The Disagreement

Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship. He has placed this issue at the forefront of his immigration agenda and it is now being taken up by the Supreme Court. To have this conversation, we’ve brought together a constitutional law scholar and a political commentator.

Cristina Rodríguez is the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School. In 2021, she was appoi...

Today’s disagreement is about college campus detentions, due process, and free speech.

We focus on the two most high-profile cases: Mahmoud Khalil: a green card holder, legal resident, and graduate student at Columbia University who had a leadership role within CUAD, which stands for Columbia University Apartheid Divest; and Rümeysa Öztürk: a graduate student at Tufts University who is a student visa holder. She co-authored an op-ed...

In March, we recorded an episode live on stage at SXSW EDU in Austin, Texas. This disagreement is all about ESAs, or Education Savings Accounts. You may have heard of ESAs under a different name, like vouchers or school choice programs. Right now, 18 states have some sort of ESA program in place.

The programs are becoming more popular across the country, but should they be? What accounts for the increasing support for ESAs? What ris...

Today’s disagreement is about transgender health care for young people and the future of the trans rights movement.

Gender Affirming Care is a method of treating gender dysphoria by affirming a child’s gender identity and tailoring medical and social interventions around this identity. This might begin with a social transition and often leads to a medical protocol that involves puberty blockers and then cross sex hormones.

Almost a y...

Today’s disagreement is on The Telepathy Tapes, Autism, and the Paranormal. If you’re not familiar, The Telepathy Tapes is a cultural phenomenon and podcast that launched in Fall 2024. By early January, it was the number one podcast in the country. Today, it’s still in the top ten. Its core thesis is quite provocative: that there are non-verbal autistic young people who possess telepathic powers and are able to read the minds of th...

This episode was recorded live on stage at EDTECH WEEK in New York City. Like most edtech conferences, there were many conversations about the potential power that AI could play in student learning. Ours was a different kind of conversation. We brought together two experts who both expressed skepticism about the role AI should be playing in education today. While they agreed on many things, there is a highly productive disagreement...

President Trump campaigned on a pledge to dismantle the DOE and has already made sweeping cuts to its research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). What role should the federal government play in U.S. education? Where should the Department of Education’s functions live bureaucratically? Should they stay in the DOE or be distributed to other federal agencies? Michelle Dimino is the Education Program Director at Third Way,...

Gender diversity in sports has become a focal point in the culture war and point of disagreement for sports governing bodies. We recorded this episode before the recent executive orders affecting transgender people. But those recent developments have put the political in a new light. Hopefully what you hear feels like a totally different kind of conversation.

What is the nature of biological male advantage? What constitutes fairness...

Destini Ann Davis is a peaceful parenting advocate and influencer with 1.5 million followers on TikTok. She's the author of Very Intentional Parenting, Awakening the Empowered Parent Within.

In our Gentle Parenting, episode with Lori Gottlieb and Ryan Allen, we covered a lot of ground, but didn’t dive deeply into the role of discipline and punishment in raising kids. So we're circling back with one of the internet's most influential...

In the last couple of years, sports betting has exploded across the United States. The rise of mobile, app-based sports betting is having profound impacts on the nature of sports viewership, fandom, and gambling addiction, particularly amongst young men.

Is the rapid ascent of online sports betting creating a public health crisis? Is the online sports betting industry predatory? How should it be regulated?

Dr. Harry Levant is the Dir...

This disagreement is on The Ethics of Having Kids.

In the age of climate change, is it more ethical to have kids or not have kids? What are the costs and benefits of either choice when the reality of our shared future is unknown? What does the pro-natalist movement and its policies get right and wrong?

Heather Houser is a professor of English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. A cultural critic and author of the book In...

Today’s disagreement is on AI tutoring and K-12 Education. How will AI tutoring benefit struggling and high achieving students? Will it enable personalized learning pathways for students?

Two education experts come together for a longform, productive disagreement about whether AI is going to usher in a new era of personalized learning – and whether that is a good thing.

Niels Hoven is the Founder and CEO of Mentava, a software compan...

Gentle parenting can be seen as a movement and generational push-back against the parenting styles that Gen-Xers and Millennials grew up with. We use “Gentle Parenting” as a stand-in for the entire constellation of modern parenting brands: Peaceful, Respectful, Mindful, Intentional, Conscious, Compassionate, Sturdy…While there are some small differences between each method, they all generally follow the core “gentle” tenets.

Ryan Al...

Today’s disagreement is on Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risk. In this episode, we ask the most consequential question we’ve asked so far on this show: Do rapidly advancing AI systems pose an existential threat to humanity?

To have this conversation, we’ve brought together two experts: a world class computer scientist and a Silicon Valley AI entrepreneur.

Roman Yampolskiy is an associate professor of Computer Engineering an...

Today we have a disagreement on whether there’s a retirement crisis in the United States. To have this conversation, we’ve brought together two thought leaders on the topic.

Andrew Biggs is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He studies social security reform, pensions and public sector benefits. Before joining AEI, Biggs was the principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration.

Monique Morrissey ...

The disagreement over the concept of white privilege is at the center of many of our political and cultural struggles at the moment. 

On the Left, white privilege is a bedrock principle, a foundational assumption that motivates much of the discourse around race in America. On the Right, the concept is primarily an object of derision. It’s dismissed, mocked and held up as the sign of the Left’s moral confusion and obsession with iden...

Today’s disagreement is on whether or not extraterrestrial life exists. We’ve brought on two guests who are out of this world. ;)

Dr. Avi Loeb is an astrophysicist and professor of Science at Harvard University. As head of The Galileo Project at Harvard, Dr. Loeb directs the search for evidence of extraterrestrials. Avi is also the author of more than eight hundred scientific papers and the books Interstellar and Extraterrestrial: T...

Today’s disagreement is about criminal justice reform, specifically the state of policing and incarceration in the United States. To explore its contours, we’ve brought on two experts in criminal justice.

Rafael A. Mangual works on the Policing & Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He is a contributing editor of City Journal AND is the author of Criminal (In)Justice: What The Push For Decarcerati...