Wisdom of Crowds

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live What a difference two years make. After Donald Trump’s victory in 2024, it seemed as though the MAGA movement had conquered American politics, perhaps for a generation. Democrats were demoralized, the culture wars appeared to be over, and Trump seemed all but invincible. Then came Tuesday’s election. Damir and Shadi...

A slightly different episode this week — no Shadi Hamid this time. I recorded this interview with my friend (and Wall Street Journal correspondent) Bojan Pancevski in Vienna about a month ago. The topic was his excellent new book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy — a “geopolitical thriller” as Bojan calls it. I then proceeded to travel to Ukraine, got back to the States, got sick, and got overwhelmed by...

Taylor Lorenz knows how to make people mad on the internet. Lately, she’s been doing it by taking on the AI doomers, whom she regards as a quasi-religious movement with an extraordinary talent for accumulating money and power. Damir is delighted to find an ally against the apocalypse crowd. But soon enough the conversation ricochets unpredictably. Shadi wonders whether AI might actually be conscio...

Shadi and Damir have been circling a question for weeks: is the American left’s moment real? To find out, they invited Sam Adler-Bell , co-host of Know Your Enemy and a socialist since it was, in his words, about as fashionable as collecting model trains. Radicalism keeps outperforming caution. Sam admits he used to advise against using the socialist label, against making Gaza a litmus test, again...

Damir is back from a sweltering Europe, where some commentators seemed to treat air conditioning as a moral failing. He opens the show with a provocation: the European aversion to AC isn’t about strained grids or shuttered nuclear plants — it’s secular theology, Christian guilt repurposed for Gaia. Shadi, on a mini-sabbatical in New York City (thermostat set well below Mamdani’s recommended 78), m...

This week, we are bringing you a conversation, recorded live at the Times Center in Manhattan last Thursday, between Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, head of the Anthropic Institute and the man behind the Import AI newsletter, and our own Samuel Kimbriel. Clark opens with the uncomfortable premise: recursive self-improvement may arrive this decade — he’ll name 2028 if pressed — and with it a w...

In this live taping — a partnership between Wisdom of Crowds, Aspen Philosophy and Society, and Yale’s new Center for Civic Thought — Samuel Kimbriel sits down with political theorist Hélène Landemore and writer Osita Nwanevu to hash out a deceptively simple question: what is democracy actually for? Hélène, whose new book Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule makes the case for s...

The Iran war has produced an unlikely main character: the Pope. This week, our dear friend and former colleague Santiago Ramos returns to the pod. He joins Christine and Damir to unpack the escalating clash between the Trump administration and the Catholic Church over the war, Trump’s various blasphemies, and JD Vance’s remarkable journey from Catholic conversion to, well, rediscovering Protestant...

This week, Damir and Shadi are joined by Julian Waller, Professorial Lecturer in Political Science at George Washington University and co-author of Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism . The occasion is an awkward one for a certain kind of democracy discourse: Viktor Orbán was last weekend thrown out in a landslide by Péter Magyar’s Tisz...

Samuel Kimbriel was in Italy the other week, where he sat down with Rome-based political theorist Giovanni Orsina to talk about European populism. The conversation starts with Giorgia Meloni, who, Orsina argues, is more a pragmatic traditional right-wing politician than a true populist. It then turns to a deeper things. Previewing his upcoming book Counter-Revolution, Orsina claims that after the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Last week, Shadi wrote a controversial essay over at Wisdom of Crowds titled “ Does Israel Have a Right to Exist? ” This week, we had our friend Peter Beinart on to the show to unpack the question some more. Peter is, among many other things , a contributing writer for the New York Times and the author of Being Jewis...

This week, Shadi and Sam sat down with Jonny Thakkar, an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Swarthmore College and one of the founding editors of the invaluable The Point magazine. In a recent essay in The Point, Jonny argues that the left’s organizing framework — reducing injustice and pursuing equality — is inherently negative and distributional, and therefore fails to inspire the kind...

This week, Shadi and Damir hosted Cameron Kasky — a rising young activist in the Democratic Party and former congressional candidate for New York’s 12th District — who gave us a glimpse into where American politics might be headed. Cameron started his career as a gun control advocate after surviving the Parkland shooting. For his efforts, he was named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in 2...

Damir, Shadi and Christine discuss the latest wave of worrying data about young adults’ retreat from dating, sex, marriage and parenthood. Shadi lays out the big numbers — projections that a large minority of young Americans may never marry and a substantial share may never have children — and ties them to two worries: widespread loneliness (especially among young men) and long-run national capaci...

Damir and Sam are joined by Cambridge philosopher Henry Shevlin of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence for a raucous and rambling conversation about the state of artificial intelligence. Is it about to get conscious, take all of our jobs, and destroy the world? Or is all this industry hype? Henry starts off the conversation asserting that AI already has a kind of “agency,” even if...

This episode features a full-length debate between Shadi Hamid and Trita Parsi —two thinkers who fundamentally disagree about the role of American power in the world. Released jointly with The Disagreement podcast and hosted by Alex Grodd , the conversation reflects a shared Wisdom of Crowds ethos — one that treats disagreement not as a failure of understanding, but as a tool for thinking more cle...

This week Christine Emba and Sam Kimbriel are joined by Laura K. Field, a political theorist and the author of the new book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right . It’s a sharp, readable taxonomy of the thinkers, factions and subcultures that helped build the MAGA coalition—from the Claremont world and national conservatism, to post-liberal Catholicism, to harder-edged online currents. L...

Against the backdrop of Trump’s breathtaking snatch-and-grab operation against Venezuela’s nasty dictator Nicolás Maduro, Shadi and Damir debate the complexities of global politics, focusing on the tension between power and morality. They explore the implications of U.S. foreign policy decisions and debate the role of values in international relations. Shadi pushes Damir about the implications of...

As the year winds down, Shadi and Damir hosted Michael McFaul , a professor at Stanford University and former special assistant to President Obama and U.S. ambassador to Russia. His new book, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder is as good a start as any in trying to figure out how U.S. foreign policy could — and should — develop in the wake of a second Trum...

This week, we have a special live episode for you. Wisdom of Crowds, in cooperation with Aspen’s Philosophy and Society program, threw a holiday party in DC, celebrating the release of our friend Osita Nwanevu ’s new book, The Right of the People . Samuel Kimbriel sat down with Osita and the great Sam Goldman of the Hamilton School at the University of Florida, to kick off our celebration of Ameri...

This week, the great Nils Gilman joined Damir Marusic and Samuel Kimbriel on the pod to unpack the complexities of American foreign policy and its implications for Europe — and beyond. The conversation starts by trying to make sense of Trump’s latest National Security Strategy as a jumping off point, before pivoting into a discussion of populism. Why do some causes, projects — and people — provide...

Damir’s back from Ukraine, still buzzing — and feeling weird about it. He and Christine talk about the thrill and guilt associated with reporting from war zones, the ethical implications of war tourism, and the psychological toll on both journalists and civilians. The conversation then shifts to Trump and a possibly looming war with Venezuela. The Trump administration has cowed many a politician,...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live A few years ago, Lea Ypi was scrolling through Facebook when she came across a family photo she had never seen before. Someone had discovered a photograph of Ypi’s grandparents on their honeymoon and posted it on a public Facebook group. Ypi — a philosophy professor from Albania who teaches at the London School of Ec...

After Friday’s meeting between Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani , everyone is asking: who is Zohran Mamdani really? What motivates him: is it progressive cultural issues, or economic populism? Is he woke, or a pragmatist? He won the mayor’s seat in New York City with just over fifty percent of the vote , when even the leaders of his own party refused to endorse him . What makes this guy tick? Today...

This week’s episode is a live recording of Wisdom of Crowds , where we celebrated a very special occasion: the publication of Shadi Hamid ’s new book, The Case for American Power . The book is a soul-searching study about American power as a force for good in the world, and it combines memoir and foreign policy analysis. Shadi’s thesis is that if we want to make the world “more just and more moral...