Each Friday, Adam Tooze and Cameron Abadi sit down with two numbers — one from the week's news, one drawn from somewhere stranger — and use them as the opening into a wider conversation. The format is loose. The frame is rigorous. The week is never quite what the headlines say it is.
The show grew out of Tooze's Foreign Policy column and Chartbook newsletter. It works because Tooze's reach is unusual — sovereign debt, energy regimes, Soviet history, German industry, the COVID balance sheets, pasta sauce — and because Abadi keeps the conversation honest: who pays, who decides, who has to wait. The episodes run thirty to sixty minutes and live on every major podcast app, plus this site for paid members.
Historian and Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. Author of Shutdown, Crashed, The Deluge, and Wages of Destruction. Tooze writes the Chartbook newsletter and Foreign Policy's economics column. His running argument: the global economy is a political project — and the politics are getting harder to keep offstage.
Deputy editor at Foreign Policy. Reports and writes on European politics, economic policy, and German society from FP's Washington and Berlin offices. The interlocutor's chair on this show: takes Adam's long view and asks who pays the bill, in which currency, and on whose schedule.
