Episodes

Perhaps the real question isn’t whether we can still talk about Israel, but whether we can afford not to. Silence, Daniel Sokatch warns, is complicity — and in both America and Israel, there’s already too much of it. Four years ago, Daniel Sokatch came on the show to discuss Can We Talk About Israel? , a guide for what he called “the curious, the confused, and the conflicted.” Now Sokatch is back with a new edition of his book. As head of the New Israel Fund , the liberal Zionist has spent his c...

As AI radically democratizes the world, we’re all about to become James Bond — or so says longtime spook watcher (and player) Anthony Vinci . In his new book, The Fourth Intelligence Revolution ,, Vinci argues that we must all become spies in order to save America. That’s the future of espionage in an age when, at least according to Vinci, the Chinese might be hacking our data to subvert the United States. This “Vinci Code” borrows heavily from the Cold War playbook — paranoia layered upon paran...

Huawei matters, not just because it’s the world’s largest telecommunications company, but because it reveals so much about contemporary Chinese economics and politics. In House of Huawei , just shortlisted for the FT business book of the year, the Washington Post ’s Eva Dou has written the untold story of this mysterious company that has shaken the world. As much about its reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, as it is about the telco manufacturer, Dou tells the story of one the great economic miracl...

So how smart is the MAGA intelligentsia? According to Laura K. Field — a longtime observer of the American right and author of Furious Minds — the making of the new right has less to do with original intelligence than with timing and marketing. What the professors, philosophers, and trolls of this movement have done so effectively, Field argues, is transform rage into a winning political coalition. It’s not that figures like Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermuele, Peter Thiel or J.D. Vance are saying a...

The Belgian surrealist René Magritte was a smart artist, but could the 20th century futurist really have predicted the end of the Worldwide Web age? Not exactly, of course. But according to That Was The Week publisher, Keith Teare, Magritte’s 1929 painting, “ The Treachery of Images ” (featuring the image of a pipe with the immortal words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”), is a helpful way of thinking about OpenAI’s introduction this week of their new Atlas “browser”. It’s not really a browser in the ...

American intellectuals always seem to believe they are living through the end times. From the fascist poet Ezra Pound in the 1930s to the historian of fascism Timothy Snyder today, they flee America in despair. In Seekers and Partisans ,, Boston University historian David Mayers tells the story of these exiled thinkers between 1935 and 1941 — what he calls “the crisis years.” But crisis… what crisis? Compared to Germany, Russia, or even Western Europe, America’s troubles were relatively modest. ...

How should America choke enemies like Iran, Russia and China? Not on the battlefield—according to Edward Fishman , that’s yesterday’s game. Today, Fishman argues in Chokepoint , America has turned the world economy into its weapon of global domination. In his bestseller, already shortlisted for the FT’s best business books of the year, Fishman reveals that 21st century American power relies on economic warfare. From Treasury Department lawyers weaponizing the dollar-based financial system to Si...

Twenty years ago, the religious scholar Reza Aslan wrote his first book, There is No god but God , about the origins, evolution and future of Islam. It was a huge hit which lead to many other bestselling books on Islam and Christianity. Now Aslan has released a twentieth anniversary version of There is No god But God suggesting that the internet is reinventing Islam in ways that even he couldn’t have imagined back in 2005. The creation of what he calls the “cyber ummah” is destroying traditional...

Last time the anti-monopoly crusader Tim Wu appeared on the show, he was warning broadly about the road to serfdom. But in his new book, The Age of Extraction , Wu gets much more specific. The real road to serfdom, he warns, runs through Silicon Valley. Forget for a moment about surveillance capitalism, Wu suggests, and imagine that the most existential threat to 21st century freedom and prosperity is the “platform capitalism” of tech behemoths like Google and Amazon. These multi-trillion-dollar...

A couple of years ago, I asked the great military historian Richard Overy if World War Two had ended yet. Overy answered inconclusively, suggesting that wars were never really over. And such depressing wisdom is shared by Michael Livingston , a historian of another great war that shattered Europe - the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) between England and France. In his new book, Bloody Crowns , Livingston argues that Joan of Arc, Agincourt and the other now immortal iconography of the Hundred Years...

Two years ago, free speech champion Greg Lukianoff came on the show to express his concerns about conservative students getting cancelled on college campuses. Today, he’s terrified of the President of the United States. The CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ( FIRE ) has spent decades defending free speech against overzealous university administrators. But in Trump’s second term, Lukianoff finds himself fighting a much scarier adversary: a government hostile to free speec...

What the former Finance Minister of Chile Andres Velasco has called the Deliveroo effect is most evident in Poland. Despite unprecedented economic growth and prosperity, Velasco explains, Poles remain miserable. The problem, he suggests, is that we’ve become so used to the magical efficiencies of the digital revolution, that we expect instant miracles in both our political and economic lives. That’s one of the core issues Velasco, now Dean of Public Policy at the London School of Economics, and ...

In the midst of today’s AI hysteria, have we forgotten about blockchain technology and the seductive Web3 promise of decentralization? Robbie Bach , longtime Xbox chief and lieutenant of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, certainly hasn’t. In his new novel, The Blockchain Syndicate , the prescient Bach imagines not only a giant political crypto grift, but also warns about the siren song of Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). No, blockchain might not be as sexy or lucrative as LLMs thes...

Bubble or not? But the debate that’s been raging over the current AI exuberance might be missing the bigger point. Yes, of course, it’s a trillion-dollar speculative bubble built around AI start-ups that mostly remain unprofitable. But as I note in my weekly tech conversation with That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare (who is significantly more optimistic than me), it’s more than just another Silicon Valley bubble. From the Trump family’s multi-trillion dollar cryptocurrency speculation to an ...

What’s the point of going to college? There used to be an obvious answer to this: to acquire the knowledge to get a better job. But in our AI age, when smart machines are already challenging many white collar professions, the point of college is increasingly coming into question—especially given its time and financial commitment. According to Caroline Levander , author of the upcoming InventEd , the American ‘tradition of innovation’ can transform college today. Levander, who serves as Vice Pres...

What unites Rudy Giuliani and Hunter Biden? According to the New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel , they are both on the payroll of corrupt foreign interests. In his new book, Devils’ Advocates, Vogel reveals the hidden story of Giuliani, Biden and the other Washington insiders who sold access to American foreign policy. From the Balkans to Brazil, shadowy foreign players have discovered that the path to influencing Washington runs through well-connected Americans willing to take their money. V...

How to Save the American experiment? That’s the question the Yale historian John Fabian Witt asks this week in both a New York Times f eature and his just published new book, The Radical Fund . Sometimes, Witt suggests, we need what he describes as a “calamity” to recognize and protect the American experiment in democracy. In the 1920s, the historian reminds us, this happened with the emergence of the Garland Fund, a charitable organization set up in 1922 which spawned many of the most profound ...

For financial journalist Elizabeth MacBride , the New American economy is like the old one - only worse. Describing it as the “Frankenstein version of neo-liberalism”, MacBride explains that business has overtaken government to create ever-more-powerful bankers like Larry Fink and Jamie Dimon. But all is not lost. In her upcoming new book, Capital Evolution , co-authored with the VC Seth Levine, MacBride argues that there’s a new consensus taking shape - what she calls “Dynamic Capitalism” - whi...

Churchill described Communist Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. For Pulitzer Prize winning Princeton historian, Paul Starr , America might be the new Soviet Union. It’s a such contradiction, in fact, that he entitles his new book American Contradiction , in an attempt to describe the dominant narrative of “revolution and revenge” from the 1950s to today’s America. But unlike Churchill, who unwrapped the Russian enigma through national interest, Starr finds only more cont...

At 85, the venerable Jeffrey Archer has lived through enough crises to stay calm and carry on whatever the stormy political weather. The best-selling author—who has sold 275 million books and, as a Conservative MP and party chairman, served Margaret Thatcher for 11 years—speaks with the authority of someone who witnessed the Iron Lady’s firm politics up close and personal. But Mrs Thatcher isn’t the only British grande dame who Archer now mourns. His latest William Warwick thriller End Game , s...

History rarely repeats itself, especially speculative bubbles. As it becomes increasingly obvious that today’s AI bubble will dramatically burst, the real question is not when but how. What makes this boom profoundly different from the DotCom crash of the nineties is OpenAI’s attempt to create an AI private monopoly by positioning itself at the center of trillions of dollars worth of self-serving “deals”. Sam Altman wants to simultaneously be the gambler, the slot machine owner, and the house. I...

Tom Brokaw famously described America’s World War II servicemen as the “Greatest Generation”. But according to the historian David Nasaw , the Americans who fought in the Second World War are better understood as The Wounded Generation . His eponymous new book describes the pain and hardships that 16 million veterans endured upon their return home - a tragic story of PTSD, racism and family breakup. Brokaw celebrated the nobility with which these ex-soldiers got on with civilian life without ei...

According to the platform economist Sangeet Paul Choudary , author of Reshuffle , today’s AI hype is a feature rather than a bug in Silicon Valley. It’s a deliberate mechanism to attract capital in an “attention-poor, capital-heavy economy” while distracting from the lack of short-term business results. So who will ultimately win and who will lose in today’s AI arms race? While Choudary predicts power will concentrate around infrastructure players like Nvidia and enterprise workflow companies li...

It’s springtime for charlatans. At least according to Quico Toro, coauthor (with my old friend Moises Naim) of Charlatans , a new screed about how grifters, swindlers and hucksters are bamboozling the media, the markets and the masses. If you listen to Toro, you wouldn’t want to get out of bed in the morning. Everywhere - on our screens, in our churches, even in the White House - there lurk charlatans intent on stealing our souls. As you can tell from my rat-a-tat scepticism, I’m not totally con...