What do gingers, vampires, Zach Bryan, and John Locke have in common? Honestly, more than we expected. This week, a “Free Palestine” shirt and the old revolutionary phrase “Appeal to Heaven” lead us into a conversation about free speech, religious tradition, political power, and whether our moral imaginations can actually change the world. Because maybe the world that feels fixed around us isn’t nearly as fixed as we think, even if the connection between redheads and vampires remains an open question.

Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.

What can a bidet teach us about power? Apparently, quite a lot. We start with “Muslim showers” and somehow end up asking what it means to have enough confidence in who you are to claim a place at the table and enough generosity to make room for everyone else. Along the way, we wrestle with coercion, accommodation, assimilation, and whether the most meaningful kind of power isn’t power over other people at all, but the power to create the conditions for more of us to belong and contribute.

Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.

There was a time when we could believe in Ferris Bueller. Skip school. Steal a Ferrari. Take over a parade. Trust that the future was basically ours. Twenty-five years after 9/11, we’re asking what happened to that sense of possibility, and how much of our lives are now lived inside stories written for us by politics, technology, fear, and algorithms. The question at the foundation of this episode is deceptively simple: Who gets to decide what our lives are for?

Things referenced in this episode:

• “The World of Security” by Ben Rhodes
• “Always Forget About 9/11” by Robert Wright
• Haroon's Episode on Oh God Now What with Nyla Boodoo
• Plain English with Derek Thompson, “What’s the Point of College?”

Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.

What if the immigration policy that feels most moral isn’t the one we actually want? Faith convictions may ask us to love the stranger, sacrifice for our neighbor, and resist the instinct to protect our own at everyone else’s expense. But what faith demands of us isn’t necessarily always what we want our politics to demand of us. In this episode, Joey and Haroon wrestle with the gap between those two instincts: what do we owe the stranger, what do we owe the people closest to us, and can a nation have borders without shrinking the boundaries of our moral concern? Ultimately, the question becomes bigger than immigration: what would it mean to translate an ancient morality of radical love into the messy realities of twenty-first-century politics?

Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.

Islamophobia is back in the headlines but maybe it never really went away. In this conversation, Haroon and Joey look at the recent targeting of Muslim communities in Texas and ask what this latest wave reveals about who gets to count as fully American. From religious freedom and foreign policy to the politics of fear and scapegoating, they explore why Islamophobia doesn’t only harm Muslims, it distorts the country’s ability to understand itself and the world around it. And ultimately, they ask a more religious question: what would our politics look like if our faith made us less afraid, rather than giving us new reasons to fear one another?

Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.

The Lakers just sold for $12.5 billion, which got Haroon and Joey wondering: what happens when being a fan starts to feel more like being a consumer? In this conversation, they look at what sports can give us at their best, inherited loyalties, shared memories, connection to place, and an easy way into relationship, and what happens when all of that belonging gets turned into a commodity. Along the way, they ask whether sports can still be both sacred and profitable, whether our teams owe us anything in return for our devotion, and whether the way back might be surprisingly simple: watching, playing, and belonging together.

Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.

Last week, Haroon and Joey explored why conspiracy theories are so compelling. They wrestled with the tension between healthy skepticism and conspiratorial thinking, asking why hidden explanations can feel more satisfying than uncertainty and why, even when some suspicions turn out to be well-founded, we're still tempted by narratives that claim to explain everything.

In part two, the conversation shifts from diagnosis to practice. If conspiracy theories promise certainty, what habits help us remain grounded in reality? Together, Haroon and Joey explore the role of friendship, community, humility, and shared first principles, making the case that the antidote to conspiratorial thinking isn't another grand theory, it's becoming the kind of people who can pursue truth without surrendering to fear.

Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.

Conspiracy theories have always been with us, but they seem to carry a different kind of power in an anxious and fragmented age. Some turn out to contain kernels of truth, others unravel under scrutiny, and most of us are left wondering how to tell the difference. In the first of this two-part conversation, Haroon and Joey explore why conspiracy theories are so compelling, what needs in us they satisfy, and whether there are habits of mind and spirit that can help us pursue truth without falling into paranoia. Part two continues next week.

Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.