Frames of Space

Brian Beutler is the writer behind the Substack "Off Message" and co-host of the podcast Politix. He believes that in light of their recent midterm victory, Democrats should play hardball against Republicans in the coming year: threatening them with Congressional arrest, for instance, or even using the power of impeachment against Trump administration officials like Pete Hegseth. In this episode,...

You can find my Patreon page here . Jennifer Pahlka is the author of Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, which highlights the myriad of reasons why the US government often fails to successfully implement the laws it passes. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with her about why government bureaucrats are so important, the tension between ac...

You can find my Patreon page here . Emma Camp is a senior editor at Free Expression, a newsletter in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. She is known for her cultural commentary on subjects like mental health, gender relations, and the myriad of ways that Gen Zers are shaping up to be very different from their predecessors. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with her about the prev...

You can find my Patreon page here . Peter Wildeford is the Head of Policy at The AI Policy Network and a board member at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (AIPS). He is also a member of the AI safety community, and has dedicated his career to controlling the pace of AI progress so that it doesn't get out of our control. He believes that there is a non-trivial chance that AI growth might lea...

You can find my Patreon page here . Darby Saxbe is a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California and the writer behind the Substack "Natal Gazing." She is known for her research on parenthood and family formation. Lyman Stone is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He writes about how to address declining birth rates o...

You can find my Patreon page here . Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic who focuses on economic issues like welfare policy, income inequality, and what an ideal tax policy would look like. She is the author of the recent book The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with her about why it's so painful to file taxes in th...

Cassie Pritchard is a leftist and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She recently got into an online debate with Substack writer Scott Alexander about the direction that the US should take its economy: Scott believes that the country should focus more on economic growth, while Cassie believes that the country should focus more on reducing income inequality through redistribution. In...

Kevin Williamson is a national correspondent at The Dispatch, and he's one of the most incisive commentators on the American right these days. His commentary covers political issues like Trump's hold on the Republican Party, foreign policy issues like NATO's changing relationship with the US, and economic issues like why taxes need to increase in the future. In this episode, I got a chance to spea...

Jeremiah Johnson is a staff writer at The Argument and a co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism. He is known for his commentary on social media; specifically, the effect that social media appears to be having on American politics in an age when liberalism seems to be under attack. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about which specific mediums of communication incentivize produ...

Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a co-founder of the Substack newsletter "The Long View." He is known for co-authoring the 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority. The book argued that a series of structural shifts in the country, such as a growing nonwhite population and the politics of young voters, were quietly tilting the electoral terrain in the Demo...

Dan Williams is a philosopher at the University of Sussex, an associate fellow at Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and the writer behind the Substack "Conspicuous Cognition." His commentary often focuses on the nature of cognitive bias, tribalism, and how all of this manifests in contemporary political discourse. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about...

Gary Winslett is a political science professor at Middlebury College and the writer behind the Substack "The Neoliberal Papers." He is a center-left Democrat who strongly supports free trade, the free market, housing deregulation, and more. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about the US economy, past and present: the merits of Biden's economic policies, the effect that AI seems to...

Robert Wright is the author of the Nonzero Newsletter and the host of the Nonzero Podcast. He is known for his commentary on evolutionary psychology, and how humans evolved to benefit from cooperation and coordination on larger and larger scales as history has progressed forward. His latest book "The God Test" posits that artificial intelligence represents the next leap forward for evolutionary hi...

Charlotte Swasey is the writer behind the Substack "Medium Data" and the Director of Analytics at the Searchlight Institute. Her work on electoral strategy often highlights how getting elected involves a juggling act: you have to factor many different variables into account at the same time, not the least of which include fundraising, coalition unity, issue taking, and more. In this episode, I got...

Announcement: this podcast will be publishing episodes twice as often as usual (so every single week on Thursdays) until the end of August, and possibly for even longer. Count yourself lucky in that regard 😉 Ryan Geddie is a prominent YouTuber known for his video essays on history, culture, and the current state of American politics. I brought him on my show to talk about his advice for the Democ...

The US's federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Is that actually enough for someone to afford basic necessities like food and shelter? Or is it a wage that'd lead to starvation, and would be practically impossible for someone to live off of? Jack Whitcomb is the writer behind the Substack "Jackonomics," which covers economic subjects such as the cost of living, welfare reform, and monetary policy....

Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a neuroscientist at King's College London and the founder of Ness Labs, a learning community designed to help people experiment and harness their curiosity more productively. She is the author of the recent book Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with her about why working at Google was stressful enough to...

Darby Saxbe is a clinical psychologist and psychology professor at the University of Southern California. She writes the Substack "Natal Gazing," a blog devoted to pronatalism, gender roles, and the biological effects that parenting has on adults. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with her about her new book Dad Brain, which explores the complex biological and societal changes that men unde...

Bret Devereaux is a military historian and a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. He writes the blog "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry," which covers US foreign policy, the nature of military tactics in war, and the best sci-fi/fantasy stories. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about what Star Wars teaches us about modern insurgencies, why non-violen...

Matthew Yglesias is the head of the Substack "Slow Boring" and co-host of the podcasts The Argument and Politix. He's been writing about politics for far longer than many people have been politically aware: he's written for Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and more. He even helped co-found the website Vox back in 2014. Nowadays, his thesis is that Democrats need to moderate on many con...

A few weeks ago, the AI company Anthropic announced something genuinely strange. They had built a new model, codenamed Mythos, that was so capable at cybersecurity tasks they decided not to release it to the public. Instead, they're using it, quietly, with a small group of partners, to patch vulnerabilities in the world's most important software before anyone else gets a model this talented. Abi O...

Jordan Schneider is the host of ChinaTalk, a podcast and newsletter covering China, US foreign policy, and the technology shaping both. He's been podcasting since 2017, and has learned a thing or two about how to shape conversations with guests to make them as interesting as possible. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about the nature of podcasting as a forcing function for learnin...

Kelsey Piper is a staff writer at The Argument, a publication dedicated to having productive arguments among people who disagree about important political topics. I tried my best to carry the spirit of The Argument with me when speaking with Kelsey in this episode, and I had a blast the entire time. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with her about her take on the AI extinction debate, the r...

Sam Kahn is a senior editor at Persuasion and the writer behind the Substack "Castalia." In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about how Substack changed his life, his current approach to politics, and the tension between the writing he enjoys and the writing that gets the most clicks. Show Notes "The Things Not Named — With Sam Kahn" from The Things Not Named

To what extent has income inequality worsened over the past few years and decades? Have the rich been getting richer and the poor poorer? Has capitalism led to a rise in worker exploitation? Is neoliberalism responsible for the rise in democratic backsliding throughout the world? Tibor Rutar is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maribor and the writer behind the Substack "Pol...