You’d think that with all the power moves Trump is making on the international stage (Greenland, Venezuela, Iran, etc.) the publication of the administration’s National Security Strategy in December of 2025 would’ve been the source of much public attention. Unfortunately, mainstream media largely overlooked the document with much of the analysis relegated to the foreign policy community.

That’s all set up for introducing my guest who offered a very intriguing and original take on the NSS: it’s a true strategic document in that it’s primarily focused on first principles and philosophical arguments. In other words, it’s a work of political philosophy as opposed to a work of bureaucratic prioritization.

More intriguing, my guest isn’t some career foreign policy type or academic who spends his days buried in the particulars of global politics and international security concerns. 

My guest today is Ron Dodson, the founder and CEO of Dallas North Capital Partners, a Texas-based hedge fund, and something of a polymath.

My burning question for Ron is “How did a hedge fund manager in Dallas see something in the NSS that the broader foreign policy community missed?” 

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US Air Force Academy professor Dr. Kerry Chávez is back on the show to pick up where we left off in our last conversation: the ethical considerations, quandaries and pitfalls surrounding drones, AI, and other emerging tech in their military applications.

While a lot of attention has been focused on armed drone use in war zones, there’s a whole realm of military application that drones and emerging autonomous vehicles that may be less visible to the public eye and cadres of armchair generals on X: medivac, ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), C2 (command and control), and other many other “back end” elements of military logistics. 

While these non-kinetic applications for emerging technology may appear at first blush to be ethically and morally neutral. However, when considering things like the field performance (and limitations) of these vehicles, the potential for bias in data being fed into them, and the still nascent norms, legal, and regulatory components governing their use by states (nonstate actors are a whole other consideration) Kerry suggests that there’s more of the ethical and moral here than meets the eye. 

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We’re back for 2026 and another season of the Tim Talks Politics Podcast. 

2025’s end of year project, The Kirk Effects, was wonderful and worthwhile, but it did draw my attention away from the international sphere before taking that holiday break. Now, as we enter 2026, the world is in flux in a way few thought possible just last month. Before we dive into conversations on Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, etc. (don’t worry, they’re in the pipeline), I want to start the year off with a conversation on Central Asia and Kazakhstan’s ascension to the Abraham Accords.

To discuss this critical region and the potentially huge impacts of the Abraham Accords on that region, Joseph Epstein returns to the podcast to give us a dime tour of the region and to flesh out the possibilities surrounding Kazakhstan joining the Accords. 

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A short message wishing you all a "Merry Christmas" as I take a slightly earlier intended Christmas break.

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They say politics is downstream from culture, but what is culture downstream from? My guest today would say culture is downstream from worldview - one’s governing assumptions of morality and ultimate reality. And that’s why she’s on the podcast today.

My guest is writer, actress, and comedian Zena Dell Lowe. Our conversation covers a wide array of topics related to culture and the ideas, people and moments that shape it. This is a longer conversation that tackles the idea of a “Kirk effect” from a very different angle by considering Kirk’s broader cultural impact beyond faith and politics. 

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In this episode of The Kirk Effect, Dr. Wilsey and I explore the broader historical and cultural context of Kirk’s work. Dr. Wilsey explains that in many respects, Kirk’s evident Christian faith and rhetoric is not an anomaly in American public life. In fact, it’s something of a throw back to a not so distant past when the intersection of faith and politics in America produced a rich cultural exchange that has generally benefited American culture.

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In this episode of The Kirk Effect, Representative David Eastman of the Alaska state legislature and I discuss his experience of attending the memorial service for Charlie Kirk. The memorial service lasted for over five hours, was attended by hundreds of thousands, and raised a lot of questions about the interaction of American Christianity with politics.

As a Christian who serves in an elected office, Rep. Eastman has some great insight on how to live and work at that intersection of faith and politics, and provides some helpful ways of thinking about how these two core elements of American life interact.

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What did Charlie Kirk see in America’s youth that drove him on to college campuses to discuss, debate, and advocate for conservative ideas in a largely hostile environment? Kirk wasn’t shy about why he so purposefully engaged young people: They were the future. But this wasn’t necessarily a manipulative political project. For Kirk and many others working with America’s young people, it was a mission of mercy...

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My guest today is Isela Becerra, a longtime TPUSA member, and one of my Political Science students at Biola University. I asked Isela on the podcast to share about her involvement and experience in TPUSA.

One of the biggest surprises to me following the Charlie Kirk assassination was to discover the expansive work of Turning Point. In the course of this discussion, an even bigger surprise emerged, which was Isela making me aware of Turning Point’s different organizational units and functions. This critical organizational detail of Kirk’s work has largely been ignored or obfuscated in the public discourse....

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Biological twins are about as demographically similar as one can get. So, it was rather surprising to me to find that social media algorithms fed Josh and Jeremy Matlock very different content related to Charlie Kirk. As we discuss in this episode of The Kirk Effect, taking a closer look at Charlie Kirk’s words and work after his assassination required both Josh and Jeremy Matlock to adjust their initial impressions of Kirk. 

Also in this discussion, we talk about how Josh and Jeremy have observed and navigated the Kirk Effect in their respective congregations. The brothers are both pastors of churches in different states that have very different profiles, which is a good reminder that America is a big country with a diverse population, even among people of the same faith, which has a big impact on how they engage national events at the local level.

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