Policy Punchline

Robert Barnes is a lawyer who prides himself on defending the underdog. His clients include Alex Jones and the Covington kids, and he was recently invited by President Trump to be part of the President’s legal team suiting to contend the 2020 election results.

In this interview, Mr. Barnes explains why Alex Jones shouldn’t have been deplatformed, what the “Gated Institutional Narratives” and the Intellectual Dark Web are, and how the institutional media coordinated their efforts to attack Alex Jones.

On the election front, Mr. Barnes dives into great detail that there was no mass, coordinated election fraud as QAnon claimed, but certain parts of the election results are indeed questionable and deserve fair trials and hearings, which unfortunately weren’t given by the courts. He describes how Trump was sabotaged by incompetent lawyers like Sydney Powell who resorted to conspiracy theories rather than evidence, which ended up distracting the legitimate effort to content the election outcome.

A self-proclaimed “constitutional populist,” Mr. Barnes is a leading voice in the fight for free speech. He walks us through the Alex Jones case and explain how the famous “section 230” clause was involved. How should we define true free speech? Where is the line drawn between disagreement versus harassment, defamation, and spreading misinformation? When does someone deserve to be held accountable for their speech online? How can the social media companies “simply include First Amendment rules in the terms and services” and how will that eliminate 90% of the concerns and questions as Mr. Barnes believes? 


A few weeks ago, famous podcast hosts Eric Weinstein and Lex Fridman released a video called “Joe Rogan is under attack,” in which Weinstein claims that everyone near Rogan’s circle had something terrible happening to them. Is there really some “institution” that is out there to get you and suppress free speech? Tiger challenges Mr. Barnes to explain how such a mechanism works. What was the actual evidence of a coordinated, pre-meditated effort attacking people in the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web?” Or is the issue way overblown by people on the Right?

Tiger also presents a series of facts and evidence against the election lawsuits and asks Mr. Barnes to explain what exactly are the lawsuits trying to get at. What are the differences between signature audits and ballot recounts? What does it mean for a case to have “no standing” from a legal perspective? Has the Trump legal team actually presented convincing evidence to prove the existence of wide-spread fraud? Is there a point of election fraud lawsuits without having the chance of actually overturning the election result since the margins are wide enough to withstand any error? Will these election lawsuits strengthen or hurt the American democracy in the long run? 


This is the longest and one of the wildest interviews Tiger has ever conducted. It’s not something we normally present to our listeners, but we’re confident that you’ll enjoy this nuanced conversation with many push-backs and challenges from both sides.

Michael Hüther is the director of the German Economic Institute (Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft), one of the most important think tanks in Germany based in Cologne. He previously served on the German Council of Economic Experts and was the chief economist of DekaBank. In this interview, Dr. Hüther discusses Covid’s shock on the German economy, why globalization has become “exhausted,” Germany’s “Golden Decade” in early 2000s and its implications for public investments and debt, and future of European integration.

The last decade was the Golden Decade for Germany. 80%+ people were integrated into the labor market; employment rate consistently went up; the government held a balanced budget… But in some sense, it was also the “Lost Decade” for public investment. The debt break introduced to the Constitution in 2009 forced Germany to maintain a balanced budget, which has been in part achieved through reducing investments in local communities and the greater economy.

With Covid-19’s impacts, the deficits in Germany have become comparably higher, and Dr. Hüther predicts that it would need another two decades for it to come back to a balance. What has changed compared to older days, however, is the relationship between interest rates and GDP growth. Until 2010, the real interest rate was higher than the GDP growth rate. That means a government would have to look for very good investment opportunities to make interest payments for public debt. Today, the interest rate at the “zero lower bound” is much lower than GDP growth, so incurring government debt has de facto become a Ponzi scheme, in which one could easily roll over the debt and no longer create any burden for the future generation.

Covid-19 was a tremendous shock to Germany’s economy, causing a -9.5% shrinkage in the country’s GDP in the 2nd quarter of 2020. The first shock was a pure liquidity shock to businesses that was soon stabilized, allowing the economy to bounce back in the 3rd quarter with +8.5% growth in GDP. Germany thus experienced a V-shaped recovery in some way, but as the country adjusted to the new normal, new uncertainty to risk arose, and the economy still faces grave challenges ahead.

With that, we dive into Germany’s economic structure and its path dependency – tracing its roots back to the 19th-century industrialization and the federalist state structure of Germany. Because Germany didn’t have a big central government, each of the 35 different states had to make their own economic policies. That means until today, there are a lot of regional clusters and networks left in Germany, allowing rural areas to flourish as a part of a larger ecosystem.

We hope this interview can spark your interest in the German and European economies as they navigate through the Covid recovery and the next stages of globalization. If you’d like to learn more about Dr. Hüther’s work, we encourage you to read his book “Exhausted Globalisation: Between the Transatlantic Orientation and the Chinese Way” and follow works published by the German Economic Institute.

Rebecca Henderson is the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard, where she specializes in innovation and organizational change. Her newest book "Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire" examines how capitalism might be reworked so as to strive for a greener, more equitable future. "Reimagining Capitalism" was named to the shortlist of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, and has received high praise from both academia and industry.

Many scholars have argued that capitalism is at a crossroads, as the climate crisis and soaring inequality pose problems that the free market has proven to be incapable of solving. Professor Henderson points to Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics as the origin of these issues. As businesspeople adopted shareholder value maximization as their primary goal, and proponents of free market capitalism attacked government and regulation, capitalism spiralled out of control.

How can businesses balance social responsibility and profitability? What changes need to be made to our current form of capitalism? And can the system truly be reformed? These are the questions that led Professor Henderson to write Reimagining Capitalism. In this interview, we explore these questions and more, diving into Professor Henderson’s insights as well as the research that informed her conclusions. We begin with Professor Henderson’s vision of “purpose-driven capitalism,” in which businesses place profit maximization on equal footing with serving society. How feasible is such an idea? Are there any real-world examples of businesses embracing this philosophy? Professor Henderson argues that, in many cases, the interests of business align with the interests of society.

One of Professor Henderson’s key insights is that business and strong political institutions are complements – not adversaries. In opposition to the classical view of government as detrimental to economic efficiency, Professor Henderson argues that businesses benefit from capable government and regulation. What does this mean for tech giants like Facebook and Google? We discuss potential antitrust activity against these companies, and how it might be carried out in a responsible manner.

Finally, we place Professor Henderson’s research alongside other recent books about capitalism: Thomas Piketty’s "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", Branko Milanovic’s "Capitalism, Alone", Nicholas Lemann’s "Transaction Man", Katharina Pistor’s "The Code of Capital", Glen Weyl on "Radical Markets"… How does "Reimagining Capitalism" differ in its approach to reforming capitalism? What makes Professor Henderson’s insights unique from that from academic economists?

This interview marks the 100th episode of Policy Punchline. We’re truly grateful for all the support you’ve given us over the last two years and sincerely hope that we may continue to explore more exciting ideas on our journey forward!

Jim VandeHei is the co-founder and CEO of Axios and the former executive editor and co-founder of Politico. In this interview, Jim and Tiger discuss the struggles and issues of independent and legacy media platforms, the danger of ideological bubbles within journalist circles, the intellectual opportunity cost of over-analyzing Trump, the deviation from truths and facts in today’s social discourse, and a variety of urgent issues in politics and beyond.

Axios, founded in 2016, has the mission is to deliver the clearest, smartest, most efficient and trustworthy experience for the audience and advertisers alike. It is on the forefront of today’s shift toward more bit-sized media with an emphasis on facts, not editorialization or the journalist’s own opinions.

How does Axios strike the balance between short-form, concise coverage and the full nuance and complexity of the subjects they are covering? How does Axios select the best set of facts and truths when there are often “multiple sides of truths” to a story?

Podcast host Eric Weinstein said “Supply creates its own demand. Optics create its own substance.” It seems that we’re in an era where there is an increasingly diverse and complex set of narratives that can no longer be controlled by the larger institutions. While there is now more high-quality information available than ever before, it has also become easier to spread and consume misinformation and misrepresenting “facts.” Who caused the media slant? The consumer or the supplier? How can consumers realistically make better decisions in their daily media consumption? 

Is there anything wrong with traditional mainstream media outlets like New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and the like? Is it fair to criticize them as narrative-driven journalism that hides behind the veil of neutrality and rationality, while in fact seeking to push for a certain set of narratives with cherry-picked facts and pandering to their base? Are any of these criticisms fair? 

What can the “beltway” media learn from the 2020 elections, when there was no “Blue Wave” as widely reported before the election? Jim has previously discussed the phenomena of the “Trump Bump” – the media covers Trump so much because otherwise they’d see a drop in ratings. How have the Trump presidency and Trump’s relationship with media coverage challenged media norms? Did the media world waste four years of precious time over-analyzing Trump when there was a plethora of more urgent issues left undiscussed – incurring a huge intellectual opportunity cost to our social discourse? 


On the day before our interview, BuzzFeed announced its acquisition of Huffington Post in an all-stock deal. Is it a merger out of necessity? How hard has it been for independent media platforms even before Covid-19 hit? Why are Axios and Politico two of the very few successful media companies founded over the last two decades?

This is one of the most insightful conversations we’ve had on the media landscape and political discourse – we hope it is a meaningful representation of how far we’ve come for our 100th episode!

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Since the race towards high-powered, destructive bombs during World War II, nuclear technologies have captured the public’s imagination in the discourse over energy and society. Large-scale nuclear fission, which involves the splitting of an atom, has been particularly crucial in the energy mix and electricity production in many Western countries over the past few decades. Nuclear fusion – where two atoms collide to create energy – has played a much lesser role in modern energy systems and is much less known than its fission counterpart. One man is hoping to change that.

Sir Steven Cowley has been at the forefront for pushing frontier research and wide adoption of nuclear fusion technology. A leader in some of the most advanced nuclear projects, including the Joint European Torus and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, Sir Cowley's knowledge and passion for fusion is contagious. Now, as the head of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL), the leading fusion research center in the U.S., Sir Cowley aims to help build one of the largest and most influential fusion labs in the world.

In this interview, Sir Cowley offers his wisdom in describing the complex processes the underline the nuclear fusion process, helping us to better understand the technologies. He explains why the paths of nuclear fusion and fission diverged following the 1940s, pointing out the more difficult nature of a nuclear fusion reaction.

From there, we dive into the role of fusion in the global energy mix, citing it as a cleaner, safer, more democratic, powerful and energy-dense source of power. In other words, fusion is the perfect source of energy. The catch? The world hasn't quite figured out how to produce nuclear fusion energy in large quantities, and we go deep on the scientific and policy hurdles that need to be overcome.

While Sir Cowley believes that there are advancements to be made before building huge commercial fusion plants, he points out that China is in the process of constructing these expensive power producing edifices and may set good examples for the West. China has been much more active investing into nuclear fusion, while some Western powers have declined to pour more money into research. 

Finally, Cowley gave his thoughts on the interrelation of physics and religion, the experience of being knighted by Queen Elizabeth, the differences between the scientifically and metaphysically unanswerable questions, and many other deep thoughts on the wide world of energy.

Liam Vaughan’s newest book explores the “Flash Crash” that took place on May 6, 2010. In the span of five minutes, S&P fell 5% and a trillion dollars of valuation was wiped out. Within around 20 minutes, the markets picked back up and resumed to normalcy. The crash was later attributed to Navinder Sarao, or Nav, a London day trader who lives with his parents and trades from his bedroom.

In this interview, Liam joins Tiger and Michael to talk about this fastest drop in market history, Nav’s journey and involvement in the crash, the moral-ethical implications of his arrest, and some fundamental issues of financial markets and emerging tech that allowed such havoc to unfold.

Why should we care about an event that only lasted 20 minutes – shorter than 1/5 of the length of this podcast interview? Was the Flash Crash a Black Swan, perfect storm type of event, or an indicator of something larger such as an unstable trading ecosystem as we move towards automation? What are the definitions of these techniques like “spoofing,” “scalping,” or “high-frequency trading” that seemed to have contributed to an ever more automated financial market and the Crash?

“Nav had fine-tuned the system to the point where he could more or less nudge one of the world’s biggest markets around at will.” Do we now live in a world where it’s indeed possible for a single person, with enough drive and the help of a computer program, can cause such destructive effects on the global economy from their bedroom? If so, what does this mean for national security and general societal stability? Are things really that fragile?


Nav is an extremely complex figure. In many ways, he has a number of admirable qualities - determination, single minded focus, mathematical brilliance and utter fearlessness - and yet many of his actions have been described as fraud. Even the way that he is named - by the nickname “Nav” or as the "Hound of Hounslow" (a clear reference to the Wolf of Wall Street) - seems in a somewhat positive or even charismatic manner. How should we view him? Does Liam admire him, see him as a man who committed criminal actions, or think of him as some combination of the two?

Futex, the firm Nav got his start at, was part of a new era of trading taking place in the digital realm as opposed to in-person trading pits. Nav’s strengths - single minded focus, mathematical brilliance, agility, and extreme risk taking - were particularly suited to this new digital trading and were emblematic of the new generation of traders. How has this broader change in personality type of traders impacted the world of finance? The fact that PhD mathematicians and data scientists are basically making more money than MBAs and corporate finance executives must reveal something quite profound about the direction our world is headed towards, right? 


Is there anything that we could do to deter this kind of behavior for future traders? Regulators seem to be always behind the financial practitioners because the best talents are much more financially incentivized to work for a quant trading firm than for the SEC or CFTC. Is there any way to fix this dead loop and reinvigorate talents within government agencies?

How did the Indian-Americans vote in the 2020 Presidential Elections? Was the nomination of Kamala Harris a decisive factor? How different will India-US ties be in a Biden administration? How did the Narendra Modi administration in India handle the COVID-19 pandemic? What are some of the most grave challenges being confronted by the Indian democractic system?

In this episode, we explore all these fascinating questions with one of the most well-reputed political economists of India – Dr. Milan Vaishnav, a Senior Fellow and the director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C. His primary research focuses on issues such as corruption and governance, state capacity, distributive politics, and electoral behavior. He is the author of the book "When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics" and is the host of the podcast "Grand Tamasha." Being an Indian-American himself, Dr. Vaishnav offers unique insights into the electoral behaviour of the Indian-Americans, a group that became visibly more important in the elections this year.

We begin the interview with unpacking the Indian-American vote in the 2020 Elections. Dr. Vaishnav explains the results of the India-Americans Attitude Survey, a survey conducted by Dr. Vaishnav and his colleagues to understand the electoral behaviour and preferences of the India-American voters. The survey, one the only ones that focuses on the Indian-Ameican community, revealed that much like other voters, Indian-Americans care about basic domestic issues - economy and healthcare. At the same time, the state of India-US relations was an insignificant factor in determining their electoral choice. Countering the general perception of Indian-Americans being overwhelmingly supportive of Trump and the Republiucan Party, Dr. Vaishnav argues that the community is predominantly Democratic. He highlights that the Trump-Modi bonhomie did not cause a shift in the choices of the Indian-Americans.

Talking about the state of the India-US ties, Dr. Vaishnav emphasized that under the Trump administration, the security and diplomatic cooperation between the two nations was tremendously expanded, while the economic cooperation remained stagnant. A Biden administration is expected to continue the growing security partnership, one that surely will be invigorated with the presence of an Indian-American Vice President.

Dr. Vaishnav also delves deep into the successes of the Modi administration in handling the pandemic, amid growing concerns about the state of the Indian economy. He also sheds light on one of the most intriguing questions for Indian political economists: Why is Modi so popular despite widespread concerns over the Indian economy and its sovereignty?

We hope that you enjoy listening to an interview about a country and a community that continues to fascinate and intrigue many. It is our hope that through these series of interviews, we continue to demystify India, Indian-Americans, and the 2020 Elections for our listeners!

A seasoned entrepreneur and financier, Tom Leyden is well versed in every aspect of the solar world. In this episode, Tom speaks about his start in the solar space, how it has evolved over the years, and what he sees as the future of the technology.

Tom narrates his experiences in Africa and Southeast Asia advising companies and governments on solar projects. He explains how solar is not only as a source of power, but also an aid mechanism that will continue to be important abroad from both financial and strategic perspectives. His article "Solar Power for Peace" describes the lasting goodwill that often accompanies solar projects in developing nations.

Tom also believes in a bright future for the American solar market, as some of the experienced foreign developers may continue to see high-potential business opportunities here. He also elaborates on distributed energy, net metering, the theory of "price cannibalization,” and some recent changes in NJ state energy policy.  

Tom has done a great deal of work on the Princeton campus, helping the University define and reach their goal to get to 100% net zero emissions by 2045. Tom's team developed Princeton's first solar project and is currently in the middle of a new 17MW solar project that involves locations around Princeton's campus.

Another topic that Tom feels strongly about concerning Princeton's relation to energy is the Princeton endowment investments into the fossil fuel industry. Tom's view on divestment has recently changed, and he is now a leading voice in pressuring Princeton to divest their holdings in key fossil fuel companies. He points to the poor performance of the traditional energy sector in public markets and cites the objectively higher returns of renewable projects.

Tom is passionate about helping students and young professionals find their way in the growing renewables industry. His own enthusiasm for solar is contagious, and it's easy to see why many young people today feel so strongly about the industry.

Full bio: One of the early solar pioneers, Tom began his solar career in 1980 and over the years has held a number of executive management positions. He was VP of Sales and Marketing at EPV, a thin-film PV manufacturer, and at WorldWater, a remote-power and solar-water pumping company that installed solar projects in Africa and Asia. He served as VP of East Coast Operations for PowerLight, the commercial PV pioneer bought by SunPower, where he ran SunPower’s East Coast office in Trenton, and later was VP of Commercial Development at SolarCity. In 2012 he became CEO of the energy storage start-up Solar Grid Storage that was acquired by SunEdison in 2015 and joined EDF Renewable Energy to help lead its solar plus storage group.

Nate Silver, widely considered as the preeminent election forecaster, uses Bayesian methods in his models. What is Bayesian statistics? It just happens that some of our team members have been studying Bayesian concepts, so we hope this explanation could be somewhat helpful in informing you of the foundational methodology that Silver uses to forecast.

The questions we discuss include:

- Was Nate Silver right in 2016? (He was and wasn’t).

- Can we even judge whether a forecaster is right or wrong?

- Are elections chaotic systems that we cannot predict or controlled systems that we can?

- Should forecasters incorporate the likelihood of a “Black Swan” event like a coup or contested elections in their models?

- Do alternative facts (or truths) exist?

- Do we have enough data to make predictions for someone like Trump?

This is a brief recap to our election night livestream, in which we had a four-hour long discussion on various topics such as the evolving nature of our political discourse, the future of ObamaCare after elections, Biden’s clean energy plan, etc.

You may visit policypunchline.com/op-ed to read more about the application of Bayesian methods in today’s political debates, and you may watch our entire livestream on our YouTube channel.

We react to the election outcome so far and discuss why it’s an indictment on the Democratic Party and a victory for Trump.

Does the failed expectations of polling consensus represent an error in election predictions or a cognitive dissonance about the true political feelings of Americans? Have the democrats failed to put forward policy that appeals to Americans, or are they simply losing the messaging war?

Will a (highly probable) Biden presidency with a Republican Senate majority devolve into a lame duck presidency and a replay of the Obama-Tea Party drama that resulted in few major legislative accomplishments? Will the Democratic Party face even greater challenges in consolidating voters moving forward, while the Republican Party seems to be more unified and determined behind Trump than ever?