Frames of Space

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...

Lyman Stone is a Substack writer and a Senior Fellow and Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He is a pronatalist, which means that he wants society to have higher birth rates and more children. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about the nature of his online persona, the gap between desired and actual fertility rates, and the correlation betw...

Announcement: this podcast will be returning to its traditional biweekly upload schedule for the foreseeable future. But I really enjoyed the run of weekly episodes that I've been able to pull off for the past few months, and I hope to do it again some time :) Damon Linker is a senior lecturer of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and the writer behind the Substack "Notes from the...

Victor Kumar is an associate professor of philosophy at Boston University and the writer behind the Substack "Open Questions." He is known for his writing on political polarization, and the cultural reasons behind the state of civil culture in America. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about why he believes in the importance of a large Overton window, the positions he held about lo...

Elena Bridgers is the writer behind the Substack "Motherhood Until Yesterday." She is known for her writing on evolutionary biology: specifically, the nature of hunter-gatherer societies, and how that explains why motherhood is so difficult in the present. In the episode, I got a chance to speak with her about the tradeoffs that come with gender equity, how parenting has changed her conception of...

Lars Doucet is the President of the Center for Land Economics and the writer behind the Substack "Progress and Poverty." Lars is a Georgist, which means he believes that land is fundamentally different from other forms of property. From his point of view, we shouldn't be taxing what people build, earn, or produce—we should be taxing the value of the location itself. In this episode, I got a chance...

Blaise Brosnan is a good friend of mine, and I've had many conversations with him over the years about the divisions within the MAGA movement. He currently studies as a PhD candidate at UCLA, and I brought him onto my podcast to better understand the civil war that's happening within the Republican Party right now. So in this episode, we spoke quite a bit about the recent interview between Tucker...

Announcement: this podcast will be going on holiday for the rest of December, so this is the last new episode you'll be seeing on this feed in 2025. But I'll be back to regularly scheduled episodes beginning on January 1st of the new year :) Rana Mitter is the ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an expert on understanding the nature of Chinese politics: government,...

Joseph Heath is a political philosophy professor at the University of Toronto and the writer behind the Substack "In Due Course." He is known for his commentary on critical theory, the nature of capitalism, and how our psychological tendencies influence our political beliefs. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about the differences between intuitive thinking and analytical reasoning...

Habib Fanny writes the Substack "Politidoc." He used to write about politics on the Q&A site Quora, where he amassed over 100k followers from writing there for over a decade about topics such as electoral trends, race relations, and how negative polarization affected his ideology. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about why non-white voters swung away from the Democratic Party...

Lakshya Jain is a political data analyst and co-founder of Split Ticket, a data journalism project known for its sharp election modeling and nonpartisan vote breakdowns. He currently leads the polling operation over at The Argument, a magazine devoted to making the persuasive case for liberal democracy—not by avoiding political conflict, but by engaging it head-on. In this episode, I got a chance...

Elizabeth Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She is one of the rare journalists today whose work moves seamlessly between politics, theology, and ethics, and grief—without flattening any of them. There’s a line of hers I keep coming back to: Beauty tells you where to look. That's how she writes. And it's how she sees the world. In t...

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Francis Fukuyama is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that liberal democracy represented the endpoint of humanity's ideological evolution. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about whether his end of history thesis holds up by modern standards, the nat...

Marshall Kosloff is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and the host of the podcast The Realignment. His work covers the nature of coalitional change in American politics since the rise of Donald Trump, and how Democrats can accomplish the policies of the Abundance agenda at the state level. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about his journey from the center-right to the center-...

Steve Teles is a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. He is one of the main advocates of the abundance agenda, which champions supply-side solutions to many of the problems of modern economies, including housing unaffordability, clean energy, public infrastructure, and more. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about how...