Power gets loud when it’s insecure. Strategy becomes theater. And ideology sneaks in wearing policy jargon. The White House’s newest U.S. National Security Strategy claims realism while quietly demanding dominance, preaching restraint while laying groundwork for escalation. Civilizational panic collides with imperial muscle, producing a document that wants everything, everywhere, all at once. Van Jackson,...
Book episode! What happens when a policy meant to shape a nation reaches into the most intimate corners of a family’s life? Journalist Barbara Demick’sDaughters of the Bamboo Grove becomes a prism for a China where babies vanish, families fracture, and two identical lives grow up worlds apart. One twin speaks Mandarin, the other English....
As global finance strains under shifting power structures, author and fintech thinker Emmanuel Daniel, founder of TAB Global, argues that the real disruption isn’t technological – it’s personal. This episode explores finance as a geopolitical arena where identity, data, and sovereignty reshape who holds leverage. What happens when individuals, not institutions, become the organizing unit...
Tariffs promise protection but unleash deeper shocks – reshaping demand, distorting prices, and testing the resilience of an already-strained economic system. Rob Larity and Jacob unpack the widening gap between political narratives and material reality, probing how erratic policy, volatile markets, and institutional guardrails collide. They ask whether the U.S. is entering a new era...
China’s rise is often framed as a geopolitical contest, but Kaiser Y Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast, pushes us to confront something deeper: what if China’s transformation exposes the West’s blind spots about modernity, power, and progress itself? Jacob and Kaiser wrestle with uncomfortable parallels between America’s Gilded Age and China’s present, the myths...
Aging quietly shapes everything – our economies, our politics, our families, and the horizon of what nations can become. Jacob and longevity expert Dylan Livingston, founder of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI), take a dive into the emerging science that treats aging not as fate, but as a solvable biological problem with staggering geopolitical...
Technological revolutions rarely unfold the way we imagine. From the steam engine to AI, each wave reshapes who creates value – and who gets left behind. What if artificial intelligence isn’t a revolution at all, but a late-stage innovation like shipping containers – transforming efficiency without changing the underlying system? Jerry Neumann joins the Jacob...
As the Supreme Court takes up one of the most consequential trade cases in decades, former Biden administration official and Yale-trained lawyer Peter Harrell joins Jacob L. for a real-time breakdown of what’s at stake. Together, they cut through the legal jargon to reveal how a 1977 emergency powers statute became the foundation for Donald...
South Korea stands at the crossroads of global power – caught between China, the United States, Japan, and its unpredictable neighbor to the north. Jacob Shapiro and Professor Jeffrey Robertson unpack how a nation long described as “the shrimp among whales” has learned to navigate the world’s toughest geopolitical waters. From shifting alliances and nuclear...
When U.S. aircraft carriers appear off Venezuela’s coast, it’s not just saber-rattling – it’s a mirror held up to a century of empire. Jacob and LatAm analyst Elohim Monard dissect what’s really driving Washington’s renewed aggression in the Caribbean, from Trump and Rubio’s internal power struggle – to the shadow of China, the lure of...
