If Books Could Kill (a podcast dunking on crappy airport books from the 2000s) did their first episode on Freakonomics:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics/id1651876...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics/id1651876...
People whose opinions I'd consider worth listening to are the ones who don't automatically change their position whenever their tribe's party line changes.
"Facemasks may be in short supply and they should be saved for caregivers"
in other words, masks work, but we need to save them for where they will do the most good.
however, the Trump admin's messaging was an unholy pile of hot burning garbage, so one could be forgiven for thinking the official recommendations were that masks don't work.
It was hordes of social media personalities trying to sound Very Smart and establishing themselves as authorities during a time of crisis.
One of their most recent episodes was on the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal where they systematically dug into every one of the 54 cases of plagiarism and demonstrated just how much of it was bad faith right wing bullshit that didn't stand up to even the slightest intellectual scrutiny. But the larger point they were making was not about the right, for which they expected intellectual dishonesty, but the complicity of the left & mainstream media in only ever talking about the scandal in terms of who is saying what about it and why and not on the meat of the facts on the ground.
They took the exact same approach to the lab leak episode where they said let's ignore all of the media meta-narrative and look at just the plain facts on the ground and they found that, like most things, it was a sandcastle built of air that collapsed when you even looked at it funny.