Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for political eclectics.

I'm Robbie Gupta and today I'm talking to Dexter Filkins, who's a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of The Forever War, which won a national book Critics Circle Award.

Filkins wrote a piece recently in The New Yorker that was riveting to say the least.

It's called Is the U.S. ready for the next war? And Dexter

and I talk all about the changing nature of war, drone warfare, artificial intelligence,

and how perhaps superpowers like the United States may be falling behind in a way that

should be very alarming for all of us. We also talk about the Ukraine War and Israel, Gaza,

and how those two theaters of war are showing us a lot about what the future of warfare looks like.

But before we get there, two big announcements. One is, if you haven't subscribed yet to where

the schools went, you should go and do that. We dropped the first episode last week on our feed,

and it's getting tons of acclaim. We shot to near the top of the charts of Apple's education podcasts. We got recognition from them for our trailer as a new and noteworthy show. It's on the top of the charts for Spotify's government podcasts. And I'm getting a lot of great feedback from people in New Orleans, both people who are critics and champions of the reforms that we saw there. And as part of this series, you know, I went down to New Orleans for a long time and interviewed over 50 people. I think it's probably over 60 at this point, all about everything that's happened since Katrina. And we're nearing that 20 years since Hurricane Katrina, which is coming up in a few weeks.

And this is your definitive story about what happened there with the schools, and you're going to

learn a lot, even if you're not from New Orleans. I mean, in some ways, especially if you're not

from New Orleans, because the people there are much closer to this story. One other thing is that I've

launched a substack to talk about things kind of outside

of politics and policies. So if you go to real Ravi Gupta at substack.com, I wrote a piece there

last week all about what I call the conscientiousness crisis, which is some data from the

financial times, all about some troubling trends amongst our young people. And then over the

weekend, I dropped

an article about my favorite scientific concept called entropy and how that you can use the

sort of your knowledge of entropy and that concept to help you manage your days better and get more

done. So you can check both of those things out. It's a free substack. So just go to real Ravi Gupta.substack.com.

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