← Honestly with Bari Weiss
Honestly with Bari Weiss
What to Expect in 2026 with Niall Ferguson, John McWhorter, Dr. Mark Hyman, Leandra Medine Cohen, Suzy Weiss, and Sarah Isgur
02:29:29
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- [00:02]
A
From the Free Press. This is honestly and I'm Bari Weiss. 2025 wasn't exactly easy, but it was certainly eventful. Donald Trump returned to the White House and issued a record number of executive orders. He deployed the National Guard to American cities like LA and D.C. he imposed sweeping tariffs on our trading partners, gutted the government with Doge, and unleashed a massive crackdown on immigration. And that was just some of the things that happened here at home. This administration reached a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and all of the living hostages came home from Gaza. Israel and the United States struck Iran's nuclear sites. We got the first American pope. And I haven't even started on the pop culture moments of this year, like the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad, the Travis Taylor engagement, or when Lauren Sanchez, now Bezos and Katy Perry went to space. There was so much, and if I listed all of them, we'd be here all day. But this is our now annual tradition. It's our predictions episode. And if 2025 brought all of that and more, the question is, what will 2026 bring? I sat down with the deputy editor of the Free Press, Ollie Weissman, and we called up some friends of the pod, who also happened to be leading experts in their field. To get a better sense of what could be in store in the year ahead. We spoke to legal analyst Sarah Isger, who told us what we could expect in Trump's second year. We talked to linguist John McWhorter, who told us how new words and language will evolve in 2026. Our very own Susie Weiss, as always, talked us through the cultural calendar. Writer and fashionista Leandra Medine Cohen clued us into fashion trends to watch for. And, of course, Dr. Mark Hyman told us how to get healthier in 2026. Last but not least, historian and Free Press columnist Neil Ferguson told us about whether or not we should stay up with nightmares about World War three. Some guests cheered us up. Other guests baffled us, especially Susie, and others just freaked us out. But all of them were a total pleasure to talk to. Coming up, Susie Weiss on Miss Piggy, John McWhorter on Slop and what it means to serve. And I don't mean in the military. Stay With Us. Honestly is proudly supported by the Jack Miller Center. At a time when our democracy faces real challenges, one question matters more than ever. Are we preparing the next generation to understand and uphold the principles that define America? At the Jack Miller center, they believe the answer begins in the classroom. Their mission is bold, to revive the teaching of America's founding ideals, documents and history on college campuses, in K12 schools and beyond. Since 2004, the Jack Miller center has built a national network of over 1300 scholars who are bringing the American political tradition to life for students across the country. And through their Teach for Freedom campaign, they're working to reach millions more by 2026, our nation's 250th anniversary. Why? Because a strong democracy depends on informed citizens. The Free Press is really proud to partner with the Jack Miller center on Old School, a new podcast about how great books can change your life, hosted by the brilliant Shiloh Brooks. To learn more about their work or to get involved, visit jackmillercenter.org again, that's jackmiller center.org your little one grew three inches overnight.
- [03:42]
B
Adorable.
- [03:43]
C
Also expensive.
- [03:45]
B
Sell their pint sized pieces on Depop
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C
and list them in minutes with no
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B
selling fees because somewhere a dad refuses
- [03:52]
C
to pay full price for the clothes
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D
his kids will outgrow tomorrow.
- [03:55]
B
And he's ready to buy your son's entire wardrobe right now. Consider your future growth. Bird budget secured.
- [04:02]
C
Start selling on Depop where taste recognizes taste. Payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details.
- [04:13]
A
Well, Ollie Weissman, here we are again. Another year, another year to look back on and another year to look forward to with my favorite episode of the year, which is our predictions episode. We have seven incredible guests today who are gonna help us make sense of the year to come. And I think we should start with what to expect in 2026 in American politics. And the person that we're bringing in to help us out is not just high energy, she also is just extremely, extremely erudite in the process. Perfect person to speak to these issues. And that of course is Sarah Isger. Sarah was a former Trump administration spokesperson at the United States Department of Justice. This was in the first administration. And now she is a lawyer. She's a contributor to ABC and General all around brilliant person and she's going to give us some insights into what she thinks his administration is going to bring in 2026. Sarah. Oh hey. Hey Sarah.
- [05:09]
D
Hello.
- [05:10]
A
Just you just happen to be in your apartment, camera ready, wearing a suit jacket now? You look amazing. Okay, thank you so much for being here.
- [05:17]
E
I'm thrilled to be here. There's a lot to break down.
- [05:20]
A
Okay, so you know that this is our predictions episode. But before we get to predictions, I want the big picture because you happen to know about and talk about the subject that has maybe been the most dominant of this second administration, which is legality in the rule of law. I want you to look back at Trump's 2025 record. What is the biggest thing Trump has accomplished? What is the most troubling thing that he has accomplished?
- [05:50]
E
Ooh, they're the same answer. So this is fun. The biggest thing and the most troubling thing has been the vertical control over the executive branch at a time when the presidency is so powerful, because Congress isn't much anything. They're very good at doing Instagram reels. And Trump has really found a lot of legal and political success consolidating power, again, that vertical power within the executive branch when it comes to firing people, how to spend money, things like this, because long time ago, Congress handed over so much of its power and then went dormant. And that is a huge shift in the way the American system of government works.
- [06:40]
C
Okay, and Sarah, when it comes to the legal stuff, since we started with that, what in your view is the biggest overreach, the biggest legal thing that keeps you up at night about the Trump administration so far? And then also I'll add to that, there is this idea that, you know, maybe that it's too soon to say that the executive branch has grabbed all this power and the Supreme Court may reign him in. So what do you think of that in 2026?
- [07:05]
E
Okay, so the thing that keeps me up at night is that it's been approximately 342 days since the TikTok ban was supposed to go into effect, and we have a president blatantly ignoring a law that was passed by Congress and signed by the previous president, who, by the way, also didn't enforce this ban either. That is a really bad precedent. Because whatever you think of the TikTok ban, or maybe you don't think it matters at all, this idea that a president can just shrug and say, like, I don't wanna again, is a pretty bad thing. My hope is that, yes, the president has consolidated that vertical power in the executive branch, the hiring and firing. Everyone reports to him, whether you're at the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice. I'm actually great with that and think separation of powers is a good thing. But the Supreme Court also needs to then make the presidency less powerful and say that Congress has to speak clearly when it's giving presidents power. It can't just say, do clean air, and then allow the president to fill in all those gaps, including not just regulations, but enforcement, punishments, fines. We now have judge, jury, and executioner, all in the executive branch. James Madison wrote, this was the definition of tyranny to have the judicial power, executive power and legislative power all in one branch. The Supreme Court this year, if we were to call this term anything, it is the term of the structural constitution. What does it mean to have three separate branches of government?
- [08:37]
C
Sarah, one of the, I think big question marks around the legal stuff to do with Trump is to what extent is this the latest development in a kind of ever eroding set of legal norms and presidents ignoring the rule of law. Biden did it with college tuition, for example.
- [08:57]
A
Obama arguably did it with dreamers.
- [08:59]
D
Right.
- [09:00]
C
So to what extent is it that or is it Trump is an unprecedented assault on a republic of laws that we have never seen before and this is a clean break from last year.
- [09:13]
E
Nope. Trump is the symptom. He is not really the cause of this. As you guys just said, this particular moment is traced back to Obama's pen and phone.
- [09:23]
F
Right.
- [09:23]
E
If Congress won't do what I want in immigration, I have a pen and a phone to rally the American people to my cause. And he had his year of executive action. We have been in a government by executive order ever since then. As you said, Joe Biden took it to even greater heights. Donald Trump taking it to even greater heights. So it is an escalation certainly. But Trump's not the one who came up with this. And frankly, Trump didn't cause Congress to roll over and die either.
- [09:51]
A
Okay, Sarah, I don't know if you're feeling this way, but I feel a little bit like and maybe this is the case for all presidents in the second part of their second administration, but it feels like things are fizzling out a little bit for Trump. Like you look at the speech that he gave that interrupted CBS his three hour Survivor the other night. I will say CBS didn't television watchers were not happy to to sort of like trumpet his accomplishments on the economy. Then you have this Vanity Fair spread that I could not get enough of. I'm sure you guys have seen it and seen the up close pictures. I don't know, there's like a vibe in the air that things are sort of sputtering out. Am I wrong to see that? Is that just what my algorithm is feeding me?
- [10:33]
G
No.
- [10:34]
E
Ever since those off cycle elections that we had in early November, it has felt already that Donald Trump is maybe not fully but on the cusp of being a lame duck president. Republicans suddenly pushing back. I mean this is small, but the Epstein files stuff or the Rob Reiner tweet where Donald Trump sort of mocks Rob Reiner's murder You saw Republicans pushing back really hard, as in, they're no longer afraid of him. Because it's, it's clear that if Trump isn't on the ballot, he doesn't have a lot of power anymore. And without Juice, that lame duck thing creeps in real fast, like the tide is moving in.
- [11:14]
A
So what do you predict, Sarah, will be Trump's biggest domestic move in 2026? Or do you think, and this is, I think, something that surprised many of us. We were talking to Neil Ferguson as part of this episode, like a lot of the past Trump year, has been about foreign policy and deals abroad. Whether or not you think those deals are good, what do you think is going to be his domestic focus in 2026? If anything, I've been looking forward to
- [11:42]
E
you asking me this question for weeks.
- [11:44]
A
Wow, Sarah, exciting life you got going on there.
- [11:48]
E
This is it. I just wait for Barry to call. I don't exist until she calls. I'm sort of like that of legal predictions. My prediction for, for the Trump administration, and look, my window's probably a little bit bigger than just 2026, is that it will be one of the most inconsequential, ineffective presidencies in American history, because he's doing it all without Congress through executive orders that can be wiped away on day one of his successor's presidency. And he's choosing not to work with Congress. And so whether you love Trump, hate Trump like what he's done, hate those executive orders. It's a stupid, stupid way to govern when your party controls both houses because there is no legacy here. There is nothing that's going to outlast, you know, January 20, 2028.
- [12:40]
C
Sarah, one thing that's quite different this time is we haven't really seen many firings in of senior Trump admin people, cabinet people. So you know, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, RFK Jr. They get a lot of publicity. Not all of it is positive. Some of that's their fault, not the media's fault.
- [13:00]
A
But there was definitely a point at different times where it was like, you know, Pete Hegseth, surely he only has a few days left. Cash Patel, surely he'll be out by next week, but they're all still there.
- [13:09]
C
So my question to you, and this is, like I said, a predictions podcast. So will we have a kind of like Night of the Long knives and in 2026, in which, in which Trump axes all his allies and brings in a whole new team, who's on the hot seat? Who's going to go? Who's going to stay.
- [13:27]
E
Yeah. I mean, this is a little like when you go to college and we call it the turkey drop, you know, where everyone breaks up after Thanksgiving break. Basically, like, I'm waiting for the turkey drop. Attorney General Pam Bondi, my understanding is really no longer has the ear of the president on most things, that Ed Martin, for instance, is a far more powerful figure within the Department of Justice. And so you should look probably for her not to be Attorney General for that long. But there's an interesting legal thing weaved in here, which is if he fires someone, who can he actually get confirmed to replace that person? Does he want to get someone confirmed by the Senate to replace that person? Or is he going to try to do these actings that we've seen through the Vacancy Reform act that the courts have been shutting down. He's been trying this with Lindsey Halligan, Alina Haba, with US Attorneys. But the same thing applies to Cabinet members, too. So I wonder whether they're not sort of letting some of this shake out, see what the courts actually will say on this before Turkey dropping the Cabinet.
- [14:32]
C
Okay, but if you had to. If you had to bet your savings on one of them going, who would it be?
- [14:37]
E
No, it's Bondi. Yeah.
- [14:39]
A
Okay, can we just stay on this for one second because it's so fun. What do you make? This is a little bit of a sidebar, but I think it's relevant only because I read this and thought Susie Wiles is gonna be out by the end of the week. And I was totally wrong. Why did Susie Wiles, who by all accounts is a pretty incredible chief of staff, and then all of these other people, Carolyn Levitt, Stephen Miller, jd, why did they participate in this extensive story with Vanity Fair?
- [15:08]
E
Oh, I. I mean, I'm a former comms operative, right? So, like, this was sort of my bread and butter, is figuring out, like, what's in your interest, what's not, what risks do you take? There's something weird that, you know, is hard for people to sort of understand when you're spending this much time with another human being. You bond with them whether you want to or not. But. But what's fascinating about some of the really good reporters out there is that they are able to fake that bond, but they're not bonding back. And. And it's like this weird human surprise, basically, that, like, they're not bonding with you. So I'm surprised that Susie Wiles agreed to something that is the opposite of what got her to where she is,
- [15:49]
A
which is headline Total discretion.
- [15:51]
F
Yeah.
- [15:52]
E
Yeah. My guess is that this was not her pick, that they decided that this was sort of in everyone's best interest. Someone else, whether it was Caroline Levitt or someone else within the comms world.
- [16:03]
A
But don't you think it was Donald Trump himself, who still lives in a world before the Internet, mostly, and loves linear television and prestige magazines?
- [16:15]
E
I mean, he certainly does, but he also doesn't care when it's not about him. There's not like, oh, I can't wait for them to have a profile of my chief of staff. So if it had been about him, yes, but no. I think, you know, she's the first female chief of staff in the United States history. And I'm sure there was a sense from someone that, like, they need to treat us the way that they would treat this if it were the first female chief of staff, but during a Democratic administration. And, yeah, I mean, my favorite Moment is when J.D. vance says he'll pay him a thousand bucks to make Marco look bad, and then tweets out a couple days later, I'll get that thousand bucks in the mail.
- [16:51]
F
Thanks.
- [16:51]
A
That was an extremely unflattering picture. Okay, we could talk about Vanity Fair all day. As you mentioned, Sarah, and as everyone knows, Republicans control everything. But maybe not for long in 2026, because we're going to have these critical midterm elections in the senate. More than 30 seats are going to be on the ballot, including special elections in Florida and Ohio, and Republicans are defending 22 of them. For Democrats to win back the majority, they need to gain a net of four seats.
- [17:18]
F
So.
- [17:18]
A
So first of all, Dems, they gonna retake the Senate.
- [17:23]
E
The Senate is the harder one, I think, for Democrats to retake. You know, Texas is where my eyes are focused on because it could be such an easy loss for Republicans if the current Attorney General, Ken Paxton, gets the nomination. It would be the first Democrat elected statewide in Texas in 30 plus years. But Ken Paxton is uniquely bad as a candidate. Um, and so what will Donald Trump do to prevent Ken Paxton from getting that? On the flip side, Democrats now look posed to nominate Jamie Crockett in Texas, probably the one Democrat that Ken Paxton would smoke in a general election because she's so extreme on the left side of the Democratic Party. And for some reason, this whole race is a big metaphor to me. The corruption and the grift from the Republican candidate who will lose versus the extreme far left, where Democrats are like, wait, hold my beer. We actually can be worse on this. Give us a chance.
- [18:22]
C
So let's talk about that. The Democrats and their own kind of version of the Tea Party. That seems to be happening perhaps. You know, you, have you mentioned Jasmine Crockett, There's Graham Platner in Maine who had this like Nazi tattoo and is still the candidate or the front runner somehow, if I had a nickel. So I mean, how do you think this plays out? Because there are two parties and it's kind of like this slow bicycle race of like who's going to be, you know, self harmed the most in their effort to win these races. You know, is it, are we making a mistake if we just focus on the administration and their shortcomings and their approval ratings, or is that how voters think? And ultimately this is going to be a referendum on Trump and co, even if the Democrats aren't picking, you know, the best, their best people.
- [19:12]
E
It's incredible. You look at the polling and obviously Donald Trump's underwater voters don't trust his handling of the economy. But then you ask them, do you trust Democrats handling of the economy? And somehow Democrats still perform worse in these polls. You know, the problem here is that we no longer have functioning political parties, which is so funny because we live in this extremely partisan, polarized time. But those two, while seemingly contradictory, are actually totally related. You know, when we passed campaign finance reform in 2002, all of those incumbents who voted for it, they weren't actually trying to get money out of politics. They were doing incumbent protection. And part of that was to gut the two political parties so there would be no one with a carrot and stick to keep them in line. Well, here we are 20 years later and we see the result of that. Without political parties, nobody's in charge. Nobody's actually interested in forming coalitions, forming majorities, because majorities in Congress don't mean anything if you're not the speaker, you don't have any power except to raise a lot of money on TikTok and Instagram. And so without those political parties, you see really dumb choices out there because it's all just up to individual incentives. There's no group incentive left. So to answer your question, it makes perfect sense to pay attention to the administration because we now do campaigns by personality. It's why you're seeing very high name id, often either self funding or sort of online influencers filling the ranks of DC for the first time. Because anyone who actually enjoyed policy arguments, legislation, they left because this is a boring place to be if you care about long term policy.
- [20:50]
C
Okay, let's talk about the House then. So we have this interesting redistricting kind of wild card in this race. People expect this to be more gettable for the Democratic Party. What's your read?
- [21:03]
E
Sure, you gotta bet on the party out of the White House, especially when it's this tight in the House. But, man, I can't think of a dumber thing to do than do a bunch of redistricting in the middle of the fastest realignment of voters that the country has seen, certainly in my lifetime, maybe in the last hundred years, because those voters are not again, loyal to any political party. They're moving very quickly. The Republican Party is getting more multicultural, more blue collar, while the Democratic Party is getting whiter, richer, more well educated. So you're redrawing districts when you don't know who your voters are anymore.
- [21:41]
D
Whoo.
- [21:41]
E
We've seen a version of this where the Republicans really. Donald Trump came out against mail in ballots, which was kind of a bizarre thing to do when his voters are now the low propensity voters, even though Republican voters in the past, you know, 2012, Mitt Romney era were the high propensity voters. So you've got people making assumptions on how to win races with old information, frankly.
- [22:05]
A
Can I just ask one thing about the direction of the Democratic Party? Because I'm super curious.
- [22:09]
E
What direction?
- [22:10]
C
Yeah.
- [22:11]
A
Which, which zor it like if you had to name one person that you think is the face of the Democratic Party in 2026, who is it? And same for the Republicans.
- [22:22]
E
Yeah. I mean, you gave it away there. It's got to be Mandani. I think obviously Kamala Harris wishes it were her. That might even be worse for the Democratic Party than Mandani because he may have more radical policy statements and beliefs that people can point to, but he's an extremely charismatic candidate. Whereas Harris has the extreme policies but without the charisma. Joe Biden maybe doesn't have anything going for him. But this is now always the problem for the party out of the White House. Who is the leader of the party when you don't have party structures anymore where Congress isn't doing anything? I mean, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee used to be a household name. I will bet you like so much money that you cannot name this person, because sitting here right now, I cannot. And so we're in this personality cult problem. And that's really bad if you're a Democrat in the midterms. And because the super socialist kind of anti semitic guy who just got elected to mayor might be the main person that people Think of whether you're in Kentucky or Texas or anywhere else, that's not great.
- [23:32]
A
Now, notably, you did not mention the name Gavin Newsom.
- [23:36]
E
I did not. You know, when I talk to Democrats, they sort of talk about Gavin Newsom the way that Republicans talk about Tim Scott.
- [23:44]
D
Got.
- [23:44]
E
It's like the other side thinks they look really good on paper. But like, anyone who's sort of in the operative world is like, that's not a thing.
- [23:52]
A
Okay. Other than Trump, who's the face of the Republican Party in 2026, no question
- [23:58]
E
that right now it's a battle between JD Vance and Ted Cruz. You know, Marco's trying to, like, get in there, as Marco always seems to do. But those are two very different directions for the party. Between Vice President Vance and Senator Cruz, I think we will see a lot more people, you know, jumping in who probably aren't even in elected office. But these sort of primaries, if you will, the primaries, before the primaries, before the primaries, that's who it is right now.
- [24:26]
A
The other night after the Turning Point USA conference, it was really fiery. You had Ben Shapiro and then Tucker Carlson. But the really notable thing is that Erica Kirk, who's now the head of the organization, got up and endorsed a guy who isn't yet running for President Trump, which is JD Vance. It's an interesting thing to see candidates getting endorsed that haven't even entered the race. Do you think that anyone wouldn't consider announcing very early? Like, as in J.D. vance announcing his candidacy in 2026, or is that nuts?
- [24:55]
F
J.D.
- [24:56]
E
vance has a problem because of Donald Trump's status. Donald Trump does not want to be a lame duck president. And the sooner people start looking to Vance, the sooner it sort of fait accompli that Vance is the heir apparent. That hurts Donald Trump. And if he feels that J.D. vance is stepping out into that spotlight too early, I expect Donald Trump to whack him hard to prevent that. So if you're J.D. vance, you can't move forward even if the president, like, kind of invites you to. I would be hesitant to do it. He kind of needs to stay behind him for as long as possible. Because, again, Donald Trump doesn't care about a legacy or the Republican Party after this. So his incentives are not well aligned with JD Vance's right now.
- [25:38]
C
So that's a no to JDvon announcing in Twitter. I've got to pin you down on the predictions. Do it, Sarah. It's good. Thank you for being here.
- [25:44]
E
Thank you so much for having me,
- [25:51]
A
Ollie. As you know, I had a Lot of free time this year, which meant that I spent a lot of time thinking about pop culture. Just kidding. Our producer wrote this list, and I'm going to read this out to explain to you some of the biggest pop culture moments of 2026. And some of these I actually do remember. Of course, we had Katy Perry and Gayle King and Lauren Sanchez Bezos. By then, she was just Lauren Sanchez in space, which Susie called the intergalactic bachelorette party. We had the Coldplay Kiss cam. We had Kendrick Lamar's boot cut Celine jeans. We had Labo boos. We had the hot guys who robbed the Louvre who apparently weren't even real. We had the Mom Donnie Trump press conference, which became a social media phenomenon. We had so much pop culture this year.
- [26:34]
C
You didn't even include the Wicked press talk.
- [26:36]
A
Oh, my God. How could I forget? That actually is a thing that needs to be analyzed. There is nobody that we want to hear from more on this topic than our very own culture critic and columnist, Susie Weiss. Hello. Hello, Susie.
- [26:51]
H
Oh, hello. How are you?
- [26:52]
A
Well, welcome to Honestly.
- [26:54]
H
Thanks for having me.
- [26:55]
A
Ollie and I want to start by asking what we should think about Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande and the Wicked Press tour.
- [27:02]
H
Very. Thank you for asking the questions everyone else is afraid to. Honestly, your courage does not go unnoticed during these unprecedented times.
- [27:11]
B
Okay.
- [27:12]
H
But here's what I think.
- [27:13]
A
During these. During these dark days for our country and our people, we need to ask the hard questions, which is, do they have some kind of mutual anorexia society together?
- [27:22]
H
Honestly, I think about the two of them kind of like gremlins at this point. They're more cartoon than human. They weigh 45 pounds together, soaking wet. They wear these huge dresses, and they're going all over the world crying with happiness. And honestly, I'm really happy for them. Wicked sort of replaced Barbie as the, like, the movie, the pop culture movie that everything was downstream of. And it sort of harbored in this, like, era of movie musicals. You had Snow White, Wicked 1 and 2. You had all of these biopics that were actually also just concerts. There was the Bob Dylan one. There was the. What was the other one?
- [27:59]
A
There was a Bruce Springsteen one.
- [28:00]
H
Bruce Springsteen. We're getting Michael Jackson, which I'm a little iffy on. But we're also getting from director John M. Chu, of course, who made Wicked Parts 1 and 2, the Britney Spears woman and me biopic in 2026.
- [28:17]
A
Hold on.
- [28:17]
H
Hold on, ladies.
- [28:19]
A
Oh, I'm holding on. We're both holding on. Who's playing her that we don't know yet.
- [28:23]
H
Who would you like to see play? Britney? Honestly, Sydney Sweeney.
- [28:28]
C
I was gonna say that's what I was. That.
- [28:30]
A
That makes sense.
- [28:31]
C
As we discussed busy year in culture, but if we had to pick one moment that you thought was the biggest pop culture moment of the year, what would you say?
- [28:41]
H
I think we have to give this one to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce getting engaged. This was the squeal heard around the world when a few months ago Taylor Swift posted an Instagram and it said your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married. Travis got her an old mine cut diamond set in 18 karat gold as we know. I actually think with this post they made being straight cool again.
- [29:08]
D
Wow.
- [29:09]
A
They.
- [29:09]
H
They saved the straights. It marks the end of Taylor Swift's career because she got what she wanted. She got the thing she was yearning for. But I think it was a gift to all of us. She. She really was a martyr for heterosexuality.
- [29:21]
A
She's a martyr for heterosexuality. Do you think the marriage is going to last?
- [29:25]
H
Of course I do. Absofrultly. They are made for each other. I think he is a total puppy dog. Now, do I think that there's going to be some heated conversations around their wedding? Because surely he will be a groomzilla. Yes. But I think they're in it for the long haul.
- [29:41]
C
So wait, do we have to. We have to struggle through a wedding in 2026? Is that.
- [29:46]
H
Oh my God. I mean, it's already going to be crazy. I mean, even the bachelorette parties. I mean, imagine Gigi Hadid lugging like an Amazon box of penis glasses. Like, this is not going to be a good year for any celebrity in the Taylor Swift orbit. Because, you know, she likes really basic stuff. She wants a stripper. Yeah, she's going to get one too in Vegas.
- [30:07]
A
Okay. Biggest pop culture moment. I agree. Kelsey and Taylor Swift.
- [30:13]
E
Is there.
- [30:13]
A
Is there a runner up?
- [30:14]
H
Oh, honestly, probably. On Love island when Huda goes, I'm a mama. A mamacita.
- [30:23]
A
Okay.
- [30:24]
H
Do you remember that?
- [30:25]
A
Well, let's talk about. Because the answer is no. But I do. Like, I'm in it enough that I know what Love island is and I know that name. But for those listening for mom and dad, Susie, explain Huda on Love Island. What is that? And what did it exemplify for you?
- [30:46]
H
I feel like an alien. This is like teaching grandma how to do her iPad. Okay. Love island is like real world in bikinis. Okay? It's just people living together and striking up relationships. On a sort of Big Brother set. They're in this villa, this enclosed villa. The Love Island UK was always huge. Us sort of broke through this year with this past season, which I believe was 185,000 episodes. And Huda was the big villain of the season. She was totally toxic. She created that viral moment where she broke it to a castmate that she was actually a mamacita. And I think she's sort of 20, 25 siren. Like she's here to ruin lives. She's very beautiful and her body don't quit, obviously.
- [31:37]
A
Okay, next up, the small subject much discussed between you and I and our entire family of Kris Jenner's facelift.
- [31:45]
H
Oh, yes. I mean, Gravity is undefeated, except in the case of Kris Jenner's new face. She contracted the New York based surgeon Dr. Steven Levine to give her a totally new face. It's almost as if they took all the skin that was at the front of her face and made like a ponytail of it in the back. I mean, she looks amazing. The Kardashians switch out their heads like every four or five years. But this year was the year they started to be like, really open about it. So they're open about whether they're on a GLP1 or if they got breast implants like Kylie Jenner. And of course, Kris had Dr. Steven Levine to her 70th birthday party. But anyway, I think he did beautiful work.
- [32:29]
C
Okay, next one, Susie. This is a big one. The American Eagles, Sydney Sweeney Firestorm. Break it down for us.
- [32:38]
H
This was an old fashioned nothing burger. I gotta say, this was a freakout over absolutely nothing. Sydney Sweeney did a jeans ad loosely based on the Calvin Klein jeans ad of the 80s that had Brooke Shields sort of defining what jeans were with a G and she was putting on jeans with a J. Anyway, she did a really cute ad. The American Eagle. Stock price went up a ton, but everyone online decided she was like Eva Braun for doing this. It was so ridiculous and she just hasn't been able to get a win since. I think she is an incredible actor. She was in the Christy Martin biopic and she's going to come out on top. The next season of Euphoria is about to come out and she's going to be like sort of a bimbo in it and people are going to love her again.
- [33:22]
A
So the Sydney Sweeney ad kind of set off a cold war between American Eagle with the Gap, which, you know, hardcore Gap number one.
- [33:32]
H
Number one forever power user gap.
- [33:34]
A
I am a power user of nothing other than the Gap. Like, if I need to be the points guy, but for the Gap, and I would be, like, the richest woman in the world. That is so pathetic. Anyway, Cat's Eye made this response commercial that was set to the soundtrack of a song that I love. My milkshake brings all the boys to the. What did you think about that commercial and that whole back and forth?
- [33:55]
H
I thought. I mean, I love, like, a pure dancing commercial, but I'm always happy for more jeans commercials. And I'm always into, like, feuds. There was a lot of feuds this year. You had Nicki Minaj, Cardi B. Nicki Minaj said cardi B had HPV, and then, of course, 50 Cent and P. Diddy that that feud was deeply reignited. So I love the Cat's Eye commercial insofar as it pushes these very public beefs in order to sell something further down our throats.
- [34:25]
A
Interesting.
- [34:26]
C
The opposite of public beefs, Susie. Very public. Big engagements this year. It's been a busy. It's been a busy year. We talked about Taylor and Travis, Selena and Benny.
- [34:37]
H
Oh, my God, I'm so happy for them.
- [34:39]
C
And then there's been some big breakups. So Zoe Kravitz and Channing Tatum, Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban. Literally every generation has something covered there. So let's talk about which couples will make it through 2026, starting with Millie, Bobby Brown and Jake Bon Jovi.
- [35:02]
H
Bon Jovi.
- [35:04]
C
I don't even know who that is. They're like, starting with millie, Bobby Browns, one journey. Let's see. Are they gonna make it 2026 for sure.
- [35:11]
H
They just adopted a baby. They just adopted a baby. They're in it for the long haul. And honestly, with Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, I'm just really happy for both of them. I think they prove to us girls who don't have a problem with authority that nice girls finish first in the end, you know?
- [35:30]
A
All right, Suz. Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau, first of all.
- [35:35]
H
My goodness. Yeah.
- [35:36]
A
Bullish or bearish. And also, what do you think they talk about?
- [35:39]
H
I'm bullish on them. I have nothing but respect for the Pop Minister of Canada, Katy Perry. I mean, talk about a rebound. She went to space, came down to earth, broke up with Orlando Bloom, goes on this, like, worldwide tour, and then all of a sudden, she's on a yacht with Justin Trudeau. I absolutely think they'll make it as far as what they talk about. I mean, I don't think our ears would understand it. I think it's like 5, 6, 9, 4, 2, 2, 6, 6, 7, 5, 8, 3. Like, I don't think they're speaking English. Like they're in a galactic realm.
- [36:10]
A
Okay, Susie, this one, this one. I really don't know what to make of JoJo Siwa and her boyfriend. You heard that, right? Chris Hughes. So I thought she was like the ultimate les. She's now Les. I cannot figure her out. Like, first of all, explain it. Second of all, tell me if, like, where's that, where's that whole story gonna wind up? Is that like gonna be a Britney Spears situation or what's going on?
- [36:36]
H
Interesting. No, I think JoJo Siwa is in the driver's seat in like a scary way. I think she. I mean, for those who don't know, JoJo Siwa was the star of Dancing with the Stars. She's like a perpetual 12 year old lesbian icon. And she went on Big Brother and shacked up with this guy, Chris Hughes, who also seems gay. They're in a lavender marriage, which is also going to be huge for 2026. And there's just no chance that's.
- [37:04]
A
Wait, hold on. Lavender marriage is going to be huge in 2026? Let's not skip over that so quickly. What's a lavender marriage?
- [37:10]
H
A lavender marriage is where like one or two gay people of the opposite sex get together for the sake of having a straight family or for platonic partnership. And I think with the, with the stats you're seeing, but you're gonna see a lot more people jacking up with people they don't have sex with. Maybe it won't be a full lavender marriage like you had in the 50s. Cause like they fucking tried you for sedition if you were gay. But you're gonna have like a, maybe a soft lavender marriage, a periwinkle marriage perhaps.
- [37:40]
C
Okay, another couple for you, Susie. Kylie Jenner and Timothee Chalamet.
- [37:44]
H
I do think Kylie and Timothee are in it for the long run. I think they're both really driven by excellence. And Timothy's having a huge year. He started the year on the Bob Dylan movie. He's ending in a Marty supreme. Of course, he deserves to have the baddest girl in America on his arm. That's my read.
- [38:02]
A
Do you like his look?
- [38:04]
H
Yeah, I think it's like off duty to stepdad.
- [38:07]
A
Interesting, interesting, interesting. All right, we're back to Sweeney because she really dominated the year and now we're on her romantic life. Sydney Sweeney and Scooter Braun caught canoodling in Central Park Pictures Were in Page Six. They are the hot new couple. What do you think?
- [38:24]
H
They'll just never make me hate either one of them like they are. They're free and they love each other. It's a time honored match of, like, older, schlubbier guy, younger, hot woman. There's a lot they have to offer each other. And, yeah, I think they're in it for the long haul. They've. They're both extremely publicly misunderstood, and I think they're both really talented.
- [38:46]
C
Love that.
- [38:47]
A
Hot take.
- [38:47]
H
Hot take.
- [38:48]
C
Okay, speaking of relationships, Susie, there was an article this year, an infamous article that had the headline, is having a boyfriend embarrassing? So, Suzy Weiss, you tell us, is it embarrassing?
- [39:00]
H
So much gloom and doom about relationships this year. There was that article about hetero fatalism. There was the case for ending your good marriage. There was that think piece about man keeping. These were all Times articles. And there was even, like, a romanticization of, like, female celibacy. There was the Melissa Phoibos book, dry season, and then there was the Elizabeth Gilbert book about her sex and love addiction. And everyone, honestly needs to quit it. Having a boyfriend is extremely cool, and everyone wants one.
- [39:30]
A
How about having marriage and a baby Cool?
- [39:34]
H
Inevitable.
- [39:38]
A
Okay, there were several it girls this year. Addison Rae. And I have to say, I don't know her music. I absolutely love her.
- [39:46]
H
Look, I am so good.
- [39:48]
A
I am so into Addison Rae. I actually can't even express it. I have no idea. Could not name an Addison Rae song. Just very into.
- [39:56]
H
No, the gay guys put in work on that. Look, they really went on there.
- [39:59]
A
It is really working. Okay, Charli. Xcx. Of course. Rosalia. I'm gonna try and be cool and get into Rosalia.
- [40:08]
C
Rosalia.
- [40:09]
A
Okay, let's keep it. I can't even pronounce her name. Rosalia. I thought it was Rosalia. See, I'm no cohort that can pronounce mom Dani, but I cannot pronounce Mandani. Yeah, a lot of. Yeah. Have you heard how, like, no one can pronounce his name? Okay, my point is, you all know the musician I'm talking about, Susie.
- [40:29]
H
We carry her flowers for. She used to say Iran. Iraq. You know, it's not nothing. Iraq. The Iranians.
- [40:36]
A
Okay, Susie Weiss, who in Hollywood and online who are going to be our it girls for 2026.
- [40:43]
H
Okay, well, I think we gotta start off with the pop girls. I definitely think Ry is going to have a huge year. R A Y E. She is the musical heir to Amy Winehouse. She is extremely talented. I think Audrey Hobert. Really funny. Really funny pop star. My big prediction, though, is that we're gonna be seeing the rise of, like the middle aged it girl. You sort of see it starting with Martha Stewart, kind of the original influencer, but like, I'm talking perimenopause here, people. I'm talking Sarah Paulson, Helen Mirren, Patricia Arquette, Sigourney Weaver, of course, Judith Light. And I think there's gonna be like this sort of like, reassessment of these women who are not given their due in their time. And it's like, it's enough with like the 19 year olds and the 20 year olds. Okay, give us a middle aged it girl.
- [41:36]
C
Susie, this is. I'm about to say some words that were very obviously written by producers and not by me, but bear with me. There have been some fun aesthetic trends this past year. Y3K Techware, Gorp. Core wired headphones seem to be trending in line with the Y2K revival. What is the next aesthetic core of 2026? What are we thinking?
- [41:56]
H
Okay, stay with me.
- [41:58]
A
Okay. We are so. We could not be more with you.
- [42:01]
H
Miss Piggy Core. Miss Piggy. Okay. Unapologetic female capitalist pig.
- [42:10]
D
Okay.
- [42:12]
H
Miss Piggy. Eloise. Eloise who lives in the plaza. You might have heard of her.
- [42:16]
A
Did you just stop on. You literally mean Miss Piggy?
- [42:19]
H
Yeah. Miss Piggy with the hoops.
- [42:20]
A
Yeah. Okay.
- [42:21]
H
Oh, you know I'm talking about Miss Piggy. Put some respect on Piggy's name. I just think there's just gonna be a wait.
- [42:30]
G
Eloise.
- [42:31]
A
Eloise.
- [42:32]
H
Eloise is also under the umbrella of Miss Piggy. Eloise has her gut hanging out all the time. Her hair is never brushed.
- [42:40]
G
She.
- [42:40]
H
She don't give. She don't gaf. Okay. She has absentee parents, but she is going to charge room service to the room. Okay. She's taking what she can get.
- [42:50]
C
This is like.
- [42:51]
H
Yes. Is there deep unhealed trauma with both of them? Sure. That's not the point. Okay. They're both sort of drag queens. They're doing a performance. It's going to be a huge year for drag. And of course, adjacent to drag is clowning, which we've talked about a lot.
- [43:06]
C
Oh, my God.
- [43:08]
A
Okay, we're really getting at.
- [43:10]
H
Core is a clown. And clown clowning is 2026. It's absurd. It's all about body humor. It's the polar opposite of sort of like cerebral comedy, like Louis CK and Aziz Ansari. It's like, it's sort of gross. It's doing Anything for the left. I know someone who was a lawyer for people on death row, gave it up to go to clown school in France. Okay. Think about that.
- [43:32]
E
Okay.
- [43:32]
A
I predict that 2026 is the year that your pitch about clowning, which you have been pitching for three years, is finally going to make its way and see the light. Okay, Susie, in addition to Miss Piggy and Eloise and drag and clowning.
- [43:46]
D
Sure.
- [43:47]
A
What are some other things that are going to be in in 2026?
- [43:50]
H
Okay. Mid century modern about to have a huge revival because it's been so maligned for so long. And in that vein, millennials are going to have a comeback. Vest scarves. So striped shirts. You are so bad.
- [44:03]
A
Vests. Vests.
- [44:04]
H
Vests are going to be huge.
- [44:05]
C
Can we just drill down on this for a second? Because I've seen these, like, videos now where it's like nostalgia, like, mood boarding videos for, like, Brooklyn in 2014.
- [44:16]
H
Yes. Like Williamsburg coffee shops. Like those. Those little mustaches that you tattooed on your finger. Like, just sort of like deep irony and idealism. I think optimism's gonna be back this year.
- [44:31]
A
Really?
- [44:32]
H
Yeah, I do. Medical optimism especially. But what I think people are. What I think is out. What I think all of the ins are predicated on an out.
- [44:43]
A
Right.
- [44:44]
H
So optimism is gonna be in because data is gonna be out. Right. No more Oura rings. No more talking about your sleep score. No more posting what your stupid age is on Spotify. Enough data. Okay. Ignorance is bliss.
- [45:02]
A
Okay.
- [45:02]
H
And it's exactly it.
- [45:03]
C
I'm all in. I'm a former all in.
- [45:06]
A
Like, I think the unexamined life is the only life worth living. I think therapy is. And I know you disagree with me.
- [45:16]
H
No, I actually think you're right. But before therapy being out, because I think the internal life will always be big. It's the external life. No more news, no more trackers, no more checking how many steps you walk that day. We have flooded the zone of data and it's time to end it. No more data. Can I give you one more?
- [45:33]
C
Wait, just before you do. Free Press subscribers, ignore the comments about news.
- [45:37]
A
We're ready. We're ready.
- [45:38]
H
Drop it on tradwives out. Obviously, it was like so cringe when it started. But downstream from tradwifery is crafting. And I think that's actually gonna be back in a huge way. I'm talking quilting, I'm talking knitting, talking sewing, embroidery, woodworking, stonemasonry. Of course, the barter economy comes along with this. You're gonna see a vial of sort of trading wares, almost like you're gonna make your own. Silk Road. Remember last year was about, like, romanticizing your life. This is about silk roading your life. Trading saffron for silk, for example. Susie, what else?
- [46:13]
C
But this is. Yeah, the new thing there, too, is not just crafting for, like, your mental health to, like, make something and then to trade it. It's not mindfulness we're talking about here. This is like, I need a quilt.
- [46:26]
A
Do you remember when you told us that the trends of the year were
- [46:32]
C
gonna be soup or something? Soup?
- [46:35]
H
Was I not right? No, I said peasant food, and now you can't turn left without seeing a caramelized cabbage recipe.
- [46:42]
A
You're right. You're right.
- [46:43]
E
It was soup.
- [46:44]
A
And Michigan.
- [46:47]
H
I. I mean, I stam. I was early on that Michigan's the new Texas, but Nashville's the new Austin. Stay with me.
- [46:53]
A
I'm really with you. I could not be more with you. I will go wherever you lead. And I know Holly feels the same way.
- [47:01]
H
Okay, amazing. I guess I'll leave you there. But I'll leave you with this. All fiber in, protein out. Stay with me. Horse girls. High end doll houses.
- [47:13]
A
In or out. Huge.
- [47:14]
H
This is all. It's like. It's not about being, like, the perfect woman. It's about being the perfect girl.
- [47:19]
A
Okay, but horse girls are in. And what else?
- [47:22]
H
High end dollhouses. I think you're gonna see, like, a lot of interiors because people got, like. With the cottage core, everyone turned their actual house into a dollhouse. Like, frankly, it got creepy with, like, the ruffles at the end of the sofa and stuff. So I think they're just going to sort of relegate it to a dollhouse. Like a tiny, high end dollhouse. Yeah, I think that's great. What else is out? Oh, having ADHD is out. But OCD is deeply in. Effective altruism is out. Gay guys is out. And Rhodes Scholars. Thank you. Rhodes Scholars are, ugh, snooze fest out.
- [47:58]
A
They are, really.
- [47:58]
C
And if you're a gay Rhodes scholar, you're in. You're in real trouble.
- [48:02]
H
Peter Thiel said Rhodes Scholars have a great future behind them.
- [48:07]
A
That's amazing.
- [48:08]
H
Which feels very apt and real. Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to next year where I'm proven right.
- [48:16]
A
Can't wait.
- [48:16]
C
Again.
- [48:18]
H
Again.
- [48:19]
C
Thank you, Susie Weiss.
- [48:20]
A
Thank you.
- [48:21]
H
Thank you for your time.
- [48:24]
A
All right, all. No pressure, but, like, these next 15 minutes are the best 15 minutes of my year. And that is because we. We get to talk to the Incredible linguist John McWhorter, who. Who. Who just brings words to the table that I've never heard before. Of course, we're in the word business, but he's like, in the super duper word business because he's a linguist. Before we bring him on, what was your favorite word this year?
- [48:49]
C
I mean, I don't know if it's a word I like, and I'm not sure if I like the thing it represents, but I think slop as a word of the year is a good contender because it does seem to represent so much of what's changing in the world. I will use another new word, the initiatification of everything.
- [49:07]
A
I love that.
- [49:08]
C
Which is kind of the increase in the amount of slop. So I'm going to go with slop. How about you, Barry?
- [49:13]
A
I love slop, too, and I should note it was Merriam Webster's word of the year, But I also have noticed lately on Twitter that people combine it so it'll be like PR slop, marketing slope. Like it's. It's become like a hyphenate, which I love. Another word that I used a lot this year and saw a lot is brain rot, which is very much of a piece with slop and inshittification and maybe speaks about our end of days times, which.
- [49:37]
C
What a great year it's been.
- [49:38]
A
It's been an incredible year. Okay, we gotta bring in our favorite linguist, John McWhorter. What is John's bio? Ollie? Hit me with that.
- [49:45]
C
So John is the linguistics professor at Columbia University. He is a columnist at the New York Times. We'll let him off on that one right now. And he's our favorite person to go to for the meaning behind the words we spend all day thinking about.
- [50:00]
A
All right, here we go. John McWhorter, Future Free Press columnist. No pressure. Welcome to Honestly.
- [50:08]
D
Great to be here, Barry.
- [50:09]
A
Well, the Oxford word of the year this year, 2025, was rage bait. Tell us about that word and how you feel about it winning the word of the Year.
- [50:19]
D
Well, I think that it's actually an important word because really, it's gotten to the point that the nature of social media, especially when Twitter became X, and especially given the nature of this presidency, there is quite a bit of things going on online that are designed to make people angry and not to think. And I would say that even in my own experience, I'm always kind of preachily saying, saying, I refuse to stop reading books. I insist on reading an actual physical book for 60 minutes a day. I must admit, it's gotten to the point that I can read for about 30 minutes at a time and even I cannot resist the temptation of scrolling and going through things that make me angry, that get me riled up, because, damn it, it feels good. It's like watermelon, Jolly Rancher soda, which exists. And if I, if I can't resist it, then I'm imagining lots of other people.
- [51:19]
C
No, we're in big trouble. We're in big trouble if you're the, you know.
- [51:23]
D
So, yeah, that was a good call. Rage bait.
- [51:26]
A
Just before we move on. Slop. How do you feel about it as a word? Do you use it?
- [51:33]
D
Yes, recently. And I think that was a very good word to think of as a 2025 phenomenon. It was around a little bit before, but I didn't hear it until this year. And I think it was this year that it became impossible not to at least talk about AI even if you're not really engaging in it yet and having to really think about, is this real, is this not? And as a professor like me, I have to think about it with assignments, but then also with anything you see online. And so, yeah, I don't particularly like the word, especially since it's now spreading. It's being used with other words than AI. But let's face it, that happened this year. Two years ago, you could ignore AI. This is the year that my 13 year old was making a poster for me. She did it with AI. I have never touched it, and she did it without even thinking. That was very 2025. So, yeah, there's a lot of AI slop out there.
- [52:28]
C
So another word of the year. I'm not even sure if it's a word, but Dictionary.com picked. And this is where we all sound old and we sound like, okay, this is.
- [52:38]
A
This is what's pathetic. I don't even know what this is.
- [52:40]
C
Okay? So this is. This is why we're screwed.
- [52:43]
A
Okay?
- [52:44]
C
And this is the Dictionary.com word of the year was 6, 7. And if anyone's listening to this with kids in the car, they're probably like freaking out right now doing six, seven. I don't know, John, can you just decipher the whole 6, 7 thing for us and its meaning and explain to
- [53:07]
A
me why my producer's laughing hysterically and I'm doing her arms like this. This must have happened.
- [53:14]
C
No, it's just you're over the age of 12, so you don't.
- [53:16]
A
Is it. Am I doing the arm movement incorrectly? And what does the arm movement have to do with 6, 7?
- [53:21]
D
It's a fascinating thing. It's got no more substance than like a quantum particle. It doesn't mean anything. It just is something. And it took me a while. Cause you do get different kinds of answers. But what it is is that if you laugh when somebody says six and then seven for some reason, then you are showing that you are about 13 years old and you get the joke. And then there's that gesture that goes along with it, which again, means nothing. Some people say that it means meh. But no, I've talked to. I'm around tweens a lot these days. And so what it is is just that. Do you get it? And that's what it means. And so it's just kind of tweens shaking hands or saluting each other. And I think it's adorable.
- [54:03]
A
So it's like if. Okay, let me just try and use it. Six, seven.
- [54:10]
F
What?
- [54:12]
D
We can't do it.
- [54:13]
A
What is it? Where did it come from?
- [54:16]
D
So some rap song, apparently. But, you know, most of them don't know that anymore.
- [54:21]
B
It was.
- [54:22]
A
It does make me laugh.
- [54:23]
C
Does the fact that this word of the year literally means nothing.
- [54:28]
A
It's the amplification, right?
- [54:30]
C
Am I. I don't want to over theorize 6, 7, Jon, but does this speak to something about the declining literacy? People are not reading books, words losing their meaning, AI and shittification of everything. Or am I just finding meaning where there isn't any and it's just a dumb thing?
- [54:49]
D
Well, I think that we're all more interested in and more accepting of colloquial language than we used to be. And six, seven is so weird that you can at least have a conversation about it. And the truth is, it's like many things, if you say, how are you doing to somebody, usually you don't have time to mean it. What you're saying is. What it means is, I acknowledge that you're there and there's no problem between us. 6, 7 is doing that same thing. It's just a way of kind of grunting or clapping hands. And it's just a random sequence of syllables.
- [55:22]
A
Who is the cohort that most loves? Six, seven.
- [55:25]
D
Young.
- [55:26]
A
How young?
- [55:26]
G
Pre.
- [55:27]
C
Teen?
- [55:27]
A
Preteen.
- [55:28]
C
Yeah.
- [55:29]
D
Yeah.
- [55:29]
A
Okay. All right. John McWhorter. The time has come. What was your favorite word of 2025?
- [55:36]
D
Chat. The way the kids are using chat. And so they'll say, chat. That's a good one. Look at that over here. Chat. That girl's wearing an interesting dress. Where it starts with addressing a chat on screen or on the phone. And now it means, hey, listen. And they're using it just fluently. You know, chat. It's a dead squirrel. I listen to that all summer, and I think it's just adorable.
- [55:58]
A
Does it also have to do with the way you describe, like, searching on Google? But it's chatting with ChatGPT. Or it's different.
- [56:05]
C
It's chat like I'm a live streamer. Like, and I'm talking to my chat that chat.
- [56:09]
A
Oh, interesting. Okay. Wow. I'm so old. I am. I am somehow older than both of you combined.
- [56:16]
D
Okay, I'm old, too, but my kids are 10 and 13. And so I just have this special conduit into it at this point. But that's gonna change.
- [56:24]
A
All right, We're. Now we're really gonna get into it.
- [56:27]
E
Okay.
- [56:27]
A
Because we are going to play our favorite game of the year. What are we going to do? All.
- [56:33]
C
Okay, this is the part of the episode where esteemed professor John McWhorter gets thrown bizarre, obscene, disgusting words his way.
- [56:44]
A
Six, seven.
- [56:44]
C
And he has to explain to us what he thinks they mean, which I think he's going to do well at, because he knows more about these words than he knows way more than I do.
- [56:52]
A
I don't.
- [56:52]
D
I'm a little better this year, but it's not fair.
- [56:55]
A
It's because he has a 10 and 13 year old. Okay, here's the first word. You ready?
- [56:58]
D
I'm ready.
- [56:59]
A
Aura farming.
- [57:02]
D
That's. Yeah, there's this thing where they talk about somebody having aura, and that kind of means that you're cool. If you're aura farming, then that means that the previous term for it was working it. And so you're trying to make people notice your aura. So Chloe Savigny, 20 years ago was aura farming and always showing up in fancy outfits. Now, I guess it's Sydney Sweeney. So that's aura farming.
- [57:26]
A
Do we think that Timothy Chalamet is sincere or aura farming?
- [57:32]
D
He gives me an aura farming vibe. Or the way he's giving Ara farming.
- [57:38]
A
Okay, next word. Baby girl. And it's not what you think it means.
- [57:45]
D
All right. The one thing that I remember that being idiomatic for was when Marjorie Taylor Greene and AOC got into it in Congress, and at one point, AOC said to Marjorie Taylor Greene, baby girl now. And I thought, that's kind of a little street fight. Is it that or is it something else?
- [58:07]
A
Okay, I love that. But this version, the 2025 version of Baby girl is not the sort of patronizing example you just used. It's used to describe an attractive man who's a celeb that's admired for being cute, sensitive, vulnerable and. Or stylish. So, like, do you know who Jacob Elordi is?
- [58:29]
D
No. And this is not Chalamet, I get the feeling.
- [58:32]
A
No. But I suspect Chalamet might be considered baby girl. Jacob Elordi is. He's not, like, very beautiful. Yeah, he's not meaty enough.
- [58:41]
C
Moody. Like, he's not moody. Extroverted, maybe.
- [58:44]
A
Yeah. Jacob Elordi is a very beautiful tall actor from Euphoria who's in this new movie, Frankenstein. You're going to see him everywhere. I think probably Harry Styles would probably be baby girl.
- [58:55]
C
Okay.
- [58:55]
D
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's a baby girl. Baby girl.
- [58:59]
A
That's a baby girl. And now we have one that's connected.
- [59:02]
C
Yeah. Related. Girly pop.
- [59:05]
D
Girly pop. And it doesn't have to do with music, I assume.
- [59:09]
C
Correct.
- [59:10]
D
I haven't heard that at all. No.
- [59:13]
C
What's that? So I'm told. And I didn't. Haven't heard this one before, but I'm told it's an affectionate term for a close girl or woman friend.
- [59:20]
D
Girly pop.
- [59:21]
C
Yeah. Or it could be. Or you could say we're very girly pop, meaning we're very close friends. I'm looking at my producer nod like I have that right, and she's just laughing at us. Barry and I are sort of getting
- [59:36]
A
roasted in the room right now, and it's really, really mean. Okay, moving on. Chopped.
- [59:45]
D
Oh, yeah, chopped. Is it a woman with bad hair or not dressed right? I know it's a woman. Close.
- [59:56]
A
Yes. It's something that's ugly, unattractive, or undesirable.
- [60:01]
D
Right. Okay, so, man, that's chopped and it's bad looking. Yeah, yeah. That one had been gradually settling in for me.
- [60:09]
A
I really like that one. If you know this, I'm gonna be shocked. Unk.
- [60:14]
D
Oh, yeah. That's what they're saying to me.
- [60:17]
G
And so.
- [60:21]
D
Gus, you're too old.
- [60:22]
A
Can they say it to a woman? It's only a man.
- [60:26]
D
It's only a man. I'm pretty sure from watching it used. I mean, there's a certain affection in it.
- [60:32]
A
I think it can be. I think I can be unk. And I think I'm also unk. And I'm looking forward to being called that.
- [60:37]
C
But this is not a nice thing to be called.
- [60:41]
A
I know, but I. I'm taking pride in it. But yeah, it's. It's it's like somebody that's kind of out of touch or old fashioned.
- [60:49]
D
It's the new. Okay, Boomer.
- [60:50]
A
Yeah.
- [60:51]
C
This conversation is very unk.
- [60:52]
A
Yeah, this conversation is very unk.
- [60:54]
E
Yes.
- [60:56]
C
Okay, John. So one trend we picked up in kind of new words this year comes from the Internet, like so many new words. And it's the way language is used to evade, I guess, kind of algorithmic censorship online.
- [61:09]
D
Oh, this stuff. Yeah.
- [61:10]
C
So we have a couple of those for you. That's a bit of a clue. The first one is Midnight Ballerina. Can you guess what that refers to?
- [61:18]
D
Oh, this is all this algo speak. And it's funny. I have a student who wrote me a paper on it that I haven't read yet. Midnight Ballerina. I have no blessed idea. Unless it means a prostitute.
- [61:30]
F
Close.
- [61:31]
C
A midnight ballerina is a stripper, apparently.
- [61:33]
D
Oh, okay. Okay. Close.
- [61:36]
C
Similarly, what does the. If you see a corn emoji anywhere online, what should you be prepared to see next?
- [61:43]
D
I almost don't want to know because it's not going to be corny.
- [61:47]
G
So I have no idea.
- [61:49]
A
I want you to guess. It's related to eggplants
- [61:56]
D
through some weird transformational logic. Does it relate to a vagina in some way?
- [62:02]
A
Yes, it does. Because it's a new way to say porn.
- [62:06]
D
Oh, oh, oh. Cause it rhymes. Okay.
- [62:08]
C
Right. It's kind of like cockney rhyming slang. There we go.
- [62:11]
A
Is my favorite thing in the world.
- [62:12]
D
Oh, we're cockneys.
- [62:13]
A
Yeah, we are cockneys. Do you want to try out your cockney accent on us by chance?
- [62:18]
D
That's something I can't. That's terrible.
- [62:22]
A
No one in the world is worse. Cockney accent. And my sister and I swear that she was going to get punched in the face when we were most recently in London when she was using it in public.
- [62:30]
F
Okay.
- [62:31]
A
This is the best game of the year, and it's not even the new year yet. John, can you talk to us a little bit about what you think some possible words of the year will be for 2026.
- [62:44]
D
In 26 it's going to be all about the tea. Because that is just jumping week after week after week.
- [62:50]
E
It's.
- [62:51]
D
And there's T in the kind of gay slang way as gossip, but T is beginning to have a wider meaning in the same way as based. And so it ends up being about just news and it ends up being about this kind of range of things. And clocking somebody's T means that you. You. You figured out what they meant I clocked her T. And that's shortening to clock. And clock is just being used as that, complete with a gesture. There's something they do with their fingers
- [63:18]
C
and that means like you're drinking.
- [63:20]
D
Clocked it because it's like this. Yeah, that thing. And I think in a year that's gonna have really taken over.
- [63:27]
C
That's just when I'm. When I'm slacking with younger Free Press colleagues just to give everyone a view behind the curtain here. And they ask me a question about what the plan is for the day's stories. And I say often the reply is just tea.
- [63:41]
D
Oh, my God.
- [63:42]
F
What?
- [63:42]
D
That's mean.
- [63:43]
A
Do you guys do this? Is there an emoji for this?
- [63:46]
C
There's no emojis. No, there's no emojis on my end.
- [63:49]
A
We need gifts for this.
- [63:50]
G
I think it's an emoji.
- [63:51]
D
Maybe it is, actually. Maybe it is.
- [63:53]
A
All right, what else?
- [63:54]
B
Unk.
- [63:57]
D
Let's see. One more.
- [64:00]
A
Unk is so fun.
- [64:02]
D
Unk is cute. I hope we're allowed to say this, but there is the expression that they use to say that something is really good. And they say that it serves. If I may. Cunt. There's that expression. I think that's about three or four years old, man, that serves. Cunt. They're not gonna say it around us, but they do say it. It's shortening to serves. And respectable people are beginning to say that under about 50. Oh, that really serves. And I don't know if all of them know what the full expression is, but I'm hearing serves. And I'll bet that's gonna keep going. Cause you always want a new way to say something is good and the kids are saying it. I have caught my 13 year old saying it with her friends when she didn't know I heard and so is going to jump. And if my, you know, proper daughter is saying it, then it's becoming language. So yeah, let's listen for serves and cunty.
- [64:57]
C
The year of The C word. 2026. John McWhorter, Happy New Year. Thank you for serving Unk. And see you this time next year. Six, seven.
- [65:09]
D
Six, seven.
- [65:11]
A
Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.
- [65:12]
D
Same to you too. See you very soon.
- [65:14]
A
Bye. More predictions with Dr. Mark Hyman, Leandra Medine Cohen and Neil Ferguson after the break. Stay with us. We can't talk about predictions for 2026 without talking to a doctor, without talking to someone who cares about health and wellness and makes that their life's mission. Because just about everyone I know when it comes to New Year's resolutions. It's something about getting skinny, getting fit, or getting healthier. And the person that I have in mind is none other than Dr. Mark Hyman.
- [65:58]
C
Yeah, Mark Hyman, who is one of America's most famous physicians. He's written 15 books. He hosts a hit podcast called the Dr. Hyman Show. He's an entrepreneur. His company, Function Health, is focused on empowering people to understand what is going on with their bodies through lab testing. So let's give Mark Hyman a call.
- [66:17]
A
Hello, Dr. Mark Hyman. How are you?
- [66:20]
G
Hi, everybody. Hi, Barry. How you doing?
- [66:23]
C
So, Mark, let's start with the Cliff Notes. If you have 30 seconds with any person knowing nothing about their specific medical issues or anything, what are three things people can do to get healthier in 2026?
- [66:35]
G
Well, you know, I. I actually don't use willpower because I think it. It fails every time when. When the food industry has hijacked our brain chemistry, our hormones, our metabolism, our immune system, our microbiome, we literally are helpless. So you have to sort of reset your system so you want the right things. And if you're looking at, you know, what are those habits that you can do that make a huge difference? It's eating food. And when I say eating food, I'm talking about the Webster's Dictionary definition of food, which is essentially some material that consists of protein, fat, and carbs that's used in the body of an organism. And that's any organism to sustain growth, repair, and vital processes to furnish energy and growth. And it basically is something that nourishes, repairs, and sustains life, not something that happens to be edible or palatable or calorie containing. I mean, that's the problem. We are eating not food. In America, 60% of our diet is something called ultra processed food. People used to refer to it as junk food. People know what it is intuitively. It's something your grandmother wouldn't have or your great grandmother now probably wouldn't have in their kitchen, like Lunchables or Go Gurts or Pop Tarts or, you know, it's not about counting calories. It's not about existing macros. It's not about biohacking yourself to death. It's just stop eating stuff that ain't food. And when we look at the diet of Americans, 60% of it isn't food, 67% of kids stuff that they're eating isn't food. It's full of refined starches, added sugars, industrial oils, emulsifiers, artificial flavors, Dyes, preservatives. And the science is not controversial about this. It's directly linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, depression, anxiety, dementia, cancer. And the data is unequivocal. So it's not willpower, it's a biochemical trap. And the good news is you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to go keto or vegan or carnivore. It's not about ideology. It's just eating real food. Stuff your great grandmother would recognize. Vegetables, fruit, beans, nuts, seeds, meat, chicken, fish, whatever looks like food that you could recognize, came from a farm and isn't too much altered. So try to shift your diet away from that shop, around the perimeter of the grocery store, cook a few basic meals, learn how to cook. I mean, people get impressed that I can cook. It ain't that hard. My mom said, mark, if you can read, you can cook. Follow the recipe, just follow the list. It's pretty easy. And it's important to know what's going on, because at Function Health, the company I co founded, you mentioned, we're finding that over 90% of people have some form of metabolic dysfunction. Over 65% have high insulin levels, something doctors never check. And it's an epidemic that's driving our healthcare costs, it's driving suffering, disability. And now for a dollar a day, you can get your labs checked twice a year and see what's going, going on. That's way deeper than you'd get when you go to your regular doctor checkup and get a sense of what's really happening in your body. So that's really, really an important thing to think about.
- [69:28]
A
Okay, so, Mark, we want to ask you about some of the biggest health threat trends that were either discussed extensively in our newsroom. We have a lot of health nuts in our newsroom. I am not one of them, unfortunately, as you know.
- [69:41]
G
But that also nuts, but not health
- [69:42]
A
nuts, exactly, but they were really big on social media, and we want to ask you, should we ditch them or bring them into 20, 26? Are you ready?
- [69:51]
G
Ready. Let's go.
- [69:52]
A
Okay, I'm going to give you the thing, and I want you to tell me yes or no, and in like a sentence, tell me why. Starting with red light therapy.
- [70:00]
G
Red light therapy is something called photobiomodulation, which is a big medical word, but essentially it means light influences our biology. We are basically receptors for the outside world. We have our typical senses, but our skin and our eyes also sense light. And red light and other light therapies can be very Effective for activating mitochondria, for reducing inflammation. In fact, I actually just got in a bike accident and I tore my face. And I use red light to actually help heal my face faster because it activates mitochondria, increases ATP, reduces inflammation. And there's a lot of evidence that this can actually work. So it's not a. Kind of a fringe thing, but you can actually look up the science on it. It's pretty deep.
- [70:41]
A
Okay, so we're taking it in to 20, 26.
- [70:44]
G
You bet.
- [70:45]
C
Another thing that I think we see on social media is EMF blockers. So the idea that you need to block electromagnetic waves, I mean, that's a tougher one.
- [70:55]
G
I mean, the data, you know, is hard. Like if, you know, it's like. It's like if. If we're all swimming in. In the ocean and say, is water bad for you? How do you know? Because everybody's swimming in the ocean. Right. So it's hard to have a control group when Everybody's exposed to Wi Fi and EMFs and so forth. It does affect us. We're electromagnetic beings. It does have potentially harm. And there is some evidence that it can affect things like fertility. I was just talking to Michael Eisenberg, a Stanford urologist. We're talking about male fertility and the decline in male fertility. And one of the things is guys put laptops on their lap, which is a bad idea, or women put on their ovaries. It's a bad idea. So I think EMFs are a problem. It doesn't mean it's a problem for everybody. We don't really have a good way of really studying it at this point. And I. I think it's unfortunate, but I. I do think it's one of those things that's ubiquitous we can't really do much about. You know, I think I know personally, when my power goes out in the house, I sleep better. And in New York, you know, I had an apartment and you could turn on the WI fi and you see like 50 different Wi Fi. And I put in a Geiger counter, like a, like EMF detector in my. In my apartment. And it was like, danger, get out. And I put an EMF tent over my bed. And I was like, you could go in there and you couldn't make a phone call and you couldn't get WI fi. So there are EMF blockers you can use. There's EMF clothing, there's. There's all sorts of stuff people are developing.
- [72:16]
C
I thought this was.
- [72:17]
E
I thought this was.
- [72:17]
C
I thought this Was just like chemtrails or like a fake thing.
- [72:20]
A
I thought this was chemtrails.
- [72:21]
G
I mean, the same.
- [72:24]
A
Is it kind of chemtrail y A little bit.
- [72:26]
G
But I would say you do your best to reduce your exposures.
- [72:31]
C
But, you know, I'm freaked out.
- [72:32]
G
Honestly freaked out too. Guess what? Guess what. If you read the Apple terms and conditions and if you go to your iPhone and you go down to Legal on the general, you know, tab of settings, it'll say, don't put this near your head. It's dangerous. It will hurt you, literally.
- [72:48]
C
On your iPhone.
- [72:49]
G
On your iPhone. If you literally look at the legal language that Apple puts in there, it's like, this is dangerous. Don't stick it near your head.
- [72:58]
A
Okay, we're gonna need to do some follow ups on this because I'm alarmed.
- [73:01]
G
I'm not making this up. Go to the general tab on your settings and then go down to legal.
- [73:05]
A
Okay, so I'll ask, I'll ask you. When you talk on your phone, do you only do headphones?
- [73:09]
G
I do. I do a speakerphone mostly. Keep it away from my body. Wow. Yeah.
- [73:14]
A
Okay. I definitely have all kinds of weird cancer is what I'm learning right now.
- [73:18]
H
Okay.
- [73:19]
A
Mark, Cold plunge and sauna.
- [73:23]
G
Yeah.
- [73:23]
A
Feel like these things had like a very big moment. I don't know if we're bringing them into 2026. What do you think?
- [73:31]
G
Oh, I mean, the science is really good on this. I mean, saunas for sure. The science of sauna is pretty impressive if you look at the. I mean, in Finland they did a lot of these studies and they have, they have more saunas in Finland than could literally fit everybody in the population at once. And the control group was people had sauna a week, which is more than most people have. And they found that people had saunas four times a week or more for 20 minutes at about 170 degrees, had a 57% reduction in mortality, which is pretty impressive. It does have a lot of cardiovascular benefits. It increases your increases circulation. It also has benefits on increasing something called heat shock proteins which repair damaged proteins, which happen as you get older. It also induces the activity of your innate immune system, which is your ancient immune system that's not antibody related, but it helps you fight infections and colds. It helps you detoxify. It's been shown to actually release a lot of environmental toxins in the sweat. It also helps with cardiovascular fitness and weight loss and helps sympathetic tone. So people have heart rate variability issues or heart failure. It's been shown to be very helpful. So saunas, I think are a really wonderful life hack. If you can get one or use one, I highly recommend it.
- [74:48]
C
Well, I'm adding that to my resolution. I guess.
- [74:51]
H
Cold plunges.
- [74:53]
G
Cold plunges are less fun for sure. I did one this morning and there's actually an incredible scientist at Denmark who I've had on my podcast who actually does legitimate scientific research on this and shows that if you go in about 40 to 60 degrees for a minute or so, you will create this cold stress that creates a whole set of neuroendocrine, metabolic, vascular and immune responses. So it increases norepinephrine, dopamine and that it'll kind of activate your sympathetic nervous system since you shock like your stress response, but there'll be a rebound where you'll go into a relaxation state. It also improves your stress resilience, helps your focus, mood alertness. I did it before here, so I'd be alert. It also helps inflammation. If obviously you sprain your ankle, I say put ice on it. So it helps with inflammation in the body and soreness after exercise. You'd be careful. If you're doing strength training and you do it within four hours, you're going to blunt the increase in strength that you're going to get in your muscles. But it also activates your mitochondria, which is brown fat. And brown fat actually is where your metabolism is. So it can increase energy expenditure. Metabolism may make you more insulin sensitive. So basically these things are what we call hormetic stresses. They're stresses that don't kill you, but make you stronger. So basically exercise is a stress that if you lift weights, you're going to tear your muscle, but eventually make you stronger. But if you do too much, you could die. Or like too much cold or too much heat, you're going to die. But, but basically the right amount like Goldilocks really works.
- [76:23]
A
Ollie, we have to get a lot of new equipment in 2026.
- [76:25]
C
Yeah. And remember, don't do your sauna after all that strength.
- [76:28]
A
Yeah, I won't. All that strength training I do on a regular basis.
- [76:31]
G
I've been in your office. Bear. You could put a nice little infrared one, two person sauna in there and you could put a, you could put a little, a little.
- [76:38]
A
Do you think that that would like violate? Do you think that would be an HR violation?
- [76:42]
E
Okay,
- [76:45]
C
how about breath work and meditation?
- [76:47]
G
I mean, breath work used to be called pranayama. It's a multi thousand year old technology from yoga and it helps to regulate the nervous system. Your diaphragm, which is what you use when you breathe. The vagus nerve, which is your relaxation nerve, parasympathetic nerve, goes through your diaphragm. So it's the fastest way to activate your body's own relaxation system if you want to lower your blood pressure, lower your heart rate, if you want to reset your stress response. Breath work is an incredibly powerful tool. And meditation, I mean, there's just so much data on this. In fact, one of my colleagues and friends, Daniel Goleman, wrote a book called Altered Traits or something like that. And it was really about the science behind the benefits of meditation. Richard Davidson has done a lot of the work on this, doing MRI machines on meditated and mentally for 40 years. It's, it's the same kind of benefits you get from taking psychedelics. Although it's a lot, you know, it's a lot more work. But you'll get, you'll get this default mode network. Slow down. Your ego will be quieter. You'll have less reactivity, less responsiveness to stresses. It helps with blood pressure, pain control. John Cabinson's done a lot of this work at University of Massachusetts. So there's, there's no doubt that, that there's plenty of data on the benefits of breath work and meditation. And by the way, it's free and it's available to everybody all the time, and you don't need any equipment.
- [78:15]
H
Okay.
- [78:16]
A
Ozempic, biggest health trend, biggest conversation that I can remember around a new drug probably in my lifetime.
- [78:24]
G
Yeah.
- [78:24]
A
Should yay or nay? Should people be microdosing Ozempic?
- [78:29]
G
Well, the two questions there, Ozempic and microdosing. Like, first of all, most people who are getting Ozempic. Yeah, most people are getting GLP1s or Ozempic or Wegovy or Mounjaro. These are in pharmacologic doses that are far exceeding your body's own natural production of this peptide, GLP1. And when you take it at these high doses, it can cause significant side effects. It can cause a lot of gastrointestinal upset. It can cause problems with muscle loss if you don't do high amounts of resistance training and eat a lot of protein, and there's a lot of rebound. 65% of people gain all the weight back after a year year, and 50% of people stop it after a year because it has side effects. So that kind of is not the answer. It's a tool. It can be used in conjunction with aggressive lifestyle intervention. I don't think it's safe practice actually to prescribe it, unless you also have a nutrition and an exercise consult. So people know what to do. However, it can be used in low doses. It's kind of the wild west out there. There's compounding pharmacies that provide it. They're not all the same. The quality isn't there. You're kind of going out on a limb. But, but people are finding that lower doses can be effective. The problem is that obesity is not a character flaw, it's not an appetite problem, it's not a hormone deficiency, it's not that GLP1 deficiency. It's the result of us living in a toxic food environment, which is something we're all swimming in. It's a, it's a nutritional wasteland. And on top of that we've got chronic stress and sleep deprivation, endocrine disrupting chemicals and trauma and emotional stuff. All this can affect our metabolism and our weight. So we have to not just deal with medicating the problem, we have to go upstream and deal with the environmental consequences and causes which is our toxic food system. And that's, you know. In fact, my new book with Brown is coming out in February called Food Fix Uncensored, which is really about the food system from field to fork and how it undermines our health and our economy and our social fabric and our environment at every single level. So if we really cared about health, we wouldn't be focused on, you know, funding GLP1s, we'd be regulating ultra processed food. We'd be subsidizing real food, not corn syrup. We'd be teaching nutrition in medical schools. We'd be making healthy food cheaper than junk food. I mean, the Rockefeller foundation came out with a great report called the True Cost of Food, declaring that it was $3 of the collateral damage for every dollar we spent on food at the checkout counter. So the price we're paying at the checkout counter is not the true cost of food. So there's a lot of ways to deal with this, but we really have to empower people to understand what's happening with their biology and take ownership of their health. And I think at the end of the day, our healthcare system and our food system are not going to change overnight. And that's in part why I co founded Function Health, was to allow people to have access to their own data, to personalize our health, to be proactive, preventive, to understand what's happening under the hood and not wait for a disaster to happen and to ultimately live 100 healthy years.
- [81:32]
C
Mark, let's put aside, which is a big one, obviously you would say, but let's put aside diet and like the fact that you should eat no junk food and a lot more proper food. What are three other things people should change about their life for better health in 2026? If you had to, it could be some of the things we've just described. So give us, give us three things they should start doing. Three things they should stop doing.
- [81:56]
G
Well, I think, I think the three things obviously they should stop doing are eating ultra processed food. I think, you know, I think not moving is obviously a huge issue. People don't move.
- [82:09]
C
They need to move.
- [82:10]
G
And cutting short corners on sleeping, those are three powerful pillars for health that work and they're free basically, in terms of what we should be doing. You know, I think to me it's really about these foundational principles of having, having agency over your health and not waiting for the healthcare system or the doctor or the hospital to fix you. They're there for acute care injuries or acute care medicine, and they're really, really good at it. I was trained in it. It's excellent. It saved my life many times. But for most of the things people suffer from, they need to actually take ownership of their health and be proactive, which means learning about how your body works.
- [82:53]
A
Last question mark. You are someone who is unafraid to use yourself as a kind of guinea pig. You try, you gotta try.
- [83:01]
G
Maybe too unafraid.
- [83:02]
H
You try a lot.
- [83:03]
A
What is something that you anticipate trying or would look forward to trying to in 2026?
- [83:10]
G
That's a great question. There's an incredible amount of research going on around a protein called Clotho. Clotho is something our body makes in abundance when we're younger, declines as we're older, and it seems to be this powerful longevity, age reversal, dementia, preventing dementia, reversing compound. Now, there's a lot of research going on in Europe and other countries, a lot of data, and I've been following the data closely. And so I'm looking forward to going to Europe and getting a trial injection of cloth and we'll see how that goes. But that's kind of not ready for prime time. I don't recommend it for everybody. I'm willing to experiment myself, but I don't recommend it for my patients or for anybody else. Just to say that's good.
- [83:53]
A
Okay. In a further conversation, we are going to talk about mushrooms, ibogaine and all of the other interesting things that you, Mark Hyman, manage to do in your Spare time. We don't know how you have it. Congratulations on everything going on with function, health, and thank you so much for joining us.
- [84:08]
G
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- [84:18]
A
Okay, Ali, next up is the most natural topic for the two of us, which is fashion in 2026.
- [84:24]
C
Yeah, we are fashionistas, fashion journalists, fashionable people.
- [84:29]
A
But you, you actually did change my life because you're the only person that got me a birthday present this year with Maya and it was Solomon shoes. And I vaguely knew that Solomons were kind of like a hot model type shoe to wear, but they are also very, very comfortable and they have been my weekend shoe ever since you got them for me. So thank you.
- [84:48]
C
You're welcome.
- [84:49]
A
Okay, so I know we are fashion experts, as you can tell from my shirt, which is from the Gap, and your beautiful jacket, which is from.
- [84:57]
C
I don't remember.
- [84:57]
A
Okay, well, it's working for me, but we need to call in an actual expert and there is no one better to speak on this subject than one Leandra Medine Cohen. She is a fashion influencer. I would actually say she's an intellectual that applies her philosophical ideas and creativity to fashion. She ran an incredible company called Man Repeller that began as a blog and I read it and so many other people did, and now I follow her on everything. She has a newsletter called the Serial Aisle. You follow her on Instagram, she'll inspire you to wear better clothes than you do. Or it'll just be something that you one day will imagine you will do and never do. And that's me. Okay, let's bring Leandra Nadine Cohen in.
- [85:38]
C
Leandra Medine, welcome to.
- [85:40]
F
Honestly, thank you so much for having me. I heard everything you said and I just want to make one thing clear. Yeah, Gap is very trend forward.
- [85:50]
A
Wow, great. Here's the great thing. I've been wearing Gap since I was 3 years old and I just never changed. So finally it's putting me ahead of time.
- [86:01]
F
You're supposed to grow up with it.
- [86:03]
A
Why do you. Why do you think you. But why do. I thought Gap is the anti trend. So why is Gap trend forward?
- [86:09]
F
Gap has always been trend. Or Gap has for a long time been trend forward. Don't you. Don't you remember the Mickey Dragon? And like the marketing was so perfectly phenomenal. And also the thing that makes it so good for baby clothes is the thing that makes it good for grown up clothes too. Like, it's dependable, it's soft, it fits well. You can put it in the laundry machine many, many times and not worry about quality.
- [86:35]
A
You get it. You get it. I'm loving it. I'm feeling very validated. Just because you brought up Mickey Drexler, I need to say that current J. Crew. This might not be a trend forward, fashion forward, or politically correct thing to say. Current J. Crew is excellent.
- [86:50]
F
That has nothing to do with Mickey Drexler and everything to do with Olympia Gallo, the current creative director, who. That she's got a big job and she is fulfilling the task order.
- [87:02]
A
Do you think she'd want to come work at the Free Press?
- [87:05]
F
I mean, not. No.
- [87:08]
E
Okay.
- [87:09]
C
Our merch is unimprovable. Firstly, I agree.
- [87:11]
A
Our merch is unimprovable. It's that J. Crew, for a little while went on this. I felt like it got a huge amount of buzz and it was, like, very cool and high fashion or whatever. And I'm sure that it was, but the clothes just didn't look good on normal people. And I am the perfect example of a normal person to try on clothes. And J. Crew. It's just crushing it right now. And now I'm glad to put a name to the success of this store where I go and buy a ton of stuff.
- [87:40]
F
I also totally agree. The clothes look good and they feel really good too.
- [87:44]
A
What is your favorite brand of 2025?
- [87:48]
F
Of 2025? Yeah.
- [87:49]
A
And then we'll get to 2026. But what is the brand that you would say owned 2025?
- [87:55]
F
You know, I gotta tell you, I'm really not brand agnostic. I'm more. I'm probably more like, what is the Trend that owned 2025 and back to last winter? Or like, I guess I can. We started to see, like, really big fuzzy coats become popular. That was the big. That was like, the burgeoning trend of last winter. Everyone looking a little 60s 70s adjacent with these, like, massive Mongolian collars shearling insides. I feel like the coats are only getting bigger and people are really doubling down on the warm. On the hygge.
- [88:33]
A
What's the hygge?
- [88:34]
F
It's. It's a Danish term. It's spelled H Y. Oh, Higg.
- [88:38]
A
Higa. Right, Right, right, right, right.
- [88:39]
H
Yes.
- [88:40]
F
Oh, is it pronounced higa?
- [88:41]
A
No. I'm certain that you are right about this as you are everything. I call it hygie, and I know that's wrong.
- [88:48]
F
And then. And then last spring, the big trend, like the one that felt like it really clobbered the spring summer, and maybe this is because I have, like, a personal investment in this trend. And I was. Who, like, really pushed it forward. But, like, balloon pants were the thing. Everyone was walking around trying to look a little bit like Jasmine from Aladdin.
- [89:12]
A
Okay, Leandra, we want to go through a list of things that we saw a lot of in 2025, and you're going to tell us if they're in or out for 2026.
- [89:21]
F
Okay?
- [89:21]
A
Okay. Animal print in any animal or specific.
- [89:27]
F
Leopard and tiger. Those are the big ones, I think, you know, zebra really tried to come in, but the black and white is just too harsh. A leopard or a tiger print can truly be replaced with a neutral. Leopard is a neutral.
- [89:41]
A
So no cow, no zebra.
- [89:44]
F
Maybe a little bit of cow, but not. It will not be as pervasive.
- [89:47]
C
How about polka dots?
- [89:50]
A
Otherwise known as polka dots. But he just called them polka dots.
- [89:56]
C
That's how my people speak.
- [89:57]
A
Six, seven.
- [89:58]
E
Babe.
- [89:58]
A
Okay. Polka dots.
- [90:01]
F
Polka dots are a no.
- [90:03]
A
Really?
- [90:04]
F
Okay. Yeah.
- [90:06]
A
Nothing more to say. Moving on. Sequins.
- [90:11]
F
Holidays only.
- [90:12]
E
Yeah.
- [90:13]
A
Okay. Fair.
- [90:15]
C
There's been a conversation about micro.
- [90:19]
F
About microaggressions.
- [90:20]
C
No, no, no. Well, they're kind of their own. Kind of. They could be their own kind of microaggression, which is micro shorts. And then they got shorter and shorter, and then they just disappeared. And it was just tights and leotards
- [90:30]
A
and I don't know if you know this, Ali, but probably the most prominent, like, propulsive force of that trend is the woman you're speaking to.
- [90:38]
C
I do know that that's true.
- [90:39]
F
I don't wear pants.
- [90:40]
A
It's just. It's just tights with, like, a thick underwear.
- [90:43]
C
So are we just post pants forever now or is 2026.
- [90:48]
A
I think pants are back. I think pants are back.
- [90:50]
F
I was just going to say. I got to tell you, I actually think that, like, the promotion proportions of nudity are totally changing. We're entering our shoulder era. Halter tops everywhere. Bare midriffs, if you can stomach it. Pun intended. But pants are in pants and boots.
- [91:10]
E
Like, we.
- [91:10]
F
We. We're exiting the era of, like, suits and flip flops and entering the era of boots and pants and nudity on the top.
- [91:19]
A
I like this era.
- [91:21]
F
Yeah, it's more applicable to, like, more women's bodies.
- [91:26]
E
Exactly.
- [91:27]
F
It's an easy template to look sexy, for sure.
- [91:30]
A
And I also think that wide leg pants, like, are. Are you tell me. I. I might be willing them into trend, but I feel that they're here. And I am personally grateful.
- [91:42]
F
Lalo's got a great pair of jeans coming out soon. You're gonna love them. How big they're not huge. You could wear them today and not feel. I think they're perfect for every day.
- [91:53]
C
Haven't we just done. I thought we just did the whole now everyone's pants are baggy thing, but this.
- [91:58]
F
No, no, they're not baggy. They're actually quite fitted. They like, they support you, they hold you in like a good partner, but then they also let you be free in your leg.
- [92:08]
A
Okay. The way that those were just described are incredible. Okay. When you were on this very show in 2023, you we had this expansive conversation. It was about fashion, but about other things. And you said God was in. And I feel like crosses and Christian iconography was really in in 2025 between Chapel Roan and Kylie Jenner. Like, talk to us about crosses in 2025 and in jewelry, but also just beyond that, where's God and where's Christianity and Even Judaism in 2026 as expressed through fashion?
- [92:49]
F
So I think the reason that wearing your religion on your sleeve has become so popular is sort of like an intuitive and sort of like unconscious desire to bring one's values back to the front. Because we live in a culture that is so anti discipline and so almost like averse to people staying close to themselves. And so wearing this talisman that represents your otherworldly values, a sort of connection to a power that is higher than you, a reminder of kind of your smallness in a good way, not in like a I hate myself, just your smallness in the broader ecosystem. I think that's why they started to be really, really popular. And I think this is kind of what happens with fashion trends. If we're, if we're thinking about trends as a reflection of where the culture is heading, which I often do. And hopefully this just means that people are losing their interest or starting to recognize that a lot of the sadness and depression and anxiety that's running rampant through the streets has to do with the fact that we're not holding ourselves to account and responsibility for our own livelihoods.
- [94:07]
C
Wow. Leandra went from a couple Chapel Rowan crosses to heavy, heavy stuff.
- [94:11]
A
I love it.
- [94:12]
C
Kelly, Andrew, let's. Let's talk about some trends from 2025 that you like and you want to bring into 2026 with us. And what are some that you want to see stay in 2025 and not come into the new year.
- [94:26]
F
Okay. The big one from 2025 that I want to see come into 2026, and I wrote a long essay about this last March, is the vibe started to shift from looking kind of sexless you know, looking like a gallerist who doesn't care about anything but having good taste and studying the world of beauty and what happens in the world of beauty and creating things against that to looking a little bit more primal and messy, you know, and like, just like Muscle man from Naples. And I wrote an essay called the New Fashion Woman has Good Sex because it seemed like all of the clothes were starting to reflect this like woman entering. And maybe this is because maybe I'm plugged into the frequency of my age group. I'm about to be 37 and so I'm like, you know, entering my 40s. And I've always thought of a woman's 40s as a time of sexual revolution in her life. Because you have your youth and the wisdom of experience to sort of just like plunge into life. You're more than likely done or almost done with your child rearing. So you also have like this energy, like attached is officially closed on the browser of your identity. You know, like you're done. And so you just like you charge forward with life. And it's a lot about refinding yourself sexually. And I'm seeing those expressions start to build in the way that women are dressing and in my own dressing behavior in the way that I want to dress.
- [95:53]
A
Can you explain it a little more for those of us I really got an image with Naples Hot Man. And when you're saying this, I'm thinking like Versace, but I don't know if
- [96:02]
F
that's what you mean.
- [96:03]
A
What does it look like?
- [96:04]
F
It kind of looks like a bodysuit and your high waist pants and your boots. It's that sort of like shifting and style starting to reflect what a woman looks like and the accentuation of what makes her look hot versus sort of like forcing her into this archetype that is misaligned with what she actually looks like. In fact, wearing hot pants every day, like tiny underwear as pants, like I do, it's not sexy. It doesn't make me look like a sexy woman. It makes me look like a seven year old boy.
- [96:39]
A
But why do you like, why, why do you gravitate toward wearing those kinds of things?
- [96:44]
F
Well, I've been really into pants lately. I'm wearing more low rise flare pants. I'm actually moving in that direction. I like when it feels a little bit more like I have hips. I like when my body looks like it's worn three children and pushed all three of them out of me not at once, but at twice. And then I, you know, like the hot Pants thing for me is really just a proportion thing. I use them as a foil for like massive jackets. Mm. Okay. Very 80s.
- [97:17]
A
Okay. What trends, Leandra, do you want to see die going into 2026 that were dominant in 2025?
- [97:28]
F
You know, I know that I really contributed to the proliferation of the balloon pants I mentioned earlier, but I don't need to see them again.
- [97:38]
G
Really?
- [97:39]
F
Yeah.
- [97:40]
A
Wow.
- [97:41]
F
I do hope I, you know, I. I like a toe ring though.
- [97:44]
A
I would like notice that. I noticed. Don't think I haven't noticed I look at all. Well, you have been rocking a toe ring with a diamond. I don't know if that's the one you're wearing.
- [97:55]
F
It is the one I'm wearing.
- [97:56]
A
Can we see it? Hold it up again. So this is a great transition into the following question. Lab grown in forever. In for 2026.
- [98:10]
F
I mean, lab grown diamonds are like the can you can't close.
- [98:13]
A
You know, it's over.
- [98:15]
F
It's like IVF didn't go away.
- [98:17]
A
Right. It's. I think lab grown's here to stay.
- [98:20]
F
I mean, obviously very different things bringing life into the world and having, and
- [98:25]
A
having a toe ring. But I don't know. You found a way to connect them.
- [98:28]
F
Okay.
- [98:29]
A
Labo boos.
- [98:32]
F
I. That is a trend that I would love to see die.
- [98:34]
C
What do you predict though? Do you think it's have. Have we passed peak Labubu?
- [98:39]
F
I think to the extent that somebody can come up with another way to. To show your wealth in a low stakes capacity. Yeah. That. That's not one that's going to stick around.
- [98:53]
A
Okay. This is one that I really dislike, but I'm open minded because I feel like you might like it. Tabbies.
- [99:00]
F
I do like tabbies. I'm actually going to go one step further and tell you that I like the. The five fingers. I put the swing ring over the five fingers.
- [99:09]
C
Okay, wait, so you combine five.
- [99:12]
A
I don't translate this.
- [99:14]
F
They're Vibram sneakers.
- [99:15]
A
They're Vibram sneaker.
- [99:15]
C
I don't like the kind of like
- [99:17]
A
crunchy, crunchy Denver like going on a hike.
- [99:20]
F
I have been known to wear them with like suits, a pinstripe suit and diamond. Lab grown diamond earrings.
- [99:26]
A
Okay, so what makes those fashionable? Like why do you. Why do you like them?
- [99:31]
F
They're really comfortable. That's not what makes them fashionable. But the reason I like them is because so we, we were just like so heavy in an era of looking barefoot. You know, like all of the most popular, the most viral shoes from the row Were, like, clear or made it seem like you were wearing socks, not shoes. And these were just such a perfect supplement to that trend.
- [99:56]
E
Because there's something.
- [99:57]
F
Sometimes shoes ruin outfits. Like, being barefoot just looks better with clothes sometimes. It's kind of the reason I like having dinner parties, because I can, like, wear a good outfit without shoes on.
- [100:08]
A
But that's why I like the flip flop. I mean, what. What's wrong with. Why? Why? Nothing is wrong with a flip flop.
- [100:14]
F
Flip flop. But you can wear the Vibrams around the city. Like, you can walk from 88th street to Bleecker street. If that is, like, how you find joy, which is how I find joy.
- [100:23]
A
Let's just define tabbies for my parents who are maybe listening to this. Leandra, what's a tabby?
- [100:29]
F
It's a split hoof.
- [100:32]
A
Why do people like these?
- [100:34]
F
It's the separation of your big toe from the rest of your toes.
- [100:37]
C
So I was. That was my question was gonna be. That's not just an aesthetic thing. Like, your toe is actually in that bit of the shoe.
- [100:43]
F
They're separate.
- [100:43]
C
Got it. Okay.
- [100:45]
A
Okay. Okay. Anything else, Leandra, that you want to leave behind along with Labubus as we move into 2026?
- [100:55]
C
Um, Sounds like the hot pants, honestly, are out.
- [101:02]
F
Yeah, you know, I. I'm not gonna miss that. No, hot pants are coming with me. They still make sense in too many contexts.
- [101:08]
A
They make for Leandra's life and body a thing that does not make sense for 99.9% of women. Does make sense. They just do. You have extremely long legs.
- [101:21]
F
Yes, I'm aware of it, and I'm grateful for it.
- [101:24]
A
Yeah, she's.
- [101:25]
E
You know what?
- [101:25]
F
Maybe that's. That's one trend that I would also like to leave behind is sort of, like, playing down what, you know is true about yourself or kind or, like, not be victim mentality. Complaining. Complaining is the language of victimhood. I would like to leave complaining behind. Oh, I really, like. I want to go into 2026. I want all of us to go into 2026 with the discipline of staying connected to our values and the, like, true understanding that we are makers of our own lives and we can have anything we want, including.
- [101:57]
A
Including our own diamonds that we make
- [101:59]
F
chronically tell ourselves that we're capable of it.
- [102:03]
C
Okay, let's talk about some of the people whose style inspires you. Leandra, the Times just had a list of their most stylish people of the year asap. Rocky was on it. Bad Bunny was on it.
- [102:12]
E
Who.
- [102:14]
C
Who was the most stylish person to you this year.
- [102:16]
F
I mean, Zoe Kravitz looked pretty great all year. I would say that almost everyone that Danielle Goldberg styles, I strongly agree with.
- [102:24]
A
Okay, so I'm gonna just come out
- [102:26]
C
straight over my head, by the way.
- [102:27]
A
This is what I'm saying. How do I have time to know who Danielle Goldberg is and to know exactly the outfits that Leandra is referencing? Somehow I do. I think I'm a secret fashion lover
- [102:39]
C
who would be some other people.
- [102:42]
F
She also styles someone called Laura Harrier, Greta Leigh, she just, like, they're these girls who are beautiful but also relatable enough, like you can see yourself in them. And she puts. Puts the most exquisite outfits on them, like, exactly correct for them.
- [103:00]
A
I. I completely agree with this. I really agree with this.
- [103:03]
F
I'm so happy to hear that, Barry.
- [103:05]
A
Well, I actually, I would like to see Sydney Sweeney styled by her. I feel that Sydney Sweeney is extremely. She is one of the most beautiful women ever.
- [103:17]
F
That's a good call.
- [103:18]
A
And she is being very poorly served by the fashion choices that she or someone is making for her. And I would like to see Danielle Goldberg on that case.
- [103:28]
C
That may be the hottest take in this entire episode. Not like excluding fashion, including everything else.
- [103:33]
A
But I really feel this way. She's. There's not like a concept every time it's different. And I don't. I really think that she is not. She's being done dirty by whoever's styling her. That's my real feeling.
- [103:46]
F
Yeah, maybe that's a good one for Danielle.
- [103:48]
A
Danielle, if you're listening, you heard it here first.
- [103:52]
C
Okay, you're going to have to pick now one more prediction, which is one, the big fashion trend of 2026. If you had to put your money on one of them, what would it be?
- [104:03]
F
You know, I'm compelled to say the sort of Americanification of European fashion. As Michael Ryder, who was at Polo for a very long time and is an American fashion designer, recently took over at Celine, which is a French fashion house. And his collections have been met with such overwhelming praise, and he's receiving so much credit and acclaim in the fashion world. And it's one of the first times that an American designer, I mean, Michael Kors actually was at Celine years and years and years ago, but it's one of the first times that an American designer is at a French fashion house and receiving global acclaim. So a lot of his style codes are very Polo esque. So I wonder if Ralph Lauren is going to have like a sort of zeitgeisty renaissance as a result. The other thing is Mathieu Blasi is now at Chanel.
- [105:00]
E
Okay.
- [105:01]
A
You just went where I wanted to go. What did you think of his? That I saw a whole fashion show in a subway that I thought was unbelievable.
- [105:11]
F
Yeah, it was really nostalgic. I was at the show, and the energy in the room was incredible. The soundtrack was just, like. It gave me life. And it was such a rainy, cold day at the beginning of the month. And so I think for anyone who was there, it was impossible to not, like, connect with the show emotionally. But the clothes are also really good. It's like a. It's a much more practical, stylistically, not financially, obviously, rendering of what a woman can look like. And for such a long time, Chanel has existed in this, like, world of its own making, where it was not with the trends and it wasn't in the fashion conversation at all. And it was really nostalgic. It felt like a love letter to an era of New York that, like, kind of doesn't exist anymore. But that was beautiful and a heyday, and the clothes looked awesome. But, yeah, people were mad about that show.
- [106:09]
C
Why would you be mad about it?
- [106:10]
A
Why would you be mad?
- [106:11]
F
Well, I think just because, like, the subway's not great these days, and it sort of felt like a romantification.
- [106:20]
A
That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense.
- [106:23]
F
I loved it. I liked the collection a lot.
- [106:27]
A
I love it, too. I just thought it was beautiful. Like, really beautiful and easy at the same time.
- [106:36]
F
It was a love note to New York in a way that was. I said this very nostalgic, but also it felt like a reminder for a lot of the people who were in there of why we choose this place.
- [106:49]
C
Okay, final question. Andrew medine, going into 2024, you said, on this show, wear what makes you feel confident. Then in 2025, you said, Wear what makes you feel generous. So what is your fashion advice to viewers and listeners for 2026?
- [107:07]
F
Wear what makes you feel sexy.
- [107:10]
C
Okay.
- [107:10]
G
Wow.
- [107:11]
A
Classic advice. I love it. I really love it.
- [107:16]
F
It's kind of a combination of confident and generous.
- [107:18]
E
It is. It is.
- [107:20]
A
Well, Leandra, what makes you feel Sexy going into 2026?
- [107:26]
F
Halter tops and flare pants.
- [107:29]
E
Love it.
- [107:30]
A
You inspire us. We love talking to you. Leandra Medine, fashionista and philosopher, thank you so much for your wisdom. I cannot wait to lurk on Instagram and see what you wear in 2026.
- [107:42]
F
Thanks for having me. Best 33 minutes and 40 seconds of my life.
- [107:48]
A
Tell Amy we say hi.
- [107:50]
F
I will.
- [107:50]
A
Okay. Bye, darling. Thank you. Well, Ali, I wouldn't call this a calm year. When we look across the globe, there was sort of no shortage of upheaval, as we know personally, not from being there, but from being up late covering things. Just a few of the things to name the US and Israel attacked Iran's nuclear site. Nelly and I were supposed to go to Israel days later. That was, of course, canceled. Ukraine spent another year in its bloody war with Russia. Trump unleashed a trade war with China that was later rolled back, which we'll talk about. And then there was this ceasefire in Gaza, but Hamas is kind of still in power, slash refusing to disband or disarm.
- [108:37]
C
So, yeah, a quiet year for anyone in the new. It's been super relaxing and, and a lot of things unresolved, even though we've had these big peace deals that the President likes to talk about. So someone who's helped us make sense of 2025 and someone who is going to help us make sense of 2026 is free press columnist Neil Ferguson. Neil's a historian. He's a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He's written dozens of books, and he really is our go to guy on the big geopolitical questions, both in print and on our podcasts. And so I think we should give Neil a ring.
- [109:14]
A
Let's do it. Neil Ferguson, welcome to Honestly.
- [109:18]
B
Well, hello.
- [109:20]
A
Hi. Ali just gave you this very nice setup as a person who we turn to, but I have to admit that the more I'm reading you, the more scared I am about what could be coming. It feels to me like we're in a pre war time. I mean, you would. You've defined this time as a second Cold War, but that war seems to be heating up more and more.
- [109:40]
B
Barry, I don't know what you're talking about. The President of peace is in the newly remodeled White House and it's raining peace prizes. 2026 is clearly going to be the year when Immanuel Kant's State of perpetual Peace arrives. And it really will just remain for us to remind ourselves of the lyrics of John Lennon's Imagine and sing them along with if Democrats and Republicans alike. Or maybe not. Look, I think the framing remains, and I think this has been true certainly since 2018, maybe since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, that we're in Cold War Two. The People's Republic of China took the place of the Soviet Union. We didn't really notice because we thought that history had ended and the world was just going to live happily ever after. But Cold War II brings with it certain predictable consequences. There are two superpowers. They're engaged in a competition in the realm of technology, in the realm of military hardware, in the realm of contested geographies, in the realm of ideologies. That's a Cold War. That's where we are. And as a result, as in the first Cold War, there are hotspots, there are places where hot war happens. We're going to be hitting the fourth anniversary of the outbreak of the full blown war in Ukraine back in February 2022. That's February. We're going to see the ongoing conflict that Israel's engaged in on multiple fronts, mostly with proxies of the Islamic Republic. And there's ongoing tension around the island of Taiwan, which is probably the nearest thing to Cuba in Cold War Two. So that's how to think about 2026. I think President Trump sincerely wants to try and end conflicts, but it's much easier to start a war, ask Vladimir Putin, than it is to end one. And that's one of the lessons of 2025, I think.
- [111:56]
A
Well, Neil, let's sort of go deeper into some of the hotspots. When Nora O' Donnell sat down for 60 Minutes with Donald Trump, he literally pulled out a piece of paper that he had printed out with all of the peace deals he had made around the world. And of course, the most famous of these is the ceasefire in Gaza. Now, Trump, of course, has declared an end to the war. There's technically a ceasefire, and yet it seems like Hamas is still in power in Gaza. So who actually rules Gaza and what can we expect in that territory in 2026?
- [112:33]
B
Well, the first thing is to acknowledge that major success was achieved by US diplomacy. And I think that owed quite a bit to the involvement of the President's son in law, Jared Kushner, who, when he joined forces with Steve Witkoff, brought to bear his whole, I guess, network, plus his experience in the region. And that meant that the key issue was resolved. The remaining surviving hostages that were still held captive by Hamas were released. And a kind of peace, I say kind of peace because it's not exactly tranquil there, but a kind of peace was achieved in Gaza, leaving Hamas in control of part of Gaza, but not all of it, because, in effect, Gaza has been divided and a substantial part of it is actually under, well, in practice, Israeli control. The problem with Hamas is it's very difficult entirely to annihilate it. The Israeli Defense Forces had a pretty good go at this and Certainly inflicted very serious damage on the organization, but it's still there in that rump of Gaza that it controls, and it's still using brutal violence to ensure that the local population doesn't question its authority. So that was an important moment and a meaningful success for President Trump because it had been enormously difficult to resolve the problem ever since October 7, 2023, because Israel found itself in the wake of those appalling atrocities that you and I discussed more than once, Barry, having to do two incompatible things. Destroy Hamas and rescue the hostages. It was pretty much impossible to do both those things. Now we can focus on destroying Hamas without having to be concerned about hostages. But I'd just like to add one broader point. It always was a mistake of media coverage to focus on Gaza as if it was the only game or the only war in town. Israel's actually been fighting on seven different fronts. It has been dealing not only with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but also with Hezbollah in Lebanon. It had to contend with the Houthis. It had problems coming at it from multiple directions, including, until quite recently, from Syria. And so you have to really understand the Middle east in a slightly broader framework than just Gaza. And I think in that sense, the real story of 2025 was that Iran and its proxies suffered multiple defeats, all of which significantly weakened it, of which the most important was clearly the destruction or semi destruction of the nuclear facility at Fordo by US Stealth bombers. Where do we go from here? Well, where we go from here is ongoing conflict in a number of those theaters, because this story ain't over. Iran is beginning to rebuild its seriously damaged nuclear capabilities. It is trying to revive its economy. That's not easy. They're in the grip of a dreadful water shortage. And Benjamin Netanyahu, the ultimate survivor of Israeli politics, has to decide between now and the election that has to happen in October, what to do. Does he hit Iran again? I think he probably does, because why let these guys rebuild when you had them on their knees last year? The challenge for him is that the more pressure he exerts, particularly on Iran, but more generally, the more he flexes in the region, the more ambivalence in the United States will become apparent. And I don't just mean the hostility of people on the left, which has been going on for some time. I think I'm really more concerned about the hostility on the right, on the far right of American politics towards Israel, which has been one of the really striking developments of the past last 12 months.
- [117:02]
C
Neil, before we move on Just on Iran. I mean, there's the Israel Iran dynamic, but then there's also the internal question of the stability of the Iranian regime. You know, we see now young women in Iran walking around without hijabs in the way they couldn't not so long ago. The kind of open defiance that suggests a regime that doesn't feel as strong as it once did. What are your predictions of how things look in Iran internally in 2026 and whether there could be some kind of instability there that changes things geopolitically?
- [117:38]
B
Well, I think there is a great danger in inferring from protests in Tehran a probability of regime change or regime crisis. In Iran as a whole, the regime has proved remarkably effective at withstanding popular protest year after year. And so I'm not about to predict its downfall. It's hard to believe that Supreme Leader Khamenei will still be alive at the end of 2026 because he's so old. And in fact, it's remarkable that he got through 2025. The bigger problem for the regime, I think, is what they do when he dies and can they manage a transition when they don't have a succession plan, they don't have a successor to what I imagine will be an irgc, a Revolutionary Guard led military type regime. I think one of the big questions for the Israeli government and the US Government is what's the right thing to do to help that regime collapse? I don't think Mr. Netanyahu cares about regime change. I think he likes the idea of regime collapse. And indeed, the United States can't come up with a credible story about what the regime would change to. So it probably implicitly is on side with regime collapse. It's just hard to bring that about. And my own view is it's extremely difficult to imagine a peaceful transition to a more friendly Iranian regime if the process has Israeli fingerprints on it. And that, I think, is one of the central strategic dilemmas not only for Mr. Netanyahu, but also for Mr. Trump.
- [119:21]
A
Okay, let's turn now from Iran to Eastern Europe. Let's go to the war in Ukraine, a subject you've written about for us an enormous amount. All of it's fantastic. Those who haven't read Neil on Ukraine go to the Free press right now. So just to review, for people who have kind of tuned out that war, Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. And in the early months, there was widespread optimism, I would say, about Ukraine's ability to win the war. We're four years in, you tell Me. How many people have been killed so far in this war, Neil? How many?
- [119:57]
B
Oh, nobody really knows. But the Russian casualties are certainly in the hundreds of thousands. It has been an enormously bloody war. We don't know the Ukrainian death tolls, we can only guess, probably not as high because they've mostly been. Not been on the defensive. But this has been a very bloody war, partly because the weaponry has become very accurate. Drones are very reliable ways of killing people. And so it's a desperately dangerous front line where the conflict goes on. But the casualties are also mounting on the home front, particularly for Ukraine, because this past year was the year when the Russians turned to terror bombing, bombing of civilians with. With drones and with missiles as a deliberate strategy. So the body count is. Is high and rising.
- [120:46]
A
So the question is how this ends and whether or not some kind of deal that doesn't sort of reward Russia is possible. So where is Putin's head heading into 2026 and where is Zelensky's?
- [121:04]
B
Well, I don't think the free press existed when this war began. It certainly didn't exist when Russia made its first move against Ukraine back in 2014. But if you were following my writing in other locations, I was saying that it was highly unlikely that Ukraine could win a war against Russia. And those who euphorically predicted a Ukrainian victory, I think were ignoring history and ignoring the economic imbalances between these two competing states. So I was never an optimist about how this would turn out. I am emotionally engaged on the side of Ukraine. I've been to Ukraine every year, I think, since 2011, and I was there most recently in September. I can tell you better where President Zelenskyy's head is, I can guess was Putin's is. Of course, you can base your guess on an extremely long press conference that Putin has just held during which I can't say I watched it all. He made it pretty clear that he was not about to accept a compromise peace of the sort that has been on the table now for some weeks. That would leave Ukraine intact as a sovereign state with a substantial army and a US And European security guarantee. Putin's goal has been from the outset to break Ukraine as an independent sovereign state, not to allow it to continue in that capacity. It's not just about territory for him. It doesn't seem to me to matter how many square miles of the Donbass region he gets to keep. The problem for Putin is that if he gets the Donbass but Ukraine is still viable, then he hasn't achieved his war aim. And so we can, I think, confidently predict that he doesn't accept a compromise peace deal and prepares to carry on fighting the war. For President Zelensky, things are more complicated because, well, he's running a democracy apart from anything else. And although the opinion polls are quite good for Zelensky, it's not like he's lost popular support despite a welter of corruption scandals that have embarrassed his government in the past year. The problem is just that this war is taking a terrible toll on Ukraine's people. The army is very thinly spread along a long front line. The army is an elderly army by historic standards. Last time I checked, the average age was 43. And they are struggling to recruit young men into that army. That is a very big problem in a war of attrition along a long front line, when the Russians seem able to find warm bodies that can walk towards gunfire or at least drone fire in the regions east of the Urals, where economic opportunities are fairly limited. So Zelenskyy is dealing with a fatigued population, and he knows that he needs a ceasefire. The problem is that if he buys a ceasefire at too high a price, he's going to be politically vulnerable to challenges. So his path is a much rockier one than Putin's, particularly because he has to get not only Trump, the United States on side, but also the Europeans, who are currently providing more financial support than the United States. And since the US and the Europeans can't really agree on what an adequate or satisfactory peace would look like, it makes the diplomacy of negotiating peace extremely difficult for the Ukrainians. Putin doesn't have that problem because the people backing him are Xi Jinping, plus the Iranians and the North Koreans. But Xi Jinping is a lot easier to deal with than all the different leaders that Zelenskyy has to spend his time mollifying.
- [125:04]
C
So, Neil, this is a prediction show. So if you had to distill all of that analysis down into a prediction about whether there will be an end to the war, some kind of ceasefire, some kind of deal in 2026, what would you say?
- [125:21]
B
My base case is that the war keeps going, but there's a rising probability, maybe it's 30%, that some kind of compromise peace gets hammered out because Ukraine needs it. And there are pressure points that can be used to move Putin if we choose to apply pressure. So I think there's a non zero, but it's not higher than 30% probability of at least a ceasefire in 2026. But the base case is I'm afraid the war keeps going.
- [125:53]
C
And just on that, one more question, which is, what should the Trump administration be doing that if it badly wants peace? What should it be doing if it wants to deliver that in 2026 that it's not currently doing well?
- [126:06]
B
There are two things that really can hurt Russia. One is that you make secondary sanctions on Russia's oil exports real, so that they cease to have a market because it's too expensive for Indian or Chinese businesses to buy Russian oil. We've threatened that, but we haven't really enforced it. And the second thing is just to tell the Ukrainians, just keep hitting those targets deep inside Russia here have some more missiles to do it. And we could also do that. We nearly gave them the Tomahawk missiles, and then Trump changed his mind. The reason, by the way, that we aren't doing more is not that President Trump has a bromance with Putin or that the the Russians have kompromat on him. It's that, strategically, the Trump team thinks that it's in a world of great powers, one of which is the us, one of which is China, one of which is Russia, and maybe there are a couple of others. And in that world, you can't permanently antagonize both Russia and China. Ideally, you want one of them to come closer to you. So, on the basis of realpolitik, or as we've sometimes called it, Barry, real estate politic, the Trump people don't really want to lean that hard on Putin. They are hoping that they can get Zelensky to make the concessions because, well, he's just Ukraine, he's not a great power. That's how they think about these things. The trouble about that approach is you don't get the peace because Putin has no incentive to settle. Putin can just play to win. He can just grind out this victory, even if the casualties on the Russian side go to a million. Because he's Putin. He's got the bodies and he's got the power. He doesn't have the accountability to his own people, and he's got the Chinese supplying them with the hardware. That's why my base case is that the war keeps going. I think the Ukrainians can hold out, but it's getting harder and harder for them, and that's why I'm urging them and the US and the Europeans take a compromised peace, even if it means losing some of the territory in Donbass you currently control, because you need a ceasefire and with security guarantees, you have a future.
- [128:17]
A
So we've covered the Middle East. We're on a rapid whistle stop tour around the world. We've gone to Eastern Europe. Now let's go to what you and everyone I trust really considers our most formidable adversary and the force, frankly, behind a lot of what's going on in those other places, which of course is China. Trump on April 2 declared Liberation Day and announced these reciprocal tariffs on all countries not already subject to sanctions. Some of these tariffs, of course, reached as high as 125%. I remember being in a very cold hotel room and live streaming with you about this topic. And then of course, what happened is that, you know, people, especially libertarian economists, were freaking out. But Trump then began to walk some of it back and carving out exceptions. And this is how he began to earn that infamous nickname of Taco. Trump always chickens out. So first I want to ask, did the tariffs work? And second is give us the broad picture. How would you rate Trump's handling so far in this second term of our most formidable adversary in the world?
- [129:27]
B
Well, on tariffs working, it depends what you mean by works that are supposed to do multiple things, not all of which they can simultaneously do. They've certainly worked as a source of revenue. It's brought in quite a hefty amount of money to the US treasury, not enough to solve the huge deficit that it's running, but still it's brought in some cash. It hasn't caused industrialization in the United States to resume on a vast scale because it would take a lot more than protective protectionist tariffs to do that. There are lots of reasons why it's hard to do manufacturing in the United States, labor costs permitting, etc. But the real point of these tariffs, I think was to try to redress the imbalances in the global trading system, which I think were real. I don't think it was delusion on the part of Donald Trump to say that the trading system, the so called liberal international order, benefited others more than the United States. The question is whether the reciprocal tariffs were the right way to go about fixing that. To some extent I think it has worked in the sense that those countries that really did have very asymmetrical trading relationships with the US Say India or Brazil, which clearly charged very high duties of non tariffs barriers on US Goods and paid almost nothing on the other end, exporting to the US have had to renegotiate. And the renegotiation, especially with the Asian economies as well as with the Europeans, is real and it's ongoing. And I don't think it's trivial. But China is the main event, as you implied, Barry. And when you look at the trade war with China that Trump launched very early on in 2025, before reciprocal tariffs, before Liberation Day, the result of that trade war has to have been a win for Xi Jinping. Unlike everybody else, China retaliated commensurately in a kind of tit for tat game theoretical way. They'd planned for this. They had a strategy. Everything Trump did, they matched it. And then they played their ace, which was export controls on rare earth elements. That's all those weird and wonderful things on the periodic table that you never learned in chemistry, which turn out to be kind of important for a whole bunch of 21st century industrial activities. And that was the trump card which forced the United States to scale back its tariffs on China and enter into negotiations, which are still going on about the tariffs that the US and China are going to levy on one another. So I think you have to say that as an instrument in Cold War II of applying pressure to Xi Jinping, this did not work well. In fact, it revealed the power that China now exerts not only over the US but over the whole world because it has a monopoly on the mining and refining of these rare earth elements. And you can't build a modern car without those.
- [132:49]
C
Neil the place, of course, where this Cold War people worry might become a hot war is Taiwan. And we ask you about it now because the clock is ticking and Xi Jinping has set himself and his, you know, the Chinese army a deadline of being ready to achieve reunification, meaning in non propagandistic terms, the invasion of Taiwan by 2027, which means it has to happen this year or it might happen this year. So again, I'm going to pin you down with a cold, hard prediction question which is will China invade Taiwan in 2026?
- [133:30]
B
No, it won't. And I don't think it'll invade Taiwan in 2027 either, because I don't think China's military is ready to carry on what would be an enormously challenging military operation. I'm not even sure they're going to blockade Taiwan, which is another option where they just surround the island and control access to it for people and trade. I think what we'll see in 2026 is ongoing political pressure and military pressure to try to shift the Taiwanese towards a kind of acceptance that where Hong Kong now is is where they're going, where they'll have some nominal separate system, but they'll in effect be under the control of Beijing. It's going to be all about diplomacy in 2026, not about warfare. Because President Trump thinks he's going to have multiple meetings with Xi Jinping IV and her. The number four bandied around. That would be unprecedented for the US President to meet the Chinese leader four times. Not even Richard Nixon managed that. I think we can forget four meetings, but there'll be at least two, I'd guess. And these meetings will be very consequential because there is a whole lot of stuff on the table. It's true that the Chinese have the rare earth elements that they can restrict our access to, but we have something that we can restrict their access to, and that is the most sophisticated semiconductors. Those are the ones designed by Nvidia, by Jensen Huang's company and manufactured by TSMC in, you guessed it, Taiwan. So the negotiations are going to be about tariffs, they're going to be about trade restrictions, about export controls on rare earth elements, they're going to be about fentanyl, they're going to be about a whole range of things. But the one that will really be the key is Taiwan itself. The Chinese want the US to change its position on Taiwan to say right out that we will not support, in fact, we will oppose any move towards Taiwanese independence. I don't think President Trump is going to do that. I don't think any of his value will tell him to do it, but that's going to be the ask. So it's going to be a year of summitry, not of invasions or blockades. And these summits could be very consequential because there's so much on the table. This is the kind of thing you would expect in a cold war. The two presidents get together. You remember, summitry was such a thing back in the day, the summit. I mean, I'm old enough to remember summit mania when you would be get all kinds of excitement because Reagan was meeting Gorbachev in Reykjavik. Well, it's going to be like that, only with Trump and Xi.
- [136:11]
A
Okay, let's take one last stop, one that I don't know if we could have predicted a year ago, and that is Venezuela. The U.S. of course, has been conducting these operations against what it describes as Venezuelan drug trafficking vessels. Washington says that these are completely legitimate. It's aimed at stopping narcotic shipments. Venezuela says that Washington is trying to destabilize the government. Machado just won the Nobel Peace Prize, she smuggled out of the country. There's a lot of drama around Venezuela and the pretty horrendous evil regime of Maduro, where does this end in 2026? Does Maduro fall?
- [136:54]
B
Well, if you want to get rid of somebody, if you really want to change the regime, history tells us it's hard to do it from the air. You really do need to be down there on the ground in Caracas if you want to get rid of Maduro and put somebody else back better than Maduro into that job. And what I'm not seeing is any evidence that the Trump administration is ready to send in the Marines. Let's go back to the Trump corollary. After the Roosevelt corollary, it was pretty routine for the Marine Corps and other US Military personnel to be deployed to Cuba, to Panama, to Haiti. And so there's a precedent, if you're prepared to go back far enough for that kind of intervention. And the US Continued to do that kind of thing, really right up until the 1950s. You could even say that the overthrow of Noriega was an example. Think of Granada. You know, the Reagan administration did stuff like this and then we stopped. Then we kind of got a bit embarrassed about treating Latin America as our backyard. And we still are a little bit get embarrassed about it. Or at least we're reluctant to deploy the proverbial boots on the ground because, well, you never know what might go wrong. And it never looks good if you send a bunch of our boys somewhere and they start coming back in body bags. So I think Maduro can hang on if the US Isn't prepared to send in some ground forces to persuade him to get on the plane and leave. That's not something I say with high confidence, because as you mentioned, Barry, there are a great many moving parts. And you have to admit that it would be kind of anticlimactic for the US to deploy an enormous flotilla, as big as there has been really, since the Second World War in the Caribbean, and then have nothing happen. So I can't quite work out how they get around this, but I'm confident that if Maduro doesn't want to go, he's not going to go unless there is a military force there that makes him go.
- [139:07]
C
Neil, we've covered the kind of obvious flashpoints, I guess, China, Venezuela, the Middle East, Ukraine. Often, though, it's the places that we don't predict, and that's where the drama pops up. Who could have predicted in 2023 that at the start of 2023 that that Israel, Gaza would be the big thing for the following two years? So, first part of my question is, what is not on our radar so far? In this conversation that should be on our radar for 2026 in your view. And then secondly, you mentioned earlier the kind of fight on the right in America about all sorts of things, including America's role in the world and U.S. foreign policy. And how does that, do you predict, how is that going to change or impact the administration's approach to all of these things? Is that going to, are we going to see the ripple effects of that fight in U.S. foreign policy?
- [139:58]
B
Well, this is a subject that I've been thinking a lot about since the hideous massacre in Bondi beach in Australia. And I come away with the following conclusion, that there are going to be attacks on Jewish communities all over the world because the pattern is now establishing itself that the Islamists, whether they're Iranian backed or not, see a whole variety of soft targets in the Jewish communities of the Western world, broadly defined. And as that violence continues, and I fear it will, then I think the whole issue of antisemitism is going to become a bigger and bigger issue in US Politics because those, and I associate them with Tucker Carlson and others who have supported him, those who want to flourish with the old and odious anti Semitism of the right will, I think, be roundly condemned, as they were by Ben Shapiro just the other night, by people who understand that antisemitism is a truly toxic ideological substance. Instance, it's a very problematic issue for the MAGA movement because there are clearly elements in the MAGA movement in the United States that don't want to expel Tucker Carlson from their midst. So I would say the question of where are we neglecting is the location of the next major attack on a Jewish community. And since attacks happened in 2025 everywhere from England to Australia, it's really anybody's guess where the next attack occurs. I'm sad to say this, but I think we have to stare in the face the reality that anti Semitism is on the rise. Violent attacks, pogroms are on the rise around the world. I had a conversation with an Israeli minister in November and he made the point that if you think about antisemitism mainly in terms of the Holocaust, which I suppose we've been educated to do you forget that prior to the Holocaust, pogrom's outbreaks of violence against Jewish communities were a regular feature of life in 19th century Europe, and not only in Europe. So it's the return of the pogrom which begins to feel like one of the trends of the 2000 and twenties, perhaps the most odious trend of the 2000 and twenties. I suspect that we're going to have to deal with more of that in 2026.
- [142:46]
G
Alas.
- [142:46]
A
Put on your historian's hat for a moment. How does that play out? In other words, has there ever been sort of a rising surge of antisemitic frenzied violence that doesn't end with some kind of broader catastrophe? Or is it possible to somehow like, put the genie back in the bottle? How does it play out more specifically?
- [143:11]
B
Wouldn't this.
- [143:12]
A
I'm just. I'm just asking for a friend, you
- [143:13]
D
know what I mean?
- [143:15]
B
Yeah, you're asking for a lot of friends of mine too. I think the lesson of the late 19th century is that when violence against Jews occurred in the Russian Empire, what was called the Pale of Settlements in Eastern Europe were Jewish communities. Under Russian rule lived. The United States played a key role in condemning the tsarist government and indeed restricting its access to the New York capital market was a remarkable time when a financial figure like Jacob Schiff could have that kind of influence. The Rothschilds in London also played a part in. In condemning the way that Jews were being treated. And Jewish communities found that they were supported by non Jewish liberals as well as many conservatives on that issue. So there is a playbook for condemning antisemitism and penalizing those who engage in it. And we need to blow the dust off that playbook and remind Britain's Americans, perhaps throughout the English speaking world and beyond, that the lesson of the 20th century is if you do not check antisemitism, if you don't condemn it, if you don't drive it out of the pale of political respectability, then like some ghastly cancer, it will spread until it poses a truly mortal threat. That is the way to think about the Holocaust. The Holocaust. I argued this in a book called War of the World published back in 2006 nearly 20 years ago, was a consequence of a sustained spread of an ideology that identified Jews as racial aliens and then laid the foundation for their annihilation. It didn't begin in 1933. These ideologies had roots in the mid 19th century. And one of the points I keep making when I try to explain what's going on to people is the ideology is not new. Nobody's come up with anything new in the 21st century. Ideologically, we're back to 19th century brands. Hey, try antisemitism or how about socialism? How does that grab you? So these ideologies are. They've been around for a long, long time. But when people try to deploy them again in the context of our time, with all the powerful algorithms that exist to disseminate these toxic ideologies. When a Nick Fuentes can be turned into a kind of star, essentially by algorithmic manipulation, then the potential seems even more lethal. So we have to act now. We have to act now because if we don't, it will ultimately lead down a path to something like Auschwitz. And this is, I think, a moral imperative for all people who care about not just democracy, but also the rule of law and basic human decency. If you think it's okay to say Hitler was cool for the lulls, then you are evil and you are part of what ultimately is a political cancer.
- [146:37]
A
Neil Ferguson maybe not the happiest note, but I can't think of a more powerful one to end on. Thanks for coming on the show. And more than that, thanks for being with us at the Free Press. Can't wait to see what you are going to write about and talk about in 2026. Merry Christmas.
- [146:52]
B
Thanks Barry. Thanks Ollie. Merry Christmas to everybody. I wasn't very merry there, but hey, you did ask.
- [146:59]
A
Can you just do the imitation that you began with for me, for my lulz for one more second? Be the radio man.
- [147:07]
B
This is London calling with news of fresh disaster. The world is ending on our watch. His Majesty the King will be opening a garden fete in Liverpool this afternoon at 4pm At Prime Minister's Questions, the Leader of the Opposition will ask a devastating question about social media censorship.
- [147:30]
A
You're the best.
- [147:31]
B
Lovely to see you. Lots of love everybody. Bye.
- [147:39]
A
Thanks for listening, not just to this episode, but all year long. If you like this conversation or disliked it, I know this topic, which is what's ahead, can be polarizing and emotionally charged. That's the point. 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 the amazing work that we do at the Free Press, there's just one way to do it. It's by going to the Free Press's website@thefp.com and becoming a subscriber today. Happy New Year and we'll see you in 2026.
- [148:26]
G
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F
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H
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A
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H
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