Ones and Tooze

Adam Tooze is the kind of historian who makes other academics nervous because he seems to know everything about everything. His Columbia University courses are legendary, his Substack newsletter Chartbook has a massive following, and this Foreign Policy podcast with deputy editor Cameron Abadi lets him apply that encyclopedic brain to whatever is happening in the world right now. The format is clever. Each weekly episode picks two data points -- one from a major headline, another from somewhere unexpected -- and Tooze connects them in ways that reveal how the global economy actually functions. Episodes run 45 to 60 minutes and feel like sitting in on a brilliant seminar where the professor has actually read the footnotes. With 247 episodes and a 4.7-star rating from 316 reviews, the show has found a loyal audience. Recent episodes have featured former CIA director David Petraeus discussing potential Iran conflict scenarios, deep examinations of Chinese economic trajectory, and a fascinating mini-series on Soviet economists that somehow made monetary theories from the early twentieth century feel relevant to current inflation debates. Tooze moves fluidly between discussing AI labor market impacts and the geopolitics of grain exports, and Abadi is a sharp co-host who keeps the conversation grounded. This is not a traditional geopolitics podcast -- it is more like geopolitics filtered through economic history and data. But that is exactly why it belongs in your feed. Understanding power dynamics between nations increasingly requires understanding supply chains, debt markets, and industrial policy. Tooze makes those connections better than almost anyone working today, and he does it with genuine enthusiasm that is infectious even when the subject matter is dense.