Robert Wright's Nonzero

Mickey protests the sexualization of Bloggingheads ... The tribal response to Simone Biles' troubles ... Mickey: The left puts too much blame on unvaccinated Trumpers ... Bob campaigns for vaccine czar ... How should Biden talk about the Delta variant? ... Who can beat Trump in 2024? ... JD Vance really wants you to have kids ... Bob wants to get rid of the news ... Mickey: Sinema should sink the child tax credit ... Elon Musk's fantasy world ... Bob is hiring! ... Parrot Room preview: Into the metaverse, Mickey's theory on Gawker, Van Jones gets rich, Mickey's take on Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau, how woke are the Olympics, sexism in trees, the joke Mickey told Jackie Mason, and a new report on a 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria ...

Last year's Beirut port explosion ... The roots of Lebanon's economic crisis ... Sectarianism and the dueling narratives of the Lebanese civil war ... Why did Hezbollah intervene in Syria? ... Rania: US policy in Syria helped lead to the rise of ISIS ... What if outside powers had stayed out of Syria? ... The effect of US sanctions on Syria ... How popular is Assad's government? ... Why Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia intervened in the conflict ...

Bob and Mickey enter the Cone of Silence ... Mickey: The narrative about vaccination has collapsed ... Should Bob worry about Eric Weinstein’s latest weird tweet? ... Are we stuck with Covid forever? ... Mickey: If Americans start to see work as optional, migrants will replace them ... The Child Tax Credit’s surprisingly bad polling ... Appraising the Cleveland baseball team’s new name ... A new Gallup opinion poll has some bad news about race relations ... Mickey doesn’t buy Bob’s take on the Pegasus spyware expose ... The inquiries and (alleged) conspiracies of January 6 ... Why blame Tom Barrack when you could blame Jared? ... Biden screws Ukraine over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline ... Parrot Room preview: What bad buses in Philly teach us about government overreach, the California recall, Jeffrey Goldberg in hot water, Nick Kristof eyes a run for office, Sean Hannity’s bowel problems—and ours, Eric Weinstein’s tweet, game theory among ethnic elites, and the January 6 prosecutions ...

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 ...

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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 ...