Cooler Heads

This week: America turns 250! 🎉 …or was that too enthusiastic? We dig into the numbers on where patriotism actually stands from a recent Gallop poll: who’s waving the flag, who’s proud, and who thinks the whole thing is deeply sus. Are we all just performing anti-American subversion for our social media followings? Is true blue pride possible in such a cynical environment? Oh beautiful, for spaci...

This week, we dig into history-literally. Author Kurt Deion joins us to talk about his quest to visit every presidential gravesite, the book it inspired, and why cemeteries might be America’s most underrated history museums. For more on Kurt’s work, visit his YouTube channel:

It’s June 16th — Bloomsday — and Johnny just finished one of the most legendary challenges in all of literature. In this episode, the crew celebrates his completion of James Joyce’s Ulysses, unpacking who Leopold Bloom really is, what it’s like to surrender to Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness prose, and how emerging from the other side of this 265,000-word masterpiece quietly changes you. A perfect...

This week, Jess emerges from the strange and exhausting world of California politics after helping run a campaign for Nancy Pelosi’s open congressional seat. We unpack the consultants, cash, dirty tricks, viral moments, manufactured narratives, and genuine human connections that define modern campaigns. What happens when months of effort, hope, and adrenaline all culminate in a single election nig...

This week, friend of the show Ilya joins us as we explore the strange world of dinosaur denialism and the history of early paleontology. Rather than dismissing skeptics out of hand, we try to steelman some of their arguments and ask a deeper question: why should anyone accept the scientific method in the first place? From the fierce competition surrounding early fossil discoveries to the birth of...

From Vatican roundtables on AI ethics to rabbis revisiting the legend of the golem to AI-generated fatwas in the Islamic world, the world’s major religions are confronting a strange new question: what happens when humanity creates something in its own image? This week, we explore faith, technology, and the possibility that there may be another ghost entering the machine.

This week, we descend into the occult stacks with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky as our guide. Special guest Dr Marina Alexandrova of The University of Texas at Austin joins us to unpack the strange, sprawling world of Theosophy: imperial Russian mysticism, Eastern and Western esoterica, hidden masters, cosmic truths, and the utterly unbelievable life of the woman behind The Secret Doctrine. Check out...

This week, we speak with Johnny’s sister, Kristie, about the excitement of living abroad—the adventure of new places, fresh connections, and building a life somewhere new. We also touch on the feeling of being a stranger in a strange place, and how that experience shapes identity, independence, and connection while navigating expat life and being single abroad.

This week: chaos in the Middle East — the Iran war, ceasefires, and Strait of Hormuz brinkmanship — plus a blunt look at what Donald Trump’s foreign policy even is (if anything). Then we pivot to something far more human: a striking, intimate conversation between Ben Sasse and Ross Douthat on mortality, meaning, and how to live when time is suddenly finite.

This week, we unpack Louis Theroux’s newest documentary, “Inside the Manosphere” alongside a heated Jubilee face-off featuring Jillian Michaels and body positivity activists—two equal and opposite extremes in the ongoing battle of the sexes. When both sides push to the edge, what does a way forward actually look like?

This week we walk through how a “contained” war somehow managed to squeeze the Strait of Hormuz, rattle global markets, and drift into the familiar “no boots on the ground…unless” phase. None of it is surprising—every escalation was basically sitting in the pregame notes. Less fog of war, more willful blindness.

This week, a State of the Union with the tenor of a wrestling match: jeers, applause lines, and red-meat rhetoric set the tone for a country already on edge. We break down the drama in the chamber (Ilhan Omar vs Trump, “these people are crazy”, etc) before diving into the escalating fallout from the strikes on Iran: questions of war powers, international law, civilian risk, whether the operation d...

What shapes music — the artist, the audience, or the architecture? This week, we dive into How Music Works by David Byrne and explore the deeper currents behind sound itself. From cathedral ceilings to village drum circles, we unpack how environment, technology, and culture shape what gets composed — and what gets heard. We also discuss our own pasts with music, playing, and current projects. Draw...

This week: Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show—loved, loathed, endlessly litigated. Then we crack open the latest Epstein file drop. What’s new, what’s noise, and what does our fixation on the abyss say about us?

Aliens, awkward cosmic silence, and a cult that thought salvation came on a spaceship. We hop from global UFO sightings to the Fermi Paradox to the bizarre legacy of the Heaven’s Gate cult.

This week we dive into Greenland—its history and growing geopolitical importance—then unpack the emerging “Donroe Doctrine” of the Trump admin and how it compares to past administrations’ views of power.

This week, we welcome another friend of the show, Ilya, for a wide-ranging conversation on the evergreen subject of AI. We explore the origins of thought and language, and how early, habitual engagement with AI may atrophy those human capacities. Along the way, we examine a recent case involving a young man in Pennsylvania who used ChatGPT as both therapist and pickup-artist coach—with predictably...

This week, friend of the show Evan Barker joins us to discuss the recent ICE-involved shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, and the subsequent fallout. Evan also fills us in on the details of her new book. Preorder Evan’s book here: “Nothing Left, Confessions of a Democratic Operative”

While America invades Venezuela, Johnny and Jess discuss looksmaxxing and one of its biggest proponents, an influencer named Clavicular. What’s the nature of beauty? Is Clavicular some modern result of our image-obsessed algorithm culture? Will the world still love us when we’re no longer young and beautiful?

This week we discuss the series of tragedies that shocked the world, all in one weekend: the mysterious shooting at Brown University, the antisemitic terrorist attack on Bondi Beach in Australia, and the horrific murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele. We touch on FBI incompetence, father-son dynamics, and our favorite Reiner films.

This week we have a wide-ranging conversation on the malaise of modern relationships, the nature of commitment, happiness vs immediate satisfaction, and how luck plays a role in all of this.

This week we discuss the decline of deviance and what it means for cultural stagnation. Are the kids even cool anymore? Inspired by Adam Mastroianni’s piece here .

This week we pardon some turkeys and delve deeper into the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein drama and its ever-growing facets: More emails! Establishing back channels between foreign leaders and arms dealers! Honeypots! How much more can our trust in institutions be eroded? Is nothing surprising anymore? Plus, how to navigate politics at the Thanksgiving table. And our favorite holiday dishes.

This week we discuss the newest Ken Burns documentary, “The American Revolution”, loyalists vs patriots, and the perception of “history” in 2025

This week, we interview Julie Behling, a filmmaker, blogger, and education activist. We discuss the years she spent in post-Soviet 1990s Russia, her work as a Christian missionary, and her fears and analysis of what she feels are insidious trends towards Communism in American society today.