The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com

Arianna is a writer and businesswoman. She co-founded The Huffington Post in 2005, and after it was acquired by AOL, she became the president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group. She’s currently the CEO of Thrive Global and the author of 15 books, including Thrive and The Sleep Revolution.
A polished transcript is here, including money quotes. Below are timestamps for the main sections of the pod:
5:05: Arianna’s meteoric rise at a young age and challenging left-feminism
28:05: IQ, meritocracy, and what sets humans apart from AI
50:10: A crisis of meaning and the “false god of productivity”
114:07: The importance of sleep and how to improve it
For two clips of the episode — on the desperate need for grace in our discourse, and how to sleep better — head to our YouTube page.
More topics: Arianna’s upbringing in Greece; her dad’s anti-Nazi magazine in WWII; the power of maternal love; her time at the Cambridge Union as its first foreign prez; her first book The Female Woman; her love affair with Bernard Levin; the feminism of the Gospels; meritocracy; AI surpassing us in intelligence; our culture’s distrust of nature; Arianna’s burnout in 2007 and my own in 2015; silent meditation retreats; Matthew Crawford and craftsmanship; Loren Eiseley the anthropologist; mental illness; psychedelics; God as love; Maslow’s pyramid; and Arianna giving me tips for my insomnia.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Emily Eakin on the French postmodernists, Sean Illing on the relevance of Camus and Nietzsche, Jake Weisberg on the cowards who caved to Trump, and Michael Lewis on the bureaucrats who fought back. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com

Azam is an international investigative reporter for the New York Times. He used to be the Times bureau chief in Afghanistan, as well as Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. He won a Pulitzer last year for his work on the US intervention in Afghanistan, among other awards. He’s also the author of Fear Is Just A Word: A Missing Daughter, a Violent Cartel, and a Mother’s Quest for Vengeance.
I discovered him simply by reading the paper and noticing an extraordinary ability to ferret out the truth. In conversation, Azam did not disappoint.
A polished transcript is here, including money quotes from the chat. Below are timestamps for the main sections of the pod:
05:23: Growing up in a Pakistani family in a small-town Virginia
10:36: The value of fiction over nonfiction
22:26: Azam’s time reporting on Wall Street, and then the horrors in Afghanistan
46:24: A deep dive into a terrifying new wave of synthetic drugs
1:03:56: The violent settlers in the West Bank and the Israeli officials speaking out
For two clips of the episode — on the new wave of dangerous drugs, and the Israeli government arming the West Bank settlers — head to our YouTube page.
Other topics: the lack of bigotry in Azam’s upbringing in the South; how UVA was more tribal than his high school; the war on terror; nation-building; how little the US understood Afghanistan; funding warlords against the Taliban; not talking to Taliban officials; US propaganda and lies; a story of suicide; Estonia beating fentanyl; the mega-potency of new drugs like nitazenes; drug-soaked paper causing overdoses in US prisons; why targeting suppliers doesn’t work anymore; harm reduction and Narcan; methadone; decriminalization in Portugal; the popularity of weed; the cynicism and evil of Hamas; dead kids in Gaza and US bombs; the depravity of Ben-Gvir; high-ranking Israelis against the settlements; and Bibi’s polling for the coming election.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Emily Eakin on postmodernism, Jake Weisberg on the cowards who caved to Trump, Michael Lewis on the federal workers who fought back, and Arianna Huffington on living well. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

In our last summer-break podcast two-fer, we’re re-running two very different conversations on sex and race, with two very different characters: Louise Perry and Glenn Loury. Next Friday we’ll be back with fresh Dish as the new season of Dishness kicks off after Labor Day with some great guests lined up for the fall.
We’ll also be introducing Weekly Dish 3.0! Stay tuned.
Louise is a writer and campaigner against sexual violence. She co-founded a non-partisan, feminist think tank called The Other Half, and she’s currently a WSJ columnist and the host of the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast. In this 2022 episode, we discussed her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century.
A polished transcript is here. You can find two clips on YouTube: on whether Louise finds it suitable to watch porn while married, and if gay promiscuity is more harmful than straight promiscuity.
See you next Friday.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

In our last summer-break podcast two-fer, we’re re-running two very different conversations on sex and race, with two very different characters: Glenn Loury and Louise Perry. Next Friday we’ll be back with fresh Dish as the new season of Dishness kicks off after Labor Day with some great guests lined up for the fall.
We’ll also be introducing Weekly Dish 3.0! Stay tuned.
Glenn is an academic, writer, and podcaster. At the age of 33, he became the first African-American professor of economics at Harvard to get tenure. He’s currently the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University, a columnist for UnHerd, and co-host of The Glenn Show, alongside John McWhorter. In this early 2023 episode, we talked about Glenn’s incredibly colorful life, and he subsequently published his memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. So in this conversation we got a preview of the book: the product of a remarkable American life.
Read a polished transcript here. You can hear two clips on YouTube — how the insistence on the permanence of “white supremacy” hurts African-Americans, and how we are all “hypocrites” to some extent. Other topics covered: Glenn’s parents dealing with him as a prodigy; dropping out of college with a newborn; rebounding to MIT and Harvard; being ostracized by the black cognoscenti; his drug addiction; his conversion to Christianity; his loss of faith; falling out with the neocon right; the racial wealth gap; and affirmative action.
See you next Friday.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

(The full Dish returns on September 4. In the meantime, we are re-airing a handful of the most downloaded episodes from the early years of the Dishcast.)
Charles is a writer, social scientist, and longtime friend. He currently holds the F.A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies at AIE, and his many books include Losing Ground, The Bell Curve (co-authored with Richard Herrnstein), Coming Apart, Facing Reality, and Taking Religion Seriously (which we covered last year). In this May 2021 pod, he and I discussed Human Diversity — a book that received little attention compared to the others. If you think you know who Charles is from the way the MSM has portrayed him for years, this conversation may surprise you.
Like Cornel West, Charles is a one-off: absurdly brave (or dumb) in wading into truly touchy subjects, and always with reason. In many ways, I think if we’d been able to have a serious debate about The Bell Curve all those years ago — and I tried to encourage one — we might have avoided some awful subsequent mistakes. But we resorted to abuse and hysteria and went on to enact Woke 1.0 and, now, Woke 2.0.
Go here for a polished transcript of Charles. We also have three clips on YouTube: on the different career choices of high IQ women; the “unearned gift” of a high IQ; and IQ’s irrelevance to the human worth, dignity, and essential equality of all people.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe