Western ideas at their best & why they're under attack - with Eric Cohen

Is New York Over? Part 3 - Crime and the City: Dan speaks with president of the Manhattan Institute, Reihan Salam, and deputy director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute, Rafael Manguel, about the role crime will play in slowing, or even halting, the City’s Post-Corona recovery. by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

68 min listen

Will We Ever Go To The Movies Again… And Does That Matter?: That phrase - going to the movies - that shared experience in a movie theater full of strangers already makes me nostalgic, like listening to vinyl records. Before the pandemic, the movie theater business was an 11-billion dollar industry in the US alone. In 2020, there were approximately 40,000 screens in 5,798 theaters that employed over 115,000 people. Then, of course, in March of 2020, like all communal entertainment experiences, they were all shut down. Netflix, Amazon and Disney, which were already increasing their market share of the movie experience, replaced movie theaters overnight. But as we crawl out of the pandemic to a post-corona world, will the tension build to return to the movies? Right now, we are seeing early signs of a market for the sanctity of the movie theater experience. To help us understand the history of the film business and where it goes from here, post-corona, John Podhoretz returns to our by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

70 min listen

When IS Post Corona, anyway? Part 2 - Turning the Corner: How will we know when we actually arrive at the Post-Corona phase? This is the second part of a two part conversation on this question, the first of which was when we looked at Israel (Vaccination Nation). Today, we’ll talk about the US -- when we will arrive at post-corona and what is standing in our way? To help us understand what is happening in the US, we welcome Scott Gottlieb, who served as the 23rd commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Gottlieb is currently on the boards of Pfizer and Illumina and a special partner with the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

56 min listen

Adam Grant on the future of work: Adam Grant, a professor of organizational psychology at Wharton, joins Dan to discuss the future of work. by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

42 min listen

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic on the Post-Corona workforce: On the first episode of Post Corona, Dan Senor invites The Atlantic's Derek Thompson to discuss the future of the American labor market. by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

58 min listen

Will We Do Better Next Time?: Is there any good news? Are there any lessons from the crisis that should give us some optimism about how we contend with future pandemics? That’s what we try to untangle today with science journalist Jim Meigs. Jim helps us think about the promise of public-private partnerships that gave birth to Operation Warp Speed, as well as the new critical infrastructure we are building for vaccine manufacturing and hopefully distribution, and how we discern the public health news we get from political leaders, public health authorities and the media to inform our decisions during a crisis. We also discuss what we’ve learned about cultures at large institutions - government agencies and companies - and how they can make better decisions in a future crisis like this. by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

63 min listen

Bret Stephens on Geopolitics Post Corona: It seems like analysts of foreign affairs and super power politics are always worrying that “the world is a mess”. But has the international order - to the extent it existed in recent years - become even more disorderly due to the pandemic? What effect has covid had on Great Power politics? As a new president assembles his national security team and develops a grand strategy, I thought it would be good to sit down with Bret Stephens of the New York Times to take a quick tour around the world and talk about China, Russia, Europe and the Middle East. What’s changed - and changing - as a result of the pandemic? What does it mean for America’s foreign policy? by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

59 min listen

Dan Senor’s New Podcast - Call Me Back: Welcome to our new podcast, “Call Me Back”, where we try to zoom out from minute-to-minute news and look back to how we got here, what we can learn from earlier decades and where we might be going in these roaring and raging 2020s. In each episode, I’ll call a friend who is deeply immersed in some of the most transformative issues of our time. Broadly speaking, I want to focus this podcast on this decade we're in, the 2020s, because it strikes me that we’ll look back at the 2020s as one of the most consequential decades in modern history - from inflation and unprecedented fiscal and monetary policies, the technological transformation driven by AI, blockchain, and life sciences, to the rise of China and Cold War II, to declining American engagement in the Middle East and parts of Central Asia - all against the backdrop of culture wars, public safety breakdowns, and, of course, a public health crack-up as we come out of the pandemic. This pod by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

2 min listen

Billy Beane on the future of sports: Billy Beane, Executive Vice President of the Oakland Athletics, joins Dan to discuss the future of sports. by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

75 min listen

Is New York Over? Part 1 - The Subway: Dan invites Reihan Salam and Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute to discuss the hotly debated question: "Is New York over?" On this episode of Post Corona, Dan and his guests explore how subways play a role in the city's future. by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

56 min listen

Is New York Over? Part 2 - Broadway: Dan speaks with John Podhoretz, Editor-in-Chief of Commentary Magazine, to discuss the hotly debated question: "Is New York over?" On this episode of Post Corona, Dan asks John to help us understand the short history of Broadway’s economic boom and where it goes from here. by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

59 min listen

John Dickerson on The Presidency Post Corona: Will a new American president lead us to a post-Corona return to normal? Or has the American presidency become an impossible job? It is, according to 60 Minutes correspondent John Dickerson, “The Hardest Job In The World”. Has the American presidency finally met its match in a global pandemic? by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

60 min listen

When IS Post Corona, anyway? Part 1 - Vaccination Nation: How will we know when we actually arrive at the Post-Corona phase? Well, THE milestone along the way will be getting entire populations vaccinated. One country may show us the way - Israel, which is on track to vaccinate its entire population by the end of March. To understand how did Israel become... Vaccination Nation, we welcome Yonatan Adiri, who is the Founder and CEO of Healthy.IO, a fast-growing digital health start-up, headquartered in Tel Aviv. by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

63 min listen

Zoom University: Is Covid The Ultimate Higher Education Disruptor?: When we think about industries that immediately got hardest hit during the pandemic, the images that come to mind include restaurants, travel, theater, sports and - higher education. In the US alone, higher education is almost a three-quarter-of-a-trillion dollar sector. To help us understand what the disruption and the coming transformation might look like, we sit down with my friend Daniel Pianko. Dan has a long venture investing career in the higher education and training sectors. Dan himself is a disrupter. He is co-founder and managing director of the investment funds University Ventures and Achieve Partners. Is the college economic model offering being turned upside down right now? Or due to Covid, is the trend accelerating even faster than Professor Christenson every imagined? And if so, what comes next? by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

52 min listen

How Will History Judge 2020?: Dan sits down with Niall Ferguson, a historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, to discuss how history will remember 2020. by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

52 min listen

"God and the Pandemic": News just out of the CDC has created fresh opportunities for normal, communal time together, indoors — just like we did pre-Corona. One of the rituals I have missed over the past year has been attending synagogue. But long before the Covid-19 pandemic, participation in organized religion - across all walks of religious life - was on the decline. Americans had become less engaged in religious institutions, whether it was regular attendance or membership and donations to their local congregation. Did the pandemic arrest these trends? Did virtual platforms provide new opportunities for religious and communal engagement? Joel Kotkin is a professor and bestselling author. He has been described by The New York Times as “America’s uber-geographer.” He has authored numerous books, including The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, and also The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us. He is also a regular contributor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Joel recently au by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

51 min listen

The Covid Presidency with Maggie Haberman: What was the impact of Covid19 on the political landscape? What will it mean for elected leaders who governed during this past year? Today we sit down with someone who knows something about covering a president during a pandemic that consumed his presidency. For the entirety of the Trump administration, Maggie Haberman was a White House correspondent for The New York Times. She joined The Times in 2015, and soon found herself covering Donald Trump’s unlikely campaign. She’s part of a team at the Times that won a Pulitzer. We talk to Maggie today about where journalism goes after the pandemic. What the Trump administration got wrong and what it got right during covid, and where that leaves others political figures - including Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo and Ron DeSantis. by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

58 min listen

Tom Cotton on the Lab Leak Hypothesis of Covid19: The source of SARS-CoV-2 has been a mystery. One theory that was initially met with a scathing response from many in the media and some in the scientific community was that SARS-CoV-2 might have leaked from a research lab in Wuhan, Hubei in China - the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The leading voice elevating the need to investigate this possible scenario back in February of 2019 was U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR). At the time, The New York Times declared Senator Cotton’s remarks a “conspiracy theory.” The Washington Post headlined an article: “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” Was it debunked? Or has more light been shed on it that warrants further examination? That’s where we are today, in which we suddenly find the discussion turning. Some in the press and in the science community - and among a bipartisan set of officials - are exploring this hypothesis. To be clear, these vo by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

53 min listen

A Post-Delta World — with Dr. Sid Mukherjee: Is the pandemic fight winnable or are we going to keep chasing these variants forever? And What does this mean for our lives and our economy? As we were all gearing up for a roaring return to normalcy, the Delta variant has tempered enthusiasm. Before Delta, we fought a virus and thought we may have won by developing a vaccine...quickly (THANK YOU Operation Warp Speed, and thank you to the ecosystem of life science start-ups and large pharma companies, and to the years and years of massive investment in the sciences that made all of this possible). But three dominant variants later, it looks like we're not fighting a virus as much as we are fighting the fundamental rules of evolution. From Alpha to Beta to Gamma to Delta, the virus is becoming more contagious (while its effects are also less severe for the vaccinated). What should this tell us? What does this trajectory look like? To help us understand the new ambiguity we’re in, we chec by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

65 min listen

Is China Turning Crisis Into Opportunity? With Josh Rogin: China is in the midst of a global vaccination campaign. According to published reports, China’s Government is supplying 10 times as many doses to other countries as it is to citizens in its own country. China’s vaccination campaign is currently engaging 45 countries spread across multiple continents around the world. Why? What is China getting in return? And should the US also be engaged in vaccine diplomacy? This is just one of many ways in which the Pandemic has upended geopolitics as we know it. To better understand how China seeks to transform a global crisis that originated in China into a foreign policy tool, we sit down with Josh Rogin of the Washington Post. He’s one of the sharpest analysts on China policy and on US policy towards China. Having written about China for years and traveled Asia extensively, Josh is the author of the new book: “Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, XI, and the Battle for the 21st Century”. The Pan by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

60 min listen

Lessons for the 2020s - With Historian Niall Ferguson: The first of our two-part conversation with Naill Ferguson is on applied history’s lessons of the 1920s and the 1970s...for the 2020s. Niall is a historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and he previously taught at Harvard, NYU and Oxford. He’s the managing director of Greenmantle, a macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm. Niall is also the author of 17 books including “The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook” and “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe”. by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

41 min listen

Fog of War - with Fred Kagan: Vladimir Putin may be unpredictable, but his direction seems to be clear. That’s the view of our guest today, Fred Kagan, who is a return guest. As of what we know now, February 25th, there are at least 1,100 Russian casualties in Ukraine, and Russian forces are entering Kiev. President Biden has announced new sanctions, but oil and natural gas are still exempt from sanctions, and Russia is still part of the SWIFT BANKING SYSTEM. So it’s not clear how tight the economic noose is tightening around Moscow. Fred is the Director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also working closely with the Russia team at the Institute for the Study of War. Fred is a former professor of military history at the US Military Academy at West Point. He completed his PhD in Soviet and Russian military history at Yale University. We want to talk to Fred less about minute to minute developments and more about where this is going wit by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

40 min listen

Afghanistan & The New Geopolitics - With Fred Kagan: While the world watches America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, there’s enormous potential for human catastrophe — in the weeks, months and years ahead. At best, the future of Afghanistan is uncertain. But what about the future of America’s role in the world? How does it impact the geopolitical landscape? What are the strategic implications for the West? What does it mean for China, Taiwan and Japan? For Russia? For Turkey? Is the new US policy in Central Asia simply one more step towards American disengagement, globally? On this podcast, we focus on covid-19’s lasting impact on our economy and geopolitics. But what is playing out right in Afghanistan is too consequential. So we are going to dive into it today with Fred Kagan. Fred was based in Afghanistan for a year and a half, where he was a top strategic advisor to General Petraeus, and then General McChrystal and General Allen. As it relates to Iraq, Fred was one o by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

67 min listen

Vaccination Nation: Is our Post Corona future unfolding now in Israel?: So far more than 70 percent of Israelis, ages 16 and older, have received at least one dose of the vaccine, and many of them two jabs. How has Israel done this? Well, Israel’s prime minister negotiated with Pfizer to obtain millions of vaccine doses early. Israel paid a premium for this upfront supply, but also agreed to provide the company with indispensable clinical data, made possible by Israel’s digital health infrastructure. Now the prime minister has set a goal of getting Israel’s economy completely re-opened by the Spring. To explain what may be heading our way, we have Yonatan Adiri returning to our podcast. Yonatan is the founder and CEO of Tel Aviv digital health startup Healthy.IO. He was also a top technology and diplomatic advisor to then-President Shimon Peres. Has Israel become the world’s Post-Corona laboratory? What can we expect over here from what Israelis are learning over there? by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

51 min listen

Naftali Bennett - Who Are You?: Naftali Bennett - Who Are You? Today we’re doing a special convention tied to the news. Politics in Israel is moving fast. It’s not necessarily about the Coronavirus, but it’s important in our geopolitics. As of today, Israel may be on the cusp of forming a new coalition government, composed of 7 parties from across the ideological spectrum - from Naftali Bennett’s Yamina Party and the New Hope party on the Right, through Yair Lapid’s party in the center, to the Labor and Meretz parties on the Left. And then there is the Arab Muslim party, Ra’am. Think about that - an Arab party is indispensable to a new Israeli government coming to power. So much for Israel being an “apartheid state”. And so much for the notion that politics in Israel has become so polarized that there’s not a strong political center. Then again, in the days ahead, this coalition may fall apart because it is dependent on a razor thin majority. It’s still too early to count out Prim by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

62 min listen

The Political Fallout from Covid19 - with Matthew Continetti: The recent electoral outcomes in Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, Buffalo, Minneapolis and other areas across the country were as much to do with the pandemic -- and the economic and cultural shocks from the pandemic -- as anything. Was it a political blip or some kind of realignment? Where does the Democratic Party go from here? And what about the Republican Party? What does it mean for Joe Biden and Donald Trump? Is the Glenn Youngkin campaign a model for our future politics? Matthew Continetti is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, founding editor of The Washington Free Beacon, and a columnist for Commentary Magazine. He’s also the author of several books. He has a new book being released in April 2022, called “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism”. by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

56 min listen

Vaccines: A New American Success Story? — with The Wall Street Journal’s Gregory Zuckerman: Have we revolutionized vaccine development? What does this mean for our lives and our health well beyond the vaccine for Covid-19? Could this kind of life sciences revolution only happen in America? And what about Operation Warp Speed? Is it a model for future public-private partnerships to solve big problems? Greg Zuckerman of The Wall Street Journal joins the podcast to discuss his new and fascinating book, “A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine.” Greg’s previous books include: “The Man Who Solved The Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution”, and then there was “The Greatest Trade Ever”, “The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters”, and “Rising Above: How 11 Athletes Overcame Challenges in Their Youth to Become Stars”. Greg is s a Special Writer and investigative reporter at The Wall Str by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

65 min listen

Revisiting China’s Great Wall of Steel - with Matt Pottinger: This week we are re-posting some of our episodes from 2021 that are most relevant right now. We’ll start with Matt Pottinger on recent developments in China. China’s borders have been sealed for almost two years. And those borders will be closed for the foreseeable future. That, obviously, is a result of the pandemic; but, is there a larger grand strategy at play? For decades now, China’s coupling with western economies has been the dominant theme of the global economic landscape - beginning with China’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization. But that’s been changing. Fast forward to a speech by President Xi Jinping to mark the hundred year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. He spoke before a massive crowd in Tiananmen Square: "The Chinese people", Xi said “will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or enslave us. Anyone who tries to do so shall be battered and bloodied colliding with a great wal by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

63 min listen

Presidents and Pandemics - with Tevi Troy: Are we living in peak politicized times? One test that pundits and the media frequently point to as Exhibit A is how our elected leaders have responded to the current pandemic. Just about every move by our current president, his predecessor, or governors in different states, and mayors and even county health commissioners -- they all get instantly analyzed in a political frame. Is this new? Are there nakedly political motives in various actions on public health? Are our leaders communicating too much information, or holding back what we need to know? Are they unleashing all the force of government to mitigate the pandemic? Or not enough? For some historical comparisons, our guest today is Dr. Tevi Troy. Tevi is a rare breed in public life: he is an author of numerous books on the history of decision-making in the White House, and also a practitioner -- having worked in senior positions in government in the US Senate, the White House and in by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

51 min listen

The Merits of Merit - with Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist: During the pandemic, standardized tests were suspended in an entire range of educational institutions. Will these changes be temporary or permanent? More than 600 of these institutions switched from a mandatory to optional test for the 2020-21 application season, and many just flat out refused to accept a test at all in their application process. According to the editor in chief of the Princeton Review, “That is a tectonic change for many schools.” According to Smithsonian Magazine, “The pandemic sped up changes that were already afoot; even before Covid, more than 1,000 colleges had made the tests optional. Many had been turned off by the way the tests perpetuated socioeconomic disparities, limiting their ability to recruit a diverse freshman class.” Concerns about disparities in outcomes, at the core of this massive shift, have been behind Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s agenda in New York City, including his past efforts to elim by Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

60 min listen

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Western ideas at their best & why they're under attack - with Eric Cohen

Western ideas at their best & why they're under attack - with Eric Cohen

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