The Curious Middle

Medi from Rep America was born in Southern California to parents from Iran. Like Polina, he was a Democrat for most of his life, until he left the left. We talk about the moment Medi realized the left had moved on without him, and why so many former Democrats feel like they got scammed. Then we got into the hard stuff. Medi doesn't hold back on Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, and why he thinks a se...

Jill Kargman grew up on the Upper East Side and still felt like an outsider there. The creator of Odd Mom Out joins us o talk about status, Instagram, October 7, and why she calls herself politically homeless. Jill explains why so many Jewish New Yorkers have already switched, why Hollywood stays quiet, and what her daughter saw on campus after October 7. Then it's rapid fire: Birkins, four-nanny...

Meet Tanya . She was born in Los Angeles to parents who left the Soviet Union as refugees in 1979. After October 7, her group of friends and her lesbian basketball league turned on her. Teammates she'd played with for years stopped talking to her. When she said she was voting for Trump, they actually banned her from team events. Her story went viral, and now she's running for West Hollywood City C...

Father Robert Sirico shares the unlikely path that led him to the priesthood — from protesting alongside Jane Fonda to a political transformation sparked by a chance encounter with a conservative friend, who handed him Bastiat, Hayek, and Milton Friedman and unraveled everything he thought he knew. Now president emeritus of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, Father Sirico m...

Danielle Haas spent 14 years inside Human Rights Watch editing their reports before she quit and helped found Eightrights.org, an insider-led group holding the human rights sector accountable. In this episode, she walks us through how Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders operate with almost zero outside scrutiny, and how human rights became a civil religion for secular Westerne...

Germania Rodriguez was 11 years old when her family fled Venezuela . Her mother, one of the regime's most aggressive journalist critics, had just been falsely accused by Hugo Chávez's government. Two decades later, sitting in NYU lecture halls, Germania became a Bernie Sanders supporter anyway. In this episode, Germania joins The Curious Middle to explain how someone who watched socialism destroy...

James Lindsay returns for a two-hour deep dive: his own journey from lifelong Democrat to Trump voter, how Trump Derangement Syndrome became what he calls one of the most wide-ranging psychological operations in modern history, the 130-year throughline from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to today's "Israel Derangement Syndrome," what Salafism and the book Milestones actually teach, and why he...

Alyssa Rosenheck was one of the only Jewish kids in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when a classmate stood up in class, pointed at her, and said, "The Jew took it." She pushed the girl down. Her dad's response: "My daughter has my permission to deck anyone who offends her family or faith."   That courage runs hrough everything that followed: a tennis scholarship, a decade in corporate medical sales, a thyroid ca...

James Lindsay led the 2018 Grievance Studies Affair, a hoax so effective it got a chapter of Mein Kampf rewritten as feminist theory accepted into a peer-reviewed journal. Since then he's built New Discourses around defining the woke formula of critical theory plus Leninist tactics, and how the formula appears on the left and the right. In this conversation, Lindsay traces "woke" back through Leni...

Dr. Joseph Moore i s a historian who spent a decade testing every financial strategy Americans have ever tried: he Airbnb'd every room in his house, bought land on the moon, founded a cryptocurrency, and invested in a startup that went to zero — to write How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked and Didn't. He started the project as a "lefty humanities professo...

Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU , is back! Last time,  she told us serving your country can mean enlisting as an educator, a line we still bring up constantly. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation: why personal responsibility beats collective grievance, how socialism and communism sell real problems with fake solutions, a teacher's union resolution instructing teachers not to tell parents...

Liza Libes is defending literature like it's under siege, and after this conversation, you will understand why. Liza went to Columbia wanting to study Tolstoy and came out having read more Edward Said and Sartre she signed up for. We got into how her English degree turned into a theory degree overnight, why Anna Karenina isn't the feminist manifesto her professors taught it as, and why so much of...

What if you could name the thing tearing America apart?   Benedict Beckeld joined us to  trace a pattern that has played out in every great civilization in history: ancient Greece, Rome, Enlightenment France, Britain, and now America. The more successful a society becomes, the more its own people turn against it. Wealth, safety, and open intellectual space create the exact conditions for a culture...

Adam Louis Klein is a PhD student in anthropology at McGill who became one of the leading voices against antizionism after October 7. He was in the Amazon jungle doing fieldwork when the attacks happened. When he returned and refused to stay silent, he was immediately labeled a Zionist and told he had no future in his field. Instead of backing down, he built a movement. In this episode, Adam expla...

What if pursuing wealth isn't greedy,  it's morally good? Rabbi Daniel Lapin has spent decades making that case, and in this conversation he makes it clearly. He's the bestselling author of Thou Shall Prosper , founder of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians, and one of the most practical thinkers on money, character, and how to live well. We get into his Five F's framework: Family, Financ...

How much power does The New York Times really have , and what happens when that power is used to shape narrative instead of pursue truth? In this episode of The Curious Middle , we speak with Ashley Rindsberg , author of The Gray Lady Winked , about the Times' reporting on some of the most important stories of the last century: the Nazi invasion of Poland, Stalin's Soviet Union, the Holocaust, Isr...

In this powerful episode, we sit down with Jonathan Harounoff , British-Iranian journalist and author of Unveiled: Inside Iran's Woman, Life, Freedom Revolt . Jonathan takes us inside the Woman, Life, Freedom movement —how it began, why it refuses to die, and why the regime continues to answer peaceful protest with barbaric force. Drawing on years of reporting and deeply personal conversations wit...

We spreak with   Marissa Streit , CEO of P ragerU    a bout education, civics, and parenting in a time of cultural chaos. Marissa shares the moment that inspired her to "enlist" through education, explains why activism can show up even in math and literacy, and calls on parents to stop outsourcing values to institutions. Our discussion also explores he crisis facing young women today—marriage, mea...

Rob Henderson , known for coining the term "luxury beliefs," joins us to discuss his memoir  Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class . Rob shares his extraordinary path—from homelessness and the LA foster care system, to adoption in rural Northern California, to enlisting in the Air Force at 17, and eventually studying at Yale and Cambridge . Rob shares research that shows how...

Former Michelle Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz joins us to explore the world of Jewish wisdom she discovered beyond ethnic jokes, bagels, and a vague sense of guilt. She shares how her culturally Jewish upbringing transformed into a deeply learned, joyful identity—and why real Jewish study is essential if we want to withstand modern antisemitism. We trace how 2,000 years of Christian anti-Judais...

Monica Harris is the Executive Director of FAIR For All ,  a Harvard Law graduate, former Hollywood executive, and author of The Illusion of Division . Monica explains how her experience as a  gay Black woman in Hollywood and then in "flyover country" shattered many elite narratives about America. She describes why she believes much of our current polarization is manufactured by media and politica...

In this episode, we speak with Lucy Biggers, head of social media at The Free Press a nd a former climate activist who has completely rethought the story she was telling the world and herself. Lucy shares how she went from a left-wing digital newsroom steeped in oppressor–oppressed ideology and climate doomsday content to slowly "re-educating" herself, especially after COVID lockdowns made her que...

Leland Vittert , NewsNation's chief Washington anchor and author of the memoir   Born Lucky , joins us to talk about his childhood, his career, and all the unexpected ways he truly  was  born lucky. Despite years of bullying and difficulty navigating school as an autistic kid, Leland had one enormous blessing: parents who never gave up on him, never lowered the bar, and never stopped believing he...

What happens when a no-nonsense entrepreneur decides she's had enough of California's chaos? Elaine Culotti has ideas politicians won't touch. She is a fearless entrepreneur, farmer, real estate developer, and a potential candidate for governor of California. You may also know her as one of the business tycoons on  Undercover Billionaire . In this conversation, Elaine shares her frustrations with...

Our guest is  Julie Smolyansky , CEO of Lifeway Food s, the company that pioneered the kefir market in America and today produces 95% of the kefir sold in the U.S. Julie's story begins in 1976, when her parents immigrated from Kiev ( the former Soviet Union)  to Chicago. Her mother opened a deli, while her father, a mechanical engineer, missed the kefir he had back in the Soviet Union so he starte...