Eccentric economist and brilliant thinker Tyler Cowen answers our questions about the confusing state of the economy. We talk about: inflation, the stock market, “The Great Resignation”, billionaires, income inequality, crypto, Texas vs San Francisco, the metaverse, good food, working remotely, what states like Virginia swinging back toward the right might mean for national politics and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dec 03, 2021•46 min
Desmond Shum knows well the cost of doing business in China. Born to a humble family that was marginalized during the Cultural Revolution, he became a wildly successful entrepreneur, along with his ex-wife Whitney, to the tune of billions of dollars. But just as quickly as the Chinese Communist Party elite helped enrich the couple, it tore them down. In 2017, Whitney disappeared, not to be seen or heard from for four years. She reemerged only on the eve of Desmond’s new book, Red Roulette. If th...
Dec 01, 2021•1 hr 12 min
If your family is anything like mine, Thanksgiving is an opportunity to take a break from work, to bask in one others’ presence, and to fight savagely over the hottest political issues of the day. And nothing is more contentious than Covid: mask policies; vaccine mandates; whether kids should be confined to the backyard; and, most urgently, whether we can safely--and finally--call time on the pandemic. To answer those questions and more, I called up Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins Sch...
Nov 23, 2021•1 hr 5 min
Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse in the last days of August 2020: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020 he had done just that: killing two peaceful protes...
Nov 17, 2021•1 hr
First, Andrew Yang ran for President, and he could barely get mainstream media’s attention. Then, he ran for Mayor of New York City, and suddenly, his every move was being scrutinized. Following those two failed campaigns Andrew announced that he was leaving the Democratic Party altogether and announced the formation of a new third party, Forward, this past October. Today, a conversation on how, and why, Yang plans to take on the two-party system, and what last week’s elections tell us about the...
Nov 10, 2021•1 hr 20 min
It’s been three years since the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, the most lethal attack on Jews on U.S. soil. That day was, for me, as it was for so many others, a watershed event. The country I knew was changing. While anti-semitic incidents in America had been climbing for a few years, this was different. Jews were afraid, and no longer felt safe. After Pittsburgh, there were countless other disturbing incidents: from a shooter at a kosher supermarket in New Jersey to a man with a machete at a...
Nov 07, 2021•55 min
"Defund the police" or "healthy at every size" or "marriage is just an oppressive institution of the patriarchy" - these are just a few of the ideas that are becoming common doctrine among American elites. And Rob Henderson has described these new orthodoxies as “Luxury Beliefs.” He says, much like second homes on the beach or Bentleys, luxury beliefs are thoughts that can only be afforded by people whose wealth shields them from the very harm those beliefs can cause to the rest of us. Henderson...
Nov 04, 2021•1 hr
If you’ve just heard of the word “TERF” (it stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) it was probably because of Dave Chapelle’s new Netflix special, “The Closer.” The comedian declared himself “Team TERF.” But what does that really mean? Julie Bindel would know. She has been physically attacked; her work has been banned; and she’s been disinvited from lectures all because of the accusation that she is a TERF. Bindel isn’t new to the culture wars. The self-proclaimed radical feminist has b...
Oct 28, 2021•2 hr 30 min
Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist, a father of four, an author . . . and also someone who lives with a tremendous amount of pain. Ross has been battling chronic Lyme disease since 2015. It's a disease that doesn’t officially exist, but it managed to bring this otherwise healthy man to his knees. This is a conversation about something we all have or will experience: pain. How pain can distort, but also how it can clarify and humanize. In Ross's telling, pain has proven a deeply powerful ...
Oct 19, 2021•2 hr 32 min
Last week, Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, confirmed what we already felt; that big tech platform’s algorithms are manipulating our sense of reality, and ourselves, and in doing so enriching themselves. Jaron Lanier, the technologist, philosopher, and virtual reality pioneer has been warning us about the dangers of the internet for years. Today, a conversation with Jaron, from his home in California, about the dangers of groupthink, digital maoism, ideology sluts, censorship, capital...
Oct 13, 2021•1 hr 22 min
The most honest thing I’ve ever read about abortion is by Caitlin Flanagan. It’s called “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate: Why We Need to Face the Best Argument From the Other Side.” You can read it here. On today’s episode, and in light of the new law in Texas, which effectively bans abortion, a conversation with my friend Caitlin. We talk about the best arguments on both sides of this issue, the reality of life before Roe v. Wade, the state of feminism and more. Read all of Caitlin’s work...
Oct 06, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Four decades ago, Glenn C. Loury became the first tenured black professor of economics in Harvard’s history. Ever since then, he has made waves for his willingness to buck the elite intellectual establishment; for his iconoclastic ideas about race and inequality; and for his incisive cultural criticism. He is a man of seeming contradictions: he rails against the divisiveness of woke politics from his post at Brown University, one of America’s most left wing campuses. He worries about what the de...
Sep 29, 2021•2 hr 42 min
So much of the conversation about Covid-19 is angry and full of finger-pointing. Dr. Vinay Prasad has consistently been able to cut through the noise, the confusion, and the endless bickering. He does this by consistently avoiding the blame game and following the data wherever it leads. Dr. Prasad is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco. His writing, videos and tweets have been among my most reliable sources for ...
Sep 22, 2021•2 hr 34 min
It’s been a month since the fall of Afghanistan. And Black Hawk helicopters and Humvees aren’t the only things we left behind. Trapped in a country now controlled by the Taliban are hundreds of thousands of America’s Afghan allies. These are the interpreters, advisers and others who worked with the U.S. government and with American organizations--and who we promised we would never abandon. Their chance at freedom — at life — now relies on normal Americans who are determined to right what the Whi...
Sep 17, 2021•53 min
Peter Boghossian is the first one to tell you: he's no victim of cancel culture. The philosophy professor has long had a taste for stoking debate, questioning orthodoxies, and exposing the brokenness of an academic system that values identity-based grievances over scholarship. He did that, in part, by writing phony papers like "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct" and getting them published by respected, peer-reviewed journals. That project and others painted a target on Peter’s back on P...
Sep 10, 2021•1 hr 17 min
Abigail Shrier is a lawyer, a reporter and author of Irreversible Damage. One way to describe her book would be: controversial. She has been accused of spreading misinformation by GLAAD. A prominent ACLU lawyer called for her book to be banned. A favorable review of the book in Science-Based Medicine ignited an online mob, which led to the journal disappearing that first review and replacing it with a negative one. Amazon and Target have also been pressured to stop carrying Shrier's book. But it...
Sep 08, 2021•56 min
Between the catastrophic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, an endless pandemic, a broken education system, and competent leaders nowhere in sight, it can feel like America is in a constant state of meltdown. On today's episode, renowned historian Niall Ferguson answers the big questions: how did we get here? Is American decline inevitable? And if not, what can be done to renew the culture and the country? Niall is the author of nearly 20 books. His latest is: "Doom: The Politics of Catastrop...
Sep 01, 2021•1 hr 20 min
In Part II, a diagnosis of the global ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party with Josh Rogin. Josh explains how U.S policy mistakes in the 20th century handed more power to China in the 21st, how the Chinese government wields power over Big Tech, Hollywood, and higher education on U.S. soil, and whether we’re headed for another Cold War. “The global scale of the China challenge is not just about China’s rise, it’s not just about the genocide,” says Josh, “It’s about what kind of world we want ...
Aug 25, 2021•54 min
When the pandemic began eighteen months ago, anyone who dared suggest that the virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China, was dismissed as a crank, or otherwise accused of racism, xenophobia, and refusing to “believe science.” Why was this highly plausible theory unsayable? On today’s podcast, Josh Rogin, a foreign policy columnist for the Washington Post and author of “Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century” answers that question. He makes the powerful case that i...
Aug 23, 2021•1 hr 19 min
How did this happen? How did we spend 20 years, over 2 trillion dollars and over 2,000 American lives to wind up losing Afghanistan to the Taliban in under two weeks? Was the mission doomed from the start? Was it political incompetence? Or was it the fault of the military brass who refused to be honest about what it would take to win? Today, a frank and wide-ranging conversation with H.R. McMaster, former National Security Advisor and three-star general. We talk about Obama, Trump, Biden; the co...
Aug 19, 2021•1 hr 17 min
For several months, the journalist Katie Herzog has been talking to some of the country's top doctors and professors—not about COVID, or vaccines—but about a new, creeping orthodoxy that’s taken over the hospitals and medical schools where they work. Those doctors say that whole areas of research are off-limits. They say that top physicians are treating patients based on their race. That professors are apologizing for saying ‘male’ and ‘female’ and that students are policing teachers. And in mor...
Aug 11, 2021•1 hr 10 min
Amy Cooper was not the internet’s first “Karen” — the pejorative used for a demanding, entitled white woman. But as the Central Park dog walker who went viral for calling the police on a black birdwatcher last year, she quickly became the paragon of the archetype. Within 24 hours, Amy Cooper had been doxxed, fired from her job, and surrendered her dog. She wound up fleeing the country. She hasn’t spoken publicly since last summer. Until now. In a wide-ranging interview with Kmele Foster, friend ...
Aug 03, 2021•1 hr 23 min
Why are men the way they are? Are they naturally more aggressive? And is it fair for transwomen to compete in sports separated by sex? Is it possible to overcome our animal instincts? And why has it gotten so hard to ask these questions out loud? To admit that there are any differences between men and women? On today’s episode, a deep dive into these subjects and more with Carole Hooven, the author of “‘T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us." The book was named ...
Jul 29, 2021•1 hr 23 min
Maud Maron is the picture of a passionate progressive. She was a Planned Parenthood escort; a research assistant for a Black Panther leader; a Bernie voter; a public school parent; and, most significantly, a public defender who worked for many years at Legal Aid. But fellow progressives, including her colleagues at Legal Aid, now insist that Maud is racist, that she supports segregation, that she is, despite all appearances to the contrary, a modern version of Bull Connor. How did this happen? W...
Jul 26, 2021•1 hr 12 min
One year after her resignation from the New York Times, Bari sits down with author (and America's most famous Stoic) Ryan Holiday to talk about how the media broke and who is to blame for breaking it. Holiday knows about fake news: In his 2012 bestseller, “Trust Me, I'm Lying,” he explains how he manipulated the media on behalf of himself and his clients, including Tucker Max and Dov Charney of American Apparel. Holiday is also the author of "Conspiracy," the story of how billionaire Peter Thiel...
Jul 20, 2021•2 hr 47 min
All of a sudden, the phrase "Critical Race Theory" seems like it's everywhere. If you are confused by the phrase, or wonder how everyone seems to have an opinion about it, you aren't alone. Despite what some in the mainstream media insist, you do not need a PhD or a law degree to understand this subject. Today, we clear up what it means. We explain why parents across the country are showing up at school board meetings to voice their opposition to it. And we host a debate between Chris Rufo and D...
Jul 13, 2021•1 hr 29 min
A recent study from the American Medical Association found that one-third of men between the ages of 18 to 24 reported having no sex at all in the previous year — and that was before the COVID lockdowns. Meantime, the marriage rate and the birth rate are both at historic lows. What’s at a historic high is online porn. In 2019, more than five billion hours of porn were watched on Pornhub alone. That’s 500 thousand years worth of time. My guest today has been at the forefront of this change. Meet ...
Jul 07, 2021•1 hr 5 min
For 14 years, Winston Marshall was the banjo player and lead guitarist of the massively successful band Mumford & Sons. Last week, following a viral incident over a tweet, he quit the band: "I could remain and continue to self-censor but it will erode my sense of integrity. Gnaw my conscience. I’ve already felt that beginning." On today's episode, Winston speaks exclusively with Bari about why he chose to walk away from the band he loved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adch...
Jul 01, 2021•1 hr 20 min
For 26 years, the swash-buckling, pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily was a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party. This week, after its offices were ransacked, its founder was jailed ,and five of its executives were arrested, it printed its very last edition. The paper's death marks the death of Hong Kong's free press.We hear from a dogged young reporter who takes us inside the newsroom to the last days of Apple Daily, and hear her explain why what is happening to her and her colleagues...
Jun 27, 2021•34 min
Why does every institution feel so broken? Why would newspapers sacrifice their credibility to suppress something like the lab leak theory? Why does it feel like small differences of opinion so quickly turn into hate? Martin Gurri saw it all coming. The CIA analyst predicted Trump, Brexit, WallStreetBets, BLM, the Yellow vests, and believes all of these movements are connected by a single force: THE INTERNET. The printing press transformed humanity in the 1400s, but Gurri argues that we are now ...
Jun 16, 2021•1 hr 5 min
