Long-form interviews and conversations with tech, AI, and finance leaders (30min+)
Former Senator Ben Sasse discusses his Stage 4 pancreatic cancer diagnosis with Ross Douthat, explaining why he is spending his final months doing interviews rather than bucket-list travel, and how targeted therapy has shrunk his tumors by 76% while he faces the reality that the cancer remains terminal.
Sheriff Grady Judd argues that Trump's Iran policy corrects decades of political failure, defends the U.S. role as global police to protect economic interests, and attributes Florida's 50-year crime lows to strict mandatory sentencing and holding judges accountable for releasing dangerous offenders.
Dave Smith argues that U.S. Middle East interventions are better predicted by Israeli strategic goals and military-industrial profit motives than by presidential intentions, while cautioning against conflating valid critiques of lobbying power with collective blame that ignores individual opposition to war among Jewish Americans.
Dr. David Anderson explains how emotions are persistent, generalizable internal states controlled by specific hypothalamic circuits, revealing that estrogen receptors (not testosterone) drive aggression and that distinct neural populations compete to generate either violent or sexual behaviors.
Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Kapur argue that India's unprecedented early adoption of universal adult franchise created a 'precocious' development model where democracy served as both the glue for nation-building and a constraint on state capacity, leading to unique patterns of stability alongside inefficient redistribution captured by powerful interest groups.
Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Kapur argue that India's unprecedented adoption of universal adult franchise at low income levels created a 'precocious' development path where democracy served as the primary instrument for nation-building and macroeconomic stability, yet simultaneously fostered a fiscally vulnerable state captured by clamorous interest groups rather than the poor.
Granola co-founder Sam Stephenson shares how the $1.5B AI note-taking app achieves rapid growth through a 'surprisingly unambitious' design philosophy that prioritizes frazzled users operating in 'System 1' thinking, leveraging organic viral loops from note-sharing rather than feature bloat.
E.B. Tucker warns of an impending 'Fed 2.0' collapse and replacement with a stablecoin-supervised central bank, advising investors to ignore political headlines and instead own assets that thrive in their economic zone, particularly in cybersecurity and financial infrastructure, while recognizing that America's true competitive advantage is financialization, not manufacturing.
Anu Gupta shares his journey from a suicide attempt driven by racial trauma to developing 'Breaking Bias,' a framework that treats prejudice as a learned somatic habit curable through mindfulness and inner development rather than intellectual DEI training alone.
Joe Rogan and Arsenio Hall discuss the evolution of phone-free comedy clubs that enable creative risk-taking, the complex relationship between substances like cannabis and Adderall versus performance, and the critical impact of sleep deprivation on cognitive function.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro details his 'GSD' governance model, explaining how bipartisan permitting reform, seven tax cuts, and aggressive anti-fraud measures transformed Pennsylvania into the Northeast's only growing economy while rejecting the wealth taxes and regulatory dysfunction plaguing California and New York.
Adobe's CTO explains why the company chose to build proprietary generative AI models from scratch to ensure legal compliance and creative control, then details how they discovered that naive scaling approaches resulted in GPUs sitting idle 60-70% of the time due to coordination bottlenecks.