Episodes

“It’s happening. The question is whether it’s a dream or a nightmare. This week, OpenAI introduced Pulse , an AI assistant that knows what we want to do and think before we do. That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare welcomes...

“What Trump is doing is not popular”. For the This Old Democracy podcaster and veteran Democratic activist Micah Sifry , that’s the good news of Trump’s sub-40% approval rate. The bad news, Sifry warns, is that the Dems remai...

Jacob Ward warned us. Back in January 2022, the Oakland-based tech journalist published The Loop , a warning about how AI is creating a world without choices. He even came on this show to warn about AI’s threat to humanity. T...

So where exactly is Trump’s America? According to the Brookings fellow Jonathan Rauch , the world’s largest economic, military and cultural power is “half way to Hungary” - the small, landlocked Central European country run b...

Donald Trump made his own controversial case against the United Nations at the UN today, lecturing world leaders that “the UN is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them.” But he was beaten to this ant...

As the prize-winning author of Dreamland and The Least of Us , Sam Quinones is one of the most acclaimed authorities on America’s deadly drug epidemics. So it might seem a little surprising that his follow-up to these two bes...

I suspect both left and right have the Kimmel-Kirk story wrong. Rather than being about free speech versus hate speech, it’s actually the story of the end of the television era and the rise of open internet platforms like You...

Is there anyone who will defend Kamala Harris’ latest debacle, her 107 Days memoir that has irritated prominent Democrats like Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz and Pete Buttigieg? Certainly not the progressive writer David Masciotra , ...

Gutted by AI larceny and glutted by an avalanche of shows, the podcast economy is in deep crisis. So says Marshall Poe, founder of The New Books Network , a publisher of almost 30,000 independent podcasts. Things really are t...

It’s the most curious paradox of today’s digital revolution. While the computers, the internet, smartphones and AI all appear magical, they haven’t actually translated into equally magical economic progress. That, at least, i...

Should being a billionaire be illegal? Or, at least, actively discouraged? That’s the argument at the heart of Ingrid Robeyns ’ intriguing case against extreme wealth, Limitarianism . It’s an argument particularly pertinent i...

If Donald Trump is a broken clock only right twice daily, then one of those truths might be US policy toward Greenland. According to the Australian based geo-strategist Elizabeth Buchanan , Trump is correct to be preoccupied ...

So are millennials really the unluckiest generation? Yes and no. At least according to their unofficial biographer, Charlie Wells, the energetic London based Bloomberg reporter and author of What Happened to Millennials . In...

So why do we humans have such big brains? According to the NYU neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin , it’s because of language. In wanting to talk to one another, Kukushkin argues in his new book, One Hand Clapping, we need to be...

How should we punish criminals? In Impermissible Punishments , the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Judith Resnik , provides a historical narrative of punishment in European and American prisons. Tracing the ...

In a week dominated by the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, Cynthia Miller-Idriss ’ insights as the founding director of American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab ( PERIL ) are particu...

Today’s $3 trillion investment in AI is not only rational and beyond inevitable - it’s “predestined”. At least according to That Was The Week newletter publisher and techno-determinist Keith Teare. Exuberance is not only requ...

David Lesch is a poster child for something. I’m just not sure what. On the one hand, given his personal reinvention from Los Angeles Dodgers first-round draft pick to official biographer of Bashar al Assad, some might consid...

Things aren’t quite as sunny on the environmental front as some recent guests suggest. According to the award winning science writer Peter Brannen , our planet is in an unprecedented crisis. We’re burning 500 million years of...

If Geoffrey Hinton is the Godfather of AI, then Bruce Schneier might be described as the Godfather of Security. A celebrated cryptographer and computer security expert, Schneier’s latest co-authored (with Nathan Sanders) book...

There are few more prolific Americans than the Harvard scholar, activist and athlete Cass Sunstein . The author of almost 30 books (including the best-selling Nudge ) as well as an influential advisor in the Presidencies of B...

Can we humans make it to 2125? According to Gary F. Bengier , author of Journey to 2125 , our species faces three existential threats over the next 100 years. His horsemen of the apocalypse are climate change, nuclear war and...

For anyone who has seen Michael B. Jordan’s excellent new movie Sinners , it’s clear that any sort of deal with the devil - what has become known as the Faustian Bargain - is still very much alive. So relevant, in fact, that ...

How to bring peace to Gaza and Ukraine? Maybe the United Nations can help. Or, sadly, maybe not. But there really was a time, in the second half of the 20th century, when the United Nations could help bring peace to supposedl...