Barry Weiss

But I value both of their perspectives, even or especially when they disagree, and I know you will too. Today, we talk about the L.A. fires that have that city burning and their political implications, not just for Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom, but for the Democratic Party.

We talk about the civil war inside the MAGA movement between nationalist populists like Steve Bannon and free marketeers like Elon Musk. We talk about Mark Zuckerberg's red pill moment and the changes he's making at Meta. And then we end on some predictions for the confirmation hearings that begin this week in Washington. Stay with us. Today's episode was made possible by Ground News.

One last question on this, and then I want to move on to another topic that's been engulfing the conversation in a different way. I've been thinking a lot about the fact that the paradox, and it goes like this. We live in a world in which private companies and very determined individuals are able to create rocket ships that return to Earth and are caught by giant chopsticks. Okay?

There's people talking legitimately, and I didn't used to believe this, about colonizing Mars. Like, that seems within the realm of possibility in our lifetime. But at the same moment that that kind of technological progress is possible... One of the greatest states in the union, a state that is the fifth largest economy in the world, is not able to contain a fire.

This is not a political question, I guess, so much as a cultural one. But what does that mean? Is that a failure of priorities or is it that everyone that's smart and competent fails? runs as far away as possible from government? And if so, how do we change that? I've just been thinking about that a lot. It's like we live in an era of Starlink and SpaceX and choose your other thing.

And also we live in an era in which I saw this unbelievably emblematic photo in which a person in L.A. was trying to put out a fire in his backyard with cartons of oat milk because there was presumably no water in the hose. That's unbelievable. What explains that?

So is Doge the solution? I don't think so. Okay, I think it might be. Before we get to Doge, let's talk about a little thing called H1B. Okay, and if you're not a person that lives on the internet, you might not even know what that is, so let me explain. The thing that everyone has been talking about for the last week or two is immigration. particularly the H-1B controversy.

And for those who have never heard of what that is, H-1B visas go to highly skilled workers. Think doctors, lawyers, engineers, coders. It's sold as a program of visas, temporary visas, for the best and brightest, and it's been around since about 1990. Now, typically, the immigration debate in this country... centers around low-wage workers and illegal immigration.

But this controversy over H-1Bs has turned out to be one of the early and profound fissures between the two wings of the new Trumpist Republican Party. The sort of, forgive me for being crude, the free market business types, think of Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the true nationalist populists think people like Steve Bannon.

The Musk types have come out in ferocious defense of the H-1B visa program. Perhaps not surprising, given that of the 85,000 H-1B visas that were granted each year, about 70% of them work in tech. On the other side, we have a very strange coalition, maybe not so strange to Batya, people like Steve Bannon, but also Bernie Sanders. So, Batya, you were big on this issue.

I saw you all over TV talking about it. Explain to us where you stand and why you stand there.

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Okay, I want to get deeper into the politics. Brianna, before we move on, you're someone who actually has worked deeply in the tech industry, presumably with a lot of people on H-1B visas. Are they indentured servants, as Batya said? What's the dynamic as you've seen it?

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But hold on, hold on, hold on. I think that there's a really interesting and hopefully we'll assign it very deep story to be written on Elon and China and his interest there. No question. But I completely fail to see how this isn't just a really, really simple debate and a sincere one between –

Those who believe, as you do and as Steve Bannon does in a kind of economic populist worldview, and those who believe, like Elon and Vivek and perhaps Brianna and probably me, that you can make a very potent America first argument by saying, look, in order for us to stay ahead of all of these other countries that we are kind of at, you know, in a new Cold War with on AI, on quantum computing, on chips, on biotech,

We have to be fast, we have to be cheap, and we have to be ahead. And that we need to win, we need to beat China. And the way to do that is to get the best and the brightest around the world. It's not to say we shouldn't train people in Appalachia or anything else, but the way to do that is to get them. Like, how is it not as—that's how I see it.

I see it as an argument between those that have generally a free market worldview and those that don't. Right.

Batia and Brianna, welcome to Honestly.

I don't know if I would think it's dastardly. I want to ask you guys a question about the politics of this because, Batya— You're a fan of Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon's going around talking about, I guess he has like five days left to do it, how he's going to do anything to keep Elon Musk out of the new administration and how it's a personal goal of his to, quote, take this guy down.

I don't see that happening. Like, I don't think that Trump, who has come out strongly in favor of H-1B visas and very much on the side of Musk and Ramaswamy in this debate, is going to change course. Do you? And where is it making you sit vis-a-vis Trump in this direction of the new White House?

Well, one thing that we haven't touched on that I'm obviously, like, you guys both saw this. I'm not sure if listeners who are not perpetually online like us did. The racism on the right that came out around this issue was really, really disgusting. I mean, I don't even want to quote the kinds of things they said, but it basically amounted to why do we want these smelly Indians in our country to—

Okay, brunettes, let's dive in. Before we get to the incoming administration, we need to cover a story that I really didn't expect us to be covering, although maybe the people that pay close attention to Nature and rain and incompetency in California governance would not be so surprised.

get out. This is, you know, America's for white people. How alarmed should we be about those voices? Do they represent a real constituency? Do they represent the base? Like, how should we understand that, Brianna or Bhatia, either of you?

You have insight, I think. And tell me, is nationalist populist the right way to explain kind of the Bannon wing of the party? How would you describe it?

So like... You swim in those waters. You speak to those people. A, how enraged are they about the way Trump broke on this issue? And B, do you think that this is a fight that we're going to kind of continue to see play itself out over and over again between sort of like – call it MAGA 1.0, the nationalist populace that –

drove him to power in 2016 and perhaps representing Trump's base, unclear to me, and then sort of MAGA 2.0 with Ramaswamy and a lot of these other Silicon Valley types. Like, let's talk a little bit about that dynamic because I think it's extremely interesting and a big one for people to watch.

And of course, I'm talking here about the California fires, since that is the thing on mine and I'm sure yours and everyone's mind. These are the most destructive fires in Los Angeles's history. As we record, 24 people have died. That number is sure to go up. More than 12,000 homes, businesses, and buildings have been damaged or destroyed.

More with Batya Ungar Sargon and Brianna Wu after the break. Stay with us. OK, one thing, you know, we were speaking earlier about the vibe shift and, you know, Maria Shriver sort of turning against California Democrats, at least subtly to me, is a big sign of it.

Another huge sign of it from another part of California, more northern part of California, is Mark Zuckerberg and the direction that he is taking meta. Yeah.

watching the five-minute... I don't think you can find sort of a better emblem of the vibe shift than this five-minute video that he put out announcing that they were getting rid of their fact-checking apparatus, which had been accused of being deeply politically biased, that they were moving parts of the company to Texas, that they're unwinding DEI.

I mean, like, he went on Joe Rogan and talked about how... Corporate America has become feminized. Like, it was just like this really red pill moment. Brianna, let's start with you. What did you think about this move? Like, a sincere change of heart, opportunism. What does it augur for the next four years?

There are whole parts of Los Angeles that seem like a nuclear bomb has been set off. And lots of people are pointing lots of fingers. And I wanted to start by just asking, who's to blame here? And Bhatia, I thought maybe we could start with you.

TOS, meaning violating the terms of service.

Do you think that this Zuckerberg pivot signals that we're post-woke?

The New York Times ran a headline a few days ago that read like a Babylon Bee headline or an Onion headline from the old days. It said, Meta says fact-checkers were the problem. Fact-checkers rule that false. I couldn't tell if it was a joke or not. Pandya, anything else you want to say about that? I don't know if you saw that headline.

From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss. Trump's inauguration is right around the corner, and there is so much to cover in this new White House. In the coming weeks, we're going to have key figures from the new Trump administration on to talk about what they're planning and what you can expect.

I don't know. I sort of see it as like this, I guess what Timur Karan would call preference falsification. Like people have been living over the past decade with private truths, you know, like saying in private, woke is a little crazy or is a lot crazy. But in public, you know, putting up the right hashtags or the black squares or whatever you're supposed to do.

And I think what's happened since November 5th and maybe actually since the attempted assassination against Trump on July 13th, is just the shattering of that illusion.

I think that people who sincerely felt like, and maybe Mark Zuckerberg is one of these people, you could look to, you know, for earlier evidence of the vibe shift, you could look to his desire to raise and butcher his own animals or getting into jujitsu. There were signs, is all I'm saying. Is like... Now the water's warm, right?

Now that it's sort of like politically and culturally and socially and reputationally acceptable, more people are coming out and just being like, hey, that was a little crazy. That's how I see it.

I think I'm having whiplash. Like what's the line in Ferris Bueller? Like life comes at you fast. Like every time I turn around, another person that I regarded as sort of like a zombie politically is now like come to life. Peter Thiel actually had a quite an interesting piece in the Financial Times over the weekend calling for almost like a truth and reconciliation commission.

Saying basically – which speaks to your point. Like he's basically saying it's really nice. I'm going to paraphrase this. But he basically says that in order for us to truly move on, it's not enough for people to just like have a change of heart. We basically need an accountability. We need a Twitter files for everything that's happened from the cover-up of the lab leak to –

you know, and he named a bunch of other things, and I felt like that was... Anyway, it's really, really provocative, like everything Peter says, and very much worth a read. We have three minutes left before Batya needs to go and yap on television, so... Last thing, confirmation hearings start this week. We're recording this in the afternoon of Monday, January 13th.

Tomorrow, Senate hearings are going to begin for several of Trump's cabinet picks. They don't need Democrats to pass these appointments, but there might be some Republican holdouts for the more controversial picks, like, let's say, Pete Hegseth for defense or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for HHS or maybe Kash Patel for FBI. What are your predictions for these guys specifically, Hegseth, Kennedy, Patel?

Are they going to make their way through? Or is, you know, Susan Collins going to stop them from getting to their appointments? What do you think? Is Hegseth going to be defense secretary? Is RFK Jr. going to run HHS? And is Kash Patel going to run FBI? Let's have answers from both of you. Pete Hegseth, yay or nay, Brianna? Going to make it through?

Batya?

OK, well, Batya Angersargon, Brianna Wu, next time we talk, Trump will be the president of the United States. So eager to see what happens this week in the Senate, what happens on Inauguration Day. And I'll talk to you guys after January 20th. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks, Barry. Looking forward to it. Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, share it with your friends and family.

And if you wanna support Honestly, there's just one way to do it. It's by becoming a free presser. It's becoming a subscriber to the free press by going to thefp.com, T-H-E-F-P.com and becoming a subscriber today. We really appreciate the support. We'll see you next time.

I'll say here that the piece that you referenced by Leighton Woodhouse has elicited more anger from very thoughtful people than perhaps any story we've run in the past few months. I want to just read part of a letter that we're going to run tomorrow because I think it'll take us a little deeper into this conversation.

Leighton Woodhouse's piece is a revolting example of the defeatism that permeates far too much of civil society today. It's the same philosophy animating low birth rates, climate inevitability, and racial determinism.

Taken to its logical conclusion, Woodhouse's argument is that because Earth is part of a solar system that faces black holes, asteroids, and an eventual implosion on the sun, we should merely hang our heads and mutter goodbye to our lineage as the natural process of destruction takes place. In other words, there's a kind of

But we all know that if Trump 2.0 is anything like Trump 1.0, there's going to be a lot to cover, a lot of twists, a lot of turns, and certainly controversy. And we wanted to make the space to analyze and break down each development as it unfolds.

determinism and defeatism in the argument that, well, Los Angeles is built to burn. In other words, you could say the same thing. Manhattan is built to flood. We're surrounded by water. The entire idea of building cities and civilization is the idea that we push back against nature.

So, maybe I'm getting too heady for before noon on a Monday, but I got to say, having lived in LA over the past four years, having seen the way that the basic compact between citizens and the government does not work. If you call the LAPD because you see a robbery, or in my case, see a man wildly swinging a machete, it might take them an hour to show up.

Living in New York, New York feels like this utopian paradise in terms of just functionality compared to Los Angeles. So those fires are taking place in that political context, one in which things that should be public are increasingly privatized and in which people have really lost faith in the mayor and in the governor. But I've gone on too long. I'm meant to be the host.

Brianna, what do you think? Who's to blame?

So starting today and for the next few months, we're going to bring you weekly panels to break down the politics with some of our favorite guests so you can stay informed about what's happening in Trump's new White House. For today, those two people are Batya Ungar Sargon and Brianna Wu. Batya Ungar Sargon is a free press contributor and the opinion editor at Newsweek.

Let's talk about the political implications of this, not politicizing the fires themselves, but... The implications. Trump tweeted, one of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America, and I can attest to that, it's really paradise, is burning down to the ground. It's ashes, and Gavin Newsom should resign. This is all his fault.

Two weeks from now, Karen Bass, will she be in or out? Gavin Newsom? What's his fate? He's long wanted to run for presidency. Are those dreams over because of this fire?

Here's one of the lessons I'll put my cards on the table that I draw from this. Government in L.A.

and in many blue cities across the country has lost sight of the most basic parts of their job, which is keeping people safe, safe from crime, safe from, you know, majorly drug-addicted people harassing them on the street, safe in this case from natural disasters like wildfires, or if not safe, at least prepared.

And instead, they have focused on, you know, what Rob Henderson might call luxury issues or niche boutique issues that have very little to do with the basics of governing. Is that going to be one of the kind of political takeaways from this?

24 so far, but it's definitely going to go up.

She is also the author of the essential book, Second Class. Brianna Wu is a Democratic fundraiser and activist, and in her past life, a video game developer. If you've heard them on Honestly Together before, you know that these two come from different sides of the political spectrum. I don't even know if there's a spectrum anymore, just different places on the political map.

Sure, there's the wealthy donor class perspective on it, but there's also, you know, Altadena, this is not Malibu. This is not the Palisades. Like, these are middle, like, solidly middle-class people. And if I'm them, and if my home is just burned to the ground—oh, and by the way, I'm thinking about this guy who went to the French Laundry or whatever it was in the middle of COVID—

Someone can fact check me on that, but I think memory serves. That was right. Yeah. Like, why am I voting for the person that is so out of touch with my everyday concerns? Just as an example, though, of like, there's been a lot that we've published and a lot of commentary, I think, over the past, since the election in November on the vibe shift, right?

Culturally and politically and, you know, woke is fading. People are moving to the right. You guys know this conversation. Right. One piece of evidence just of how quickly things can shift is Maria Shriver, hardly a Republican conservative, is on Twitter talking about how Los Angeles and California needs radical change in the wake of this.

I have friends in L.A., progressives, texting me, I guess I'm a Republican now. In other words, they are so fed up It's not that they're Republican on any particular policy issue. It's that they are so disgusted, Brianna, with, you know, one party rule and the corruption of it that they're just like, done. I'll vote for anything else that's not this. Do you see that happening?

You're talking about like an Oura ring or something like that.

Brian, we obviously we just went through a holiday season where a lot of us were indulging or sleeping at odd hours, definitely eating things that are not good for us. Like, do you ever indulge?

Do you ever indulge or go off of the routine?

You can't imagine having a piece of chocolate.

But I'm thinking of you on Thanksgiving or Christmas, right? How does this affect your ability? I'll give you an example. When you're at a meal with people and there's someone there that claims to be gluten-free either because they're trying to diet, that's a lot of women I think who claim to be gluten-free, or they're genuinely celiac, people roll their eyes and they get annoyed.

People are annoyed when people don't go along with the flow of what everyone else is doing. You don't even eat at a meal. So how does it work when you're Sitting down with loved ones at 6 p.m. for a holiday feast, how does that actually work for you in a social way?

So you'll put something on your plate so you're not there as the extra guy not doing anything. Yeah, exactly. But presumably you'll leave in time to get in bed by 830.

Wow. OK, Brian, this is we got to discuss your dating. How can you go on a date?

Yeah.

Now, going into it, I knew it was going to be an unusual conversation. If you haven't heard of Brian or watched the new Netflix documentary about him, it's called Don't Die, The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. Brian is a person who has given over his whole life and his body to the science of longevity. It means he's essentially turned himself into a human lab rat.

Okay. I want to just kind of list some of the other things you do that don't fit neatly into the buckets of diet, exercise, or sleep. Yeah. You do hair growth therapy.

You do red light therapy, audiotherapy, body fat scans, routine hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which is breathing pure oxygen in a pressurized chamber. That sounds kind of amazing to me. You do MRIs, blood and stool sample tests. Stop me if I get any of these wrong. You experiment with drugs like Acrobose. I've never heard of some of these until researching you.

You had 300 million young Swedish bone marrow stem cells injected into your shoulders, hips, and joints. You received phallostatin gene therapy in Honduras. You did a total plasma exchange, removing the plasma in your body and replacing it with, you tell me, something that begins with an A. Albumin?

Never heard of it. You inject yourself for brain health. You get these bloody facials. What's the point of all of this, right? Because some of these things, sleeping consistently, I get it. Eating superfoods, Even that, I get, sounds miserable, but I get it. Exercising the way you do, the results speak for themselves.

But there's these extra things that seem kind of, as you put it, extra or even intensely risky. Tell me about these experimental treatments.

It seems to me, and this is a little bit of a crude way to put it, but I think it's pretty accurate, that there's sort of like two competing schools of thought among, and forgive the phrase, alternative health people. There's the people that want to sort of embrace the practices of the past, right?

Paleo carnivore diets, people that are sewing and hand-dyeing their own clothes because they don't want any polyester or plastics, people that are like, let's go back in time sort of pre-industrial age for purity, right? And by going backwards in times, we can get healthier again.

undergoing hundreds of tests and studies on every human biomarker imaginable to discover the best ways to stop the process of human aging, or maybe even to age in reverse. What he does is unconventional, to say the least. He eats dinner at 11 a.m. He has swapped blood with his 17-year-old son, just to name two of the hundreds of things that I had never heard of a person doing before.

And then there's people like you that are embracing sort of every technological, futuristic tool at our disposal, whether it's supplements or injections or biohacking tools, and sort of believing that the way to health is by embracing these sort of tools of the future, things sort of at the bleeding edge of technology.

Can you contend with that tension a little bit for me because I feel like it's kind of one or the other and you embody the – you're like the embodiment of the latter school of thinking about this.

So all of these things we've been talking about, and anyone who's seen the documentary will know or has read about you, you call this protocol Blueprint. How long have you been doing Blueprint?

Four years. Okay. And you say the goal is not just – your critics would say – Have fun, Brian Johnson. This is your life. Be a lab rat. You say that you're being sort of a human lab rat, not just for yourself, but in order to produce results that are hopefully adaptable for others. What are some of the big takeaways that are accessible already from this four-year experiment for other people?

Yeah.

My question is, you know, if the goal is not just to elongate your own life and not die, but through the experiment of your life, working with this very strict discipline protocol to produce... actionable behavior, really, that are accessible to other people that don't have, you know, an MRI in their bathroom?

Like, what are those things that are already takeaways after four years that you would advise people? I mean, there are some obvious ones, of course, like consistent sleep. But are there any other things that you've sort of already learned from this experiment that are usable for other people listening?

So I knew it was going to be one of the weirder conversations I've ever had on this show. What I didn't anticipate was that it was going to be challenging in a deeper way. What do you think I think the idea of being human is?

I assume that the idea of even having a smartphone in your bedroom is, like, disgusting to you.

Okay, you turn it off.

Well, I think for most people just encountering you, they're probably going and Googling you right now and finding some incredible photos and lots of pieces that have been written about you, including by the wonderful journalist Ashley Vance. And they'll discover when they do that that, A, you didn't always look like this, and B— This was not the life at all that you were born into.

And I want to ask you a little bit about sort of the journey that led you to this point. You know, before you started Blueprint, you were a startup bro, right? You were a tech bro. You probably hate the word bro, but that's what you did. You founded a payments processing company called Braintree, which was very successful. It ultimately acquired Venmo. Tell me about that time in your life.

You know, I'm doing a startup now. I find that it is extraordinarily stressful. I've basically turned gray over the past two years. Tell me about how that period sort of affected your health and ultimately led you to want to change the way, not just that you live, but I think also the way that you think about the nature of your brain and your mind and your body. So let's go back there a

The Brian Before Blueprint.

Well, not to get too galaxy brain here, but isn't it just that human beings are incredibly memetic and imitative creatures and we – the thing that makes us compete is our sameness and wanting to – I mean, Elon obviously is the embodiment of what you're talking about. I think the thing that struck me is your description of grinding 80 or 100 hours a week as debaucherous.

Brian, do you think being human is a social construct?

I don't think most people that are running startups think of that kind of behavior as debaucherous. I think they think of it as, you know, self-sacrificial and necessary. And you're just saying it's not.

The internet.

I think most people are going to be with you on the former, but I think a lot of people, frankly, me included, will say, Brian, it's awesome that your organs are the age of an 18-year-old, but the idea that not dying is within our grasp in the way that AI is seems totally implausible to me. What evidence is there of that other than what you are doing?

I don't see that as a movement in the way that I see superintelligence.

I'm with you on all of that. But I see rockets from SpaceX going to space and getting caught by chopstick arms. And I think, hey, maybe this thing of getting to Mars, which 10 years ago seemed like, you know, as crazy as believing that aliens were going to march through New Jersey, maybe that's within reach. I could be convinced of the, if not dying, incredibly elongated lifespans.

But where is the either social movement or other than... You and a number of other people that are, frankly, like people in Silicon Valley that have resources that are at the bleeding edge of this. Like, am I missing some broader sort of cultural shift or some broader, huge scientific breakthrough that I should be made aware of?

I think it's really interesting that don't die is the promise, if not explicitly, but implicitly. It's the subtext of kind of every meaningful movement that people are a part of. How do you achieve immortality in some way?

That we'd get to talking about the fundamental meaning and purpose of life. And that I'd feel challenged about what I know and believe to be true. Because it's not just that Brian wants to live forever. It's that he believes, agree with it or not, that we're at the bleeding edge of a new kind of reality.

You grew up Mormon, and I've been thinking about that because I don't want to be stereotypical here, but I think Mormons are just like highly, highly productive, disciplined people in a way that I really admire. And I wonder how much do you attribute growing up in that kind of structure to your ability to be so disciplined with something like Blueprint?

One thing that you say sort of in many different ways is that the mind is the enemy and we can stop aging by giving control to our bodies and not our mind. I have to tell you, I don't fully understand that. And I want you to explain it a little bit more to me because I see those things as so integrated.

Tell us what you mean by giving control to the body.

He thinks he's akin to Amelia Earhart or Ernest Shackleton, and that he's on the frontier of something big, something that will change everything about humanity as we know it. Today on Honestly, Brian Johnson tells us about why he's not going to die. Stay with us. Are you ready to make better sleep your New Year's resolution? Cozy Earth can help you do that.

I mean, the idea of outsourcing fights to AI with my wife seems like a good idea, but I guess I'm left wondering, and maybe we'll wind up here, but if any of that is a life worth living, if AI is doing everything for me,

But I think what I'm responding to, and maybe I am having exactly the response you're saying, but I think maybe the deeper read of it, or another read of it, rather, is that the idea of being free to choose is the thing that makes us human. And if what you're saying is we can just outsource everything to a super intelligent machine...

Like, at least in my worldview, that choosing and that discerning and that even the ability to fail miserably is like at the very, very core of our humanity. But maybe that's just an old idea and a different worldview.

What do you think I think the idea of being human is?

What do you think the idea of being human is?

Brian, do you think being human is a social construct?

From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss. I've never quite had a conversation like the one I had today. Do you think that you're going to die?

More with Brian Johnson after the break. Stay with us. Brian, we're in a really interesting moment where I think people understand at a more broad level than they did certainly 10 years ago that whatever is going on right now with health in America and maybe the West more broadly is bad.

Cozy Earth sheets, which are made from 100% premium viscose from bamboo, are incredibly soft, breathable, and get even softer with every wash. Good sleep is essential to a nighttime routine. It gives me the energy to tackle the day and feel my best. And right now, I'm not getting that because we have two little kids, but hopefully I'll get back to that soon.

And they're open to pretty wacky or alternative or unconventional ideas because they see whatever our habits are, whatever's going on, they're leading to widespread obesity and heart disease and cancer and sickness.

And one of the core manifestations of that openness to alternative health ideas showed itself very powerfully in this last election cycle with the Maha movement, with the Make America Healthy Again movement. And I wanted to ask you what you think about it.

Just to draw a line under it, there was a guy, I'm blanking on his name, but who did a study of microplastics in like all foods. This came out in the past week. And I think it made people feel very betrayed that like the Whole Foods grass-raised beef had the most microplastics.

And so it was like even the people that are spending so much money to get the healthy meat felt betrayed. So it's kind of like everywhere. It feels like nothing is safe.

Wow. What does that mean?

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Maha, I would say, is particularly focused on a few things. And I'm curious just your quick takes on them. We hit on microplastics. Obviously, you think that's an enormous priority, given what you just told us. Seed oils overstated in their badness or as bad as people are saying?

So like most infamously in the cultural debate is that McDonald's uses seed oils. RFK wants to bring tallow back. This is like a whole micro debate. But you're saying seed oils themselves aren't that bad. It's the way they're used.

Vaccines.

Are you fully vaccinated?

On everything other than COVID.

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So let me make it personal. Do you get a flu shot every year?

Did you get vaccinated for COVID?

Do you regret getting vaccinated for COVID?

Why?

One of the things that we cover a lot in the free press and on this show is the way that our institutions that are meant to sort of be in the public interest have betrayed public trust. And the thing that's been described as sort of a crisis of trust in the public is actually a crisis of trustworthiness in those institutions. Like they have betrayed people.

And yet I don't think either of us wants to live in a world in which we have no institution. We have no public health institutions because we do need some shared reality in a country with 330 million people.

Are there, in the same way that you had your five rules for how to get back to better health for those of us that don't want to do the full blueprint, are there things you feel that the CDC and other organizations can be doing to win back the trust that felt so demolished during the pandemic?

But this gets to something I think about almost every day. Do you think individuals can actually replace institutions? Because individuals are flawed. You know, I'm trying to do that in my own way, I guess, in the media.

But the reason I decided not to be a sort of singular, you know, writer in the world, which would have been much more lucrative for me in trying to build a new institution instead, is I felt I am limited. I am flawed. It is much more sort of anti-fragile to create, I guess, a consortium or an institution of lots of journalists who share the same sort of old school journalistic values as me.

And also there's a much greater chance of scale. And frankly, if I get hit by a truck, it continuing. So like what are the limits of it being sort of the Brian Johnson show? And do you think about that?

If you get their post-purchase survey, mention that you heard about Cozy Earth from Honestly with Barry Weiss. Brian Johnson, welcome to Honestly.

Brian Johnson, you are definitely the only person I've ever interviewed for this show where there's a betting page on Polymarket for your nighttime erection lengths. That is a first for me. And that's just sort of one of the hundreds, maybe more, of markers that you measure every day, from your urination speed to brain plaque, and that you've reportedly spent millions of dollars on the process.

Okay, let's talk about some of the criticisms you've received briefly. In the new Netflix documentary about you and Blueprint, there are some longevity scientists who are interviewed who say, this is a really neat way to do your life. They're very curious about you. But the idea that this is scientific, they say, is bogus. What do you say to that criticism?

Mm-hmm.

Okay, that's really interesting because if the goal is shifting the cultural norm, how much do you worry about some of the really experimental things that you're doing? In other words, you're saying, I want people to watch what I'm doing so they imitate it in the same way they once imitated sleeping under the desk. Right.

So you do things, for example, like taking rapamycin, this organ transplant drug, please correct me if I'm wrong, that suppresses your immune system. You decided to stop because of the harsh side effects of it that you said didn't justify the benefits. Knowing that you're trying to be sort of a beacon for people to ask themselves, wait, I can live a different life.

How does that affect your decision of whether or not to do or not do certain things and whether or not to, you've been very transparent, to not share all of them given the risk of some of the things you might personally want to try?

iced coffee and I know that you're going to judge that.

It's a Yeti. It's a Yeti full of microplastics probably.

The New York Times asked you at one point if you were building a religion and you said yes. Others have described the Don't Die movement as a cult. What's the difference between a cult and a religion if there is one? And what would the world look like if we all signed up for the Don't Die, I'll call it a movement?

All in your quest to, as you put it and as your shirt puts it and as the name of your new Netflix documentary puts it, not to die or don't die. So let's start there. You are the first person I've talked to that's literally given your life over to not dying. Why are you trying so hard not to die?

We're having a crisis of meaning in the West right now, as you know, that's making a lot of people depressed, a lot of people addicted to things, a lot of people amazingly lonely. How does this solve it?

When people say, life wouldn't have meaning if we didn't die, is that just a cope?

Does it hurt you when people say that about you?

Are you a disagreeable person by nature?

Do you think that you're going to die?

You think you're going to live forever?

What do you say to that?

Really?

Okay, in the last three minutes we have, Brian, I want to do a quick lightning round, okay?

Okay, when is the last time you ate cake?

When's the last time you had a cold?

Do you think depression and anxiety can be cured with lifestyle choices and without pharmaceutical intervention?

How much credence do you give to alternative medicines like Ayurvedic or traditional Chinese medicine?

I'm going to list a few health trends and tell me your one sentence or one word opinion on each, okay? Or a ring.

EMF blockers.

Reverse osmosis water filters.

Ozempic.

When did you get on that?

Blue light blockers.

UV filters on windows.

Barefoot shoes. Great. Multi-wave oscillator therapy.

Sensory deprivation tank.

Talk therapy.

Meditation.

Do you still believe in God?

What do you mean by that?

Other people have tried to create God or utopias, and that's not turned out very well.

You think you're going to live forever?

You said you don't think you're going to die. How long do you want to live?

It seems weird to ask someone who's already so disciplined what your goals are for 2025. Do you have any? Do you have any resolutions?

Well, Brian, what are you off to next?

Okay, so before we get into sort of the more existential questions about whether or not death is something fundamental and core to being human, let's establish for people just how differently you live your life in the pursuit of not dying than most of the rest of us do. I take vitamin D, if I'm lucky, maybe twice a week. How many pills and supplements would you say you take every single day?

All right, Brian, I consider that a personal challenge or an admonishment. I'm not sure which. Brian Johnson, thank you so much for making the time.

Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. And if you wanna support Honestly, there's just one way to do it. It's by becoming a free presser. It's becoming a subscriber to the free press by going to thefp.com, T-H-E-F-P.com and becoming a subscriber today. We really appreciate the support.

We'll see you next time.

Okay. And give us a range and a sense of what these pills are and the variety of what they're doing.

And that's with tech founder, centimillionaire, and the king of longevity, Brian Johnson.

Exercise is a huge part of it. We see you doing a lot of it in this documentary. And then eating. And this is maybe the most hard to fathom for most people. You know, I eat three meals a day plus a few snacks. I think I'm pretty normal in what I do. What do you eat? I mean, we're talking at 1230 EST. So by my schedule, if you're on EST, you've already eaten your dinner.

So just so listeners understand, you eat all of your meals between 6 a.m. and 11 a.m.?

Okay. And what are the foods that you eat and don't eat? When I hear superfoods, I think blueberries and kale, meat, no meat, cheese, eggs. Tell us what you eat in a day.

But that just seems like a very, very aesthetic meal plan for someone that's exercising the amount you do and a man of your size. I would really been thinking about this. Are you hungry most of the time? Are you hungry right now?

Is that painful or pleasurable to you?

Is there a specific aspect to that sort of low level of hunger, frankly, that I think most people listening will never have experienced in their life that is good for longevity?

Explain that.

Well, one thing about sports is there's sort of a way to judge them. And I want to get to that in a little bit because obviously there's been criticisms from some scientists, including in the documentary itself, which I appreciated, about the scientific nature of what you're doing. Before we get there, I just want to establish a little bit more about your daily habits.

I probably, if I'm lucky, drink two glasses of water a day. It's very bad. I'm constantly dehydrated. How much water do you drink?

Of course.

Okay. And I go to sleep around. Well, we have two kids under the age of three. So I'm waking up last night, 3 a.m., 6 a.m. So very, very bad sleep habits. But generally, I go to sleep around midnight, wake up around 7. When do you go to sleep? 8.30 p.m. So why did you discover this 830 to 430 routine? Why is that optimal or optimal for you?

I think that one of the Key things being debated right now is whether or not Zelensky was poorly advised and wasn't adept enough to read the room. Or if he had become sort of so confident, having been working with administration in Biden that was so sympathetic to him. He obviously spoke this summer at a Pennsylvania rally. Harris war nicht da, aber es war im Grunde ein Harris-Demokraten-Rallye.

Er wurde von Annie Leibovitz im Vanity Fair fotografiert. Und vielleicht hat er nicht das Memo über die neue Administration und den Vibe-Schiff bekommen. Was denkt ihr, was das war?

In Europa haben die Führer in Aktion geflogen. Ukrainer europäische Alliierten, z.B. der britische Bundespräsident Keir Starmer und der französische Präsident Emmanuel Macron, haben sich am Sonntag in London getroffen, um ihren eigenen Friedensplan zu formen und argumentuell die Führung des Krieges aufzunehmen.

Aber Brianna, warum sind die Leute dann so begeistert von der Idee, und um es krudelig zu sagen, ich fühle mich, dass die Art und Weise, wie die Debatte im Publikum stattfindet, ist, schau dir diese verlassenen, verlassenen, du weißt, amerikanischen Städte an, viele davon, die Batia in dem Buch geschrieben hat, die sich einfach hinter ihrem Schulter befindet.

Warum senden wir Billionen von Dollar nach Ukraine und anderen fremden Ländern, wenn sie zu den amerikanischen Menschen gehen sollten? Erklär mir, warum das eine falsche Dichotomie ist.

Aber du sagst, es ist nicht das eine oder andere.

More after the break with Batya Anger Sargon, Brianna Wu and Chris Caldwell. Stay with us. Eine der Dinge, die sicherlich die Kabel-News dominiert, ich bin mir nicht sicher, wie viele von uns das jetzt mehr anschauen, aber ich finde es interessant, ist, dass man eine Rückkehr von dem sieht, was ich als eine totale Lette war.

In Moskau feiern die Offiziere Trumps Bezug auf den Konflikt und seine Außenpolitik mehr generell. Die neue Regierung ändert schnell alle Außenpolitik-Konfigurationen. Dies gehört stark zu unserer Vision, sagte ein Kremlin-Vorsitzender. Und auf russischer Staats-TV beschreiben sie glücklicherweise den Aufstieg einer neuen Weltordnung mit Trump in der White House.

Die Idee von Russiagate, die Idee, dass die Punditur in der ersten Trump-Administration dominierte, dass Trump... was at best sympathetic to Putin and Russia, at worst somehow a paid-up tool with a secret P-Tape that never materialized. All of that kind of fell apart. I will admit, in the early days of the Trump administration, I watched

die Namen aller dieser verschiedenen russischen Charaktere zu lernen, nur um zu erkennen, dass mein Gehirn von absolutem Nonsens ausgetragen wurde. Aber wir sehen eine echte Rückkehr davon.

Und ich möchte, dass wir damit ein bisschen zusammenkommen, weil du nicht glauben musst, dass Trump irgendwie wie ein geheimer russischer Agent ist, um diese neue Administrationspolizei zu beobachten und zu denken, warte, setze alle Details ab. If Moscow is celebrating what America is doing, Isn't that just plain bad?

Not to sound like too much of a civilian here, but isn't that just a really good litmus test? And if you're seeing people like Medvedev and others celebrating what happened on Friday and celebrating the direction that the Trump administration is taking policy in this war, isn't that a sign that things are going in a bad direction? And Chris, I'd love for you to contend with that.

And in Washington, White House officials have made it clear that it is up to Zelensky to apologize if there is going to be any chance of a U.S.-Ukraine mineral deal. The president believes Zelensky has to come back to the table and he has to be the one to come and make it right, one official told NBC News.

So, I just want to underline it for people that are coming new to this. What you're saying is, what appears like Trump's seeming sympathy toward Putin and Russia is actually a strategic move to pull Russia toward America and away from China.

Es gab einen wirklich brillanten Artikel, den Matt Continetti über Trumps Außenpolitik-Revolution vor einer Woche in der Freien Presse geschrieben hat. Und ich möchte euch ein Paragraph lesen, weil ich denke, dass es einige der Dinge, die wir sehen, aufsammelt. He basically is trying to capture what I view as the most intense debate going on right now on the political right.

And, you know, usually the terms that are used are like neocon, isolationist. He uses two words that I think are more neutral and I actually think more effective. He says, »On one side of the fight are the so-called primacists, who insist that American leadership and greater defense can save or revive the post-war order.«

On the other side are the Restrainers, who counter that America should reduce its overseas commitments and adopt a balance of power diplomacy toward China and Russia. Primacists tend to be hawks and are often disparaged incorrectly as neocons. Restrainers are doves, and Trump is siding with the Restrainers for the moment.

Do you guys think that that is a fair... Because I think what we're seeing is basically the... Dominance of the Restrainers, at least for now. You could argue that it's weird to see Rubio, who was absolutely a Primacist up until about five minutes ago, join that camp. But I think that's very much what we're seeing. And to me, maybe I'll be very humbled here.

I think the jury's out on whether or not that's true. But I think for those of us who are inclined to be Primacists, Es ist sehr schwierig, nicht nur die 50 Minuten am Freitag zu sehen, sondern auch die generelle Richtung der Dinge. Und nicht zu fühlen, als ob wir eine Außenpolitik der Verschuldung sehen.

The Zelensky-Trump-Bust-up and the war in Ukraine in general is one of those critically important subjects where people we respect, including inside the Free Press Newsroom, passionately disagree. Nun, es gibt viele andere Podcasts und Outlets, die nur einen starken Blick auf diesen Thema geben.

Einen Sinn, für den die amerikanische Hegemonie nicht gekämpft werden kann, weil es bereits vorbei ist. Und wir müssen die Realität akzeptieren. Ich versuche, ihre Position zu artikulieren. Und die Realität ist eine Art der Welt der Sphären der Einfluss.

And one in which we don't get the luxury of having intense conflicts with Russia, Iran and China, but one in which we kind of have to choose and we're choosing China. Am I articulating that properly, Bhatti? I'm asking you that because I think of you as more of a restrainer, but correct me if I'm wrong.

I gotta push back on this. The idea that it's a border... First of all, I don't think anyone on any side of this would characterize the level of destruction and death as a border dispute. I mean, it's been just a profoundly tragic... Whatever side you're on here, a profoundly tragic and horrible war. Let me make the case for you.

Aber es ist unsere Überzeugung, auf diesem Show und bei der Freien Presse, dass der einzige Weg, dass wir die Wahrheit über diesen oder irgendeinen anderen Thema finden können, ist, sich ernsthaft mehrere Perspektiven auszusehen, die in guter Glauben von Leuten, die wir respektieren, auszusprechen. Die Unterschiede in der Meinung beginnen mit der Frage, was wir genau am Freitag gesehen haben.

If we're wanting to put the ordinary American at the center of this, is the ordinary American better off If we appease a tyrant that does not simply want to have control of the Donbass and Crimea, but has a much more expansionist view of sort of imperial designs, let's call it, on that part of the world. Wenn China wirklich unser Hauptverteidiger ist, was für ein Zeichen schickt sich das an Xi?

Was für ein Zeichen schickt sich das an China, das sich gegen Taiwan bewegen möchte? Und was sind die folgenden Auswirkungen dieses Konflikts? Und viele, viele weise, klare Experten, die viel mehr zu diesen Bewegungen angewiesen sind als wir, sagen, es könnte passieren. Die Folgen davon sind großartig. Das ist eine tolle Frage.

Vielleicht sagst du, Barry, das ist wie die alte Domino-Theorie, wo du... Ja, bitte. Ja, bitte.

You might say they're a lesser adversary and less lethal and less threatening to us than Trump.

I don't disagree with you that a majority of Americans are not even just sick of this war, wondering what the hell it even has to do with us. Chris, do you want to jump in there or Brianna?

Was that Trump and Vance bullying a besieged, war-weary ally in public? Or were we actually watching the White House finally stand up for American taxpayers?

Und dann gibt es die größeren Fragen, wie ist Trumps Ukraine-Polizei ein langverdünntes Acknowledgement der Grenzen der amerikanischen Macht? Oder ist es eine tragische, unverzweifelte Fehler, die nicht nur unsere Alliierten gefährdet, sondern vielleicht auch das Heimatland selbst? Und was sind die Chancen an diesem Punkt einer Frieden mit Ehren für die Ukraine?

Das war vielleicht der beste Kapsel-Argument von Stielmann aus dieser Perspektive. Warum ist es so, dass die Ansicht, die du ausdrückst, so... Ich weiß nicht, ob das Wort ausdrücken das richtige Wort ist, aber es ist so eine sehr unpopuläre Sache, die man ausdrücken muss. So viel so, dass man es nicht wirklich ausdrücklich in anderen Orten als Twitter sieht. Ja.

Heute haben wir ein Grupp von Leuten zusammengebracht, die all diese Fragen anders beantworten. Free Press-Columnist Batya Agersargon, Democratic Fundraiser and Strategist Brianna Wu and special guest Christopher Caldwell, author of multiple books, including The Age of Entitlement.

Warum ist das eine Perspektive, die Leute so aus der Linie und so außerhalb des Weißen betrachten würden?

Aber was steht im Tabu?

Peter Thiel sagte etwas in einer Konversation mit mir, kurz nach der Wahl, das wirklich mit mir bleibt, wenn man über Außenpolitik und die Möglichkeit einer Art der 3. Weltkrieg denkt. Und er hat immer so eine orthogonale Perspektive auf alles. Und eines der Dinge, die er in dieser Konversation gesagt hat, war wirklich darüber, wie wir für das allererste Ding reichen. Also es ist wie World War II.

ist die Art und Weise, wie wir über alles denken. Oder man könnte sagen, in diesem Fall ist die Kolden War die Art und Weise, wie wir über alles denken, die gerade vorhanden ist. Und er machte den Fall, dass, ich weiß nicht, vielleicht sind wir in einer eher pre-Kolden-War-1-Type-Periode.

Und ich frage mich, ob das ein bisschen so ist, was hier passiert ist, wo, weil die Framework der Kolden War über eine Art und Weise war, you know, marshalling the English language and sending it off to battle. It was about the evil empire.

It was about using rhetoric and supporting dissidents and freedom fighters that maybe, at least I'll speak for myself, like the first political event of my life. I was two and a half and I went with my parents to the march to free Soviet Jewry. And like that whole movement had such an impact on me and the way that I see the world. And the notion that

Wir haben keine Art von, ich glaube, Moral, die unsere Außenpolitik außer unseren eigenen Selbstinteressen einfügt. Ich denke, das macht mich sehr ungeheuer und fühlt sich für mich sehr nicht amerikanisch an. Hört das auf?

But I think a crucial phrase there is Western values. I was one of the people during the Arab Spring. I had up some flag on my desk at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I was like, democracy is coming, guys, to the Middle East. What a fool I was. What an absolute fool I was. I mean, because it's not, what is democracy? What is a vote if it's, you know, if it ushers in Hamas?

You know, Gaza had a vote and look what happened there. So I do think that, you know, Brianna, I resonate with so much of what you're saying, but then I also have been humbled by the reality of the past 20 years of our foreign policy. And I can't kind of ignore that.

From the Free Press, this is Honestly and I'm Barry Weiss. It's been four days since the diplomatic earthquake between President Trump, Vice President Vance and Ukrainian President Zelensky went down in the Oval Office.

I mean, look at what Apple just did.

And the free press is one of them. Our merch store, powered by Shopify, has everything important you need to rep the free press, including our TGIF socks, wear them every Friday, and our free press hats. Shopify helps us manage inventory, run promotions, and arrange things smoothly. Even our newest team members can take charge.

Das ist ein Thema, an dem ich wirklich etwas weiß. Ich muss meine Senior-These herausfinden. Aber ich habe unter diesem brillanten Mann studiert. Wir stimmen sehr stark gegen Politik, aber er war so ein guter Professor, dass ich es damals nicht wirklich wusste. Sein Name ist Sam Moyne. Leute können sein Werk anschauen.

auf die Art und Weise, wie die Menschenrechte, die ich als Erwachsener bezeichnete, einfach in die amerikanische Außenpolitik gebraten wurde. Seine Arbeit und das, worauf ich mein Thesis gemacht habe, handelt es sich um die Erkennung davon, wie das tatsächlich geschehen ist und sich dann so mächtig in der Kölner Kriege ausgesprochen hat.

Das ist eine längere Diskussion für einen tieferen Zeitraum. Ich denke, wo ich mich einigen möchte, ist, wenn ich alle von euch frage, ob oder nicht das unverdünnt sein kann. Ist da ein Off-Ramp hier für Zelensky? Ist da ein Weg, dass er Dinge kurz vor dem Gehen, oder vielleicht braucht es das Gehen, vor dem Präsidenten der Vereinigten Staaten?

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Chris, ich denke, vielleicht fühlt Zelenskyj, dass die USA kein wertvoller Verein sind, aber der Fall, den du in deinem Buch machst, ist, dass so viel wie Keir Starmer und Macron und alle Europäer aufstehen wollen, gibt es einfach kein Verhältnis für die Vereinigten Staaten. Zelenskyj kann es ohne uns nicht machen.

Well, Batya Ungar Sargon, Brianna Wu, Christopher Caldwell, thank you so much for joining me.

Always a pleasure. Vielen Dank fürs Zuhören. Ich hoffe, was Sie in dieser Konversation gehört haben, war nicht nur ein guter Glaubensunterschied, sondern auch uns, die laut denken. Und ich spreche für mich selbst. Das ist ein Thema, über das ich mich über die letzten drei Jahre sehr begeistert habe. Und ich fühle mich, als würde ich meine Vorhersagen im Alltag wiederholen.

Ich kann schrecklich fühlen, aber auch gut. Vielleicht fühlst du dich in der gleichen Weise. Und wenn du das tust, dann ist es auch gut. Wir sehen uns nächstes Mal.

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The ones that make selling and buying simple. For millions of businesses, that company is Shopify. And the free press is one of them. Our merch store, powered by Shopify, has everything important you need to rep the free press, including our TGIF socks, wear them every Friday, and our free press hats. Shopify helps us manage inventory, run promotions, and arrange things smoothly.

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Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash honestly, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash honestly, all lowercase, to upgrade your selling today. shopify.com slash honestly. Okay, Brianna, Batia, Chris, welcome to Honestly. Hi, Barry. Thanks for having us. Thanks for being here. So, we obviously have to start with Ground Zero.

And Ground Zero here is this extremely heated exchange. I would say, I've been alive for 40 years, I've never seen anything like it happen in public. Between President Trump Vice President Vance and Ukrainian President Zelensky. And I think those 50 minutes are a little bit like that dress, you guys might remember, that dominated the Internet a few years ago.

Was it gold and white or was it brown and blue? And everyone saw it differently and was completely... dass die Farben, die sie sahen, die echten Farben waren. Also möchte ich einfach anfangen, den Tisch zu setzen. Was haben beide von euch gesehen? Und vielleicht, Brianna, fangen wir mit dir an.

I was at a dinner on Friday night and this is all anyone was talking about. And I think the big question that we all had sort of sitting down, having just watched it, was who started it? War es J.D. Vance, der ein bisschen schuldig war? Denn für meine Karten auf der Tafel, ich fühlte mich, als ob Trump der Junge in der Raum war.

Er war meiner Meinung nach, es ist Freitagabend, er ist wahrscheinlich entspannt. Er, all die Termine des Deal, was er die rare earths nennt, aber die Mineralien, haben sich ein bisschen predeterminiert. Es ist eine Fotografie, es ist eine Formalität. And I really saw the conflict as being between Vance and Zelensky. And I think the big question is, who baited who? Batya, how did you see it?

The world is still reeling from the aftershocks.

Okay, offensichtlich eine riesige Menge da. Ich möchte ein bisschen tiefer in die Details des Deal gehen und auch die Meta-Implikationen, Batia, die du gerade besprochen hast. Lass uns einen Moment aufhalten. Und Chris, ich möchte dich hier einbringen. Viele Leute haben das Video gesehen und fühlten das Gegenteil von dem, was Batia gerade gesagt hat.

Not that the president and the vice president were standing up for the American taxpayer, but they were dressing down, even if he wore the wrong clothes, even if he should have had a translator, even if he was a little bit rude, that fundamentally what we were watching was the dressing down of a war-weary besieged ally in public.

And it looked to a lot of people like strong people punching down against a weak person. You wrote, Chris, in the Free Press today this. Zelensky had played a Trumpian trick, which I want you to explain, but he won a Trumpian victory and for now it looks like a Pyrrhic one. So break it down for us.

What you stipulated in this article is that, you know, Zelensky and Trump, it's kind of like the perfect litmus test. People that love Trump hate Zelensky. People that love Zelensky hate Trump. But what you point out is that other than Trump himself, Zelensky is the most Trump-like leader on the political scene. So talk to us about that and how you saw those 50 minutes.

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The cost to reputation and social status and prestige, I think for a lot of American Jews, felt too high. They wanted to be in the right clubs more than they wanted to stand up for the truth.

Hell yeah! I'm Barry Weiss, and I am thrilled to be here with you tonight. Did you guys know that Joseph Stalin could sing with perfect pitch? Or that he was so scared of his wife that he would hide from her in the bathroom? Did you know that Peter the Great liked to surround himself with a lot of naked dwarves?

I think the subtext behind what you just said, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that's sort of the ugly way that history is made. And yet there's one country in the world for whom that ugliness has not been forgiven. Am I putting that in an elegant way?

That's your business.

No, no, what... But you also do write novels.

Did you know that Catherine the Great, long smeared as a nymphomaniac, was actually a lovelorn monogamist? Or that King Herod's genitals once exploded with maggots? Most historians bore you with dry accounts of battles and treaties, and honestly, I don't remember any of it. But not my guest tonight, not Simon Sebag Montefiore, who writes 900 pagers that you cannot put down.

I love this idea of giving history sort of a holiness or a sanctity. If we wind back the clock to 2016, and maybe we'll start to hear some things like this again on cable news, maybe it's happening right now on MSNBC, the comparisons were being made to the 1930s. This is the 1930s, and Trump is a kind of neo-Hitlerian figure.

Other historians, I'm thinking of, you know, Walter Russell Mead has compared this era to a kind of pre-World War I era. Neil Ferguson, a free press columnist, has said it's a kind of new Cold War that's starting to get very, very hot in places. At the risk of sort of forcing you to make a crude comparison to this moment, What does this moment remind you of?

Because everyone's sort of reaching for a way to explain it. And the only way they seem to be able to do that is to look to the past.

But... Well, let's just touch on it. Yay or nay? What did you think that was? We're talking about Elon Musk, of course.

Nay. Okay.

And I think that my view on the last election was... And I think one of the things that's so amazing about that incident is the people that were most up in arms about it have had either nothing to say about the explosion of anti-Semitism over the past year and a half especially. But... Or they have literally apologized for it. So like, forgive me if I'm not tearing my hair out.

I fully agree with that. I also wonder, just thinking about the ways that words have been leeched of their power, I wonder if the Jewish community sort of made the mistake of calling. I remember that when I was 16 or 17 years old,

that Hebe magazine, which was like this kind of dirtbaggy, really fun, I don't know, radical magazine, that the ADL put out a press release about how it was a danger to the Jews, it was made by Jews, because it was anti-Semitic. And now looking back, it's not only quaint, it's sort of tragic.

Maybe the ways that we overuse that word, and now that we're in a moment where we so need it, it doesn't feel available to us in the same way.

Sebag is one of the most important historians alive today. His many books, like Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great, to name a few, are essential to understanding power, politics, revolution, dictatorships, and above all, human nature. Most of his books are biographies of people, but Jerusalem is a biography of a city.

Why do we want to do that?

I wonder if there is an analogy to the following situation. If you go and walk through the University of Pennsylvania or Yale or Harvard or Princeton or some of the greatest museums in the world, which are in this city, or you look at the people that founded organizations like Human Rights Watch, and I could go on. You guys get the picture. These are Jews who have donated, who have

A city, as he writes, that is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions, and the only city to exist twice, in heaven and on earth. The book takes you through Jerusalem's 3,000-year history, from King David to Bibi Netanyahu. It is a must-read. It has sold more than a million copies, many of them in China, which we're going to learn about.

poured themselves into these institutions, in many cases founded the institutions themselves. And yet right now those institutions are playing host and are in fact dominated by a profoundly anti-Jewish ideology. Has there ever been, in your language, a ruling class that has overseen their fortunes so poorly as the American Jewish community over the past several decades?

Because I don't understand the impulse to suicide.

Is that the nature of things, though? I guess that's what I'm getting at. Is this just sort of the tragedy of history, the tragedy of institutions as they start out with one mission, they inevitably drift, they inevitably decay, people then go and start new ones? Or is there something unique and particularly rotten that happened here that we're now seeing in full?

And it has just been reissued in paperback. With the ceasefire deal underway in Israel, with Trump, I think, 72 hours into being president again, I could not think of a better person to talk to than Sebag. So, Simon Sebag Montefiore, welcome to Honestly.

So it's like we're jealous of jihadis?

So, given your study of history, do you think that we would be a healthier, more self-confident society if we had a religious revival?

This is a perfect transition to talking about Jerusalem. The word was carved into your ancestors' bed. Sir Moses Montefiore, people who have been to Jerusalem will, of course, know the windmill in that beautiful area of the city. Tell us, let's start personal. What is the meaning of Jerusalem to your family? You're wearing a ring on your finger that has the word, Yerushalayim, carved into it.

Tell me, take us into your family.

It's great to see you too.

Exactly. So we saw each other the afternoon of the election.

What did he write about it? Tell me about it.

We did call it right. But neither of us had the cojones to go on Twitter and say we think Trump's going to win. But we both acknowledged to each other privately that we thought Trump was going to win. And I think the feeling that both of us felt that day was a kind of nauseous anticipation and a sense that something big was coming.

As you were talking before, you said he foresaw a world where Jerusalem was just at the center of life for the Jewish people, meant so much to the Jewish people. The Jewish people have yearned for Jerusalem for 2,000 years. We are living during a time of just an unbelievable historical anomaly, where Jews have returned to political sovereignty. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about how

how, I would say, miraculous it is that we're alive for that. I don't know if that's too religious a word. And also, if you could reflect a little bit on what being powerless as a nation, as a people, for 2,000 years has done to the Jews.

Because that seems to me to be something quite exceptional, to sort of maintain our status as a people, devoid of land and devoid of political power, only to return to it.

Exploding genitals for one second.

And I don't think either of us felt like the big thing was Trump, but something maybe beyond him on the horizon. Can you maybe take us back to that conversation and take us to like how you felt on the eve of his election and how you're feeling today and what you think it portends?

And a tyrant, though.

But maybe let's talk about that a little, because it seems to me that so many of the paradigms that I grew up with, the two-state solution, land for peace, the idea that both the Israelis and the Palestinians fundamentally wanted the same thing, all of that is shattered or let's just say uncertain.

Is the reason for that because we were putting sort of a Western gaze or a Western paradigm on a profoundly anti-Western environment?

Let's go deeper and be explicit. Do you mean like UNRWA when you're referring to that?

So the UN draws the borders in 1947, just to gloss the history. The Israelis accept the partition. The Palestinians reject it. A war... you know, of many Arab states begins. There have been tons of wars since then. I just want to, like, draw you out a little bit more when you're saying that there are international organizations, because you said a pretty radical thing, an important thing.

You're saying there are organizations that exist in the world to keep the conflict going and to keep Palestinians immiserated.

But there's no UN organization specifically dedicated to those refugees.

Draw that out a tiny bit more. I'm imagining some of the Columbia students that took over Hamilton Hall and were calling it a human rights violation that they didn't get their gluten-free crackers. They would be shocked to find out that they have some philosophical or political DNA with crusaders. So just a few more sentences on that one.

One of the things that I think is the result of people not knowing history is that they take kind of a very American rubric and slap it on to a faraway place that they couldn't locate on a map. And I think if you went to the average Columbia student that found themselves

cheering, or I'll be more generous, you know, standing up for Hamas, sorry, that's what they were doing, they would say that the reason that they're doing it is because, again, to put it very crudely, they see the conflict as sort of whites versus blacks. Palestinians are American blacks before the civil rights movement or maybe even further before that.

And Jews, Israelis, are sort of like the white oppressor class. And this is a meme. It's really, really sticky and very powerful and something that you see absolutely everywhere. Obviously, it bears no relation to reality. But talk a little bit about, like, how do you dispel that kind of thing? It is such a profoundly... compelling idea.

It's captured in a more erudite way in Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent book, The Message. And it's something that people, young people, are being educated to in our most elite schools. What do we do about that? How do you, like, you can't go up to that person and be like, read this book, when they're seeing every Twitter and Instagram, you know, slideshow that's giving them an opposite message.

You gave an interview recently where you talked about being unable to sleep. You were asked a question about whether or not you're ever able to take off your historian hat. You said no, and you said, that's the reason I'm having trouble sleeping lately. What is keeping you up? Is it the West? Is it Israel?

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But let's choose maybe a dichotomy that's a little more uncomfortable. Jews in Hungary report being safer than Jews in England. And that is a reality. What are we meant to take from that?

I guess the question I've been thinking about a lot personally is just, how do we learn to be Jews inside history? I feel that my generation wasn't necessarily given the tools, and we're now having to feel our way toward them. And when you're being a historian, you have the privilege of sort of remove an observation and skepticism, and you're looking back.

Yeah, that would be a word for it. But you're also a Jew living in 2025. experiencing all the things that we WhatsApp each other about. How do we be Jews in this historical moment?

And I say this as someone... And you said how they lost their instinct for danger.

I think a lot of people feel like the consensus politics that we grew up under, thinking about Clinton, I'm thinking about the idea that history had ended, as you sort of alluded to it, that liberalism and capitalism were obviously better and therefore were going to conquer the world, that now seems so naive. How did we get that so wrong?

That's such a perfect way to end, but I can't let you leave the stage without a quick lightning round, and I'm going to fold in some of your questions. What do you think of the hostage deal in two sentences?

I love this question from Barrett. What role might religion play in a world with superintelligence?

Have you gotten more religious over the past year and a half?

What was the first book that made you enthralled with history? I think your parents gave you Toynbee at like seven or something insane like that.

Your mother was an actress and also a writer. What did she teach you about storytelling?

Having studied so many evil people, what's your view of human nature, good or bad?

How did so many so-called experts tell us that we had come to an end of history itself? And that's so obviously, whether it's Trump here or Maloney or Malay or I could go on and on and on, people are enthusiastically electing those that stand for a very different set of values.

You wrote a book about speeches that changed the world that I think is incredible. You included Churchill, Lincoln, MLK, Bob Dylan, Cleopatra. What was the most impactful speech for you? The one people should Google when they get home.

If you had to go back and live in a different period of time, which one would it be?

I think Amazon or Hulu, one of them is making a TV version of Young Stalin. Who's going to play Young Stalin, and could it be Timothee Chalamet?

So if any of you are interested in playing Stalin, please talk to Seebeg after the show. Last question, what's your next book going to be about?

Favorite story in the Bible?

Simon Sebag Montefiore, thank you so much for spending tonight with us. Thanks for listening. If you learned from this conversation, if it challenged you or made you think differently, please share it with your friends and family and use it to have an honest conversation of your own. And if you want to support Honestly, and we really hope you do, there's just one way to do it.

It's by going to the Free Press' website at vfp.com and becoming a subscriber today. We'll see you next time. Hi, Honestly listeners. Barry here with a really exciting announcement. The world today, as you know, is confusing, chaotic, unpredictable, bizarre, times scary, at other times just absurd.

But chances are, whatever crisis is currently blowing up your phone, it's probably happened before, or at least a version of it. And there's so much we can learn from looking to the past. Thank you so much for having me. Before there was Russiagate, there was the Red Scare. Before there was Donald Trump, there was Huey Long and Andrew Jackson.

As George Santayana warned, those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it. So tune in every other Wednesday as we remember, rediscover, or learn it for the very first time. Do me a favor, pause me right now, stop listening to me, and go subscribe to Breaking History on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll be waiting. Go ahead.

I am seriously so excited about this show. Eli's brilliant. I learn every single time I listen to him and I read him. And I know if you love this show, you're going to love his. Thank you. Breaking History every other Wednesday from the Free Press.

visit CozyEarth.com slash Barry and use my exclusive code B-A-R-I for up to 40% off. That's CozyEarth.com slash Barry. If you get their post-purchase survey, mention that you heard about Cozy Earth from Honestly with Barry Weiss.

If you had to diagnose the psychology of America and the West right now in a few lines, what would it be?

They have borders.

Well, if you polled most Israelis, there wouldn't be a question. If you polled most Americans, and there are polls, the number of conservatives or Republicans, I'm forgetting the details, that would serve as higher than they are for Democrats, but they're low across the board in America.

I want to pick up on what you were saying about the return to normalcy, like the return to the mean of history, and this idea that the things that growing up I took for granted, like gravity, now seem up for debate, or at least not at all guaranteed.

I think that the expression that's been used so much in the American Jewish community since October 7, and really the whole diasporic Jewish community, is this sense that the old world is shattered. And people have been talking about how they felt like they were on a holiday from history, and that is over. I want to ask you about that phenomenon.

Has there ever been a people, ever, that had the luxury of being on a holiday from history?

Looking back, now that it feels like that age has come to a close and we're on the cusp of a new emergent age that we're not sure what it looks like, although I want to have you outline some of the characteristics of this new age, was there anything that we could have done differently to keep the golden age going? And where did we go wrong?

You don't mean liberals in a partisan sense. You mean it in the capacious sense of the word.

So, for example, just to articulate it, maybe go a little further, the idea that America is bad or evil or not the greatest, the most exceptional nation, that is an idea that I heard probably expressed in different language every single day that I was in college. And no one challenged it.

I think it's important to just underline why so many people did not stand up to lies, like the dumb one I plucked out, that America is a bad country, not worth defending. There's so many other ones. Why did people not stand up against those lies? It's because it was so... chic to go along with them.

From the free press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss. Have you ever gone on the internet and stumbled onto combos of words or perhaps non-words? I'm talking Dogecoin, the Shibu Inu one, Hawkcoin, or Bored Ape NFT. If those things sound like gibberish, don't worry, we're going to explain.

Trump said just before the election that, and I'm quoting now, crypto is one of those things we have to do. Whether we like it or not, we have to do it. Previously, he had said things like, and I'm grabbing just one of many things, Bitcoin, quote, just seems like a scam and I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar. Why did he change his mind?

Give us insight into why and how he changed his mind and who influenced him on this score.

Who would be the foot soldiers in that army, exactly?

They don't think about it. Yeah.

Do you credit Elizabeth Warren for turning Trump inadvertently or unintentionally?

But Armstrong says stories like SBF are the sideshow and that Bitcoin, or perhaps another crypto coin we haven't yet heard about, will prove itself to be as essential as the dollar. Today on Honestly, I asked Brian why he thinks crypto is the way of the future, how he navigates eager regulators, what he thinks about Elizabeth Warren specifically.

You met with Donald Trump shortly after the election. What did you guys talk about? Tell us about that meeting.

Let's pause on that for a second. You run the most important cryptocurrency exchange in the world. Your company is worth, how much is Coinbase worth today?

Okay, just a cool 80 billion. You couldn't get a meeting with Kamala Harris?

Why?

Like crypto is somehow perceived as like brand unsafe.

And Brian, when like the chief of staff would show up, what are they saying to you? Milk toast things or?

How about a lot of this?

So the Kamala Harris campaign was giving you the brush off then, you know, very, very different picture with this administration, I imagine.

So just to ask it one more time, you met with Trump after the election. Can you tell us anything that the two of you talked about?

Did you give him any advice on launching his own meme coin? Because presumably you met with him before you did that.

Okay, well, let's talk a little bit about that because there's many people in the country who do not pay attention to this enormous industry that you are in. But it came on their radar when Trump launched his own meme coin. And I got a lot of texts from people in my life saying, what is a meme coin? And that meme coin went from like $6 to $73 in two days.

And then that was followed on by Melania Trump also launching her own coin. Now, the vast majority of people who bought this thing at its height lost money. And a lot of people are left thinking, what the hell is this? Like, is this a grift? Should we understand this as like a fun commemorative coin? Do people think or do you think that this actually has real value?

Like, help explain this to a civilian who's kind of coming to this cold.

why he was so politically active in this last election, how MAGA's America First ethos gets along with the borderless, decentralized crypto zeitgeist, and if crypto is really as dangerous as some make it out to be. We also talk about the volatility of these assets and why that makes them different from gold, or if it doesn't. We talk about Doge, Elon Musk,

I want to just push back on the analogy that this is art because when I think about a great painting or a great song or a play or movie, like it has maybe intrinsic value as to loaded a phrase, but it moves you. It makes you think. It does something visceral. I don't see a meme coin as doing that at all.

Exactly, Brian.

And also, it's time to start learning them, because they exist in a new financial ecosystem, the world of crypto, a market that started just 15 years ago and is now worth more than $3 trillion. This new world has caught the attention of a lot of people, including President Donald Trump.

Some of it seems more to me like the Beanie Baby craze.

Fair enough. Jeff Koons, I guess, could be compared to the Trump meme coin and that might be a plausible comparison. Do you think it's strange? Forget the legality. Do you think it's strange for the president to be doing this?

OK, well, since Trump was inaugurated, the price of Bitcoin, the largest and most popular cryptocurrency, if people have heard of any cryptocurrency, they will have heard of Bitcoin. It hit it surpassed one hundred thousand dollars, which is unbelievable, basically doubled in value. And more and more people are treating Bitcoin like a legitimate asset class.

The problem is, is that right now, at least you'll correct me if I'm wrong, crypto is not really usable. Like people are still talking about use cases for crypto. I can't go into the deli or I can't go into buy a sandwich and use crypto. Explain the gap for me. Why am I not able to use it in that way in the real world? And when will I be able to?

Brian's recent meeting with Trump, and how the decision to keep politics out of Coinbase in the workplace was one of the hardest things he's ever had to do. I learned a lot from this conversation. Crypto is not my typical subject, as you know, and I found it extraordinarily fascinating. I think you will, too. Stay with us.

But it's almost like small-minded of me to ask, why can't I go into a 7-Eleven and use crypto? Because I also wouldn't go into a 7-Eleven and use a gold bar.

One of the tensions I see right now between like inside of the right, and I think that this is like a fascinating debate watching it play out, is the tension between sort of the nationalist impulse, the nationalist populace who want a strong dollar, obviously, and want America to win and, you know, are very, very invested in this idea of America first. And then...

The nature of digital currencies, which is about like freedom, frankly, from the nation state itself. Talk to me a little bit about how you see that tension. And yeah, we just I would love to hear you on that topic.

Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere, from self-driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming, and it's coming fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control?

So it's like we're not going to go back to tethering to gold, but actually in the future, five years from now, you wouldn't be surprised if we were tethering the dollar to Bitcoin?

One of the things that makes ordinary Americans skeptical of crypto is how volatile it is, right? I think it was in 2022, crypto lost $2 trillion of its $3 trillion in market capitalization. You'll correct me if I'm wrong. And I think if like the dollar had gone through something like that, we would all be like, stay away from the dollar. How do you, you know, but crypto obviously is siloed.

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So the people in your world and certainly you were affected. Most Americans weren't. But in a world where there was much wider, there was widespread adaptation of crypto, we all would have felt that. And I think that scares people away from it. What do you say to people about the volatility question?

I'm thinking about my mom listening in on this conversation and I just want to like keep her in mind as I ask you the following question.

I think that a lot of people will not understand like the comparison between a commodity like gold or ore or oil to gold. because crypto is a number on a computer. You know, it feels more like an idea. It doesn't feel like a real physical thing. Draw that out a little bit more. Explain why the comparison is correct.

One of the things that's hurt the broad brand, I know crypto is many things, but one of the things that's hurt, I think, public trust are the people that are now in prison. And, you know, companies like FTX, Binance, I'm sure there are other ones that you have in mind. Like, how do you overcome as an industry those kind of fraudsters that for many, like many people who hear crypto think of SBF?

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And that's just like their immediate connection. Do you think that that's beginning to fade? How do you move away from it? What do you say to people who say, yeah, cool, the underlying technology here might be awesome, but the whole industry seems awash with scammers and grifters?

A lot of our parents are still on those spam lists, Brian.

One of the other criticisms of crypto, and then I want to talk a little bit about your political evolution, is that it's used for just all the illicit things in culture, right? It's used for sex trafficking and drug cartels and like everything in like the darkest realms of society. And Elizabeth Warren obviously hits this theme a tremendous amount. Why is that wrong?

Like respond to that broad criticism. So like in my mind, there's sort of two core criticisms of crypto that seem to stick in people's minds. One is the fraudsters and the grifters like SBF. And the other is that the people that really use crypto are bad criminally people who we want, who we don't want to give access to lots and lots of money to be able to do the bad things that they do.

How much of crypto is actually used for the kinds of things that Elizabeth Warren is constantly talking about?

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After the break, Brian Armstrong tells us how he stood up against the mob in his own workplace by saying, no politics here. Stay with us. Brian, long before I knew anything about crypto, and I'm still a newbie when it comes to the topic that dominates your life, although I'm trying to learn more, you came on my radar because you did something really radical in September of 2020.

Now, given the vibe shift, it seems hilarious that this seemed so radical. But what you did is you basically said, no politics in the workplace. And if you want to bring politics into the workplace at Coinbase, you should go work somewhere else. you received a tremendous amount of blowback for this decision.

And I was sort of like going back and looking at your, maybe it's unfair to say it this way, and you'll tell me if it's not fair, but this political evolution really that you've gone through. Because I went back a little bit before that, and June of 2020, you sounded a lot like a lot of other CEOs and founders when you tweeted in the wake of George Floyd's death that, I've decided to speak up.

It's a shame that this even needs to be said in this day and age. But racism, police brutality and unequal justice are unequivocally wrong. And we need to work to eliminate all of them from society. So that's what you said in June. By September of 2020, you're saying no politics in the workplace.

Tell me about your decision to go from someone that was speaking out very clearly on political issues, and there was a tremendous amount of pressure on everyone to do that at the time, to someone saying, you know what, we're here to do business and keep politics outside of Coinbase.

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I was like... You're saying that that tweet that I read in June, that you were kind of blackmailed to put that out.

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Well, yeah, the playbook is the person wrong thinks and then the sort of the hounds are unleashed to go and find anything that will further discredit you now that you've added yourself as a baddie.

What do you regret most about that period?

When you did it, I cheered so hard. It felt like such a – I had left the New York Times that July and you put that out in September. I wonder if you experienced the phenomenon that I've experienced a lot of times over the past five years, maybe longer, of kind of what people say in private versus what they say in public.

100%.

Five, five years later, yeah.

What did you feel like before you hit send on that blog post?

Go to shopify.com slash honestly, all lowercase, to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash honestly. Brian Armstrong, welcome to Honestly.

Brian, there's a piece that I worked on a few years ago now with one of the most interesting, provocative, strange people on the Internet, Balaji Srinivasan. And the piece was a reaction to something that Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's longtime right-hand man, had said that year. I think it was 2022 at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting. And I want to read it to you.

He said, of course, I hate the Bitcoin success. I should say modestly that the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization. And Balaji's piece was extremely interesting because what he basically said was,

The reason that Charlie Munger thinks that Bitcoin or crypto is an enemy of civilization is because he implicitly identifies civilization with the Pax Americana, with sort of implicit American empire and the order that it erected in the aftermath of World War II. And here's what Balaji wrote. And I've gone back and reread this a lot of times. I think it's a very provocative vision.

He says this, that order worked very well for a time. It produced peace and prosperity in the Western world. It outlasted the Soviet Union and it gave rise to the digital revolution that's the driving force of our era. Not bad. But the post-war order is now showing its age.

It's no longer obvious, he writes, that America is a model for the world, that it should rule the world, that it wants to rule the world, or that it even can rule the world. I do appreciate, he writes, what the U.S. once was, just as I appreciate what the U.K. once was, or what Kodak, Sears, or Lockheed Martin once were.

Every great run, though, eventually comes to an end, and the world we were born into is not the one we are entering. And I've wanted to ask you about this for a long time because I do see this. I think that anyone with eyes to see would agree that the world we were born into is not the world we're living in or certainly the one that we are entering.

I'm really happy you're here. So Doge has uncovered a lot of insane things over the past three weeks. It's felt like more like three years since Trump came to office. But, you know, there's been like trans operas in Siberia and DEI initiatives in Kazakhstan.

But the question is, do we want to sort of, in my view, what Balaji here is doing is sort of accepting American decline and saying we're on the ruins already of empire, time to try and build, you know, from those ashes? Or is there a way to sort of harmonize Pax Americana and Pax Bitcoinia, as it were?

Or are they, as Balaji says, sort of is Pax Americana dead and Pax Crypto the thing that has to replace it?

But I don't think there's anything that's going to stick with me more than this image of a limestone mine in Pennsylvania where 230 feet under the ground in a cave – 700 workers process federal employee retirements using paper by hand, which are then stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes.

Okay, Brian Armstrong, in the last minute that I have you, we're going to do a quick lightning round. Are you ready?

Okay. How would you describe yourself politically in a word?

One word to describe Elizabeth Warren.

Is there a cryptocurrency you feel is undervalued at the moment?

Who's the single smartest person you've met in Silicon Valley?

Do you think Mark Zuckerberg's move to the right is genuine, opportunistic, or a mix of the two?

Elon Musk and Sam Altman have a long running feud. You know, both of them. Do you take a side?

Will the United States still be the world's hegemon in a hundred years?

And there is this incredible Washington Post article from 10 years ago about how it's basically a limestone cave version of the office and how all these people hate each other. Thank you so much for having me.

Americans know that fascism is bad. We grow up learning about why it's bad. Why do you think we don't have an education or a similar education about communism or socialism?

Generally speaking, like the average American will have a poster of, you know, Che on their wall, but they would never have a poster of Hitler.

Who is winning the AI war right now, China or America?

Do you think Elon Musk tweets too much?

Brian, what's the most important book you've read that has shaped your thinking, book or thinker that you'd recommend that other people check out?

Okay, well, Brian Armstrong, thank you so much for making the time.

Thanks for listening. If you like this conversation, if it introduced you to things you had never heard of, or if you know a ton, but it made you think differently about crypto, doge, or the nature of art, that's great. Share it with your friends and family and use it to have an honest conversation of your own. Last but not least, if you want to support Honestly, there's just one way to do it.

It's by going to the Free Press' website at thefp.com and becoming a subscriber today. We'll see you next time.

And then this other world, which is the world of the private sector, most notably the private sector in Silicon Valley, that is Lightspeed AI, crypto, blockchain, blood boys, rockets into outer space, the future, right? And these are the two largest employers in America. And now they have met inside this new MAGA Trump coalition in Washington. And I wanted to start by asking you,

if you think this merger marriage is working, and what you think of this sort of strange split-screen reality coming into one frame.

Since coming to office, Trump has appointed a crypto czar, floated the idea of a national crypto stockpile, and launched his own meme coin, as did first lady Melania.

Do you think that America was freer 100 years ago than it is today?

They reportedly made $100 million in just trading fees so far. To top it off, he's taking calls from the biggest names in the business, one of which is our guest today, Brian Armstrong. Brian is a 42-year-old San Jose native who changed the nature of commerce, not only in America, but all over the world. That's because he founded the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase in 2012.

I think some people who are watching what Doge is doing right now in Washington are like, their minds are blown. It seems absolutely insane. It seems revolutionary. But you can make an argument that actually what they're doing is just trying to chip away and trying to return government to what had been its rightful place.

Peter Thiel once said that people in DC are completely backwards. They don't understand any of the technology. And even to the extent that they can, it can't be stopped. Do you think that's true?

Like Signal, like you're talking about things like Signal.

So you're bullish on the idea that Doge, led by Elon, can drag the federal government into, I don't even know if it's the future, but the present.

It's now the largest crypto exchange in the world. To some, he's doing something as revolutionary as building rocket ships that go to Mars by bringing us into a new digital and financial age. To skeptics, he's growing an industry riddled with scammers, grifters, and even criminals.

Let's stick for a second on politics and Washington. Your company, Coinbase, invested heavily in this past election cycle. And you'll correct me if I'm wrong, Brian, but spending through pro-crypto packs like Fair Shake. And I think the breakdown is something like double the amount of money went to Republicans.

And the obvious question is, why are Republicans more inclined to see the world the way that you do or more inclined to be favorable toward crypto than Democrats?

But as this episode goes live, Kfir, Ariel and Shiri Bibas won't be returning home alive. Hamas instead will be handing over their remains.

Lassen wir uns vielleicht einen Moment über einige der Illusionen sprechen, die seit Oktober 7. zerstört worden sind. Denn es gibt viele davon. Einer von ihnen war für mich die Idee der Start-up Nation. Israel hatte, was eine unglaubliche Idee ist und zu einem großen Teil auch wahr ist, und trotzdem ist es der technologisch die wichtigste Land in der Welt, und sicherlich auch im Mittleren Osten,

was undone by people on motorbikes and handgliders. How are Israelis reckoning with the paradox of that? That like the most low-tech attack was the most brutal since the Holocaust in a country that prides itself on, well, I'm sure everyone here knows the stats. How are Israelis reckoning with that? And then I promise I'll talk about some of my shattered illusions.

Es ist jetzt ein bisschen erstaunlich, wenn man sich zurückzieht und schaut, dass Israel und die Israeliten glaubten, dass eine genocidale Gruppe ein Territorium an ihrer Grenze regieren könnte und dass das okay sein könnte. Wenn man das jetzt nur laut sagt, das klingt einfach verrückt.

Ich denke, wir... Und dann könnten sie irgendwie aus ihren genocidalen Intentionen mit Arbeitsvermögen verabschiedet werden, was die Idee war.

And the only place you could read about that at the time was memory.org, which I'm sure all of you read and subscribe to.

Exactly.

Mein Freund, Kommentar-Magazin-Senior-Editor Seth Mandel, erklärt, warum in der Freien Presse. Hier ist, was er schreibt. In einem besseren Weltraum würden die Gesichter der Bibas-Kinder überall sein. In dem Weltraum, in dem wir leben, sind die Gesichter von Bulletin-Boards zerstört.

Ich meine, es hat schon etwas verändert. Die Frage ist, Trump went on Twitter, said there would be hell to pay, sent a real estate guy from the Bronx who seems to have accomplished, arguably, depending on how you look at it, more than Jake Sullivan and any of these fancy pointy heads over the past few years. Ich habe es in einer anderen Weise angeschaut.

Trump ist ein Typ, der wirklich Geld machen möchte. Und ich war mit Mark Dubowitz von der Foundation for Defensive Democracies gestern Abend und ich habe ihm eine Frage gestellt, die ich nicht erwartet hätte, dass es mir zurückgekommen wäre. Ich habe ihm gesagt, Trump mag Geld, Trump mag keine Kriege. Glaubst du, dass Trump noch einen Iran-Deal machen wird?

Und er hat gesagt, 50-50% Chance, dass Trump einen Iran-Deal machen wird und es wird schlimmer als der JCPOA. Ich denke also, dass vieles von dem hier sehr ungewiss ist. Es gibt Dinge, die von der ersten Trump-Administration phänomenal waren, wie z.B. die Abraham-Akkorde, die Übergabe der Embassy nach Jerusalem.

Es sieht aus, als gäbe es eine Normalisierung mit Saudi-Arabien und einer zweiten Trump-Administration. Was ist nicht zu lieben? Das ist phänomenal.

Aber es gibt auch andere Impulse, die zu Dingen führen wie, ich weiß nicht, Mike Pompeo von seiner Sicherheitserklärung und Sicherheitsvorschläge abzuschließen, die unprinzipiell sind und für niemanden gut zählen, weil es keine unterliegende, prinzipielle Weltanschauung oder Framework gibt. Natürlich können wir darüber sprechen, wer die andere Wahl war. Das war keine tolle Situation hier.

Aber ich glaube, das große Thema ist diese unvergessliche Unvergesslichkeit, nicht nur von Trump, sondern auch von der Welt. Ich fühle mich, wir haben das heute früher gesprochen, Das Zentrum hat sich einfach zerstört. Es ist weggefallen.

Und die Unorientierung, die sich dazu gebracht hat, nicht nur für Menschen, die sich generell als politische Moderaten identifizieren, und ich denke, viele Juden das tun, sondern auch für Juden, die das Zentrum brauchen. Die Juden tun nicht gut in einem politischen Kontext, in dem

von Tribalismus, von Extremismus, von Identitätspolitik, von rechts oder links, von Gruppenwissenschaften, die Konformität und Orthodoxie benötigen und durch Unterschiede bedroht werden. Sie tun nicht gut in einer Ära, in der Mobben populär sind und Mobben-Ruhe und Mobben-Gerechtigkeit. Und sie tun nicht gut in einem Moment, in dem die Leute von rechts und links

die für das Zerstören, das Zerstören und das Zerstören unserer regierungsbasierten, regierungsbasierten Ordnung anrufen. Und das ist unsere Realität. Also, es ist nicht nur die Israelis, die es in so einer intimen und hochpreisenden Weise fühlen, in den letzten 15 Monaten, aber ich denke, und es ist eine längere Periode als 15 Monate, aber ich denke, die amerikanischen Juden sind

eine Konfrontation mit der Realität fühlen, und eine Veränderung der Realität, die ich glaube, nicht viele Menschen erwarten, und die viele unbewusst haben. Weißt du, die Wörter, die jetzt klischee sind, diese Idee, dass unsere Weihnachtszeit aus der Geschichte vorbei ist, als ob die Juden jemals eine Weihnachtszeit aus der Geschichte bekommen hätten. Aber es fühlte sich so an, als wären wir es.

Die Verbrechen gegen die Bibas-Familie sind tatsächlich das Symbol des antizivilisierenden Verbrechens, das Hamas ist. Aber sie sind auch ein Symbol der Verrücktheit der politischen und kulturellen Führer des verleumdeten Westen.

Es fühlte sich wirklich so an, als wären wir es. Ich bin in einem Kontext geboren, in dem es überhaupt keine Tensionen gab zwischen meiner Judenheit und meinem Zionismus und meiner Identität als stolzer Amerikaner. Keiner. Sie waren alle harmonisch. Who can say that today? The world has changed.

So it's important to look reality squarely in the face, to not delude ourselves, as you were saying at the very beginning of this conversation, and then to figure out the right ways to protect ourselves, to protect our community, and also to protect the country that allowed for this tiny window that Jews for 2,000 years never been able to experience.

So that's, I think, a lot of what I'm thinking about. Und zweitens wollte ich Sie fragen, die Geschichte von Sally Busby zu erzählen. Und ich bringe sie hierher, weil ich wundere, ob Sie denken, dass sie sozusagen emblematisch ist für den Geist unserer Zeit, zumindest journalistisch. Das ist eine Frau, die der Middle East Editor war, als Sie bei der AP waren.

Sie wird dann Editorin des Washington Post durch diese Jahre von Demokratie, dem Tod und der Dunkelheit. Sie ist nun Leiterin der Reuters. Ich finde, sie ist ein sehr interessanter Charakter.

Es ist unmöglich für die Rest von uns, dass wir nicht gesehen haben, dass ein Teil der Gesellschaft, ob in der Person oder online, sich auf diese Linie überrascht und die Menschen, die zwei Babys verabschiedet haben, aufrufen. Baby Kfir, neun Monate alt, als er verabschiedet wurde, wurde er ein Symbol, weil er die Antwort auf jede relevanten Frage über diesen Konflikt ist.

One of the things that I have thought a lot about over the past year is, you mentioned how institutions like Harvard still has the Harvard name, the New York Times still has the really beautiful font, but the content of it is completely different. And yet the pursuit of truth has nothing to do with what Harvard is about.

Eine der Dinge, die mich als eine Tragödie der amerikanischen jüdischen Geschichte beeindruckt, ist der Fakt, dass es so viele jüdische Namen gibt, die sich an die Gebäude dieser Orte befinden. Museums, Universitäten, wir könnten weiter und weiter gehen. Aber was bedeutet das? Was bedeutet das? Ist das etwas über Juden, die in dieser Weise verursacht wurden?

Die Idee, unsere Unterstützung hinter Orte zu werfen, die Ideen kreieren, die uns im Allgemeinen entlasten? and seeming to either be ignorant about it or kind of okay with it? What explains that tendency?

Wie Seth schreibt, ist sein Fall der Krieg, der sich in der Essenz verbreitet. Kfir ist die dividierende Linie. In einem besseren Weltraum würde niemand auf der falschen Seite stehen. Before the devastating news of the Bibish children broke, I sat down with Mati Friedman, Free Press' Jerusalem correspondent.

Raphael Lemkin.

Vielen Dank fürs Zuhören und vielen Dank an Mati, dass er sich für diese wichtige Konversation gesetzt hat. Wenn ihr noch nicht das Werk von Mati Friedman gesehen habt, gibt es zwei Dinge, die ihr tun müsst.

Das erste ist, in diesem Feed zurückzusehen und die unglaubliche Konversation zu hören, die wir hatten über Leonard Cohen und den transformativen Trip, den er zu Israel nahm während der Yom Kippur-Wahl. Das zweite, was ihr tun müsst, ist, auf die Webseite der Free Press zu gehen, wo Mati regelmäßig für uns über alles, Israel und den Mittleren Osten, schreibt. Wir sehen uns zum nächsten Mal.

We happened to talk on the very day that Kfir and Ariel's father, Yarden, was released after being kept in unimaginable conditions. Now Yarden confronts the nightmare that his entire family was murdered. We talk about the toll of this war. We talk about why returning the hostages is so fundamentally important to the future of Israel.

We talk about the rise of anti-Jewish hate, about how to be an American, Jewish and a Zionist at the same time, and about how all of us that care about civilization are waking up to a new reality in 2025. Stay with us. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere, from self-driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency.

Von der Freien Presse, das ist Honestly und ich bin Barry Weiss. Ich bin sicher, dass Sie sich die Bilder von Kfir und Ariel Bibas erinnern, auch wenn Sie ihre Namen nicht erinnern. Sie waren nur neun Monate und vier Jahre alt, als sie von Hamas verabschiedet wurden, zusammen mit ihrer Mutter Shiri, am 7.

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We're speaking here tonight, right after Shabbat, on a day in which three additional hostages were liberated from slavery, really is the word for it in Gaza. Keith Siegel, Ophir Calderon, and of course Yarden Bibas. Sie wurden befreit.

Und ich denke, der offensichtliche Ort zu beginnen, nachdem du gerade aus dem jüdischen Staat flog, den Herzl in den 1800er-Jahren vorgestellt hat und aus dem Opernhaus in Wien von seinen Freunden gelacht hat, er hat den letzten Lächeln, wie es sich herausstellt. Was ist die Mood gerade in Israel?

Es war unmöglich, es zu sehen und nicht zu denken an den Holocaust. Für mehr als 500 Tage haben die Menschen weltweit gebeten, dass diese Babys sicher zurückkehren. Und unsere Hoffnungen wurden am 1. Februar erhoben, als der vierte Teil der Familie, ihr Vater, Yarden Bibas, nach 483 Tagen in Hamas-Kabinett liberiert wurde.

Ich war im Israel im Januar. Ich war im Israel im Januar. Ich war im Israel im Januar. Ich war im Israel im Januar. Und ich habe mich einfach auf ihre acht, neun, zehnjährigen Mädchen eingedroht. Und was ich bemerkt habe, war, dass sie ein Spiel über Terrorismus spielen. Und wie sich von Terroristen verstecken. Und sie waren acht und neun Jahre alt. Du kennst diese Leute.

Und es hat mich in einer tiefen Art und Weise beeindruckt. Und natürlich haben sie in den letzten Monaten viel Zeit verbracht, ihre Sicherheitsräume aufzubauen, in ihrem Bunker zu bleiben, die Dinge zu tun, die für die meisten Amerikaner unvermeidbar wären.

Können Sie nur ein wenig darüber sprechen, was es bedeutet, ein Vater zu sein, zwei Zwischenbräuche zu haben, die in den Militär kommen, aber auch einen jungen Mann zu haben, von ihren Kindern, die zu Hirsch Polen geschaut haben. Du hast dieses unglaubliche Essay dieses Jahres für die Freien Presse geschrieben, das heißt »Why I Got a Gun«.

Gib uns ein bisschen mehr, vielleicht, wenn du es kannst, einen persönlichen Sinn, Mati, wie die letzten 15 Monate dich verändert haben, vielleicht als Eltern, die in Israel leben, und als Israelin.

Ich denke, es gibt ein paar Dinge, die mich überrascht haben. Eines, und ich bin sicher, dass viele mich für das naiv nennen könnten, ist die Anzahl der Blutdurchsage, die man in diesen Bildern sieht, von den Menschen, die um Arbel Yehud herum sind, zum Beispiel, um nur eines zu wählen.

Ja, eines der Kibbutzniks. Oder wenn man sich die Details von dem, was an den Leuten angetan wurde, zurückgibt. Ich denke, der Eindruck des Schicksals ist etwas, das ich intellektuell wusste, aber in einer visuellen Weise verstanden habe. Und ich denke, das zu beurteilen, hat eine sehr schreckliche Erfahrung gemacht.

And I would say the last thing that I'm beginning to sort of reckon with right now is the extent of profound anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiment on large parts of the American right. And that is something that I said on a stage probably a year and a half ago and I got heckled by the Jewish audience in the room, which was mostly center-right crowd.

And maybe this one is too, but I feel it's very, very important to bring up because a lot of the A lot of the liberalism on the left that came from the fringe into the mainstream of the Democratic Party began as a fringe online movement that a lot of Democrats and a lot of liberals waved away because it was just some crazy influencers online.

And woe to the people that still are telling themselves that. And still believe that the things that Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are saying will not make an impact on the right. Because they will. And I think it's profoundly important to pay attention to those things now. And that's sort of... It's weird.

It's like I've spent the past decade of my life so focused in so many ways on the excesses of the illiberal left. And over the past... Seit einigen Monaten fühle ich mich, als würde mein Blick auf das, was auf der rechten Seite passiert, jetzt wechseln. Jetzt stelle ich die Frage an dich.

Du bist viel prophetischer als ich, also ist es schwer für mich, etwas zu vorstellen, was dich über die letzten 15 Monate erschreckt hat. Was hat dich am meisten erschreckt?

Notably, the mastermind of that suicide bombing is one of the people that is being released as part of this hostage deal.

Hi, Honestly listeners, it's Barry here with a big end of year ask. By the end of 2024, in a few short weeks, we want to get to 1 million free press subscribers. That's right, a million people, 1 million. That's right, 1 million people who value journalistic independence and curiosity, and above all, who want a news source that reflects reality.

Give us like the 10,000-foot version. What is the fundamental conflict between Elon Musk and his various allies, Meta being one of them, and you guys? Like what is the disagreement fundamentally about?

For someone who's just sort of tuning into this topic, why is it important, Sam, that OpenAI has a for-profit arm or converts in the way that you've been talking about? Why is that essential to your growth?

Maybe another way to say it is like it's absolutely essential for the computational power to create.

From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss. Just a few years ago, as AI technology was beginning to spill out of startups in Silicon Valley and hit our smartphones, the political and cultural conversation about this nascent technology was not yet clear, or at least it wasn't clear yet to civilians like me.

You've said a lot of different things about Elon in recent days. You gave this interview at Dealbook where Andrew Ross Sorkin is sort of asking you how you feel about the conflict. And you say, sad. And you also say that you think Elon's companies are awesome.

And then he asked you, do you think he's going to use his newfound political influence to kind of punish you or punish OpenAI or punish his competitors? And you said in that interview that you thought he would do the right thing. How do you square that with what you just told me, which is that Elon's a bully? Bullies don't typically do the right thing.

Until now, much of this battle – for those of us who are like perpetually online and perpetually on Twitter, we have been following the conflict via like tweets lobbed, subtweets. It's all sort of been playing out in real time on Twitter for us to watch. OpenAI, though, has sort of been in, like, response mode sometimes or mostly kind of ignoring everything. That's sort of how I'd characterize it.

That changed a few days ago when you guys published this very, very long memo on OpenAI's website. And it's like a timeline going back to 2015, proving from your perspective that, you know, via emails and screenshots of texts and explanations of those screenshots and those texts that... Elon was open to OpenAI being a for-profit going all the way back then. I read all 29 pages.

For those who don't want to do that, they could go to ChatGPT and ask Chat to summarize it. Here's how ChatGPT summarized it. This article details the rift between Elon Musk and OpenAI's leadership, particularly Sam Altman, stemming from Musk's dissatisfaction with OpenAI's shift from a nonprofit to a hybrid for-profit model.

This feud is crucial, Chet told me, because it underscores the broader ethical dilemma of how AI should be developed and controlled, whether it should prioritize public good or corporate profit, especially as powerful AI technologies become increasingly influential in society in the economy. I thought that was pretty good. What do you think?

Anything you would add to it?

In the early days of OpenAI, the brand, like the way I encountered the brand of it was transparency and nonprofit. Like those were the things that it over and over emphasized. And the reason you said that you couldn't take any equity and the reason you took such a small salary is because you said, you know, I don't want to be conflicted.

I remember asking former Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Honestly in January 2022 if AI was just like, and this is actually what I said, the sexy robot in Ex Machina. I literally said to him, what is AI? How do you define it? I do not understand.

I want to always be motivated to do the thing that's best for humanity. The day after OpenAI launched in December in 2015, you described it to Vanity Fair as a nonprofit company to save the world from a dystopian future. You also said that trying to make OpenAI a for-profit would lead to, quote, misaligned incentives that would be suboptimal to the world as a whole.

I guess I want to ask, like, do you still agree with that, but simply you've had to adapt to the reality, which is that developing these models takes billions and billions and billions of dollars? Two things.

Naive how?

Do you think that we need a Manhattan Project here?

Meta right now, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's company, is also siding with Elon. A few days ago, Meta asked California's AG to block OpenAI from becoming a for-profit. And this is what they said in their letter. OpenAI's conduct could have seismic implications for Silicon Valley.

I cringe listening back to that because today, in the waning days of 2024, not only has it become clear what AI is and how to use it, ChatGPT, just to choose one example, averages more than 120 million daily active users and processes over a billion queries per day.

If OpenAI's new business model is valid, nonprofit investors would get the same for-profit upside as those who invest in the conventional way in for-profit companies while also benefiting from the tax write-offs bestowed by the government. This echoes what Musk said last year when he said, I'm confused as to how a nonprofit, which I donated to, somehow became a market cap for profit.

In other words, if this is legal, like, why isn't everyone doing this?

But for the civilian who's hearing, how does a nonprofit become a for-profit? What's the answer? It doesn't.

At the end of the day, Sam, who is going to profit most from the success of OpenAI?

Will you have equity or do you have equity or what kind of stake do you have in this new capped for-profit?

But it's also becoming clear what the political and cultural ramifications and the arguments and debates around AI are and what they're going to be over the next few years. Among those big questions are who gets to lead us into this new age of AI technology? What company is going to get there first and achieve market dominance?

10%.

I mean, you understand why. Do you get why people are fixated on that?

If you could go back in time, how would you have done this from the beginning? Like, let's wind back the clock to 2015.

How essential was Elon to getting OpenAI off the ground? Like if the Oracle also told you about this fight that would ensue with someone that you regarded as your close friend, would you have said, you know, don't need him, can do it myself?

I remember, I think it was the first time I ever saw Elon Musk was on stage at a conference. You were interviewing him. You guys had a wonderful dynamic. You seemed like you were really good friends. He has said some really harsh things about you. He's compared you to Littlefinger in the Game of Thrones. And he has most devastatingly said, I don't trust him.

And I don't want the most powerful AI in the world to be controlled by someone who isn't trustworthy. Why is he saying that?

I'm trying to put myself in a position of a former friend, a former co-founder of mine, saying those kinds of things about me. You seem relatively calm about it.

How those companies are structured so that bad actors with bad incentives can't manipulate this technology for evil purposes. What role the government should play in regulating all of this. At the center of these important questions, at least for right now, are two men, Sam Altman and Elon Musk. And if you haven't been following, they aren't exactly in alignment.

This recent blog post that went up on OpenAI's site said that Elon should, quote, be competing in the marketplace rather than in the courtroom. And the cynical view, of course, is to say, and you've alluded to this in this conversation, that Elon, who now owns an OpenAI competitor himself called XAI, is suing you not out of some concern over...

AI safety or anything else, but really just to get in on the competition. What do you say to that? Is the cynical view true? Is this really just a fight to be the first to dominate the market? Or is there... You should ask him. I hope, yeah, I hope to. I invited him on.

After the break, more with OpenAI's Sam Altman. We'll be right back.

Let's talk a little bit about AI regulation and questions about safety in AI. You're not just known as one of the most important AI CEOs, AI developers in the world. You're also a very, very well-known proponent of AI regulation.

And the cynical view here, right, is that in the very same way that you could cast dispersions on Elon's motives, you could look at the way that you have lobbied for AI regulations as a way to stifle competition and benefit your company. Obviously, you've heard that argument before. I'd love for you to respond to that.

But the argument that some of these startups are making, startups like – there's an AI startup called Hugging Face, which is an unbelievable name, the founder of a company called Stability AI. They're basically saying what Sam and the other big guys, the incumbents, are trying to do, OpenAI, Google, and Apple, is to kind of create –

basically asking government to kind of build a moat around you and stifle the competition through regulatory capture. What do you say to those people? And this is sort of like the argument between big tech and little tech. We can frame it in all kinds of ways.

What do you say to those people who are saying, we want to get in on the competition, the regulation that people like Sam and others at many other times are pushing for will hurt us and benefit them?

If you're here, it's not just because you believe in fearless old-school journalism for yourself. It's because you believe in it for other people too. You believe it's for the good of the country. Free pressers tell us again and again that we're not just a media company. We're a public trust.

I definitely – first of all, I don't even understand what we're talking about when we talk about superintelligence. You understand what that means and the implications of it in a way that I just don't. So that's number one. And number two, if this technology is as powerful as people like you and Elon and so many others that are closer to it say that it is –

Of course, I think it should be regulated in some way. How and when is obviously like the relevant question. How and when matters a lot.

Recently, Marc Andreessen was on this show. And he talked to me about his perception of what the Biden administration was trying to do around AI technology. He came on and made the argument and told a story, really, that he experienced. He says... that the Biden administration was trying to sort of completely control AI.

And what they were aiming to do was to make it so closely regulated by the government that in his words, there would only be sort of two or three big companies that they would work with and that they were trying to ultimately protect them from competition. Is that true? Do you know what he's referencing? Was OpenAI one of those companies?

They started off as friends and business partners. In fact, Sam and Elon co-founded OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, in 2015. But over the years, Elon Musk grew increasingly frustrated with OpenAI until he finally resigned from the board in 2018.

So OpenAI was not one of those companies?

You weren't like in a room with OpenAI and a number of, you weren't in a room ever with the Biden administration and other AI companies.

What was your feeling in general about the Biden administration's posture toward AI and tech more generally? You just said, like, you didn't think they'd have the competence to –

OK, that's like a perfect analogy to get us to the comparison that's often made, which is the comparison between AI and nuclear weapons. When Mark was on, I asked him to kind of steel man the Biden administration's perspective or steel man the perspective that this should be heavily regulated.

And he basically drew the analogy to the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb when the government failed. felt that it needed to make sure that this new science and innovation remained classified. First of all, do you think that that's a good analogy?

And if so, if it is as powerful as nuclear weapons, wouldn't it make sense for this to be not OpenAI and Gemini and Claude, but rather a project of the federal government?

That feud escalated this past year when Elon sued Sam and OpenAI on multiple occasions to try to prevent OpenAI for launching a for-profit arm of the business, a structure that Elon claims is not only never supposed to happen in OpenAI. He likes to remind people that a nonprofit transparent company should not become a closed for-profit one.

At the beginning of the nuclear age, we had people in this country who functioned almost like chief science officers, right? I'm thinking about people like Vannevar Bush who helped launch the Manhattan Project and came up with the National Science Foundation and kind of guided American policy for those first few like very crucial years of nuclear energy. Does that person exist?

Like, if we wanted to have someone like that who sort of understood the technology, had no financial stake in it, and could talk, whether it's President Biden or Trump or whoever comes after him, sort of the pros and cons, not just of the development of AI here, but the competition with China. Like, does that person exist actually right now in America? Like, could you be that person, arguably?

Don't you feel, though, that, I mean, what do you make of not just the political vibe shift, but the cultural vibe shift that we've been experiencing since November 5th? Like, if you made that argument to me eight weeks ago, I would say, yeah, Sam's probably right. Now it feels like a different country.

I don't know science. I just think that there's a shift in the direction of growth is a good thing. Technological progress is a good thing. Nihilism feels like it's passe and falling out of favor. Like I feel that change happening in a dramatic way.

Now maybe it's because I spend a lot of time on X and like a lot of it's sort of like fomenting there and sort of leaping from the online into the real world. So, you know, if you went and like talked to the average PhD student uptown at Columbia, I don't think that they would have the same experience I do because everything is so balkanized.

But he argues that changing its structure in this way might even be illegal. Now, on the one hand, this is a very complex disagreement. To understand every single detail of it, you probably need a law degree and special expertise in American tax law, neither of which I happen to have.

Well, one of the companies that I feel excited about, perhaps it's controversial to say this, but I just think the founder is one of the most interesting people in the country, is Palmer Luckey and his company, Anderle Industries. And OpenAI recently entered into an agreement with, with Anduril to develop AI with military applications.

Now, previously, OpenAI had had a prohibition against using its technology for weaponry. Now, with the caveat, of course, that you're concentrating on defensive systems at the moment, the sorts of things that could guard us against attacks like drone swarms, perhaps like what's happening in New Jersey right now. We don't have time to talk about that.

But what made you change your mind fundamentally about integrating your company's technology with into even a defensive weaponry system.

A year and a half ago when we were talking, part of our conversation was where the AI arms race with China was. I think now it's like well and definitively clear that we are very much in that arms race with China. And I think even people who worry about the power of AI in this country feel like, well, if it's a choice between us and China— It's got to be us. We got to win.

Spell out for us, Sam, in your mind, because I'm sure you're thinking about this all the time, like what it looks like if China wins the AI arms race. Like what happens to America? What happens to the world?

And do you think the possibility of that happening is a real one? Them winning?

How do we know if they are winning given how much they lie and also steal stuff from us?

President Trump talks a lot about, you know, peace through strength. Is the Sam Altman OpenAI version of peace through strength, we have to crush, get ahead and win on AI so it's not even a question that China could do whatever it wants?

But you don't need any special degree or specialization to understand that at its heart, this feud is about something much bigger and more existential than the business model of open AI, although that's extremely important.

Meaning if there's an arms race, we want to win, but we don't want the arms race, period.

You mean collaborate with our enemies?

Are we doing that right now? With China on AI? Like, you know more than I do.

If Trump called you tomorrow and said, hey, Sam, I want to make you AI regulation chief. You can do whatever you want in this position. What's the first thing that you would do? What's the most important thing that the person in that position would do?

Bias and censorship in AI is an enormous topic and one that we think a lot about here at the Free Press. And, you know, the most obvious example of this, the one that trended for days and everyone was laughing at, was when Gemini generated those images of, like, a black George Washington and, like, a trans Nazi, and it was hilarious. Yeah.

In a way, it was really serious because it felt like only the most sort of like exaggerated, hyperbolic, obvious example of a much, much deeper endemic problem, which is the bias that is baked into these technologies, both because of the people programming those technologies and because of the information that they're sort of scraping online.

At its heart, what this is really about is a fight over who will ultimately be in control of a technology that some say, if used incorrectly, could very well make human beings obsolete. So the stakes are low. Here to tell his side of the story is Sam Altman.

Talk to us about how you're thinking about it at ChatGPT because obviously the system that is closest to reality, it seems to me, will win in the end of the day. If a ChatGPT is giving me images of, you know, is telling me George Washington was trans, I'm like, I'm not going to rely on this. We don't do that. Okay, fine. But you understand my point.

How do you think about the problem of bias and how are you solving for it?

Is it possible to build a thing like ChatGPT or any other technology in this lane that we can't even conceive of yet that doesn't have a political point of view? Isn't that inevitable?

Do you believe that AI or chat GPT has a responsibility to fight pernicious ideas? Let me give you an example of what I mean. If you knew that by... putting your thumb on the scale and in the teeniest, tiniest way, you might be able to usher in a world where there's less racism, less anti-Semitism, less misogyny. And maybe it would even be invisible to people because they wouldn't know.

At a certain point, as we've just talked about, this is going to be, I don't know if this was Mark or somebody else, the control layer of all of our information.

How do you think about that?

We talk about where AI is headed, why he thinks superintelligence, in other words, the moment where AI surpasses human capabilities, is closer than ever. We talk about the perils of AI bias and censorship, why he donated a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund as a person who had long opposed Trump, What happens if America loses the AI race to a foreign power like China?

Sam, you've donated a million dollars to Trump's inauguration, and it turned some heads because in the past you've called him a racist, a misogynist, and a conspiracy theorist, among other things.

You've been a prolific donor to Democratic candidates and causes over the years, but now you say that Trump is going to lead us into the age of AI, and you're eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead. Is this a change of heart, a political evolution, a vibe shift inside of you? What's going on?

What's the vibe shift inside of you? We know that there's one going on inside Silicon Valley and one going on in the culture. How have you changed in the past few years?

Do you think growth and the growth of open AI and the growth of AI more generally is a patriotic duty?

I'm going to use my 30 seconds on a lightning round. Sam, lightning round. What are the drone things, what are the flying objects flying over New Jersey right now?

No, we're reporting on it a lot. I find it interesting that various electeds are saying it's the Iran mothership or China. Do you think Twitter has become better or worse since Elon Musk took control? Worse. You're having a baby. Yes. Will you let your kid have an AI friend?

Will you let them go on social media?

Will you let them have screen time?

What's your favorite sports car? You love sports cars.

Favorite movie?

Do you have any normal hobbies?

And of course, what went wrong and is going wrong between him and the richest man on Earth? We'll be right back. Today's episode is brought to you by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or FIRE. FIRE believes that free speech is the foundation of a free society. This freedom is fundamental.

You built a treehouse recently. I did. Why'd you do that?

Would you box Logan Paul?

Will we enter World War III in 2025? I hope not. What's your New Year's resolution?

Sam Altman, thank you so much for coming on Honestly.

Thanks for listening. If you liked this conversation, if it got you Googling or chatting things about Elon Musk, open AI, tech, government, the future of humanity, that's all good. Share this conversation with your friends and family and use it to have an honest conversation of your own.

I can't think of a better holiday topic than whether or not humans are going to become obsolete in the next few thousand days. Last but not least, if you want to support Honestly, there's one way to do it. It's by going to the Free Press' website at thefp.com and becoming a subscriber today.

Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, something festivus, and we'll see you next week for some holiday episodes that we love and that we're really excited for you to hear.

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It drives scientific progress, entrepreneurial growth, artistic expression, civic participation, and so much more. But free speech rights don't protect themselves. And that's where FIRE comes in. Proudly nonpartisan, they defend free speech and the First Amendment where it's needed most, on campus, in the courtroom, and throughout our culture.

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You may have read BHL in our pages ahead of the French elections this past summer, or perhaps you remember our reporting in the free press about how an ad for his new book, Israel Alone, was rejected from a trade publication on the grounds that it would cause controversy. You heard that right. An ad for a book about Israel would itself cause controversy.

Or perhaps you're familiar with one of the 48 books that Levy has written. Regardless, I urge you to pick up a copy of his new book, Israel Alone. It's a passionate creed decor about Israel and the tragedy of October 7th, starting with Levy's eyewitness account. He was on the ground in Israel the day after the pogrom.

From his unique humanist perspective, Levy analyzes what exactly Hamas did to Israel on October 7th and delves into how Iran, Russia, radical Islamist groups, Turkey, and China have played roles in and profited from this tragedy.

He weaves in his experiences from his first trip to Israel in 1967 and his meetings with Israeli leaders throughout the decades, including Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Shamir, and Yitzhak Rabin. The book addresses the worldwide eruption of anti-Semitism. over the past year and takes head-on the arguments for a ceasefire.

It's a deep meditation on Zionism and Israel, and I think regular listeners of this show will get a lot out of it. Israel Alone is available on Amazon and at local booksellers. If your local independent bookstore does not carry Israel Alone, ask them to order it. This ad is sponsored by Marty Peretz in honor of Bernard-Henri Lévy. Sam Altman, welcome to Honestly.

The last time we spoke, and I know you've given a zillion interviews since then, but it was in April of 2023, and it feels like a world away. ChatGPT had just launched, and people were just at the very beginning of trying to figure out, like in the abstract, what this technology was and how it might transform their everyday lives. And

Now, sitting here in December of 2024, ChatGPT is a household name. So is OpenAI, and of course, some of your competitors are too, like Perplexity and Gemini and Claude. And average Americans are using these tools every day, everything from math tutoring to debugging code to drafting emails, and it's very, very good at doing that.

Sign up for free and get our daily emails that gives you our view of the world and a view into the world of the Free Press in your inbox every morning. If you're already signed up, why not give a gift subscription to your friends and family members or anyone you think can use a good dose of reality? Okay, one more time.

Tell me about how ChatGPT and, I guess, AI technology more broadly has changed since we last spoke a year and a half ago and whether or not it's where you expected it to be today or further along.

Give me a sense of, like, how are you using the tool that you have helped create in your daily life? Like, the way that most people I know are using it, Tyler Cowen and lots of people who are, like, passionate early adopters, it almost seems to have, like, replaced Google for them. And it's just, like, a much, much deeper Google. Is that how it's working for you?

Wow.

What do you call it? Do you call it searching or is there a verb in the way that Googling is a verb?

in September, so just a few months ago, you published this manifesto on your website predicting the emergence of superintelligence in the next few years, or as you put it, and memorably, in the next few thousand days. Explain to us what superintelligence is. Tell us how we'll know if it's actually here and how it stands to change people's lives over the next decades.

Support us by going to the Free Presses website at dfp.com slash subscribe or click the link in our show notes and help us get to our goal of minting 1 million Free Pressers by December 31st, 2024. Thanks so much.

Okay, well, Sam, one of the reasons we wanted to have this conversation with you today is not just because we want to hear about the ways that AI is going to transform the way that we live and work, but because you're in a very public battle right now with your original OpenAI co-founder, Elon Musk.

And I think it's safe to say that most listeners of this show will like vaguely know that there's a conflict between Elon Musk having to do with this, one of his companies, one of his many companies. But they're certainly not following the nitty gritty details of the various lawsuits and of the conflict more generally. So I want to try and summarize it in the most fair way that I can.

And then you'll tell me if I've gotten it. wrong or where I've overstepped. So OpenAI begins in 2015, and it starts as a nonprofit. And in a blog post introducing OpenAI to the world in December of that year, you wrote this, "'OpenAI is a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company.

Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.'" Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. And this was a huge aspect of the brand.

Then, fast forward four years, in 2019, OpenAI moves to what it called a hybrid model with a for-profit arm that got a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft in that year. Since then, Microsoft has poured something like $13 billion—it might be a higher number—more into the company. And Elon was one of the co-founders, as I mentioned, since the beginning.

But his relationship with the company soured over time because he disagreed with the shift that I just described, the shift from this nonprofit model to a hybrid model. And he eventually leaves the company and steps down from the board. And that takes us to this year.

in which Elon has sued you and OpenAI on several different occasions so far this year, and he has given many interviews and posted countless amount of tweets or exes or whatever we're supposed to call them about this conflict. All of the lawsuits claim that you were in some kind of contract violation by putting profits ahead of the public good in the move to advance AI.

And then last month, and this is the most recent development, Elon asked the district judge in California to block OpenAI from converting to this for-profit structure. Okay, that was a mouthful. Did I summarize it properly? And is there anything crucial that I left out or misstated?

From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss. Very few people have worked closely with Donald Trump, gotten fired, and walked away with a pretty balanced view of him. But former National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, is an exception.

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14 days, 15 days.

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We'll see you next time.

They talk about his tensions with Trump, his understanding of Trump's worldview, particularly his foreign policy, and how Trump's rhetoric towards adversaries was actually good, despite being villainized by the press. And how, as General McMaster puts it, Trump can be so disruptive, he often interrupts his own agenda. They talk about what to expect a few days from now when Trump takes office.

Trump's current cabinet picks, the ones who HR sees as good and the ones who sees as less good. They talk about Trump's options for handling Russia, China, and Iran, and why HR is cautiously and surprisingly optimistic about Trump 2.0.

Yeah.

Politicians and prosecutors did their best to sweep it under the rug.

I think this is maybe a place where the two of you might see it a little bit differently. Julie is seeing things from a very consistent feminist perspective. You know, this is the nature of men. This is the kind of crimes that men in groups commit, and we shouldn't be surprised by it. But Ayaan, I wonder if you disagree about that.

To what extent does the fact that these are Pakistani immigrants—and I'm curious if they're sort of first or second generation— How should that inform the way that we understand the nature of the crimes and why there wasn't more of a sense of public outrage about them? Does their ethnicity and religion figure in here in a way that Julie maybe doesn't feel?

Journalists, at least many of them, skipped the biggest story of their lives.

A culture of silence came to envelop the United Kingdom. Why? Why did that happen? And who's to blame? And why are we talking about it right now?

As I mentioned before, your book Prey was one of the first places other than Douglas Murray's book where I came across some of these anecdotes. And I just want to share them with listeners because, frankly, reading about these over the past few days again, they were keeping me up. I mean, it takes a lot to keep me up at night. I read about a lot of bad things in a day.

So let's just share maybe two of these stories so people have a sense of what we're talking about. In the piece that we ran, the writer writes about one 12-year-old girl who's named Sophie. And she's molested in a graveyard by a man who's named Ali. And these are not their real names, I'm assuming.

A desk officer told her to come back to the police precinct with an adult when she was sober, and two men accosted her in the police station. Joined by a third, they raped her in their car. When they dumped her on the street, she asked a man named Sarwar Ali for directions. He then took her to his home, raped her, and gave her money for a bus fare home.

A man named Shaquille Chowdhury pulled up in his car then and offered to take her home. He abducted her and took her to a house where he and four other men then repeatedly raped her. That's one story. Here's another one. This is a girl who's called Lucy in Telford. Azhar Aleem Mahmood groomed Lucy Lowe from the age of 12 and impregnated her at 14.

He burned her alive in her own home with her mother, her disabled sister, and her unborn second child, who was also fathered by Mahmood, this rapist. If you went to the average British person, would they know about stories like this, Julie?

Let me just – let me set us up just for the listener who doesn't know who he is. Tommy Robinson is in prison right now. He is serving an 18-month sentence for defaming a Syrian immigrant. Robinson for years has been denounced by mainstream conservatives, even – Conservatives like the right-wing populist leader Nigel Farage, who leads the Reform Party.

But now there's sort of this relook at Robinson saying that he should be released from prison. I think I've got that about right.

The thing I want to stick on just for a second is the nature of why people are scared. Looking at this from the outside, I think there's good reason to be scared. In other words, when you're living in a country in which a member of parliament – and I'm thinking now of Mike Freer, I believe his name is – basically resigns from parliament because of so many threats to his life –

Because he has had the gall to do things like stand up for his Jewish constituency or stand up for Israel, had to walk around wearing a stab vest, had his office, I think, was the victim of an arson attack and ultimately thought, screw this, this isn't worth it. This is not worth my life, which is frankly a pretty rational conclusion.