The Good Fight

Will you be in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday July 15? I will be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about how liberalism should respond to the postliberal threat. Find out more and get your free ticket here! —Yascha

Yascha Mounk and Deirdre McCloskey discuss why ideas, not capital accumulation, made the modern world rich.

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, sometimes described as “the conscience of economics,” holds the Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Deirdre McCloskey discuss why liberalism drives economic growth, how the gradual erosion of inherited hierarchy unleashed centuries of innovation, and what liberals should think about the trans debate.

We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.

That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking in moral terms. Liberalism’s opponents, by contrast, speak to people’s passions and deepest moral sentiments.

This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, aims to change that narrative. In podcast conversations and long-form pieces, we feature content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.

If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following ⁠this link on your phone⁠.

Email: [email protected]

Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.

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Yascha Mounk and Arvind Narayanan discuss why the real transformation from AI will take decades rather than months—and what that means for how we should prepare.

Arvind Narayanan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Arvind Narayanan discuss why AI’s transformative impact will unfold over decades rather than months, whether human accountability can survive the rise of AI agents in the workplace, and what the economy will look like once AI has automated every task that can be precisely specified.

If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.

Email: [email protected]

Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.

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Yascha Mounk and Ivan Krastev examine what the country’s founding ideals mean on its 250th anniversary. 

Ivan Krastev is Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and the Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the advisory and governing boards of several international organizations, including the European Investment Bank, the International Crisis Group, and GLOBSEC.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ivan Krastev discuss what the 250th anniversary of the United States reveals about America’s crisis of self-confidence, whether America and Europe are converging rather than diverging, and how competition with China will reshape American identity in the decades ahead.

We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values.

That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking in moral terms. Liberalism’s opponents, by contrast, speak to people’s passions and deepest moral sentiments.

This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, aims to change that narrative. In podcast conversations and long-form pieces, we feature content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.

If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following ⁠this link on your phone⁠.

Email: [email protected]

Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.

Connect with us!

⁠Spotify⁠ | ⁠Apple⁠

X: ⁠@Yascha_Mounk⁠ & ⁠@JoinPersuasion⁠

YouTube: ⁠Yascha Mounk⁠, ⁠Persuasion⁠

LinkedIn: ⁠Persuasion Community

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yascha Mounk and Charles Fain Lehman explore how strategic policing drove the decline in violent crime—and why Baltimore was left behind.

Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal, where he covers crime, policing, and urban policy.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Charles Fain Lehman discuss why Baltimore failed to follow the crime declines that transformed other American cities, what the evidence tells us about why strategic policing works, and how focused deterrence breaks cycles of retaliatory violence.

Watch the conversation below—the full video is behind the paywall on this page!

If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.

Email: [email protected]

Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.

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Matthew Yglesias, Claire Ainsley, and Yascha Mounk debate whether progressives have abandoned the working-class voters they once claimed to represent.

Will you be in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday July 15? I will be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about how liberalism should respond to the postliberal threat. Find out more and get your free ticket here! —Yascha

In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Matthew Yglesias, Claire Ainsley, and Yascha Mounk examine why center-left parties are losing ground across democracies, whether structural forces or strategic failures are to blame, and what lessons from Canada, Australia, and the UK might offer a path forward for the left.

Matthew Yglesias is the founder and author of Slow Boring, a Substack newsletter focused on policy and politics. He is the author of One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger and a longtime commentator on economics, housing, and Democratic Party strategy.

Claire Ainsley is Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute. A British political strategist and policy expert, she previously served as Executive Director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and as a senior adviser in the Labour government of Keir Starmer. 

Note: This episode was recorded on June 3, 2026.

If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following ⁠this link on your phone⁠.

Email: [email protected]

Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.

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X: ⁠@Yascha_Mounk⁠ & ⁠@JoinPersuasion⁠

YouTube: ⁠Yascha Mounk⁠, ⁠Persuasion⁠

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Yascha Mounk and Mark Leonard discuss how the West can defend itself without America.

Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think–tank. His latest book is Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Mark Leonard discuss why Europe is behind, the global impact of China’s rise, and whether Europe can learn to defend itself without the United States.

If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.

Email: [email protected]

Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.

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YouTube: Yascha Mounk, Persuasion

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Curtis Yarvin, Minna Salami, and Yascha Mounk discuss whether we can ever be free in a liberal society in a discussion moderated by Roger Hearing.

In this special episode of The Good Fight, recorded at the How The Light Gets In Festival, Roger Hearing moderates a debate between Curtis Yarvin, Minna Salami, and Yascha Mounk on whether liberalism can ever be neutral, what a truly free society would look like, and whether liberalism’s heyday is over. Find out more about the Institute of Arts and Ideas—and book tickets to this year’s  How The Light Gets In Festival in September—here. Watch the video of the debate here.

Roger Hearing is a broadcaster and journalist with over 30 years experience presenting and reporting for BBC News and Bloomberg.

Minna Salami is an award-winning Nigerian-Finnish and Swedish author, cultural critic, and independent scholar based in London. She is the author of Can Feminism Be African?: A Most Paradoxical Question.

Curtis Yarvin is a political blogger and software developer.

If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following ⁠⁠this link on your phone⁠⁠.

Email: [email protected]

Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.

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X: ⁠⁠@Yascha_Mounk⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠@JoinPersuasion⁠⁠

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LinkedIn: ⁠⁠Persuasion Community

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Yascha Mounk and Sam Moyn also discuss whether some people deserve to have more votes than others.

Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. His books include Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, The Last Utopia, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. Cohost of the Digging a Hole podcast, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and many other publications.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sam Moyn discuss whether a truly fair democracy might weigh different citizens’ votes differently, whether the emphasis on human rights have got us into the mess we’re in today, and to what extent our democracy is in danger from populism.

If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.

Email: [email protected]

Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.

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Yascha Mounk and David Bau delve into the emerging science of AI interpretability and what we can learn from billions of neural signals.

David Bau is Assistant Professor at Northeastern University and Director of the National Deep Inference Fabric, researching the emergent internal mechanisms of deep generative networks in both Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Bau discuss how AI models actually produce their results and reflect about problems, whether the “thinking” process that models show users reveals their authentic thought processes, and how researchers can decode the internal representations of neural networks to understand what information they contain and use.

If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following ⁠this link on your phone⁠.

Email: [email protected]

Podcast production by Jack Shields and Leonora Barclay.

Connect with us!

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X: ⁠@Yascha_Mounk⁠ & ⁠@JoinPersuasion⁠

YouTube: ⁠Yascha Mounk⁠, ⁠Persuasion⁠

LinkedIn: ⁠Persuasion Community

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Yascha Mounk and Rebecca Haw Allensworth examine how professional licensing has become America’s most important—and most restrictive—regulatory institution.

If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.

Email: [email protected]

Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay.

Connect with us!

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X: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasion

YouTube: Yascha Mounk, Persuasion

LinkedIn: Persuasion Community

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