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Est. listeners per new episode within ~30 days
10,001 - 25,000 - Monthly Reach
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25,001 - 75,000 - Active Followers
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5,001 - 15,000
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On the show
From 11 epsHost
Recent guests
Recent episodes
How Sports Became Our Civic Religion
Apr 30, 2026
51m 53s
The Ancient Jewish Wisdom Behind a $5 Billion Company
Apr 16, 2026
52m 33s
Neal Stephenson on AI, Rome, and How Civilizations Decline
Apr 9, 2026
49m 18s
The Two Types of People Who Never Find Happiness
Mar 26, 2026
53m 00s
Hunting Humans for Sport
Mar 19, 2026
54m 43s
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| Date | Episode | Topics | Guests | Brands | Places | Keywords | Sponsor | Length | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4/30/26 | How Sports Became Our Civic Religion✨ | sports culturecivic religion+3 | Wright Thompson | ESPNThe Free Press | — | sportscivic education+7 | Jack Miller CenterTFP | 51m 53s | |
| 4/16/26 | The Ancient Jewish Wisdom Behind a $5 Billion Company✨ | business ethicsleadership+3 | Daniel Lubetzky | Kind SnacksPirkei Avot | — | Kind SnacksDaniel Lubetzky+5 | Jack Miller CenterTFP | 52m 33s | |
| 4/9/26 | Neal Stephenson on AI, Rome, and How Civilizations Decline✨ | AIcivilizations+5 | Neal Stephenson | The Free PressThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | — | Neal StephensonAI+5 | Jack Miller Center | 49m 18s | |
| 3/26/26 | The Two Types of People Who Never Find Happiness✨ | happinessneuroscience+4 | Arthur Brooks | HarvardThe Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness | — | happinessArthur Brooks+5 | Jack Miller CenterTFP | 53m 00s | |
| 3/19/26 | Hunting Humans for Sport✨ | thriller genrehuman hunting+3 | Jack Carr | The Free PressThe Most Dangerous Game | U.S.Iran+1 | hunting humansthriller+5 | Jack Miller Center | 54m 43s | |
| 3/12/26 | Joan Didion Knew What Hollywood Would Become✨ | Hollywoodcelebrity culture+4 | Peter Savodnik | The Free PressPlay It as It Lays | — | Joan DidionPlay It as It Lays+5 | Jack Miller Center | 55m 23s | |
| 3/5/26 | The NYC Public Defender Who Sends Books to Prisoners✨ | criminal justicepublic defense+3 | Ben Schatz | Books Beyond BarsThe Free Press+1 | — | public defenderprison books+3 | Jack Miller Center | 55m 45s | |
| 2/26/26 | ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ Helped Inspire the Catholic App Hallow✨ | Catholic faithDostoevsky+4 | Alex Jones | HallowThe Free Press+1 | — | CatholicDostoevsky+5 | Jack Miller Center | 54m 56s | |
| 2/19/26 | ‘Lolita,’ Jeffrey Epstein, and the Real Meaning of a Challenging Classic✨ | literatureJeffrey Epstein+3 | Rafaela Siewert | House Oversight CommitteeThe Free Press+1 | — | LolitaJeffrey Epstein+4 | Jack Miller Center | 49m 04s | |
| 2/12/26 | The Secret Lives of Ordinary People✨ | poetrytheater+3 | David Aaronovitch | The Free PressUnder Milk Wood | — | Dylan ThomasUnder Milk Wood+5 | Jack Miller Center | 54m 12s | |
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| 2/5/26 | David Mamet vs. the Snobs✨ | literaturetaste+4 | David Mamet | The Free PressMain Street | — | David MametSinclair Lewis+5 | Jack Miller Center | 1h 03m 10s | |
| 1/29/26 | ![]() Colin Quinn on Incels, Woke Activists, and Peaking at 14 | In this episode, legendary comic Colin Quinn dives into a cult classic that still makes him cry with laughter: John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. The novel follows the misadventures of an overweight, pretentious misanthrope still living with his mother in 1960s New Orleans. It’s a book that turns fart jokes into high art. It’s also, somehow, a love story between a fat incel and a woke activist—a seemingly absurd pairing that just may be a prescient solution to our modern polarization problem. Plus, Colin and Shilo dig into the parallels between great comic writing and great standup: Both give language to things audiences half-know but have never quite articulated, making the familiar suddenly, painfully funny. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and reduced ads. Click here to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 52m 57s | ||||||
| 1/22/26 | ![]() Dante: The Most Famous, Least Read Poet | Dante Alighieri is one of the most consequential poets in human history, and his The Divine Comedy is essential to understanding Western civilization itself. And yet, though most of us have heard of Inferno, Dante remains one of the least read of all the greats. His masterpiece unfolds in three parts—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—charting a journey from despair to redemption. For literature professor Joseph Luzzi, this journey was not abstract. After his wife was tragically killed in a car accident while eight months pregnant, leaving him widowed and a father on the same day, the epic poem helped him overcome his grief and build a new life. In this episode, Shilo and Joseph sit down to discuss Dante’s genius. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and reduced ads. Click here to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 48m 44s | ||||||
| 1/15/26 | ![]() America’s Most Righteous War Produced Its Best Anti-War Novel | In Venezuela, a U.S. operation that captured President Nicolás Maduro has sent shock waves through the hemisphere. In Iran, a deadly crackdown on nationwide protests has Washington threatening the possibility of direct military action. Meanwhile, war rages on from Ukraine to Sudan. All this instability and conflict makes now a good time to revisit the most acclaimed anti-war novel in American history: Catch-22. In this episode, Elliot Ackerman—a Marine Corps veteran and former CIA special operations officer—sits down with Shilo Brooks to unpack Joseph Heller’s classic satire, why it speaks so sharply to this moment, and how Americans have been shielded for the past few decades from the true costs of war. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and reduced ads. Click here to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 55m 45s | ||||||
| 1/8/26 | ![]() Why ‘Middlemarch’ Changed This Catholic Priest’s Life | Middlemarch is George Eliot’s (real name Mary Ann Evans) masterpiece. The 900-page Victorian novel is about the people living in a fictional English town in a time of enormous changes. In this episode, Shilo Brooks sits down with Dominican friar Father Jonah Teller to discuss what makes the book worth reading. Their conversation tackles the novel’s major themes: marriage in all its mismatched forms, political upheaval around reform and the rise of liberalism, the promises and limits of scientific progress, and the facets of human nature revealed in ordinary domestic life. They highlight Eliot’s conviction that there are no truly insignificant lives—that quiet, “unhistoric” acts and small, private decisions are of great importance. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and reduced ads. Click here to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 52m 53s | ||||||
| 12/18/25 | ![]() The Lost Art of Taking the Piss with Richard Dawkins | Richard Dawkins is best known as a formidable evolutionary biologist and biting critic of religion. But when he wants a break from polemics and proofs, he turns to P.G. Wodehouse for a belly laugh. Wodehouse’s satire skewered British aristocrats, Hollywood phonies, and self-important moralists with surgical precision. In this episode, Shilo Brooks sits down with Dawkins to find out why the British humorist remains one of the sharpest writers in the English language. The conversation ranges from Wodehouse’s outrageous similes and linguistic brilliance to his internment by the Nazis during World War II and to a larger question: why has humor been evacuated from modern intellectual life? Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org.Become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and reduced ads. Click here to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 41m 14s | ||||||
| 12/11/25 | ![]() Living Through the Fall of a Regime | “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” This famous line from The Leopard has become a shorthand for moments when a ruling order senses its own looming downfall. And it feels eerily relevant now, in an age when the liberal order we cherish seems increasingly unsteady. We are living in a moment when we shout “regime decline” from the rooftops. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s classic novel is about what it feels like to live inside history—inside the collapse of a social order and the disorientation that accompanies the fall of a ruling class. In this episode, historian Dominic Green joins Shilo Brooks to explore why today’s American and British establishments resemble that fading aristocracy: oligarchic, overregulated, technologically backward, and increasingly contemptuous of the people they rule. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and reduced ads. Click here to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 04m 35s | ||||||
| 12/4/25 | ![]() Read This Book Instead of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ | According to Ryan Holiday, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer is like the better, more mature cousin to The Catcher in the Rye. In this episode, Shilo Brooks sits down with the author and Daily Stoic founder to discuss the quiet Southern novel set in postwar New Orleans. The book follows a Korean War veteran who has money, women, and a respectable job but whose inner life is defined by existential malaise and a spiritual itch that he calls “the search.” In the end, he resigns himself to the humdrum responsibilities of marriage and everyday life. Brooks and Holiday explore the book’s philosophical themes and its continued relevance in a media-saturated world where many of us, still starved for meaning, try to turn our own existence into a social-media performance. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and reduced ads. Click here to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 02m 39s | ||||||
| 11/20/25 | ![]() George Orwell’s Lessons on the Class Divide | Most of us have read 1984 or Animal Farm. But fewer know of George Orwell’s first great work—an unvarnished account of his descent into the world of society’s outcasts. In this episode of Old School, Shilo Brooks sits down with Rob Henderson to discuss Down and Out in Paris and London, which is inspired by Orwell’s real-life plunge into the slums of two great European cities. Henderson draws on his own trajectory from foster care and poverty to the rarefied worlds of Yale, Cambridge, and elite culture. Their conversation examines why people with privilege so often misunderstand the realities of the poor, how poverty shapes the mind and spirit, and what Orwell ultimately discovered about the divisions—and the common ground—between classes. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and reduced ads. Click here to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 02m 42s | ||||||
| 11/13/25 | ![]() What ‘The Great Gatsby’ Taught Fareed Zakaria About America | It’s been 100 years since The Great Gatsby was published. In this episode, Shilo Brooks sits down with journalist Fareed Zakaria to explore why the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel still feels so modern. Zakaria shares his experience discovering the classic as an Indian immigrant, describing Gatsby as his gateway to understanding America. Together, they unpack the book’s enduring themes: the allure of reinvention and the American dream, the search for meaning in a world stripped of faith and tradition, and the spiritual hollowness that accompanies wealth and glamor. They also discuss Fitzgerald’s unique partnership with his editor Maxwell Perkins, a writer-editor collaboration that helped transform Gatsby into one of the greatest works of American literature. Plus: Zakaria sounds off on what’s wrong with journalism—and its consumers—today. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and reduced ads. Click here to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 01m 24s | ||||||
| 11/5/25 | ![]() How Thomas Sowell Transformed Coleman Hughes | Why do we believe what we believe? And how do those beliefs shape our politics? Thomas Sowell, one of the world’s most influential economists and social philosophers, set out to answer this question in his 1987 book, A Conflict of Visions. In it, he traces the underlying logic behind all modern political divides—why it is that knowing someone’s position on one issue, say gun control, makes it easy to predict their position on a totally unrelated issue, like abortion. In this episode, Shilo Brooks sits down with Coleman Hughes to discuss the book that Sowell himself calls his favorite. Their conversation—recorded well before yesterday’s election of Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani—illuminates why some of us buy into utopian projects of remaking society, while others trust the quiet power of incentive structures like free markets. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and reduced ads. Click here to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 00m 14s | ||||||
| 10/30/25 | ![]() Nick Cave on ‘The Adventures of Pinocchio’ | Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio is a dark, dazzling Italian fable that is worlds apart from Disney’s sanitized version. Beneath its fantasticism and humor, the story is brimming with poverty, violence, and existential peril. In this episode, Australian rock legend Nick Cave joins Shilo Brooks to talk about one of the best-selling and most widely translated books ever written. Together, they explore how transgression and disobedience shape character and how art thrives in defiance of conformity. Cave reflects on how the story helped him process grief after the death of his son. In examining the puppet’s journey to becoming a real boy, Cave and Brooks consider how love and suffering make all of us real. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and reduced ads. Click here to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 57m 12s | ||||||
| 10/23/25 | ![]() Why We Still Need Plato | What is justice? And why should we live justly? These questions lie at the heart of Plato’s Republic, the foundational text of Western philosophy. In building his utopian city, Plato reveals how the quest for perfect justice can slip into tyranny. Yet his call for relentless self-examination—for resisting nihilism and seeking meaning—remains a starting point for us all. In this episode, Dr. Cornel West joins Shilo Brooks to discuss why ancient Greek philosophy remains relevant for all of us, regardless of race or background. Together, they argue that confronting Plato is a universal rite of passage for everyone seeking to overcome despair and live a good life. Plus: West critiques the corruption of American universities and political parties—especially the Democratic Party, which he declares “beyond redemption.” Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes and reduced ads. Click here to subscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 54m 21s | ||||||
| 10/16/25 | ![]() What Steven Pinker Taught this Pro Bodybuilder about Genetics | Dr. Mike Israetel is a bodybuilder and scientist who believes reading is as important as a gym session. Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate changed his life. In this episode, Israetel joins Shilo Brooks to discuss how this explosive book on genetics, human nature, and the myth of infinite potential turned his own outlook (and coaching style) upside down, inspiring humility, killing illusions, and sharpening his science-first approach to diet and training. And he explains why athletes need to stop dreaming of becoming LeBron James and start maximizing the hand they’re dealt. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 07m 31s | ||||||
| 10/9/25 | ![]() MeatEater’s Steven Rinella on Lessons from the Wilderness | Few people have turned a love of the wild into a cultural force quite like Steve Rinella, the outdoorsman and author behind the MeatEater empire. Jim Harrison’s Wolf, published in 1971, changed Rinella’s life. In this episode, Rinella sits down with Shilo Brooks to discuss this stream-of-consciousness novel replete with chaos and male angst. He reflects on growing up in rural Michigan and seeing himself in Harrison’s protagonist—a bitter, damaged, self-destructive young man on a quest for meaning in the wilderness. Rinella lays bare the novel’s darker undercurrents and why it has appeal for young men lacking purpose. Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. If you believe in the importance of civic education and want to help prepare the next generation to carry on our democracy, join us at JackMillerCenter.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 08m 01s | ||||||
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Chart Positions
8 placements across 6 markets.
Chart Positions
8 placements across 6 markets.





