Honestly with Bari Weiss The Free Press

There’s a new $6 billion-dollar industry. Its global market size is expected to increase to $100 billion within the decade. No, it’s not a fancy new app or a revolutionary gadget: it’s weight-loss drugs.
Just a few years ago no one had even heard the word Ozempic. Almost overnight, the drug previously used to treat type 2 diabetes became a household name. Healthcare providers wrote more than 9 million prescriptions for Ozempic and similar drugs in the last three months of 2022 alone. By the end of the decade, 30 million people are predicted to be on it. For comparison, that means that Ozempic is on track to do as well as birth control pills and Prozac—a blockbuster medication. 
A little over a year ago we had a fiery debate on Honestly about these revolutionary weight-loss drugs and our cultural understanding of obesity. On one side of the debate, people saw Ozempic as the golden answer we’ve been searching for. After all, obesity is the second biggest cause of cancer. It causes diabetes, and it’s linked to dementia, heart disease, knee and hip problems, arthritis, and high blood pressure, which causes strokes. In short: when you crunch the numbers, drugs like Ozempic seem to be lifesaving.
On the other hand was another argument: Why are we putting millions of people on a powerful new drug when we don’t know the risks? Plus, isn’t this a solution that ignores why we gained so much weight in the first place? In other words: Ozempic is not a cure for obesity; it’s a Band-Aid.
A year later, all of those questions are still up for debate. Our guest today, journalist Johann Hari, has spent the last year trying to find answers, traveling the world investigating weight-loss drugs, and. . . taking them himself.
In his latest book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, Johann investigates what we know and what we don’t know about how these drugs work, their risks and benefits, how our food system sets us up to fail, and how movements like “fat pride” and “healthy at any size” have completely altered the conversation.
So on today’s episode: How do these new drugs impact our brains, our guts, and our mood? What are the hidden risks? Are they really a permanent solution to the obesity crisis? Or are they merely a quick fix that do little to address the root causes of obesity? With over 70 percent of Americans today classified as overweight or obese and the average American adult weighing nearly 25 pounds more today than they did in 1960, how did we get here in the first place? And why aren’t we addressing that problem, too?
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The news lately has not exactly been a walk in the park. Iran launched hundreds of rockets at Israel, creating the prospect of World War III; we have Trump’s ongoing criminal trial; a TikTok ban; a war in Ukraine; and much of the Ivy League is now co-opted by Hamas. Should we go on?

Today’s episode isn’t about any of that. Because sometimes we just need a breath of fresh air. Cue the one and only David Sedaris—America’s favorite humorist, or at the very least, our favorite humorist.

You might know David from one of his bestselling books like Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Calypso. His words are frequently in The New Yorker, and he’s also just come out with a children’s book called Pretty Ugly, which he says has “no message.” 

David was on Honestly a few years ago—if you haven’t heard that interview, please check it out; it’s a highlight of this show—and he’s here again today to read an essay he wrote for The Free Press, where he imparts his thoughts on the underappreciated joys of small talk. We hope you enjoy.
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The United States is home to more immigrants than any other country in the world. It is a truism that everyone who lives here at some point came from somewhere else. At the same time, debates about who and how many people to let in have roiled the nation since our very founding.

And in the past few years, things have heated up to a new level.

That’s no surprise, considering that unlawful attempts to cross the southern border hit a record high of about 2.5 million last year. In the past four years, nearly 5 million attempts to cross the border illegally occurred in Texas alone.

We’ve all seen the videos of mothers with babies shimmying under barbed wire, of migrant caravans marching toward Texas, of young men charging Border Patrol agents.

It’s why immigration is the top issue for voters in the 2024 election. Indeed, the influx has made even progressive cities, which previously declared themselves immigration sanctuaries, sound the alarm. Last May, former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot said “we’ve reached a breaking point,” while declaring a state of emergency in her city. In September, New York mayor Eric Adams said the influx of migrants “will destroy New York City.”

All of this is the subject of our first live debate of 2024, which took place in Dallas, and that we wanted to share with you on Honestly today. The proposition: Should the United States shut its borders?

Arguing in the affirmative are Ann Coulter and Sohrab Ahmari. On the opposing side, arguing that no, the United States should not shut its borders, are Nick Gillespie and Cenk Uygur.

They also cover questions like: Is mass immigration is a net gain or a net loss for America? How do we balance our humanitarian impulse with our practical and economic needs? Do migrants suppress wages of the already strained working class? Do they stretch community resources impossibly thin? Does a porous border impact our national security? And what does a sensible border policy really look like?

We hope you listen, share, and discuss. 
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President Biden just signed into law a bill forcing the sale of TikTok by its Chinese parent ByteDance—or else face an outright ban. The measure was included in a bill providing a $95.3 billion foreign aid package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. 

Proponents of the bill cite privacy and national security concerns. TikTok, like all social media giants, collects piles of user data—and if requested by the Chinese Communist Party, ByteDance is obligated by law to share that user information. Critics also worry about political influence operations on the platform—a dictatorial foreign adversary turning our kids into little Manchurian candidates.

Opponents of the bill argue that forcing a TikTok sale under the threat of a ban is a blow to users’ free speech rights and represents an overreach of government authority. They insist that the government should not dictate which apps Americans can use, especially on opaque grounds of national security. 

Today, a debate: Is American national security at risk from an Orwellian app ultimately controlled by a totalitarian regime? Or is this just McCarthyism in digital form, a government-created moral panic fueled by dubious threats of misinformation? 

Arguing that the TikTok bill is a logical extension of our current laws—and a necessary countermeasure to authoritarian meddling—is Geoffrey Cain. Cain is the author of The Perfect Police State and senior fellow at the National Security Institute of George Mason University. 

On the other side, arguing that the bill is a dangerous overreach justified by flimsy evidence of an alleged threat, is Walter Kirn. Kirn is a novelist, Free Press contributor, editor-at-large of County Highway, and co-host of the podcast America This Week. 
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This weekend at Columbia and Yale, student demonstrators told Jewish students to “go back to Poland.” A Jewish woman at Yale was assaulted with a Palestinian flag. And an Orthodox rabbi at Columbia told students to go home for their safety. 

Demonstrators on these campuses shouted: “Say it loud and say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.” In one chant at Columbia, the protesters were heard saying “Go Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.” and “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.”

These campus activists are not simply “pro-Palestine” protesters. They are people who are openly celebrating Hamas and physically intimidating identifiably Jewish students who came near. We published the accounts of two of those students—Sahar Tartak and Jonathan Lederer—today.

Students—all of us—have a right to protest. We have a right to protest for dumb causes and horrible causes. At The Free Press, we will always defend that right. (See here and here, for example.) It is not, however, a First Amendment right to physically attack another person. It is not a First Amendment right to detain another person as part of your protest. 

The institutions that are supposed to be dedicated to the pursuit of truth have not only abandoned their mission—they have stood by and done nothing meaningful to condemn students who support terrorism, or to stop the horrific scenes of the past 48 hours. 

In fact, at Columbia they have done quite the opposite: on Monday morning the president announced that she is moving classes online. If that’s not cowering to the mob, I don’t know what is. Meanwhile, the NYPD has offered to help secure the safety of Jews on campus, but so far the president of Columbia has refused to let them on campus.

Since the very founding of America, this country has been a unique place for the Jewish people. That is because of America’s exceptional ideals and our willingness to defend them. 

But in the past six months these core American beliefs, once deemed immutable, have been challenged in ways that were previously unimaginable, as a rising wave of antisemitism and illiberalism have swept the country—a wave that was put on full display over the last few days, at the country’s most elite and prestigious universities.

Jews around the world are about to celebrate the holiday of Passover—otherwise known as the festival of freedom. But what does it mean this year to commemorate our freedom, when our freedom feels like it is contracting before our eyes? How can we defend the original principles that underpin our society? How can we find the courage to do so?

A few months ago, I gave a speech at the 92Y called “The State of World Jewry,” where I addressed these very questions. I argued that the state of world Jewry depends on the state of the free world. Right now, its condition is in jeopardy. Our holiday from history is over.

For those celebrating Passover, Chag Sameach. And as we say at the Passover seder, “Next year, may we all be free.”
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It was November 30, 2021, when Nicole Avant got a call in the middle of the night from her husband. The unthinkable had happened. Her otherwise healthy mom, Jacqueline Avant, was in critical condition at the hospital. She had been shot.

Nicole would soon find out that her mother had been having an ordinary evening at her home in Beverly Hills when a man broke into her home in an attempted robbery. He shot Jacqueline, and then fled the scene.

She died later that night in the hospital. Jacqueline was 81.

It was an unspeakable tragedy that would leave most people paralyzed, enraged and probably seeking revenge. But Nicole’s response surprised a lot of people. She decided that she’s not a victim, and she would forgive her mother’s murderer. 

She shares this radical sentiment in her new book: “Think You'll be Happy: Moving Through Grief with Grit, Grace, and Gratitude.”

For those unfamiliar with Nicole, she is someone who wears many hats. She served as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas under President Obama—and she was the first black woman to hold this seat. She's been a force in political fundraising. She raised more than half a million for President Obama in one night in 2012, and she was part of a fundraising team that raised $21 million for him in 2008. She's also a movie producer, which isn’t exactly surprising considering she was born into black Hollywood royalty—her father was Clarence Avant, the legendary music mogul who managed artists like Bill Withers, Sarah Vaughan, and Freddie Hubbard.

Today, she finds herself again a part of Hollywood royalty, just of more recent vintage. Her husband is Netflix Co-Ceo Ted Sarandos.

But unlike the British royals, Nicole Avant doesn’t put her views through a PR machine. She says what she thinks, and she doesn’t have time for b******t. All of which is why we were so eager to have her on Honestly today. 
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