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•1 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
An emergency pod: “War, or something resembling war, is breaking out in the Middle East,” says Shadi Hamid . A year after the October 7 massacre, Israel has all but destroyed Hamas. Last month, it killed Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, thus decapitating that terrorist organization. This week, it launched an invasion of southern Lebanon. In retaliation, Iran — the longtime backer of Hezbollah — has lobbed a barrage of ballistic missiles into Israel. We decided to release the podcast early th...
Oct 03, 2024•1 hr 21 min
What is human dignity? Is it a real thing, or merely an idea? If it’s real, then where does it come from? And why do only human beings have dignity? What about other intelligent beings? What about the octopus? These are only some of the many questions that Damir Marusic and Santiago Ramos talk about in a slow-burn, philosophical episode of Wisdom of Crowds . Because Santiago is executive editor of Wisdom of Crowds , Damir wants to learn more about his bedrock convictions. He cross-examines Santi...
Sep 29, 2024•1 hr 12 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live How does order emerge from anarchy? How do human beings create institutions? Can big problems — like climate change, income inequality, or AI alignment — find solutions “from below,” through collective action, rather than “from above,” i.e., imposed by regulatory bodies? Today’s guest is a fascinating economist. Professor Paul Dragoș Aligică is a senior research fellow at the Program for Advanced Study in Philosoph...
Sep 15, 2024•1 hr 3 min
A very special episode this week, completely free for all listeners. The world-famous philosopher Charles Taylor joins Wisdom of Crowds editors Samuel Kimbriel and Santiago Ramos for a conversation about his new book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment . Professor Taylor has spent a long and fruitful career trying to understand the basic questions of modern life. What does it mean to be a modern person? How do we form our sense of identity? How do we relate to the sacred? Wh...
Sep 07, 2024•1 hr 3 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live The Harris-Walz campaign is having a moment. It is polling well . Harris made a good speech at the Democratic National Convention. The Democratic Convention as a whole got better TV ratings than the Republican one. Harris’s campaign is all about joy . Even Shadi’s parents are feeling the vibes (and using the word, “vibes,” probably for the first time). But Shadi and Damir aren’t feeling it. No joy. No vibes. No exc...
Aug 30, 2024•48 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Elon Musk just started tweeting about the Iliad. But our guest, Twitter’s Audrey Horne , has been talking about Homer with Samuel Kimbriel and Damir Marusic for at least two weeks now — well before Elon turned his attention to these kinds of things. We figured this was an excuse to share some of the offline chatter with the Crowd. If Elon’s interested in it, it has to be relevant, right? Christians and Greeks both ...
Aug 25, 2024•59 min
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” goes the famous line from Joan Didion — but is it worth it? How do narratives help us make sense of our lives, and how might they be misleading? Advertisements these days are full of them, but can a company really have a story of its own? And could having “ main character energy ” actually indicate a fundamental philosophical problem? In this special live recording from the Lyceum Movement ’s Tallgrass Ideas Festival in Des Moines, Iowa, Sam was join...
Aug 17, 2024•1 hr 4 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live The international drop in baby-making is currently in the headlines, and it’s been constant preoccupation for us at Wisdom of Crowds (including in our latest edition of CrowdSource ). It concerns us not only because of the possible long-term economic consequences but also because a people’s inability — or lack of desire — to reproduce itself might be the consequence of serious moral or social problems. Enter philos...
Aug 09, 2024•1 hr 7 min
It’s a dog days of summer special! This week, we are releasing a live interview from last April, that’s more timely today than when it was first recorded. Dictators and their sychophants; democracy imperiled by foreign policy misadventures. Sound familiar? For almost a century, American intellectuals of different political stripes have been in thrall to dictators. They’ve either projected utopian ideals on to them, or been seduced by their charisma and alleged effectiveness. The story of left wi...
Aug 03, 2024•1 hr 8 min
That was fast. Just days after Joe Biden chose to remove himself from the presidential ticket, Kamala Harris is the unquestioned candidate of the Democratic Party. But was this a democratic process? Or was Biden bullied out of the ticket, and Harris shoehorned into it, without any attention paid to the peoples’ wishes? And who are “the people,” anyway? Joining us to debate these questions is the author Freddie deBoer — one of the most influential and provocative leftist thinkers writing today. F...
Jul 27, 2024•1 hr 22 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Greetings, dear Listeners! We are releasing our podcast early this week. We figured that an episode about the unity of the American people would sound good right about now, given the circumstances. Damir’s Tuesday Note — which will respond to a Provocation — will be published this coming Thursday. What holds the United States together? Three hundred million people of different races, religions, and histories, sprea...
Jul 16, 2024•50 min
Welcome to summer, dear crowd! This week, we have a live episode for you — live from the Aspen Ideas Festival. Sam Kimbriel recorded this episode with Tamar Gendler , a Dean and Philosophy professor at Yale University, and Erin McFee , a Future Leaders Fellow at the Latin America and Caribbean Centre in the London School of Economics. The subject, very broadly, is forgiveness . Is it good or bad? Do we know what it means? Can one forgive wrongly? And could forgiving foreclose the possibility of ...
Jul 13, 2024•52 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live On July 1, the Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump, as President of the United States, enjoys “absolute” immunity for “his core constitutional powers,” but that he “enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does if official.” The ruling has an obvious immediate impact on the upcoming presidential elections. But it also suggests far-reaching questions about political sovereignty,...
Jul 05, 2024•45 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live What happened on Thursday night was a debacle for Joe Biden and an embarrassment for the nation. About this, our three hosts — Christine, Damir and Shadi — all agree. And they are all angry about it. But who is to blame? Biden himself? The DNC? The media? Trump? All of us? Shadi, Damir, and Christine work through their post-debate anguish and anger — and try to figure out who is responsible for the predicament that...
Jun 29, 2024•45 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live You might have noticed that Wisdom of Crowds got a facelift this week. We touched up our homepage and added two new features: CrowdSource and Provocations (read more about both here ). In this spirit of renewal and relaunch, on the podcast we are getting back to our bread and butter with a classic Shadi and Damir episode. This week’s episode deals with the virtues of resignation. Is giving up ever the right choice ...
Jun 22, 2024•40 min
Morality and war. Two words that seem to have nothing to do with each other. Yet as recent events have shown, our conscience pricks us every time we hear news of an atrocity, smarts at every war and rumor of war. Can a war ever be just? Does talk about morality in the conduct of war make any sense? Joining Shadi and Damir to discuss this heady topic is Phil Klay, a novelist and essayist whose first book, the short story collection Redeployment , won the National Book Award in 2014. An Iraq War v...
Jun 15, 2024•1 hr 7 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live This week, Wisdom of Crowds hosts a fluid discussion about violence and sex in movies, where the “shoulds” of life come from, and whether liberal values can be based on something other than religion. The discussion is more meditative than contentious, an exploration prompted by recent pop culture hits and a probing comment from the Crowd. Violence is entertaining. That’s the conclusion that Damir draws after watchi...
Jun 07, 2024•1 hr 2 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Conservatives often argue that liberalism is not a neutral political system. Liberalism, they say, has values of its own. It sneakily promotes these values as normative, and even good, for the citizens of liberal societies — whether those citizens like it or not. The philosopher and self-proclaimed liberal Alexandre Lefebvre believes that, empirically speaking, this conservative critique is pretty much true. As the...
May 31, 2024•51 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live The war in Gaza is dividing Israeli opinion, but not along the same lines that it divides American opinion. What are Israeli priorities? How important is the return of hostages relative to total victory? What is Netanyahu thinking? What is the Israeli Left thinking? Is there an anti-war movement in Israel? Do American categories make any sense within the Israeli political context? Washington Post political columnis...
May 24, 2024•54 min
What does justice mean for animals? Is justice for animals the same as justice for human beings? Why should we care more about the rights of animals when the rights of humans are so often neglected? Martha Nussbaum teaches philosophy, ethics, and law at the University of Chicago, and is one of the most influential and cited philosophers of our time. She’s written dozens of books on Greek philosophy, the importance of emotions in politics, justice, feminism, and many other topics. She joins the p...
May 17, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Do Arab Americans support pro-Palestine protests because of identity politics? What about American Jewish support for Israel? Are both groups being “tribal” or are they fighting for universal values — as they understand them? Recently, policy guru and Ur-Blogger Matt Yglesias pointed out that some of the political thinkers who, just a couple years ago, were aligned in opposition to identity politics today find themselves on opposite sides over Palestine. One of the names Matt mentioned was our o...
May 10, 2024•1 hr 22 min
