Behold! The recording of our first ever live event! We were graced by the thoughts, arguments, and non-English accents of Niall Ferguson — economic historian, fellow at Stanford, and author of many books, including Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe — and Martin Gurri — a former media analyst for the CIA and author of T

Robin Hanson is an economics professor who kept running across conundrums of human behavior in his research. Why do we spend so much of our GDP on medicine —  even when studies show that more medicine does not lead to better health outcomes? Why have we spent years perfecting methods of instruction — yet educational in

Eli Lake — host of The Re-Education Podcast, contributing editor to Commentary, and columnist for the New York Sun — is a Neo-Conservative, Neither-Trumper as comfortable talking about the FBI  as the musical genius of Ye. Eli was game to debate ideas, have his opinions challenged, and cover a wide-range of topics — fr

Andrew Heaton, host of The Political Orphanage and our favorite “tepid grab bag” of political punditry, returns to the pod to help us understand the big issues at stake before the midterm elections: abortion, inflation, and culture war stuff. Along the way, Heaton explains why having sex on the hood of a car isn’t alwa

Scientist-turned-historian Peter Turchin is best known for a dire prediction he made in 2010: we were headed for serious unrest, circa 2020. Peter came to this (as-so-happened) accurate prediction by treating the soft science of history like a hard one — what he calls cliodynamics. He and his team quantified indicators

Urbanist, architect, and professor Vishaan Chakrabarti joins us to explain how the f*** cities got so expensive — and, while we’re at it, ugly. Vishaan is both a doer and a thinker — he’s the founder and creative director of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism as well as a writer of books, talker of TEDs, and a coll