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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and life.

My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of the spectator.

I'm very pleased to be joined by Jeff Schullenberger, who teaches at New York University and is

also a columnist for Compact magazine, which is a new, interesting, radical journal in America.

Jeff, I thought I'd start by ask you, because I think

we're going to talk about sort of hive minds, the hive minds that exist in America today.

And I thought I'd start by ask you a bit about somebody you seem to be influenced by and

you've talked about. And that's the French thinker, René Girard. He seems to be increasingly important in American

thought, particularly on the sort of radical right-left fringes, if you like, of public debate.

And we know that he influences people like Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire,

who's very influential on the right, as well as many other leading intellectuals in America.

What is it

about this French thinker? I know that he was married to an American and lived in America,

but what is it about this French thinker that speaks to American intellectuals today, do you think?

I would say, I mean, speaking for myself and other people I know who are engaged with,

Gerard, it really did have to do with trying to make sense of what was happening with the internet

in the past sort of 10 to 15 years.

People may have read this kind of widely shared essay by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt

about something like, you know, why the past 10 years have

been uniquely stupid or something like that.

...