TRIGGERnometry - Bari Weiss - Where Did the Media Go Wrong？

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:09.680 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:15.080 A fascinating person we have for you today. She is an American author, journalist,

00:00:20.120 and as of very recently, podcaster, Barry Weiss. Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:24.300 Thank you guys so much for having me.

00:00:25.940 Oh, it's a real pleasure to have you on the show. For anyone who's not familiar with you,

00:00:31.240 your backstory, your background, who you are, just tell everybody a little bit about that.

00:00:36.220 How have you managed to end up here talking to us?

00:00:39.200 I don't know. I'm a Jew from Pittsburgh. That's kind of the long and short of it.

00:00:45.440 I was born in the Jewish community of Squirrel Hill, oldest of four children, four daughters.

00:00:53.680 I'm from a politically mixed marriage.

00:00:55.960 My dad is a Trump-curious conservative.

00:00:59.040 My mom is a liberal. 0.82

00:01:00.720 She withheld sex during the 2016 and 2020 elections to make sure that he would vote in the right way, which I think meant writing in Steph Curry the first time around and maybe like Nikki Haley the second time.

00:01:12.900 So it was effective.

00:01:14.920 And, you know, that was my background.

00:01:18.180 I come from a family, and I think this is relevant to kind of where I wound up because I never imagined I would be a writer, where arguing about things and disagreeing about things and talking about big ideas was totally natural and normal.

00:01:34.060 And it was also normal to vehemently disagree with people that you love the most in your life and that in the end of the day, you know, you still love them.

00:01:44.340 So I think that's one virtue that my parents gave me that I feel like is in incredibly short supply these days in my country and I know yours too.

00:01:53.060 So from there, go to Columbia University. Long story short, I was pretty active when I was a college student politically on the subject of Israel, but also wound up being a columnist for the student paper and starting my own publication that's still in existence.

00:02:14.340 And through a serendipitous event, I was debating the college socialists, I believe.

00:02:20.400 This older gentleman was at the debate, very clearly not an undergraduate.

00:02:25.240 And he told me that his name was Charles Stevens and his son, Brett Stevens, worked at the

00:02:29.760 Wall Street Journal.

00:02:30.440 I had never read the Wall Street Journal.

00:02:31.900 I thought it was only an economics newspaper and that I should meet him and I should go

00:02:35.680 be an intern there.

00:02:36.660 And that was really it.

00:02:38.420 That was my first sort of foray into professional journalism.

00:02:41.500 I spent basically the past decade at the Wall Street Journal, Tablet Magazine, a Jewish magazine

00:02:48.900 that's excellent, and the New York Times. And I think the relevant thing for people who have never

00:02:54.460 heard of me is that I went from being the sort of leftmost flank of a conservative editorial page

00:03:02.120 at the Wall Street Journal, where I was very regularly told that I was a squish and a pushover,

00:03:06.320 And to the New York Times, where I was something like the right to the right of Attila the Hun. And I think in a way that journey is not in any way unique to me. I think it kind of tells a broader story about where the country is going, maybe even more broadly where the West is going in terms of more extremist polarized politics.

00:03:29.620 And certainly it tells the story about where the mainstream media is, which is increasingly a choice between two increasingly stark options.

00:03:37.460 The last thing I'll say that I think is probably relevant is that I became a bat mitzvah at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, which people may or may not remember was the site of the deadliest attack on Jews in American history in October 27, 2018, where a neo-Nazi walked into the synagogue and killed 11 people.

00:03:59.620 Um, that moment, um, it's hard to summarize in a quick soundbite, but that moment was pretty

00:04:06.080 impactful on my life. And I wound up sort of putting to the side, the book that I was supposed

00:04:10.960 to write about the culture war. I'm hoping to pick that up soon. And I ended up writing a book

00:04:15.180 called how to fight antisemitism. So that's also, I would think in a really important piece of my,

00:04:20.260 my journey over the past few years. Um, and then the last thing I'll say is that, um, my most recent

00:04:27.400 job was that, you know, I had kind of the plum job in all of journalism. I was an op-ed writer

00:04:33.560 and editor at the New York Times, like I mentioned, and I chose to leave that of my own accord,

00:04:39.240 which my grandma is still sort of scratching her head about. So that's where I am now. Now I'm a

00:04:45.660 newspaper woman without a newspaper. I have a newsletter. And now increasingly, like lots of

00:04:51.680 people in this country and all over. I have a podcast like you guys. So that's kind of the

00:04:57.400 big picture. Yeah. And it's called Honestly with Barry Weiss. I'm looking forward to seeing some

00:05:01.380 of the stuff that's coming up because you've only just started it. But listen, the reason we wanted

00:05:06.480 to talk to you, most of all, we'll probably come back to the antisemitism, but we wouldn't be doing

00:05:12.560 this show if journalism hadn't become what it's become, right? Now, you've been on the inside.

00:05:21.680 Yes, I have.

00:05:23.140 What is happening to journalism and newspapers and the mainstream media?

00:05:29.180 OK, well, let's start with two things.

00:05:32.720 The first thing is a radical shift in the economic model of how newspapers, how television

00:05:39.820 stations, how radio makes money.

00:05:43.360 Go back to the age before the Internet.

00:05:46.480 I know it's very hard to do that.

00:05:48.000 But back in the day, some 20 years ago, the constituency that the New York Times had to please, the constituency that they had to worry about pissing off, and I'm talking about the New York Times as a stand-in for all publications, pretty much, in the legacy press, that constituency was advertisers, right?

00:06:06.680 That's who they had to worry about.

00:06:08.240 Well, that's no longer the case.

00:06:09.760 The advertising model, as we know, has collapsed, and the model now is subscribers.

00:06:14.140 Well, if you go and you look at who are the people that subscribe to The New York Times, it's something like 95% identify as progressive or liberal or, you know, not old school Democrat, but Democrat.

00:06:27.840 So if the goal, right, is to keep your subscribers engaged, to keep them happy, it only makes sense that the thing that you would feed them is their version of political heroin, which in the case of The New York Times meant Donald Trump is a moral monster, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:06:49.280 And that model, if you go look at the stock price and you look at the subscriber numbers, is working beautifully.

00:06:56.140 But what's good for business may not be good for democracy. So that thing that I just described to you, it's the same model at Fox, where obviously it's the diametric opposite in terms of who the audience is. But that's, again, the goal is to keep people engaged, keep people engaged.

00:07:10.740 Now, the second thing that comes on top of that is social media. And social media amplifies this trend because what it does is that it gives or maybe not gives a microphone. I was going to say there's a group of people that tend to hog the microphone that tend to be the most extremist part of that base.

00:07:33.700 And that then gives editors and reporters a sense of, oh, wow, that's what they want.

00:07:40.220 And what happens is, and it's much more insidious than a kind of like top-down do this, which is, I think, how people maybe imagine it from the outside.

00:07:49.660 It's much more subtle because we are like, you know, we're animals, right?

00:07:56.380 We respond well to incentives.

00:07:59.060 And if you know that writing about a certain topic or writing about a certain topic from a particular perspective or telling your readers who feel a certain way that you know because you're getting constant feedback about it, that they feel a certain way about the world, you naturally want to just please them because pleasing them means winning for yourself.

00:08:20.000 It means going viral.

00:08:21.580 It means being most popular inside the paper.

00:08:24.260 It means getting better assignments and on and on and on.

00:08:27.640 So that's the other thing that's going on. I would say the third thing that's going on that's related to it is what's been talked about as the kind of ideological takeover of 20th century institutions that are meant to uphold the liberal order and are increasingly betraying their mission and betraying their values in order to pursue a very different kind of ideology that's not liberal at all.

00:08:55.300 And so that is very much what I witnessed when I was at the New York Times.

00:09:01.480 The vast majority, I still believe, of people at the New York Times still believe in the old school liberal model of journalism.

00:09:09.680 What do I mean by that?

00:09:11.040 Things that we used to take for granted, you know, pursuing the truth, telling it, whether or not it's convenient to a particular political constituency, striving for objectivity, even though we all recognize that there's no such thing as the view from nowhere.

00:09:24.940 and that we're all incredibly subjective.

00:09:28.380 You know, vying to be the paper of record,

00:09:31.100 all the news that's fit to print,

00:09:33.020 that has given way to something much more morally

00:09:36.280 and politically strident.

00:09:38.960 Some journalists have referred to this without irony

00:09:42.240 as being journalism in the service of moral clarity.

00:09:46.120 Now, whose morals they are and who has the clarity, right,

00:09:50.660 is the whole question, and they believe that they do.

00:09:53.120 And so the way that it's functioning at the Times, but I could say the same about publishing houses or Hollywood studios or big tech corporations, is that the people at the top are living in tremendous fear of a minority, and I don't mean racial minority or gender minority, but a minority constituency inside the paper who do not believe in the historical mission of the institution.

00:10:20.300 And so rather than, although we have some good examples of this that maybe we'll get to, rather than saying to those people, hey, if you believe that words are violence, hey, if you believe that an op-ed by a sitting United States senator literally puts people's lives in danger, maybe journalism isn't the right career for you.

00:10:40.460 Instead, they find themselves being struggle sessioned in full view of thousands of employees, right? Because the whole thing is that people are, I knew this to be true, but I really feel it now in a visceral way now that I've witnessed it over and over and over again.

00:10:57.780 people generally act in herd. They do not want to stick their necks out. The most painful thing is

00:11:06.700 the idea of being kicked out or ostracized from your community, especially if the way your

00:11:12.460 community is branding itself, especially if the way your community is identifying itself is like

00:11:17.800 the community of the good and the righteous and the right side of history. The worst thing ever

00:11:21.980 would be to be told that you're not on that right side.

00:11:26.000 The worst thing ever would be to be told

00:11:28.100 that you're a bigot or you're an ism 0.99

00:11:30.280 or you're a phobe in some kind of way.

00:11:32.900 And so what you have, and this is really the key,

00:11:37.300 the cowardice at the top of these institutions

00:11:39.760 is what's allowing for all of this to take place.

00:11:42.640 Because if the people that were actually in charge

00:11:45.180 were courageous and said no politely

00:11:48.760 and no, we'll give you severance,

00:11:50.460 but this isn't the right place for you,

00:11:51.760 Or maybe, no, we're not going to hire you in the first place if you don't believe that an op-ed page, in my case, should share a range of views that represents the truth about the country that you live in.

00:12:04.480 The whole thing would be playing out quite differently.

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00:13:11.840 it's very very interesting that you said that and one of the things i kept thinking barry when you

00:13:18.480 were explaining their business models what was going off in my head is but you're just creating

00:13:23.660 large echo chambers that's all you do that's all of us are creating and what effect is that having

00:13:29.040 on society i mean we're all living in it right we're living in different epistemological realities

00:13:35.980 where if you watch, you know,

00:13:38.980 Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity,

00:13:40.920 I'm not sure what the exact comparison

00:13:42.860 in England would be, but I'm sure-

00:13:44.120 We don't have anything quite like that here.

00:13:46.020 All right.

00:13:46.480 It's coming, I'm sure, but not yet, Barry.

00:13:48.700 You know, versus like,

00:13:49.660 if you watch Rachel Maddow every night,

00:13:51.260 you just have a totally different perception

00:13:53.380 of what's going on in the country.

00:13:55.880 That's problem number one.

00:13:57.220 Problem number two is like,

00:13:59.920 if, is, and I think we're all feeling this in our lives,

00:14:04.140 The feeling of like being motivated by fear rather than empathy and understanding and being increasingly told that we need to be really, really scared of the opposite tribe that somehow wants to fundamentally undo the foundation of the country. 0.64

00:14:22.500 I mean, that's ultimately what it's about.

00:14:23.800 And so those fissures are obvious, not just in society at large, but I think sometimes in friend groups and in families and in people's own lives.

00:14:34.140 And I just think that it's extraordinarily dangerous.

00:14:38.160 It betrays my most fundamental values that I believe in.

00:14:43.140 And ultimately, that's why I decided to self-deport from, you know, the highest purchase of American

00:14:49.980 journalism, because I just didn't want to be part of that machine.

00:14:54.180 And it seemed to me quite clear, and I mean this in a nonjudgmental way, that it really

00:15:00.160 does work as a business model.

00:15:01.660 just like Facebook stoking outrage

00:15:04.120 really does work as a business model.

00:15:06.700 I do not think that someone has yet come up

00:15:09.220 with the solution to this in terms of like economics

00:15:13.480 because this clearly works.

00:15:15.040 It's clearly tapping into some part of our lizard brain

00:15:18.280 that wants to keep hitting the pellet

00:15:20.700 and getting the sugar.

00:15:22.420 But I want to be part of trying to see

00:15:26.420 if there's a better way.

00:15:28.440 And you talk about if there's a better way

00:15:30.180 and you use terms of progressive, liberal, on the left. Now, at one point, these were how I

00:15:37.680 described myself. I was a teacher for many years. Yeah, I look at these labels and I don't feel,

00:15:43.600 and I feel as if I couldn't be more ostracized from them. Would you be able to explain to our

00:15:49.980 listeners and to our viewers what these terms used to mean, what they mean, and what they mean now?

00:15:54.940 so when i identify myself as a liberal and i think when a lot of people identify themselves

00:16:01.180 as liberals until quite recently what they mean was this liberalism is not a partisan term

00:16:08.740 liberalism is a view of the world that holds the following truths that we're all created

00:16:14.740 in the image of god whether or not you believe in god but we act that way that because of that

00:16:20.820 equality in a cosmic sense, we're all entitled to equal treatment and equality under the law,

00:16:28.320 that no person should be guilty for the sins of their parents, that no person because of their

00:16:37.880 skin color or because of other immutable characteristics should be held to a standard

00:16:43.920 of collective innocence or collective guilt because of it. The idea that we judge people

00:16:49.220 based on their actions, based on their character, and based on their merit, and not based on

00:16:54.980 qualities of their identity. The idea that we're not constrained to the lane of our birth,

00:17:01.880 that's really important. The idea that because we're a particular identity, it doesn't mean

00:17:06.880 that we can't understand or strive to understand someone from a different group. And the idea,

00:17:12.900 perhaps most importantly, that politics is not the only thing in life, and that there are things

00:17:19.140 that fall outside of the realm of politics, and those are the most important things in life,

00:17:23.740 art, music, love, relationships, family, and that not everything needs to be put to political

00:17:30.740 litmus tests. If you believe that, you believe in the liberal worldview. And you can be a

00:17:37.140 conservative liberal, or you could be a liberal liberal, but that, by and large, is what I think

00:17:42.920 we mean when we're talking about the liberal worldview. That is now being challenged. And it's

00:17:48.820 very obviously being challenged by the far right, right? The blood and soil, ethno-nationalist,

00:17:56.160 people marching in Charlottesville shouting, Jews will not replace us. That's the obvious threat 1.00

00:18:00.860 to liberalism from the right. We don't need to have a debate about that threat.

00:18:06.720 Everyone who's sane sees the evil of that worldview. And frankly, the mainstream media

00:18:15.000 pays an incredible amount of attention to that worldview.

00:18:19.500 And so I think that it's, you know,

00:18:21.040 it's like when someone marches down the street

00:18:23.040 shouting Jews will not replace us 0.99

00:18:24.460 or says Jews need to die or says, you know, 1.00

00:18:26.960 some people because of their skin color 1.00

00:18:29.040 are less American than others.

00:18:30.380 Like there's no moral debate about what that is.

00:18:33.840 The confusion, I think,

00:18:35.580 and the reason that so many are caught flat-footed

00:18:38.140 by the challenge to liberalism from the far left

00:18:41.700 is it doesn't have a tiki torch.

00:18:45.000 It comes cloaked in the language and in the garments of social justice, of progress, of civil rights, of being on the right side of history and all the things that liberals want to be a part of.

00:18:58.100 But if you look under the hood beyond the slogans of what these movements and this ideology that doesn't really have a name yet, some call it wokeness, some call it soft totalitarianism, some call it critical social justice, the critic Wesley Yang has called it the successor ideology because it's trying to be the successor to liberalism.

00:19:19.580 I think that's a really effective term. It's really this stew of supremely unenlightened ideas that try and replace, you know, persuasion with public shaming, that try and say that, no, you know, we're determined by the circumstances of our birth, that we're pitted in a sort of war against all of identity group versus identity group.

00:19:46.660 And it's sort of a zero-sum battle in which we're all vying for the most claims to victimhood because what accrues power to you, the way that we judge the things that come out of your mouth and the truth claim is not the actual content but your identity.

00:20:09.020 The more victimhood you can claim, literally the more claim you have to morality and truth.

00:20:15.660 It claims that we actually do have collective innocence or collective guilt.

00:20:20.640 It claims that we are guilty for the sins of our fathers.

00:20:24.120 In so many ways, if you just look at what these people say, not necessarily the people

00:20:29.680 that are hanging up the sign in the window, right, who are doing it for well-intentioned

00:20:34.500 reasons, but the hardcore of this ideology, it is just deeply, deeply illiberal.

00:20:39.280 And the reason that I feel like it's the battle of our lifetime to resist it is because it has captured so many of the institutions, including journalism, that we rely on to sort of tell us the truth about the world.

00:20:57.520 Barry, we'll talk about the institutional capture in a second.

00:21:00.180 But first of all, I feel like there is a contradiction in the conversation we're having,

00:21:05.760 because on the one hand, we lament the increasing polarization of society where we are all deeply

00:21:12.820 suspicious of quote-unquote the other side.

00:21:15.180 And instead of seeing them as people we disagree with, we now see them as the people who are,

00:21:20.140 you know, they want to destroy America or destroy the British way of life or whatever.

00:21:25.180 But on the other hand, I also agree with what you've just said, where, you know, the far right, obviously, we all understand that that is not compatible with the world that we want to live in.

00:21:35.560 But this other thing, I mean, it is about destroying the foundations of the Western world.

00:21:41.060 Well, I mean, the thing that both of these ideologies have in common is that they're Manichaean and binary, and they split the world into good and bad, black and white, oppressed and oppressor.

00:21:54.740 And anything, any ideology that does that cannot be harmonized with the liberal project.

00:22:02.380 Yeah, I agree. I agree. My point is we lament the media polarizing us and making us think that the other people who we don't agree with are the enemies of, in our case, Western civilization.

00:22:17.420 But at the same time, I think it's also accurate to say that there are some people who are the enemies of Western civilization.

00:22:23.720 Do you see the contradiction I'm getting at?

00:22:26.940 I do.

00:22:28.200 I do see that contradiction.

00:22:30.200 And I guess I would say that it's the job of anyone that wants to fight for the liberal

00:22:36.060 project, broadly defined, to stand up against both of those things wherever they rear their

00:22:41.920 head.

00:22:42.280 I think the problem in the mainstream is that you have one group of people relentlessly

00:22:47.400 insisting that it's just this one group.

00:22:49.700 And if you only watch that, you think it's just this one group.

00:22:52.900 But then if you watch the other side, it's the opposite case. And I think what's required right now of those of us who want to still live in a reality-based world, those of us in the reality-based community, that it's our obligation to talk about both.

00:23:08.340 I think one thing that critics sort of hit me with is the idea that I focus inordinately on the threat from the far left.

00:23:15.520 And I do focus more on that.

00:23:17.420 The reason for that is not because I don't take the threat from the far right seriously.

00:23:21.720 Like I said earlier, I mean, I'm from a community where I witnessed the evil of what that ideology is about.

00:23:29.320 So I take it extremely seriously and it's had an impact on my own life.

00:23:33.240 But I think that like there are giant news organizations focusing all of their time and energy on that threat.

00:23:41.520 And there's very few people that are focusing on the other one.

00:23:44.700 And so that's one of the reasons that I try and put a special emphasis there.

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00:25:08.360 It'll be interesting because this is something that we have a bit of an issue with as well, I suppose.

00:25:12.920 We focus a lot on some of the issues to do.

00:25:15.420 We focus on both sides, but particularly the far left, not necessarily because of what you've said,

00:25:20.520 but rather certainly in my, I don't know whether Francis would agree with this,

00:25:23.280 But my view, while the far right is obviously evil and obviously a threat, I just don't see the same level of public support.

00:25:32.940 I don't see the same level of the willingness to legitimize some of the ideas of the far right in the mainstream discourse.

00:25:40.180 I don't see the numerical support in terms of the number of people who buy into this ideology.

00:25:45.840 I don't see far right narratives being shoved down my throat on radio and television and newspapers, etc.

00:25:52.440 so do you feel like these threats are equally dangerous i think that they it's always a really

00:26:02.080 hard question to answer because they have like um parasitics the wrong word but they they are like

00:26:09.300 they have a codependent relationship in this moment constantine i i agree with you that i

00:26:16.860 think the threat from the far left has just inordinately more power in the culture but the

00:26:24.700 problem right is that what the backlash to that is going to be and the way that it's going to empower

00:26:31.600 the kind of ethno-nationalist neo-nazi right is one of the reasons that i am so scared about what's

00:26:41.280 coming out of the far left because i just like if you just look out into the world you see the way

00:26:46.500 that this dynamic is playing out. And it really, really worries me. If this thing continues to

00:26:52.660 sort of sweep through the culture without resistance, what is going to come in response

00:26:57.700 to it? So that is one of the reasons that I feel like it's so incredibly urgent.

00:27:02.440 And why do you think, Barry, we don't see the far left as a problem? Because Constantine's

00:27:08.480 family are from the Soviet Union, I have family from Venezuela. You know, we've seen what the

00:27:14.200 far left has done to our respective countries. But in the UK and, you know, in America, I see

00:27:20.000 kids walking around with Che Guevara t-shirts, you know, abolish capitalism. Why is that?

00:27:27.920 I've thought about this so much. I think there are two reasons. One has to do with maybe

00:27:33.780 institutional capture before we called it that, which is to say, most people educated in this

00:27:39.400 country, you learn a tremendous amount. I would say because I went to a Jewish day school, it's

00:27:44.940 different. And we had tons of students who were from the former Soviet Union. And so I was aware

00:27:51.280 of what that meant because it was like in my family, like that was in our community. That was

00:27:57.540 something, oh, why are these people moving here? Okay, let's understand what actually happened

00:28:01.120 there. But were it not for that, and a lot of extremely well-educated people I know who went

00:28:06.480 to some of the best prep schools in the country, really don't learn about the evils of Soviet 1.00

00:28:12.580 communism, for example, at all. So that's one aspect of it. There's just genuine ignorance.

00:28:18.940 And I think the other thing is like, just better branding. Like, if your thing is about,

00:28:25.880 you know, lifting up everyone equally, doesn't that sound great? You know, if your thing is

00:28:33.000 about like guaranteeing everyone whatever we all know the promises like I think there's

00:28:40.420 that that still resonates maybe for people who believe it hasn't been tried yet you know or

00:28:47.380 hasn't been tried yet in the right way it's amazing to me that that's the reality but I

00:28:52.360 think that for a lot of young Americans that is just the reality and frankly like just look at

00:28:58.700 popular culture like other than mr jones you know that movie that came out recently or maybe the

00:29:04.120 lives of others like is there anything that gets made that shows the evils of i'm just thinking

00:29:12.200 now about like what like stalinism and the former soviet like is there anything about that not

00:29:17.660 really there's a ton about fascists as there should be but i think i think that's a that's

00:29:24.260 a huge part of it is just like this tremendous gap in people's education. Um, yeah, I wish I

00:29:32.880 had a better answer, but, but I I'm constantly running into this from people that I think of

00:29:38.880 as being very sophisticated and extraordinarily, um, well-educated. And do you think, I think part

00:29:46.720 of it, Barry, is that capitalism isn't really working for a lot of people, particularly young

00:29:53.160 people. In the UK, you can see it with the housing market. It doesn't matter how much you own. It

00:29:58.300 doesn't matter how good your job is. You're never going to get on the housing ladder unless you've

00:30:02.300 got mum and dad to support you. It just seems the wages are stagnating whilst everything is

00:30:08.320 getting more expensive. Do you think that might be the problem? People are looking around and

00:30:11.760 going, well, this isn't working. I think that's a huge aspect of it, especially, I don't know how

00:30:16.200 old you guys are, but I imagine we're similar. 23. Me too. So we're similar. Yeah. Yeah. So we're

00:30:24.140 similar. Um, we're one year older than you. Yeah. Okay, cool. So as elder millennials, uh, I think

00:30:31.420 that we know, like, you know, think about what our generations live through it here. It's been,

00:30:37.260 you know, the great recession, the crushing student debt crisis, the fact that like basic

00:30:42.580 tenants of what used to be called unironically the American dream are totally out of reach for

00:30:48.060 people in my generation. And so absolutely, I think that capitalism has been, you know,

00:30:55.440 beaten down and has an understandably poor reputation among people of our generation,

00:31:02.800 and they're looking for something better. And I just think that the solution is a much more

00:31:10.220 serious social safety net and policies that lift up the poorest people in the country.

00:31:18.700 Obviously not communism, but I think that, yeah, the fact that capitalism has failed

00:31:24.000 for so many people has left them understandably casting about for something better.

00:31:29.460 Do you not think also, I mean, Jonathan High obviously has written quite a lot about the

00:31:33.500 culture of safety and all of that. You probably would have seen while working at the New York

00:31:39.140 times younger the next generation we are actually there's a term for for us which i always forget

00:31:45.100 that generation between millennials and the one before like gen z something i can't remember

00:31:50.620 whatever it's basically the generation that didn't have internet growing up but did when they got to

00:31:56.900 like 16 17 18 i think yeah but the next generation who always had the internet their values are also

00:32:03.640 different. There's something happened there where the focus on culture, being offended about things,

00:32:10.140 all of that stuff started to come through. And performative caring and performative compassion

00:32:16.040 started to, this is my opinion anyway, started to set in. Did you notice a generational

00:32:20.740 shift in terms of the people coming through into journalism in your experience?

00:32:27.400 Yes, but I think that has maybe less to do with the internet and more to do with ideological

00:32:32.540 capture of elite universities here right because this isn't every an everyone problem this is

00:32:38.940 mostly an elite problem the problem is is that the elites control all of the institutions in

00:32:44.680 the culture so like the good and the bad news right is that ideas really really matter and

00:32:51.200 the ideas that you're exposed to or not exposed to during the most formative years of your

00:32:55.780 intellectual development, which is college. Like if all you're exposed to is this broad view of

00:33:03.200 the world that we've sort of been circling here and you think that disagreement is violence and

00:33:08.400 you think, you know, in the case of Yale University and Nicholas and Erica Christakis that emails

00:33:13.220 about Halloween costumes are literal violence or at Evergreen State College with, you know,

00:33:19.200 two of my heroes, Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying, that, you know, resisting a day of racial 0.96

00:33:23.340 segregation is somehow racist and then all of a sudden you're going into these institutions right

00:33:30.100 the old view of things was that if you were you know an anthro major at vassar or a gender studies

00:33:38.920 major at columbia like you were exposed to some radical politics sure but you would go and get

00:33:46.640 your job at jp morgan or mckinsey at the new york times or now netflix or hbo max or whatever

00:33:51.520 And like you would leave those ideas behind and the institution would be so strong that it would shape you rather than you shaping it.

00:34:00.460 But as Yuval Levin and others have put much more articulately than me, the opposite has happened.

00:34:06.200 The institutions have become platforms, first of all, rather than institutions.

00:34:11.420 And rather than them shaping the young people coming up into them, no, the young people coming up into them have shaped them.

00:34:20.320 And one of the reasons they've been able to do that so effectively is that the quivers that they have are so incredibly powerful.

00:34:28.860 They wield, you know, the threat of moral shaming.

00:34:33.060 They wield the threat of cancellation.

00:34:35.560 And they have this incredible thing called Twitter and Facebook to do it.

00:34:40.120 And so in a weird way, well, I'll sort of leave it at that.

00:34:44.160 But did I see the generational divide?

00:34:46.460 Absolutely.

00:34:46.940 Absolutely. It's not, it's, look, speaking of the Soviet Union, there are double thinkers, okay? And there are dissidents. And those are strange words to use when you're living in America, but that's 100% what's going on. And so it's really hard to figure out exactly who believes what, right? Unless you're in like, you know, in your basement reading your samizdat or your equivalent with the people that you really just, you know, that are super high trust inside an institution.

00:35:14.800 there are a lot of people that say one thing in public or say one thing in the slack channel

00:35:20.760 but then in a signal text me something totally different and we were talking about this morning

00:35:26.660 actually barry that we know when a comedian or a journalist or public figure in the uk in this 0.52

00:35:31.520 country has decided they don't give a shit about their careers when they follow us on twitter 0.58

00:35:35.680 that's when we know they're done they're ready i mean i know people that have got i know people 0.98

00:35:41.800 I heard a story about an agent the other day who got fired from her job for following a

00:35:47.520 conservative on Twitter. I mean, that's the level that we're talking about. So it's understandable

00:35:52.580 that people are scared and not telling the truth. But the reason that I think it's hard to figure

00:35:58.260 out exactly who's true believers or who's just kind of going along because they have children

00:36:03.920 to support and a family and a mortgage to pay, it's hard to suss that out. But my feeling,

00:36:09.520 I'm pretty confident that it's still very much a minority view that's being supercharged by the younger generation, let's say the under 30 generation.

00:36:20.620 But a lot of older people are going along with it because they're saying they're looking and seeing same things going on in the Democratic Party.

00:36:26.740 Like, oh, the prevailing political winds are at their backs.

00:36:30.180 Those people are going to be my bosses one day.

00:36:32.060 And it looks like the publisher of the paper isn't standing up to them.

00:36:35.240 So it seems like the right thing to do would be to go along with it.

00:36:38.460 And I think that's a lot of what's happening is just this kind of like people going along with something that they know is wrong, thinking, though, that if they just accommodate in X, Y, Z ways, if they just apologize in the right way, if they just caveat this or that, that it will go away.

00:36:56.760 And that is the delusion.

00:36:59.400 That's the ultimate delusion.

00:37:00.860 But like you said, and I love the way that you've used that word delusion, but like all delusions, Barry, it's not sustainable, surely. You can't sustain a delusion, can you?

00:37:12.060 Well, of course, ultimately, you can't sustain a delusion. The question is, how much is it going to burn through before it dies out? And the notion that I think a lot of people who know that this is bad but are not saying so publicly somehow believe that it's going to recede on its own without resistance.

00:37:35.740 And I think that's a very dangerous view. And I think that it's incumbent on people right now, like I think it's people's moral duty to speak out about something that they know is wrong.

00:37:47.860 and the thing that i think is happening is that it's like almost for the sake of short-term

00:37:56.080 comfort people are sacrificing like long-term the things that allow us to even be able to speak out

00:38:05.260 in the first place i don't really think most people understand what we're at threat of losing

00:38:10.820 um and by the way i hope that someone's going to view this tape 10 years from now 0.73

00:38:15.060 and be like, that lady was hysterical and crazy. 1.00

00:38:19.040 Like, I hope that I'm overstating it 0.73

00:38:20.940 and I hope that I'm wrong.

00:38:22.840 But just watching what I've seen at the New York Times,

00:38:25.780 but just in my reporting in sectors like education,

00:38:29.320 K through 12 and medicine and the law,

00:38:33.100 I just don't think that I'm overstating the case,

00:38:35.820 at least in this moment.

00:38:36.960 Let's talk about that, Barry.

00:38:38.360 What are you talking about?

00:38:39.620 What do we have to lose?

00:38:40.880 What is happening in education?

00:38:42.480 What is happening in healthcare?

00:38:43.620 you're an intelligent experienced journalist you've seen many things why are you concerned

00:38:49.740 about what's happening and what is it that you're seeing well what i'm seeing is people afraid to

00:38:55.940 tell the truth i'm seeing people that are acting based on fear including doctors and lawyers and

00:39:07.460 Like, let me put it this way. It's one thing when a celebrity, you know, says a lie on the internet to protect their brand or because they don't want to lose their sponsorship or because they want China, you know, to pick up their Avengers movie.

00:39:23.640 It is quite another thing when a doctor who literally deals with matters of life and death is unable to say things like there are differences between males and females or is unable to say that, you know, certain groups of people have more proclivities towards certain diseases and that that doesn't mean anything about anyone's like that and acknowledging that.

00:39:49.720 So like that's the kind of thing we've been exposing on my newsletter. In K-12 education, what does it look like? And it looks like, you know, throwing out classic books like To Kill a Mockingbird or Huckleberry Finn or tons of others that I can name, Catcher in the Rye, and replacing them with Ibram Kendi books rather than reading both as an example.

00:40:18.100 it means teaching children that their skin color really really matters to them and their skin

00:40:26.400 color is an extremely important part of who they are rather than their character so what i'm

00:40:31.500 talking about is what i what i articulated before the liberal project those ideas those values that

00:40:39.880 allow us to come on this and disagree in public or agree in public but have a conversation and

00:40:46.660 not tear each other's throats out, that is what's under threat. Like, I really believe that. And

00:40:55.040 that's ultimately why I feel like that's why I'm doing the work that I'm doing because I want to

00:41:00.740 expose what I feel like a lot of journalists are ignoring or actively lying about. Because

00:41:08.000 this thing that I'm describing, it's not going to be contained, you know, to high rises in

00:41:14.620 in town Manhattan or Harvard University or Yale like this is coming to affect everyone and that's

00:41:22.420 why it's so important for us to stand up against it and you say it's so important to stand up

00:41:27.620 against it but isn't it a really tough ask to do if someone's got a mortgage they're reliant on a

00:41:34.180 salary they've got kids etc etc and knowing that they can be cut at any moment yes yes it is a hard

00:41:44.080 ask. And not everyone can, not everyone can stand up to this or needs to stand up to this

00:41:50.880 in exactly the same way. Right. It could be that you support organizations like, you know,

00:41:57.820 the trigonometry, like trigonometry. Exactly. That's the name you were searching for.

00:42:04.800 That's right. Or like my sub stack or like there's this amazing new organization I'm on the board of

00:42:08.820 FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. There's so many things that you could do

00:42:13.680 quietly. But I would also suggest to people, and without sounding like too high-minded about it,

00:42:20.140 there are things worth sacrificing professional advancement and prestige for. And,

00:42:27.820 you know, like the things that might feel like major sacrifices already in this moment,

00:42:34.900 what is that going to look like a year or two years or five years from now,

00:42:38.300 if this thing continues to roll through, well, Western civilization

00:42:42.860 without good people, people of conscience standing up to it.

00:42:47.640 I mean, what do you think it's going to look like, Barry?

00:42:50.060 I really hesitate that question because I think we're going to go down

00:42:52.400 a pretty depressing alley, but go for it.

00:42:54.140 You love it, mate.

00:42:54.960 I do. I'm a miserable fucker. 1.00

00:42:57.060 Well, wait, hold on. 1.00

00:42:58.500 You guys are closer to places like, you know, the Soviet Union and Venezuela.

00:43:02.680 What do you think it's going to look like?

00:43:04.360 Oh, if it's going to look like Venezuela, it's going to be great. 1.00

00:43:06.420 We're all going to lose weight, Barry.

00:43:07.680 it's going to be we're going to be super slim it's going to be great there's going to be time

00:43:12.660 on the beach yeah we're going to be very equal we're going to be equally poor yeah it's going

00:43:17.520 to be great so yeah there's lots to look forward to but look i i personally i agree with you that

00:43:23.380 i mean especially when you talk about education if you teach if you spend enough time teaching

00:43:30.580 the next generation and the one after that to think of themselves primarily through their

00:43:35.700 ethnicity and their skin color in my opinion there's only one way that ends there's only one 0.99

00:43:42.100 way that ends because this is all this shit has been tried before again and again and again uh 0.97

00:43:48.540 and given particularly that we live in multi-ethnic societies uh you know there's only one way that 0.95

00:43:56.040 ends well right and you i hope you guys saw it but we just exposed this you know there was a

00:44:01.420 professor i did not believe it when i first heard the tape maybe we want to include it where you

00:44:06.600 know a psychiatrist delivering grand rounds at yale university openly fantasized about

00:44:13.640 unloading a revolver into the brains of white people um who talked about how she fantasized 0.58

00:44:20.140 about it and walked away guiltless because she was doing a favor to some i mean you have to listen 0.98

00:44:24.680 to this to believe it now you know how france's girlfriend feels

00:44:28.300 how has that become normalized the way that's become normalized is that people

00:44:50.560 are not standing up to things that very obviously like are are wrong right you don't need to

00:44:57.980 understand what critical race theory is or have read whatever like Marcuse or Foucault to know

00:45:04.440 that a psychiatrist at Yale talking about murdering people based on their race is wrong

00:45:11.120 and like don't be if you're listening to this like don't be fooled by the jargon you know like

00:45:20.480 it's common sense you know that that's wrong and the thing to do is not wait for the cavalry to

00:45:26.400 come in like we're the cavalry like trigonometry is the cavalry so like you got to stand up you got

00:45:33.660 to speak out because as hard as it feels now sorry to repeat myself but like as hard as it feels now

00:45:39.400 if it already feels hard that's a sign to you that things are already too far gone it shouldn't be

00:45:45.500 hard to stand up against something like that you say it shouldn't be hard to stand up against

00:45:50.480 something like that but we look at you know particularly you know the arts entertainment

00:45:55.680 publishing all these industries seem to have been toppled one after another after another

00:46:02.140 after another and now it's infected sport well what's happening right though is and i i hope

00:46:08.960 that we're going to look back on it this way what's going on is is the rotting out of 20th

00:46:13.240 century institutions but what's happening and that's horrible and deserves like I was heart

00:46:20.780 sick about it for a long time but once you move beyond the grieving process you're like wait hold

00:46:27.280 on Joe Rogan has you know more viewers and listeners on a single episode than all of CNN

00:46:36.000 in a week like i think the more people can is that really true well he had like oh i mean if

00:46:44.600 you look at the average ratings of cnn's getting like something per episode per night something

00:46:51.020 like post trump right they're in the slump it's like something like 300 000 it's it's a very very

00:46:57.900 low number right and like joe rogan with dave chappelle had something like 50 million downloads

00:47:03.780 So it's like, it's true that like what you're saying is totally true.

00:47:09.580 And I'm living in LA.

00:47:10.560 And so now I'm seeing a whole nother side of it out here in Hollywood.

00:47:14.000 But what's also true is that people are building new things.

00:47:18.120 And like, that's the whole game as far as I'm concerned.

00:47:21.520 If there are institutions that can be salvaged and shored up, we should do that because it's

00:47:26.280 really fucking hard to build new things.

00:47:27.720 But otherwise, all of our energy should be going on building new institutions and new projects, new schools, new universities, new publishing houses, new podcast networks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that uphold the values that we've been talking about during this hour and that are immunized to the ideological takeover. 0.60

00:47:51.540 And that's the real challenge, how to how to prevent yourself from experiencing exactly what all of these storied institutions are right now.

00:48:00.940 Yeah, that's a really good point.

00:48:02.660 And I hope that process is happening because the more I look at a lot, not all, but a lot of the mainstream media, the the legacy institutions of various kinds, I just I just think they'll need to burn down to the ground, to be honest, because that that's what I'm seeing.

00:48:17.180 But look, let me put a counter argument here. 0.97

00:48:19.680 Is there a possibility that we are just a bunch of slightly getting older bigots now and we've just, you know, we just don't like progress and we hate gay people and we hate black people and we just hate everyone? 0.98

00:48:31.780 No, I'm gay. 0.99

00:48:33.180 I know you are. I know. You know, and secretly deep down, you and I hate the Jews and whatever. 0.84

00:48:39.960 Do you know what I mean? Like we're just really regressive and we just hate the fact that the world yet again is moving forward.

00:48:47.620 And finally, it's recognizing yet more minority groups that have been marginalized and we're all really uncomfortable with whatever is going on.

00:48:56.480 What I would say to that is that if you study American history, the thing that has allowed for the American experiment to come to include, you know, it's Pride Month. 0.96

00:49:10.580 So we're talking about gay marriage recently, like to come to include more and more groups in its embrace, to come to abolish slavery, to come to, you know, pass civil rights law, to pass gay marriage.

00:49:28.040 And we can go through tons of different examples. The tools that have allowed us to do that are the liberal tools and the tools, whatever you think of the founders moral hypocrisy, the tools that the founders laid out in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

00:49:45.600 that's why i know that this ideology is dangerous because it basically says we don't need those 0.92

00:49:53.400 tools anymore that because those tools were invented by bigoted dead white men we gotta we 0.65

00:49:59.900 gotta tear the whole house down rather than improving and renewing and rebuilding we're 0.95

00:50:04.740 tearing down and that's how i know that this is different because it's not saying let's think

00:50:11.800 about who's been left out. Let's think about who needs to be included. Let's think about who's,

00:50:19.540 you know, yeah, everything I just said. That's not what it's asking. It's asking for a total

00:50:26.720 teardown. And that's why I think that, you know, we're not just cranky, old, becoming middle-aged

00:50:33.620 and graying people. That's why I think we're responding to something quite real. 1.00

00:50:37.380 and you say we're responding to something quite real do you think that the younger generation

00:50:44.180 are going to wake up or do you think they're going to carry on as they have been I have to tell you

00:50:49.280 I've been like through the company I'm building and other things I also have a sister who's 25

00:50:54.900 uh and living in Brooklyn and is the antithesis of the kind of Brooklyn stereotype so I have to

00:51:01.700 say there's a lot of Gen Zers I think that's the name of their generation that I meet that I think

00:51:05.800 are incredible and very much don't buy into this. So I think I'm actually feeling like

00:51:14.720 super optimistic. When I felt pessimistic was when I was in the world of the New York Times

00:51:21.520 and I was just like this, you know, but since I've left, I feel first of all liberated and I feel

00:51:28.920 like, oh, wow, like I'm participating to whatever small extent that I am in doing the thing that I

00:51:36.500 really believe is being asked of us in this moment in history, which is trying to build

00:51:42.800 new things that live up to our values. Barry, I was going to ask you,

00:51:47.660 slightly going back in terms of our conversation, but I think it's valuable.

00:51:52.140 Tell us what it was like. You obviously left the New York Times. What was it like going into work

00:51:58.520 in that sort of environment, day in doubt.

00:52:00.680 The reason I'm asking you this

00:52:02.160 is because I want you to give people a flavor.

00:52:05.580 And I think a lot of people would recognize

00:52:07.380 their own experience in it potentially.

00:52:09.460 And then we can talk about what they can do about it.

00:52:11.880 Well, as an unhinged Zionist, 1.00

00:52:13.620 as my friend Andrew Sullivan once called me, 0.72

00:52:17.160 you know, I was never cool to begin with.

00:52:20.720 I, you know, I had had a career beforehand.

00:52:24.000 I was never as public facing as I was at the times,

00:52:26.380 But I had written op-eds, book reviews, and there was already a long, you know, Google search where you could find everything that you wanted to if you wanted to dislike me.

00:52:36.620 So from the beginning, you know, there were certain people who gave me the cold shoulder.

00:52:41.380 There was – I had a feeling like I had to really overcompensate.

00:52:46.960 Like I brought in babka like every Friday. 1.00

00:52:49.280 I was like, I'm a good person.

00:52:50.600 Trust me.

00:52:51.120 I bring good office snacks.

00:52:52.080 and also I like bringing in good office snacks but I felt like there was something I had to

00:52:58.520 overcome like I kind of smelled that right and I needed to like show them that I was in good odor

00:53:03.420 so but you know I'm also like I'm also a big girl and can I say that about myself and and I

00:53:11.440 I like was so pinching myself that even so okay what so I'm not cool who cares I get to work at

00:53:20.640 the New York Times. Even if you hate it, it's still the most powerful platform in the world.

00:53:25.400 And so that kind of like social discomfort, that kind of rolled off my back. To be honest with you,

00:53:32.560 like I'm pretty used to that because I'm often like kind of on the edge of one group or another.

00:53:40.220 I'm kind of like politically homeless. So I was used to that. What shifted was when that

00:53:47.140 kind of the sense that like my politics were somewhat heretical came to justify open bullying

00:53:56.800 of me including in slack channels with thousands of my colleagues so that by the end of my time

00:54:04.520 there you know there were like acts and guillotine emojis being put up next to my name and next to the

00:54:11.160 name of my boss that was forced out of the paper um there were people openly calling for me to be

00:54:18.240 fired in again in full view of the publisher and the masthead and everyone else there were people

00:54:23.920 you know it wasn't and this had gone on for a long time but like i would kind of be sitting

00:54:28.300 two desks away from someone that was you know hold on sorry to interrupt you were you they were

00:54:33.660 calling for you to be fired because what you were sexually harassing people or like what were you

00:54:37.740 yeah five foot four woman is a real real threat that's what i mean like what were you doing that 1.00

00:54:43.680 people your colleagues are calling for you to be fired what i was doing was that i i was problematic

00:54:49.300 like think about it this way because this was like when i first encountered this view of the world

00:54:55.140 at columbia university in the middle east studies department they almost to a person

00:55:02.720 pushed the Soviet propaganda line that Zionism was racism. Okay. Well, if Zionism is racism, 0.68

00:55:09.160 then Zionists are racist. And then it became acceptable to bully Zionists, 0.97

00:55:14.520 including in the classroom. And it was exactly the same thing at the New York Times.

00:55:19.400 As this ideology kind of hardened, and as the sort of tenants of the new dogma,

00:55:27.700 that laundry list grew ever longer anyone that didn't ascribe or conform to every single aspect

00:55:35.660 of that dogma was seen as suspicious and I was suspicious in so many ways I mean during the

00:55:41.080 me too movement you know I wrote this crazy piece that said you know we should trust women but 1.00

00:55:46.520 verify their claims crazy I know come on Barry it was it was nuts you know like radical uh you know

00:55:56.460 during the women you know during evergreen i had written in support of brett and heather

00:56:00.540 i wrote pieces about his pick your topic like you know i just didn't conform to everything

00:56:07.240 they believed and so what happened obviously everything in this country and i think around

00:56:13.640 the world heated up in the pandemic and also following the murder of george floyd and the

00:56:19.300 black lives matter movement and that led to this intense what i think will be remembered as a kind

00:56:25.380 of moral panic inside the paper. So that when we ran in early June, God, it's almost like to the

00:56:31.360 day, a year ago, an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton saying that the National Guard should

00:56:37.920 be brought in to quell violent rioters, not peaceful protests, but violent rioters. There

00:56:43.760 was just an absolute conflagration at the paper. And 800 people signed this letter claiming that

00:56:52.020 the piece literally put their lives in danger and rather than saying to them maybe go have a drink

00:57:00.340 or maybe consider getting a job that's not in journalism the response was to praise people for

00:57:06.700 their moral courage it was to fire and reassign my bosses who had brought me into the paper and

00:57:13.780 it was to hang out to dry and this is a story that still needs to be told my 25 year old colleague

00:57:18.820 as a scapegoat who was one of seven editors

00:57:22.200 that worked on that piece

00:57:23.440 who ultimately ended up being pushed out

00:57:25.820 and leaving the paper.

00:57:27.660 So like that to me was a signal event

00:57:30.260 where I knew, wait,

00:57:32.360 if that's how they're gonna treat people

00:57:34.660 that tried to do their job

00:57:36.500 and tried to take a risk,

00:57:38.620 I don't even think it's a risk,

00:57:39.740 but tried to take a risk by running a piece

00:57:41.980 that other colleagues or our readers

00:57:43.900 would be challenged by,

00:57:45.620 how could I possibly think that the same thing

00:57:48.580 won't happen to me and that was when I you know was facing this choice of okay I can stay here

00:57:55.840 and keep you know the most powerful name in news which is Barry Weiss of the New York Times

00:58:00.960 and a lot of people you know really respond when you say that you're calling from the Times and

00:58:05.740 it's a real prestigious thing and and by stay I need to avoid writing about an ever-increasing

00:58:12.720 number of topics that I think are the real story in this country and by the increasing number of

00:58:17.780 topics give us an example of what you mean by that oh just like you know the violence let's say

00:58:22.920 of the many of the the protests of this past summer the idea that they weren't all peaceful

00:58:28.880 um the idea i remember trying to commission complicated pieces about the really hard subject

00:58:36.220 of trans athletes in high school sports um but but already it had been so difficult and took so much

00:58:44.840 energy for me to do my job, which was to bring in pieces that wouldn't otherwise appear in the

00:58:49.840 paper. And it just took like the threshold and the bar was so, so high for, you know, pieces from

00:58:57.900 people like, you know, Glenn Lowry or Thomas Chatterton Williams or just pieces that didn't

00:59:03.460 toe the line were just so much harder to smuggle through. And by the end of my time, I actually was

00:59:09.860 told not to commission pieces anymore. Because the new system following the Tom Cotton debacle,

00:59:15.040 and I'm sure it's changed at this point because it's just totally unsustainable,

00:59:18.000 was that every editor needed to sign off on every single piece. And that if anyone raised a red flag

00:59:24.720 that this piece made them uncomfortable, it wouldn't run. So of course that meant I couldn't

00:59:29.360 do my job. And I literally had an email from then my then boss saying like, why don't you just write

00:59:34.380 pieces for a while? I see that, like, I think you should stop commissioning. And then it was like,

00:59:38.200 well why am I here like what's my life really about what's my career really about because this

00:59:43.480 isn't it and that effectively means that journalism is dead because the greatest pieces of journalism

00:59:49.420 are incendiary they deal with truth they deal with dealing with subject matter that we are

00:59:56.420 uncomfortable with we all remember those groundbreaking pieces of journalism yeah I mean

01:00:03.140 I don't want to overstate this, guys, because there's still, like, not just reporters, but stories that come out of The Times that are unbelievable.

01:00:12.640 Like, I think about Jack Nickus' recent expose of Apple in China.

01:00:17.500 Like, this is one of the things that we have not figured out yet how to do, and hopefully this will be the next decade.

01:00:23.420 Like, podcasts are great, newsletters are great, they can do a certain kind of reporting.

01:00:26.900 But the amount of infrastructure and support legally and security-wise that you need to go report in a country like Iran or China, sorry, like Substance can't do that yet.

01:00:37.340 So like there's still great, great reporters at The Times.

01:00:41.180 The problem is is that once The Times is so clearly betraying its values in other arenas, you start to be skeptical of those stories too, which is another one of the dangers.

01:00:50.640 Yeah, that's a very good point, Barry. That's the one thing that nobody in the alternative media yet is able to do. Even very rich people is the investigative journalism that needs thousands of man hours.

01:01:03.180 Exactly. Like journalism. Journalism is very expensive and it is a real skill. And the great thing about it, though, is that it's not a skill that requires a college degree. Like you all you need to do to be a great journalist is to learn the skill of dropping into strange places and learning how to talk to people.

01:01:25.140 One of the things I remember suggesting

01:01:26.620 to the publisher of The Times

01:01:27.820 way before all of this was happening,

01:01:29.940 years before, I suggested two things

01:01:31.600 because they knew that I was getting bullied

01:01:34.820 and they were at first very sympathetic about it,

01:01:37.960 but ultimately did nothing.

01:01:39.500 One thing I suggested was

01:01:40.840 ban all New York Times reporters from Twitter.

01:01:44.000 Try it for six months.

01:01:45.680 Try it for six months

01:01:46.560 and see how that affects their reporting.

01:01:49.260 The second thing I said was

01:01:50.940 hire, make an explicit policy

01:01:53.740 that you will not hire people

01:01:55.740 from any elite institutions or the coast.

01:01:59.780 Hire people from the middle of the country 1.00

01:02:01.400 that do not have college degrees

01:02:02.760 and see how that changes, you know,

01:02:05.520 your ability to fulfill your mission.

01:02:08.560 You know, I don't think they took me up on you.

01:02:10.900 I'm sure those two ideas went down brilliantly, Barry.

01:02:13.240 I can just see it.

01:02:13.880 Yeah, they did.

01:02:14.320 They did.

01:02:15.020 But listen, we got to let you go.

01:02:17.600 It's been really great chatting with you.

01:02:20.280 I've really enjoyed it.

01:02:21.200 I'm sure Francis has as well.

01:02:22.300 and I know our audience will have enjoyed it.

01:02:24.380 We've got one final question for you,

01:02:26.620 which we ask all of our guests,

01:02:28.140 which is what is the one thing

01:02:29.940 that we're not talking about

01:02:31.420 that we really should be?

01:02:33.200 Oh, I think we're not talking enough about sex.

01:02:40.760 Speak for yourself.

01:02:42.740 I don't know if you guys have seen,

01:02:44.520 but there was this crazy chart

01:02:45.940 that came out a few months ago

01:02:47.880 that showed that,

01:02:49.200 and this was before COVID,

01:02:50.280 it, that the percentage of men in America between the ages of 18 and 24 who hadn't had sex in the

01:02:58.140 previous year, I think, was 30 percent. That's wild to me. And that's a story that I feel like

01:03:06.800 has not been told and has incredible cultural and political ramifications. So I'll be looking.

01:03:12.600 It's a story that's very much on my radar because the question of like, are we turning into Japan,

01:03:18.680 And I think is, and what are the implications of that?

01:03:21.060 I think are a really interesting one.

01:03:22.920 The ladies of trigonometry, you've got a job to do. 1.00

01:03:27.800 Barry, listen, it's been an absolute pleasure

01:03:29.700 chatting with you.

01:03:31.260 I'm so looking forward to your new podcast,

01:03:34.040 honestly, with Barry.

01:03:34.880 It's going to be great.

01:03:36.020 I'm going to tell people a little bit about,

01:03:37.600 I read the press release and you just absolutely nailed

01:03:40.760 what I think the moment needs.

01:03:42.820 So tell everybody why you decided to start a podcast

01:03:45.400 and where else people can find you online.

01:03:46.920 Because the world needs another podcast.

01:03:49.580 Absolutely.

01:03:50.620 I decided to start a podcast because I feel like the most interesting and searching and authentic conversations in our lives no longer happen in public.

01:04:01.140 They happen in private.

01:04:02.720 And I want to take what's happening on my WhatsApp and Signal Chats and have those conversations out loud.

01:04:08.740 And I want to tell the stories that the legacy press is overlooking and tell them in a way that promotes empathy and understanding rather than polarization.

01:04:20.780 So the first episode is I'm incredibly proud of it. It's not an interview with a famous celebrity. It's an interview with a Palestinian business owner in Minneapolis named Majdi Wadi and the public shaming and the boycott of his business that he lived through and what his story says about the direction that the country's heading in and the way that he articulates the kind of foundational values that we've been talking about, I think, will really, really move people.

01:04:51.320 That sounds incredible.

01:04:52.500 I'm going to go and listen to it.

01:04:54.580 And as we like, Barry, thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:04:57.960 If people want to find you on social media, et cetera, et cetera,

01:05:01.060 where is the best place to do that?

01:05:02.740 They can find me Twitter at Barry Weiss.

01:05:04.800 They can subscribe to my newsletter, barryweiss.substack.com

01:05:08.860 and go look up Honestly with Barry Weiss.

01:05:12.720 Fantastic.

01:05:13.420 Thank you so much, Barry, for your time.

01:05:15.080 And thank you guys for watching.

01:05:16.980 We will be back very soon with another brilliant episode like this one.

01:05:20.120 or Raw show

01:05:21.220 all of them go out

01:05:22.300 at 7pm UK time

01:05:23.640 take care

01:05:24.380 and see you soon guys

TRIGGERnometry - June 20, 2021

Bari Weiss - Where Did the Media Go Wrong？

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