Russ Roberts: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s your all-time favorite EconTalk episode? I have a couple. Christopher Hitchens on Orwell was a thrill. I did that face to face. He is one of the great talkers of our age, incredibly articulate — Richard Epstein with a British accent. Richard Epstein — I remember I interviewed him, I think it was on property rights. I either had done two that day, or I was just tired. I thought, “I’m just going to let him go.” In the first, I think, nine minutes, he reels out a perfect set of paragraphs that could be an essay on property rights. Interviewing Milton Friedman was a thrill. One of my all-time favorites was the guy who does the potato chips for northern California. O’Donohoe was his last name. Great episode where I learned a lot about industrial production and Frito-Lay strategies. He does Frito-Lay potato chips for northern California. He was in charge of it. Let’s see. Any others that jump to mind? There’s a fun interview with Mark Helprin, my favorite novelist, living novelist. That was just a thrill. Interviewing Bill James, who taught me to love statistics and data and baseball. It was an incredible thrill, and to get him to say something like we know 1,000th of what we could know in baseball, which is a very narrow, controlled environment. I get a lot of flack for interviewing Nassim Taleb, because his online persona seems to be different from mine — I’ll say it judiciously. I’ve learned an immense amount from him. We had a great interview with him.…

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