A Gentlemen’s Disagreement

We begin this week by talking about the opening week of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games, particular stories that have caught our eyes, and the general feeling of togetherness that rooting for Team USA brings and then juxtapose that positivity with the direction our political discourse has taken since the new presidential race has begun in earnest.

We recap one of the wildest weeks in modern U.S. political history, starting with the assassination attempt on President Trump, the ensuing RNC and President Trump's selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate, and ending with President Biden's decision to drop out of the race and to endorse Vice-President Harris as his successor.

We welcome back Suffolk University Law School Professor Renee Landers to analyze the major cases and trends from the Supreme Court's just-concluded term. We discussed the Trump cases, the administrative law cases, including the overturning of the Chevron Doctrine, the abortion cases, and the gun cases.

We begin with an extended reaction to the presidential debate before analyzing what foreign policy might look like under a second term of either President Biden or President Trump.

We begin this week by discussing the life and legacy of Willie Mays, and then we dive more fully into what the significance of the Negro Leagues was then and is now and discuss how baseball, in particular, and sports in general, often serve as a microcosm for the country. We wrap up by highlighting two Negro League greats.

We are joined this week by Dr. Po-Shen Loh, professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, social entrepreneur, and innovator, to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities the rise of AI will pose to work, education, and democracy. Throughout our conversation, we analyze how humans can--and must--remain supreme in an AI world.

We are joined this week by Brian Concannon, the Founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti. We discussed the history of Haiti, the role of the U.S. and France in that history, and how that history has led to the current situation in Haiti. We also talked about what U.S. policy towards Haiti should look like moving forward and how Haiti has been a world lea...

We are joined this week by Dr. Michael Beckley, professor of political science at Tufts University and Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, for a discussion on U.S. policy towards China. Dr. Beckley discusses the challenges China currently faces, why those challenges should concern the U.S., and what the U.S. needs to do both economically and militarily to count...

We're back this week with the latest installment in our monthly series of episodes analyzing how individual issues might affect the 2024 election. In this episode, we discuss the feelings people have around crime in the U.S., how those feelings combine with the messaging about crime by the two major parties to give one of those parties a significant advantage, what Presidents Trump and Biden did d...

We are joined this week by TIME editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs to discuss the challenges and opportunities journalism faces today, how TIME is navigating that landscape, and what his vision is for covering the most controversial stories of the day, including and especially the 2024 election here in the U.S. 

We discuss and debate every aspect of the campus protests that have proliferated across the country over the past few weeks, including who the protesters are, what they are protesting, what the goals of the protests are, and how these protests compare to historical protest movements.

The third installment in our monthly series of episodes analyzing how individual issues might affect the 2024 election returns as we take a look at what taxing, spending, the budget, and the national debt would look like with Congress and the Presidency under control of either of the two major parties.

Ricky reflects on being a father, and then we welcome on Dr. Eugene Beresin, a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Executive Director of the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds to talk about mental health and the rise of loneliness in our society. We discuss why people seem to be increasingly lonely and what we can as family members, friends, mentors, and as a society to make...

We are joined this week by Larry Sharpe, the Director of National Organizing for American Values 2024, a Super PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to talk about the importance of ballot access, generally, and the importance of getting RFK on the ballot, in particular. Larry, himself a former gubernatorial candidate in New York, makes a fascinating and compelling case for not only why people shou...

Our monthly episode analyzing how individual issues might affect the 2024 election returns as we take a look at the state of the abortion debate from both a long-term, post-Dobbs perspective, and a short-term perspective given recent cases around mifepristone and IVF. It's an issue on which Democrats have an advantage, but will that translate to electoral results in the fall?

Lots to talk about this week, including a great week for former-President Trump: the Supreme Court ruled that states could not disqualify him from their ballots, he romped through Super Tuesday and his last remaining challenger dropped out, and the longtime Republican Senate Leader with whom he has a famously frosty relationship announced he was stepping down. We then shifted to President Biden's...

This week marked the two-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It also brought news of Alexei Navalny's death and a potential Russian space nuclear weapon. With U.S. aid to Ukraine still stalled in the House, we decided this would be as good a time as ever to engage in a full debate on the issue.

We are back with our fourth annual Presidents Day Mount Rushmore-style snake draft. We are joined for the draft, once again, by our friends Dan Gonzalez and Joe Webster, and this year we are drafting the most significant speeches in U.S. history. A fun episode for any lover of U.S. history.

This week we kick off the first in a series of conversations about the main issues that will define the 2024 elections. Immigration has surged to the top of many people's lists as a central issue that needs to be addressed, and we examined the issue in light of the recent failure to pass the agreement that several senators hammered out. We analyzed why the agreement failed and what that means goin...

We are joined this week by Dr. Yi Ming, a leading climate science expert and a professor at Boston College's Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, for a conversation about the current state of climate change. We discussed the increase in natural disasters in recent years, COP28 and Dr. Ming's experience at that conference, previous successes and failures in climate policy, and rea...

We are joined this week by Dr. Greg Skomal, one of the leading great white shark experts in the country, to discuss how great white sharks came back to the Atlantic Ocean over the past decade. Dr. Skomal provided us with the science behind the reemergence of the great white in these waters and detailed the positive and negative effects of its resurgence. We then used the example of the great white...

We return to our trusty "Six in Sixty" segment this week to touch on a bunch of topics that have been in the news. We begin by discussing Martin Luther King, Jr. and how his words remain as relevant as ever today (8:41-24:38) and then move into discussing the enfolding conflict between the Houthi forces in Yemen and the U.S. and its allies (24:39-38:18). We next turned to U.S. politics to discuss...

We kick off the year by diving into the text of the 14th Amendment in light of the recent decisions in Colorado and Maine that the Amendment bars former President Donald Trump from holding office. We delve into the history of the 14th Amendment, the text of Section 3, whether we think the text applies to President Trump, and whether we think states should pursue this method of potentially keeping...

We close out our year by each choosing our top five stories of 2023--with the least overlap we have had during our three years of doing this episode.

We spent the episode this week delving into the lives and legacies of two of the most significant Americans of the latter-half of the 20th century.  We began by discussing Henry Kissinger, perhaps the most impactful American diplomat of the century (7:01-45:02), before discussing the first female justice of the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor (45:07-1:07:39).