course not.” Now a historian, a scientist, and a journalist talk it over and reveal new threads in the debate around science and theism.

Benjamin Netanyahu is the past and soon to be again prime minister of Israel. In his new book, Bibi: My Story , Netanyahu describes how he went from an Israeli American high school student in Philadelphia to a member of the Israeli Defense Force, detouring along the way to study architecture and get a master’s degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1976. His studies were interrupted whe...

Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and the 24th president of the United States, the only man to win nonconsecutive terms in the Oval Office. In his new book, Man of Iron , author Troy Senik discusses Cleveland’s improbable rise from obscure lawyer in upstate New York to mayor of Buffalo, governor of New York, and finally, in 1885, president of the United States; followed by his subsequent loss of...

John Cogan and Kevin Warsh are both Senior Fellows at the Hoover Institution who have spent the careers in and out of government trying to make it more efficient and cost effective. On this show, they discuss their newest white paper, Reinvigorating Economic Governance: Advancing a New Framework for American Prosperity, which is intended to provide a framework to revitalize the governance of econo...

With his many varied interests in technology, politics, and culture, Peter Thiel has often been described as a Renaissance man. So perhaps it was only fitting that we traveled to Florence, Italy— where the Renaissance originated and thrived for hundreds of years —to speak with him. In this wide-ranging interview, we cover several topics, including his support for candidates across the country who...

Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) has served in the US Senate since January 2011. Before that, he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush from 2006 to 2007, and as a member of the US House of Representatives from 1993 to 2005. He also served as White House director of legislative affairs under President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1991. In this wide-r...

Current Hoover Institution director and former secretary of state and national security advisor to President George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice is the only person in the world who can speak knowledgeably about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the threat from China . . . and the Denver Broncos and why college sports must be saved from itself. And that’s exactly what she does in this must-hear convers...

The summer of 2022 saw record temperatures recorded all over the world. Bjorn Lomborg acknowledges that climate change is here, it’s real, and humans are largely responsible for it. He also says that it is survivable and manageable. In other words, climate change is not the extinction-level event it is often characterized as. Lomborg also discusses practical ways to lower our carbon footprint and...

In 1970, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published a famous book, The Population Bomb, in which he described a disastrous future for humanity : “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” That prediction turned out to be very wrong, and in this interview American Enterpris...

Historical biographer Walter Stahr has given us definitive biographies of William H. Seward and Edwin Stanton, two of the ablest and most influential members of President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. Earlier this year, Stahr followed those books with the definitive biography of Salmon P. Chase, Treasury secretary under Lincoln and one of the country’s most important antislavery lawyers, one of the f...

Dartmouth College anthropology professor Sergei Kan was born in the Soviet Union just a few months after the death of Stalin. He came to the United States in 1974 at the age of 21 and received his undergraduate degree from Boston University and his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He teaches courses at Dartmouth on the native peoples of Alaska, on the Jewish diaspora, and...

Roland Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard University. Fryer's research combines economic theory, empirical evidence, and randomized experiments to help design more effective government policies. His work on education, inequality, and race has been widely cited in media outlets and congressional testimony. Rafael Mangual is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and head of research for its...

If there were a Mount Rushmore of American Black intellectuals, the three guests on this show would certainly be on it: Glenn Loury is a professor of the social sciences in the Department of economics at Brown, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the host of his wildly successful podcast, The Glenn Show . Ian Rowe is the cofounder of Vertex Partnership Academies and the author of the...

Matthew Continetti is the author of the new book The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism , an extensively researched and reported history of the conservative movement in America. Chris DeMuth is a former president of the American Enterprise Institute and currently a fellow at the Hudson Institute. In this conversation, DeMuth states that national conservatives (or “NatCons”) “are...

Yoram Hazony is the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and president of the Herzl Institute. His 2018 book,  The Virtue of Nationalism , established Hazony as one of the leading proponents of a new kind of “national conservatism.” His new book,  Conservatism: A Rediscovery , has set off a passionate debate among intellectuals on the Right to determine what “national conservatism” actually mea...

William P. Barr is one of only two people to have served as attorney general of the United States under two presidents and the only one to have done it in two different centuries (under George H. W. Bush from 1991 to 1993 and under Donald Trump from 2019 to 2020). In his new book,  One Damn Thing after Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General , Barr goes into great detail about the chaos, the troub...

The political philosopher Harvey Mansfield first arrived at Harvard University in the fall of 1949. He has remained at that august institution of higher education and is still teaching at age 90. In this special edition of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, recorded in the Baker Library at Dartmouth College, Dr. Mansfield answers five questions about America today from his perspective of obse...

By any measure, Dr. Jordan Peterson is the most famous (now former—as is discussed in this interview) Canadian professor of clinical psychology in the world. He’s also a deep thinker and a best-selling author of multiple books, and has amassed a huge following through podcasts, YouTube videos, and public speaking. Today, Jordan Peterson is one of the most influential voices in the “anti-woke” move...

Amy Zegart is  a fellow at the Hoover Institution , a professor of political science at Stanford University, and the author of a new book,  Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence . In this frank conversation, Zegart grades American intelligence-gathering operations, recent and historical, and compares them to their counterparts in China and Russia. Professor Z...

Recorded on February 15, 2022 Bari Weiss began her career as a mainstream media prodigy, landing coveted positions at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times in her early twenties. In 2020, she famously resigned from the Times when conditions there became intolerable for her, famously writing  in a public resignation letter  that “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Tw...

Last month, Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson  asked Princeton Professor and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin 5 questions , all in the foreign policy and history realm. Since then, the world has changed in ways that were unimaginable just 3 weeks ago. So we asked Professor Kotkin to come back for a second round of questions, this time all dedicated to one topic: the Russian inv...

Stephen Kotkin is a professor of history at Princeton and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of nine works of history, including the first two volumes of his planned three-volume history of Russian power and Joseph Stalin,  Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928  and  Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 . The premise of this show is simple: Peter Robinson poses fiv...

In 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 year...

In 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 mon...