Uncommon Knowledge

In this special, crossover edition of Secrets of Statecraft and Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, Andrew Roberts is the guest and is interviewed by Peter Robinson. Roberts explains why great individuals still shape history—and why Winston Churchill remains history’s ultimate example. Roberts also confronts attacks on Churchill’s record, explains Britain’s decision to fight Hitler in 1940, and discusses tyranny, Brexit, socialism, immigration, Donald Trump, and Britain’s future. Roberts also despairs of the decline of literacy and historical memory, and reveals  both the world leaders he admires today and the source of the title of this podcast: Winston Churchill’s enduring advice: “Study history, for therein lie all the secrets of statecraft.”

Subscribe to Uncommon Knowledge at hoover.org/uk

For most of his life, Charles Murray was a casual agnostic who assumed smart people had left religion behind. Now he’s not so sure. Murray joins Peter Robinson to discuss the evidence that forced him to reconsider God, the soul, and Christianity—from near-death experiences and the mysterious Shroud of Turin to the historical reliability of the Gospels and the Resurrection. It’s the story of an empirically minded skeptic following the evidence wherever it leads—and discovering that faith may be far more reasonable than he once believed.

Subscribe to Uncommon Knowledge at hoover.org/uk

"America was an investment before it was a nation." That idea anchors this conversation between SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and Peter Robinson. Atkins argues that vibrant capital markets are essential to American prosperity and explains why he believes excessive regulation has discouraged companies from going public and innovators from building in the United States. The discussion also covers crypto, disclosure rules, investor protection, and the role of free markets in driving economic growth.

Subscribe to Uncommon Knowledge at hoover.org/uk

Victor Davis Hanson—fifth-generation rancher in California’s San Joaquin Valley, classicist, military historian, Hoover Institution senior fellow, and author of more than two dozen books, including The Case For Trump, The Second World Wars, and The Dying Citizen—joins Peter Robinson to discuss the American founding and its critics.   Drawing on ancient Greece and Rome, Magna Carta, the French Revolution, the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson’s administrative state, and the Trump era, Hanson argues that the genius of the American system lies in its difficult but durable structure: checks and balances, ordered liberty, and a Constitution built for flawed human beings.

Subscribe to Uncommon Knowledge at hoover.org/uk

Renowned historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow Frank Dikötter discusses his new book, Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity. Drawing from tightly controlled Chinese Communist Party archives and Soviet Comintern documents, Dikötter systematically dismantles decades of romanticized Western myths—originally popularized by journalist Edgar Snow—surrounding the rise of Mao Zedong. He details how the Chinese Communist Party was a deeply unpopular, marginal movement that was parameterized and heavily armed by Joseph Stalin rather than gaining organic peasant support, eventually taking the country through the devastation of civil war and the Red Army's strategic handover of Manchuria. Shifting to modern-day geopolitics, the conversation explores how this "enforced amnesia" shapes the systemic constraints of China's current single-party state, analyzing the vulnerabilities behind its economic facade, Xi Jinping's relentless military purges, the critical importance of arming Taiwan, and why the West must counter a regime built on deep-seated political paranoia.

Subscribe to Uncommon Knowledge at hoover.org/uk