The Burke-Paine Podcast

Congressional candidate Scott Cooper on American unity and the economics of the news cycle

I sat down with former US marine and Democratic Congressional candidate Scott Cooper, to talk about how we could go about restoring a sense of American unity, and why the political climate has become so divisive. We went over everything from his experiences in Iraq, to the economics of click-bait media, and the hurdles Americans have to overcome to make politics work again.

Alexandria Mayor Justin Wilson on the lessons federal politicians can learn from local government

Today I sat down with Mayor Justin Wilson, of Alexandria, Virginia, to talk about the lessons federal politicians can learn from the (usually healthier) dynamics of local government, and to get his insider's perspective on why bipartisan communication is so broken at the national level.

Bill Kristol on Trump, and the problem with "facts" in an age of artificial intelligence

For today's episode, I sat down with Bill Kristol, founder and former editor-at-large of the Weekly Standard, and arguably the highest profile figure in the Republican Never Trump movement. We covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time: everything from what it means to be conservative in the age of Trump, to the problems created by dramatic advancements in artificial intelligence, that blur the line between what's real and what's not.

James Lindsay on the Sokal Squared hoax, and everything that's wrong with politics

In today's episode, I got to sit down with James Lindsay, one of the authors of a series of hoax papers that formed part of a high-profile probe exploring politicization and corruption in disciplines that James and his colleagues call "grievance studies". James is an avowed leftist, who nonetheless sees his work as a necessary exposé of a problem that  specifically afflicts his own side of the ailse. During our chat, we explore the crisis of confidence that's unfolding within the humanities and academe more generally, as well as what it means to be on the left or the right in an age where labels don't seem to cut it anymore.

Yuval Levin on the origin of the American Right & Left

In  this first episode of the Burke-Paine Podcast, I got the chance to sit  down with Yuval Levin, a prominent public intellectual and political analyst who has been referred to as “probably the most influential  conservative intellectual of the Obama era”. Not only is Yuval a  contributing editor to big-name publications like the National Review  and the Weekly Standard, but he’s also the author of a number of books,  most notably The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right & Left.