What if everything we believe about changing political minds is wrong? The real work of transformation happens elsewhere.

What if everything we believe about changing minds is wrong? What if the foundation of democratic discourse — the belief that better arguments lead to better outcomes — is not just flawed but destructively naive?

Sarah Lubrano, with her PhD from Oxford and years of writing about the intersection of psychology and politics, brings devastating news: Decades of research reveal that political debates don’t change minds; they calcify them.

Her book Don’t Talk About Politics reads like a clinical study of American democracy, dissecting why our most sacred ritual of reasoned argument has become democracy’s poison pill.

But Lubrano’s diagnosis goes far beyond the failure of debate. She reveals something more troubling: We’ve accidentally engineered a society that systematically prevents the kinds of human connections that actually do transform political thinking.

Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren joins me on the WhoWhatWhy podcast to decode this historical inflection point. A historian, former Knesset member, and veteran of Israeli government service, Oren offers a unique perspective from someone who has spent his life at the intersection of scholarship and statecraft. Hours before Israel’s first strike, he published a prescient piece asking whether this was Israel’s “Dirty Harry moment” — the confrontation that would finally call Iran’s bluff.

$500 drones destroyed $100M Russian bombers.

Last month (it seems so long ago) Ukrainian forces achieved what seemed impossible: Commercial drones costing less than a smartphone successfully struck Russian strategic bombers worth $100 million each, deep inside enemy territory. This isn’t tactical innovation—it’s the emergence of warfare where David doesn’t just defeat Goliath, but renders him obsolete.

On this WhoWhatWhy podcast, I talk with David Shlapak, senior defense researcher at RAND Corporation, to examine how these miniature flying weapons are rewriting the rules of military power.

And while we’re already seeing the future of warfare unfold in the skies over Eastern Europe, an even more disruptive shift lies just ahead: the integration of artificial intelligence into autonomous weapons systems.

That convergence could redefine not only how wars are fought, but who — or what — does the fighting.