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Mike Murphy on Plan B for 2024 Aug 07, 2023

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Each national political party should be thinking about their Plan B for the 2024 presidential election. Mike Murphy returns to the podcast to discuss each party's predicament and where they can go from here. Murphy has worked on a number of presidential campaigns and run 26 gubernatorial and US Senate races across the country. He was a top strategist for John McCain, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC. He’s co-host of the critically acclaimed "Hacks on Tap" podcast. Mike is also co-director of the University of Southern California’s Center for the Political Future. Subscribe to Mike's substack newsletter: https://substack.com/@mikemurphy1

Is Israeli society collapsing, or just growing up? Jul 31, 2023

Show notes

One week ago, Israel’s parliament passed the first pillar of its judicial reform package. This, despite 30 weeks of massive protests against the reforms. Calling these mass protests understates it. Hundreds of thousands of people turning out each week, culminating last week in a historic protest march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. We have received a lot of questions and comments from listeners to this podcast about the current situation in Israel. Haviv Rettig Gur joins us for the first time, to help us make sense of events. Haviv is the political analyst at The Times of Israel. He was a long time reporter for the Times of Israel. He’s also working on a book. Haviv was also a combat medic in the IDF where he served in the reserves until he was 40 years old. Haviv Rettig Gur on Twitter: twitter.com/havivrettiggur?s=20

A techno-skeptic on the A.I. revolution - with Christine Rosen Jul 17, 2023

Show notes

Dr. Christine Rosen is skeptical of all the techno-optimism around the coming era of artificial intelligence. In this episode, she responds to our recent guest, Tyler Cowen (episode # 120). Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, culture, technology and feminism. Concurrently she is a columnist for Commentary magazine and one of the cohosts of The Commentary Magazine Podcast. She is also a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a senior editor in an advisory position at the New Atlantis. Previously, she was a distinguished visiting scholar at the Library of Congress. Christine is the author or coauthor of many books. Her next book is called The Extinction of Experience. She's also a prolific opinion writer – not only on the pages of Commentary, but also the Los Angeles Times, National Affairs, the New Atlantis, the New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Politico, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New England Journal of Medicine.

The (Iran) deal that shall not be named - with Rich Goldberg Jul 10, 2023

Show notes

Is the US on the cusp of reaching a new deal with Iran? Or has a deal already been hatched that nobody is talking about? To help us understand what is going on, Rich Goldberg returns to the podcast. Rich is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. From 2019-2020, he served as a Director for Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction for the White House National Security Council. He previously served as a national security staffer in the US Senate and US House. He was a founding staff director of the House U.S.-China Working Group and was among the first Americans ever to visit China’s human space launch center. A leader in efforts to expand U.S. missile defense cooperation with Israel, Rich played a key role in U.S. funding for the Iron Dome. Rich is an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve with military experience on the Joint Staff and in Afghanistan.

Cracks in the Kremlin? With Fred Kagan Jul 05, 2023

Show notes

Does Putin’s hold on power now look stronger or weaker? What can we learn about where the Russia-Ukraine war is heading? And what is actually happening with the Ukraine counter-offensive? Fred Kagan is the Director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also working closely with the Russia team at the Institute for the Study of War. Fred is a former professor of military history at the US Military Academy at West Point. He completed his PhD in Soviet and Russian military history at Yale University. The Critical Threats Project – https://www.criticalthreats.org/ Institute for the Study of War – https://understandingwar.org/

Contrarian take on the Wagner Putsch - with Richard Fontaine Jun 26, 2023

Show notes

Last weekend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, launched a rebellion, coup or putsch against Moscow. It's still hard to discern what it was. As of now, It seems Prigozhin has halted the Wagner operation. The situation is fluid, and we aren’t going to leap to conclusions on this podcast. But our guest today, Richard Fontaine, told me he is skeptical that these events so far reflect real cracks in President Putin’s rule. So I asked Richard to hop on our podcast to unpack where he think events are headed. Richard is the CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), bi-partisan foreign policy think tank in Washington, DC. Prior to CNAS, he was foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain and worked at the State Department, the National Security Council, and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He serves on the Biden administration’s Defense Policy Board – which advises the Pentagon.

SELECTS: The American College Crack-Up - with Niall Ferguson Jun 19, 2023

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In this special re-published episode, we revisit a captivating conversation that resonated deeply with our audience, offering new listeners an opportunity to delve into the insights shared by Niall Ferguson. In this decade we may finally experience a true crack-up in higher education. There have been comparable periods on American college campuses in the past (in the 1960s and 1980s, for example). But our guest today, historian Niall Ferguson, believes what’s happening now is on a whole other level. Niall is doing something about it -- he’s started a new university. Niall argues that parents -- who had enriching and intellectually diverse experiences when they went to college -- don’t fully appreciate that their own children will experience something completely different when they go off to university. Niall Ferguson has taught at Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and New York University. He’s authored 17 books. He’s currently at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University where he is the MIllbank Family Senior Fellow, and Managing Director of Greenmantle, a macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm. Order Niall’s most recent book, “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe” here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/doom-niall-ferguson/1137713414 Learn more about the University of Austin here: https://www.uaustin.org/ Learn more about Greenmantle here: https://www.gmantle.com/

"Losers Don't Come to Their College Reunions" -- with Bruce Feiler Jun 12, 2023

Show notes

These days there are lots of conversations about the re-shaping of the workforce as a result of the pandemic. Bruce Feiler is just out with a new book – THE SEARCH: Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World – based on years of research on this topic. He is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers. His book WALKING THE BIBLE describes his 10,000-mile journey retracing the Five Books of Moses through the desert. The book spent a year and a half on the New York Times bestseller list. His book WHERE GOD WAS BORN describes his trek visiting biblical sites throughout Israel, Iran and Iraq. His book AMERICA’S PROPHET is the story of the influence of Moses on American history A longtime columnist at the New York Times, Bruce now writes the popular newsletter THE NONLINEAR LIFE. Items discussed in this podcast: The Nonlinear Life newsletter -- https://brucefeiler.substack.com/ The Search -- https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-search-bruce-feiler/1142169519

Bret Stephens teaches college grads to argue! Jun 05, 2023

Show notes

Bret Stephens, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times, returns for a conversation immediately following his address at the University of Chicago’s Class Day, where there was an organized — and ultimately unsuccessful — effort against his speech. We discuss his address, the effort against him and lessons learned. Bret also recently returned from a mission to rescue 111 Ethiopian Jews, part of a multi-decade effort to bring thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel to become Israeli citizens, the history of which he unpacks at the end of our conversation. Bret came to The New York Times after a long career with The Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial page editor and, for 11 years, a foreign affairs columnist. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. And prior to working in Israel, he was based in Brussels for The Wall Street Journal. Today, Bret is also the editor-in-chief of Sapir Journal. Bret was raised in Mexico City, earned his BA at the University of Chicago and his Masters at the London School of Economics. Items discussed in this episode: Sapir Journal — https://sapirjournal.org/ “The Herd of Independent Minds: Has the Avant-Garde Its Own Mass Culture” — https://www.commentary.org/articles/harold-rosenberg-2/the-herd-of-independent-mindshas-the-avant-garde-its-own-mass-culture/ Bret Stephens — “Go Forth and Argue” — https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/opinion/free-speech-campus.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Bret Stephens — “Israel’s Unfinished Exodus Story” — https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/opinion/ethiopian-jews-israel.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare “Sideways” — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375063/ “The Lives of Others” — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/

Optimism, AI (and the end of homework!) - with Tyler Cowen May 30, 2023

Show notes

Today’s guest is surprisingly upbeat about the world. A big factor in his optimism is the revolution in artificial intelligence that we’re about to live through. Tyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University and he’s the faculty director of the Mercatus Center. He is the coauthor – with Alex Tabarock – of the economics blog Marginal Revolution (the #1 economics blog in the world) and the co-founder of Marginal Revolution University. He is the host of the top-rated podcast “Conversations with Tyler”. Cowen’s latest book is Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. Before that he penned The Great Stagnation, and also The Complacent Class. About a decade ago he wrote Average is Over, which was somewhat prescient about this period we are heading into with AI. He also published a book called Big Business: A love letter to an American anti-hero. Tyler writes a column for Bloomberg View; he has contributed to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. His academic research has been published in the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy. Items discussed in this episode: Marginal Revolution University -- mru.org Marginal Revolution blog -- marginalrevolution.com Tyler Cowen's books -- https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/talent-tyler-cowen/1138462103

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