Stay Free - Russel Brand - Bari Weiss (Twitter File Revelations)

Barry Weiss, founder and editor of the Free Press and former editor at the New York Times, joins me to talk about her experiences with Elon Musk and the revelations that he s been making about the influence of big tech and the government on the public discourse, and how they affect the way we think about the truth and the truth itself. This is a fascinating conversation, and I know you're going to love it! Subscribe to Stay Free with Russell Brand to stay up to date with the latest episodes of Stay Free, and to get notified when new episodes of the show are available for your favorite streaming platform. Stay Free With Russell Brand is available on all major podcast directories, and is also available on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. If you don t already have an Amazon Prime membership, you can get 20% off the first month with the promo code: STAYFREE. You'll also get access to all of our other premium memberships, including Audible, iTunes, and Podcoin. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/StayFree. We're giving away $5 off your first month when you sign up for a Free Press membership, and we'll send you a $10 discount when you place an ad-free membership offer. Learn more about your choice of three-day shipping offer, and get 10% off your entire month, plus free shipping when you enter the offer is $50 or more! You get 7 days early and get 5 VIP access to the offer gets you a complimentary to stay free for 7 days, plus a discount of $99 a month, and you'll get $99 or get a VIP membership when you get a complimentary membership offer when you buy a Vimeo membership offer, plus they get the offer starts starting at $99, and they get 5 other places get $5 or 7 days get $10 or they get a choice of 7 days of VIP access, they also get $49 or 7 other places they get 4 times a place get $4 or 7 times they get VIP access? Get all of these things? Thanks for listening to this episode? Stay free with Russell and I hope you ll get a chance to watch the show? - stay free with me on the show. Thank you, Russell Brand and tweet me . Tweet Me! and I'll be back next week!

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:00:03.000 Today it's Subcutaneous where I have in-depth conversations with free spirits, great minds, fascinating thinkers, people who care about truth and love more than pillorying you with terrible lies to make you a numb little drone.

00:00:17.000 We've had Wim Hof on the show before, Graham Hancock, Meyer, Tim Robbins, Jocko, all of those are available to watch now on Rumble for free by the way.

00:00:25.000 And today I'm joined by the journalist Barry Weiss.

00:00:27.000 Barry's the founder of the Free Press and a former editor at the New York Times.

00:00:32.000 You should follow her, you should look at Free Press, she's an unbelievable journalist. 0.77

00:00:35.000 You will know her because recently she's been working with Elon Musk on the Twitter files and those revelations, and you can imagine what kind of experiences that's brought into her life.

00:00:44.000 This is a fascinating conversation.

00:00:46.000 I know you're going to love it.

00:00:47.000 We're joined now by journalist Barry Wise, founder and editor of the Free Press, former editor of the New York Times, who's obviously come to public notoriety lately because of her work on the Twitter files.

00:01:01.000 Thanks for coming on, Barry.

00:01:03.000 Thanks for having me, Russell.

00:01:04.000 Were you astonished by the mainstream media's reaction to these revelations or was it largely what you expected?

00:01:11.000 And do you feel vindicated having resigned, broadly speaking, from your position at the New York Times because of the new establishment liberal orthodoxy that was prevailing there?

00:01:21.000 How has this experience affected you in your opinion on mainstream media journalism broadly, mate?

00:01:27.000 It just confirmed what I experienced myself and it was vindication of exactly why I decided to walk away from the prestige and start my own thing that is trying to close the gap between reality, the reality that people can see with their own eyes and ears.

00:01:45.000 And the insistence on sort of putting the narrative, whatever it is that given day, over reality.

00:01:52.000 And that's exactly what I'm trying to do with The Free Press.

00:01:54.000 You asked if I was surprised at the kind of mainstream media blackout or then the insistence once they had to cover it that it was a nothing burger.

00:02:02.000 I wasn't surprised at all.

00:02:04.000 You'd be hard-pressed to come up with sort of a cleaner example of one of the problems happening, not just in America, but, you know, around the world more broadly, which is this incredible gap between the things that the legacy press has decided are news and the things that actual living people in the world think are news and are important to them.

00:02:24.000 And I would venture to guess that most Americans, whether or not they have a Twitter account

00:02:28.000 or have ever logged onto this, see that two stories here matter a great deal to them.

00:02:34.000 One, the fact of the incredibly cozy relationship between parts of the United States government,

00:02:40.000 namely the FBI and Twitter.

00:02:43.000 And second, the unbelievable power that basically a handful of private companies

00:02:49.000 have over the public discourse.

00:02:51.000 Those are the things that Matt Taibbi, me, Abigail Schreier, Michael Schellenberger,

00:02:56.000 and a team of incredible independent journalists have revealed.

00:02:59.000 And I think the fact that Elon Musk decided to come to a bunch of people essentially with newsletters

00:03:05.000 rather than the Washington Post and the New York Times tells you a lot about where real trust

00:03:12.000 in the media these days actually lies.

00:03:14.000 And it's just no longer with those legacy institutions.

00:03:16.000 I think it's astonishing in and of itself.

00:03:20.000 And I would imagine in a sane world, they will not be able to recover

00:03:24.000 from the depth of these revelations, how thoroughly those social media organizations

00:03:31.000 have been infiltrated by state interest.

00:03:34.000 And as you say, how much power is wielded by those very social media organizations.

00:03:38.000 It's unprecedented.

00:03:40.000 The previous incarnation of monopolizing power was in.

00:03:43.000 energy resources of course and the fact that attention, consciousness itself can be controlled

00:03:48.000 in the way that it has been. Our community here on our channel are astonished. It's sort

00:03:54.000 of like Foucaultian biopolitics. It's controlling reality itself, huh?

00:03:59.000 Yeah, I think one of the things that is so strange to me about this is that somehow caring

00:04:05.000 about outsized corporate power, caring about the amount of power that a number of extraordinarily

00:04:13.000 wealthy individuals or political cliques within companies have over the entire world, the

00:04:19.000 idea that that's now coded as a right-wing or conservative issue is absolutely bizarre

00:04:24.000 to me.

00:04:26.000 I do not understand how we've gotten to a place where that is not in the interests of everybody and specifically not in the interests of the left that historically has cared deeply about outsized corporate power, has cared deeply about the voices of everyday individuals being censored by big tech, in this case, and the government.

00:04:48.000 All of which I know is exactly what you talk about on this show, which is why I'm really excited to be here.

00:04:52.000 The emblematic issue that has initially defined this arc, even prior to the revelations that you and your colleagues,

00:05:00.000 if that's the correct term, have made, was the Hunter Biden story,

00:05:05.000 which when I first learned of it and started hearing about it,

00:05:09.000 it was with the tinge of publications like the New York Post,

00:05:13.000 and because of the hue of sexual and drug-related orientations,

00:05:17.000 I felt that perhaps it was a sleaze story rather than a power story,

00:05:21.000 and as was commonly understood, something that, you know, needn't or oughtn't be reported.

00:05:26.000 But the fact that this has become, in a sense, a litmus test of the level of censorship is extraordinary

00:05:31.000 and also a way of marking and measuring the way that what we call the left,

00:05:35.000 establishment neoliberalism, the new conservatism of our age,

00:05:39.000 'cause it certainly doesn't have any interest in sharing power, generating new power bases,

00:05:43.000 telling the truth, holding corporate power to account.

00:05:47.000 It shows you now that this has become, in a sense, the centre of true establishment power in the way that their interests align with big tech, the way that their interests align with the military-industrial complex.

00:05:59.000 So we're, in a sense, facing at least a new understanding.

00:06:03.000 We finally understood that power isn't what it was when it was Dick Cheney and Wolfowitz and Bush.

00:06:10.000 That's not it anymore.

00:06:12.000 The Democrat Party is the representative.

00:06:14.000 I'm not saying that the Republicans are a great party.

00:06:15.000 Far from it.

00:06:16.000 That's not where I'm heading at all.

00:06:18.000 What I'm saying is, doesn't this suggest a completely hollowed out, nullified, corporatised Democrat Party that's no longer fit for purpose?

00:06:25.000 I can't fit that many words into a sentence the way you just did, but what I can say is I think one of the things that our reporting has revealed, and one of the reasons that I became so uncomfortable at the New York Times as a journalist whose vocation is to pursue my curiosity and to look into dark corners, even when what those dark corners reveal is inconvenient to the powers that be, is the way that there has become a kind of hive mind, let's call it, between Parts of the government, big tech, legacy press, and they're all sort of speaking in unison.

00:06:58.000 And whenever a huge group of powerful institutions are speaking in unison and censoring anyone that deviates, even in the smallest way, we should be skeptical.

00:07:08.000 The fact that the New York Post was locked out of Twitter for reporting on the news, regardless of how tawdry and frankly tragic a lot of the things on that laptop were, Anyone who had any principle should have opposed it.

00:07:24.000 The fact that so many people under this fig leaf of hacked documents, as if that's not what the New York Times and the Washington Post do every single day, what are the Pentagon Papers?

00:07:34.000 I mean, come on!

00:07:35.000 The idea that that was the fig leaf that they hid behind told you just about everything you needed to know about what was actually happening there.

00:07:44.000 And I think the reporting that Taibbi has done, the reporting that my colleague, and that's definitely the right word, Michael Schellenberger has done, have revealed the fact that essentially what the FBI did in the case of the Hunter Biden story was pre-bunked an inconvenient piece of information.

00:08:01.000 In other words, they preyed on, I think, the well-intentioned inclinations of people at these tech companies and essentially told them there's something coming down the pike.

00:08:13.000 It is Russian disinformation.

00:08:15.000 And you should just be aware that, you know, the Russians are trying to steal the election or sway the election so that when the story of the Hunter Biden laptop came out, they were already primed to understand it in a particular way. 0.62

00:08:28.000 But for me, the reason that story was an important moment is I just couldn't understand.

00:08:34.000 Even if you think the New York Post is a right-wing rag, I think it's the paper of record in New York.

00:08:39.000 But even if you think that, and even if you think what's in the Hunter Biden laptop was tragic and embarrassing and shouldn't have been relevant to who he voted for in the election, go with all of that.

00:08:50.000 Shouldn't it chill you, the idea that one of the most powerful amplification systems in the world, in all of humanity, in all of human history, was locking out a newspaper from sharing information?

00:09:04.000 It really shouldn't matter what party you vote for.

00:09:07.000 It shouldn't matter what you think of Hunter Biden or Joe Biden or Donald Trump.

00:09:11.000 To oppose that on the very, on the most basic principles, principles that are enshrined in our Bill of Rights, I mean, these are like, it doesn't get more fundamental than that.

00:09:23.000 And it really was shocking to me to watch the way that people fell around this particular story.

00:09:28.000 And I think the reporting that we've done over the past few weeks have vindicated, frankly, the reporting of the New York Post.

00:09:34.000 What it seems to me, like Barry, is that these principles are a veil that masks a real appetite for tyranny, a kind of tyrannical impulse that will be exercised when necessary.

00:09:49.000 Perhaps what concerns me most is the set of assumptions that Ordinary people are unable to discern information for the validity of information for themselves, are unable to calculate what information to pay attention to. 0.92

00:10:04.000 For me, this suggests that the principles that are pushed to the forefront are not relevant, not rooted, grounded, or relevant.

00:10:12.000 I also feel that what we're beginning to see is nominated public villains that, again, that I wouldn't typically particularly support or laud.

00:10:22.000 For example, Trump, somewhat uniquely banned from that platform, and then curiously, currently, Musk himself.

00:10:30.000 I wonder if you can talk to us about what appears to be veiled by sort of liberal aesthetics, a kind of new form of technological tyranny and what you think about the

00:10:41.000 movements within media and the kind of figures that are presented as new avatars for vilification.

00:10:51.000 I think, first of all, having been the villain of the day more than once on a platform like Twitter, I definitely think that when you're trying to redraw the bounds of what is in and what is out, what is morally acceptable and what is not, you have to make public examples.

00:11:09.000 You have to scapegoat particular people in order to signal to everyone else watching, look what we just did to that person.

00:11:16.000 You could be next.

00:11:18.000 Step out of line and we'll do the same to you.

00:11:20.000 And the scapegoating mechanism is unbelievably powerful for all of human history.

00:11:25.000 And I think we're watching it play out.

00:11:27.000 And all of us can see it on a place like Twitter.

00:11:30.000 So to take an example, and I'm very happy to talk about Elon or Trump, take the example of Jay Bhattacharya.

00:11:36.000 Jay Bhattacharya is a doctor at Stanford.

00:11:39.000 He's one of the people that I reported on who was slapped with essentially a trends blacklist.

00:11:45.000 In other words, even if him or his work was being talked about on the platform, you wouldn't see it if you were a typical user.

00:11:52.000 And people were slapped with all kinds of labels.

00:11:54.000 Do not amplify, you know, tombstone.

00:11:57.000 There were many different kinds of categories.

00:11:59.000 Jay Bhattacharya is a celebrated doctor at one of the best universities in America.

00:12:06.000 He happened to have a view that I think has largely been vindicated, by the way, over the past few years, that blanket lockdowns during COVID would on balance be detrimental to us.

00:12:18.000 In other words, him and other people who signed onto this thing called the Great Barrington Declaration took the view that the vulnerable should be protected and locked down and resources should go to them,

00:12:30.000 but for other ordinary healthy people, that it might not be the best thing and that the after effects economically,

00:12:37.000 psychologically, emotionally, might be worse, that the prescription might be worse than the cure, whatever that

00:12:44.000 phrase is.

00:12:45.000 So, in other words, Jai Bhattacharya was turned in, not just on Twitter, but in the culture more generally, by

00:12:52.000 these legacy institutions as a kind of boogeyman.

00:12:56.000 Why did they do that?

00:12:57.000 They did that in order to enforce the view that that idea is dangerous.

00:13:04.000 And that if you touch that idea, if you question the logic that, you know, cloth masks don't prevent the spread of COVID, obviously true.

00:13:13.000 If you question the idea that, I don't know, this virus came from Wuhan and 10 miles down the road there's this crazy lab where they're doing gain-of-function research.

00:13:22.000 Don't touch that!

00:13:23.000 You know, you're a xenophobe and a conspiracy theorist.

00:13:25.000 It's all about ring-fencing ideas that are... It's about intentionally coding people and ideas that are considered third-rail, dangerous, outside-of-the-line, isms, phobias, whatever.

00:13:40.000 Any kind of baggage that they can be larded with in order to say, if you want to be on the right side of history, don't go there.

00:13:47.000 If you don't want your reputation destroyed or your career ruined, don't go there.

00:13:52.000 And it has been an unbelievably effective tool.

00:13:56.000 And that is the thing that I am unbelievably interested in, because I think you see it in all parts of, it's not just American life, although I'm in New York right now, it's all over the world.

00:14:07.000 And so this deeply human impulse in us, right, which is to be with the good people, to not be cast out of our tribe, is almost on steroids right now because of platforms like Twitter and Facebook and all of the rest.

00:14:23.000 Because we don't need to go to a public square and watch someone get stoned.

00:14:26.000 We can watch it happen digitally all day, every day.

00:14:29.000 And we are social animals and we learn to sort of prevent ourselves from being vulnerable or putting ourselves into harm's way.

00:14:39.000 Does that make sense?

00:14:40.000 Barry, yeah, not only does it make sense, it's terrifying that these tools of ostracisation have been mobilised to a fully immersive and omniscient degree.

00:14:52.000 When I hear you describe that, and it's interesting the example you chose, it seems that Something unique took place during the pandemic in how much power was unquestionably granted to already potent institutions and organisations.

00:15:10.000 And it appears to have, what do I want to say, gilded, augured a new era Of unquestioning compliance, where you find, for example, with criticism of the war between Ukraine and Russia is incredibly censored now and people just accept that, that you can pull up an article from 2014 in The Guardian where they were posing the very questions that would now be considered apostasy, the NATO infringement, the coup in 2014.

00:15:42.000 And we've just seen this with the pandemic.

00:15:47.000 Do you feel that something is being engineered on a massive scale or do you just feel that the exponential growth of these tools happens to be in the hands of the current regime and therefore we're experiencing what appears like a unique and egregious tyranny but it's actually just the tools have emerged rather than a new ideology?

00:16:07.000 For me it's the latter.

00:16:07.000 I don't think there's some kind of grand conspiracy.

00:16:10.000 I don't think the heads of all of these places are sitting in a room coming up with, you know, a strategy.

00:16:16.000 No, I think it's much more human story than that.

00:16:19.000 I think that institutions are people, that people are social animals, and that, you know, Let's just take the example of Twitter, right?

00:16:26.000 Everyone has been asking me and Matt and others, where are the stories of Twitter shadow banning people on the left?

00:16:32.000 They probably exist, right?

00:16:34.000 But you have to think about who created, at old Twitter at least, who was the institution?

00:16:41.000 The institution was 98 to 99% progressive or Democrats.

00:16:45.000 If Twitter was a social media platform that was located in Western Junction, Colorado, The story would be a totally different story, but it's as if people are surprised that, you know, if you live in San Francisco, if you're working at a place like Twitter with t-shirts that say stay woke, you know, if you, you know, your entire world

00:17:09.000 Is that world?

00:17:10.000 So should it be surprising that they regard certain kinds of speeches beyond the pale?

00:17:16.000 Should it be surprising that they view what I see as, in some of these cases, just heterodox ideas or just typical conservative ideas as something more like hate speech?

00:17:27.000 It shouldn't surprise us at all.

00:17:28.000 Anyone that's ever been in a very homogenous, whether politically or religiously, environment knows that that's the case.

00:17:36.000 Yeah, so you think that the ideology is an appendage rather than the essence.

00:17:40.000 Now I know a lot of people that watch this... No, I think the ideology is deeply rooted.

00:17:47.000 I'm just saying that when... I'm not ascribing Ill intent to many of these people.

00:17:55.000 I think many of these people genuinely thought, let's just take the case of Trump and you watch the way they were talking back and forth to each other.

00:18:02.000 And it in many ways reminds me of the times there were true believers, right?

00:18:06.000 There were true believers who said Trump is basically akin to a terrorist leader or the Christchurch murderer.

00:18:13.000 And those people are driven by ideology.

00:18:15.000 You see people saying, Including Yoel Roth.

00:18:19.000 Basically, I left academia because I could affect more change in the world from joining Twitter.

00:18:23.000 But then there are other people who are looking out at what was happening in Washington and saying, this is an unprecedented situation.

00:18:30.000 It calls for unprecedented decision making.

00:18:33.000 There's gradations, as there are in any groups, and I think that that's an important aspect of what was happening at Twitter in the period we were reporting on, old Twitter.

00:18:43.000 It's frankly what happened at the New York Times during the very hot summer of 2020, where some people at the New York Times genuinely believed that running an op-ed by a sitting Republican senator literally put their lives in danger.

00:18:57.000 But the vast majority of people who signed on to an idea like that were doing it because of social pressure, and because they believed that if they didn't, they would be on the wrong side of history.

00:19:07.000 And I think that dynamic was playing out at old Twitter, it was playing out at the New York Times, it's playing out in book publishing, it's playing out in...

00:19:14.000 Basically, all of the sense-making elite institutions in American life right now.

00:19:19.000 And that is one of the great stories of our time.

00:19:21.000 And the reason it's not being reported on by places like The New York Times or The Washington Post is because they are implicated in it.

00:19:28.000 It's because they are the story.

00:19:29.000 Yes, you're quite right.

00:19:30.000 And in a sense, those social dynamics and the homogeneity that you're describing, though, it has been arrived at.

00:19:39.000 There is a process that has generated that.

00:19:42.000 And we also are talking about state collusion and intervention and censorship and an astonishing degree of infiltration by in particular The FBI.

00:19:55.000 What I've found more broadly in my conversations with the likes of Adam Curtis or Glenn Greenwald, and now in conversations in-house here, is that much of the ideology around civil rights and what has come to be known as identity politics is a convenient way of distracting us from the fact that when it comes to the crunch, Democrat interests ultimately align significantly with establishment interests elsewhere, the military-industrial complex, the financial industry, and big tech and in order to create a diversion, not

00:20:23.000 because there is a genuine ideological yearning at the heart of the establishment, i.e. its

00:20:28.000 financial heart, but because it is a convenient way of dividing people, these ideas are

00:20:32.000 promoted.

00:20:33.000 To your point earlier, it used to be accepted and ordinary that we would just sit and chat

00:20:37.000 to people that were conservative or Republican or had really wacky outlandish conspiratorial

00:20:44.000 views or take for example something as evidently frivolous as Graham Hancock's documentaries

00:20:51.000 about the origin of our species, although in a sense what could be more important.

00:20:55.000 In a way, the idea that that should be censored or dangerous feels like there is a climate

00:21:00.000 of amplification and an appetite for censorship.

00:21:05.000 While the principles appear to be somewhat fluid, i.e.

00:21:08.000 you could find yourself on the wrong side of the argument tomorrow if the wind changes once this precedent has been set and these powers have been granted, it does seem that at the moment there are a set of ideals that are being represented one way or another.

00:21:27.000 I get letters from people, maybe you too, you also do Russell, like every single day that feel like they were written in the Soviet Union.

00:21:35.000 In other words, it's people saying to me, thank you for saying this out loud.

00:21:40.000 I have a job as a lawyer.

00:21:42.000 I have a job as a doctor.

00:21:42.000 I have a job as an accountant.

00:21:44.000 I agree with you.

00:21:45.000 But if I said those things out loud, you know, I don't know what would happen to me or my career.

00:21:50.000 How did we arrive at that in the West?

00:21:53.000 I mean, and I think one of the dynamics of it that is particularly insidious is as you watch, right, as a ordinary person, the list of things grow longer and longer that you have to say or that you don't have to say or that you have to avoid.

00:22:10.000 You're thinking to yourself, what are they going to add tomorrow?

00:22:13.000 What are they going to add next week?

00:22:14.000 What are they going to add three months from now? 0.93

00:22:16.000 I better just shut up entirely.

00:22:18.000 And I think that that the effect of that kind of pre like that self censorship and self censorship and anticipation that the list can grow longer is just terrible for our democracy.

00:22:31.000 And it's terrible for our friendships and our relationships.

00:22:34.000 And frankly, I think it leads to political extremism, because when the bounds of what are politically acceptable narrow to such a degree, That people with even normal views, like there are differences between men and women, fall outside of it, then they're thinking, well, where can I actually speak the truth?

00:22:53.000 Where can I actually not walk on eggshells?

00:22:56.000 Where can I actually be my full selves?

00:22:58.000 And they will run into the open arms of political extremism.

00:23:02.000 One of the reasons I think it's so important to resist the censorious impulses that I think both of us for various reasons or from various directions want to resist is because of that, is because of where this kind of ideology ultimately leads to, and it leads to a place where

00:23:24.000 there's no political center, where people cannot talk to each other, where there's

00:23:28.000 polarization, and where you have half the country thinking the other half are Nazis, depending on

00:23:31.000 which side you're on.

00:23:32.000 That is a recipe for violence and disaster. And it's not a country I want to live in,

00:23:38.000 which is, you know, a lot of the reason why I decided to say bye bye to the New York Times

00:23:43.000 and to try and start something that lives up to those kind of values, to have honest conversations,

00:23:49.000 transparently, out loud, and fearlessly.

00:23:52.000 And I think, you know, frankly, like any journalist who believes in in the old school values of journalism needs to be doing the same thing right now.

00:24:02.000 My personal perspective is one of optimism about humanity that actually people that are different can get along and you don't need authoritarianism at the center of all of our institutions, systems and society in order for people to behave correctly.

00:24:21.000 It's not born of naivety, it's born of true optimism.

00:24:25.000 I also think that what's being masked is the birth of genuinely new political visions that That we have a heterogeneous political space now where there are no real alternatives, where there are no real voices that are interested in advancing ordinary people's lives and that we're being invited to bicker and squabble and even kill amongst ourselves and against one another rather than identify where real power is.

00:24:54.000 To some degree, I think it's just an aesthetic sheen that masks the telos of true power heading

00:25:01.000 in the direction that it always has done.

00:25:04.000 I'm concerned about advancing globalism.

00:25:06.000 I'm concerned about technological dictatorship, advancing surveillance, the ability of the

00:25:11.000 state and private interest to collaborate in exactly the way this story has demonstrated.

00:25:16.000 For me, we ought to be moving towards a time where there is less centralized power, small

00:25:22.000 amounts of government, and a kind of agreements among ourselves of how we're going to treat

00:25:27.000 one another and the kind of freedoms that we're going to grant one another.

00:25:30.000 Also, sort of anecdotally, Barry, my feeling is that most people sort of just want to be

00:25:34.000 left alone.

00:25:35.000 I don't mean in a sort of a...

00:25:36.000 Narcissistic libertarian way that people just want to run their like people don't want to focus on hatred the whole time I think we're being stoked into an unnatural state by these kind of movements and this type of agenda and that's sort of what's fueling it in me seeing as how you sort of almost asked I mean, I agree with you, and I'll tell you just from, you know, having been on the other side of it, in other words, having been the person that commissioned, you know, the 2000th op-ed about how Donald Trump is a unique danger to society, the incentive in it is,

00:26:09.000 It's unspoken, but it's so obvious, right?

00:26:11.000 It's that, you know, like, we know from all of these amazing documentary studies and also just our personal experience that outrage keeps us engaged, right?

00:26:21.000 The entire mechanics of these platforms are based on outrage.

00:26:26.000 They're not based on kindness or empathy or love.

00:26:28.000 And I think that, like, one of the great challenges of our time is how do you use These platforms as the kind of incredible tools that they are and they are I mean, I've I've commissioned amazing pieces because on Twitter I was able to connect to a underground pastor in Hong Kong like people that I just otherwise wouldn't find have become available to me because of these tools, but you know, they also can.

00:26:54.000 Kind of overtake us.

00:26:56.000 And and I think that it's, yeah, just one of one of the challenges I find in my own life, forget even as a journalist, just as a civilian, is how do you use what's good about them without becoming subsumed by them?

00:27:08.000 And I think I have found what when I'm basically living online and a lot of my life is online because of my work, you know, you start to sort of see people not as three dimensional and complicated and, you know, working from Good intentions and hearing them in good faith, you sort of start to see people as two dimensional caricatures.

00:27:29.000 And that's just not a that's not how I want to live.

00:27:32.000 And that's certainly not a way to do good journalism, because good journalism requires you to put yourself in other people's shoes, to be curious about what motivated them to vote a particular way.

00:27:43.000 You know, and and a lot of journalism right now is basically just derivative of Twitter, where Twitter is the ultimate editor.

00:27:49.000 And I think, you know, At least one of my big takeaways having spent much of the past two weeks there is the necessity to sort of get back on the road interviewing people in real life and not just looking at kind of the Twitter conversation.

00:28:04.000 It's extraordinary to me that the culture has become as divisive as it has done.

00:28:08.000 Half of the voting population can be sort of condemned as fascists or terrorists or unacceptable and that's normalized when I sort of take it... Deplorable!

00:28:19.000 deplorable being the defining word. When you take a glimpse at this late night TV culture,

00:28:24.000 I've sort of, because I don't watch too much of it, when I see it I'm sort of startled by the easy

00:28:29.000 and casual way those narratives are carried. And what it tells me is that there are no viewers

00:28:35.000 in conveying a balanced perspective. So there must be ossification and bifurcation of the culture.

00:28:41.000 They know that there's no one who likes Trump or libertarianism or even perhaps republicanism

00:28:46.000 is watching TV between 10 and 12 at night in the United States. So it does suggest a

00:28:51.000 degree of division that in a way don't seem positive. And Barry, can I...

00:28:56.000 No, but the thing to be optimistic about is, listen, these...

00:29:00.000 Peace.

00:29:01.000 The companies that we're referring to still have the sort of mechanics of distribution, right?

00:29:08.000 They're able to be beamed into tens of millions of homes across the country.

00:29:13.000 But the thing is, look at where the actual audience is.

00:29:17.000 They're not there.

00:29:18.000 They're with you.

00:29:19.000 They're with Joe Rogan.

00:29:20.000 They're with Tayibi. 1.00

00:29:21.000 They're with all of these new things that are part of this Cambrian explosion of independent media.

00:29:28.000 That is what to be optimistic about.

00:29:30.000 People are voting with their feet, and I think a lot of people still stuck in the old world do not understand that that is over.

00:29:37.000 It's over.

00:29:38.000 You know, audiences are just in a radically different place, and they're seeking voices and journalism that reflects the world as they actually see it, not the world as a few people in midtown Manhattan wish it were.

00:29:54.000 Barry, undoubtedly Elon Musk's actions in making these revelations available to you has been beneficial and has advanced the conversation.

00:30:02.000 It's difficult to know anybody's motivations, let alone a complex figure like Elon Musk.

00:30:08.000 What's your general sense around him stepping down as CEO and that poll?

00:30:13.000 Is that something you would care to comment on, mate?

00:30:16.000 I think that the Even the small glimpse that I had from my time reporting on this story has left me very grateful that I did not have $44 billion to spend and that I did not spend it acquiring Twitter.

00:30:33.000 I mean, it is just an absolutely thankless job trying to moderate the public square.

00:30:39.000 And the question is, you know, does he want to stick to his stated aim, which is to keep it that way, or is it going to transform into something else?

00:30:48.000 And I think that is the big question hanging over this entire project is the goal to try and, you know, was was the reason that he opened the archive in order to embarrass the former regime?

00:31:00.000 For sure.

00:31:00.000 But I think, you know, at his best and That his intention was to win back trust, right?

00:31:08.000 Everyone saw that certain subjects were getting suppressed.

00:31:12.000 Everyone saw that the gap between, you know, Twitter was essentially gaslighting the public.

00:31:17.000 Our job was to sort of look into it and see whether or not it was true.

00:31:21.000 And it was true, right?

00:31:22.000 And if you're taking over a company that has lost trust with at least half of the American public, yeah, you should probably clean house, clear the decks and all the things that he said to me on the record about what his intentions were.

00:31:33.000 But then to turn around and start to boot people off of Twitter, to tell people that they can't share a link from a competitor, they can't share a link to Linktree to promote their work, or, you know, and there are many other examples, you know, some of the policies, for example, on doxing seem absolutely sensible to me.

00:31:52.000 Of course you shouldn't be able to stalk people on the Internet.

00:31:55.000 You shouldn't be able to say, Barry Weiss is in this place right now, go get her.

00:31:59.000 Obviously.

00:32:00.000 But I think what people are objecting to is the kind of chaotic nature of the way that these new rules are coming down, the sense that they're basically being implemented and then backfilled with a reason.

00:32:11.000 And I think, you know, if Elon Musk or, you know, I don't know if he's going to pay attention to the poll and actually step down, if Elon Musk or whoever the next CEO of Twitter is wants to genuinely win back trust, It needs to be transparent, it needs to be consistent, there needs to be a level playing field, and it just needs to be clearly communicated to the hundreds of millions of users on Twitter.

00:32:30.000 That is where you do need genuine values and principles, because I suppose values and principles are what remains when it's inconvenient to have them, when it's at odds with your own interests, when it involves sacrifice, and that's why I continually take recourse to what have to be called spiritual ideals in so much as they're not material, and sometimes they transcend rationalism, humanism, and even reason.

00:32:51.000 It's sometimes unreasonable to have principles.

00:32:54.000 Barry, it's an extraordinary privilege to talk to you.

00:32:56.000 You're very, very intense And I really like communicating with you.

00:33:00.000 Yeah, you're really, really an intense person.

00:33:04.000 It's good to deal with you.

00:33:05.000 I don't know if that's bad or good.

00:33:07.000 Yeah, I mean, as a compliment, that's not like something, that's not a criticism.

00:33:10.000 Intensity is a good experience.

00:33:12.000 It's good to have people that communicate like that.

00:33:15.000 I was captivated the entire time and it's not easy to talk about.

00:33:19.000 And I can see the appeal sometimes, you know, we're talking about the role taken on by Musk and whoever he's succeeded in, if indeed he does step down, the attraction of dogma, because sometimes dealing with complexity is so hard, you know, God, I'm just going to call myself this, I'm just going to be this, and whatever they think, I'll do that.

00:33:37.000 And then it's the power of the tyranny that you've just been unpacking, is that people are just, well, let's just accept what we're bloody told, it's getting confusing out there.

00:33:45.000 I think there are two things that I sort of walk away with after these two weeks.

00:33:49.000 Thanks for calling me intense.

00:33:50.000 One is that I think that these tools may be too powerful for any individual or group.

00:33:56.000 And, you know, I don't know if that means that the solution is to treat things like Twitter like a common carrier in the way that the railroad is or the electric or the electric company.

00:34:08.000 Power is, this is an incredible power.

00:34:12.000 And the power can be really, really corrupting.

00:34:15.000 And that the roar of the crowd in the ears of Elon Musk, positive or negative, is just maybe too much for any individual.

00:34:25.000 Like, I don't know if we human beings are built for that kind of roar.

00:34:29.000 And I have to tell you, I mean, I was I gained a lot of Twitter followers in this, but the thing I'm looking most forward to over the Christmas holiday is just logging offline and getting back to real life and stepping away from the sort of gladiatorial arena that some of these platforms have become and touching grass.

00:34:52.000 being with my baby and my wife and getting back a little bit to reality because I think that

00:34:57.000 that roar can be for anyone of whatever political valence just a lot to take in.

00:35:05.000 Yeah it seems and sounds extraordinarily overwhelming and the idea of connecting with

00:35:12.000 actual reality and frankly love must be very appealing after enduring that and when you said

00:35:20.000 that about the sort of the roar of the crowd and that much accrued in centralized power seems like a

00:35:25.000 broad critique of monopolisation, capitalism more generally, because once you start looking

00:35:31.000 at the principle of municipality, once anybody owns energy, resources, communicative tools,

00:35:36.000 it starts to present situations that are somewhat inhumane and at odds with what I would dare

00:35:42.000 to call our nature.

00:35:43.000 Barry, thank you so much for sharing that information and for the personal sacrifices

00:35:48.000 you must have made in order to bring about this story and to get to a position to even

00:35:52.000 be afforded that right.

00:35:53.000 No sacrifices.

00:35:53.000 that way. No sacrifices.

00:35:54.000 No sacrifices.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - December 22, 2022

Bari Weiss (Twitter File Revelations)

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