This week in underappreciated world history ... Were the elections all—or just mostly—bad news for Trump? ... Will Trump invade Venezuela? ... Epstein's creepy relationship with Trump ... What’s the shutdown fight really about? ... Mickey vs Ezra Klein (in absentia) on healthcare ... Back down the Epstein rabbit hole ... Was Tucker playing 4D chess with the Fuentes interview? ... What happened to the blogosphere? ... The case for (and against) Bari Weiss ... AI doom in fiction vs reality ... The AI bubble: Dot-com déjà vu? ... AOC in 2028? ... Mickey: Beware of gym girls! ...

The Carlson-Fuentes interview controversy ... Paul: Candidate Carlson is coming ... Is gatekeeping dead? ... Is Carlson’s show respectable? ... Carlson and Fuentes on the Israel lobby ... William F. Buckley as MAGA precursor ... Is antisemitism more organic on the right or left? ... Heading to Overtime ...

Bob tries to lower American Prestige’s self-esteem ... The Trump-Xi trade talks ... Making sense of Trump’s nuclear saber-rattling ... Signs of a US-China vibe shift ... Is AI accelerating science? ... Bill Gates’s climate change of heart ... This week’s Gaza ceasefire death toll ... Overtime preview: Bob vs Danny on international law ...

Teaser ... Trump on drug cartels: "We're gonna kill them. They're gonna be like, dead." ... Venezuela: Regime change disguised as drug war ... Marco Rubio holds all the foreign policy power ... Trump Doctrine candidate #1: "Jump at the chance to use force" ... Trump Doctrine candidate #2: Monroe 2.0 ... Roy Cohn's philosophy: "It is a nation of men, not laws" ... Bob: There's value in hypocrisy ... Trump is paving the way for a more competent tyrant ... Could Trump actually be good for the world? ... Trump the comedian ... Heading to Overtime: Bob's mysterious invitation-only conference ...

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What triggered Trump’s 100-percent tariff threat? ... How China is mirroring the US playbook ... The real escalation: America's "50% rule" ... Why has US media coverage been so bad? ... Why has US media coverage been so bad? ... US China policy as cognitive empathy failure ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Why Liron became a Yudkowskian ... Eliezer Yudkowsky’s vision of AI apocalypse ... Does intelligence want power? ... Decoding Yudkowsky’s key Darwinian metaphor ... Is doomerism crowding out other AI worries? ... Liron: The silent majority is very AI anxious ... Heading to Overtime ...

Amazing Bob-Paul discount deal! ... The Bari Weiss trivia test ... Lasting peace in Gaza? ... Why did Trump finally get tough on Bibi? ... MAGA free speech debates ... Is the AI bubble about to burst? ... If anyone builds it, will everyone die? ... Heading into Overtime: Ian McEwan, George Harrison, OpenAI, One Battle After Another ...

Was Free Press bought “to control US media”? ... Why pay $150M for a Substack? ... Netanyahu on the TikTok deal and "giving direction" to the Jewish people ... Pro-Israel donors giving a $2M ultimatum to Charlie Kirk about his ties to Tucker Carlson ... How much influence does Israel have over US media? ... Why Tucker Carlson's appeal to Christians is a problem for Bibi ... Trump: "I would make TikTok 100% MAGA related if I could" ... Why Hamas would be crazy to trust Trump on his Gaza deal ... Prigozhin conspiracy theory: Why would the Russian government want people to think he's alive? ... Cognitive sovereignty ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Steve’s book In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us ... Were school closures smart policy? ... The mask mandate question ... Did medical experts get too much say? ... The role of social class and political tribe ... How dissent was suppressed ... Bob takes a jab at Jay Bhattacharya ... Heading to OT: Why Steve wrote the book ...

The deal Hamas offered Bibi before October 7 ... How October 7 changed the landscape ... Why Clinton’s Camp David talks failed ... What Arafat was actually offered at Camp David ... The centrality of the right of return ... Beyond two states ... Heading into OT: Abandoning false optimism is not pessimism ...

How Eliezer Yudkowsky's new book envisions AI takeover ... Will we ever really know how AI works? ... The “paperclip maximizer" problem revisited ... Will advanced AIs be insatiable? ... David’s alternative takeover scenario: gradual disempowerment ... Can—and should—we keep humans in the loop? ... Heading into Overtime ...

Teaser ... Glenn’s latest book, Self-Censorship ... Why the Manhattan Institute dropped Glenn ... Glenn on Gaza: “I can’t bear it.” ... “Genocide” and other Israel speech code flashpoints ... Has Trump’s anti-antisemitism push chilled campus speech? ... The irony of the antisemitism crackdown ... A few kind and less kind words for Bari Weiss ... Are Israel’s defenders hurting their cause? ... Glenn’s next big project ...

Free speech after Charlie Kirk ... Tyler Robinson’s strange messages ... How influential was Kirk? ... Do violent video games encourage violence? ... What Gary Marcus gets right—and (very) wrong—about AI ... Overtime topics: Paul’s debate triumph, Redford’s legacy, etc. ... Heading into Overtime ...

How this conversation came to be ... What surprised Glenn most about the Kirk killing ... Who (or what) is driving our polarization? ... Cognitive empathy for MAGA ... Reacting to Charlie Kirk on affirmative action ... Are we re-running the 1960s? ... Coming up in part 2: Israel-Gaza ...

Has the pace of AI progress slowed? ... How the tech CEOs are learning to stop worrying ... Mark Zuckerberg ... Sam Altman ... OpenAI’s attempt to shed its non-profit status ... Dario Amodei ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... "Would Putin send a weird sexually suggestive birthday greeting to a famous affluent well-connected pedophile?" ... Decoding Trump's message in the greeting ... Conspiracy theories vs official silence ... Why is Ezra Klein content with "We'll never know"? ... Why no president wants to release the Epstein files ... Ghislaine names Clinton and Larry Summers ... Does Epstein kill faith in democracy? ... Trump vs. Putin: Authoritarian playbooks compared ... Will Trumpism outlive Trump? ... David Sacks embraces strongman tactics ... How war changes everything overnight ... Trump's Mexico invasion fantasy ... Heading to Overtime ...

The Bob-Paul secret sauce—spilled! ... Mickey Kaus's latest contribution to Epsteinology ... Paul fact-checks Mickey, gets fact-checked ... What’s better: AI or indoor plumbing? ... What Gary Marcus gets right—and (very) wrong—about AI ... Has TV made us smarter? ... The pros of the Google antitrust ruling ... Putin’s paleo-transhumanism ... Heading to Overtime ...

Teaser ... Seth’s new NYT bestseller, The Fort Bragg Cartel ... What is Delta Force? ... The growth of Delta Force's covert ops and unaccountability ... American "death squads" ... Why cops and prosecutors cover up crimes by elite soldiers ... The mysterious murder of Billy Lavigne ... How invading Afghanistan fueled America's drug crisis ... Heading to Overtime ...

Bob welcomes Nikita back to the Nonzero team ... WSJ's report on Trump's authoritarian drift ... Three levers: streets, media, education system ... Trump the businessman and Trump the politician ... Why Putin was compelling in 1999, when Russia was a young democracy ... Laws vs norms ... Trump and lawfare: how independent is the US judiciary? ... Partisanship among judges ... Trump's view of the world as a game ... Cynicism as a political brand ... Nikita: Putin and Trump share a geopolitical worldview ... The damage the US and Russia did to the international law ... The evolution of Putin's understanding of geopolitics ... Today's Overtime segment is open for everybody! ... The crisis of the nation-state & NonZero's community building project ... "Kremlin is not Russia": distinguishing between the nation and the state ... Bob: We all need a tribe ... What does it mean to be an American? ... Nikita's Armenian propaganda: A legitimate reason to be proud of your nation ...