When she was just six months old, Louise Lawrence-Israels' parents hid her and her brother in an abandoned attic in Amsterdam. It was the winter of 1943, and the situation for Jews in the Netherlands was deteriorating. Public executions and mass deportations to Concentration Camps in Poland made Louise's parents fear for her and her brother's safet…

Dr. Matthew Levitt is perhaps the United States' foremost leading expert on Hezbollah. He's a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and an adjunct professor in Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies. We sat down with Dr. Levitt to better understand Hezbollah's history, how it operates, how Israel plans to fight it, wh…

Hassan al-Qazwini is one of the most prominent Muslim leaders in America. The Dearborn, Michigan-based Imam has been an American citizen since 1998 and considers the United States to be the best country in the world to be a Muslim. However, he argues that Israel exerts an undue influence -- to put it mildly -- on our politics and has made him and t…

In 2012, Oren Cass was the domestic policy advisor to Mitt Romney during his 2012 presidential campaign. Romney's economic policy epitomized that of the modern Republican Party: He celebrated free markets, free trade, and entrepreneurial capitalism. Since the time of Reagan, this worldview dominated the Right. But then, in the mid 2010s, something …

Dr. Carl Hart is a neuroscientist at Columbia University who researches drugs and their effects on the human brain. After decades of research, Hart concluded that drugs aren't nearly as dangerous as we're taught to believe. Since then, he's published best-selling books like "High Price" and "Drug Use for Grown Ups" that share his findings on drug a…

Hours after President Biden's posted on X that he would be stepping aside and endorsed Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee, we sat down with Marianne Williamson to discuss what happened, what's next, and how the Democratic Party works. We also heard from several Roca readers in the first-ever call-in episode. Thank you to all those who calle…

In early June, Dr. Alina Chan published an essay in The New York Times arguing what the media once considered a conspiracy: Covid-19 originated in the Wuhan lab. The essay made waves on social media. To some, it was a breath of fresh air from the intelligentsia that validated long-held beliefs about where the costliest pandemic in modern history st…

Pennsylvania is the important swing state in the 2024 presidential election. That's why we took a week-long roadtrip around the state to talk to voters, meet with local leaders, and see the different corners of one of America's most fascinating, historically rich, and politically pivotal states. We also ate our fair share of Wawa and Sheetz... In t…

The homeless population in NYC recently eclipsed 100,000 for the first time in history. The official number now is around 150,000, but the real number is likely much higher. That only counts people who live in homeless shelters and not people like Ghoul and Lil Yea Yea, the guests of this episode of We the 66, who don't live in shelters but right o…

Today's episode of "We the 66" is with none other than "The Godfather" actor Gianni Russo, who played the drunken, abusive son Carlo Rizzi in the iconic film. Russo overcame insurmountable odds to land that role: First, he was a child with with polio, and second he had never had a movie role in his entire life. He went from zero acting experience t…

It’s hard to fathom the scale of the United States’ fentanyl crisis: In 2023, more Americans died from fentanyl overdoses than in the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam Wars – combined. In the same year, more Americans died from fentanyl overdoses than from car crashes, gun homicides, drowning, and choking – combined. And in 2023 alone, more Americans …

This is a message to our readers regarding the criticisms we received after last episode. But first some context. Almost exactly one year after the murder of George Floyd, Canada had its own reckoning. But this time, there was no video or autopsy that sparked the unrest. There was a claim, and that claim may have turned out to be baseless. On May 2…

On May 27, 2021, a shocking story out of British Columbia swept through Canada and eventually the entire world. The Kamloops Indian Band announced they had discovered 215 unmarked graves of schoolchildren under the ground of a former residential school. Everyone from the BBC to The New York Times speedily published a version of the headline: "Mass …

Mehdi Hasan is one of the most polarizing media figures today. When we polled the Roca audience to ask who we should invite onto our show, Mehdi Hasan was one of the more requested names. He has achieved a loyal following among progressive and pro-Palestinian circles and has sparred frequently on Twitter with previous We The 66 guest, John Spencer.…

Batya Ungar-Sargon is the author of the new book "Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women." We had first come across Batya on "Real Time With Bill Maher," where she's appeared twice in the last two years. In both appearances, she made points about the political state of America that surprised us. She cited statistics a…

Harvard Professor Avi Loeb is one of the world's leading theoretical physicists and the founder of the Galileo Project, which seeks to find alien civilizations in the universe. Our conversation with Professor Loeb proved to be highly educational: He gave us a brief history of the universe, discussed the recipe for designing "baby universes," explai…

To some, Alex Berenson was the "pandemic's wrongest man." To others, he was a prophet, whose Covid and vaccine predictions -- although deeply unpopular and ultimately the reason for his ban from Twitter -- came true. A graduate of Yale University, Alex Berenson got a job as a journalist at The New York Times around 2000. During his award-winning 10…

About 10 years ago, Molly Winter decided she wanted to start seeing new men. She was an English teacher in Brooklyn at the time and felt that boyfriends would help spice up her life. That may sound entirely normal, but what made it unique is that Molly Winter was also a married mom. She and her husband then proceeded to open up their marriage. They…

Greg Lukianoff is perhaps the leading expert on free speech on college campuses -- and now even off college campuses. He is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and co-author of the #1 New York Times best-seller "The Coddling of the American Mind." In this conversation, we asked Greg about the history of free …

Pastor Carl Day, known as the "Pastor of the Hood" was once the type of youth he's now trying to help. He grew up in a rough north Philly neighborhood without a dad and quickly fell into a life of crime. He had a kid at 18 and was charged with attempted murder and armed robbery a few years later. He spent the next three years in prison or on house …

In 2021, Winston Marshall was the lead guitarist of Mumford & Sons, one of the most successful rock bands of the 21st century. He co-founded the band in 2007 and was instrumental (no pun intended) to its extraordinary success. Then, after Tweeting a positive review of conservative journalist Andy Ngo's new book on the radical left's violence in 202…

Dr. David Hasan, a professor of neurosurgery at Duke University, was among the first cohort of doctors to enter Gaza in the wake of October 7th. It was late December 2023, and he had no clue what to expect. Although his visit was emotionally shattering, he later returned to Gaza in March and plans to do so again in June. Hasan discusses the morale …

Today we bring you an interview with John Spencer, an expert in urban warfare who serves as the chair of urban warfare studies at the Military Institute at West Point and has visited Gaza twice since October 7th. John Spencer is a US military veteran himself. He served for 25 years in the Army including two combat deployments to Iraq as both an inf…

Steven Pinker is the guest on the latest episode of We The 66. He defended his thesis in "Enlightenment Now" and shared how progress isn't linear, which might explain the backsliding in various areas over the last decade. He also discussed wokeness, free speech, and how Harvard his changed. He continues to defend the Enlightenment and argues that o…

A member of the Roca community, Michael Colgan, sent us a rather surprising message: He said he died for 7 minutes when he was a college student. At first, we didn't know if this was a joke, but we were curious. We reached out to him and brought him into the studio for an interview. He tell us his story, which was both terrifying and inspiring. It …

Marianne Williamson joined the pod to discuss her experience as an outsider candidate in the Democratic Party. She shares how she's lost friends on the campaign trail, why the Democratic Party hates her so much, claims that being a woman has made her candidacy harder, why her dad took her to Vietnam when she was 12, why she thinks her candidacy hur…

Today we bring you an interview with Dr. Martin Kulldorff. Virtually overnight, Dr. Kulldorff went from being one of the world’s most prominent epidemiologists – a Harvard medical professor and NIH affiliate – to being labeled “fringe” by the government, blacklisted on social media, and, eventually, losing his job at Harvard. You may be thinking, “…

Welcome to the first episode of We The 66! We are so thrilled to launch the first episode of our official podcast. In this episode, we share how Instagram has censored Roca, why we have this name, what we plan to cover in this show, and what we've learned about the news media in our 3.5 years of running Roca. We're the Maxes, and we hope you can fo…