676. Has America Lost the Plot?

Let me just say this up front. Predicting the future is hard. We once made an episode called The Folly of Prediction, episode number 41, if you want to hunt it down. The findings were clear. Most of us are much worse than we think at making predictions, and we're also much more confident than we ought to be.

But that doesn't stop us from trying. Look at the huge success of prediction markets like Calci and Polymarket. We are always dying to know what might happen next. I am not immune from this desire, you probably aren't either.

The one particular temptation is geopolitics. It is so complex and dynamic and important that it's hard to hold yourself back, even if you know that your prediction is at best an educated guess. So you might as well get your geopolitical predictions from someone who is extremely educated in these matters. Someone like this. Farid Zakaria, I work at CNN and write a column for the Washington Post and write books.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (65 minutes, 11,252 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

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