The Brian Lehrer Show

On this Summer Friday, we've put together some of our favorite recent interviews, including:

Ben Rhodes, contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, co-host of "Pod Save the World," an advisor to former president Barack Obama and the author of All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches (Random House, 2026), talks about his new book that tells the history of the United States and its central conflicts  through public speeches, from Benjamin Franklin to Donald Trump.

Robinson Meyer, founding executive editor of Heatmap, talks about the DSA's evolving relationship to the Green New Deal and climate policy in general, as its members keep winning elections in big cities.

WNYC has been targeted by scammers who posed as hosts, and offered authors interviews -- for a fee (which WNYC would never do). Rachel Tobac, co-founder and CEO of Social Proof Security, and Kenneth Atkins, assistant director of IT and data security at WNYC, talk about how to spot sneaky online phishing scams, and how to deal if you fall for it.

Jeffrey Winters, professor of political science at Northwestern University and the director of the Equality Development and Globalization Studies Program at Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and the author of The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies (Scribner, 2026), talks about the history of oligarchy, how to fight it, and why it maintains power in a democracy.

Meghan Sullivan, professor of philosophy at Notre Dame and founder of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, offers her take on the contemporary context for belief, or doubt, in God as religious affiliation largely declines in the U.S.

 

These interviews were lightly polished up and edited for time, the original versions are available here:

Speeches as a Key to American Identity (June 8, 2026)

What the DSA's Popularity Means for Climate Policy (July 7, 2026)

How to Avoid Sneaky Phishing Scams (May 5, 2026)

When Voters Support Oligarchs (May 26, 2026)

How Belief in God Has Changed (May 20, 2026)

 

Photo: Whimbrel on the beach at Fort Tilden beach, Queens. Rare shorebird for this location, 24 September 2021 (Remydee1, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Following a recent cybersecurity breech by OpenAI, in which two of their in-progress models autonomously hacked into the AI company Hugging Face, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are pushing for an "AI Kill Switch" bill in Congress. Brendan Bordelon, AI and tech influence reporter at Politico, discusses Washington's changing approach to AI regulation amid growing concerns over cybersecurity in every sector, and unpacks how tech giants are hoping to guide the shift. 

Photo: WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 29: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, leaves a meeting at the U.S. Capitol on July 29, 2026 in Washington, DC. Altman is meeting with lawmakers to discuss artificial intelligence policy ahead of the August 1 deadline for AI leaders to develop a framework to limit AI security threats. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

 

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After Stuyvesant high school admitted only 3 Black students for next year, Errol Louis, political anchor of Spectrum NY1 News, host of Inside City Hall and The Big Deal with Errol Louis, New York Magazine columnist and host of the podcast "You Decide," argues it's time to end the use of a single test for admission to NYC's specialized high schools.

Photo: New York, NY, USA - March 21, 2021: Main entrance to Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan

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Sophia Smith Galer, UK-based journalist and the author of How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words (Crown, 2026), talks about what's lost when a language dies.

Photo: A person leads a finger on the lines in the book, but instead of letters only question marks on the page in the textbook.

 

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Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic and host of their podcast "'How to Touch Grass", talks about the difficulty of determining when being "middle aged" actually starts.

Photo: Portrait of smiling multi-generation family sitting in living room

 

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