Wisdom of Crowds

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Trump has been in office for one hundred days, and Damir Marusic thinks America deserves him: “I do tend to intuitively see Trump and Trumpism as a correction on a social order that has lost its way and is somehow badly out of tune,” Damir wrote earlier this week . “Something is broken and unsustainable, and has been...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live This episode is a bit “meta”: it’s about what it means to keep an open mind, how to trust your conscience, why we should all avoid groupthink, and the phenomenon of “self silencing” — keeping your views to yourself when you’re afraid it might be too costly to say them out loud. But of course, this being Wisdom of Cro...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Is it possible to move up in this world? Are Americans stuck? Our guest today is Yoni Appelbaum , an American historian and staff writer at The Atlantic magazine. His new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity , explores the various ways the American dream has been...

It’s been an exceptionally crazy week, even by Trump-era standards. So we decided to experiment with the podcast this week by doing a live-stream recording . Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic discuss whether there is a method to Trump’s madness about tariffs and everything else — or whether we have to accept that we are ruled by a Mad King, who himself does not know what he will do from one moment to...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live In 2012, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat published Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics , a book about how mainstream American religion was devolving into the prosperity gospel, superstitious cults and other forms of heterodox faith. Thirteen years later, the American religious landscape has changed...

This week, we tried an experiment: a Substack live event! Matthew Gasda wrote a popular article about Romanticism, his contribution to an ongoing debate . Samuel Kimbriel had a few disagreements with Gasda’s piece. In the spirit of Wisdom of Crowds , we hosted our first-ever live-streamed Substack debate. It went pretty well! We hope to host more. By popular demand, here is a video recording of th...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Friend of Wisdom of Crowds and frequent podcast guest Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale University, and author of several books, including Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2021, Macmillan) and Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our...

Recent events suggest that the balance of power is breaking down. Trump is achieving executive supremacy. In less fancy terms, Trump looks like he’s becoming a dictator. Rule of law might be slipping away. Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic agree about all this. But they disagree about which recent event is the true inflection point. Shadi thinks it’s the Mahmoud Khalil case : it’s a straightforward go...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Mana Afsari is a writer and sometime contributor to Wisdom of Crowds , whose career has taken her from the RAND Corporation, to a job as an assistant to a great American poet, to the position of Research Associate at the Aspen Institute’s Philosophy and Society Initiative. In January, Mana published an essay titled,...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live With the Gaza ceasefire possibly collapsing any minute , we return to the topic of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks and the ensuing war in the Holy Land. Specifically, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic discuss the tension between a belief in universal human rights, on the one hand, and allegiance to one’s ethnic and...

J. D. Vance delivers a seismic geopolitical speech at the Munich Security Forum. Vance, Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy get into a shouting match before television cameras . Relations between the United States and Europe are deteriorating before our very eyes. In one of our best episodes of the year so far, we invited the great Ivan Krastev to help us understand what is happening...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live “Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is,” goes the Bob Dylan track from 1965. That song was directed at the squares who weren’t yet hip to the Sixties. It sounded foreboding then, and it sounds foreboding now, because something is happening, again — something perhaps as great and consequential as t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live “I am done saying, ‘impossible’,” announces Damir Marusic . At least, with regard to what Trump might do or could do in the near future. We are still in the midst of a major shakeup in the administrative state. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is combing through Treasury data and cutting gover...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Donald Trump and Elon Musk are moving quickly, so we decided to release this episode a few days early. In a half-week of alarming developments, Trump has announced that the United States might send troops to Gaza to transfer the Palestinian population to Egypt or Jordan, and to aid in reconstructing the country. Elon...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live “The weird right wing men are coming out to the fore in joy,” announces Shadi Hamid . “They’re strutting more than they did in 2016,” observes Damir Marusic . “The counter-elite is becoming the elite,” says Shadi. “There is gonna be a bloodbath,” says Damir: “They will soon be drinking from a fire hydrant of sewage.”...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Last week’s episode dealt with the state of the American Right post-election. Today we ask: Where is the American Left going? How will it respond to Trump? “There is a palpable sense of passivity on the Left,” says Damir Marusic . “What I’ve seen is resignation or weird, detached analysis,” says Samuel Kimbriel . Is...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live On the eve of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic sit down to discuss the state of the Right and the Left in American politics. The conversation picks up where the last podcast episode left off, in a discussion about Damir’s apparent rejuvenation in the wake of Trump’s victory. Given tha...

A new year is before us, and soon, a new president will assume office. What does the future have in store? Trump supporters are happy, and his opponents are full of foreboding. Many people also feel that a new era in American history is about to begin — for better or worse. Damir Marusic and Santiago Ramos discuss the nature of this new era. They begin with the question of fear: Are you afraid of...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live For some people, “liberal socialism” sounds like an oxymoron. Liberalism is a political idea that promises to protect individual rights. Socialism, on the other hand, is about collective power: the power of workers to organize and, if not quite seize, at least have a say in the administration of the means of producti...

Damir Marusic has been reading the Bible this year for the first time. So Christine Emba and Santiago Ramos decided it was the perfect occasion for interrogating him about what he’s learned and what he’s been thinking about. In the ensuing conversation, the three discuss Freemasonry, Protestantism, Catholicism, Predestination and how Christianity is receiving new attention in Silicon Valley. Then,...

As election data analysis continues to pour in, we can be sure of one thing: a large number of working class votes which traditionally would have gone to the Democrats shifted in 2024 toward the GOP. As CNN reported last week: “Trump ran up large margins among White voters without a college degree who belong to labor unions and also significantly improved among unionized non-White workers without...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live In 2024, over 77 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Friend of Wisdom of Crowds Michael Brendan Dougherty, a writer and conservative commentator at the National Review , was one of them. However, MBD (as he is known) did not vote for Trump in 2020 nor in 2016. In fact, he was an early conservative opponent of T...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live Last week, President Biden granted his son, Hunter Biden , “a full and unconditional” pardon for any and all offenses from Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 1, 2024. Because Hunter Biden has been a politically charged figure since the first Trump term, and because President Biden repeatedly promised that he would not use his pow...

The headlines prove it: we live in turbulent times. Elizabeth Oldfield , our guest this week, recently published a book — Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times — about how to thrive during such a moment. “If we’re heading into (even more) turbulent times,” Elizabeth writes, “I want to be someone who is of use, not overwhelmed and panicking but steady and hopeful, able to contribute t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live The Declaration of Independence affirms that all human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Yet the Declaration is silent about who this Creator is. Is it the Jewish deity or the Christian God? Or is it the god of the philosophers — the blind watchmaker of the Enlightenment? The Cons...