Peter Turchin is not like most historians. For starters, he has an unusual background as an evolutionary biologist studying lemmings and mice. He says that analyzing the complexities of the natural world has allowed him to understand the most complex system of all: human society. He has pioneered a field of history that he calls cliodynamics that applies hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of historical data points to a mathematical model in order to understand the present and to predict future trends.Using these tools, Peter and his team published an article in the journal Nature in 2010 making a bold prediction. They said that economic, social, and political instability in the United States would hit a “peak” in or around the year 2020. Many of Turchin’s critics said he was crazy to make such a speculation, that it’s too hard to predict how history will progress, that the study of history is more art than science. But then came 2020.It turned out to be a massively turbulent year, one that would bring outbreaks of political violence that the U.S. hadn’t experienced in decades. It felt like complete chaos, between Covid lockdowns, mask and vaccine protests, BLM riots, and then, only six days into 2021, the storming of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. What did Peter see that everyone else missed?Peter is the author of over 200 articles and eight books, and his fascinating new one is called End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. It argues that societies operate cyclically, going through golden ages and end times. And he says that we’re currently looking at the telltale signs of an imminent revolution. On today’s show, Peter talks to us about how he studies history, what American history can tell us about our current moment, why 2024 is going to be a year to watch, and what individuals can do to change the direction of history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last month, Britain’s National Health Service made major news when they announced that they were banning the use of puberty blockers for children, except for those enrolled in a tightly regulated clinical trial. The decision was made after an independent review found there were “significant uncertainties” surrounding the long-term effects of these drugs, which had previously been touted as totally reversible.The announcement followed another major decision that the NHS made last year on the same subject, which was to close Britain and Wales’ only treatment center for children with gender dysphoria: the Tavistock Gender and Identity Service. The NHS found that the care provided at Tavistock, which has operated for nearly 35 years, was “not safe or viable as a long-term option for the care of young people with gender related distress.”These decisions bring the UK in sync with countries like Sweden and Norway—which have also made similar policy decisions when it comes to gender care for children. But all of those countries seem light-years away from how the United States approaches these issues. My guest today, Hannah Barnes, has reported on this topic for years. Indeed, her reporting was the catalyst for many of these new changes. She’s here to explain what happened in the UK, and why the U.S. is so out of step with one of our strongest allies.Hannah is an award-winning investigations producer at Newsnight, one of the BBC’s flagship news programs. Her new book, Time To Think, follows the story from Tavistock’s inception to its imminent closure. It investigates how a clinic can open its doors to thousands of young patients at their most vulnerable, how it can operate for more than three decades without oversight or regulation, and how—in the words of some of the clinic’s own staff—this “medical scandal” unfolded.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last week, the Supreme Court handed down, as they usually do as the term comes to an end, a flurry of highly anticipated major decisions. Two of them made a lot of news: one effectively ended affirmative action in American higher education, and another ruled that a Colorado web designer could refuse to create a wedding website for a same-sex couple. The mainstream media’s prevailing sentiment over the last week has been that these are the sorry consequences of a conservative majority court. This court overturned Roe v. Wade last year in a major setback to women’s rights; now they’ve undone decades of precedent that helped historically disadvantaged students have a chance at the American dream, and they’ve weakened gay rights. When President Joe Biden was asked at a press conference last week whether or not this is a “rogue court,” Biden basically said yes. He muttered, “This isn’t a normal court.”  Is that true? Is this court “not normal”? Or do these decisions actually reflect a legitimate reading of the Constitution? To help separate signal from noise and fact from hyperbole, today we have three legal experts from different sides of the political aisle to hash it out. Harry Litman is an attorney who has clerked for two Supreme Court justices, Thurgood Marshall and Anthony Kennedy. He is also a host of the podcast Talking Feds. Jeannie Suk Gersen is a professor at Harvard Law School and writer for The New Yorker. She clerked for David Souter. And Sarah Isgur is a columnist for The Dispatch and an ABC News contributor. She clerked for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and served as the Justice Department spokeswoman during the Trump administration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2016, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was one of 17 Republicans in a crowded field trying to beat Donald Trump. We know how that movie ended. One of the hard won lessons of that primary, especially among Republicans, was that it was foolish not to unite right away behind the strongest candidate. If they had done that, perhaps Trump wouldn't have been the nominee and then the president.Yet here we are in 2023 and we seem to be watching the same movie play out in real time, with 13 Republican candidates trying, once again, to outperform Trump in a crowded field.One of those people, once again, is Chris Christie. But this time, he insists, he can write a new ending. Christie not only believes that he could win the nomination, but he believes he can win it by going toe to toe with Trump.Christie's brand is the brash, straight-talking Jersey guy, and he's more than living up to his reputation. He's been absolutely brutal in his attacks on the former president, calling Trump a “lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog,” a “petulant child,” a “bitter, angry man,” and “the cheapest S.O.B I’ve ever met.”This, as one would expect, has made him a liberal darling of sorts. At the same time, a lot of people think, too little, too late. For a long time, Christie was very much a Trump cheerleader. After Christie dropped out of the 2016 race, he was the first establishment Republican—and the first of any of the Republican governors or senators—to endorse Donald Trump, which a lot of people say helped launch Trump to the nomination. During Trump’s presidency, Christie said things about Trump like, “he’s not only a strong leader, but a caring, genuine and decent person” and “when he makes a promise, he keeps it.”On today's show, I ask Governor Christie to explain himself. I ask him why he supported Trump in 2016 and again in 2020 and what finally led him to break ranks. I also ask him about whether this kind of rejection of Trump can resonate with a Republican base who doesn't seem to have moved on from Trump or Trumpism. And last, I ask him why he wants to be president of the United States in the first place.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. is the rare Kennedy who hasn’t yet joined the family business. But at age 69—after a long career as an environmental lawyer and activist, and many years advocating against lifesaving public health programs like childhood vaccinations on the unproven claim that they cause autism—he has decided to run for President of the United States.Many voices in the mainstream have dismissed RFK Jr. as a distraction. The New York Times called him a “crank” and a “high-profile circus act.” But the polls don’t seem to agree. RFK Jr. is polling as high as 20 percent among Democratic-leaning voters. And according to one recent poll from The Economist and YouGov, RFK Jr. has the highest favorability rating among all major candidates, including Trump and Biden.A challenger to the incumbent has never won the primaries in modern political history, and RFK Jr. doesn’t seem poised to break that historical precedent. But that he’s doing this well so early tells us a lot about the current state of American politics. Namely, people are dissatisfied with the options on the table—especially Democrats, who are desperate for a Biden alternative.It also tells us something deeper about American culture right now, and what fits into the realm of acceptable conversation. RFK Jr. says things—whether about vaccines causing autism, SSRIs leading to school shootings, or the CIA killing his dad and uncle—that are described by mainstream media as disinformation and ideas that are simply beyond the pale. But his high polling suggests that many Americans are tuning in to what he has to say. And perhaps they think that we have drawn the lines of debate too narrowly.Last week, I went to Mr. Kennedy’s house to ask him why he thinks he has hit a nerve among American voters, and how he thinks he can win the nomination, and ultimately, the presidency—all without any political experience and while hanging on to the kooky opinions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Happy Father's Day! For today's episode, a conversation about fatherhood with three dads who have thought a lot about parenthood, masculinity and being a dad in a world stripped of convention. Richard Reeves is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of the book Of Boys and Men about why boys and men are falling behind in so many aspects of American life. Ryan Holiday is a writer, bookstore owner, Daily Stoic and Daily Dad podcast host. Ian Rowe is a Senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute where he works on issues surrounding education and upward mobility, family formation, adoption. He’s also Chairman of the board at the Spence-Chapin adoption organization, author of the book, Agency, and cofounder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a new network of character-based International Baccalaureate high schools in the Bronx.Along with guest host Eli Lake, the four dads talk: fatherhood, marriage and if it matters anymore, what's up with "toxic masculinity," being a role model for boys, adoption, if the rules and traditions of gender are hurting today's dads or if they offer wisdom we need to re-embrace, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On May 1, 2023, a 30-year-old homeless man named Jordan Neely boarded the F train in New York City. Neely appeared to be in the midst of some kind of mental health crisis, as witnesses describe him acting aggressively, screaming that he was hungry and thirsty and that he didn’t care if he went to jail or died. A few witnesses describe feeling threatened by Neely’s behavior. Soon, a 24-year-old man named Daniel Penny, who we later learned is a former Marine, jumped forward and put Neely in a chokehold. Minutes later, Neely was dead. Neely’s death once again stoked our culture wars and our debate about crime, homelessness, and mental illness in American cities. Was Jordan Neely a casualty of white supremacy? Was he another example of a criminal justice system that has stopped enforcing crime, thus encouraging people to take matters into their own hands? Was Jordan Neely a victim of a mental health system that has failed both its patients and society? How could we have prevented this tragedy? And how should we prevent it going forward? To dive into these questions and more, today on Honestly we have Rafael Mangual, Jonathan Rosen, and Kat Rosenfield. Mangual is a legal policy expert at the Manhattan Institute. Rosenfield is a novelist and a columnist for Unherd. And Rosen is the author of the book The Best Minds, which examines his childhood friendship with Michael Lauder, a graduate of Yale Law School who suffered a schizophrenic break and killed his pregnant fiancée. (You can check out our previous conversation with Rosen about that tragedy here.)  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s almost hard to believe, but in the 1950s doctors were frequently portrayed in TV commercials for. . . cigarettes. That’s because smoking wasn’t just seen as cool and glamorous, but as an actual health-enhancing activity. Fast-forward to today, and Americans have been sold on a dizzying number of health trends: from grapefruit diets and Weight Watchers to Pelotons and yoga. The health industry churns through information and fads faster than anyone can possibly keep up. As soon as you’re gearing up to start a juice cleanse or go on a Costco rampage for keto-friendly ingredients, a new diet, a new drug, a new piece of equipment shows up to tell you out with the old, in with the new: here is the real key to your health. One person who consistently cuts through all that noise is Dr. Peter Attia. His new book, Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, is a blueprint—based on the best available science and data—for what really matters to live a healthy life. And not just a healthier one, but a longer one.Attia is a Stanford- and Johns Hopkins-educated, NIH-trained physician who is at the forefront of some of the most important conversations around health and longevity in medicine today. His work is at the center of a new industry that has been booming in Silicon Valley for the past several years. Tech giants like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Larry Page, and Brian Armstrong have poured billions into start-ups that research human life extension.But Attia doesn’t think this is only for the elites of Silicon Valley. He thinks there’s a well of everyday changes—from what we eat, how we move, and how much we sleep, to scans, blood tests, and other early interventions, to our emotional health—that can give people extra years to the very short life we have here on earth.On today’s episode: what’s possible in the uncharted science of longevity? And—from our broken medical system to our truly unhealthy lifestyles—what are the major factors preventing us from living longer, healthier lives? And what makes a life worth living anyway? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Earlier today, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott entered the race for President. That makes him the sixth Republican candidate to get into the race, in a crowded attempt to beat the current frontrunner, former President Donald Trump. So for today’s episode, a rerun of my conversation with Tim Scott from last summer. As you’ll hear, Scott’s approach is fundamentally different from many of his fellow republicans in that he’s the ultimate optimist. In part, that optimism comes from his own story. Scott’s grandfather picked cotton in the segregated south. He never learned to read or write. Within two generations, without money or connections, his grandson became a U.S. senator, and today, throws his hat in to become President of the United States.Scott told me he is frustrated at all the pessimism, including from inside his own party — and he’s frustrated at the notion that America is in decline. Though I hope Scott is right, you’ll hear that I challenge him on that idea. I see very good reasons for Americans to be fed up with the state of the union and deeply worried about the future of the country.We also talked about Trump, the state of the GOP and what it’s like to be the Senate’s only black Republican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seventy-five years ago this week, the Jewish community of Palestine (known as the yishuv) gathered in the art museum of Tel Aviv—then a city of less than 200,000 inhabitants—in order to perform a resurrection. Thirty-seven people—36 men and one woman—were about to sign Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which would reestablish Jewish political sovereignty in the Holy Land for the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple 2,000 years ago.They gathered in that museum just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, just three years after six million Jews were murdered in Europe, to establish Israel as a place where the Jewish people could at last control their own fate and destiny and safety. More than that, in the land of Israel, there was a sense—not just among religious Jews, but all Jews—that they were finally going home.The Israel of the early days—poor, socialist, secular, where food rationing was the norm— feels so far away. Now, Israel is an economic superpower, a world leader in high tech. And the socialist left that built the country has given way to a political right that dominates the Jewish state. But throughout its 75 years, Israel has always prided itself on being the world’s only Jewish democracy. A liberal democracy in a sea of undemocratic regimes.Now, hundreds of thousands of Israelis are worried that that identity—an identity that Israelis pride themselves on and have defended since its existence—is in danger. They’ve been taking to the streets, night after night for the past five months, with Israeli flags in their hands chanting and demanding one thing: “democratya.” Democracy.One of those people is my guest today, Daniel Gordis: rabbi, academic, American Israeli, and author of eight books, including the just published Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders’ Dreams?On today’s episode, Danny helps us make sense of this complicated, tumultuous, beautiful, often indecipherable place: What did Israel’s founders want for the country? Has their promise been fulfilled? How did the Jewish people manage to become a world economic powerhouse after two in every three European Jews had been slaughtered? And in light of the ongoing political turmoil, what does the future of this small, miraculous country—both Jewish and democratic—hold? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices