This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live This episode is a bit “meta”: it’s about what it means to keep an open mind, how to trust your conscience, why we should all avoid groupthink, and the phenomenon of “self silencing” — keeping your views to yourself when you’re afraid it might be too costly to say them out loud. But of course, this being Wisdom of Crowds , we link these meta-topics to the politics of the day. Jenara Nerenberg is a journalist, produc...
Apr 26, 2025•44 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Is it possible to move up in this world? Are Americans stuck? Our guest today is Yoni Appelbaum , an American historian and staff writer at The Atlantic magazine. His new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity , explores the various ways the American dream has been stymied — by the consolidation of property and wealth, the abuse of environmental regulations, the ...
Apr 18, 2025•51 min
It’s been an exceptionally crazy week, even by Trump-era standards. So we decided to experiment with the podcast this week by doing a live-stream recording . Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic discuss whether there is a method to Trump’s madness about tariffs and everything else — or whether we have to accept that we are ruled by a Mad King, who himself does not know what he will do from one moment to the next. It’s free for all subscribers, so give it a listen! Required Reading: * Shadi’s interview ...
Apr 11, 2025•45 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live In 2012, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat published Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics , a book about how mainstream American religion was devolving into the prosperity gospel, superstitious cults and other forms of heterodox faith. Thirteen years later, the American religious landscape has changed, and Ross wrote a new book tackling a much more basic question: why you should be religious at all....
Apr 04, 2025•49 min
This week, we tried an experiment: a Substack live event! Matthew Gasda wrote a popular article about Romanticism, his contribution to an ongoing debate . Samuel Kimbriel had a few disagreements with Gasda’s piece. In the spirit of Wisdom of Crowds , we hosted our first-ever live-streamed Substack debate. It went pretty well! We hope to host more. By popular demand, here is a video recording of that debate. Please continue the discussion in the comments below! — Santiago Ramos, executive editor ...
Mar 28, 2025•45 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Friend of Wisdom of Crowds and frequent podcast guest Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale University, and author of several books, including Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2021, Macmillan) and Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023). He is also the author of a recent article saying that no, sorry, the courts cannot sav...
Mar 26, 2025•46 min
Recent events suggest that the balance of power is breaking down. Trump is achieving executive supremacy. In less fancy terms, Trump looks like he’s becoming a dictator. Rule of law might be slipping away. Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic agree about all this. But they disagree about which recent event is the true inflection point. Shadi thinks it’s the Mahmoud Khalil case : it’s a straightforward government action against freedom of speech, intended to have a chilling effect on the population. Dam...
Mar 20, 2025•51 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Mana Afsari is a writer and sometime contributor to Wisdom of Crowds , whose career has taken her from the RAND Corporation, to a job as an assistant to a great American poet, to the position of Research Associate at the Aspen Institute’s Philosophy and Society Initiative. In January, Mana published an essay titled, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History,” a fascinating reported piece about the young men with intel...
Mar 14, 2025•55 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live With the Gaza ceasefire possibly collapsing any minute , we return to the topic of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks and the ensuing war in the Holy Land. Specifically, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic discuss the tension between a belief in universal human rights, on the one hand, and allegiance to one’s ethnic and religious roots, on the other. Joining Shadi and Damir is friend of the pod Peter Beinart , contrib...
Mar 07, 2025•48 min
J. D. Vance delivers a seismic geopolitical speech at the Munich Security Forum. Vance, Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy get into a shouting match before television cameras . Relations between the United States and Europe are deteriorating before our very eyes. In one of our best episodes of the year so far, we invited the great Ivan Krastev to help us understand what is happening. Ivan is one of the brightest minds in Europe — an incisive analyst, historian of ideas, and ever-p...
Mar 01, 2025•1 hr 11 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live “Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is,” goes the Bob Dylan track from 1965. That song was directed at the squares who weren’t yet hip to the Sixties. It sounded foreboding then, and it sounds foreboding now, because something is happening, again — something perhaps as great and consequential as the cultural changes of Dylan’s time. For several years now, people have been speaking about a cultur...
Feb 22, 2025•45 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live “I am done saying, ‘impossible’,” announces Damir Marusic . At least, with regard to what Trump might do or could do in the near future. We are still in the midst of a major shakeup in the administrative state. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is combing through Treasury data and cutting government personnel. Trump is delaying the distribution of federal funds. Trump’s policies have full sup...
Feb 14, 2025•50 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Donald Trump and Elon Musk are moving quickly, so we decided to release this episode a few days early. In a half-week of alarming developments, Trump has announced that the United States might send troops to Gaza to transfer the Palestinian population to Egypt or Jordan, and to aid in reconstructing the country. Elon Musk has become the undertaker of government agencies, the wrecker of the civil service. Through th...
Feb 06, 2025•43 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live “The weird right wing men are coming out to the fore in joy,” announces Shadi Hamid . “They’re strutting more than they did in 2016,” observes Damir Marusic . “The counter-elite is becoming the elite,” says Shadi. “There is gonna be a bloodbath,” says Damir: “They will soon be drinking from a fire hydrant of sewage.” Two weeks have passed since the Trump inauguration, as well as its attendant galas, balls and parti...
Feb 02, 2025•47 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Last week’s episode dealt with the state of the American Right post-election. Today we ask: Where is the American Left going? How will it respond to Trump? “There is a palpable sense of passivity on the Left,” says Damir Marusic . “What I’ve seen is resignation or weird, detached analysis,” says Samuel Kimbriel . Is there more going on than we see? We invited WoC contributor Osita Nwanevu , writer for the New Repub...
Jan 26, 2025•47 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live On the eve of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic sit down to discuss the state of the Right and the Left in American politics. The conversation picks up where the last podcast episode left off, in a discussion about Damir’s apparent rejuvenation in the wake of Trump’s victory. Given that he didn’t vote for Trump — in fact, he didn’t vote for anybody — why is Damir smiling? Shadi sugge...
Jan 19, 2025•45 min
A new year is before us, and soon, a new president will assume office. What does the future have in store? Trump supporters are happy, and his opponents are full of foreboding. Many people also feel that a new era in American history is about to begin — for better or worse. Damir Marusic and Santiago Ramos discuss the nature of this new era. They begin with the question of fear: Are you afraid of the second Trump term? Santiago explains why the Trump phenomenon seemed more frightening in 2016 th...
Jan 13, 2025•1 hr 13 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live For some people, “liberal socialism” sounds like an oxymoron. Liberalism is a political idea that promises to protect individual rights. Socialism, on the other hand, is about collective power: the power of workers to organize and, if not quite seize, at least have a say in the administration of the means of production. Liberalism is about freedom, while socialism is about equality. Not so, argues Matthew McManus ,...
Dec 29, 2024•50 min
Damir Marusic has been reading the Bible this year for the first time. So Christine Emba and Santiago Ramos decided it was the perfect occasion for interrogating him about what he’s learned and what he’s been thinking about. In the ensuing conversation, the three discuss Freemasonry, Protestantism, Catholicism, Predestination and how Christianity is receiving new attention in Silicon Valley. Then, the conversation turns to Christmas traditions, and how the contemplative and party-going sides of ...
Dec 24, 2024•1 hr 14 min
As election data analysis continues to pour in, we can be sure of one thing: a large number of working class votes which traditionally would have gone to the Democrats shifted in 2024 toward the GOP. As CNN reported last week: “Trump ran up large margins among White voters without a college degree who belong to labor unions and also significantly improved among unionized non-White workers without advanced education.” So, did Trump’s victory signal a realignment for the working class? Or was it a...
Dec 19, 2024•1 hr 4 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live In 2024, over 77 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Friend of Wisdom of Crowds Michael Brendan Dougherty, a writer and conservative commentator at the National Review , was one of them. However, MBD (as he is known) did not vote for Trump in 2020 nor in 2016. In fact, he was an early conservative opponent of Trump. In 2016, MBD wrote: “[Trump] is clearly a product of a decadent society, not the scourge or re...
Dec 15, 2024•51 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Last week, President Biden granted his son, Hunter Biden , “a full and unconditional” pardon for any and all offenses from Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 1, 2024. Because Hunter Biden has been a politically charged figure since the first Trump term, and because President Biden repeatedly promised that he would not use his power to protect his son, the presidential pardon was, for many, a strategic and moral mistake — an act...
Dec 08, 2024•44 min
The headlines prove it: we live in turbulent times. Elizabeth Oldfield , our guest this week, recently published a book — Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times — about how to thrive during such a moment. “If we’re heading into (even more) turbulent times,” Elizabeth writes, “I want to be someone who is of use, not overwhelmed and panicking but steady and hopeful, able to contribute to weaving a canopy of trust under which other people can shelter.” Along with being a writer, a form...
Dec 01, 2024•1 hr 24 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live The Declaration of Independence affirms that all human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Yet the Declaration is silent about who this Creator is. Is it the Jewish deity or the Christian God? Or is it the god of the philosophers — the blind watchmaker of the Enlightenment? The Constitution, on the other hand, doesn’t mention the divine at all, except for the phrase, “Year of Our ...
Nov 24, 2024•52 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Official WoC house philosopher Samuel Kimbriel joins Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic to discuss the role that ideas had in the recent elections. Specifically, they focus on whether it was bad ideas or bad political strategy that doomed the Dems. Sam insists that the Democrats failed because liberalism as we understand it has become weak, devoid of ideas and moral persuasion. Liberals, Sam insists, constantly shift fr...
Nov 17, 2024•55 min
Tuesday night’s election has left us with total Republican control of all three branches of government. What does this mean for the immediate future of the Republic? Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic get together to discuss. We are releasing this episode early and completely free for all subscribers. Will Donald Trump become a dictator? What is he capable of? What might be the worst aspects of his second term? Damir discusses mass deportations as the biggest risk. Shadi worries about Trump’s foreign...
Nov 07, 2024•59 min
On October 21 in Washington, DC, Wisdom of Crowds hosted a special live taping of the podcast. WoC editor-at-large Samuel Kimbriel joined WoC contributor and New Republic journalist Osita Nwanevu , along with Georgetown political theory professor Joshua Mitchell , to discuss “Happiness and Misery in America” on the eve of the general elections. Joshua spoke from a more communitarian and conservative point of view, citing the drawbacks that come with the growth of the state: “When you have a regi...
Nov 03, 2024•1 hr 4 min
For the past year, Shadi Hamid has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s war in Gaza — and the Biden administration’s complicity. Now he, like many others, is baffled by the Harris campaign’s disregard and seeming disdain for Muslim and Arab voters. In a week is election day, and he is wrestling with the moral and political implications of the choice at hand. In our pages earlier this week, Shadi and Haroon Moghul debated the merits of voting for Harris or not voting at all. You can read their fu...
Oct 27, 2024•2 hr 38 min
Damir Marusic and WoC executive editor Santiago Ramos get together to discuss Damir’s latest article, “Why We Need Nightmares.” In it, Damir writes about the the binding of Isaac — the chilling story from the Book of Genesis where God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son. Damir is fascinated both by the story and by a Caravaggio painting depicting it. “That’s the stuff ,” he writes. But what is this “stuff”? While searching for an answer to this question, Damir and Santiago cover a lot of ground. T...
Oct 20, 2024•1 hr 2 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He joins Christine Emba and Damir Marusic to discuss his new book, We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality, and the Rise of a New Elite . Don’t worry: the book is not another culture war polemic. Instead, it’s something much more useful: a work of social science that...
Oct 13, 2024•1 hr 2 min
