A Gentlemen’s Disagreement

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 things better. 

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 should want RFK to win but also how RFK could actually win the presidency.

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 State of the Union address and analyzed the political needle he is trying to thread in the Middle East. Finally, we spent some time discussing the supernova that is Caitlin Clark.

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 going forward, including what immigration policy might look like under a second term of President Biden or President Trump.

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 reasons for hope for the future. 

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 to discuss the broader policy implications of conservation, climate, and economic efforts in the U.S. and globally.