Welcome to our new podcast, “Call Me Back”, where we try to zoom out from minute-to-minute news and look back to how we got here, what we can learn from earlier decades and where we might be going in these roaring and raging 2020s.

In each episode, I’ll call a friend who is deeply immersed in some of the most transformative issues of our time.

Broadly speaking, I want to focus this podcast on this decade we're in, the 2020s, because it strikes me that we’ll look back at the 2020s as one of the most consequential decades in modern history - from inflation and unprecedented fiscal and monetary policies, the technological transformation driven by AI, blockchain, and life sciences, to the rise of China and Cold War II, to declining American engagement in the Middle East and parts of Central Asia - all against the backdrop of culture wars, public safety breakdowns, and, of course, a public health crack-up as we come out of the pandemic.

This podcast is a natural transition from our Post-Corona podcast, where we tried to understand larger trends being shaped and accelerated by the pandemic. No doubt, we’ll continue to delve into those topics on this new podcast, as we haven’t fully processed how profound and long-lasting some of these changes will be.

We’ll also try to feature guests that can help us provide some historical context, to call us back to a previous period, where we can learn a thing or two from the past about what we’re dealing with now.

Our first episode will be this week, with historian, author and daring public intellectual Niall Ferguson. Look out for it. And feel free to drop me a line with ideas for the new podcast at [email protected]