Honestly with Bari Weiss

• How to Examine Your Marriage and Your Life

  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

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  1:09:36
• Welcome to the Global Intifada

  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

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  14:52
• Debate: Will the Truth Survive Artificial Intelligence?

  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. FIRE knows free speech makes free people. You make it possible. Join the movement today at thefire.org. Cosmos Institute and FIRE are launching a $1M fund – cash and compute – for open-source AI projects that advance truth-seeking. Apply at CosmosGrants.org/truth! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  1:16:02
• Andrew Cuomo on His Past and New York’s Future

  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

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  1:26:36
• How China Captured Apple

  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

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  1:37:20

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