Frames of Space

To what extent has income inequality worsened over the past few years and decades? Have the rich been getting richer and the poor poorer? Has capitalism led to a rise in worker exploitation? Is neoliberalism responsible for the rise in democratic backsliding throughout the world?

Tibor Rutar is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maribor and the writer behind the Substack "Political Economy, Stats, and Society....

Lyman Stone is a Substack writer and a Senior Fellow and Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He is a pronatalist, which means that he wants society to have higher birth rates and more children.

In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about the nature of his online persona, the gap between desired and actual fertility rates, and the correlation between marriage and fertility.

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Announcement: this podcast will be returning to its traditional biweekly upload schedule for the foreseeable future. But I really enjoyed the run of weekly episodes that I've been able to pull off for the past few months, and I hope to do it again some time :)

Damon Linker is a senior lecturer of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and the writer behind the Substack "Notes from the Middleground," which covers the na...

Victor Kumar is an associate professor of philosophy at Boston University and the writer behind the Substack "Open Questions." He is known for his writing on political polarization, and the cultural reasons behind the state of civil culture in America.

In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about why he believes in the importance of a large Overton window, the positions he held about lockdowns during the pandemic, and wh...

Elena Bridgers is the writer behind the Substack "Motherhood Until Yesterday." She is known for her writing on evolutionary biology: specifically, the nature of hunter-gatherer societies, and how that explains why motherhood is so difficult in the present.

In the episode, I got a chance to speak with her about the tradeoffs that come with gender equity, how parenting has changed her conception of contemporary feminism, and the ways...

Lars Doucet is the President of the Center for Land Economics and the writer behind the Substack "Progress and Poverty." Lars is a Georgist, which means he believes that land is fundamentally different from other forms of property. From his point of view, we shouldn't be taxing what people build, earn, or produce—we should be taxing the value of the location itself.

In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about the concep...

Blaise Brosnan is a good friend of mine, and I've had many conversations with him over the years about the divisions within the MAGA movement. He currently studies as a PhD candidate at UCLA, and I brought him onto my podcast to better understand the civil war that's happening within the Republican Party right now.

So in this episode, we spoke quite a bit about the recent interview between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, the misco...

Announcement: this podcast will be going on holiday for the rest of December, so this is the last new episode you'll be seeing on this feed in 2025. But I'll be back to regularly scheduled episodes beginning on January 1st of the new year :)

Rana Mitter is the ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an expert on understanding the nature of Chinese politics: government, culture, values, and much more.

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Joseph Heath is a political philosophy professor at the University of Toronto and the writer behind the Substack "In Due Course." He is known for his commentary on critical theory, the nature of capitalism, and how our psychological tendencies influence our political beliefs.

In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about the differences between intuitive thinking and analytical reasoning, why common sense is sometimes wro...

Habib Fanny writes the Substack "Politidoc." He used to write about politics on the Q&A site Quora, where he amassed over 100k followers from writing there for over a decade about topics such as electoral trends, race relations, and how negative polarization affected his ideology.

In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about why non-white voters swung away from the Democratic Party in 2024, how to strive for good-fai...

Lakshya Jain is a political data analyst and co-founder of Split Ticket, a data journalism project known for its sharp election modeling and nonpartisan vote breakdowns. He currently leads the polling operation over at The Argument, a magazine devoted to making the persuasive case for liberal democracy—not by avoiding political conflict, but by engaging it head-on.

In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about the results...

Elizabeth Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She is one of the rare journalists today whose work moves seamlessly between politics, theology, and ethics, and grief—without flattening any of them. There’s a line of hers I keep coming back to: Beauty tells you where to look. That's how she writes. And it's how she sees the world.

In this episode, I got a chance to spea...

Francis Fukuyama is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that liberal democracy represented the endpoint of humanity's ideological evolution.

In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about whether his end of history thesis holds up by modern standards, the nature of democratic backsliding in th...

Marshall Kosloff is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and the host of the podcast The Realignment. His work covers the nature of coalitional change in American politics since the rise of Donald Trump, and how Democrats can accomplish the policies of the Abundance agenda at the state level.

In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about his journey from the center-right to the center-left, the dearth of compelling stor...

Steve Teles is a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. He is one of the main advocates of the abundance agenda, which champions supply-side solutions to many of the problems of modern economies, including housing unaffordability, clean energy, public infrastructure, and more.

In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about how the abundance movement has grown in...

Allie Volpe is a correspondent at Vox. She writes extensively about the science of human connection—friendship, conversation, community, and the invisible threads that tie our well-being to the relationships around us. And let me tell you, these connections are vital.

Take loneliness, for instance. Loneliness isn’t just a feeling; it’s a state of being that affects us both psychologically and physically. When we’re lonely, we feel ...

David French is an opinion columnist for The New York Times. Formerly a senior editor at The Dispatch and staff writer at National Review, David is known by many for his understanding of mainstream conservatism, and how Republican culture has changed significantly over the past decade.

In this episode, I spoke with him about the history of populism within Evangelical America, the ways that Evangelical culture led to the rise of the...

Jeremiah Johnson is the co-founder of The Center for New Liberalism, host of The New Liberal Podcast, and the writer behind the Substack Infinite Scroll.

His writing lives at the strange intersection of serious policy and unserious online discourse—and he’s one of the few people I’ve come across who is willing to take both seriously. One day he’s writing about marginal tax rates or housing vouchers; the next he’s explaining how fan...