No rush, no noise, no one else on the golf course: solo golf is an entirely different game, offering physical, mental, and spiritual benefits that playing with others can't. Listen as author and former editor of ESPN The Magazine Gary Belsky and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss how golfing alone can create flow, develop physical mastery, and enhance self-awareness. Along the way, they explore what makes golf different from other sports, what it reveals about our character, and why even non-golfers may love its solo version for the lessons it imparts about life.

The Department of War wanted to deploy Anthropic's Claude for "all lawful use." What begins as a policy dispute between a tech company and the Department of War quietly unfolds into something far more unsettling. Listen as Dean Ball and EconTalk's Russ Roberts trace the collision between Anthropic and the federal government over Claude's use in classified military operations, exploring thorny questions about autonomous weapons, domestic mass surveillance, and whether a private company can demand contractual red lines when it comes to national security. The conversation spirals outward through the erosion of constitutional norms, the decay of institutional trust, the blurred line between public and private power, and the frightening possibility that AI's most powerful capabilities may arrive just as the Republic is least equipped to govern it.

What can Adam Smith teach us today? In this conversation between Ross Levine of Stanford's Hoover Institution and EconTalk's Russ Roberts, Smith emerges as a penetrating psychologist who understood that our deepest hunger isn't for wealth but for respect--and that this hunger, left unexamined, leads individuals and societies alike into serious trouble. The discussion moves from the personal (why do highly successful people keep grinding long after they've "won"?) to the political: Smith's sobering warning that when a society admires wealth and power for their own sake, it breeds servility and undermines freedom. Along the way, there's a Marxist father reading Smith during COVID, a Nobel-adjacent economist who couldn't understand why anyone would bother with a 1759 book, and a childhood story about loyalty and friendship that cuts to the heart of what we may have lost in modern culture. This is a conversation about how to live well--using one of history's greatest thinkers as a guide.