Aug 23, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min · 14 segments
Cheap Talk’s triumphant return for season 7: Our favorite international news stories of the summer; cutting short military exercises with South Korea; AI models hacking their way out of sandboxes; a…
Marcus HolmesHost
Jeff KaplowHost
And Marcus, I just want to say, I think we have shown admirable restraint over the summer in not
I'm actually really glad we didn't record over the summer because I feel like if we had started doing that, we would have felt compelled to come back every week because there was so much.
So here's my hot take on summer 2026 from an international relations perspective.
And today, on August 20th, as we're recording this, we're still in a war with Iran.
That war has changed a little bit and there's been some fits and starts and there's been diplomacy and signed memorandums of understanding and – you know, ceasefires that have come and gone, but the sort of fundamentals of what both sides kind of are demanding, uh, really haven't changed.
So we would have, I think, been caught in a situation where we're responding in the minute to things that are happening.
And – By not responding to those things sort of as they were happening, it allows us to take stock, you know, sort of like the bigger picture, which in my view is very similar to the picture that we left with in May of 2026.
And it was kind of a little bit of whiplash because we stopped recording in May on our last episode of season six.
And so I think we are kind of right back where we started in terms of the big picture fundamentals of what we think about in international conflict.
Oh, we should mention another thing just to put on the table is that the views expressed on this podcast are not the views of William & Mary
Yes, they're solely our own, and they do not represent the policies or positions of William & Mary.
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And Marcus, I just want to say, I think we have shown admirable restraint over the summer in not
I'm actually really glad we didn't record over the summer because I feel like if we had started doing that, we would have felt compelled to come back every week because there was so much.
So here's my hot take on summer 2026 from an international relations perspective.
And today, on August 20th, as we're recording this, we're still in a war with Iran.
That war has changed a little bit and there's been some fits and starts and there's been diplomacy and signed memorandums of understanding and – you know, ceasefires that have come and gone, but the sort of fundamentals of what both sides kind of are demanding, uh, really haven't changed.
So we would have, I think, been caught in a situation where we're responding in the minute to things that are happening.
And – By not responding to those things sort of as they were happening, it allows us to take stock, you know, sort of like the bigger picture, which in my view is very similar to the picture that we left with in May of 2026.
And it was kind of a little bit of whiplash because we stopped recording in May on our last episode of season six.
And so I think we are kind of right back where we started in terms of the big picture fundamentals of what we think about in international conflict.
Oh, we should mention another thing just to put on the table is that the views expressed on this podcast are not the views of William & Mary
Yes, they're solely our own, and they do not represent the policies or positions of William & Mary.
