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PODCAST

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast

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

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All Episodes

39:59

There Is No Light Web - Minor Powers

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/10/27

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 attack surface only widens, and some things may have to come off the internet altogether. Then to Israel, voting on October 27, where Benjamin Netanyahu campaigns against dangers his own government deepened and has floated crypto as a hedge against sanctions

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59:16

Ukraine Is Not a Sovereign State

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/10/26

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 them built a stronger state, and that this, more than any Russian tank, explains where Ukraine stands now: a country whose budget is largely paid for by the European Union, run by elites who bet everything on an international order that may not outlast the war. He

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54:39

The World Cup of Politics (Brazil Elections)

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/10/23

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 International Economics maps what Sunday's runoff against Flávio Bolsonaro decides: who fills at least three of the Supreme Court's eleven seats, whether anyone fixes debt rules built for an age of runaway inflation, and who controls the world's second-largest rare

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01:05:57

Brazilianization

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/10/19

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 wealthy world didn’t pull the laggards forward; it declined to meet them. A shrinking middle class, patrimonial politics, collapsing trust, gated condominiums and open sewers alongside WhatsApp. This is Brazilianization, and Hochuli joins from São Paulo days

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46:01

Ethiopia's New War

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/10/12

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 Africa Report maps the forces pulling at a country that was, until recently, one of the fastest-growing economies on earth - a messianic prime minister with a very young team, Emirati money on several sides at once, Egypt quietly assembling a coalition to box Addis

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55:57

Circular Financing

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/10/05

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. Chris Branch, author of The Athletic's The Pulse, joins to pull on the thread: life insurance money funding franchise purchases, a UAE sovereign wealth fund in the holding company, a Kushner and a former Disney CEO waiting on the other side. Neither of them can prove

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56:09

Rubio Makin Moves

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/09/28

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 Pucallpa, deep in the Peruvian Amazon, to trace what Marco Rubio's recent swing through the region actually accomplished, why security is the MacGuffin and China is the real story, and how a continent ends up saying "yes sir" while Chinese state companies quietly run its

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47:54

The Sand Mafias

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/09/23

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 comes from and who pays the price for it. Dubai imports its sand from Australia. Greenland's melting ice sheet is quietly producing a new export. And somewhere in Rwanda, a woman crushes stones by hand for two weeks to earn twenty dollars. The foundation of the

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01:04:10

Rabbit Season, Duck Season

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/09/14

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 costs to step away from Washington and forge out on its own. Is Carney brave or delusional? Does scale decide everything? When the polite fictions come down, what's left holding any of this together? Tune in for a real disagreement between people who like each

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01:06:52

The $10 Trillion Ocean

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/09/07

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 studies how much these events actually cost - and his estimates run to $10 trillion or more in global economic loss over the next five years. Big numbers, short timeframe, scary outlook. But the hardest question that Dr. Mankin brought up with us wasn't about how

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01:11:46

Boil the Frog

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/08/31

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 yen rescue, a sudden fondness for stablecoins - aren't policy. They're symptoms. The arithmetic of debt, entitlements, and interest has crossed a threshold from which, Gromen argues, there are only three exits, and none of them are painless. We've got a crisis

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58:41

Pulped

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/08/24

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 mysterious bulk orders - following overlooked books into Amazon warehouses filled with entire categories of obscure human knowledge. Today we're taking the plunge into a mystery that spans artificial intelligence, culture, and the LTV of a "rare" book

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57:05

Cooler Heads Are Not Prevailing

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/08/11

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 forgotten 1930 law now aimed at Canada - and companies have stopped investing because they can't guess what comes next :/ Also, Washington has quietly bought stakes in 37 companies, with no rules and almost no transparency around any of it.--Timestamps:(00:00) - Welcome

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01:01:41

Geography is Destiny: China, The Global South, & Energy

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/07/21

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 expects China to ride to anyone's rescue, and how Vietnam's tariff and energy shocks became a never-again moment. He and Jacob dig into the myth that tariffs can implode China, America's fading China literacy, and why the next order won't be Chinese-led - but China

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01:11:20

Why Is China Bad at Soccer?

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/07/19

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 Falklands, why sports and politics were never actually separate, and why China and India can barely qualify while Cape Verde runs wild. Plus: whether soccer ever truly takes hold in America, and why it might take a billionaire treating the sport like a Carnegie library

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57:34

Shipping for Dummies

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/07/14

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 hulls, eco-designed vessels, LNG boil-off fixes, were locked in over a decade ago, leaving only regulation to move the needle. The two dig into why the US lost shipbuilding to Japan, Korea, and now China, how the Jones Act complicates the picture, and why

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50:17

Frontlines: Ukraine, Iran, oil markets, and what the...

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/07/09

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 follows major global events.Shapiro says that international sporting events can provide valuable insight into broader geopolitical trends while also serving as a rare source of optimism.--Referenced in the Show:Frontlines:

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59:21

Is The War Over?

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/07/02

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 $300 billion investment fund is unfunded, and both Iran and the US are already renegotiating its terms through actions, not words. They dig into Iran's Strait of Hormuz fee gambit, China's calculated non-intervention, Turkey's regional rise, and 80% inflation

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55:34

The Cartel Math Isn't Mathing

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/06/22

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 US drone strikes Mexico has no way to resist. El Mencho's death looks more like an ambush than a victory. Nearshoring pencils out on a spreadsheet - until corruption and parallel taxation eat the margin. A bracing case for what happens if Jacob's

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41:21

Crosspost: Frontlines "Hormuz to AI"

The Jacob Shapiro Podcast ·

2026/06/18

You might not realize it, but Jacob also appears on a few other podcasts regularly! Jacob is a regular guest RealAgriculture’s Frontlines podcast, hosted by Shaun Hane. Shaun and Jacob discuss geopolitics from an agricultural lens, exploring how the world reacts to the extremely fine-tuned world of ag. Many analysts expected a prolonged disruption in the Strait to trigger severe economic fallout. Instead, oil prices have risen, inflation pressures have intensified, and shortages are emerging in some

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