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Eccentric economist and brilliant thinker Tyler Cowen answers our questions about the confusing state of the economy. We talk about: inflation, the stock market, “The Great Resignation”, billionaires, income inequality, crypto, Texas vs San Francisco, the metaverse, good food, working remotely, what states like Virginia swinging back toward the right might mean for national politics and more.
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Desmond Shum knows well the cost of doing business in China. Born to a humble family that was marginalized during the Cultural Revolution, he became a wildly successful entrepreneur, along with his ex-wife Whitney, to the tune of billions of dollars. But just as quickly as the Chinese Communist Party elite helped enrich the couple, it tore them down.
In 2017, Whitney disappeared, not to be seen or heard from for four years. She reemerged only on the eve of Desmond’s new book, Red Roulette. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the CCP routinely disappears people who fall out of the Party’s favor. Most recently, tennis champion Peng Shuai vanished after accusing a high-ranking official of sexual assault.
Today, Desmond Shum talks about how all of this happens, as well as his personal experiences during China’s economic boom, how companies like Blackrock both support and fall for CCP propaganda and more.
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If your family is anything like mine, Thanksgiving is an opportunity to take a break from work, to bask in one others’ presence, and to fight savagely over the hottest political issues of the day.
And nothing is more contentious than Covid: mask policies; vaccine mandates; whether kids should be confined to the backyard; and, most urgently, whether we can safely--and finally--call time on the pandemic.
To answer those questions and more, I called up Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health of nearly 20 years and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Makary has published over 250 scientific articles and is the author, most recently, of “The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care and How to Fix It.” He offers a no-nonsense approach to the two pandemics he sees plaguing the country; the coronavirus and the “pandemic of lunacy.”
Veteran Honestly listeners will notice that this episode may sound a bit different. We’re piloting a new format, which we’re calling “Quick Question.” So email your burning ones-- even if they’re not quick--to tips@honestlypod.com. Please include “QQ” in the subject line.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse in the last days of August 2020: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020 he had done just that: killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.
It turns out, I was mostly wrong. And if you relied on the mainstream media when it came to Kyle Rittenhouse, you would have been too. Today, a conversation with Jesse Singal, one of the independent journalists who got this story right, and about why so many got it so wrong.
Follow Jesse’s work at jessesingal.substack.com
Read my full column on the Rittenhouse trial: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-medias-verdict-on-kyle-rittenhouse
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First, Andrew Yang ran for President, and he could barely get mainstream media’s attention. Then, he ran for Mayor of New York City, and suddenly, his every move was being scrutinized.
Following those two failed campaigns Andrew announced that he was leaving the Democratic Party altogether and announced the formation of a new third party, Forward, this past October. Today, a conversation on how, and why, Yang plans to take on the two-party system, and what last week’s elections tell us about the political temperature of the country. Plus, universal basic income, Dave Chapelle, open primary voting, establishment politics, The New York Times, the left wing of the Democrats, cryptocurrency, and Confederate statues.
Andrew’s new book is called, “Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy.”
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It’s been three years since the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, the most lethal attack on Jews on U.S. soil. That day was, for me, as it was for so many others, a watershed event. The country I knew was changing. While anti-semitic incidents in America had been climbing for a few years, this was different. Jews were afraid, and no longer felt safe. After Pittsburgh, there were countless other disturbing incidents: from a shooter at a kosher supermarket in New Jersey to a man with a machete at a Hanukkah party in Munsey. This past spring, antisemitic attacks skyrocketed, and even in a year where George Floyd’s killing and attacks against Asian Americans rightly captured our attention, Jews are still the number one victim of hate crimes in America.
But what’s most shocking is that in an era where we worry so much about hatred and bigotry and exclusion, Jews don’t seem to count; Jews don’t seem to make headlines. My guest today, Dara Horn, whose book ‘People Love Dead Jews’ is a brilliant explanation of anti-semitism in 2021, joins us for a conversation about how most of the world thinks about Jews, and how the future of America, and the future of American Jews, may be one and the same.
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"Defund the police" or "healthy at every size" or "marriage is just an oppressive institution of the patriarchy" - these are just a few of the ideas that are becoming common doctrine among American elites. And Rob Henderson has described these new orthodoxies as “Luxury Beliefs.”
He says, much like second homes on the beach or Bentleys, luxury beliefs are thoughts that can only be afforded by people whose wealth shields them from the very harm those beliefs can cause to the rest of us. Henderson, a graduate of Yale and a PhD student at Cambridge, should have been susceptible to the very ideas he now criticizes. But the reason he remained immune to the groupthink of academia is because he was, in many ways, an outsider looking in. He grew up in a kind of chaos and suffering that most people shouting about white privilege and the evils of the musical Hamilton could never understand. And that’s why he is able to so accurately observe the indulgence and hypocrisy of our elite class, and call it out for what it is: a luxury.
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If you’ve just heard of the word “TERF” (it stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) it was probably because of Dave Chapelle’s new Netflix special, “The Closer.” The comedian declared himself “Team TERF.” But what does that really mean?
Julie Bindel would know. She has been physically attacked; her work has been banned; and she’s been disinvited from lectures all because of the accusation that she is a TERF.
Bindel isn’t new to the culture wars. The self-proclaimed radical feminist has been active in the movement since 1979. Today she breaks down the battle raging inside the feminist movement and makes me wonder: am I a feminist?
Her new book, endorsed by J.K. Rowling, is called “Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation.”
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Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist, a father of four, an author . . . and also someone who lives with a tremendous amount of pain. Ross has been battling chronic Lyme disease since 2015. It's a disease that doesn’t officially exist, but it managed to bring this otherwise healthy man to his knees.
This is a conversation about something we all have or will experience: pain. How pain can distort, but also how it can clarify and humanize. In Ross's telling, pain has proven a deeply powerful teacher.
Ross is one of my favorite thinkers and writers, so we also covered some of his core topics: Catholicism, populism, the future of the political right and left, the internet, and, of course, decadence.
You can buy his new book, "The Deep Places," here:
https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Places-Memoir-Illness-Discovery-ebook/dp/B08Y1BFFWC
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Last week, Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, confirmed what we already felt; that big tech platform’s algorithms are manipulating our sense of reality, and ourselves, and in doing so enriching themselves.
Jaron Lanier, the technologist, philosopher, and virtual reality pioneer has been warning us about the dangers of the internet for years. Today, a conversation with Jaron, from his home in California, about the dangers of groupthink, digital maoism, ideology sluts, censorship, capitalism, universal basic income, Facebook, robots, billionaires, wokeness and losing yourself in the ambiguity of the internet’s fake reality.
Can the problems of the Information Age be fixed by more regulation? Or will it take a fundamental shift in how we structure our society, and our relationship to emergent technologies to reclaim our humanity?
In addition to being an author of the internet, he worked at Atari and Microsoft in the early days, Jaron wrote, ”Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” and “Dawn of the New Everything.” He appeared in the movie “The Social Dilemma.”
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