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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Last December, the highest court in the State of Colorado ruled that Donald Trump’s involvement with January 6 disqualified him from holding the office of president. On May 4, the Supreme Court voted unanimously to overturn this decision, clearing the way for Trump to appear on the ballot in all fifty states. Naturally, at Wisdom of Crowds these events got us thinking about the big questions. When it comes to eligi...
May 05, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Pro-Palestine protests have spread to college campuses across the country. Our social media feeds are flooded with images of chanting students and clashes with police. Meanwhile, Congress has passed a bill to deliver more aid to Israel, and there’s signs that the IDF is about to move on Rafah. In this episode, Shadi explores what it means to stand in solidarity with the protests, while Damir teases out their effect...
Apr 27, 2024•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s episode is a special collaboration with The Disagreement , a new platform that aims to “celebrate and normalize healthy disagreement.” ( Check them out! ) Wisdom of Crowds is 100% behind that mission statement, and so it was natural for us to agree to record an episode together. Fans of Wisdom of Crowds will know that Shadi has recently completed a book about American power, tentatively titled, “On Power.” Fans will also know that he debated the socialist writer Dan Bessner of the Am...
Apr 19, 2024•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Christine and Damir kick things off by discussing a memoir about the fall of Communism in Albania. Damir reflects on his own post-Communist background, and ponders why Communist nostalgia affects only some countries, while others are not looking back. He wonders whether Christine is becoming a Communist herself after reading her essay about “Limitarianism,” a school of political thought that favors a cap on extreme...
Apr 12, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live This week’s podcast is a recording of a live event. Rachel M. Cohen, a senior policy reporter for Vox , recently published an essay where she asks: “To our generation, being a mom looks thankless, exhausting, and lonely. Can we change the story?” As listeners know, this question speaks right to the heart of Wisdom of Crowds . Christine and Shadi invited Rachel to discuss her piece before a live audience in Washingt...
Apr 06, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast America is badly polarized. It’s a fact so pervasively acknowledged that pointing it out starts to feel like saying the sky is blue. Unlike a blue sky, however, growing polarization in America presents a difficult challenge. Because America is both incredibly diverse and a vibrant democracy, polarization starts to eat away at our politics. Many attempts have been made to deal with polarization. A lot of it has to do with putting people with diverging perspectives face-to-face in an attempt to tr...
Mar 30, 2024•1 hr 27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Editor’s note: We haven’t done an episode quite like this before. I absolutely loved this conversation with the novelist Jordan Castro, one of the most exciting young American authors writing today. Because it was such a rich conversation, we’re leaving out the paywall so that everyone can have a listen. —Shadi Hamid, co-founder, Wisdom of Crowds What’s it actually like to be a novelist? And how does literary success—and some amount of fame and notoriety—change how people think of you? Special g...
Mar 22, 2024•2 hr 49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live In a late-night confab, Damir and Sam explore the meaning of experiences of wonder, which they each have written about for Wisdom of Crowds . For Sam, these unique experiences are the foundation for his beliefs about the nature of the world and human life. Damir, on the other hand, does not believe that the experience of wonder necessarily leads to metaphysical questions. This freewheeling, stay-up-all-night fever ...
Mar 15, 2024•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live A recently-published memoir making headlines suggests a trend: Polyamory is going mainstream among high-status Americans. Culture critic and environmental studies professor Tyler Austin Harper joins Christine and Shadi to make sense of this fad, and explain why it’s both an upper-class luxury and a raw deal. Along the way they discuss happiness, self-expression, race, love, self-immolation, parenting, and a better ...
Mar 02, 2024•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Christine and Damir discuss two personal essays from New York magazine that went viral last week. The first deals with divorce, the second with getting scammed. A flabbergasted Damir can’t believe they were published; he wonders if anyone outside New York would care to read them. Christine finds ironic wisdom buried in both essays. The conversation ends on a high note, with Christine explaining how one of the essay...
Feb 23, 2024•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Jason Blakely of Pepperdine University joins Shadi and Damir to discuss his new book, Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life . A professor of political science, Jason claims that everyone has an ideology. The point is to be aware of it, and to remember that there’s always more to reality than your ideology can explain. Damir doesn’t buy it. The quest for power, he thinks, is what ultimately drives pol...
Feb 16, 2024•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Our brand new Executive Editor, Santiago Ramos, joins Shadi and Damir to discuss his first-ever essay for Wisdom of Crowds , “Empathy for the Devil.” The essay is about the need for cognitive empathy in politics. But Damir wants to discuss something slightly different: Whether “the Good,” as a category, is something real, out in the world, or whether it is completely contingent on tribal allegiances. Santiago comes...
Feb 09, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Are ideas overrated? Shadi’s recent column (and controversial tweet) exploring the reasons behind Trump’s popularity launches a discussion about what exactly drives politics. Are politicians motivated by winning more than ideology? Do voters respond to strong personalities, rather than policies and promises? As expected, Damir makes a case for “materialism” over ideas. Shadi isn’t totally convinced. Required Readin...
Feb 02, 2024•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Three months into the Israel-Gaza war, Shadi, Damir, and Sam get philosophical about morality and international relations. Is it realistic to expect states to behave morally? Is the Western concern for human rights real? Or is it merely a mask for self-interest and imperial rule? The American attitude toward the war has caused Shadi to doubt his conviction in the goodness of American power. Damir thinks he sees an ...
Jan 26, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Longtime member of the Crowd and WoC contributor Tom Barson once called episodes when Shadi and Damir just chew over stuff “train wrecks”. (He meant it in an affectionate way — we think.) Well that’s what this episode is: a classic back and forth that ranges far and wide. Shadi asks Damir how his year ended. Damir admits he’s feeling properly burned out. Does following two bloody wars all too closely contribute to ...
Jan 19, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Aaron Sibarium, a star reporter over at the Washington Free Beacon covering the campus culture wars, joined us this week to talk about Claudine Gay’s resignation. Aaron’s reporting on Gay’s plagiarism was instrumental in her eventual downfall. We start the episode discussing the merits of the case, but quickly switch gears to talk about first principles. What does it mean for our society if culture war becomes a wa...
Jan 08, 2024•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live This week, our in-house philosopher and very own Editor-at-Large Samuel Kimbriel returns to the podcast for a one-on-one discussion with Shadi Hamid about wealth, ambition and whether they are the paths toward happiness. How do societal values, especially those in American culture, influence our sense of fulfillment? The guys probe why those who are perceived as the most successful — like tech entrepreneurs and pos...
Dec 10, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live We’re thrilled to publish the audio from our first major event in collaboration with Aspen Institute’s Philosophy & Society Initiative . P&S and Wisdom of Crowds have grown up together and are both relentlessly focused on getting down to first principle questions. Click the link below and add your email to the mailing list to find out when we’re doing more of these kinds of events. In this episode, we take on the c...
Dec 03, 2023•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live What constitutes justifiable warfare—and how should the overall impact of conflicts be evaluated? With the United States being so closely associated with Israel’s war, is it possible to still envision America as a “force for good” in the world? One of America’s leading leftist intellectuals, Samuel Moyn , joins us to debate these questions and much more. Sam is the Chancellor Kent Professor of History at Yale Unive...
Nov 21, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Why do Americans struggle so much to understand Palestinians? A former advisor to the Palestinian leadership and a participant in the doomed 2008 Annapolis peace talks, Khaled Elgindy has written arguably the definitive account of America’s blind spot. In Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump , Khaled chronicles how time and time again the U.S. has failed to see the Palestinians as actors ...
Nov 14, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
