EconTalk

Author: Russ Roberts

EconTalk: Conversations for the Curious is an award-winning weekly podcast hosted by Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford's Hoover Institution. The eclectic guest list includes authors, doctors, psychologists, historians, philosophers, economists, and more. Learn how the health care system really works, the serenity that comes from humility, the challenge of interpreting data, how potato chips are made, what it's like to run an upscale Manhattan restaurant, what caused the 2008 financial crisis, the nature of consciousness, and more. EconTalk has been taking the Monday out of Mondays since 2006. All 900 episodes are available in the archive. Go to EconTalk.org for transcripts, related resources, and comments.
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How We Tamed Ourselves and Invented Good and Evil (with Hanno Sauer)
Episode 1040
Monday, 9 March, 2026

What if humanity's capacity for cruelty was actually one of our greatest moral achievements? That's just one of the provocative ideas philosopher Hanno Sauer explores in this conversation about his book The Invention of Good and Evil with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Sauer tackles a fundamental puzzle: in a Darwinian world of selfish genes, how did humans become so extraordinarily cooperative? Sauer traces a fascinating journey from small hunter-gatherer bands to modern civilizations, revealing surprising mechanisms along the way--including the systematic killing of the most aggressive tribe members over millennia, which made humans the "golden retrievers of the primate kingdom." The conversation ranges from whether agriculture was history's worst mistake, to a spirited debate about religion and morality between Sauer (a German atheist who doesn't know any believers) and host Russ Roberts (a person of faith living in Israel).