Episodes

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, ce...

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 unprofi...

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...

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 stor...

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 ne...

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 ...

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, t...

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 ...

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 differen...

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...

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...

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 t...

Next Monday is Columbus Day. Or should it be Indigenous People’s Day? According to the historian Matthew Restall we should be celebrating both Columbus and Indigenous People on Monday. The author of the timely The Nine Lives ...

Last weekend, the English reggae band UB 40 played in the Orpheum in Los Angeles and included in the set their 1980 song “Tyler”. Tyler is guilty white judges said soWhat right do we got to say it’s not soTyler is guilty whit...

Just be yourself many career coaches tell us. But for the psychologist and entrepreneur Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic , the reverse is true. Don’t Be Yourself Chamorro-Premuzic advises in his new book, arguing that authenticity Is...

What unites America, it used to be said, is a common commitment to “freedom”. But in our disunited times, it's worth remembering that two incompatible versions of freedom have actually divided rather than brought the United ...

We’ve done a couple ( here and here ) of shows recently about the war on cars. But we never discussed the connections, both literal and metaphorical, between the damage of “Big Car” and “Big University” . According to the ten...

One of the most painful lessons of the Kirk assassination is that conservatives are running rings around progressives in political mobilization - especially of young Americans. So how to make the left relevant in America agai...

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” were, of course, the closing words from Polanski’s 1974 movie, Chinatown . But the point of Jeff Chang ’s new biography of Bruce Lee, Water Mirror Echo , is that by 1973, when Lee died, Asia...

Back in 1990, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur called Jim Fruchterman chose purpose over profit. In his new book, Technology for Good , Fruchterman explains how nonprofit leaders like him are using software and data to solve our...

It’s not exactly news that the Nazis didn’t like the Jews. But according to the Rutgers historian Jochen Hellbeck , author of World Enemy Number One , the Nazi obsession went so far as to believe that the Soviet Union was own...

The numbers are mind blowing. According to Roadkill authors Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay , cars have killed more people than both world wars combined. That’s how toxic our relationship with cars has been over the last centu...

It’s the $320,000 question both parents and students are asking themselves: Is that four-year liberal arts degree really worth it? According to Brandeis University President Arthur Levine, it’s a question they should, indeed,...

Some liberals might shake their virtuous heads and tut-tut disapprovingly. But, as the Brookings scholar William Galston argues, Donald Trump’s Old Testament politics of retribution has exposed the limitations of liberal thou...