Policy Punchline

Join hosts Maddie Feldman and Fletcher Kaneb as they sit down with Alexander Yui, Taiwan’s representative to the United States. The conversation begins with Representative Yui’s multi-national upbringing as the son of a diplomat, his relationship to Taiwanese national identity, his decision to pursue Spanish in college and grad school, and his military experience in high school JROTC and later in the Taiwanese military. Drawing on decades of diplomatic service and a rich understanding of Taiwan’s history as it informs the contemporary pursuit of peace and stability, Representative Yui reflects on the importance of cultivating “friendships” and sustaining Taiwan’s international partnerships—including its longstanding diplomatic ties with Paraguay, where he served as Taiwan’s Ambassador from 2015 to 2018. He discusses his mantra of ‘honor, duty, country’—there is “no higher honor than to serve your country”—that have guided his career, as well as the challenges of strengthening Taiwan’s defensive readiness and societal resilience while preserving the cross-strait status quo. This interview is part of the Policy Punchline podcast series. Supported by Princeton’s Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance, the series aims to foster dialogue on critical public-policy issues, connecting listeners with leading experts from around the world.

Join hosts Maddie Feldman and Audrey Damis as they chat with Owen Zidar, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs in the Princeton University Department of Economics and co-author of The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There. Zidar has spent much of his career studying inequality and tax policy through rigorous economic analysis. His latest book uses the groundbreaking administrative tax database that he developed with Eric Zwick to challenge the mainstream narrative depicting the distribution of wealth in America as a mirror image of the 19th-century Gilded Age. By examining the rise of pass-through businesses, the book highlights how a sizable class of private business owners were able to acquire substantial wealth while remaining beneath the public radar. The conversation explores how the dominant narrative surrounding wealth distribution in the U.S. today contradicts its actual abundance and dispersion. Zidar discusses previous gaps in tax data that limited economic research, the promise of socioeconomic mobility offered by business ownership, the means through which the “stealthy wealthy” yield economic power to exert political influence, and the overrepresentation of wealthy individuals in electoral office. He considers personal factors behind the dominance of a narrative portraying wealth as solely concentrated amongst the few tech billionaires of Silicon Valley, such as the discomfort that comes with examining your neighbor’s use of wealth to achieve political outcomes that might run contrary to the interests of the broad public. This interview is part of the Policy Punchline podcast series. Supported by Princeton's Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance, the series aims to foster dialogue on critical public-policy issues, connecting listeners with leading experts from around the world.

Join hosts Maddie Feldman and Leighton McCamy-Miller as they chat with Samuel Moyn, the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University and author of Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It. Best known as a historian of ideas, Moyn has spent much of his career examining the histories of human rights, liberalism, and international law. His latest book turns that lens toward contemporary America, arguing that age has become an overlooked dimension of inequality and that the country’s political institutions, patterns of wealth accumulation, and increasingly long lives have allowed older generations to retain power far longer than their predecessors. The conversation explores how America became a gerontocracy and what that means for younger generations. Moyn discusses the concentration of wealth and homeownership among older Americans, the extraordinary age of the country’s political leadership and electorate, declining youth participation, and the institutional advantages that allow incumbents to remain in power. He also considers the more personal forces behind gerontocracy: delayed succession, longer lifespans, and the deeply human reluctance to surrender relevance, authority, and control. This interview is part of the Policy Punchline podcast series. Supported by Princeton's Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance, the series aims to foster dialogue on critical public-policy issues, connecting listeners with leading experts from around the world.

Join hosts Maddie Feldman and Josh Stiefel as they sit down with Rachael Greenberg ‘14, Senior Vice President of Patient Acquisition and Retention at HarmonyCares and former Chief of Staff in the State Department’s Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. This conversation follows a career that moves between government and the private sector, from Goldman Sachs and USAID to the White House, the COVID-19 response, and negotiations to reunite wrongfully detained Americans with their families. Rachael reflects on making consequential decisions with incomplete information, balancing speed with safeguards in an emergency, and centering human connection in the most extreme circumstances. This interview is part of the Policy Punchline podcast series. Supported by Princeton's Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance, the series aims to foster dialogue on critical public-policy issues, connecting listeners with leading experts from around the world.

What does it take to hold France's place at the centre of Europe's biggest crises? In this episode of Policy Punchline, Philippe Etienne, France's Ambassador to the United States from 2019 to 2023, joins Princeton students Alice McCarthy ’27 and Darden Shuman ’27 to discuss his memoir, Le Sherpa. A career diplomat for more than four decades, Etienne explains why he gave the book that title when his work went well beyond preparing summits for a head of state. The conversation starts with his unusual route from mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure into the diplomatic service. It follows him to Belgrade in the early 1980s, then to Moscow from 1991 to 1994, where he watched the Soviet Union collapse and the early career of Boris Nemtsov. From there we move to Brussels during the Eurozone crisis, to Berlin, and to the fault lines in Franco-German relations on economic policy, defence projects and energy. Etienne then recalls working with Emmanuel Macron on Donald Trump's first-term Washington, including the April 2018 state visit and the Iran deal that fell apart two weeks later. He describes the 2021 AUKUS recall, when Paris pulled its ambassador from Washington for the first time in nearly 250 years of relations, and how he worked to rebuild trust once he returned. We also ask what Europe can do about the war in Iran, how America changed during his posting, and what a NATO that functions without the United States would require, including Britain's role. We close by focusing on how to be an effective diplomat, how Germans, Russians and Americans each negotiate, and how he navigated those differences. This interview is part of the Policy Punchline podcast series. Supported by Princeton's Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance, the series aims to foster dialogue on critical public-policy issues, connecting listeners with leading experts from around the world. Join us as Philippe Etienne looks back on a career spent in the room for some of Europe's hardest decisions, and explains what comes next for the transatlantic alliance.

What does the history of the dollar reveal about power, sovereignty, and the way money really works? In this episode of Policy Punchline, Financial Times journalist and Princeton historian Brendan Greeley joins Princeton students Alice McCarthy ’27 and Maddie Feldman ’27 to discuss his forthcoming book, The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Powerful Money. Greeley challenges the familiar story that the dollar began as an American invention. Instead, he traces its origins through Spanish silver, German mining towns, colonial ledgers, promissory notes, banking panics, and the private systems of credit that long preceded the modern Federal Reserve. The conversation explores why there is no single “dollar,” how different forms of money serve different people, and why monetary sovereignty is often far messier than governments or economists suggest. The discussion then turns to the present: crypto, stablecoins, America’s broken payments infrastructure, and the uncertain future of dollar dominance. Greeley argues that many supposedly new financial innovations are better understood as old banking problems in new packaging, and that the durability of the dollar depends not only on American power, but on the institutions, regulations, and trust that make money work. This interview is part of the Policy Punchline podcast series. Supported by Princeton’s Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance, the series aims to foster dialogue on critical public-policy issues, connecting listeners with leading experts from around the world. Join us as Brendan Greeley offers a sweeping and often surprising account of the dollar’s past, and what it can teach us about money, markets, and power today.

What does it take to repair a democracy from the inside? In this episode of Policy Punchline, Princeton neuroscientist and NJ-12 candidate Sam Wang joins Princeton students Maddie Feldman ’27 and Alice McCarthy ’27 to discuss his unusual path from brain science to election reform. Wang reflects on the common thread running through his work: using evidence to understand systems that shape people’s lives, whether in the brain, the ballot box, or Congress. The conversation begins with his research on neuroscience and autism before turning to his work founding the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, where he has used data, law, and statistical analysis to challenge distorted electoral maps and defend fair representation. Wang also discusses his run for Congress in New Jersey’s 12th District. We discuss New Jersey’s political system, including Wang’s role as an expert witness in the lawsuit that helped dismantle the state’s county line ballot system. This interview is part of the Policy Punchline podcast series. Supported by Princeton’s Julius Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance, the series aims to foster dialogue on critical public-policy issues, connecting listeners with leading experts from around the world. Join us as Sam Wang offers a scientist’s lens on American democracy, and a reformer’s blueprint for how to fix it.

[Recorded March 5, 2026] Representing New Jersey’s 16th Legislative District while continuing his work at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, State Sen. Andrew Zwicker brings a dual perspective on how frontier research translates into real-world policy. Join hosts Maddie Feldman and Alex Tseng for a conversation about a plasma physicist-turned lawmaker working at the intersection of science, energy policy, and public service. In this episode, we explore how scientific expertise shapes political decision-making, from New Jersey’s role as one of the most concentrated innovation hubs in the world to the challenges of building a clean energy economy. Zwicker reflects on the promise and politics of fusion energy, the realities of state-level policymaking, and what the strategies he’s learned about political communication on the campaign trail vis-à-vis promoting long-term scientific investment.

[Recorded February 18, 2026] Join hosts Maddie Feldman and Maya Chu for a conversation with economist Michael Pettis, a leading voice on global trade, capital flows, and China’s economic trajectory. In this episode, we unpack the mechanics and misconceptions of global trade, beginning with Pettis’s core distinction between the gains from balanced trade and the costs of persistent imbalances. Drawing on decades of experience in sovereign debt markets and more than twenty years teaching finance in Beijing, Pettis argues that trade is about how countries distribute the costs of domestic economic distortions across borders. Along the way, we debate the economic philosophies of John Maynard Keynes and Joan Robinson, explore Pettis’s “two doors” framework for how deficit countries adjust, learn the steps for how best to “overdose” on economic and financial history, and, of course, assess the gusto of Beijing-based indie rock bands like Carsick Cars.

Join hosts Maddie Feldman and Ollie Braden as they sit down with Professor Meredith Martin, Faculty Director of Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities. This conversation explores how we search, interpret, and make meaning in an increasingly data-driven world. Professor Martin challenges the idea that data is neutral and that search equals knowledge, unpacking how digital tools shape both what we see and what we miss. We discuss the Princeton Prosody Archive, the limits of large language models, historians of the future, and why the humanities remain essential for understanding meaning in an AI-mediated age.