Honestly with Bari Weiss

The question of who represents the working class is probably the hottest debate in American politics. Is it Republicans? Democrats? Or socialists like Zohran Mamdani? Pundits can debate that question all they want, but the undeniable test is: Who do the unions believe stand for working people? For a century, unions were undeniably Democratic. And in 2021, Biden tried to carry on that tradition. He went as far as to say: “I intend to be the most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history.” Then in 2023, he became the first sitting president to walk a picket line, joining United Auto Workers in their strike against General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. But as the Democratic Party went left, and then further left, many union members—who were reliable Democratic voters—broke the mold and voted for Trump—nearly half of union households, to be exact. Was it Trump’s hatred of NAFTA? His promise to bring manufacturing back? His unbridled vibrato? Or was it the left’s preoccupation with boutique issues? The shift was palpable when Teamsters president Sean O’Brien spoke at the 2024 RNC despite being a lifelong Democrat. It felt like a new era. We’ve reported extensively on how the Democratic Party lost the working class. But now, six months into Trump’s second term, are working-class Trump voters happy with their choice? And how has Trump been for labor in America? Sean O’Brien—the voice you heard at the RNC—is the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, representing 1.3 million union workers. It’s one of the biggest unions in the country. As Sean puts it, “They represent airline pilots to zookeepers and everyone in between.” That “in between” includes truck drivers, warehouse workers, mechanics, baggage handlers, construction workers, and UPS drivers—UPS is their largest employer. Basically, Teamsters have organized workers in every occupation imaginable. And more than his role as Teamsters president, Sean himself is a fourth-generation union member, having joined the Local 25 at 18 as a heavy-equipment driver in Boston. He’s spent 34 years in the union and has a unique vantage point from which he sees American labor. Today on Honestly, Bari asks Sean: Why did he speak at the RNC? How has Trump been for labor—given his coziness to Elon Musk, DOGE, and his new big, beautiful bill? Can Democrats win union workers back? And can unions find their footing again? How does he plan to organize Amazon—he has some choice words for Jeff Bezos. And how do we ensure more American workers have access to middle-class wages, quality healthcare, and strong pensions? Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories. Visit chevron.com/America to learn more about how Chevron is building a stronger future powered by American energy, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here’s one fun question to ask at a dinner party: What is your favorite conspiracy theory? There’s the idea that the CIA killed John F. Kennedy. The moon landing was fake, and 9/11 was an inside job. Covid was designed by the Gates Foundation to control the world—and the Covid vaccine had a microchip. There’s the deep state. Chemtrails. QAnon. The Illuminati. Reptilian overlords. Pizzagate—which says that high-ranking Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a D.C. pizzeria. That one, Pizzagate, is rivaled only by the idea that there is a group of Satan-worshipping globalists and Hollywood celebrities who traffic children in order to harvest adrenochrome, a chemical which, in this scenario, is extracted from their blood. Why? It’s obvious: They inject it in order to stay young. It’s easy to joke about these theories. It’s much harder to reckon with the fact that many Americans believe them sincerely—and their justification is grounded in the fact that some conspiracy theories turn out to not be theories, but fact. The government was poisoning alcohol during Prohibition. The FBI was illegally spying on civil-rights activists like MLK. The U.S. government did let some few hundred black men with syphilis go untreated to study the effects. And Covid likely came from a lab in Wuhan, China. The question is how to tolerate and even encourage healthy speculation and investigation? How do we allow for skepticism of received wisdom, which may actually be wrong, without it leading to reptilian Jewish overlords? In the past few weeks, the speculation surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s life and death is a perfect example of this conundrum. It’s a story filled with smoke and unanswered questions: How did Epstein get so rich in the first place? Was his wealth connected to his crimes? Was he acting alone? Was there a client list—and if so, who was on it? Why did he get such a sweetheart deal? And on and on. And then things get more far-fetched: Was Epstein’s suicide faked? Who could have killed him? Was he connected to foreign intelligence? And my favorite: Was he running a Jewish cabal? To help us understand why conspiracy theories are so compelling—and how we might better engage with those who believe them—is Ross Douthat. Ross Douthat is an opinion columnist at The New York Times and host of the Interesting Times podcast. He has been covering conspiratorial thinking—how to understand it, and what to do about it—for years. In 2020, he wrote: “It’s a mistake to believe most conspiracy theories, but it’s also a mistake to assume that they bear no relation to reality. Some are just insane emanations or deliberate misinformation. But others exaggerate and misread important trends rather than denying them, or offer implausible explanations for mysteries that nonetheless linger unexplained.” Which we thought perfectly encapsulated the conundrum of handling conspiracy theories today. So today on Honestly, Bari asks Ross: What is the state of conspiracy theories in America? How do we dispel conspiracy theories that are clearly false—without relying on establishment sources the public no longer trusts? And what are the consequences when these theories go unchecked? Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rahm Emanuel is giving every indication that he’s running for president in 2028—including by coming on Honestly yesterday. Emanuel, now 65 years old, has spent decades making a name for himself as one of the Democratic Party’s fiercest and most effective partisans—a true knife fighter, and you’ll see that spiciness in this interview. But can the dealmaker, the guy so adept at pulling the levers of power behind the scenes, really become the front man? And as the party continues to pull leftward, is there really room for an old-school moderate liberal like Rahm to be the standard-bearer? And lastly, but perhaps most importantly, does he have the bedside manner to be president? Or will people love his blunt nature and find it refreshing? He certainly has a résumé to run on. While still in his early 30s, he became a key adviser to Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, and before he was 40, his career was already the stuff of legend, thanks to stunts like sending a dead fish to a Democratic pollster who had upset him. And after Clinton won the White House in 1992, when staffers met around a picnic table to celebrate their accomplishments, Rahm instead picked up a knife and began listing Democrats he felt were insufficiently supportive of the campaign. “Dead man!” he yelled after each name, jabbing the knife into the table. His nickname—“Rahm-bo,” after Sylvester Stallone’s fearsome commando—became so pervasive that even his mom started calling him that. Meanwhile, in Hollywood, Rahm became the inspiration for a leading character on The West Wing, Josh Lyman. He spent five years as a top White House aide following Clinton’s victory. Rahm then returned to his native Illinois and was elected to Congress in 2002. In 2006, he was the mastermind of the Democratic Party’s wildly successful effort to retake the House of Representatives, making Nancy Pelosi speaker. In 2008, Barack Obama made Rahm his first White House chief of staff. He guided the new president through his tumultuous first two years in office, a period when Obama signed Dodd-Frank, a massive stimulus package, and the Affordable Care Act, into law. Then, in 2011, Rahm was elected to the first of his two terms as Chicago’s mayor. And when Joe Biden won the White House, he made Rahm his ambassador to Japan, giving the maybe–presidential contender direct foreign policy experience in what some would argue is America’s most important ally. Now the question is whether a man who ran Chicago and served every living Democratic president is too conservative for Democrats. Today on Honestly, Bari asks Rahm how moderates on the left and the right can get elected, about free trade, China, Israel, Iran, Trump, Biden, Obama, Zohran Mamdani, and the American dream—and what his party needs to do to win back Congress in the midterms next year, and the White House in 2028. And more deeply, if the Democrats can ever win a national election again after losing the trust of the American people. It’s a fascinating conversation with one of the most unique, knowledgeable, and—dare we say—zesty figures in politics today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Depending on who you ask, some would call the ultrarich “shameless”; others might say “aspirational.” For example: Mukesh Ambani, the Indian centibillionaire, has a room of snow in the Indian tropics—to say nothing of his skyscraper home, 168-car garage, and 600-person-staff. And celebrations for his kids’ weddings featured Rihanna and Beyoncé. This is nothing new. Aristotle Onassis had whales’ teeth carved into pornographic scenes from The Odyssey, and stools upholstered in whale foreskins which he kept aboard his yacht—because where else would you keep that? And one hedge-fund billionaire—whose name you won’t even know—bought a 14-foot shark preserved in formaldehyde. Why? Why not? These opulent displays of wealth just scratch the surface. There are blood boys, Basquiats, and bunkers, many of them in New Zealand for the end of the world. From the Kochs to the Kardashians—most of us cannot look away. But one question remains: Do Americans loathe or love the ultrarich? That’s one of the questions raised by Evan Osnos’s new book, The Haves and the Have-Yachts. Evan is a staff writer at The New Yorker and an author—several times over. In his newest book, he investigates how this class of people—the “Have-Yachts”—got their money, how they spend it, and how they fight to keep it. It all paints a fascinating picture not just about America and capitalism, but about human nature and the status games we play. The book feels eerily relevant in this moment of social and political breakdown, fueled—perhaps above all—by rage at the economic picture and economic inequality. As Zohran Mamdani—the self-proclaimed socialist and likely future mayor of New York City—says, “Billionaires should not exist.” And anti-elite sentiment grows on the right, too—through voices like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Today on Honestly, Bari asks Evan Osnos what this level of income inequality means for America, if a revolt or a revolution is in our future, and how AI is going to supercharge an already precarious status quo. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Just two weeks ago, New Yorkers voted en masse for a self-proclaimed socialist—someone who once called for “seizing the means of production.” This is, of course, Zohran Mamdani, who dominated in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor with a definitive victory over Andrew Cuomo. He has called for rent freezes, free buses, and even government-run grocery stores. He won 56 percent of the vote in a campaign fueled by young, highly educated, wealthy people—many of whom believe in reviving socialism here in America, in 2025. According to a Cato Institute poll from May: 62 percent of Americans age 18 to 29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism. And 34 percent had a positive view of communism. Polls by Emerson and Marist from May and June had shown Mamdani leading with voters under 45 by as much as a 2:1 ratio against the former governor. This phenomenon has left many people wondering: Why are so many young people embracing a failed economic system? Is it their university education? Is it the influence of social media? Is it just “cool”? Is it a desperate call for anything to fix wealth inequality? Or is it something else? Here to help us understand are Tyler Cowen and Kyla Scanlon. Tyler Cowen is an economist and Free Press columnist who just wrote an important essay for us called “Why Won’t Socialism Die?” Kyla Scanlon is a writer, economic commentator, and educator—and, importantly for this conversation, a member of Gen Z. She is 28, and her new book is In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work. This conversation was originally a Free Press livestream—and you’ll hear throughout this conversation that I take lots of questions from people who joined us live. To make sure that you never miss one of these in the future, you can become a paid subscriber today. Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Love him or hate him, many consider Elon Musk to be a modern-day genius. He co-founded PayPal, which transformed how people purchase things. He became the CEO of Tesla, which revolutionized electric vehicles—and made it cool to drive them. He founded SpaceX, accomplishing what only superpower nation-states have previously. And he is working to make our species interplanetary—maybe in a few years, we’ll be doing this podcast on Mars. To many, these acts make Elon Musk a genius, perhaps the most important genius in history. But it’s worth asking: What exactly makes him a genius? Is it a particular set of qualities, or is Elon Musk just particularly adept at playing the role of genius? Or at least what we’ve come to expect of geniuses? Is his offensive behavior excused by his genius, or the result of it? And why do human beings value genius, even to the point of deifying it? All of these questions are raised in Helen Lewis’s new book, The Genius Myth. And not just with regard to Musk, but to so many of the figures our culture venerates as geniuses: Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. Lewis asks: Were these people actually geniuses? Or was their genius based on a myth? And more importantly, how does our perception of “genius” confuse and distort our understanding of success—and how we value, or don’t value, other human beings? Today on Honestly, Bari asks Helen Lewis if some people belong to a special and superior class, what it means to be a genius, and if she believes in geniuses at all. Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

America is turning 250. And we’re throwing a yearlong celebration of the greatest country on Earth. The greatest? Yes. The greatest. We realize that’s not a popular thing to say these days. Americans have a way of taking this country for granted: a Gallup poll released earlier this week shows that American pride has reached a new low. And the world at large, which is wealthier and freer than it has ever been in history thanks to American power and largesse, often resents us. We get it. As journalists, we spend most of our time finding problems and exposing them. It’s what the job calls for. But if you only focus on the negatives, you get a distorted view of reality. As America hits this milestone birthday, it’s worthwhile to take a moment to step back and look closely at where we actually are—and the reality of life in America today compared to other times and places. That reality is pretty spectacular. Could Thomas Jefferson and the men gathered in Philadelphia who wrote down the words that made our world—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—ever have imagined what their Declaration of Independence would bring? The Constitution. The end of slavery—and the defeat of Hitler. Astonishing wealth and medical breakthroughs. Silicon Valley. The most powerful military in the world. The moon landing. Hollywood. The Hoover Dam. The Statue of Liberty (a gift from France). Actual liberation (a thing we gave France). Humphrey Bogart and Tom Hanks. Josephine Baker and Beyoncé. Hot dogs. Corn dogs. American Chinese food. American Italian food. The Roosevelts and the Kennedys. The Barrymores and the Fondas. Winston Churchill (his mom was from Brooklyn). The Marshall Plan and Thurgood Marshall. Star Wars. Missile-defense shields. Baseball. Football. The military-industrial complex. Freedom of religion. UFO cults. Television. The internet. The Pill. The Pope. The automobile, the airplane, and AI. Jazz and the blues. The polio vaccine and GLP-1s, the UFC and Dolly Parton. The list goes on because it’s really, truly endless. Ours is a country where you can hear 800 languages spoken in Queens, drive two hours and end up among the Amish in Pennsylvania. We are 330 million people, from California to New York Island, gathered together as one. Each of those 330 million will tell you that ours is not a perfect country. But we suspect most of them would agree that their lives would not be possible without it. So for the next 12 months, we’re going to toast to our freedoms on the page, on this podcast and in real life. And we’re doing it the Free Press way: by delving into all of it—the bad and the good and the great, the strange and the wonderful and the wild. And today—on America’s 249th birthday—we’re kicking off this yearlong event with none other than Akhil Reed Amar. Akhil has a unique understanding of this country—and our Constitution. Akhil is a Democrat who testified on behalf of Brett Kavanaugh, is a member of The Federalist Society, who is pro-choice but also anti-Roe—and these seeming contradictions make him perfectly suited to answer questions about the political and legal polarization we find ourselves in today. Akhil is a constitutional law professor at Yale and the author of the brilliant book The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840. He also hosts the podcast Amarica's Constitution, and you might recognize his name from his work in The Atlantic. I ask him about the unique history that created our founding document, the state of the country, our political polarization, the American legal system, and what this country means to him. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we last recorded Saturday night, the U.S. had just announced its strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The U.S. had entered the war. The restrainers had seemingly lost. In the following hours, President Donald Trump said the mission was a “spectacular military success.” And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the program “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites. But there’s much more to that story than meets the eye. As Jay Solomon wrote in our pages: Before the U.S. struck, 16 cargo trucks entered the fortified mountain complex and moved unidentified equipment to another location. Are the sites destroyed or merely damaged? Was enriched uranium smuggled out? It all remains unclear. Now the war is heating up. Israel has expanded its bombing campaign beyond nuclear facilities to hit regime targets. Qatar has closed its airspace. And just as we write this, Iran has reportedly fired toward Qatar and Iraq. It all begs the question: Was the strike on Iran’s Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant the end of this war—or just the beginning? And what comes next? To understand the state of the nuclear facilities and the state of the war, we’ve brought together three of the most well-read experts: Michael Oren, Jay Solomon, and Matti Friedman. Oren is the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. He served from 2009 to 2013. He is also a former Knesset member. He is the author of many books, including Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide. Solomon is an investigative journalist who has covered Iran and the region for decades. He just published an explosive piece for The Free Press titled “Did Iran Just Sneak Out Critical Nuclear Material from Fordow?” And, Friedman is our Jerusalem-based columnist, and the author of four books, including his latest, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. He just wrote “After the Bombs: American B-2s Just Changed the Middle East. Now It’s Time to Return the Region to the Humans Who Live Here” for our pages. We’ll note we recorded this Monday morning, starting around 11 a.m. ET, as a Free Press Live event. To join these, you just need to do one thing—and that’s become a Free Press subscriber. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Saturday night at 7:50 pm ET, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. had entered the war against Iran when he posted: “We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.” In the minutes after this historic announcement we assembled six of the top experts on this issue: Haviv Rettig Gur, Michael Doran, Mark Dubowitz, Amit Segal, Eli Lake, and Matt Continetti. We discussed it all: what we actually know about the strikes; what it means for Iran’s nuclear capabilities, how Iran might respond; why Trump struck now; what this means for the Middle East; and what Trump’s national address signalled to the American public, to Israel, and most importantly to Iran. We'll note we recorded this Saturday night starting at 8:30 pm ET as a Free Press live event, and we will be hosting more in days to come. Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories. Beekeeper’s Naturals is offering you an exclusive offer: Go to beekeepersnaturals.com/BARI to get 20% off your order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s the fourth day in the war between Iran and Israel. Many questions hang in the air. Chief among them: Will Israel be able to fulfill its main goal in the war—to end Iran’s nuclear program? Will it put troops on the ground to do so, specifically to blow up Iran’s most important nuclear site? Or will the U.S. get involved? Will Trump provide the bunker-busting bombs necessary to destroy the facility at Fordow? Will the regime fall—and if so, what will come next? How does this struggle fit into the much, much larger geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and China? So today, I have two experts to break it all down: Niall Ferguson and Dexter Filkins. Niall Ferguson is a historian and Free Press columnist who just wrote in our pages, “Israel’s attack restores the credibility of the West.” Dexter Filkins is a longtime foreign correspondent who has reported from Iran. He is a contributor at The New Yorker, has covered this topic for years, and is the author of The Forever War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we taped this episode of Honestly, it was 3 a.m. in Israel. Sirens wailed across the country as Iranian missiles rained down on Israeli towns. At the same time, Israel was striking military and nuclear sites inside Iran, and oil fields were aflame. Meanwhile in Washington, reports were emerging of a heated debate inside the White House over whether the U.S. should get involved in the war. It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of this story—or how uncertain the outcome is for Israel. There’s no one better to help us make sense of this war than Michael Doran—senior fellow and director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. This has been his story not just for the past few days—for the last decade, no one has written more, and more brilliantly, about Iran’s nuclear aspirations and Washington’s posture toward Iran than Mike. And he just wrote for The Free Press “The Ultimate Deception: How Trump and Bibi Outfoxed Iran.” We recorded this interview Saturday evening at 6 p.m. as a Free Press subscriber livestream. We’re doing more of these given the speed of the news. To attend one live and ask your own questions, become a Free Press subscriber. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the early hours of Friday morning, Israel pulled off a historic strike on Iran. As I record these lines, Iran is reporting a “massive explosion” in Isfahan, in a province that is home to several nuclear facilities. In Israel, where Shabbat has begun, the government has ordered all synagogues to shut down—and for citizens to remain close to bomb shelters as they brace for a retaliatory strike. It is hard to overstate the magnitude of this operation. Israel has taken out much of Iran’s military leadership and some of its top nuclear scientists and hit nuclear facilities across the country. And it is still going. Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to do whatever it takes in order to prevent a nuclear holocaust. Meanwhile, the X account for Iran’s military has threatened that “our response will be lethal.” And the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has tweeted: “The Zionist regime has prepared for itself a bitter, painful fate, which it will definitely see.” Donald Trump, for his part, is using this as an opening to push Iran into a nuclear deal. This is a historic juncture for the region—not just for the state of Israel, but for the West. So last night, just as the news of these attacks broke, I sat down with former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren and former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett to discuss all of it: the strikes, what they accomplished, how Israel defied conventional wisdom and seemed to pull off the impossible, what we can expect in the days ahead, and—perhaps most importantly to many of our listeners—whether or not America is supporting Israel in its efforts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are people who have résumés we might call “diverse” or “wide-ranging.” And then there are people like Mike Huckabee who, at age 69, has seemingly crammed several lifetimes’ worth of careers into one. He was a televangelist. He was governor of Arkansas for over a decade. He ran for president and won the Iowa caucuses. He hosted his own show on Fox News for seven years. He’s written books on everything from Christmas to weight loss. And now he’s America’s ambassador to Israel. And he’s filling that post at a moment when the longtime status quo in the region is being completely upended. Israel is inching closer to eradicating Hamas in Gaza—but the day-after plan is unclear. Iran is feared to be on the cusp of developing nuclear weapons, and Trump and Steve Witkoff are working hard on a renewed Iran nuclear deal. Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, and even Syria, could normalize relations with Israel. But Islamist terror groups are trying to derail any attempts at lasting peace. And American adversaries like China and Russia are trying to take advantage of any instability in the region. Suffice it to say, it’s a time of great uncertainty. Meanwhile, Huckabee is in some way redefining what it means to be Israel’s ambassador. He’s been outspoken in criticizing inaccurate press accounts about the conflict, and he’s been ardent in his support of the Jewish state. And while most ambassadors exist behind the scenes, Mike Huckabee has been in front of the cameras, making the case for Israel and its war with Hamas directly to Americans. It could even be argued that he’s making a better case for Israel than the Israeli government itself. So today on Honestly, Ambassador Huckabee and I discuss all of that and more—the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. and the West more broadly, the future of America’s involvement in the Middle East, and the fight between doves and hawks in Trump’s 2.0 presidency. One final note: This interview ended abruptly. The ambassador took a call from Israel, and at 10 p.m., the rocket sirens blared and he had 90 seconds to get to the shelter. It’s something normalized in Israeli life. Talk to any parents, and they’ll talk about having to wake their kids up several times a week because of these sirens. But it also serves as a constant reminder of the persistent threat Israel faces—and not just from Hamas. There were so many other great things I wanted to ask him about—particularly the right’s antisemitism. But we’ll have to have him back. The conversation is thought-provoking and timely, and I think you’ll really enjoy it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the past few weeks, Qatar has been all over the news with flashy headlines of a $400 million luxury jet that the country gifted to President Donald Trump. It symbolized their opulence and eagerness to please the U.S. But 40 years ago, Qatar was a country with a gross domestic product (GDP) of a few billion dollars. Since the 19th century, it has been run by the Al Thani family, which can trace its roots in the region back thousands of years. Qatar was long considered a backwater. The main industries were fishing and pearls. It was impoverished for the vast majority of its history. Its royal family was dwarfed by rivals in Saudi Arabia. Then everything changed. It turned out that the largest liquified natural gas field was sitting just off the coast of Qatar. And with the help of American energy giants like ExxonMobil, Qatar began exporting LNG in 1997. In a few decades, Qatar’s GDP grew exponentially. Today it’s over $200 billion. Qatar hosts the main air base for American forces in the Middle East. It hosted the World Cup in 2022. And it’s embarking on a series of business and military deals with the U.S.—earmarked at $1.2 trillion. There are a lot of petro-states in the region. Some, like Saudi Arabia, exceed Qatar’s wealth by hundreds of billions. But what Qatar has chosen to do with its money—morality aside—is farsighted. Qatar has chosen to focus a huge amount of money and resources on influence. In the past 15 years, Qatar has developed a sophisticated apparatus to embed itself into American society in a way that would shock most Americans. They’ve done it by investing in our politicians, universities, newsrooms, think tanks, lobbying firms, and corporations—all on an unprecedented scale. In all, the tiny Gulf nation has spent almost $100 billion to establish this influence. So what’s the problem? Well, Qatar’s push to buy influence has made their connection to the Muslim Brotherhood ever more alarming and apparent. Frannie Block and Jay Solomon published a massive investigative report on Qatar’s seismic influence strategy for The Free Press. It’s called “How Qatar Bought America.” Today on Honestly, I ask Jay and Frannie how Qatar built this ecosystem, what they want in return, and what it has already gotten them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2023 and 2024, there were many things that were unsayable. Perhaps the most unsayable—at least in legacy media circles—was that the President of the United States was not capable of being president, because he was no longer mentally fit. Those people who did break the taboo—who dared to notice Biden’s countless gaffes, his stiff gait, those who recognized the reality of old age, including Special Counsel Robert Hur—were written off or smeared. Videos of the president—clips of Biden tripping or misspeaking—were rebranded by The New York Times as “cheap fakes.” People were told to disbelieve their eyes and ears. It’s now the spring of 2025. Trump is the president. Biden dropped out. And now the unsayable things are being said—most dramatically in Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Tapper, of CNN, and Thompson, of Axios, interviewed more than 200 people for this book, which illuminates Biden’s mental decline, his enablers, and how the country was effectively run by committee in the midst of his clear cognitive impairment. For those of us who thought it was bad—it was actually much worse than anyone could have imagined. Alex and Jake have chosen to call the effort to hide Biden’s decline a “cover-up.” Those are choice words from two mainstream media insiders, invoking memories of Watergate and Iran-Contra. And the cover-up they are referring to is that of the Biden family and the close circle of advisers around them, many of whom are still delusional about Biden’s state. But cover-up might be the word that many Americans would use to describe the press’s coverage of Biden. How did ordinary people see more than people with White House press passes? And, what does it all say about human nature, transparency, and groupthink? This is a really illuminating conversation about presidential power, the lengths some will go to keep it, and how the media failed to report the story of a lifetime. Header 6: The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A lot of people fall in love outside of their marriages. Some have affairs. Some leave their wives or husbands. But not a lot of people are Agnes Callard. Agnes did something really unique. She fell in love while she was (seemingly happily) married with two children. She told her husband. They got divorced—sharing a single lawyer—and it took under three weeks to split. And then? Then they all moved in together. To repeat, Agnes lives with her husband, her ex-husband, and their combined three kids. And by the way, they’re all philosophy professors at The University of Chicago. The cherry on top is that she talks about all of it. A lot. And with radical openness and honesty—including in an unforgettable profile of her in The New Yorker titled “Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds.” Perhaps you hear all of that and think: This woman is a nut. Or at the very least a little zany. We beg to differ. There’s something about Agnes. Whether it’s a result of her worldview, her predisposition, or her vocation as a philosopher, that gives her a tremendous ability to float above any situation—including the most intimate and personal—and philosophize it. When Agnes writes and speaks openly about the experience of falling in love while married, and about how it unmoored her understanding of relationships and expectations, she helps the rest of us make sense of the most universal topics and experiences. It is an unusual gift. These experiences and her reflections on them all became fodder for her new book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, where she says we are not asking ourselves important questions—about how we should live and how we might change. Today on Honestly, Bari asks Agnes: how and why she turned her life upside down for love, how she knew it was love, how she examines her own marriage, how we can all live like her hero Socrates, and how an examined life can benefit us all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, were staffers at the Israeli Embassy. They had just planned a trip for Sarah to meet Yaron’s parents. He had recently bought an engagement ring. Then on Wednesday night, they were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. The suspect, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez, told police: “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.” Since its founding, The Free Press has reported on the rise of this kind of radicalism and a culture that has embraced violence as a means of expression, that has lost hold of the difference between life and death. Today, Bari reflects on the climate we now find ourselves in—and the deafening silence from mainstream media and pop culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The late biologist E.O. Wilson said that “the real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous.” Wilson said that back in 2011, long before any of us were talking about large language models or GPTs. A little more than a decade later, artificial intelligence is already completely transforming our world. Practitioners and experts have compared A.I. to the advent of electricity and fire itself. “God-like” doesn’t seem that far off. Even sober experts predict disease cures and radically expanded lifespans, real-time disaster prediction and response, the elimination of language barriers, and other earthly miracles. A.I. is amazing, in the truest sense of that word. It is also leading some to predict nothing less than a crisis in what it means to be human in an age of brilliant machines. Others—including some of the people creating this technology—predict our possible extinction as a species. But you don’t have to go quite that far to imagine the way it will transform our relationship toward information and our ability to pursue the truth. For tens of thousands of years, since humans started to stand upright and talk to each other, we’ve found our way to wisdom through disagreement and debate. But in the age of A.I., our sources of truth are machines that spit out the information we already have, reflecting our biases and our blind spots. What happens to truth when we no longer wrestle with it—and only receive it passively? When disagreeable, complicated human beings are replaced with A.I. chatbots that just tell us what we want to hear? It makes today’s concerns about misinformation and disinformation seem quaint. Our ability to detect whether something is real or an A.I.-generated fabrication is approaching zero. And unlike social media—a network of people that we instinctively know can be wrong—A.I. systems have a veneer of omniscience, despite being riddled with the biases of the humans who trained them. Meanwhile, a global arms race is underway, with the U.S. and China competing to decide who gets to control the authoritative information source of the future. So last week Bari traveled to San Francisco to host a debate on whether this remarkable, revolutionary technology will enhance our understanding of the world and bring us closer to the truth . . .or do just the opposite. The resolution: The Truth Will Survive Artificial Intelligence! Aravind Srinivas argued yes—the truth will survive A.I. Aravind is the CEO of one of the most exciting companies in this field, Perplexity, which he co-founded in 2022 after working at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind. Aravind was joined by Dr. Fei-Fei Li. Fei-Fei is a professor of computer science at Stanford, the founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered A.I., and the CEO and co-founder of World Labs, an A.I. company focusing on spatial intelligence and generative A.I. Jaron Lanier argued that no, the truth will not survive A.I. Jaron is a computer scientist, best-selling author, and the founder of VPL Research, the first company to sell virtual reality products. Jaron was joined by Nicholas Carr, the author of countless best-selling books on the human consequences of technology, including Pulitzer Prize finalist The Shallows, The Glass Cage, and, most recently, Superbloom. He also writes the wonderful Substack New Cartographies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you think about great political comebacks, maybe you think of Donald Trump, or Richard Nixon, or “comeback kid” Bill Clinton. You might soon add Andrew Cuomo to that list. In 2020, Cuomo was at the top of the world. He had been governor of New York for a decade. He had an illustrious career in New York politics—which is sort of the Cuomo family business. He learned how the state worked from his father, three-term Democratic governor Mario Cuomo. When COVID hit, Governor Cuomo’s star just kept rising. Millions of Americans—even outside of New York—tuned into his COVID briefings, and his CNN segments with his brother, Chris Cuomo. He was “America’s Governor.” On the cover of Rolling Stone. Women and men were even self-identifying as “Cuomosexual.” But then it all came crashing down. With two scandals—one personal and one political. As Covid was peaking in New York City, Andrew Cuomo was hit with a wave of allegations. In the end, state Attorney General Letitia James brought forward a report that alleged Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women. (Cuomo denies wrongdoing.) The other scandal, as many will recall, had to do with Covid—specifically, Cuomo’s administration was accused of mishandling the readmission of elders who’d had Covid into nursing homes, and many alleged that he misrepresented the nursing home death count. The governor disputes that, as you’ll hear today. By August 2021, Cuomo announced his resignation. His political career appeared to be over. For a time, he totally disappeared from public life. He went from having an audience of 59 million tuning into his Covid briefings to zero. But today, in May of 2025, the picture is dramatically different. Andrew Cuomo is now the front-runner to be the next mayor of New York City. Among Democrats—the party that tore him down—he has a commanding lead, polling at around 37 percent ahead of next month’s primary. His closest competitor, 33-year-old socialist state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, is hovering around 18 percent, according to a Marist Marist poll from just last week. So, what is it about Andrew Cuomo? Will New York choose Andrew Cuomo again? And if so, why? What does that say about the state of the city and our political choices? And why does he want the job of mayor at all? Today on Honestly, Bari asks former governor Andrew Cuomo about all of it—Covid and the harassment allegations, but also his vision for New York City, addressing public safety and affordability, his thoughts on school choice, Eric Adams’s tenure, the state of the Democratic Party, Donald Trump, illegal immigrants in New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and his plan for getting NYC back on track. Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The majority of people listening to this episode are hearing it on an iPhone. As most of us can attest, the iPhone is so central to our lives that if we lose it, we feel totally unmoored from our ability to function in the world. It’s hard to explain how ubiquitous the iPhone is—and how much of a behemoth Apple is. Apple sells over 60 million iPhones in the U.S. a year, and one plant can make as many as 500,000 iPhones per day. And in 2024, the company brought in a total revenue of $391 billion. The rise of Apple and the iPhone did not happen by accident. The fact that we all walk around with the most sophisticated technology in our pockets—at a cost of about a thousand dollars each—is the result of two forces: Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, and China, our largest geostrategic and economic rival. Few people are more prepared to discuss the symbiotic relationship between Apple and Communist China than Patrick McGee, a longtime business journalist who has covered Apple for the Financial Times. McGee is the author of Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. And Patrick makes the case that Apple became the world’s most valuable company by wedding itself—and its future—to an authoritarian state. As the president and others talk about decoupling from the country, Apple’s exposure in China isn’t just a liability for the company—it’s a liability to our national security, our own workforce, and our future. Today on Honestly, Bari asks Patrick how China came to dominate Apple’s manufacturing supply chain; how its totalitarian system and labor practices lured Apple to it; and how Apple’s decades-long transfer of knowledge and capital into China has made it nearly impossible to leave. Also, why the conventional wisdom—which is that Apple would not exist but for China—actually works the other way around. As Patrick argues, China would not be China without Apple. Header 6: The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories. Check out fastgrowingtrees.com/Honestly and use the code HONESTLY at checkout to get 15% off your first order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices