- #49 Politik & Verwaltung
- #49beste Platzierung
- wöchentlichErscheinungsrhythmus
- 59 mintypische Länge
- vor 4 Tagenletzte Folge
The Jacob Shapiro Podcast is a modern geopolitics podcast that wades deep into the machinery of our global systems. We explore not just what happened this week, but why it happened, and what it means for markets, money, and the people living through it.
Geopolitics is the intersection of geography and politics. Each episode, geopolitical analyst Jacob Shapiro sits down with economists, strategists, scientists, journalists, and people on the ground to follow one story to its roots: the US-China rivalry, Africa's devastating civil unrest, the war in Ukraine, Latin America’s political realignment, the energy transition, oil and commodity markets, global trade and tariffs, artificial intelligence, food and water security, and the fiscal math behind the dollar. Some conversations start with a headline. Others start with a shipment of lentils, a tanker in the Red Sea, or a warehouse full of used books, and end up somewhere much bigger.
Jacob is a Geopolitical Analyst and a Stratfor alumnus who advises Fortune 500 companies, institutional investors, and family offices on geopolitical risk. He studied literature and theology before he studied foreign policy, and he approaches the world as a fox, not a hedgehog: curious, contrarian, skeptical of single-cause explanations, and willing to change his mind on air.
For investors, policymakers, business leaders, and anyone who suspects the news is missing the bigger picture. New episodes weekly.
(Formerly "Cognitive Dissidents” and “The Perch Pod”)
Folgen
There Is No Light Web - Minor Powers
A flaw sat for years in the code beneath most of the world's websites until an AI model went looking for it (See: PHP2Shell). Dror Poleg, an economic historian who writes about technology and work, doesn't think patching ends the story: the
Ukraine Is Not a Sovereign State
Ukraine has had three revolutions since 1990: students on Kyiv's granite square, the Orange crowds of 2004, the Maidan in 2014. Volodymyr Ishchenko, a sociologist at the Institute for East European Studies in Berlin, argues that none of the
The World Cup of Politics (Brazil Elections)
A Brazilian congressman runs a WhatsApp channel called "Lula's Army." This week it passed ten million followers, part of a late surge that has turned a race Lula was losing into a near tie. Monica de Bolle of the Peterson Institute for Inte
Brazilianization
Brazil was always the country of the future - prophesied as a new Eden since the sixteenth century, promised great things that never quite arrived. Alex Hochuli’s argument is that the future caught up to Brazil from the other direction. The
Ethiopia's New War
Eritrea and (a Tigrayan-led) Ethiopia fought one of Africa’s deadliest wars against each other. Then Eritrea helped Ethiopia crush Tigray. Now Eritrea and Tigray are fighting Ethiopia together. Confusing? Super. Nicholas Norbrook of The Afr
Circular Financing
Mark Walter bought the Lakers for $10 billion and sold them fourteen months later for $12.5. That's a 20% return - which sounds enormous until you consider that nobody sells the Lakers after a year unless something has gone badly wrong. Chr
Rubio Makin Moves
Two hundred years ago, Simón Bolívar dreamed of a united Latin America - precisely so it could resist becoming America's backyard. South America may finally be integrating... Just not the way he had in mind. Elohim Monard joins from Pucallp
The Sand Mafias
People are being killed over sand. Not diamonds, not lithium, not rare earths - sand, the second-most consumed resource on earth after water, and the one nobody thinks about twice. Mette Bendixen, a geoscientist at McGill, studies where it
Rabbit Season, Duck Season
Inside you are two wolves. One (Michael Every) looks at Washington and sees a plan. The other (Jacob) looks at the same info and sees chaos. Somewhere north of both is the sovereign nation of Canada - a country discovering what it actually
The $10 Trillion Ocean
The world has never been wealthier... but a warm patch of ocean in the Pacific is about to reorganize the weather across four continents and all that wealth still might not be enough to cover the damages. Climate scientist Justin Mankin stu
Boil the Frog
Scott Bessent knows something that we don't. Luke Gromen has spent his whole career reading the fine print of America's balance sheet, and his conclusion is stark: the quiet interventions coming out of Washington - doubled bond buybacks, a
Pulped
AI companies are buying up used books, scanning them, and destroying the originals. At least, that's the headline... the real story is weirder. Charlie Becker, a seventh-generation bookseller in Houston, went viral for tracing one of these
Cooler Heads Are Not Prevailing
Jacob Shapiro welcomes back Peter Harrell, visiting scholar at Georgetown's Institute of International Economic Law and former White House senior director for international economics. Trump keeps finding new legal tools - including a forgot
Lessons Learned - Geopolitical Cousins
Round two. Same four analysts, a lot more whiskey, and a lot less structure. Peter Zeihan, Marko Papic, and Matt Gertken sit back down with Jacob - a man who cut his teeth pestering all three of them for their pieces as a Stratfor intern -
This Is The Way The World Ends (w/ Zeihan & Gertken) - Geopolitical Cousins
Sixteen years after last sharing a table together, four Stratfor alumni reunite for a wide-ranging conversation on the decade ahead. Jacob and Marko are joined by Peter Zeihan, and Matt Gertken to tackle three questions: How does the world
Geography is Destiny: China, The Global South, & Energy
Eric Olander, editor-in-chief of the China Global South Project, joins the pod to discuss the developments on the other side of the globe. From Ho Chi Minh City, Eric explains how the Global South actually sees the US-Iran war, why nobody e
Why Is China Bad at Soccer?
Jacob grabs Chris Branch, senior writer at The Athletic and author of The Pulse, to talk about the World Cup as geopolitics. They cover Trump's red-card intervention and the Balogun controversy, England-Argentina and the ghost of the Falkla
Shipping for Dummies
Jacob sits down with J Mintzmyer of Value Investors Edge for a shipping deep-dive (but of course it's a geopolitics lesson in disguise). Mintzmyer argues the industry has barely changed in eleven years, most of the efficiency gains, double
Frontlines: Ukraine, Iran, oil markets, and what the World Cup reveals about global politics
Crosspost! Shaun Haney and Jacob use the global football tournament as a springboard to discuss nationalism, international institutions, and the role sport plays in bringing people together, while acknowledging that politics inevitably foll
Is The War Over?
Hamidreza Azizi joins the show once more to ask a deceptively simple question: is the war over? Azizi argues the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is deliberately vague and fully reversible - sanctions relief hinges on a phone call, the $30
The Cartel Math Isn't Mathing
Jacob Shapiro sits down with Victor Hernandez, a Mexican national security analyst, to stress-test his own optimism about Mexico. Hernandez argues the army now runs eight ministries' budgets, can't out-spy the cartels, and may face limited
Crosspost: Frontlines "Hormuz to AI"
You might not realize it, but Jacob also appears on a few other podcasts regularly! Jacob is a regular guest RealAgriculture’s Frontlines podcast (https://www.realagriculture.com/frontlines/), hosted by Shaun Hane. Shaun and Jacob discuss g
Who Killed the Florida Orange?
Florida produced 242 million boxes of oranges in 2003. This year, the USDA is forecasting 12 million... a decline of more than 95% in less than a generation. Jacob sits down with journalist Alexander Sammon, who wrote a definitive autopsy o
Are the Cartels Winning?
Ioan Grillo has spent decades on the ground in Mexico watching the cartels evolve, and his assessment is sobering. Violence has shifted form more than it's receded. Governments change rhetoric, not reality. The U.S. is more involved than an
Static, Not Strategic
Our favorite military analyst, Sim Tack, returns to the pod to assess three different conflicts reshaping global security. In Ukraine, territorial gains are tactical, not strategic; Russian economic endurance remains the real variable. In I
Warp Speed for Everything
Jacob sits down for a fantastic conversation with author and analyst Dror Poleg to explore how AI is reshaping work, value, and the economy. They unpack why AI is better understood as a medium than a tool, what the shift from tangible to in
Gross Diplomacy
Peru has had seven presidents in nine years, homicides have nearly doubled, and extortion is up sixfold - and yet the country just tried to buy $3.5 billion worth of F-16s. Elohim Monard returns to diagnose a political crisis that doubles a
Fertilizer 101
Josh Linville,VP of Fertilizer at StoneX, chats with Jacob about the global fertilizer crisis triggered by disruption to the Strait of Hormuz. They cover why the Middle East dominates fertilizer supply, why the US can't easily fill the gap,
The Off Ramp Is Right Now
Josef Schachter - President of Schachter Energy - walks us through what global oil markets looked like the day before bombs started falling, and what the math looks like now. Prices were already heading higher, the conflict accelerated the
The View From Delhi
Kabir Taneja, Executive Director of the Observer Research Foundation Middle East, joins the podcast for an Indian perspective on the US-Israel conflict with Iran. Jacob and Kabir discuss how ordinary Indians are feeling the economic anxiety
