Chloé Valdary is a writer and entrepreneur whose company, Theory of Enchantment, aims to offer a “human approach” to diversity and inclusion training. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Chloé Valdary discuss the flaws of the dominant paradigm in diversity, equity, and inclusion; why many of today’s interpersonal conflicts stem from a larger crisis of meaning; and how to engage in big debates about social issues without becoming a combatant in the culture war. This transcript has been ...
Sep 10, 2022•50 min
Damon Linker is a Senior Fellow with the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center and a former senior correspondent at The Week. He writes the "Eyes on the Right" newsletter. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Damon Linker discuss the odds that a prospective prosecution would be successful; whether it would harm or help Trump’s chances in 2024; and what those of us who want to rescue American democracy can do. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Pleas...
Sep 03, 2022•55 min
Coleman Hughes is the host of Conversations with Coleman. Racialized, his first book, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Coleman Hughes discuss how we can remain vigilant about racial injustice without treating others differently on account of their race; whether reparations for slavery are justified in theory and workable in practice; and how we should measure progress on race. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity...
Aug 13, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Sarah Longwell is a Republican political strategist and publisher of The Bulwark. She is also host of the Bulwark podcast The Focus Group, which presents the broad takeaways from hundreds of hours of voter opinion focus groups across both the country and the political spectrum. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sarah Longwell discuss which candidates from either party have a chance to break out in 2024; why neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris is the Democrats’ best choice; and how De...
Aug 06, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Eboo Patel is the founder of Interfaith America and the author of We Need to Build: Field Notes For Diverse Democracy. Patel also served as an advisor on faith to President Barack Obama. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Eboo Patel discuss why it’s so common for faith-based organizations to serve communities beyond their own; why Patel once embraced critical race theory but eventually moved beyond it; and the vital role of civil society organizations in the fabric of American democra...
Jul 30, 2022•59 min
Corey Brettschneider is a professor of political science at Brown University, where he teaches constitutional law and political theory. He is the author of The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents. He is also editor of the Penguin Liberty series, the most recent installment of which is devoted to great thinkers in the tradition of free speech In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Corey Brettschneider discuss why many Americans feel unable to speak their ...
Jul 23, 2022•58 min
Sergei Guriev is a Russian economist. He serves as provost and professor of economics at the Instituts d'études politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris. From 2016 to 2019, he was the chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He is the co-author, with Daniel Treisman, of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sergei Guriev discuss why Russia’s economy failed to modernize over the last two decades; wh...
Jul 16, 2022•47 min
David French is a columnist for The Atlantic and senior editor at The Dispatch. His books include Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation and The Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore. French received a Bronze Star for service during Operation Iraqi Freedom and, as an attorney, litigated cases surrounding issues of religious and personal liberties. He is a member of Persuasion's board of advisors. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David French discu...
Jul 09, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Graeme Wood is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a lecturer in political science at Yale University. He is the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Graeme Wood discuss why the January 6th insurrection does not resemble other coups; his experience interviewing Mohammed bin Salman and being Richard Spencer's middle school lab partner; and the need for general interest journalists whose curiosity is not constrained by...
Jul 02, 2022•57 min
Olúfẹmi Táíwò is a philosopher and an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He is the author of Reconsidering Reparations, and his latest book is Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Olúfẹmi Táíwò discuss the difference between identifying the wrongs of the past and charting a road for progress, why we shouldn’t shy away from pursuing difficult political goals, and how we can better ...
Jun 25, 2022•1 hr
Ian Bremmer, a renowned political scientist, is President and Founder of the Eurasia Group and GZERO Media. His latest book is The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats—and Our Response—Will Change the World. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ian Bremmer discuss why Russia’s war on Ukraine has become more difficult to follow, the opportunities that crises offer for global cooperation, and how today's problems are shaping the institutions of tomorrow. This transcript has been condensed a...
Jun 18, 2022•1 hr 18 min
Yalda Hakim is a BBC World News correspondent and broadcaster. Born in Afghanistan and raised in Australia, Hakim has reported from Afghanistan for many years, often dealing directly with the Taliban. In recent months, she has also reported from western Ukraine. Her foundation offers academic and professional opportunities to Afghan girls. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Yalda Hakim discuss the dramatic changes the Afghan people have felt since the Taliban’s return to power, the pa...
Jun 11, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Sam Koppelman is a Democratic strategist who served as director of surrogate speechwriting on the Biden campaign. He is the author, with former Attorney General Eric Holder, of Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote—a History, a Crisis, a Plan. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sam Koppelman discuss the history of voting rights, how and whether to reform institutions from the electoral college to primary elections, and why Democrats are in such a weak...
Jun 04, 2022•1 hr 8 min
Robert P. George is an American legal scholar and political philosopher. The McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, George is considered one of the foremost conservative intellectuals in America, and advocates a theory of natural law consistent with Catholic belief. With Cornel West, he authored a statement on “Truth Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression.” In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Robert P. George discuss the political philosophy of...
May 28, 2022•1 hr 10 min
Adolph Reed, Jr. is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written widely about race and class and is the author, most recently, of The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, which presents a granular look at the reality of life as he and others experienced it under Jim Crow. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Adolph Reed, Jr. discuss how the mainstream American conception of race has developed since the early 20th century, why and how much of t...
May 21, 2022•58 min
Thomas Piketty is one of the foremost economists in the world, renowned for his work on wealth concentration and inequality. The author of the bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, his latest book, A Brief History of Equality, focuses on the ways in which the world has become more equal over the course of the last centuries. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Thomas Piketty discuss why inequality has increased within rich countries over the course of the last few decades, h...
May 14, 2022•1 hr 15 min
David Wallace-Wells is one of the foremost journalists covering climate change. A writer at The New York Times and a columnist at The New York Times Magazine, Wallace-Wells is the author of the best-selling book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. His New York Magazine article of the same name was the most read in the magazine’s history. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Wallace-Wells discuss why the worst scenarios for the future of climate outcomes have become less l...
May 07, 2022•1 hr 8 min
One of the world’s most influential social psychologists, a professor of ethical leadership at NYU's Stern School of Business, and a member of Persuasion's Board of Advisors, Jonathan Haidt is the author of The Righteous Mind and, with Greg Lukianoff, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind. Haidt recently wrote a much-read feature in The Atlantic entitled “After Babel.” In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jonathan Haidt discuss how we can make social media less toxic, what poli...
Apr 30, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Yascha Mounk is a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and the founder of Persuasion. His new book, The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, was published this week. In this week’s conversation, Ravi Gupta and Yascha Mounk discuss why it is so hard to build diverse democracies, how we can overcome the deeply human instinct to discriminate against those unlike ourselves, an...
Apr 23, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University, where he was Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum from 2008 to 2018. He is the author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. In this week’s conversation, Roosevelt Montás and Yascha Mounk discuss how a copy of Plato he found atop a pile of trash as a child unlocked his future, the drawbacks of exclusively teaching material that is "cul...
Apr 16, 2022•51 min
Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He has written widely about race and its effect on American society and the law. In this week’s conversation, Randall Kennedy and Yascha Mounk discuss how racism in American life has changed and the ways in which it hasn’t, why we should move towards a more fluid sense of individual identity, and why he remains optimistic about America. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Please do list...
Apr 09, 2022•1 hr 7 min
T. M. Scanlon, one of the world's preeminent moral philosophers, was Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard University until his retirement. In his seminal work, What We Owe to Each Other, Scanlon gives a liberal account of how to reason through what it takes to act justly in matters of morality as well as politics. In this week’s conversation, T. M. Scanlon and Yascha Mounk discuss the true meaning of tolerance, how to decide whether an action is mor...
Apr 02, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Senior Fellow of the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. In her books - most notably Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe she has chronicled the terrible human costs of past attempts by Russia to dominate countries in Central and Eastern Europe. In this week’s conversation, Anne Applebaum and Yascha Mounk discuss the developing ideology of "Putinism," what it would look like for Ukrai...
Mar 26, 2022•54 min
Radosław Sikorski is a Polish politician and journalist who is currently a Member of the European Parliament. He served as Defense Minister of Poland from 2005 to 2007, and as Foreign Minister from 2007 to 2014. In this week’s conversation, Radosław Sikorski and Yascha Mounk discuss whether a unified Europe could play a real geopolitical role on the world stage in the future, reasons to be skeptical of the realist view that NATO or the West is to blame for the war, and the role of sanctioning Ru...
Mar 19, 2022•49 min
Yevgenia Albats is a Russian journalist, and editor-in-chief and CEO of the popular Russian independent magazine The New Times. The magazine has now been blocked by government censors for reporting on the war in Ukraine. Until last week, when the station was taken off the air, Albats was also host of a long-running radio show on Ekho Moskvy. The author of The State Within a State: The KGB and its Hold on Russia–Past, Present, and Future, she is a member of the Persuasion board of advisors. In th...
Mar 12, 2022•52 min
Lea Ypi is a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics. She is the author of Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, about growing up in Albania, Europe’s last Stalinist outpost, and the political convulsions that followed its transition to liberal capitalism. In this week’s conversation, Lea Ypi and Yascha Mounk discuss childhood in the shadow of totalitarianism, the perils and pitfalls of post-communist states’ rapid transition towards capitalism, and how states can ma...
Mar 05, 2022•1 hr 7 min
George Packer is a journalist, author, playwright, and a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he recently published a piece on Ukraine's meaning for the liberal world and American interests. In his books, from The Unwinding to Our Man, he has chronicled the disintegration of America’s social fabric and the polarization of its politics. His latest book is Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and George Packer discuss the dire choices facing the U...
Mar 01, 2022•1 hr
Moisés Naím is a Distinguished Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of the Persuasion board of advisors. He has served as Minister of Trade and Industry for Venezuela, Executive Director of the World Bank, and editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine. His latest book is The Revenge of Power. In this week’s conversation, Moisés Naím and Yascha Mounk discuss how authoritarian powers have banded together to respond to the challenges of technology and decentralizat...
Feb 19, 2022•52 min
Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption is a British judge, author and historian. He is a former Justice of the United Kingdom Supreme Court and a frequent public commentator. In this week’s conversation, Jonathan Sumption and Yascha Mounk discuss the prospects for democracy in the English-speaking world, the value of judicial oversight, and the power of strong political conventions. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good F...
Feb 12, 2022•52 min
Gerald Knaus is a social scientist and chairman of the European Stability Initiative. An expert on asylum and migration policy, he has been one of the most influential voices in reshaping Europe's refugee system since the 2015 crisis. In this week’s conversation, Gerald Knaus and Yascha Mounk discuss the history of asylum; how to develop a more humane system of migration; and how the European Union can fight democratic backsliding in its member states. This transcript has been condensed and ligh...
Feb 05, 2022•57 min
