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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 
