The Wright Show

Are democracies better at following international rules than autocracies? ... Eli: The world is better off with America in charge ... Debating US policy toward Cuba ... Bob: What's the difference between America's authoritarian allies and its authoritarian enemies? ... Does China see liberal democracies as a threat? ... The virtue of epistemic humility ...

Bob vows not to get flapped again ... A flood of reporting on the Trump Administration’s last days ... Will the billionaire space race help a wealth tax gain traction? ... Mickey: Democrats will get the soft infrastructure bill passed ... On the question of JD Vance’s degree of Trumpiness ... Mickey: The Child Tax Credit will produce a social disaster ... How Bush made war with Afghanistan unavoidable ... Why are we sanctioning Cuba (or anyone)? ... Parrot Room preview: a sad story from Bob’s youth, the subtext of Bob’s Eric Weinstein piece, further work on the Bret side of the Weinstein equation, an empirical observation about black employees in public-facing jobs, the Aspen Information Disorder Commission, apologies of Abigail Shrier’s book, Ashli Babbitt, Richard Lewontin, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and Mickey’s Law of Success Stories ...

Tim's academic background ... Tim responds to Eric Weinstein's claims against him and his co-author ... How Tim first came into contact with Weinstein ... Tim: Weinstein is evading our critiques of his theory ... What would a "theory of everything" require and accomplish? ... Weinstein's attempt at a theory of everything ... The Shiab operator and its problems ... Tim's further objections to Geometric Unity ... The "aesthetic wish" for a unified field theory ... The difference between a mathematical and a physical theory of everything ... What frustrates Tim about Weinstein's presentation of GU ... The irony of Weinstein trying to squelch Tim's critique ... Pondering the crackpot question ...

Branson aims to beat Bezos to space ... J.D. Vance flirts with delegitimizing the 2020 election ... Tucker suggests cameras in classrooms to root out CRT ... Bob makes progress toward a Unified Theory of the Weinsteins ... Is a new Alzheimer’s drug worth the astronomical cost? ... Is Haiti paying for Trump’s belligerence toward Venezuela? ... Why is China clamping down on a big Chinese ride-hailing company? ... Mickey: Democrats will abandon the bipartisan infrastructure bill ... Covid cases are up in the US. Will deaths follow? ... Searching for insight into Trump’s mindset on January 6 ... Parrot Room preview: A Hunter Biden development, Big Tech’s possible bias against J.D. Vance, Glenn Loury and Charles Murray’s recent conversation, Republicans oppose beefing up the IRS, a Jeffrey Epstein-Marty Peretz connection, Bob continues to hypothesize on the Weinsteins, Fellini’s La Strada, even more JD Vance, and Trump’s Waterloo ...

Josh's aversion to the term "guru" ... Explaining the explain/excuse conflation ... The (possible) evolutionary origins of (biased) arguing ... Are humans mismatched to their modern environment? ... Building strengths vs. addressing deficiencies ... Defusing attribution error ... Making cognitive empathy cool ... Using meditation to strengthen cognitive empathy ... The mythical side of Bob ... Rationalists, effective altruists, and other possible fellow travelers ...

Mickey's future's so bright ... ... Michael Wolff’s account of January 6 ... How serious are the charges against the Trump Organization? ... JD Vance masters the art of political victimhood ... The NCAA allows college athletes to monetize ... Is Bret Weinstein right about ivermectin? ... Will Kamala face competition if Biden doesn't run again? ... Derrick Bell’s “Space Traders,” Gwen Berry and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Donald Rumsfeld, Hunter Biden, Child Tax Credit, Nikole Hannah-Jones gets tenure at UNC, Mickey gets snide about Thomas Chatterton Williams, the alleged crankiness of the Weinsteins, Bill Cosby released, and Mickey has a question about monogamy. ... Special bonus topic: Bob takes David Sanger to task ...

Assessing Biden's recent airstrikes in Iraq and Syria ... How autonomous are Iran-linked militias in Iraq? ... Sectarianism and Iraqi politics ... Why does the US still have troops in Iraq and Syria? ... Derek: Iran feels threatened by the US presence in the region ... Is the US in Syria to counter Iran? ... The hawkish bias in MSM foreign policy reporting ... Derek's new podcast, American Prestige ...

Is the infrastructure bill crumbling? ... What wouldn't Mickey sacrifice to defeat the Child Tax Credit? ... The Supreme Court rules against the NCAA ... Is ranked choice voting the best option? ... Mickey: Dem voting rights legislation is fizzling out ... CRT remains the right’s target of choice ... Bob and Mickey are on Team Britney ... America’s post-pandemic order: No waiters and no towels ... Bret Weinstein flirts with vaccine trutherism ... Parrot Room preview: Lin-Manuel Miranda gets blowback, Hunter Biden’s M&M trick, Network discussed, Isaacson’s Einstein, the Wimbledon Challenge, Ramesh Ponnuru’s ascent, Gossip Girl wrestles with its privilege, and attribution error ...

Is Israel a democracy? ... Bret: Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not illegal ... Has Israel ever offered the Palestinians a sovereign state? ... Bret: The core of the problem is Palestinian misgovernance ... Deterring Hamas ... Is international criticism of Israel inevitable? ... An exercise in perspective taking ... Whose side is time on? ...

Biden’s good-enough Russia summit performance ... Bob: Michael McFaul is obsessed with aiding-and-abetting accusations ... Jeffrey Toobin returns, to Mickey’s dismay ... Is it National Biden-Harris Child Tax Credit Day already? ... Is Stacey Abrams ingeniously engineering the end of the filibuster? ... Did the FBI have a hand in provoking the January 6 riots? ... Some peculiar implications of the Texas anti-CRT law ... Bob responds to Mickey’s anal probe challenge ... Norm entrepreneurs ... Parrot Room preview: a mystery guest joins the conversation, Hunter Biden’s memoir, a Jill Biden-Kamala Harris rivalry, a Tom Wilson biopic, the unjustly unverified, Loury and McWhorter, and the Blinken-Biden schism ...

Nikita’s disclaimer: I don’t speak for the average Russian ... One result of Western sanctions: no good cheese in Russian stores ... The crackdown on the supporters of Alexey Navalny ... What Putin learned from the protests in Belarus ... The Internet vs TV ... Do Russians see America as an enemy? ... Siloviki, the Russian ruling class ... Nikita tries to describe his ineffable Substack newsletter, Psychopolitica ...

Why we should hope there are extraterrestrials ... Bezos in space ... Bob manages to hold back on Jeffrey Toobin jokes ... Mickey: Kamala's staff is incompetent ... Is Biden really getting the US out of Afghanistan? ... Bob defends Ilhan Omar's war crimes comments ... Mickey: It's harder to pass a reconciliation bill in the House than in the Senate ... Bob frets about a mirth shortage on the left ... Parrot room preview: the Vanity Fair piece on Jeffrey Epstein, Hunter Biden, Bob's problem with Slates’s Slow Burn, Bob’s problem with David Sanger, hydroxychloroquine, trucks flying flags, and sexy cicadas ...

Agustín on what he was and wasn’t saying in his controversial Science piece on Darwin ... What is biological anthropology? ... What social media critiques of Agustín’s editorial missed ... Untangling Darwin’s attitudes toward race and genocide ... Darwin’s worries about his theory’s acceptance ... What do female gibbons want? ... Agustín: Commonly used racial categories are unscientific ... The changing rules for competition among males ... Okay, so should we cancel Darwin or not? ...

Mickey: Where's the anti-woke Tea Party? ... How far will Democrats go with budget reconciliation? ... Can Trump really be reinstated? ... Bye-bye Bibi ... Mickey's got good news for the Wuhan lab and bad news for pangolins ... Mickey: Just let Naomi Osaka play tennis ... Bob reminisces about life as a journalist pre-Twitter ... Mickey: We don't need more electric car subsidies ... Bob's not impressed by the NYT's UFO reporting ... Parrot Room preview: UFOs, Idiocracy, the Philadelphia sound, the situation in Xinjiang, Naomi Osaka, Huawei strikes back, and J.D. Vance ...

A primer on Xinjiang's history ... Are Uyghur women facing forced sterilization? ... China's counter-terrorism justification ... Sinifying" the Uyghurs ... What we know about the detention camps ... How many people have gone through the camps? ... Can outside pressure change China's policy? ...