EconTalk

What happens when a writer discovers her "boring" great-grandfather was actually a household name across the Russian Empire who helped 10,000 Jews escape to Texas? Rachel Cockerell's The Melting Point traces this forgotten history through an audacious technique: she removed herself entirely, letting only primary sources--newspaper articles, diaries, letters--speak across time. Her journey uncovers great-grandfather David Jochelmann's partnership with Israel Zangwill, the "Jewish Dickens" and their ambitious Galveston Project to divert Jewish refugees from overcrowded New York to Texas. The conversation with EconTalk's Russ Roberts spans the early Zionist movement's schism over the right location for a Jewish homeland, 1920s New York experimental theater, and one family scattered across London, New York, and Jerusalem.

Are your genes your destiny? Despite famous studies of identical twins that seem to answer in the affirmative, mathematician David Bessis says: Not so fast. He and EconTalk's Russ Roberts take a deep dive into the "twins reared apart" literature, showing how multiple flaws in those studies undercut their claims about heritability. Bessis demonstrates why the natural experiments are never perfect, and why differences across people in a particular time and place are no guarantee of what will happen to any one human being. They also discuss psychologist Eric Turkheimer's three laws of behavior genetics, emphasizing the role of unique experiences in shaping who we become.

Philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein discusses her new book, The Mattering Instinct, which argues that our lives are a quest to validate our inherent self-centeredness. Tracing this essential longing from physics and biology through to ethics and politics, she explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts why material success alone can never satisfy our deep-seated need to matter. She describes the four ways people seek significance--through transcendence, social connection, excellence, or competition--and explains how the unmet need to matter is at the heart of some of the biggest problems afflicting modern societies: loneliness, extremism, and polarization.

If technology is ruining the art of conversation, maybe it can save it, too. Anna Gat--poet, screenwriter, playwright, and founder of Interintellect--talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts on how she's reviving the French salon in the digital age. They discuss why authority, moderation, and clear formats make conversation freer, not more constrained. They also explore why one of the greatest of modern plays--Tom Stoppard's Arcadia--is so resonant not only as a live theatrical performance, but also when read aloud, both alone and in a group. They conclude the episode by connecting Arcadia's themes to Gat's mission at Interintellect: Namely, preserving the value of thinking together across generations, disciplines, and worldviews.

Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer explains the power of intuition, how intuition became gendered, what he thinks Kahneman and Tversky's research agenda got wrong, and why it's a mistake to place intuition and conscious thinking on opposing ends of the cognition spectrum. Topics he discusses in this wide-ranging conversation with EconTalk's Russ Roberts include what Gigerenzer calls the "bias bias"--the overemphasis on claims of irrationality, why it's better to replace "nudging" with "boosting," and the limitations of AI in its current form as a replacement for human intelligence and intuition.