It’s the fourth day in the war between Iran and Israel.

Many questions hang in the air. Chief among them: Will Israel be able to fulfill its main goal in the war—to end Iran’s nuclear program? Will it put troops on the ground to do so, specifically to blow up Iran’s most important nuclear site? Or will the U.S. get involved? Will Trump provide the bunker-busting bombs necessary to destroy the facility at Fordow?

Will the regime fall—and if so, what will come next? How does this struggle fit into the much, much larger geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and China?

So today, I have two experts to break it all down: Niall Ferguson and Dexter Filkins.

Niall Ferguson is a historian and Free Press columnist who just wrote in our pages, “Israel’s attack restores the credibility of the West.” Dexter Filkins is a longtime foreign correspondent who has reported from Iran. He is a contributor at The New Yorker, has covered this topic for years, and is the author of The Forever War.

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As we taped this episode of Honestly, it was 3 a.m. in Israel. Sirens wailed across the country as Iranian missiles rained down on Israeli towns.

At the same time, Israel was striking military and nuclear sites inside Iran, and oil fields were aflame.

Meanwhile in Washington, reports were emerging of a heated debate inside the White House over whether the U.S. should get involved in the war.

It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of this story—or how uncertain the outcome is for Israel.

There’s no one better to help us make sense of this war than Michael Doran—senior fellow and director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East.

This has been his story not just for the past few days—for the last decade, no one has written more, and more brilliantly, about Iran’s nuclear aspirations and Washington’s posture toward Iran than Mike. 

And he just wrote for The Free Press “The Ultimate Deception: How Trump and Bibi Outfoxed Iran.”

We recorded this interview Saturday evening at 6 p.m. as a Free Press subscriber livestream. We’re doing more of these given the speed of the news. To attend one live and ask your own questions, become a Free Press subscriber.

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In the early hours of Friday morning, Israel pulled off a historic strike on Iran. As I record these lines, Iran is reporting a “massive explosion” in Isfahan, in a province that is home to several nuclear facilities. In Israel, where Shabbat has begun, the government has ordered all synagogues to shut down—and for citizens to remain close to bomb shelters as they brace for a retaliatory strike.

It is hard to overstate the magnitude of this operation. Israel has taken out much of Iran’s military leadership and some of its top nuclear scientists and hit nuclear facilities across the country. And it is still going. Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to do whatever it takes in order to prevent a nuclear holocaust.

Meanwhile, the X account for Iran’s military  has threatened that “our response will be lethal.” And the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has tweeted: “The Zionist regime has prepared for itself a bitter, painful fate, which it will definitely see.”

Donald Trump, for his part, is using this as an opening to push Iran into a nuclear deal. This is a historic juncture for the region—not just for the state of Israel, but for the West.

So last night, just as the news of these attacks broke, I sat down with former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren and former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett to discuss all of it: the strikes, what they accomplished, how Israel defied conventional wisdom and seemed to pull off the impossible, what we can expect in the days ahead, and—perhaps most importantly to many of our listeners—whether or not America is supporting Israel in its efforts.

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There are people who have résumés we might call “diverse” or “wide-ranging.” And then there are people like Mike Huckabee who, at age 69, has seemingly crammed several lifetimes’ worth of careers into one.

He was a televangelist. He was governor of Arkansas for over a decade. He ran for president and won the Iowa caucuses. He hosted his own show on Fox News for seven years. He’s written books on everything from Christmas to weight loss.

And now he’s America’s ambassador to Israel. And he’s filling that post at a moment when the longtime status quo in the region is being completely upended. Israel is inching closer to eradicating Hamas in Gaza—but the day-after plan is unclear. Iran is feared to be on the cusp of developing nuclear weapons, and Trump and Steve Witkoff are working hard on a renewed Iran nuclear deal.

Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, and even Syria, could normalize relations with Israel. But Islamist terror groups are trying to derail any attempts at lasting peace. And American adversaries like China and Russia are trying to take advantage of any instability in the region. Suffice it to say, it’s a time of great uncertainty.

Meanwhile, Huckabee is in some way redefining what it means to be Israel’s ambassador. He’s been outspoken in criticizing inaccurate press accounts about the conflict, and he’s been ardent in his support of the Jewish state. And while most ambassadors exist behind the scenes, Mike Huckabee has been in front of the cameras, making the case for Israel and its war with Hamas directly to Americans. It could even be argued that he’s making a better case for Israel than the Israeli government itself.

So today on Honestly, Ambassador Huckabee and I discuss all of that and more—the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. and the West more broadly, the future of America’s involvement in the Middle East, and the fight between doves and hawks in Trump’s 2.0 presidency.

One final note: This interview ended abruptly. The ambassador took a call from Israel, and at 10 p.m., the rocket sirens blared and he had 90 seconds to get to the shelter. It’s something normalized in Israeli life. Talk to any parents, and they’ll talk about having to wake their kids up several times a week because of these sirens. But it also serves as a constant reminder of the persistent threat Israel faces—and not just from Hamas. 

There were so many other great things I wanted to ask him about—particularly the right’s antisemitism. But we’ll have to have him back. The conversation is thought-provoking and timely, and I think you’ll really enjoy it.

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In the past few weeks, Qatar has been all over the news with flashy headlines of a $400 million luxury jet that the country gifted to President Donald Trump. It symbolized their opulence and eagerness to please the U.S.

But 40 years ago, Qatar was a country with a gross domestic product (GDP) of a few billion dollars. Since the 19th century, it has been run by the Al Thani family, which can trace its roots in the region back thousands of years.

Qatar was long considered a backwater. The main industries were fishing and pearls. It was impoverished for the vast majority of its history. Its royal family was dwarfed by rivals in Saudi Arabia.

Then everything changed. It turned out that the largest liquified natural gas field was sitting just off the coast of Qatar. And with the help of American energy giants like ExxonMobil, Qatar began exporting LNG in 1997.

In a few decades, Qatar’s GDP grew exponentially. Today it’s over $200 billion. Qatar hosts the main air base for American forces in the Middle East. It hosted the World Cup in 2022. And it’s embarking on a series of business and military deals with the U.S.—earmarked at $1.2 trillion.

There are a lot of petro-states in the region. Some, like Saudi Arabia, exceed Qatar’s wealth by hundreds of billions. But what Qatar has chosen to do with its money—morality aside—is farsighted. Qatar has chosen to focus a huge amount of money and resources on influence.

In the past 15 years, Qatar has developed a sophisticated apparatus to embed itself into American society in a way that would shock most Americans. They’ve done it by investing in our politicians, universities, newsrooms, think tanks, lobbying firms, and corporations—all on an unprecedented scale.

In all, the tiny Gulf nation has spent almost $100 billion to establish this influence.

So what’s the problem? Well, Qatar’s push to buy influence has made their connection to the Muslim Brotherhood ever more alarming and apparent.

Frannie Block and Jay Solomon published a massive investigative report on Qatar’s seismic influence strategy for The Free Press. It’s called “How Qatar Bought America.”

Today on Honestly, I ask Jay and Frannie how Qatar built this ecosystem, what they want in return, and what it has already gotten them.

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In 2023 and 2024, there were many things that were unsayable. Perhaps the most unsayable—at least in legacy media circles—was that the President of the United States was not capable of being president, because he was no longer mentally fit.

Those people who did break the taboo—who dared to notice Biden’s countless gaffes, his stiff gait, those who recognized the reality of old age, including Special Counsel Robert Hur—were written off or smeared. Videos of the president—clips of Biden tripping or misspeaking—were rebranded by The New York Times as “cheap fakes.” People were told to disbelieve their eyes and ears.

It’s now the spring of 2025. Trump is the president. Biden dropped out. And now the unsayable things are being said—most dramatically in Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.

Tapper, of CNN, and Thompson, of Axios, interviewed more than 200 people for this book, which illuminates Biden’s mental decline, his enablers, and how the country was effectively run by committee in the midst of his clear cognitive impairment.

For those of us who thought it was bad—it was actually much worse than anyone could have imagined.

Alex and Jake have chosen to call the effort to hide Biden’s decline a “cover-up.” Those are choice words from two mainstream media insiders, invoking memories of Watergate and Iran-Contra. And the cover-up they are referring to is that of the Biden family and the close circle of advisers around them, many of whom are still delusional about Biden’s state.

But cover-up might be the word that many Americans would use to describe the press’s coverage of Biden. How did ordinary people see more than people with White House press passes? And, what does it all say about human nature, transparency, and groupthink?

This is a really illuminating conversation about presidential power, the lengths some will go to keep it, and how the media failed to report the story of a lifetime.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

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A lot of people fall in love outside of their marriages. Some have affairs. Some leave their wives or husbands. But not a lot of people are Agnes Callard.

Agnes did something really unique. She fell in love while she was (seemingly happily) married with two children. She told her husband. They got divorced—sharing a single lawyer—and it took under three weeks to split.

And then? Then they all moved in together. To repeat, Agnes lives with her husband, her ex-husband, and their combined three kids. And by the way, they’re all philosophy professors at The University of Chicago.

The cherry on top is that she talks about all of it. A lot. And with radical openness and honesty—including in an unforgettable profile of her in The New Yorker titled “Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds.”

Perhaps you hear all of that and think: This woman is a nut. Or at the very least a little zany.

We beg to differ. There’s something about Agnes. Whether it’s a result of her worldview, her predisposition, or her vocation as a philosopher, that gives her a tremendous ability to float above any situation—including the most intimate and personal—and philosophize it.

When Agnes writes and speaks openly about the experience of falling in love while married, and about how it unmoored her understanding of relationships and expectations, she helps the rest of us make sense of the most universal topics and experiences. It is an unusual gift.

These experiences and her reflections on them all became fodder for her new book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, where she says we are not asking ourselves important questions—about how we should live and how we might change.

Today on Honestly, Bari asks Agnes: how and why she turned her life upside down for love, how she knew it was love, how she examines her own marriage, how we can all live like her hero Socrates, and how an examined life can benefit us all.

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Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, were staffers at the Israeli Embassy. They had just planned a trip for Sarah to meet Yaron’s parents. He had recently bought an engagement ring.

Then on Wednesday night, they were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. The suspect, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez, told police: “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.”

Since its founding, The Free Press has reported on the rise of this kind of radicalism and a culture that has embraced violence as a means of expression, that has lost hold of the difference between life and death.

Today, Bari reflects on the climate we now find ourselves in—and the deafening silence from mainstream media and pop culture.

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The late biologist E.O. Wilson said that “the real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous.” Wilson said that back in 2011, long before any of us were talking about large language models or GPTs.

A little more than a decade later, artificial intelligence is already completely transforming our world. Practitioners and experts have compared A.I. to the advent of electricity and fire itself. “God-like” doesn’t seem that far off.

Even sober experts predict disease cures and radically expanded lifespans, real-time disaster prediction and response, the elimination of language barriers, and other earthly miracles. A.I. is amazing, in the truest sense of that word.

It is also leading some to predict nothing less than a crisis in what it means to be human in an age of brilliant machines. Others—including some of the people creating this technology—predict our possible extinction as a species.

But you don’t have to go quite that far to imagine the way it will transform our relationship toward information and our ability to pursue the truth.

For tens of thousands of years, since humans started to stand upright and talk to each other, we’ve found our way to wisdom through disagreement and debate.

But in the age of A.I., our sources of truth are machines that spit out the information we already have, reflecting our biases and our blind spots.

What happens to truth when we no longer wrestle with it—and only receive it passively? When disagreeable, complicated human beings are replaced with A.I. chatbots that just tell us what we want to hear? It makes today’s concerns about misinformation and disinformation seem quaint.

Our ability to detect whether something is real or an A.I.-generated fabrication is approaching zero. And unlike social media—a network of people that we instinctively know can be wrong—A.I. systems have a veneer of omniscience, despite being riddled with the biases of the humans who trained them. Meanwhile, a global arms race is underway, with the U.S. and China competing to decide who gets to control the authoritative information source of the future.

So last week Bari traveled to San Francisco to host a debate on whether this remarkable, revolutionary technology will enhance our understanding of the world and bring us closer to the truth . . .or do just the opposite.

The resolution: The Truth Will Survive Artificial Intelligence!

Aravind Srinivas argued yes—the truth will survive A.I. Aravind is the CEO of one of the most exciting companies in this field, Perplexity, which he co-founded in 2022 after working at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind. 

Aravind was joined by Dr. Fei-Fei Li. Fei-Fei is a professor of computer science at Stanford, the founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered A.I., and the CEO and co-founder of World Labs, an A.I. company focusing on spatial intelligence and generative A.I. 

Jaron Lanier argued that no, the truth will not survive A.I. Jaron is a computer scientist, best-selling author, and the founder of VPL Research, the first company to sell virtual reality products.

Jaron was joined by Nicholas Carr, the author of countless best-selling books on the human consequences of technology, including Pulitzer Prize finalist The Shallows, The Glass Cage, and, most recently, Superbloom. He also writes the wonderful Substack New Cartographies.

FIRE knows free speech makes free people. You make it possible. Join the movement today at thefire.org.

Cosmos Institute and FIRE are launching a $1M fund – cash and compute – for open-source AI projects that advance truth-seeking. Apply at CosmosGrants.org/truth!

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When you think about great political comebacks, maybe you think of Donald Trump, or Richard Nixon, or “comeback kid” Bill Clinton.

You might soon add Andrew Cuomo to that list. In 2020, Cuomo was at the top of the world. He had been governor of New York for a decade. He had an illustrious career in New York politics—which is sort of the Cuomo family business. He learned how the state worked from his father, three-term Democratic governor Mario Cuomo.

When COVID hit, Governor Cuomo’s star just kept rising. Millions of Americans—even outside of New York—tuned into his COVID briefings, and his CNN segments with his brother, Chris Cuomo.

He was “America’s Governor.” On the cover of Rolling Stone. Women and men were even self-identifying as “Cuomosexual.”

But then it all came crashing down. With two scandals—one personal and one political.

As Covid was peaking in New York City, Andrew Cuomo was hit with a wave of allegations. In the end, state Attorney General Letitia James brought forward a report that alleged Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women. (Cuomo denies wrongdoing.)

The other scandal, as many will recall, had to do with Covid—specifically, Cuomo’s administration was accused of mishandling the readmission of elders who’d had Covid into nursing homes, and many alleged that he misrepresented the nursing home death count. The governor disputes that, as you’ll hear today.

By August 2021, Cuomo announced his resignation. His political career appeared to be over.

For a time, he totally disappeared from public life. He went from having an audience of 59 million tuning into his Covid briefings to zero.

But today, in May of 2025, the picture is dramatically different. Andrew Cuomo is now the front-runner to be the next mayor of New York City. Among Democrats—the party that tore him down—he has a commanding lead, polling at around 37 percent ahead of next month’s primary. His closest competitor, 33-year-old socialist state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, is hovering around 18 percent, according to a Marist Marist poll from just last week.

So, what is it about Andrew Cuomo? Will New York choose Andrew Cuomo again? And if so, why? What does that say about the state of the city and our political choices? And why does he want the job of mayor at all?

Today on Honestly, Bari asks former governor Andrew Cuomo about all of it—Covid and the harassment allegations, but also his vision for New York City, addressing public safety and affordability, his thoughts on school choice, Eric Adams’s tenure, the state of the Democratic Party, Donald Trump, illegal immigrants in New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and his plan for getting NYC back on track.

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