Every few months someone declares that the Baby Boomers ruined America — and every few months someone else points out that most Boomers never sat in Congress, never got rich, and lived through Vietnam, stagflation, and 15% mortgages. So which is it?This week on Approach the Bench, Mason and Will put the question on trial: did the Boomers inherit an unusually prosperous America and preserve it — or consume its advantages, entrench themselves in power, and leave the bill to everyone born after them?The frame is a phrase coined by Russ Greene in a December 2025 essay for The American Mind: "Total Boomer Luxury Communism" — the web of local, state, and federal policies that quietly move wealth, on a multi-trillion-dollar scale, from younger workers to older (and on average richer) retirees. We take the thesis seriously. We take the strongest objections to it just as seriously.A few of the numbers we get into:Boomers hold 51.6% of America's household wealth. Everyone under 40 holds 6.6%.Americans 65+ receive 62% of the federal spending that can be assigned by age — roughly six dollars for every one that goes to someone under 26.The median U.S. senator is nearly 65. The country's median age is 38.A baby born in 1960 came into the world owing about $1,600 in national debt. A baby born today owes about $115,000 — roughly seven times more, even after inflation.Some Medicare Advantage plans have covered golf fees, ski trips, and pet food — on the taxpayer's dime.But we make the other case too: the real divide may be less young-vs-old than asset-owners vs. everyone still trying to buy in — and no generation, handed the same cheap houses and appreciating assets, would have volunteered to give them back. Then the verdict, and the line we keep circling: the Boomer sin may not have been taking everything. It may have been believing they earned everything.00:00 Introduction 04:42 Total Boomer Luxury Communism55:17 Girl Problems

What does it actually mean to call yourself a feminist in 2026?In this 45-minute, single-shot sit-down on a couch (no bench to be found!)), the three of us - as conservative Christians - have the honest conversation most people avoid. And we recorded it.We trace feminism through all four waves and then ask the question that matters most: Would you - and should you - call yourself a feminist as a Christian?Remember to like and subscribe for more!

Hinge, Bumble, Tinder --- they're supposed to help you find a partner. Right? On this segment from Ep. 21 of Approach the Bench, Harvard Business School student Luis Penichet explains how dating apps are designed to keep you single. He also shares his idea for a dating app startup that isn't.Email [email protected] with your questions/comments or submit a voice memo at https://www.speakpipe.com/approachthebench for a chance to be featured on the show! You can also submit anonymous comments through this Google Form: https://forms.gle/9Zjxzkpwajivx19z8

WEEK 43 The Socialists Are Winning. What Do They Actually Want?

We're in a fine Utah hotel for this one, and there's no guest — just the two of us and a stack of DSA's own documents.

Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York. National DSA called it the biggest socialist electoral win in this country in a century, and 2026 kept the streak going: Chris Rabb in Philadelphia, a citywide breakthrough in LA, Janeese Lewis George in DC, more seats in Albany, and Melat Kiros unseating a fifteen-term incumbent in Denver. So we stopped arguing about the label and went to the platform.

We start with definitions, because nobody keeps them straight. Socialism versus communism. Democratic socialism versus a bigger welfare state. Then decommodification — DSA wants housing, healthcare, energy, transit, food, and education pulled out of the market — and the question that follows: what exactly is left?

Then the part almost nobody talks about. DSA doesn't just want a different economy; its platform calls for a new constitution. Proportional representation, a single federal legislature, no House-Senate split. We take that seriously and ask why an economic movement needs to dismantle federalism to get what it wants.

We also get into whether Mamdani won on socialism or on rent, why national DSA pulled its endorsement of the most famous democratic socialist in Congress, whether "anti-imperialism" is a foreign policy or just a posture, and whether this is really a working-class movement or a movement of frustrated college graduates. Will pushes hard on federalism throughout. We disagree in a couple of places.

GIRL PROBLEMS rounds us out as always.

Email [email protected] with your questions/comments or submit a voice memo at https://www.speakpipe.com/approachthebench for a chance to be featured on the show! You can also submit anonymous comments through this Google Form: https://forms.gle/9Zjxzkpwajivx19z8

00:00 Introduction

04:13 Some Basics About DSA

10:32 Our Responses to DSA

55:15 Girl Problems

We sat down with Brian Rath and debated who the best and worst American Presidents are. This was a surprising debate, full of all sorts of twists and turns. Let us know what you thought of it in the comments!And for the rest of the show, look for episode 20!Email [email protected] with your questions/comments or submit a voice memo at https://www.speakpipe.com/approachthebench for a chance to be featured on the show! You can also submit anonymous comments through this Google Form: https://forms.gle/9Zjxzkpwajivx19z8

WEEK 42: We Took an Eyewitness Back to Where Charlie Kirk Was Killed

We're not on a bench this week. We're on a courtyard at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, standing roughly where three thousand people were standing on September 10, 2025.

Our guest is Jeb Jacobi, who was in that crowd. We asked him to walk us through the whole thing — where he was, what he saw, what he thought was happening before he understood what was happening, and what the next several hours looked like.

We also asked the harder questions. What it did to how he thinks about political events, about crowds, about his own faith. Whether the year since has settled anything. What he makes of the language people reached for afterward, on all sides, and whether any of it matched what he actually experienced.

There's a case moving through the Utah courts right now, and we stay out of it. This episode isn't about the defendant. It's about what it's like to be forty feet from a political assassination and then go home and try to be a normal person again.

Email [email protected] with your questions/comments or submit a voice memo at https://www.speakpipe.com/approachthebench for a chance to be featured on the show! You can also submit anonymous comments through this Google Form: https://forms.gle/9Zjxzkpwajivx19z8

00:00 Introduction

02:06 The Morning of Sep. 10, 2025

03:22 Charlie Arrives

04:07 The Layout

05:56 The Shooting

09:12 Media Reaction & The Aftermath

19:39 Mason and Will on Sep. 10, 2025

23:31 Reflecting on Charlie’s Life

WEEK 41: Our Testimonies

We're on a bench in Arlington, Virginia for this one — and we're doing something we've never done in 40 episodes. No guest, no topic, no rapid-fire round. Just the two of us telling our stories in full.

How we each came to faith, what we believed before, the parts that were slow and unglamorous, and the moments that actually turned. This is the background to everything else we've ever said on this show.

Got a question for a future episode? Send it to [email protected], leave us a voice memo on SpeakPipe, or drop it anonymously through our Google Form — links below.

00:00 Introduction

03:52 Will’s Testimony

23:20 Mason’s Testimony

46:36 Some Christian Classics

53:14 Girl Problems

WEEK 40: What Happens When AI Replaces Us?

We're filming this one on a rooftop overlooking the U.S. Capitol — which felt right, because this episode is about who's still going to have a job when the dust settles. Joining us is Jack Kieffaber, who's spent real time thinking about where AI is actually headed, not just where the headlines say it's headed.

We open with the state of play in 2026: a tight, multi-lab race between Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and the Chinese open-weight labs, moving at a pace that's genuinely hard to describe — seven frontier models shipped in 78 days earlier this year. The benchmarks are wild (95% on competition math, mid-90s on graduate-level reasoning) but so is the humility check: on the hardest reasoning tests, the best models still only hit 35% against a 90% human expert baseline. We walk through what "task length doubling every seven months" actually means for your job, whether you're a lawyer, a doctor, a coder, or a pastor — and we run the thought experiment of a perfectly accurate AI judge that decides every case before you're even allowed to act.

Then we go where this show actually lives: the meaning question. If a machine reasons better than we do, what was reason for?

We don't dodge the dark scenarios either — the AI 2027 report, misaligned models behaving differently when they know they're being watched, and the real question of whether this ends in abundance or catastrophe.

We close with Girl Problems — real listener questions, real answers:

• Would you go on a practice date with an AI companion once the tech is good enough?

• Is an AI actually a better love counselor than your friends are?

Email [email protected] with your questions/comments or submit a voice memo at https://www.speakpipe.com/approachthebench for a chance to be featured on the show! You can also submit anonymous comments through this Google Form: https://forms.gle/9Zjxzkpwajivx19z8

00:00 Intro01:39 Getting to Know Jack05:17 Will AI Replace Gen Z?01:09:30 Girl Problems 

WEEK 39: Feminism (with Hannah, Concerned Women for America)

We sit down with Hannah, who works for Concerned Women for America — the largest conservative Christian women's policy organization in the country — to take on a question that splits both the culture and the church: should you call yourself a feminist?

We open with the number that frames the whole episode: 61% of American women agree with the definition of feminism, but only 29% will claim the label. That 32-point gap is where this conversation lives. We trace the word back through its four waves — from Frances Willard and Susan B. Anthony's first-wave suffrage movement (which sounds a lot more like a Bible study than a modern rally) through the second wave CWA was built to fight, up to the fourth wave's collision with gender ideology. Hannah walks us through what CWA actually does, the ERA fight that founded the organization, and where the group stands on the flagship issues of 2026.

Then we go inside the debate happening among Christians themselves — complementarian versus egalitarian, what Genesis and Galatians 3:28 actually say about equal worth, and whether Deborah, Junia, and the Proverbs 31 woman prove the Bible already settled this question before the word "feminist" existed. We also get into the Gen Z gender divide, the widest in American political history, and ask whether the modern feminist movement is delivering what it promised the most feminist generation ever.

We close with Girl Problems — the segment where real listener questions get real answers: What's the discernment a Christian man should show before asking a woman out, and is the worst she can really say "no"?

Submit your questions at [email protected], leave a voice memo at https://www.speakpipe.com/approachthebench, or submit anonymously via the Google Form: https://forms.gle/9Zjxzkpwajivx19z8

00:00 Introduction

01:58 Getting to Know Hannah & CWA

10:21 The Feminist Debate

57:48 A little game that Mason poorly devised

1:03:14 Girl Problems, a Reddit Special

WEEK 38: What Makes America Great — w/ Rear Admiral Putnam Browne

We recorded this one at the Iwo Jima Memorial in Washington, DC, in front of the flag-raising — because if you're going to ask whether America is actually great, you should have to answer it standing somewhere that raises the stakes.

And we brought backup. Rear Admiral Putnam Browne has done things only Americans can do: over 450 carrier landings, command of a fighter squadron, command of a ship, and command of a nuclear aircraft carrier with thousands of souls aboard. He's flown the jet, run the reactor school, and led the Carl Vinson's humanitarian response to the Haiti earthquake. When he talks about what this country is, he's not theorizing.

We open with THE MOST AMERICAN — rapid-fire, no hedging. Most American movie, food, sport, achievement, and the single most American thing a person can do. The Admiral does not equivocate.

Then the main event: what actually makes America great? We refuse the easy version. Great and good are not the same word — the whole question is whether America earns both. From there we work through the real case: a nation founded on an idea instead of blood and soil, a Constitution built by men who assumed you're not an angel, religious liberty as America's most original gift to the world, and the biblical grammar running underneath the whole secular frame. We take Tocqueville seriously — greatness from the bottom up, the little platoons of neighbors and churches and volunteer fire brigades — and we ask the hard question about whether that America is fading. And we don't dodge the ledger: slavery, the gap between creed and conduct, and the remarkable fact that every reformer who fixed America — Douglass, Lincoln, MLK — appealed to the founding, not against it. The idea contained its own cure.

The Admiral brings the last pillar himself: power spent on something. Most empires conquered and stayed. America liberated and went home.

We close with Girl Problems — real listener questions, real answers:

• What is the most American date possible?

• What are the essential American traits in a spouse?

Submit your questions at [email protected], leave a voice memo at https://www.speakpipe.com/approachthebench, or submit anonymously via the Google Form: https://forms.gle/9Zjxzkpwajivx19z8

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

02:47 Getting to Know the Rear Admiral

38:47 Most American Rankings

50:49 What Makes America Great?

01:31:23 Girl Problems America Edition