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
, 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…[a piece I wrote this week for Project Syndicate]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),
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.