Above is Episode #38 of America’s fastest-growing podcast. We had a lot to talk about and much we had to leave out. We began with 9/11 and Richard’s views on what it meant in retrospect. He wrote about it in his most recent Substack newsletter:
I am struck by what 9/11 did not lead to. In a piece I wrote this week for Project Syndicate, I explain that 9/11 did not usher in an age defined by terrorism. A wave of attacks on a similar scale did not follow, in no small part because the U.S. and other governments adopted measures that made it more difficult for would-be terrorists to emerge and succeed. Another reason 9/11 did not alter history is that terrorists tend to be better at destroying than building, at killing rather than creating. As a result, terror tends to leave little or no lasting legacy…
Looking back at the past quarter-century, it becomes apparent that 9/11 was not a transformative event. Far more important were China’s rise, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic, the collective failure to take meaningful action against climate change, the emergence of AI, and, perhaps more than anything else, America’s rejection of the post-World War II order it had done so much to build and maintain.
We then moved on to discuss the horizontal escalation of the Iran war (with the Houtis threatening to choke off the Bab-el-Mandab Strait), the “real estate” diplomacy of Mssrs. Kushner and Witkoff, Treasury Secretary Bessent’s apparently unpersuasive attempts to strangle the Iranian economy and stare down the bond markets and the “whatever” indifference to AI’s incredible advance. It’s reached the point where the people who run the frontier AI labs believe they may no longer have the ability to apply “guardrails” to prevent AI from running amok.
We end with our “Sports Section”, which I’m afraid will include a discussion of the coming defeats of the New York-New Jersey-Meadowlands Giants for the next 18 weeks. Sorry.
The biggest sports story of the last 9 days was The Walker Cup, with the Great Britain and Irish team storming back from certain defeat to win the Cup with a birdie putt on the final hole. “Birdie at the last”. It was amateur golf at its very best.
