Honestly with Bari Weiss

Love your content! Great thoughtful conversations.

November 2024 The show is OK when Bari does it. Michael Moynihan is awful. I heard the podcast when he hosted it and he badmouthed everyone in the GOP about “conspiracy theories”. He’s also whining about Trump’s meetings with Kanye West and other people. Just because Trump met with someone, it doesn’t mean he adopted their policies. Come on Bari, get control of the pod!! July 2024 I want to like this podcast and often it’s good. But Bari Weiss just isn’t objective. Two days after Donald Trump was almost assassinated she STILL kept calling him a “threat to Democracy” and used the “Whitmer Kidnapping Plot” in which it was learned that the FBI had provided funding and planning and entrapped the supposed conspirators. Do your homework, Bari, and stop the adhominem attacks!!

I love Honestly! I appreciate the variety of guests and Bari’s willingness to ask tough questions. However, I wish she pushed back on guests’ claims more. For instance, to support his sweeping proposition that all of science is corrupt and too dogmatic, Peter Thiel claimed that people are “not allowed” to question whether methane is more of a warming gas than carbon dioxide. This is an absurd claim—scientists and climate advocates CONSTANTLY raise that methane causes more warming in the short-term than carbon dioxide (although it doesn’t stay in the environment for as long). If this fact is not communicated widely enough it is because the “natural” gas industry has a strong PR campaign to frame their product as less harmful than carbon; it is not because scientists are too dogmatic. Despite Thiel’s incorrect claim, Bari said nothing. I’m involved in climate spaces, so I had the knowledge to immediately know his claim was false. But this made me worry about how many of his other claims are based on untrue premises that I can’t fact check.

Medicine has its problems (DEI and less rigor in medical schools, large portion of NIH funding going to identity politics studies). But few things have been more studied than childhood vaccines and fluoridation. The CDC kowtowed to the worried-well fluoridationists by lowering the already very low level of fluoride in community water, which did the opposite of what the CDC predicted: it created less trust in the public rather than more. That vaccines cause autism has been addressed quite thoroughly. The apparent “increase” in autism is because the official definition of autism has been broadened, i.e. the scope of the disorder was expanded. That Mr. Thiel is unaware of this simple fact makes me think he’s only been talking to Kennedy and his ilk. “Vaccine skeptics” are not true skeptics. As for scientist colluding…that’s pretty rare (outside of pharm) because there is no greater thrill in science than when your findings show fellow scientists have been wrong all along.