In 1989, Andrew Sullivan wrote “Here Comes The Groom,” an essay making the conservative case for gay marriage. Less than four decades later, the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges.How did that happen in such an amazingly short time? Why were gay rights won so quickly? Was there something about the nature of that movement that made it so successful? Today, a provocative conversation with Andrew Sullivan about what we can learn from the history of gay rights, how gay became LGBTQIA+ . . . and why he doesn’t support gender ideology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The average American adult spends over three hours a day staring into their phone. If you’re a teenager it’s even worse – seven hours. What’s really troubling is that in study after study, people say that they want to be looking at their screens less. They just don’t know how. They’ve lost control. Johann Hari interviewed over 200 of the world’s leading experts on focus and attention for his new book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. What he found was that your attention didn’t collapse. It’s been stolen from you. So on today’s episode, while everyone is busy debating what Elon Musk is doing to Twitter, Johann explains what Twitter is doing to all of us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you read Common Sense, you know that the best day of the week is Friday, when Nellie Bowles delivers us all the news from the week that was. This Friday, we bring you an Honestly special: TGIF! This time built just for your ears and brought to you by America’s favorite lesbians: Nellie and dear friend of the pod, Katie Herzog.Featuring: The end of the mask mandates, Biden and fellow aging American leaders, the end of CNN+, Libs of Tiktok, and finding some hope in unity around... balls. It's a strange world, but it's our world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’re confused about what is happening with the economy right now, so are we. Why is inflation up 8.5%? Who’s to blame? Is it the Democrats? Or everyone that’s been pushing easy money?What should we do in the long term? The short term? Should we be renting? Buying? Good time to get into the market? Or should we be putting a couple thousand away under the mattress? Or into crypto?Today, Tyler Cowen is here to answer all of your burning questions about the economy. Cowen is a professor at George Mason, runs one of the most useful blogs on the internet (it’s called Marginal Revolution), and is widely considered one of the most influential economists in the country. Cowen, as always, reminds us that conversations about money are often much bigger than money – that at the heart of the conversation about the state of the dollar are fundamental questions about institutional distrust and broken cultural incentives. Cowen helps us answer those questions, too.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Exodus—the story of the Israelites’ freedom from Egyptian slavery 3,000 years ago—is the ultimate story of freedom. And not just for Jews. But for people seeking liberation from subjugation in so many other times and places. Including here in America. From the founding fathers, to abolitionists like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas, to presidents like Lincoln and leaders like Martin Luther King Jr, the themes and symbols and moral truths of the Exodus story have been at the core of how Americans seeking freedom from tyranny have seen themselves. One could argue that without the Exodus there might be no America.To make that case on the eve of Passover—and to take us on a tour of the way the Exodus has been used throughout American history—Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who teaches at Yeshiva University and helms the oldest synagogue in the United States. You don’t need to be a believer to love this episode. You just need to be concerned with how divided we have become, how we have lost a shared sense of reality, a shared sense of ethics, and shared stories from which we can draw universal meaning and inspiration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Perhaps you’ve noticed that the thing we call “social media'' is deeply antisocial—the thing that promised to unite us has done precisely the opposite. A lot of people have tried to explain why. They blame Mark Zuckerberg. Or Jack Dorsey. Or the attention-stealing algorithms of TikTok. Or capitalism. Or human nature.But the best explanation I have read to date was just published in the Atlantic by my guest today Jonathan Haidt. It is a must-read essay, as are Jonathan’s books, “The Righteous Mind” and “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Our conversation today, fitting the importance of this subject, is long and deep. It spans the advent of the like button–and how that transformed the way we use the internet–to Jon’s argument that social media is making us unfit for democracy. And that unless we change course we stand to lose everything. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you read Common Sense, you know that the best day of the week is Friday, when Nellie Bowles delivers us all the news from the week that was. This Friday, we bring you an Honestly special: TGIF! This time built just for your ears and brought to you by America’s favorite lesbians: Nellie and dear friend of the pod, Katie Herzog.Featuring: Elon Musk v. Twitter, BLM corruption, inflation, “don’t say gay,” plus special guest Jeff Ross, America’s Roastmaster General, on jokes about alopecia. Including his own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1973, Leonard Cohen announced he was done with music for good. The same year, in October, war broke out in Israel.The Yom Kippur War would become the bloodiest in Israel’s young history—and Cohen was there to witness it. As the war broke out, he left his home on the Greek island of Hydra to fly into the warzone.Leonard Cohen never said much about why he went to the front. What we know is that in the months that followed, he would write “Who By Fire.” Five decades later, on Spotify and in synagogue, you can still hear the echoes of this trip.So what was it that happened in the desert in October of 1973 between this depressed musician and these too young soldiers going off to battle? How did it remake Leonard Cohen? How did it transform those who heard him play? And how did the war transform Israel itself?Those are just some of the questions Matti Friedman explains in his beautiful new book Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Sacks is a paradox. The entrepreneur and venture capitalist helped lay the foundations of the digital world we now live in: He was one of the members of what's known as the PayPal Mafia, alongside people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Max Levchin. He’s also been an early investor in some companies you may have heard of: Airbnb, Facebook, Slack, SpaceX, Twitter, Uber. At the same time, he is something of a whistleblower from inside the world of tech. He believes that Big Tech has far too much power. He argues that the fact that a handful of billionaires get to decide what we are (and aren’t) allowed to say in the new, digital public square is something that the Framers would have been repelled by—and that all Americans should oppose.Today I spoke to David, now a general partner at Craft Ventures, about the rise of America’s social credit system and how we can defend our civil liberties in the age of the Internet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are republishing Bari’s appearance on Hoover Institute’s Uncommon Knowledge Podcast, hosted by Peter Robinson. Peter Robinson is probably best known as a speech-writer for President Ronald Regan. He was the guy who wrote the famous line, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"Bari and Peter talk about the social movements shaping our culture, how the personal has become political, anti-semitism and the future of the news media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices