The favorite EconTalk episodes for host Russ Roberts are when he and his guest have an unusually powerful connection such as his recent episode with Charles Duhigg, and the ones where he learns something mind-blowing, like Adam Mastroianni’s insight that you can’t reach the brain through the ears. Listen as Russ explains how he chooses guests, and why EconTalk has evolved to focus on things other than economics. He also shares listeners' favorite conversations from 2023, and tells a story that shows the challenges—and opportunities—of applying EconTalk’s lessons to our personal lives.
Welcome to Econ talk conversations for the curious part of the Library of economics and Liberty.
I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Go to econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
Our email address is mailcontalk.org dot.
We'd love to hear from you.
Today is April 14, 2024, and we're going to do something a little bit different today.
Last month marked the 18 year anniversary of Econ Talk.
If all goes as planned, this will be episode 943, which is kind of amazing, a little bit hard for me to believe.
That means that we're about a year away from episode 1000.
Barring any surprises to my health, the world, things I can't anticipate.
I hope to do something special for that 1000th episode if we get there, but I thought it appropriate to mark the 18 year anniversary we started in March of 2006.
The number 18 represents life in the jewish tradition.
The word for life in Hebrew is chai, which is spelled with two hebrew letters, Chet and Yud.
Chet is the 8th letter of the hebrew Alphabet.
Yud is the 10th letter, which gets you to 18, which is why jews often make donations to charity in multiples of 18, 180, 1800 and so on 360.
So 18 years seems like a nice landmark, and I thought it'd be useful to do a little bit of reflection.
In addition, I want to give you the results of our annual survey and say some things about the econ talk episodes of 2023, your favorites, and a few other things, as well as responding to some comments in that survey.
So first, some survey results.
1105 people voted.