Episódios

  • They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.

    They Tortured Him for Years. Now They Rule Syria.
    Dec 17 2024
    Last week marked a historic turning point in Syria. Rebel forces seized control of the nation, toppling the regime of Bashar al-Assad and ending his family’s brutal 50-year stranglehold on power. For decades, the Assad dynasty ruled through unimaginable violence—launching chemical attacks on civilians, silencing dissent with mass imprisonment and torture, and presiding over a civil war that killed an estimated 600,000 people and drove 13 million into exile. In cities across the world, jubilant Syrians have celebrated the regime’s downfall, having deemed it to be one of the world’s most oppressive dictatorships. But not everyone is celebrating. Or at least, some people are saying there is reason for caution. That’s because the coalition of rebel forces taking control of Syria now is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a militant Islamist organization which originated as an offshoot of al-Qaeda. Its leader is a Saudi-born Syrian who calls himself Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. A 21-year-old al-Jolani left Syria for Iraq in 2003 to join al-Qaeda and fight against America. There, he was captured by the U.S. and put into Bucca jail, which housed some of the most notorious al-Qaeda prisoners. But since emerging on the world stage in the last week, al-Jolani has indicated that he is a reformed man, leading a moderated organization. He insists his al-Qaeda days and their methods—the detentions and torture and forced conversions—are over, and HTS is not going to persecute religious and ethnic minorities. But is it… true? Few people in the West might know that answer as well as journalist Theo Padnos. In October 2012, Padnos ventured from Turkey into Syria to report on the Syrian Civil War. There, he was captured by HTS (then known as Jabhat al-Nusra) and held captive for nearly two years. Throughout his captivity, Padnos endured relentless torture at the hands of his captors. He was savagely beaten until unconscious, given electric shocks, and forced into severe stress positions for hours at a time. All of this is to say nothing of the psychological torment inflicted on him. Today, he joins Michael Moynihan to discuss his harrowing experience, the psychology of jihadists, and what the future of Syria will look like under the leadership of his former captors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    56 minutos
  • Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

    Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?
    Dec 12 2024
    Kemi Badenoch just became the first black woman to lead the UK’s Conservative Party, the oldest in British politics, colloquially known as “the Tories.” She’s also 44, has three children, grew up in Nigeria, actually worked at McDonald’s (unlike some American politicians who have claimed to), didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge, and has a master’s degree in computer engineering. Not exactly your typical Tory party leader profile. But it’s Kemi Badenoch who has just inherited a Conservative Party that has dominated British politics for decades until Labour Party leader Keir Starmer became prime minister earlier this year. The Britain that Starmer inherited—the Britain that Conservatives like David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Rishi Sunak left behind—is a country with enormous debt, a shrinking GDP, a huge immigration challenge, and arguably a national identity crisis. Or as Free Press columnist and British historian Niall Ferguson has bleakly put it, “it seems that the UK has a national suicide wish.” Can Kemi Badenoch, the woman who has been compared to Margaret Thatcher, turn her party—and ultimately, her country—around? How will the rising star in British politics offer something different than the past five Tory leaders who served before her? And can she beat out not just the Labour left but also the growing threat from a very energized hard right? If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hora e 25 minutos
  • Marc Andreessen on AI, Tech, Censorship, and Dining with Trump

    Marc Andreessen on AI, Tech, Censorship, and Dining with Trump
    Dec 10 2024
    Democrats once seemed to have a monopoly on Silicon Valley. Perhaps you remember when Elon Musk bought Twitter and posted pictures of cabinets at the old office filled with “#StayWoke” T-shirts. But just as the country is realigning itself along new ideological and political lines, so is the tech capital of the world. In 2024, many of the Valley’s biggest tech titans came out with their unabashed support for Donald Trump. There was, of course, Elon Musk. . . but also WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum; Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who run the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini; VCs such as Shaun Maguire, David Sacks, and Chamath Palihapitiya; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey; hedge fund manager Bill Ackman; and today’s Honestly guest, one of the world’s most influential investors and the man responsible for bringing the internet to the masses—Marc Andreessen. Marc’s history with politics is a long one—but it was always with the Democrats. He supported Democrats including Bill Clinton in 1996, Al Gore in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and then Hillary Clinton in 2016. But over the summer, he announced that he was going to endorse and donate to Trump. Public records show that Marc donated at least $4.5 million to pro-Trump super PACs. Why? Because he believed that the Biden administration had, as he tells us in this conversation, “seething contempt” for tech, and that this election was existential for AI, crypto, and start-ups in America. Marc got his start as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, which is said to have launched the internet boom. He then co-founded Netscape, which became the most popular web browser in the ’90s, and sold it to AOL in 1999 for $4.2 billion. He later became an angel investor and board member at Facebook. And in 2006, when everyone told Mark Zuckerberg to sell Facebook to Yahoo for $1 billion, Marc was the only voice saying: don’t. (Today, Facebook has a market cap of $1.4 trillion.) He now runs a venture capital firm with Ben Horowitz, where they invest in small start-ups that they think have potential to become billion-dollar unicorns. And their track record is pretty spot-on: They invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Instagram, Instacart, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, Lyft, and Oculus—to name a few of the unicorns. (And for full disclosure: Marc and his wife were small seed investors in The Free Press.) Marc has built a reputation as someone who can recognize “the next big thing” in tech and, more broadly, in our lives. He has been called the “chief ideologist of the Silicon Valley elite,” a “cultural tastemaker,” and even “Silicon Valley’s resident philosopher-king.” Today, Bari and Marc discuss his reasons for supporting Trump—and the vibe shift in Silicon Valley; why he thinks we’ve been living under soft authoritarianism over the last decade and why it’s finally cracking; why he’s so confident in Elon Musk and his band of counter-elites; how President Biden tried to kill tech and control AI; why he thinks AI censorship is “a million times more dangerous” than social media censorship; why technologists are the ones to restore American greatness; what Trump serves for dinner; why Marc has spent about half his time at Mar-a-Lago since November 5; and why he thinks it’s morning in America. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. This show is proudly sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). FIRE believes free speech makes free people. Make your tax-deductible donation today at www.thefire.org/honestly. Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 50% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hora e 46 minutos
  • What We Can Learn from the Ancient Stoics

    What We Can Learn from the Ancient Stoics
    Dec 5 2024
    In the 2010s, Ryan Holiday was the head of marketing for the controversial clothing brand American Apparel, and the sought-after media strategist for people like the womanizing blogger Tucker Max. Then he wrote an exposé called Trust Me, I’m Lying, which lifted the veil on his world of media manipulation. Now, he is an advocate of the ancient philosophy of stoicism, which he roughly defines as the idea that we do not control what happens but we do control how we respond, and that it’s best to respond with four key virtues: courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice. His series of books on stoic virtues have sold over three million copies worldwide. His latest book, Right Thing, Right Now, is about the necessity of living justly—even when it is hard. Today: why power corrupts, how ego can destroy you, whether we should remain loyal to people even when they do abhorrent things, the limits of free speech, and how to treat people in our everyday lives. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    57 minutos
  • From Aleppo to Tehran: A Middle East on Edge

    From Aleppo to Tehran: A Middle East on Edge
    Dec 3 2024
    This week marked a dramatic escalation in Syria’s 13-year civil war. Rebel factions launched their most audacious offensive in years, capturing Aleppo, the focal point of the war for over a decade. This marked the most serious challenge to President Bashar al-Assad’s government and its Russian- and Iranian-backed allies in nearly a decade. Syrian and Russian forces are currently unleashing joint air strikes in a desperate attempt to reclaim the city. Iran has thrown its weight behind al-Assad, promising increased support to shore up his faltering grip on power. But Syria is just one piece of a much larger—and far more dangerous—puzzle. The Middle East is on a knife’s edge. Just last week, Israel and Hezbollah reached a fragile ceasefire along the Lebanon border, but tensions remain high. In Gaza, Israel has continued its operations against Hamas, who still hold 63 hostages. And then there’s Iran—the architect of much of the region’s instability—whose escalating provocations make it seem like a direct war with Israel is no longer a question of if, but when. These conflicts are deeply interconnected, and the fall of one domino could set off far-reaching consequences. The potential power vacuum left by a weakened al-Assad regime could reshape alliances and alter the balance of power in ways that reverberate from Tehran to Tel Aviv, and from Moscow to Washington. To help us make sense of these rapidly unfolding events and their implications for the region, Michael Moynihan is joined today by Haviv Rettig Gur, a senior analyst at The Times of Israel and one of the sharpest minds on Middle East politics. In this conversation, they unpack what’s going on in Syria, the root causes of tribal war and dysfunction across the Arab world, the ceasefire in Lebanon, what comes next in Gaza, the weakening of Iran, and what all of this means for Israel and the United States. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hora e 15 minutos
  • Love, Death and Gratitude: Seven Stories

    Love, Death and Gratitude: Seven Stories
    Nov 30 2024
    As you’re recovering from indulging in stuffing and pecan pie, we wanted to bring you a special bonus episode we put together in collaboration with our friends at StoryCorps. If you haven’t heard of StoryCorps, it’s an organization that has been gathering individual stories from across the country for over 20 years and collects them in the U.S. Library of Congress. StoryCorps’s online archive now has the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered. Today, we wanted to play seven stories about gratitude. There’s one about a man’s deeply held appreciation for his father, a story about a mother who forgave the man who killed her son, and one about a busboy who prayed over Robert Kennedy right after he was shot in 1968. There’s a story about a first love, an unexpected friendship, and being yourself. We know it sounds cheesy, but these stories made us laugh and cry, and we think you’ll love them, too. And as StoryCorps’s founder Dave Isay tells us, “Don’t forget about the beauty in poetry, and the grace in the stories of our loved ones and neighbors hiding in plain sight all around us.” Thank you so much to Dave and StoryCorps for partnering with us for this episode. If you want to have a conversation with a stranger across the political divide, sign up at One Small Step. If you want to honor a loved one over the holidays with a StoryCorps interview that goes straight from your phone into the Library of Congress with one tap, participate in their Great Thanksgiving Listen. And, of course, if you want to support one of our favorite nonprofits, you can donate here. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    34 minutos
  • The Making of America’s Most Famous Cheerleaders

    The Making of America’s Most Famous Cheerleaders
    Nov 28 2024
    Happy Thanksgiving, Honestly listeners! If you’re anything like the rest of America, you’ll be spending the day with family, cooking turkey, eating sweet potatoes, and. . . watching football. Whether or not you’re from Texas, the game on most American TVs on Thanksgiving Day will be the Dallas Cowboys. But just behind the players are the real stars of the show: blue and white pom-poms accenting sparkly white cowboy boots dancing to the sound of “Thunderstruck” for 41.8 million viewers at home. We’re talking, of course, about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders—who you may have seen in the viral Netflix documentary, America’s Sweethearts—which is what today’s episode is all about. Why, you might ask, would we talk about cheerleading on Honestly? Because as we watched the documentary, we realized that the show is about a lot more than cheerleading, football, faith, patriotism, and quintessential American culture. Yes, it’s about those things—and yes, it’s a reality show about making a very competitive dance team—but really, it’s a master class in leadership and excellence. So today, we’re talking with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders’ director, Kelli Finglass. We ask her how she became the master operator she is today, leading an organization just as well as—or perhaps better than—a Fortune 500 company, how she created a culture of dedication and precision, and most importantly, what it takes today to build a phenomenal team. It’s a different kind of episode than you’re used to these days—no talk about Matt Gaetz or Elon Musk—but it’s an all-American conversation for an all-American day. And it couldn’t be more fitting and fun. We hope you enjoy it. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    56 minutos
  • How to Save America with Peggy Noonan

    How to Save America with Peggy Noonan
    Nov 26 2024
    Peggy Noonan does what we try to do every day at The Free Press: tell the truth, make sense of things plainly and without pretension, frame the news in a way that helps the reader make sense of things, and put things in a historical context that gives the day-to-day depth and meaning. The very annoying thing about Peggy Noonan is that she makes the thing that we know is so very hard look so very easy. And she does it week after week after week in The Wall Street Journal—which adds up to more than 400 columns over the last 25 years. In her newest—and ninth—book, A Certain Idea of America, she collects 80 of her best columns published over the last eight years. Now, the idea that old newspaper columns might be good fodder for a book sort of seems like a weird idea, given that newspapers are most famous for being the next day’s fish wrapper. But somehow this book feels urgent and timeless. Which means that Peggy Noonan’s old columns are better than most people’s brand-new ones. That’s probably because she knows a thing or two about rhetoric and American politics. She was a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. She helped President George H.W. Bush get elected. She consulted for the TV show The West Wing. In today’s conversation, we talk about how Peggy understands Trump’s win and the political revolution that we’re living through, what it feels like to lose in a values war, and what it feels like to defend things like civility and decency in 2024. We also talk about Trump’s appointments so far, Peggy’s first meeting with Trump, and how, despite our troubles, America remains a good and great country—and why it’s so important for young people to know that. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. This show is proudly sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). FIRE believes free speech makes free people. Make your tax-deductible donation today at www.thefire.org/honestly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hora e 2 minutos