Wisdom of Crowds

Shadi and Damir have been circling a question for weeks: is the American left’s moment real? To find out, they invited Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of Know Your Enemy and a socialist since it was, in his words, about as fashionable as collecting model trains. Radicalism keeps outperforming caution. Sam admits he used to advise against using the socialist label, against making Gaza a litmus test, against letting the movement’s fringe run loose — and history embarrassed him each time.

Damir is back from a sweltering Europe, where some commentators seemed to treat air conditioning as a moral failing. He opens the show with a provocation: the European aversion to AC isn’t about strained grids or shuttered nuclear plants — it’s secular theology, Christian guilt repurposed for Gaia. Shadi, on a mini-sabbatical in New York City (thermostat set well below Mamdani’s recommended 78), mostly agrees, but argues that the new American Left isn’t like the sanctimonious European mainstream.

This week, we are bringing you a conversation, recorded live at the Times Center in Manhattan last Thursday, between Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, head of the Anthropic Institute and the man behind the Import AI newsletter, and our own Samuel Kimbriel. Clark opens with the uncomfortable premise: recursive self-improvement may arrive this decade — he’ll name 2028 if pressed — and with it a world where AI starts designing its own successors.

I’ve been using AI a whole lot lately, at work and at home. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get it to be as useful as possible. I’ve mostly been using it for ideating and sharpening arguments on tight deadlines, and I’ve had some success. Nevertheless, though I’ve fully accepted that AI is a game changer and will profoundly reshape the economy, I now believe that the practice of chatting with your AI is not long for the world.

Every society has things you’re not supposed to say. Not lies, exactly — more like truths that have been flagged as dangerous, or questions that mark you as suspect for even asking. The list is not set in stone. It shifts. It grows. It shrinks. And the paradox is that almost everyone instinctively knows what’s on it. Trump came to power in no small part by being fearless about speaking the unspeakable, about immigration, about trade, and about liberal orthodoxy.

We are thrilled to invite Wisdom of Crowds listeners to an exclusive event, AI and the Good Society, hosted by the Aspen Institute’s Philosophy & Society Initiative on June 18, 2026 in Midtown Manhattan. Doors will open at 5:30pm, the conversation will go from 6:00 – 7:15pm, with a reception to follow until 8pm. The speed of tech is inspiring major philosophical questions: What does human agency look like in an age of artificial intelligence? What is likely to happen to human community?

In this live taping — a partnership between Wisdom of Crowds, Aspen Philosophy and Society, and Yale’s new Center for Civic Thought — Samuel Kimbriel sits down with political theorist Hélène Landemore and writer Osita Nwanevu to hash out a deceptively simple question: what is democracy actually for?

The Iran war has produced an unlikely main character: the Pope. This week, our dear friend and former colleague Santiago Ramos returns to the pod. He joins Christine and Damir to unpack the escalating clash between the Trump administration and the Catholic Church over the war, Trump’s various blasphemies, and JD Vance’s remarkable journey from Catholic conversion to, well, rediscovering Protestantism. The conversation then turns to more interesting matters.

Join us on May 7 for a Wisdom of Crowds Live Taping at Bistro Cacao, co-sponsored by Aspen Philosophy & Society and The Yale Center for Civic Thought. Does democracy really need politicians? Or could we let the people rule directly? Join Hélène Landemore (Yale University) and Osita Nwanevu (The New Republic) for a timely and provocative conversation about reimagining democracy.

This week, Damir and Shadi are joined by Julian Waller, Professorial Lecturer in Political Science at George Washington University and co-author of Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want: State Institutions and Autonomy under Authoritarianism. The occasion is an awkward one for a certain kind of democracy discourse: Viktor Orbán was last weekend thrown out in a landslide by Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party, ending a sixteen-year run.