Podcaster/journalist Andy Mills shares the unusual trajectory of his life and career: from small town boy; to God-loving member of a close-knit group of friends; to rebellious drop-out of a Christian college; to curious outsider in Southern Sudan; to hard-working, some-time inappropriate young media professional; to a more self-aware, award-winning…

The indispensable Eli Lake — contributing editor at Commentary Magazine and staff writer and podcaster at The Free Press — returns to the pod to mark the destruction of mass murderer and DSA heartthrob Hasan Nasrallah along with the top brass of his terror gang in Beirut this weekend. This leads to a discussion about the nature of warfare and the i…

Caitlin Flanagan returns! The unapologetic author of On Thinking for Yourself (a selection of her excellent essays for The Atlantic) comes to talk to us about the fall of Western civilization, what happens when you let church-going go, what happened to universities, and why (though a Catholic herself) Caitlin has started wearing a Star of David. Ch…

Nick Gillespie — editor at large at the libertarian institution that is Reason Magazine (and host of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie) — comes on the pod for an IRL conversation about 'The Agony of Abundance,' the paradoxical state in which we’re more prosperous, yet more dissatisfied, than ever. We discuss the negative narratives peddled b…

PLEASE NOTE: We are releasing this episode in the immediate aftermath of the alleged assassination attempt on President Trump. Details and facts presented in this conversation are still being corroborated and are subject to be updated/corrected. Recurrent guest Misha Thomas (“The Liberal Who Voted for Trump” / “Blackness and the Other Side of Traum…

Nellie Bowles is back! The journalist, writer of the TGIF newsletter, and co-founder of The Free Press (along with her wife Bari Weiss) returns to discuss her new book, Morning After the Revolution. In it, she chronicles the unfortunate series of events that led her to leave The New York Times in 2021. We get into that in this conversation, too (di…

William Deresiewicz — author of (the newly updated) Excellent Sheep, The Death of the Artist, and The End of Solitude — returns to the pod! This time we dive into one of the institutions we love to hate: elite universities. We dwell on and debate the protests at Columbia (et al.), the reasons why it’s all gone so wrong, and whether or not the solut…

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, author, and former Columbia Journalism School dean (to us!), Steve Coll, takes us deep into the conspiracy-plagued mind of Saddam Hussein, the subject of his latest book The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq. We go deep into the wonky journalism weeds — includ…

With Vanessa off for the weekend to explore the world of psychedelics, the podcast has been hijacked by a cabal of furious, loud, and lubricated Jews. Adaam, 3 martinis and a Laphroaig in, is joined by Newsweek opinion editor and author of Second Class Batya Ungar-Sargon, and Free Press reporter and host of The Re-Education podcast Eli Lake. The th…

Authors and co-hosts of the Cut the Bull podcast, Charles Love (Race Crazy) and Wilfred Reilly (Taboo, Hate Crime Hoax) join us for a lively conversation/debate about race, history, and K-12 education — and Vanessa gets put in the hot seat. Questions covered include: Should Black history be separate from American history? Are we over-indexing on se…

Dr. Einat Wilf is an Israeli writer, speaker, former (and future?) politician, podcaster (We Should All be Zionisists), and co-author of The War of Return. In this episode, we dive into some historical context for the Israel-Palestine conflict, with Vanessa asking all the ignorant questions you were too afraid to ask: What/who was there in Israel b…

Iranian historian and writer Arash Azizi comes on the pod to share his perspective on the Israel-Hamas conflict today — and why he believes ceasefire is the only viable path forward for Israel’s war with Hamas. Along the way, Azizi gives us on an overview of Iran’s politics since the Revolution of 1979 (i.e. how Soleimani became The Shadow Commande…

John Aziz is a British Palestinian musician who has come into the public spotlight since October 7th for tweeting out for peace and against Hamas. In this conversation, we unpack why it’s so controversial for a Palestinian like John to be pro-peace, the trauma both sides aren’t acknowledging or addressing, and the overly-simplified, ironic, Star Wa…

Friend of the pod Batya Ungar-Sargon, deputy opinion editor for Newsweek and author of Bad News, returns for a deep, contentious conversation about the responsibility of journalists covering the Israel-Hamas war, the people worth expending energy on (versus relegating as enemies), and the uncomfortable embrace of moral certainty. While much vitriol…

Note: This episode is far more explicit — and way more rage-ful — than your average. As you have likely read by now in the news, last Saturday, a group of Hamas combatants infiltrated Israel and massacred about 1300 people, mostly civilians. Usually, Uncertain Things is all about embracing epistemological uncertainty. This conversation is not about…

Yascha Mounk returns for round two! If you missed part one of our conversation with the political theorist, writer, and podcaster about his latest book, The Identity Trap, stop now and listen to that episode first. We pick up where we left off last time and get deep into debate about strategic essentialism, the privileging of marginalized voices, a…

Political theorist, writer, and podcaster Yascha Mounk returns! Last time, we spoke about Yascha’s last book: The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. This time, Adaam got to air his personal grievances as we dove into the thorny topic of his latest book: The Identity Trap. Yascha covers a ton: he traces the…

We bring in the fall with a big conversation about big tech, with the authors of System Error: Stanford professors Rob Reich (expertise in: political science, philosophy, ethics, democracy, digital technology), Mehran Sahami (software engineering, in particular machine learning and AI, and VC funding), and Jeremy Weinstein (political science, gover…

James (Jamie) Kirchick is an author, columnist for Tablet magazine, historian, podcaster, and staunch believer in/defender of liberal values — and he’ll speak up against any party/group currently trampling on them. He began his journalism career writing about domestic and foreign politics; his first book, The End of Europe focused on the rise of po…

Scientist-turned-historian Peter Turchin returns! Peter first came on the pod a few months ago to discuss the famous prediction he made in 2010 that we were headed for crisis, circa 2020. Last time, we covered the controversy he’s stirred up within the historical discipline, the methodologies behind cliodynamics/his data-based predictions, and the …

David Krakauer is the President of the Santa Fe Institute — an academic institution that conscientiously bucks the overly-siloed and ideological bents of most universities these days. Krakauer is an evolutionary biologist who studies “​​the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth.” He joined us on the pod for a wide-ranging conversation co…

William Deresiewicz — author of Excellent Sheep, The Death of the Artist, and The End of Solitude — has lived many lives. He’s been an orthodox Jewish boy who lost his faith; a journalism school student unimpressed by the pretensions of the profession; a literature professor who (blasphemously) loved books and teaching. Today, he’s an author, essay…

Nellie Bowles is one of the few journalists who lives and writes in the Venn diagram of both Adaam and Vanessa’s interests. For years she was the tech reporter for The New York Times and her epic 2022 piece on San Francisco’s decline for The Atlantic deservedly kicked up a lot of attention, including from your podcast hosts — for different reasons,…

Behold! The recording of our first ever live event! We were graced by the thoughts, arguments, and non-English accents of Niall Ferguson — economic historian, fellow at Stanford, and author of many books, including Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe — and Martin Gurri — a former media analyst for the CIA and author of The Revolt of The Public and th…

Journalist Helen Lewis spent much of last year knee-deep in gurus — the Steve Jobs, Russell Brands, and Jordan Petersons who captivate (and capture) audiences with their spiritual aura and (increasingly) podcasts — while reporting The New Gurus. She postulates that they derive their popularity, in part, to the decline of religion in our societies, …

Vanessa has admired the New York Times’ architecture critic Michael Kimmelman ever since she was a starry-eyed youngster starting her urban journalism career. Now that his latest book The Intimate City is out, it was the perfect excuse to have him on the show. She and Adaam ask Michael what it was like at the Times in the late ‘80s when he started …

The Personal, The Political, and The Urban. Adaam and Vanessa discuss the episodes from the year that stuck with them most — and reflect on the unexpected ways these conversations are thematically linked together. With Mark Lilla, they continued mulling on the questions they began considering back in season one with Tom Holland and Tomer Persico — …

Robin Hanson is an economics professor who kept running across conundrums of human behavior in his research. Why do we spend so much of our GDP on medicine — even when studies show that more medicine does not lead to better health outcomes? Why have we spent years perfecting methods of instruction — yet educational institutions keep resisting the v…

Eli Lake — host of The Re-Education Podcast, contributing editor to Commentary, and columnist for the New York Sun — is a Neo-Conservative, Neither-Trumper as comfortable talking about the FBI as the musical genius of Ye. Eli was game to debate ideas, have his opinions challenged, and cover a wide-range of topics — from the Israeli elections and Am…

Andrew Heaton, host of The Political Orphanage and our favorite “tepid grab bag” of political punditry, returns to the pod to help us understand the big issues at stake before the midterm elections: abortion, inflation, and culture war stuff. Along the way, Heaton explains why having sex on the hood of a car isn’t always a good idea, why dating in …

Scientist-turned-historian Peter Turchin is best known for a dire prediction he made in 2010: we were headed for serious unrest, circa 2020. Peter came to this (as-so-happened) accurate prediction by treating the soft science of history like a hard one — what he calls cliodynamics. He and his team quantified indicators of social unrest in previous …

Urbanist, architect, and professor Vishaan Chakrabarti joins us to explain how the f*** cities got so expensive — and, while we’re at it, ugly. Vishaan is both a doer and a thinker — he’s the founder and creative director of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism as well as a writer of books, talker of TEDs, and a collaborator of journalists (see: …

Foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead’s new book — The Arc of a Covenant — kept Adaam up at night with its unique insight into the American-Israel relationship and its gripping historical anecdotes (Stalin! Truman! Roosevelt, oh my!). In this conversation, we investigate the culpability of “THE JEWS,” explore why gentiles catalyzed the creation…

Christine Rosen is the best kind of opinion writer — one we love to disagree with. Senior fellow at AEI, senior writer at Commentary magazine, and co-host of the Commentary podcast, Christine joined us for a conversation ostensibly about trauma, a word/concept that is proliferating in art and life (and getting dangerously diluted in the process). H…

In his latest book, Matthew Continetti — the right’s pre-eminent intellectual historian — traces the rich history of America’s 20th century conservative moment. In this conversation, we don’t dive into the details of history itself (for that, pick up a copy of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism), but rather discuss the origin…

The yin to David French’s yang, lawyer Kreesa Lancaster gives us her perspective on how and why the Supreme Court came to the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. Along the way, Kreesa breaks down the legalese, explaining such terms as substantive due process, stare decisis, and strict constructionism / originalism, for good measure. But we also discuss why al…

David French, conservative thinker, podcaster, and author of Divided We Fall, returns to the pod to talk about friendship, or the lack thereof, and why Americans are so goddamn lonely. David unpacks the link between loneliness and the rise of radical and authoritarian groups, and we ponder why Americans just don’t seem to prioritize friendship and …

Back from a delicious month-long detachment from the news cycle, Adaam sits down with political vagabond and comedian Andrew Heaton, host of The Political Orphanage podcast, to relearn how to do audio rambling. In a more light-hearted discussion than normal (still need to warm up!), we talk the subtle art of political comedy, the glory (and pains) …

Angel Eduardo, author and co-host of the Fair Perspectives podcast, insists that we can rise above this polarized moment and have real – difficult but vitriol-free – debates with each other. Steelmaning is for beginners. We’re talking starmanning! How to do that is what we try to figure on this episode. Adaam and Angel argue about the merits of com…

We’ve been wanting to have political theorist, writer, and podcaster Yascha Mounk on the show for a while now, and the wait was so worth it: his new book, The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, is not only timely, it’s quite Uncertain Thingsy. He explains the three main ways that diverse democracies fall a…

When writer and podcaster Meghan Daum released her book The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars in 2019, she didn’t get canceled, per se. But its reception among her liberal friends was… frosty. Readers charged that Meghan had been captured by the IDW; reviewers painted her as out of touch; event organizers sent nary an…

After covering the 2016 elections, podcaster and journalist Jody Avirgan (FiveThirtyEight, 30 for 30) was tired. Damn tired. Of the news cycle, the click bait, the politics. He felt pulled to history as a way of making sense of the present in a more complex, thoughtful way — and so he reached out to Nicole Hemmer, a historian who studies right wing…

Jacob Mchangama — author of Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, lawyer, and founder and director of the Copenhagen-based think tank Justitia — has uncovered an unfortunate, though not too surprising, historical pattern, across cultures and societies: the second we feel under threat in a society, free speech (that supposedly sacros…

After studying neurobiology in college, Daniel Roy became a professional sleight-of-hand artist slash YouTube magician. He joined us to explore how illusionists exploit our innate psychological and social tendencies in order to make us unwillingly suspend our disbelief. In this in-person conversation, we dive into the topics of misdirection, decept…

Author and political philosophy professor Mark Lilla joined us to debate morality (what makes something good, and how much of it is enough?), innocence vs. ignorance, reactionary passions and nostalgia, the importance of maintaining a private sphere of moral inquiry, and the psychoses of current American politics. We usually ask our “blindspots” qu…

You’d think author and speaker Helen Russell — whose professional obsession for the past few years has been happiness — would be loathe to discuss the topic of sadness. Au contraire. As she’s learned more about what it takes to be happy, she’s discovered it relies on perfecting the lost (at least in America) art of being sad. We talk with Helen abo…

People Love Dead Jews. That's the title of novelist and literary scholar Dara Horn's provocative book, which explores the ways in which non-Jewish societies exploit Jewish histories and atrocities to "flatter" themselves and erase Jewish realities. In an episode filled with more ghoulish humor than usual, we follow Dara’s journey of uncovering a tr…

Matt Taibbi thrives on the absurd. He used to revel in journalism's culture: caustic, independent, collaborative, and adversarial to those in power. Now, the former Rolling Stone writer and author of Hate Inc. sees little to love in the toxic, "credentialist" media world. We discuss Matt's transition to Substack (the future!), the psychotic break T…

Anthony Gottlieb is a historian of ideas, the former executive editor of The Economist, the author of The Dream of Reason and The Dream of Enlightenment, and the George R.R. Martin of the history of philosophy. He tells us why he kept a poster of Wittgenstein in his dorm, how journalism forced him to unlearn the bad prose of academia, what is the q…

Film critic, YouTube influencer, and sci-fi author Lindsay Ellis joins us to talk about her new novel and the complexities of human-alien relationships. But, in typical Uncertain Things fashion, we couldn't help but ask Lindsay about the f*ed up nature of today's social media landscape — one that cripples artists and rewards very bad behavior indee…