Advertise on podcast: The Free Press Interviews

On the eve of October 7, many Israelis would have told you the greatest threat to their country came from within. For nine months, hundreds of thousands of people had filled the streets every week to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to transform the judiciary. His critics said it would strip Israeli courts of their power to check the government, and some suspected it was designed to help Netanyahu escape his own corruption trial. It tore the country apart. Army reservists threatened to stop showing up for duty, and people talked openly about a “civil war.” Then Hamas broke through the border, killed 1,200 people, and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza. The protests stopped. The war that followed spread across the region, and the fabric of the country changed forever.  Now, three years later, Israelis are finally getting their say. On October 27, in the first national vote since the massacre, they’ll decide whether Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, keeps his job. The polls are close, and neither side has a clear path to a majority. A lot is riding on the outcome: accountability for the security failures that led to October 7, whether ultra-Orthodox men will be drafted into an army suffering a manpower crisis, and whether the plans for judicial overhaul that divided the country before the war will come back. The result of the vote will shape Israel’s relationship with Washington, the future of Gaza and the West Bank, and whether Israel’s international isolation becomes entrenched.  To make sense of all the issues at stake, I sat down with Haviv Rettig Gur, The Free Press’s Middle East analyst. Few people explain Israel better. We talked about why Netanyahu is still competitive, who his fiercest competition is, and what happens if nobody wins a majority.  Haviv places this moment in the longer arc of Israeli history and helps us see why Israelis and Arabs vote the way they do, what this election means for the country, and what voters are thinking about most when they go to the polls. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

If you live in New York City and spend any time on social media, there’s a chance Joe Sweeny’s videos have come across your feed. The John F. Kennedy Jr.–meets–Christian Bale look-alike delivers no-nonsense, 60-second takes from the streets of New York, expounding on the benefits of capitalism, the follies of the Democratic Socialists of America, or the latest Zohran Mamdani press conference. Sweeny or (@Sweeenie as he’s known online) is an attorney who grew up in New Jersey and posted his first video in July of last year. He has already gained a cult following, with over 200,000 followers across platforms and millions of views each month. When I asked what inspired him to start speaking out, he pointed to frustration and fury over the rise of socialism in the city he loves. Despite what his critics might think, he has never voted Republican. He considers himself a progressive and a liberal in the traditional sense of those words—he’s committed to freedom and liberty. He told me that he believes the modern left has abandoned those values in favor of government overreach, socialism, and anti-American and anti-West points of view. I was excited to sit down with the man behind the 60-second takes. We talked about why his videos are resonating with New Yorkers, why he thinks Mamdani’s message is so effective—and so dangerous, and how algorithms are reshaping our politics. We also got into Donald Trump, the books that have shaped Sweeny’s worldview, and whether he might one day run for mayor of New York City. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Is social media making us crazy? That’s the question everyone is asking themselves, as it seems like every week there’s something new: moms clad in pink showing up in sympathy for Lindsay Clancy, the latest outrage over a scandalous Sydney Sweeney ad, or even something as ubiquitous as the rise of fashionable therapy terms like gaslighting, narcissism, and trauma. As our screen time has increased, society’s neuroses have increased along with it. Few people have thought about this more than my guest today, Joe Nucci. Nucci is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of Psychobabble: Viral Mental Health Myths & the Truths to Set You Free, his 2025 book on some of the biggest myths and misconceptions about psychotherapy that have taken hold online. And he also lives inside this social media ecosystem himself: His common-sense videos on therapy topics have reached tens of millions of people. I sat down with Nucci to talk about the state of mental health in America: what’s real and what’s hype, why therapy-speak has become so pervasive in our culture, whether we’re too quick to explain away regular bad behavior as mental illness, and whether a culture that increasingly sees people as victims of their circumstances is actually making us less capable of improving them.

Watch now | Can the U.S. win every conflict around the world? John Spencer answers.

Twenty-five years ago, then-governor George Pataki led New York through the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, one that killed nearly 3,000 people and left the nation’s financial capital in ash and rubble. On September 11, 2001, Pataki closed bridges and tunnels and refused his own security detail’s advice to retreat to an underground bunker in Albany. Later that day, he was sitting across from New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani in a makeshift command center in Lower Manhattan. In the weeks and years that followed, Pataki saw a level of national unity that offered the only silver lining to that day. A quarter century later, that unity—even the basic understanding that the United States has been the target of a terrorist attack—has collapsed. That collapse is what I asked Pataki about in our interview. For two decades, he has wrestled with the question he raised in his 2020 book, Beyond the Great Divide: whether the terrorists ultimately won, not on the battlefield but by unraveling the country’s unity from within. We talked about the rise of figures like Hasan Piker, the controversy over NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani’s planned attendance at this year’s memorial, and why Pataki believes America now faces a different kind of threat today: a moral rot eating away at the foundations of Western civilization. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

Matt Calkins spent 11 years as a sports columnist for The Seattle Times. Last week he resigned after the paper refused to publish a column with a pretty basic thesis: that supporting the separation of biological males and females doesn’t make you transphobic. Calkins says the final column wasn’t a one-off, but the breaking point in a pattern of silencing dissenting voices. He describes a newsroom that changed dramatically over his tenure, especially after 2016, when what started as small edits to his columns turned into a pattern of spiked stories, sidelined pitches, and pressure to write pieces that aligned with the worldview of his paper. He says one editor told him to think about being “on the right side of history” after Calkins fought for one of his stories to be published. The piece that finally saw him resign came after a rally outside a Seattle Storm game in support of WNBA player Sophie Cunningham, who has publicly opposed transgender inclusion in women’s sports—a position roughly 80 percent of Americans agree with. Calkins announced his resignation on X and laid out the full story on his Substack, where he’s now publishing independently. Today, we talk about what actually happened behind the scenes—how his newsroom shifted over 11 years, how dissent got handled internally, why this issue has become such a flashpoint in women’s sports this year, and why he finally decided to walk away.

Watch now | A conversation with Haviv Rettig Gur and Coleman Hughes and hosted by Maya Sulkin on Israel, Iran, and the future of Jewish life in the West.

Two years ago, in the wake of burgeoning antisemitism after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, Elise Stefanik sat across from the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania and asked them a simple question: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct? Their non-answers…

Over the next four weeks, I’m hosting a video series called What Should Smart People Think About UFOs? As the conversation around UFOs has moved from the fringes of conspiracy culture into serious discussion, including at the highest levels of government, I want to speak with experts who have devoted real attention to the subject, to make sense of what …

Late last night, the United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire. But the first day has already proven rocky: Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel all reported missile and drone attacks from Iran; Israel carried out major air strikes against Hezbollah, raising questions about whether Lebanon is included in the ceasefire; and Ira…

On Wednesday night, President Trump delivered a 19-minute address on Iran. As expected, he stressed his accomplishments: “In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield. . . . Iran’s navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins. Their leaders, most of them. . . are now dead.” And he issu…

Most people have heard of Scientology, but have a limited understanding of what it really is. To many, it just seems wacky–associated with Tom Cruise jumping on a couch, and science fiction books staged as religious texts. But in preparing for my conversation with Claire Headley, who was born into Scientology and rose to a high-ranking position under leader David Miscavige, I was shocked by the depths of the abuses she endured. Under the control of the “church,” Claire was separated from her parents, subjected to brutal work conditions, indoctrinated into total obedience, and even, horrifically, forced to have an abortion. In Confessions, I sit down with people who have changed their minds to understand what it takes to confront closely held beliefs and pursue true ideological honesty. It’s hard to fathom the courage Claire needed to decide that everything she had known since birth was wrong, and to escape the church with her husband over two decades ago. We discuss her journey to leaving Scientology, how even as a child she sensed that something was wrong, why she decided to sign a billion-year contract with the elite Sea Organization religious order at age 16, and the disturbing patterns of abuse she witnessed at the highest levels of the church that eventually helped her change her mind. We also talk about why––even as people learn the cruel nature of Scientology––it’s remained largely unscathed in the court of law and accepted by Hollywood elites. Though Scientology continues to harass her family, Claire finally feels free—and she has an urgent message for anyone still trapped inside organizations that brainwash, abuse, and surveil.

This week, I sat down with one of the founders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Mohsen Sazegara has witnessed nearly every phase of the modern-day Iranian regime—from the inside. In 1978, at the age of just 23, he was one of Ruhollah Khomeini’s closest aides and advisers, helping plan the final stages of the Iranian Revolution from Khomeini’s commune in Paris. He was then aboard the historic flight that brought Khomeini back to power in Iran after 15 years in exile. After the revolution, Sazegara helped establish the IRGC and held a number of positions in the new government. Then things began to unravel. He was first arrested in 1984 after being falsely accused of involvement in a bombing at the prime minister’s office. Sazegara was held for just 24 hours, during which he heard a guard shout, “Take her to be lashed,” as a young woman in the prison began to cry. The experience shocked him. He raised his concerns with Khomeini, but they fell on deaf ears. It all led Sazegara to revisit the writings of the revolution’s founders and become disillusioned with their ideas. Then his life transformed. He left the government, tried to run for president (but was barred), called for a constitutional referendum, spoke at more than 50 universities in Iran, staged sit-ins, and published critiques of the regime in newspapers and magazines—all in an effort to reform the system. For speaking out, he was thrown in prison multiple times. After his release, Sazegara went into exile—and later advised Iranian activists on how to respond to the Revolutionary Guard during the 2009 Green Movement. Few people have had such an intimate view of a regime that continues to fascinate and horrify the world. And few people have had such a dramatic and consequential change of heart. Today, I ask Sazegara: When did he first feel disillusioned with the revolution he helped bring to life? Why did he decide to speak out against the regime? Why did the 1979 Iranian Revolution fail to deliver on its promises of freedom and democracy? Does he regret his role in building the IRGC? And, as the current war in Iran rages on, what would it take to bring down the regime?

Mass migration. Net-zero carbon goals. Expansive welfare states. Identity politics. Limited defense spending. Throughout the 2010s, all these policies became causes du jour across the European continent. It was an intellectual mood captured by three famous words from former German chancellor Angela Merkel: wir shaffen das roughly meaning “we can handle…

For 50 years, Dennis Prager, one of the most important and influential conservative thinkers of the 21st century, has made a single core argument: Without God, there is no good and evil—only opinion. He advanced it on the radio, in five volumes of biblical commentary, in more than a dozen books on religion, morality, and the foundations of Western civil…