This week, the 2016 race welcomed Ted Cruz to the GOP scrum after the Texas Senator made his presidential ambitions clear to a literally captive audience of Liberty University students. He's been immediately anointed as a long shot, but is he really?

Meanwhile, there are other places in the world besides America. How are things going there, and what does it mean for us? We'll talk about elections in Israel, unrest in Yemen, and -- I hesitate to even say this aloud -- a potentially hopeful turn in Afghanistan, graveyard of empires.

Finally, as if you needed something even more surreal and complicated in your lives, we're going to talk about seigniorage, the minting of dollar coins, the minting of platinum coins, the eternally ephemeral nature of the concept of money, and -- strangely enough -- whether or not Europeans are terrible people. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy