00:01:00.720She 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.
00:01:14.920And, you know, that was my background.
00:01:18.180I 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.
00:01:34.060And 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.
00:01:44.340So 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.
00:01:53.060So 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.
00:02:14.340And through a serendipitous event, I was debating the college socialists, I believe.
00:02:20.400This older gentleman was at the debate, very clearly not an undergraduate.
00:02:25.240And he told me that his name was Charles Stevens and his son, Brett Stevens, worked at the
00:02:38.420That was my first sort of foray into professional journalism.
00:02:41.500I spent basically the past decade at the Wall Street Journal, Tablet Magazine, a Jewish magazine
00:02:48.900that's excellent, and the New York Times. And I think the relevant thing for people who have never
00:02:54.460heard of me is that I went from being the sort of leftmost flank of a conservative editorial page
00:03:02.120at the Wall Street Journal, where I was very regularly told that I was a squish and a pushover,
00:03:06.320And 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.
00:03:29.620And certainly it tells the story about where the mainstream media is, which is increasingly a choice between two increasingly stark options.
00:03:37.460The 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.
00:03:59.620Um, that moment, um, it's hard to summarize in a quick soundbite, but that moment was pretty
00:04:06.080impactful on my life. And I wound up sort of putting to the side, the book that I was supposed
00:04:10.960to write about the culture war. I'm hoping to pick that up soon. And I ended up writing a book
00:04:15.180called how to fight antisemitism. So that's also, I would think in a really important piece of my,
00:04:20.260my journey over the past few years. Um, and then the last thing I'll say is that, um, my most recent
00:04:27.400job was that, you know, I had kind of the plum job in all of journalism. I was an op-ed writer
00:04:33.560and editor at the New York Times, like I mentioned, and I chose to leave that of my own accord,
00:04:39.240which my grandma is still sort of scratching her head about. So that's where I am now. Now I'm a
00:04:45.660newspaper woman without a newspaper. I have a newsletter. And now increasingly, like lots of
00:04:51.680people in this country and all over. I have a podcast like you guys. So that's kind of the
00:04:57.400big picture. Yeah. And it's called Honestly with Barry Weiss. I'm looking forward to seeing some
00:05:01.380of the stuff that's coming up because you've only just started it. But listen, the reason we wanted
00:05:06.480to talk to you, most of all, we'll probably come back to the antisemitism, but we wouldn't be doing
00:05:12.560this show if journalism hadn't become what it's become, right? Now, you've been on the inside.
00:05:48.000But 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?
00:06:09.760The advertising model, as we know, has collapsed, and the model now is subscribers.
00:06:14.140Well, 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.
00:06:27.840So 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.
00:06:49.280And that model, if you go look at the stock price and you look at the subscriber numbers, is working beautifully.
00:06:56.140But 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.
00:07:10.740Now, 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.
00:07:33.700And that then gives editors and reporters a sense of, oh, wow, that's what they want.
00:07:40.220And 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.
00:07:49.660It's much more subtle because we are like, you know, we're animals, right?
00:07:59.060And 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.
00:08:21.580It means being most popular inside the paper.
00:08:24.260It means getting better assignments and on and on and on.
00:08:27.640So 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.
00:08:55.300And so that is very much what I witnessed when I was at the New York Times.
00:09:01.480The vast majority, I still believe, of people at the New York Times still believe in the old school liberal model of journalism.
00:09:11.040Things 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.
00:09:24.940and that we're all incredibly subjective.
00:09:28.380You know, vying to be the paper of record,
00:09:38.960Some journalists have referred to this without irony
00:09:42.240as being journalism in the service of moral clarity.
00:09:46.120Now, whose morals they are and who has the clarity, right,
00:09:50.660is the whole question, and they believe that they do.
00:09:53.120And 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.
00:10:20.300And 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.
00:10:40.460Instead, 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.
00:10:57.780people generally act in herd. They do not want to stick their necks out. The most painful thing is
00:11:06.700the idea of being kicked out or ostracized from your community, especially if the way your
00:11:12.460community is branding itself, especially if the way your community is identifying itself is like
00:11:17.800the community of the good and the righteous and the right side of history. The worst thing ever
00:11:21.980would be to be told that you're not on that right side.
00:11:26.000The worst thing ever would be to be told
00:11:50.460but this isn't the right place for you,
00:11:51.760Or 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.
00:12:04.480The whole thing would be playing out quite differently.
00:12:08.920Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website?
00:12:12.460Well, if you do, then EasyDNS are the company for you.
00:12:16.380easy dns is the perfect domain name registrar provider and web host for you they have a track
00:12:22.880record of standing up for their clients whether it be cancel culture de-platform attacks or
00:12:28.940overzealous government agencies he knows a bit about that so will you in a second easy dns have
00:12:34.940rock solid network infrastructure and incredible customer support they're in your corner no matter
00:12:41.240what the world throws at you unless it's your ex-girlfriend in which case you're on your own
00:12:45.120you'd know about that move your domains and websites over to easy dns right now all you've
00:12:52.560got to do is head over to easy dns.com forward slash triggered and use our promo code which is
00:12:58.560of course triggered as well and you will get 50 off the initial purchase sign up for their newsletter
00:13:04.960access of easy that tells you everything you need to know about technology privacy and censorship
00:13:11.840it's very very interesting that you said that and one of the things i kept thinking barry when you
00:13:18.480were explaining their business models what was going off in my head is but you're just creating
00:13:23.660large echo chambers that's all you do that's all of us are creating and what effect is that having
00:13:29.040on society i mean we're all living in it right we're living in different epistemological realities
00:13:59.920if, is, and I think we're all feeling this in our lives,
00:14:04.140The 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.
00:14:22.500I mean, that's ultimately what it's about.
00:14:23.800And 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.
00:14:34.140And I just think that it's extraordinarily dangerous.
00:14:38.160It betrays my most fundamental values that I believe in.
00:14:43.140And ultimately, that's why I decided to self-deport from, you know, the highest purchase of American
00:14:49.980journalism, because I just didn't want to be part of that machine.
00:14:54.180And it seemed to me quite clear, and I mean this in a nonjudgmental way, that it really
00:18:45.000It 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.
00:18:58.100But 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.
00:19:19.580I 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.
00:19:46.660And 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.
00:20:09.020The more victimhood you can claim, literally the more claim you have to morality and truth.
00:20:15.660It claims that we actually do have collective innocence or collective guilt.
00:20:20.640It claims that we are guilty for the sins of our fathers.
00:20:24.120In so many ways, if you just look at what these people say, not necessarily the people
00:20:29.680that are hanging up the sign in the window, right, who are doing it for well-intentioned
00:20:34.500reasons, but the hardcore of this ideology, it is just deeply, deeply illiberal.
00:20:39.280And 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.
00:20:57.520Barry, we'll talk about the institutional capture in a second.
00:21:00.180But first of all, I feel like there is a contradiction in the conversation we're having,
00:21:05.760because on the one hand, we lament the increasing polarization of society where we are all deeply
00:21:12.820suspicious of quote-unquote the other side.
00:21:15.180And instead of seeing them as people we disagree with, we now see them as the people who are,
00:21:20.140you know, they want to destroy America or destroy the British way of life or whatever.
00:21:25.180But 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.
00:21:35.560But this other thing, I mean, it is about destroying the foundations of the Western world.
00:21:41.060Well, 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.
00:21:54.740And anything, any ideology that does that cannot be harmonized with the liberal project.
00:22:02.380Yeah, 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.
00:22:17.420But at the same time, I think it's also accurate to say that there are some people who are the enemies of Western civilization.
00:22:23.720Do you see the contradiction I'm getting at?
00:22:42.280I think the problem in the mainstream is that you have one group of people relentlessly
00:22:47.400insisting that it's just this one group.
00:22:49.700And if you only watch that, you think it's just this one group.
00:22:52.900But 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.
00:23:08.340I think one thing that critics sort of hit me with is the idea that I focus inordinately on the threat from the far left.
00:34:46.940Absolutely. 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.
00:35:14.800there are a lot of people that say one thing in public or say one thing in the slack channel
00:35:20.760but then in a signal text me something totally different and we were talking about this morning
00:35:26.660actually barry that we know when a comedian or a journalist or public figure in the uk in this
00:35:31.520country has decided they don't give a shit about their careers when they follow us on twitter
00:35:35.680that's when we know they're done they're ready i mean i know people that have got i know people
00:35:41.800I heard a story about an agent the other day who got fired from her job for following a
00:35:47.520conservative on Twitter. I mean, that's the level that we're talking about. So it's understandable
00:35:52.580that people are scared and not telling the truth. But the reason that I think it's hard to figure
00:35:58.260out exactly who's true believers or who's just kind of going along because they have children
00:36:03.920to support and a family and a mortgage to pay, it's hard to suss that out. But my feeling,
00:36:09.520I'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.
00:36:20.620But 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.
00:36:26.740Like, oh, the prevailing political winds are at their backs.
00:36:30.180Those people are going to be my bosses one day.
00:36:32.060And it looks like the publisher of the paper isn't standing up to them.
00:36:35.240So it seems like the right thing to do would be to go along with it.
00:36:38.460And 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.
00:37:00.860But 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?
00:37:12.060Well, 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.
00:37:35.740And 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.
00:37:47.860and the thing that i think is happening is that it's like almost for the sake of short-term
00:37:56.080comfort people are sacrificing like long-term the things that allow us to even be able to speak out
00:38:05.260in the first place i don't really think most people understand what we're at threat of losing
00:38:10.820um and by the way i hope that someone's going to view this tape 10 years from now
00:38:15.060and be like, that lady was hysterical and crazy.
00:38:43.620you're an intelligent experienced journalist you've seen many things why are you concerned
00:38:49.740about what's happening and what is it that you're seeing well what i'm seeing is people afraid to
00:38:55.940tell the truth i'm seeing people that are acting based on fear including doctors and lawyers and
00:39:07.460Like, 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.
00:39:23.640It 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.
00:39:49.720So 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.
00:40:18.100it means teaching children that their skin color really really matters to them and their skin
00:40:26.400color is an extremely important part of who they are rather than their character so what i'm
00:40:31.500talking about is what i what i articulated before the liberal project those ideas those values that
00:40:39.880allow us to come on this and disagree in public or agree in public but have a conversation and
00:40:46.660not tear each other's throats out, that is what's under threat. Like, I really believe that. And
00:40:55.040that's ultimately why I feel like that's why I'm doing the work that I'm doing because I want to
00:41:00.740expose what I feel like a lot of journalists are ignoring or actively lying about. Because
00:41:08.000this thing that I'm describing, it's not going to be contained, you know, to high rises in
00:41:14.620in town Manhattan or Harvard University or Yale like this is coming to affect everyone and that's
00:41:22.420why it's so important for us to stand up against it and you say it's so important to stand up
00:41:27.620against it but isn't it a really tough ask to do if someone's got a mortgage they're reliant on a
00:41:34.180salary they've got kids etc etc and knowing that they can be cut at any moment yes yes it is a hard
00:41:44.080ask. And not everyone can, not everyone can stand up to this or needs to stand up to this
00:41:50.880in exactly the same way. Right. It could be that you support organizations like, you know,
00:41:57.820the trigonometry, like trigonometry. Exactly. That's the name you were searching for.
00:42:04.800That's right. Or like my sub stack or like there's this amazing new organization I'm on the board of
00:42:08.820FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. There's so many things that you could do
00:42:13.680quietly. But I would also suggest to people, and without sounding like too high-minded about it,
00:42:20.140there are things worth sacrificing professional advancement and prestige for. And,
00:42:27.820you know, like the things that might feel like major sacrifices already in this moment,
00:42:34.900what is that going to look like a year or two years or five years from now,
00:42:38.300if this thing continues to roll through, well, Western civilization
00:42:42.860without good people, people of conscience standing up to it.
00:42:47.640I mean, what do you think it's going to look like, Barry?
00:42:50.060I really hesitate that question because I think we're going to go down
00:42:52.400a pretty depressing alley, but go for it.
00:47:10.560And so now I'm seeing a whole nother side of it out here in Hollywood.
00:47:14.000But what's also true is that people are building new things.
00:47:18.120And like, that's the whole game as far as I'm concerned.
00:47:21.520If there are institutions that can be salvaged and shored up, we should do that because it's
00:47:26.280really fucking hard to build new things.
00:47:27.720But 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.
00:47:51.540And that's the real challenge, how to how to prevent yourself from experiencing exactly what all of these storied institutions are right now.
00:48:02.660And 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.
00:48:17.180But look, let me put a counter argument here.
00:48:19.680Is 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?
00:48:33.180I know you are. I know. You know, and secretly deep down, you and I hate the Jews and whatever.
00:48:39.960Do 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.
00:48:47.620And finally, it's recognizing yet more minority groups that have been marginalized and we're all really uncomfortable with whatever is going on.
00:48:56.480What 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.
00:49:10.580So 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.
00:49:28.040And 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.
00:49:45.600that's why i know that this ideology is dangerous because it basically says we don't need those
00:49:53.400tools anymore that because those tools were invented by bigoted dead white men we gotta we
00:49:59.900gotta tear the whole house down rather than improving and renewing and rebuilding we're
00:50:04.740tearing down and that's how i know that this is different because it's not saying let's think
00:50:11.800about who's been left out. Let's think about who needs to be included. Let's think about who's,
00:50:19.540you know, yeah, everything I just said. That's not what it's asking. It's asking for a total
00:50:26.720teardown. And that's why I think that, you know, we're not just cranky, old, becoming middle-aged
00:50:33.620and graying people. That's why I think we're responding to something quite real.
00:50:37.380and you say we're responding to something quite real do you think that the younger generation
00:50:44.180are going to wake up or do you think they're going to carry on as they have been I have to tell you
00:50:49.280I've been like through the company I'm building and other things I also have a sister who's 25
00:50:54.900uh and living in Brooklyn and is the antithesis of the kind of Brooklyn stereotype so I have to
00:51:01.700say there's a lot of Gen Zers I think that's the name of their generation that I meet that I think
00:51:05.800are incredible and very much don't buy into this. So I think I'm actually feeling like
00:51:14.720super optimistic. When I felt pessimistic was when I was in the world of the New York Times
00:51:21.520and I was just like this, you know, but since I've left, I feel first of all liberated and I feel
00:51:28.920like, oh, wow, like I'm participating to whatever small extent that I am in doing the thing that I
00:51:36.500really believe is being asked of us in this moment in history, which is trying to build
00:51:42.800new things that live up to our values. Barry, I was going to ask you,
00:51:47.660slightly going back in terms of our conversation, but I think it's valuable.
00:51:52.140Tell us what it was like. You obviously left the New York Times. What was it like going into work
00:51:58.520in that sort of environment, day in doubt.
00:52:13.620as my friend Andrew Sullivan once called me,
00:52:17.160you know, I was never cool to begin with.
00:52:20.720I, you know, I had had a career beforehand.
00:52:24.000I was never as public facing as I was at the times,
00:52:26.380But 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.
00:52:36.620So from the beginning, you know, there were certain people who gave me the cold shoulder.
00:52:41.380There was – I had a feeling like I had to really overcompensate.
00:52:46.960Like I brought in babka like every Friday.
00:57:45.620how could I possibly think that the same thing
00:57:48.580won't happen to me and that was when I you know was facing this choice of okay I can stay here
00:57:55.840and keep you know the most powerful name in news which is Barry Weiss of the New York Times
00:58:00.960and a lot of people you know really respond when you say that you're calling from the Times and
00:58:05.740it's a real prestigious thing and and by stay I need to avoid writing about an ever-increasing
00:58:12.720number of topics that I think are the real story in this country and by the increasing number of
00:58:17.780topics give us an example of what you mean by that oh just like you know the violence let's say
00:58:22.920of the many of the the protests of this past summer the idea that they weren't all peaceful
00:58:28.880um the idea i remember trying to commission complicated pieces about the really hard subject
00:58:36.220of trans athletes in high school sports um but but already it had been so difficult and took so much
00:58:44.840energy for me to do my job, which was to bring in pieces that wouldn't otherwise appear in the
00:58:49.840paper. And it just took like the threshold and the bar was so, so high for, you know, pieces from
00:58:57.900people like, you know, Glenn Lowry or Thomas Chatterton Williams or just pieces that didn't
00:59:03.460toe the line were just so much harder to smuggle through. And by the end of my time, I actually was
00:59:09.860told not to commission pieces anymore. Because the new system following the Tom Cotton debacle,
00:59:15.040and I'm sure it's changed at this point because it's just totally unsustainable,
00:59:18.000was that every editor needed to sign off on every single piece. And that if anyone raised a red flag
00:59:24.720that this piece made them uncomfortable, it wouldn't run. So of course that meant I couldn't
00:59:29.360do my job. And I literally had an email from then my then boss saying like, why don't you just write
00:59:34.380pieces for a while? I see that, like, I think you should stop commissioning. And then it was like,
00:59:38.200well why am I here like what's my life really about what's my career really about because this
00:59:43.480isn't it and that effectively means that journalism is dead because the greatest pieces of journalism
00:59:49.420are incendiary they deal with truth they deal with dealing with subject matter that we are
00:59:56.420uncomfortable with we all remember those groundbreaking pieces of journalism yeah I mean
01:00:03.140I 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.
01:00:12.640Like, I think about Jack Nickus' recent expose of Apple in China.
01:00:17.500Like, this is one of the things that we have not figured out yet how to do, and hopefully this will be the next decade.
01:00:23.420Like, podcasts are great, newsletters are great, they can do a certain kind of reporting.
01:00:26.900But 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.
01:00:37.340So like there's still great, great reporters at The Times.
01:00:41.180The 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.
01:00:50.640Yeah, 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.
01:01:03.180Exactly. 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.
01:01:25.140One of the things I remember suggesting
01:03:50.620I 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.
01:04:02.720And I want to take what's happening on my WhatsApp and Signal Chats and have those conversations out loud.
01:04:08.740And 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.
01:04:20.780So 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.