Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Bari Weiss: Quitting The Mainstream Media

Transcript

Bari Weiss: Quitting The Mainstream Media · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
Get a human welcome to the space space for dangerous ideas and what exciting times for this
0:08
old project, which is about to expand massively. Great news, uncomfortable conversations will
0:16
now become my main gig in the new year, meaning you will get a lot more episodes, so you
0:21
will get them in video form instead of just audio. And we'll be branching out and providing
0:28
you with a lot more content. If you've ever been on the fence about whether or not to become
0:31
a premium subscriber, I would tactfully suggest that you do so now. It's probably worth getting
0:36
ahead of whatever it is that we roll out in the new year. There will be benefits to people who
0:42
got in ahead of the game. Uncomfortable conversations.substac.com. It's very easy. You don't even necessarily need
0:49
a credit card yet. If you don't want to become a premium subscriber, you can just become part of the
0:53
community for free just by entering your email address and then at least you'll be kept up to date
0:58
with whatever one of the things we're rolling out. If you didn't hear the news and the rest of the
1:04
press I'm resigned from my ABC radio show last week, without further ado, I think rather than
1:10
explaining any ins and outs, it might be easier just to let you hear the way that I announced it to
1:16
my listeners on the air.
1:18
It's 20 to 3 Zoe texts on the text line saying, hi Josh, happy in your return from holidays. You
1:25
can hear the chirpier within you. Holidays as we all know do help in a good break. Take care
1:31
and regards. Thank you Zoe. That's very sweet. What you're hearing in my voice may not only be
1:38
because of holidays. As we approach the end of the year, there's always some speculation about
1:44
the lineup of shows and presenters for the next year. Look, it's time for my contract to be
1:50
renewed for 2024. I want to tell you why I won't be signing it and we'll be ending the show this year.
2:00
I could spin you a lot of PR gaff about how I just don't have time in my life for all the other
2:05
things that I want to do, which is true. I could talk about how I could make as much money for
2:11
less work if I was working for myself, which is true and how I want to spend more time with my
2:16
family, which is true, especially now that we've got a kitten, we got the kitten. She is adorable.
2:22
Taka is her name. The kids may have had some role in naming Taka. But those things wouldn't be
2:28
the whole story and if you know me, you know that I don't do bullshit. I'm a bit of a straight
2:33
shooter. The bottom line is I'm a bit too spicy for this gig, aren't I? I love the ABC. I love my
2:45
colleagues. I love you the listener most of all, Toto. But what I love, really above all else,
2:52
is having uncomfortable conversations about the most provocative issues we face. I really believe
2:59
democracy depends on upsetting the odd apple cards, triggering the odd trip wire,
3:06
treading on the odd land mine. I kind of see that as my duty and I think I'm good at it.
3:12
And so I have to ask where am I able to optimally fulfill that duty?
3:21
The ABC is the greatest institution in Australian public life. I really believe it's the
3:26
jewel in this country's crown. I have no beef with the ABC. I have no beef with its management.
3:33
The acting manager of ABC Sydney, Mark Spurway, is a legend. The ABC Sydney boss,
3:37
Steve Aherne, is a champion. His new boss, Ben Lanimer, is a great guy, whip smart.
3:44
The new head of content, Chris Oliver Taylor, is if you're not in the industry, you may not be
3:50
aware, a legend of Australian broadcasting who actually has the potential to transform the
3:56
ABC in tremendously positive ways. And the managing director of the whole place, David Anderson,
4:03
is the most warm, wonderful, passionate and tireless champion of everything that's good about
4:09
public broadcasting. But having truly rational bullshit-free conversations about controversial
4:19
issues is risky these days. The penalties for speaking bluntly, the penalties for trying to
4:29
coax people out of their thought silos and their echo chambers are very high.
4:35
And the fact that it's risky only makes it more important to me,
4:39
and the fact that I found a way of doing it independently that's financially viable
4:44
leads me to the question that I've been mulling over ever since
4:47
chatter about the 2024 lineup began, which is where am I of most use to the national conversation?
4:54
I mean, you know me. If you're a regular listen to this show, you know I am the kid who gets
4:59
invited to Christmas lunch. And when somebody says whatever you do, don't talk to old Uncle Herbie,
5:05
he voted for Pauline Hanson. You'll end up in an argument. The first thing I do
5:11
is head straight for old Uncle Herbie. You know, and as that old codger farts his way through
5:15
the potato salad, I have an uncomfortable conversation with him about why he thinks migrants are
5:20
responsible for bushfires. And why he thinks Greta Tunberg is a Venezuelan secret agent.
5:27
Look, maybe all I'll do is make the prim and proper party go as uncomfortable. That's not my intention.
5:32
But my hope is that by understanding Uncle Herbie's point of view, I might better understand my own.
5:40
Everyone might better understand their own. Maybe there's value in consciously defying bubbles of
5:47
conversational safety. And if the whole thing ends in tears with Uncle Herbie throwing his Christmas
5:54
pudding in my face, then that, my friend, is what's technically called stretching the Uncle Herbie
5:58
metaphor, but you get my gist. I don't want to be at a Christmas lunch where everyone talks in
6:03
ways that are designed to reassure everyone else that they're on the correct side of worthy issues.
6:08
I'm a misfit. I'm a child of refugees, but I'm a white Australian. I'm a gay guy, but I hate
6:16
Madi Grah. I have Holocaust surviving grandparents, but I'm conflicted about Zionism. I'm an ABC
6:22
presenter, but I don't like kale. I am a riddle wrapped in a bloody enigma, ladies and gents. And if
6:29
you're not, and not everyone has to be, if you think that being a team player is the highest virtue,
6:37
good for you. Join a pickleball squad, but don't pretend to be a journalist. Journalism needs more
6:46
contrarians, not fewer, more risk-takers, not fewer. We need more Andrew Ollies, more young John
6:53
Pilgers and Mike Carlton's and Helen Lewis's and John Stewart's and Jermaine Griers and Christopher
7:00
Hitchens. The way to expand the conversation is to expand the people having the conversation,
7:08
not just in ways that prioritize superficial diversity, but in ways that reward true idiosyncrasy.
7:19
As I say, I love the ABC. This institution is honestly our best hope if we're going to survive
7:25
the challenges of this century, as a country that we would recognize as Australia. The ABC
7:30
is indispensable. The ABC deserves our support. It certainly deserves more funding.
7:37
And yet at the same time, I have this parallel life going on, where my podcast is a place where I've
7:43
been having nonsense-free conversations about the most controversial challenges that we face,
7:48
and it's become a big hit. We've had over three million downloads and at the risk of being
7:55
immodest, which as you know is what people say when they have no intention of not being
7:59
immodest, it's one of the most successful Australian interviews shows in the world.
8:04
It does turn out that people are craving a kind of conversation that they're not hearing in the
8:09
mainstream media. So I got myself a great podcast producer, Stefan, and a great podcast distributor,
8:17
and we're making money. We launched a premium subscription on Substack, where you get bonus
8:22
content for a small monthly fee, and we ended up with one of the highest paid conversion rates of
8:27
any show on this global Silicon Valley-based platform. So then we go, what about expanding
8:34
into video content? That's another audience. That's another revenue stream. So in the new year,
8:40
I'm launching a YouTube show with the network founded by the Batuta Advocate team if you know
8:45
that satirical institution. I have TV development deals on ice, a couple of book offers. I'm a
8:50
professional fellow at the University of Technology Sydney. This summer, I'm launching a live
8:56
podcast tour bringing some of the biggest guests from around the world to join me on stage in Sydney
9:01
and Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. That's in collaboration with Australia's best touring
9:06
company, Tech Dainty, which handles the likes of Jerry Seinfeld and Richard Dawkins and Guns and
9:11
Roses. I'll leave it to your imagination, which of those three? My tour will be most like.
9:17
Sweet child of mine will definitely be on the cards. I say all of this not to big note myself. I
9:23
just say it. It's a long way to say that I don't actually have a financial reason necessarily
9:27
be at the ABC. I am beyond grateful to everyone who made my little patch of this institution a
9:34
success. Over the past dozen rating surveys, this show's ratings have increased thanks largely
9:41
to my beloved Jane, Robbie, Hannah, Elizabeth, Roche and Steve. The only shows on this station
9:51
that are competitive with 2GB, a man competitive are afternoons and drive. This show does do better
9:57
than its Melbourne counterpart in the ratings and in cumulative listens, it has one of the largest
10:01
cumulative audiences of any show on this station. So I'm grateful, enormously proud and thankful.
10:11
And to every listener, I would hate for you to hear this and think that it's the end of our
10:16
relationship because it's actually the beginning of my main event. You can go to Joshsteps.com if
10:21
you want to stay up to date, sign up for a mailing list, which will take you through how you can
10:26
keep me in your earholes. I have loved spending my afternoon with you. I'll be here till the end of the
10:32
year. I'm so privileged to have had this show. It's incredible honor to have a show on the ABC.
10:40
I'm grateful to everyone I've worked with and I wish the ABC and its management and all its
10:45
employees nothing but the best. Australian needs a strong and independent ABC.
10:57
So that was that. I'm super excited. I'm super grateful to everybody at the ABC.
11:02
Wish them all the best and incredibly liberated and over the moon about this next chapter of
11:09
my media adventure. And before embarking on my own path, I wanted to speak with the most
11:17
successful person who has recently pulled that off. Barry Weiss is perhaps the most successful
11:23
independent media pioneer in the United States, perhaps the world. She used to be an opinion
11:32
writer and editor at the New York Times before that she was an op-ed and book review editor at the
11:38
Wall Street Journal and a senior editor at Tablet magazine. And you will hear in this conversation
11:45
her account of her exit from the New York Times, which certainly has some resonance. I
11:56
am certainly empathetic should we say to Barry's experience to put it tactfully. She went off
12:02
and founded an entire media company called The Free Press of which she is now the editor.
12:08
There's so much we could have talked about. I love Barry's mind. I could follow it down a
12:13
million rabbit holes for a million hours, but enjoy what we could discuss and shoot with the one
12:18
that I'd leave. Very wise.
12:30
How's my hair? Your hair is always fabulous baby. Bob, you always look divine.
12:36
You're so sweet. I really don't. We both know I gain, you don't know this. I gain so much weight
12:40
in COVID basically from drinking, but then I'm one of those epic and solve the whole problem.
12:44
Get the fuck out of here. I did exactly the same thing without the as-ampic parts. I put on
12:49
I put on like 20 pounds in the first year of the pandemic. I scream and Netflix will do that.
12:55
And then I was like, oh, I'm going to become a fat man. No, it was like that moment when I was like,
13:01
if I don't change something, I will just be a fat. I will be a portly gentleman. I mean,
13:06
you look weird. You look way scarier than when I met you. Yes, my hair is like all in the teeth.
13:11
It's really bothering me. Hold on a second. I'm sorry. See, this is when you get to a certain
13:16
level of success, you become a deeper about your ear bones. Yeah, so much better. Oh, yeah.
13:25
You're right. And then after I put on 20 kilos, then I lost like 50 pounds after the
13:31
second year of the pandemic. Yeah, I was going to say you're the most felt I've ever seen you
13:34
by far. Thank you. Thank you very much. God bless you too. So the as-ampics working out. Are you still
13:40
going to work? It worked out. It worked out. God knows what kind of weird cancer I've given
13:44
myself, but at least I'm skinny for a minute. Well, I actually did a story yesterday on my
13:49
soon-to-be no longer radio show about the Olympics in Australia. And the dietician was saying,
13:54
it is great, but you are mostly losing like muscle and diet and stuff. So it makes you skin
14:00
skinny, but sort of haggard. I mean, do I look haggard? No, no. You look bright and bright
14:07
and pushy-tile. I mean, I have no bones left in my body. So basically a suit of muscle and
14:13
flesh. It's left of my organ. I mean, yeah, anyway, we could we could go. I'm not about this,
14:18
Josh, but how are you, my love? How are you holding up in these insane times? I have to be honest,
14:25
it's been like one long day since October 7th. Like I've literally I've never experienced time
14:31
in this way. I mean, the only thing that's comparable to it, I guess is when we had the baby
14:36
and sort of like the sleeplessness and the way that the days would bleed into each other,
14:40
it's been a little like that. But yeah, like October 7th happened and then I looked up and now it's
14:47
well, you guys don't have Thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving. I did Thanksgiving this weekend for the
14:51
first time in Australia, Barry, because I'm married to an American boy. Every year he says,
14:56
you know, every year after Thanksgiving, he's like, I wish we could kind of bring Thanksgiving
15:00
here. And I was like, this year I was like, there will be no regrets. Your wish is like a man.
15:06
So did you invite it? Did you make the turkey? Yeah, I made a turkey. I made the first turkey
15:10
of my life. Oh my goodness. I was shitting, I was shitting liquid for the next 24 hours. I don't
15:16
know if I get something wrong, but I got to tell you. It was delicious at the time. Oh, that's
15:22
so great. Remember when I was in Australia, those were the days. Those were the simple times.
15:31
I was just starting out. I was full of promise about the mainstream media and all of the
15:37
opportunities that it was. I was just catching up on all of it. Amazing. I mean, so, you know,
15:44
I'd like being driven out of your place of work because a risk of first corporation can't handle
15:48
the range of perspectives you want to wrestle with is not something that you would be familiar with.
15:53
Not at all. I have no idea what you're talking about. I want to tell you about. But Josh,
15:58
the thing about you is you always seemed like so reasonable. Like is your sort of, I don't know
16:06
if it was a self deportation or it was a self deportation when it reached a certain level.
16:13
Yeah, you know what? There's a different. It's hard. I don't know what it was like. But I was
16:17
going to say it's is the Australian context even more sort of narrow than the American one.
16:23
Because maybe it's narrower but less hostile. I thought like less partisan and less divided,
16:34
but maybe because of that more unaware of its own boundaries, you know, of the tightness of
16:41
the echo chamber of the thought silo, perhaps. I mean, it was it's one of those things where when
16:46
people ask, did I jump or was I pushed, it's actually a little bit hard to know because there are
16:51
so many factions inside the organization that you're not aware of what they're actually wanting.
16:56
So things come at you and you go, are they just being unreasonable or do they want?
17:02
Do they know that this is going to push me out? I mean, there's a zillion things I want to ask
17:07
you about it, but I don't know if you want to go there. I don't. Look, we will catch up perhaps
17:13
on the era or perhaps off the air sometime in 2024. Are you coming to the States at all?
17:18
Yeah, I will. I will. I'll do it. I'll do a victory lap when I launch the new podcast. Maybe
17:22
I'll have a set as beautiful as yours because we're doing we're now going to expand this operation
17:27
and do it all legit because that'll be I don't want to be employed by another employer. I'm just
17:30
going to be solo like you. So that'll mean beautiful library style sets like the one that I wish
17:37
you could see the broader room that we're in. But we've learned how to fake lots of the
17:42
a soundstage in Culver City. No, you're literally we're in a former casting office in Los Angeles
17:51
that I mean, the level of schmutz in this building, I really can't quantify it for you.
17:57
It's fabulous. And I'm so delighted that you'd be invited. Well, I mean, it's really because
18:04
you know, as much as it can look like a you know, a solo act, the only reason that I'm not
18:09
sort of in some basement looking, you know, in terrible lighting is because I'm working with just
18:15
unbelievable people who have been joining the free press since it became the free press a year ago.
18:19
And there's 20 there's 20 people that work here now, which is out. No, it's crazy. How do you pay
18:24
them all? Or do they eat like cat food? No, people eat very well here. Why you why you beef burgers
18:31
for on often. I could tell that you had 20 people because before you came, it came to a,
18:38
there were about 17 12 year olds running around fixing everything for you.
18:42
Right. Look at child labor. How on top of this?
18:45
Australian label. I mean, I think I think a big, a big question you will face and maybe
18:51
already know the answer to it because a lot of it is personality driven is whether or not you want
18:56
to be working essentially completely alone on the Josh Zeps, you know, show or if you want to
19:03
sort of build a new institution. And it became a mirror to me that that is what I wanted to do.
19:09
You know, foolishly, I had no idea sort of how absolutely difficult that was going to be.
19:15
I had no ambition to be an entrepreneur, a startup person, any of that stuff. But
19:19
here I am. No, Sam Oldman, but doing what I can to build a new media company.
19:25
Sam Oldman without the jail fraud part.
19:29
No, you're talking about Sam Benfrey from AI.
19:32
Yes, sorry, this is the only story I'm talking about today.
19:35
Is that has that like crossed over? I don't know. I've barely had a coffee yet.
19:39
What's Sam doing? What's up in AI doing in the course of the past 72 hours.
19:45
Sam Oldman was fired, summarily and shockingly as the head of open AI.
19:53
Then it appeared he was going to get rehired, came back into the building with a guest pass
19:58
was talking about it in the meantime. All of the leadership of open AI said they were going to
20:03
walk with him. So everyone thought the boards made a horrible decision. They're going to reverse course.
20:08
Then they actually said, nope, we're not reversing course. We're sticking the landing. We're appointing
20:13
the CEO of Twitch. This guy Emmett Sheer to be the head of open AI. Look like Sam had lost.
20:19
But no, he didn't because Satya Nadella of Microsoft said, I'm hiring Sam under Microsoft,
20:26
which owns open AI and as of this recording 700 of like 800 staffers or leaving open AI to work
20:34
for Sam Oldman at Microsoft. It is like it is succession in real time, but like the entire
20:43
like all of the seasons collapsed in the 72 hours. It's unclear how to go read about it.
20:47
Because I'm a selfish person or I can think right now is last week I was going to buy some
20:52
Microsoft stock and I'll just go on up by 20%. It's I mean, I assume that it has. I know nothing
20:59
about stocks, but open AI, of course, is absolutely tanked. And the most crazy part of it is there's
21:04
these are all new characters to me, but other than Sam who I've been following and interested in
21:08
for a while and came on the podcast. One of the, I think even the head of the board of open AI,
21:14
a guy called Ilya, who's known Sam for a long time involved in my combinator. I think he was the
21:19
head of the board three hours after the whole thing went down. He said, I regret my participation
21:26
in this ouster. And even he is following. So the whole thing is. Wow. It's unbelievable. It's
21:33
it's unbelievable. I'm Microsoft for the win, baby. I've been this is I've been I've been talking
21:39
about Microsoft and AI for a while mainly because I just borrow what I believe from like Scott
21:44
Galaway and various other investors who I respect. But that it's so it's going to be so
21:48
fascinating over the next five years to see how like large language models and machine learning
21:54
disrupt the way that we live. I mean, I'm super interested in and with who ends up taking the crown.
22:00
I reckon Microsoft. But one of the reasons this story is really interesting and you'll have fun
22:05
reading about it is that, you know, the reporting just start starting come out. But like, what are
22:09
the deeper philosophical implications of it? Because obviously it's insane sort of like castle drama,
22:15
but the what I'm gathering from everything I'm reading is that if if there was sort of a deeper
22:22
philosophical disagreement that all of this is about, it was sort of the fight between the people
22:29
yelling stop and saying AI is going to destroy civilization. So all of the world there needs to be a
22:35
pause versus sort of the accelerationists that claim that rushing toward AI is sort of a moral
22:42
obligation. So the fight between the accelerationists and the decelerationists seems to be sort of
22:47
one of the threads in this story. Anyway, I'm. Do you have anything from that Barry?
22:54
I don't I mean, in general, in general, I would say that I'm sort of not with the dystopians.
23:02
In general, I'm with the people who believe that technology is sort of a neutral force that can
23:09
be used for good or bad, but in general, trying to stop its progress is not only a fool's errand,
23:15
but often the people who have done it when you sort of look back on history look like, you know,
23:21
like look like fools. There's a really great, I think it's unsubstack, but there's a really great
23:26
blog that tracks the reaction to like the wheel and the car and the slide rule and everyone at every
23:32
moment was saying this is going to be the downfall of civilization. And of course, all of those things.
23:37
Wait, there may be there may be two things that you're conflating there. Why is whether or not there's
23:42
something different about this particular technological revolution and whether it could destroy us all.
23:46
And the other is whether or not stopping it or pausing it is likely to be useful, right? Or
23:52
feasible, like whether that's even like, I think you can hold both of those. I mean, I think there is
23:57
a non zero chance that this could destroy civilization. And I also think there's no point in trying to
24:02
pause it or like vent research into it. Yeah, it's, I mean, human. But do you think that only,
24:08
you know, from a strategic perspective, like if we pause, China's not going to pause in
24:12
there for people more obligation, not to, yeah, basically, it's an arms race. Like I'm glad we got the
24:17
bomb, you know, I'd rather live in a world with no nuclear bombs, but I don't. I mean, I read like
24:23
everything Tyler Cowan writes about AI. And I read some of these other people you've mentioned as
24:29
well. I still don't understand how it works in the same way that if you asked me to describe,
24:35
like ask me to describe how the internet works. I'm like, there are tubes under the ocean. Like,
24:39
I don't, I don't know. But I got to be honest, like pre October 7th, I might have had a more
24:46
cogent answer to that question. But nobody does know how it works. That's what's terrifying about it.
24:51
The people who are building it aren't quite sure why it's doing what it's doing. I mean,
24:55
I heard someone describe it as being it's likely designed a portal. And there are things coming out
25:00
of the portal. And even the people who designed the portal aren't quite sure what the things are.
25:03
I know what they're going to do or what their intentions are. But we're like, these portals are
25:07
amazing. Look at all the shit coming out of them. And you know, some people are saying, I'd be
25:10
careful about the, I'd be careful about the ghost portal that you're building. And nobody quite
25:15
knows the internet. It is like, you remember that, you remember the Senator who tried to describe
25:20
the internet as, it's like, you know, the internet is not a truck. It can't just back it up and
25:29
put all the information out of it. The internet is a series of two. And I'll frank it when he was
25:37
saying that he got up and he said, well, you're, you're, you are right about one thing. The internet
25:41
is not the truck truck. There are two involve that here. I guess what I guess what I mean is like
25:49
my mind was so much more sort of ranging and thinking about these kinds of issues that felt more
25:55
theoretical. But right now, my mind has just been so fixated on the war and the widening war and
26:04
what it means for the West. And anyway, all of those, all of those extremely light subjects.
26:09
I mean, so there'll be some people listening to this. And maybe 10% of me is in this camp,
26:17
which thinks we've been over this a million times since October 7th. We all know the basic
26:23
parameters of what's happening. It's a tale as always time. Two people want the same land.
26:31
The policy, you know, that certainly the bulk of public opinion in places like Australia and
26:36
Europe. And increasingly probably in the US is I think simplistically siding with the people
26:46
who are hurting the most right now, which is Palestinians and Gaza. And it's definitely not true
26:51
in America. 75% or more of Americans still side with Israel. If you watch TikTok or Twitter,
26:57
you might have a different perception of that. Right. Yes. Definitely not the case in America.
27:01
So I think I think people, well, side with Israel, I think I think most Australians would
27:06
side with Israel in the sense that they think that Israel deserves to exist. And they think
27:11
Hamas is a terrible organization. But I think they would also think that there are underlying
27:17
problems about the long-term viability of Palestinian self-government that has made a conflict
27:24
like this inevitable. And of course, chickens were going to come home to roost at some point.
27:29
And it was not viable for Israel to keep people and our people in, you know,
27:34
by the name of refugee camps in perpetuity. So something was going to give. And this is a horrible
27:38
way in which it's giving. What's wrong with that? Oh, I mean, the paradigm that you laid out in the
27:42
beginning is wrong with that. This is not the war is not about a contest over land. If it was a
27:48
contest over land, as maybe your listeners don't recall, you know, Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.
27:55
It's been completely euthanized since 2005. What the war is about is, you know, what Hamas has
28:01
in its charter. It's a war against Jewish existence. And that's why I think it's significant
28:08
for the West, the world, and why, you know, it's as I've been reading and I've been so curious,
28:16
actually, and waiting for this conversation, because I'm so curious if my perception of what's
28:20
happening in Australia is accurate to your experience of it, because it seems like the kinds of
28:26
things I'm seeing on Twitter is that there has just been an explosion of sort of the fight for
28:30
as Jew hate in Australia in the way that there certainly has been across Western Europe,
28:36
really no Europe writ large in America as well. And the reason for that is because this isn't
28:42
sort of a fight between two peoples that have contested claims to land, although that is true
28:48
between Israelis and Jews, Palestinians and Arabs, but it's really about the desire to wipe
28:55
the world of its Jews. And the notion that sort of Hamas would stop if somehow it got land is just
29:03
absolute farce. I don't see the wiping the world of Jews thing at least not overtly. And I'm
29:10
for my own mental sanity, I'm staying off social media, so I'm not seeing whatever you're seeing.
29:16
Oh my god, okay. My experience, like just as a journalist and a citizen, is that there is once again
29:25
an easy, that people are responding to their post-colonial bias, like we have a laudable instinct
29:32
in the West to be mindful of our history of colonialism. And so we just have a template or a
29:38
heuristic onto which we superimpose every conflict, which says if there's a poor brown person
29:44
in rubble, that person is in the right. And if there's a white, whiteish person, or white
29:50
her person wearing a suit and talking fancy words who may be responsible for the brown person's
29:55
plight, that person is a colonizer and they're in the wrong. Right. That template is just
30:00
collapses all moral distinction. And it's the reason if the reason that you see people across the West,
30:06
including some of the most sort of pedigree educated people, making excuses or even celebrating
30:15
mass rape, live incineration, the tying together of parents to their children, an unspeakable
30:23
acts of evil. It's why you see them justifying it because they're falling for a framework that,
30:28
you know, at every single juncture of what you just said falls apart under when it touches reality.
30:34
That's right. Yeah. I mean, I think that's right. And I think people don't necessarily understand
30:39
1948. They don't necessarily understand 67 or 73. They don't necessarily understand Oslo.
30:44
They don't understand the ins and outs of all this stuff. But yeah, but even my feeling about
30:49
any of that is like none of that is really relevant to this moment. It's like not that
30:57
you don't need to know anything about the establishment of the state of Israel, about 1967,
31:03
about Oslo, about about the pull out from about any of that to look at the at what Hamas did
31:09
that day and say, that is evil. And no amount of context, no amount of sort of historical nuance
31:17
can justify it. And the fact that we have so many people who claim to be progressive claim to
31:23
be on the right side of history who, you know, cry crocodile tears over the slightest microaggression
31:29
justifying it tells you something like very, very scary and profound about the depth of moral,
31:37
I would even say spiritual rot in our societies. And so when when you say like, why is this
31:43
what are the implications for the West? I think they're profound. Like, what does it mean to live
31:47
in a culture in which college professors are saying that what happened on October 7th was awesome
31:55
and that they're exhilarated by it. What does it mean when, you know, an editor of the Harvard
31:59
Law Review is trying to physically assault an Israeli student as happened on Harvard's campus?
32:04
What does it mean when, you know, a public defender that my wife went to college with
32:09
is seen tearing down the posters of kidnapped Israeli women and children? Like, what what universe
32:15
have we entered? Were that kind of morally inverted view of the world has become acceptable,
32:21
even high status, really? And a sort of basic fundamental view of like good and bad
32:30
civilization and barbarism is seen as sort of like stupid or low status in some way. And that's
32:38
I think where we are. And that I think should be concerning to everyone who wants to live in a
32:43
country where the virtues that have made our lives possible, like, and I mean specifically,
32:50
our lives, you know, are not protected because people either are taking them for granted,
32:55
think they can sort of be tossed away, don't understand how fragile they are. And I think a lot
33:02
of people, if there's a silver lining to the past few weeks, have sort of woken up, like real
33:08
woke to how fragile our freedoms are. And, you know, even that, even the word freedom, I'm sure
33:15
is like coded in some kind of politicized way for people, but not for me.
33:20
It's fascinating. I mean, the what comes to mind is just that it's worth separating out the
33:26
various categories of role here, right? So the category of moral error that you're talking about,
33:34
which is the people who actually would justify, let alone celebrate what happened on October 7th,
33:40
I'm just parking as so self-evidently awful that I'm just going to put that to the side,
33:47
because I just don't think there are that many people who actually think that what
33:51
comes to you on October 7th was right. But just think about, okay, fine. But put aside the
33:55
people celebrating it. What about the silence? Think about, I just take one example. Okay, there's
34:01
evidence of crimes that I can't even talk about without breaking down on this video that I'll
34:09
just say rape as a weapon of war, but things that are significantly worse than just what you think
34:17
about when you think of rape, I'm talking about people mutilated. Okay, I'm like such unspeakable
34:23
horrors happen. And yet, you know, I'm on the list serves of many feminist organizations here in
34:29
America, who had a lot to say in the era of me too, who had a lot to say about horrible things
34:35
that happened on casting couches. They have had nothing to say in the wake of this. Like,
34:42
what is that? Don't you think that they think that it's self-evidently wrong? So what's the point
34:47
in saying? No, absolutely not. I think they've been completely subsumed by the sort of post-modern,
34:55
post-colonial, morally relativistic view that you just laid out, which erases the distinction
35:00
between good and evil and says that powerful, powerful, however you're defining that, is bad and
35:07
suspicious. The powerless are necessarily good. And they have fallen into that trap when it comes
35:13
to the story of, you know, the Israelis and the Palestinians. That's what I think. I mean, to me,
35:18
what's interesting about this particular moment and this particular cultural rift that's kind of
35:22
ballooning like a mushroom cloud out of the devastation of October 7th is the, just to say,
35:31
I'm trying to, I guess, steal man the opposing point, right? So I think most listeners can
35:38
understand why it's horrible to advocate or to celebrate for the rape and dismemberment of
35:44
innocent civilians on October 7th. Where I think people find it confusing and where it's
35:50
probably useful to try to tease apart what's going on psychologically is the attitude of,
35:57
of course, that was horrible and it's horrible for babies to be buried under piles of rubble
36:05
because, you know, they're living in Gaza and it's horrible for people to have no aspirations
36:13
for their future. This is why I go back to like the historical context because the powerlessness
36:19
and illicitness of the Palestinian people not as individual human beings but as a movement for
36:26
national self-determination actually is relevant in understanding the kind of moral balance here.
36:33
If since 1948 Israel had relentlessly pursued the subjugation of Palestinians with, and if the Arab
36:42
states had welcomed the Jews with open arms, and the Jews had been persistent aggressors,
36:48
and the Israelis had never provided a window of opportunity for Palestinian statehood,
36:54
then I think the moral balance would actually be different because you'd be able to, I mean,
36:59
so yeah, I mean, in terms of the steel manning option, I think there's a lot of what's going on,
37:03
which is Hamas is terrible, what they did on October 7th is terrible, also Israel does terrible
37:09
things, both sides, both sides. But it's, right, that that's the thinking I think, which I
37:15
wanted to object to, then I think Sam Harris, I really commend anyone listening to this to go
37:22
listen to the episode Sam Harris has done on this. We reposted one of his in the honestly
37:28
feet, I think the bright line between good and evil, but the one before that, I'm forgetting the
37:31
title, which talks about intentionality, and the idea that, you know, in the case of Hamas,
37:38
a genocidal death cult, the goal was to savage and maim and mutilate and murder as many
37:46
Israelis as possible. And, you know, again, I guess there are people who might not believe this,
37:51
in the case of Israel, genociding the Palestinian people is simply not the goal. Wiping out Hamas
37:58
is the goal, and as Sam has pointed out, if Israel wanted to genocide the Palestinian people,
38:03
could do that immediately right now. And that's simply not the goal. If you look at the population
38:09
that has swelled in Gaza, I mean, we could, we could like do this whole thing, but I don't want to,
38:14
I don't want to hijack the conversation because I know you've done it with Eli and other people as well.
38:18
Yeah, and I mean, it's, I'm with you, I'm with you. I mean, I'm just, my heart is broken,
38:26
and I'm incredibly nervous about the fate of not just the region, but all of Western liberalism
38:34
really, you know, when you take what's going on in the Middle East with Russia's invasion of Ukraine,
38:43
with China's assertiveness, with the stresses that are being put on liberal democracy by forces
38:50
of the far right and social media algorithms and whatever else. And then you add what I think is
38:57
stressing us a lot as well, which we don't necessarily always notice, which is a coin that
39:02
events where you would we're just sort of being drained by the increasing regularity of wildfires and
39:08
hurricanes and droughts. It's a happy time. It's a happy time. But then I'm also optimistic.
39:16
Oh, I am too. I'm a Jew. Of course, I'm optimistic. I mean, the, I just want to say one thing about
39:22
Israel, just less than you want to have any confusion about where I sit, you know, I can say
39:28
everything I just said about Hamas and believe that BB Netanyahu is a corrupt power hungry leader
39:37
that needs to set aside for the good of Israel, that Jewish settlers in the West Bank that are
39:42
terrorizing Palestinians right now are terrorists. And there can be such thing as Jewish terrorism.
39:49
I mean, it's very possible to just hold all of these things in your head at once that, you know,
39:54
that all of the children that are dying in the rubble in Gaza, you know, it's horrible. It's a
40:03
horrific tragedy. It's horrific. And, you know, I'm holding it together now, but I mean,
40:10
there have been so many nights since October 7th, where I'm just looking at the news and just
40:14
weeping. I mean, the fact that there are Israeli parents who have three-year-olds, 10-month-olds,
40:20
there's a Thailand, there's a woman from Thailand that gave birth in the tunnels under the Gaza
40:25
strip. You know, a father, the father of a little girl called Emily Han who was relieved when he
40:31
thought she was dead, but then found out that she has been held by Hamas for the past 40 days. It's
40:37
just like, it's just horrific. I mean, the whole situation is just heartbreaking. It really is.
40:44
But then we can pivot and talk about World War III and get really happy.
40:50
Well, whenever I get down on history, I always remember that my dad was born in a refugee camp
40:58
during World War II in Switzerland as his parents who were Holocaust, you know, survivors were
41:04
had been fleeing the Nazis and, you know, it didn't stop playing. People say, like, how could you
41:08
bring a child into this world? You know, this troubled world of climate change and chaos,
41:13
and like, things didn't look very good in 1943 for a Jew in quite France either, but they
41:19
went ahead and I owe my life to that. Yes, and it's also, I mean, the most optimistic thing in the
41:27
world that you can do, like, you know, we have a 14-month-old and it's just like, I've never,
41:34
I just feel like the whole world has opened up for me. I truly feel like I didn't understand
41:40
the world before, but also it means that, you know, the way that I consume news and the way that
41:44
the way that these stories impact you as a parent, I don't know how you feel, but I just feel
41:50
it's really, really different. It's just much more profound. Yeah, especially if it has to do with
41:55
kids, I just blubber like a baby. I mean, there can be, like, an ad for AT&T where they've
41:59
called in their kid abroad and I'm like, it's so beautiful, it's a little baby. Yeah, 14-month-old,
42:05
you have, remind me. Yeah, I have twins, two or six-year-olds now, or not, would you believe,
42:10
it's amazing. So, it's amazing. So, it's great. I remember 14 months being a moment where they
42:15
really stop being an annoying lizard and turn into a human being, you know? It's really,
42:21
it's amazing. It's amazing. Yeah, that's great. But Nelly and I, I was sort of always thinking,
42:26
like, two kids will be enough and now I'm like, Nelly, as many as you want. We'll do it.
42:32
June and next week for the age, age child, yeah, four in the family. Oh,
42:36
white family story. That's right. I want to talk about the mainstream media. It's on my mind,
42:42
you know, the challenge of having institutions that are able to grapple with the most
42:48
capacious, possible, expansive ideas and that are enthusiastic about triggering tripliers
42:54
and running across the whole intellectual terrain instead of being risk averse and
43:00
capturing themselves into the correct opinions about things is I think probably one of the big
43:06
pressing challenges of the 21st century. And I wonder, can you just take us back for people who
43:11
don't remember the your origin story? What was it like? Well, born in 1984.
43:19
The my parents tell me I was conceived on July 4th, which you know, is if that's true.
43:26
Okay, professionally, I, the thing that's relevant, I think, to your listeners, your viewers,
43:32
is that people will remember the sort of very, very intense summer of 2020 where you had COVID
43:40
lockdowns, then combined with Black Lives Matter, peaceful protests, but also riots in cities
43:46
across the country. And I had been brought into the New York Times in the wake of Trump's election
43:53
in a sort of brief window of soul searching that the paper experienced. How was it that the
44:00
paper that prides itself on speaking to the country, on capturing the mood of the country,
44:05
holding up a mirror to the world that as, as it actually is, how did they tell us, you know,
44:11
that Hillary Clinton was going to win with 99% certainty. And yet my mother, for whom for her work,
44:17
she has to sort of drive two hours outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and was calling me saying,
44:22
I've never seen signs like this in my life. Trump's going to win. How did she get it right in the
44:26
New York Times? Got it wrong. Well, that was a question they were wondering too. And to put it
44:30
bluntly, I was brought in along with Brett Stevens from the Wall Street Journal as a kind of
44:34
intellectual diversity hire. Now it tells you a lot about the New York Times that like approach
44:40
choice Jewish gay woman from the Midwest was their intellectual diversity, but there you go.
44:46
And my job explicitly was to bring in voices that wouldn't otherwise naturally appear in the
44:52
New York Times, either because other editors wouldn't think to commission them or the writers
44:56
themselves would think, you know, the New York Times would never accept me. So that met everyone
45:01
from people like Ion, her CLE to, you know, the Iranian dissonant, my CLEna job to underground
45:08
pastors in China, hiding their Christianity to first time writers like you name it. But I think my,
45:14
what I was known for was getting sort of non progressive voices into the paper. So I remember
45:19
specifically a piece by Thomas Chatterton Williams, the black intellectual who I'm sure you've had on
45:24
or if not, you should on a room candy like thing is that we're just spicy and a little hot to handle.
45:30
And I loved it and it was great. And from the very beginning, I was uncool. People there didn't
45:35
like me. We can speculate about why that is. I think my supportive Israel had something to do with it.
45:40
But I could give a rat's ass because holy shit, I got to work at the New York Times. And the
45:45
privilege, if I can use that word, if it hasn't been so solid of getting to reach so many people,
45:51
of getting it to publish my own pieces was just so exhilarating and exciting. And it didn't matter
45:56
to me that people kind of gave me the cold shoulder. Fast forward to the summer of 2020.
46:02
The New York Times ran an op-ed by Republican Senator from Arkansas named Tom Cotton.
46:10
Who he is, kind of irrelevant, the point is that he published a pretty incendiary op-ed
46:15
called Send in the Troops, which made the argument that not in the case of peaceful protesters,
46:21
but in the case of violent rioting, that the National Guard should be brought in to put down
46:25
the rioting. Now, this was misread. It was misconstrued to say he was talking about peaceful
46:30
protesters. But in any event, it led to an absolute meltdown inside the newspaper.
46:37
Something like 800 of my colleague signed a letter. Some say the number was way higher that
46:43
this op-ed literally put their lives in danger. James Bennett, my boss, who had hired me,
46:49
who had formerly been the Jerusalem bureau chief, had covered the second into FATA,
46:53
had done a lot of things to sacrifice his safety and his time, and his talents to the paper
47:00
was pushed out after two days. Two other people were reassigned or demoted, and I found myself
47:08
wondering what the hell I was doing. I had nothing to do with the peace. I didn't commission it.
47:13
I didn't edit it. I only saw it when it appeared on the website like everybody else,
47:18
but because I had been known as someone who didn't go along with every aspect of the new
47:23
orthodoxy, I was seen as suspicious. What had been a cold hostility became hot. People in
47:30
company-wide slack channels were putting axe emojis next to my name. We're openly asking
47:36
an all-company meetings when I was going to be fired. I faced a choice, Josh, and maybe it's a
47:45
choice that you relate to. The choice was this. I had seen what they had done to someone who
47:52
had dedicated their life to the paper and the way that his risk-taking, his specific mandate
47:58
was to bring in other voices that wouldn't normally appear in the New York Times. That was how
48:03
that was sort of one of the great lessons from Trump, at least for a moment, of we're not listening
48:08
to what half of the country is saying. Let's really listen. What was his risk-taking
48:14
intellectually rewarded with? Getting pushed out of the newspaper where he had spent his entire
48:20
career. I said to myself, if this is what they're willing to do to someone who has given so much
48:25
of their life to the paper, what will they do to me if I have a misstep? More to the point,
48:31
it was an environment that was already so, so difficult to smuggle through
48:40
heterodox ideas or controversial ideas or ideas that might rob a colleague the wrong way
48:46
or might get you accused of any one of the isms or fobs that you get accused of every day if you
48:52
trip over those tripwires you mentioned. Do I stay and cling to the prestige of being able to tell
48:59
people I work at the New York Times, which at least on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I
49:03
lived at the time was definitely an asset, maybe not an Arkansas, but definitely in Manhattan.
49:09
Or do I leave and do I leave to pursue the curiosity that led me to become a journalist in the
49:16
first place? I left and I left in a very loud way with this open letter to the publisher of the
49:26
newspaper, A.G. Solzberger, and thus began a period of intense day drinking, weight gain, and
49:35
casting about for what I would do next. Well, here I am doing what I decided ultimately to do next,
49:40
but it's a long-winded way of saying, it was like one of the few moments in my life where I
49:48
sort of stepped back and said, what is the purpose of my life and not to sound like precious about
49:56
it, but really, what's the point in my career? What's the point of being a journalist?
50:02
Is it, again, so I can brag and put the New York Times next to my name? Or is it because I believe
50:09
that there is virtue in the work itself, work that is becoming increasingly impossible to do
50:15
if I want to cling to the prestige? So what I am, of course, wondering if this at all resonates
50:22
with your experience, and maybe you're not even free to talk about it yet, which I would totally
50:26
understand, but you can just link three times if this resonates with you. That's right. I mean,
50:32
I'm interested in how much of a, how much of that was corporate cautiousness and ask covering,
50:39
and kind of legalistic desire to avoid bad PR and upsetting subscribers and like financial
50:48
imperatives versus, and I'm wrestling with this myself, versus just an ideological
50:56
blinker-ness, a blindedness, a sense that like we sort of, we know what the right answer's
51:00
are here. Why do these troublemaking people like Barry keep coming around and asking complicated
51:07
questions about issues that are actually quite simple? Like we know what the just, you know,
51:11
position here is, and so stop screwing around, you know, with your fancy games of free speech and
51:19
alternative and what about this? Like we have the answers, so shut up and suck it. Do you have a sense
51:26
of which, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, I experienced it for the first time around the Me Too
51:32
movement where, you know, I'm a lifelong feminist and yet, you know, I thought this very notion
51:37
of believe all women reflexively was like an anti-humanist position and really in a way like
51:47
just didn't square with reality. Like women could lie just like everybody else and it doesn't
51:52
mean that the Me Too movement, you know, wasn't in many ways virtuous and wasn't in many ways overdue,
51:57
but I remember writing pieces around that time, specifically one called Aziz Ansari's guilty
52:04
of not being a mind reader that went very viral and sort of for the first time made me think, oh wow,
52:12
like things that I think are common-sensical in the world and that most people in the country
52:20
would sort of not along with and be like, yeah, isn't that obvious? Like in the framework of the
52:25
New York Times felt like incredibly radical. And again, it was like, as you're saying, but the frame
52:32
was the problem, right? Like if again, there are places that just announce themselves like we are
52:38
left-wing publication, we are a socialist publication, we are right-wing publication and okay,
52:43
so like you know what you're going to get and they're serving their readers. The conceit of the
52:47
New York Times that I think to a large extent this has sort of fallen away is the idea that it's
52:52
both to be sort of as used, the word you use, capacious, it should be sort of trying to
53:01
give voice to as many possible viewpoints inside the sort of 40-yard lines of American political
53:08
life as possible. And in fact, it was giving you like a tiny sliver. And now the reason for that
53:15
part of it of course, as you alluded to, is like the problem of audience capture, which
53:21
you know, any schmo with a podcast experiences and the New York Times experiences. In other words,
53:26
when the old economic model of having to serve the advertiser was replaced with having to serve
53:31
your paying customer, everything shifted, right? It used to be that you had to worry about, you know,
53:37
something that would piss off Johnson and Johnson. Now you know, in the case just not to pick on the
53:42
times, it's just the it's the model that I know most. Intimately, like if 95% of your readers are
53:48
liberals and progressives, like you know what they want and what they want is another piece about how
53:54
Donald Trump is a monster of this destroying democracy and that's going to go viral and that's
53:58
going to work very well. And you know, it becomes a cycle. And so there's an aspect of it where
54:04
it's self-reinforcing. It's like no one had to come down from the corner office and say, hey guys,
54:10
an op-ed saying Donald Trump is a monster is going to do well, like you would see it do well.
54:15
And you would see it do well because you knew who the audience was and you knew what they liked.
54:19
So that's certainly part of it. But I think actually that is condescending toward the audience.
54:26
Because I do think that specifically in the case of the times, people are curious as much as it
54:32
can annoy people to your another perspective, they want to. And you could see this often reflected
54:38
not to get too tedious in like reader comments and the things that would get upvoted by other
54:44
readers where they would be like, hey, yeah, like is JK Rowling really a monster? It kind of seems
54:50
like she's saying something that seems somewhat reasonable, upvote, you know, so you would see it
54:54
in that way. But I think the big sort of headline story with the times and this is the case with
54:59
like almost every sense making institution in American life is the story of how a small,
55:06
ideologically committed, sophisticated, zealous group of people can overtake an institution
55:16
by using the threat of moral condemnation. A threat that I didn't understand, Josh,
55:22
until the past five years of my life, how unbelievably powerful that tool of social and
55:29
reputational shame is. But wow, is it powerful? And that was sort of the way that it functioned
55:36
at the times. And let me just give you a tiny example. You could feel yourself, and I felt
55:45
this even inside my own self, like the way that self-sensorship can work, because again, it's not
55:51
someone saying to you, maybe don't do that story, although sometimes that would happen too.
55:56
It's more thinking, do I really want to spend the next two weeks of my life battling everyone
56:00
sitting alongside me? Is it really worth it to die on this hill? You know, if I know that in the case,
56:06
and this, there were literally two editorial tracks, progressive op-eds who just sailed through,
56:11
and so was so easy, and that would make your life easier to just commission and edit those,
56:15
as opposed to like anything else, like even classically liberal to the right of that,
56:20
would have to go through like four additional layers of editing, and everything would need to be
56:25
contextualized, and to be short, and like by the time you were done, you were just like,
56:29
gray, and you thought to yourself, like, just make your life easier, and I just, like the second
56:34
I sort of felt that inside of me, there was something in me that raged against that, where I was
56:39
like, that's not those aren't my values, and I don't want to give into that, and I also don't want
56:44
to spend the next 10 years of my life begging my head against the wall. So there were many
56:51
to, along with the way of answering your question, it functioned in like several different ways,
56:57
but the key thing that was different, I would say, is like the New York Times had always been a
57:03
liberal newspaper, what was different in the past decade, maybe even more so, is that there were
57:08
people entering the paper who specifically did not believe in the mission of the New York Times,
57:14
and believed that the mission of the New York Times should not be independent or independent
57:20
to the greatest extent possible journalism, journalism that you know would try and reflect the
57:26
world as it is, but journalism is a political tool, journalism as a way to assert their vision
57:31
of the world as they wish it would be, and that really was the change. And when I wrote at the time
57:37
about the sort of generational civil war that was playing out, like that is not only the case of
57:43
the New York Times, the case it's so many other institutions as well. I mean, there's a prior change
57:49
that's even more insidious that's necessary for that change, which is the change in people's
57:54
understanding of their own fallibility, a change in people's appreciation of their own
58:02
epistemic limits, a change in people's empathy intellectually for other people's positions,
58:07
like I don't think people are coming into these institutions thinking I disagree with diversity
58:12
of opinion, and I want to turn this into my own political puppet. I think what they're thinking
58:16
is why wouldn't you want this to be a tool for good? Exactly. Why would you want this to be
58:21
tool for a better world? That's right. Why would you want to play around with all this stuff that
58:25
we already know to be wrong? Correct. To me, the real, so the real problem that's causing all of this
58:30
in the media is less an institutional takeover, and more why do these people have this world view
58:38
that they can be so deranged as a belief that that is justified because they lack the understanding
58:43
of like a classical liberal tolerance for a range for a diversity of use that they disagree with.
58:48
I mean, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's what this is coming from.
58:51
Yeah, they don't think that truth is something you get to with, you know, slight nudges,
58:57
slight discoveries, tweaks, you know, like a push, and then an encounter push and the sort of sharp
59:03
opening that comes from disagreement, they think truth is something that is known and that we need
59:08
to like spread the good word about what it is. Yeah, it's obvious. It's obvious. I had similar
59:14
run-ins during gay pride where I was trying to take a position. I'm a bit conflicted about
59:19
gay pride, and I think I have some standing as a guy who's married to a guy to ask questions about
59:25
whether there ever comes a point at which it becomes counterproductive to keep pumping young
59:31
teenagers full of very cliched images of oiled up white gay manners, you know, sitting
59:39
as dry and giant inflatable penises driving down your sixth avenue. Like, is, you know, just
59:44
they come a point at which sexual flourishing and emotional well-being would be better served
59:49
by turning down the volume on identity and turning up the volume. Sounds like self-hating,
59:55
sound like self-hating internalized totally a fit of me, Josh. That's right. So, you know,
1:00:00
and like that point of view, inside an institution that has been persuaded that the contemporary gay
1:00:10
rights movement is on the right side of history, is by definition a retrograde, bigoted, anti-gay,
1:00:20
homophobic point of view. So, it doesn't need engaging with, and it really shouldn't be in.
1:00:26
Like, that to me is to change. That's bizarre.
1:00:32
The thing I'm describing as experiencing at the times is that sort of the norm in Australia,
1:00:37
because I always think of Australia as being like slightly more sane than us, maybe because,
1:00:43
well, I don't actually know why I think that. That was just my impression when I spent time.
1:00:47
There are people just seemed like, I think we are more common-sensical.
1:00:51
Less extreme. Yeah. I think we're less extreme in every way, and that's for better and for worse,
1:00:57
right? You know, we wouldn't have elected Donald Trump, but then we wouldn't have elected
1:01:03
Barack Obama either. You know, America is just a more, slightly more crazy place, the dial that
1:01:09
turned up to 11 in America, and that has, that's one reason why we love it, and one reason why it
1:01:15
keeps shooting itself in the foot in various ways. But I think there's a cosiness in Australia
1:01:20
that's not necessarily helpful. There's a, there's a, a sense of, we have a phrase like,
1:01:28
she'll be right. She'll be right. What does that mean? I mean, it's going to be fine. That's going
1:01:34
to be fine. Don't worry about it. You know, like smooth sailing, don't write feathers. The tall
1:01:42
poppy syndrome isn't trying to phrase. That's fascinating me. Yes, that's the opposite of,
1:01:48
it's just so antithetical to, I don't know, like that. Well, yeah, but just, like, how do you create
1:01:56
a culture where people want to take risks and pursue excellence? It's not a culture of exceptionalism.
1:02:02
It's not a culture of egalitarianism, which has its own upside. So I think it's a culture of
1:02:06
the fair go, and like everyone, no one should be able to fall too far, but also nobody should be
1:02:12
able to rise too high. So what are you, so what are you moving here? I spend most of my professional
1:02:19
life in New York City. I mean, I've only been back here for six years now. And I think I
1:02:27
precisely because of the tenet of the rest of the media in Australia, I think it's ripe
1:02:32
for me to go full barri-wise. And I don't know whether that means actually creating a
1:02:37
a media institution yet. I'll noodle on that. And I'll certainly spend the next bit of time
1:02:43
without bosses and having the conversations that I think Australians are super hungry for.
1:02:48
Oh God, wow. I'm so excited for you. Thank you, Barry. Thank you for being here.
1:02:54
I do have to say, by the way, that it did strike me. And partly, this is because
1:03:01
I've been to Australia exactly once, but I claim to know something about it simply from that.
1:03:06
That time, no, it's that when we boarded the flight, moms of young children boarded first,
1:03:13
and there were also bassinets on the planes for babies. And then I don't know, that made such
1:03:20
an impression on me just because, no, it's pathetic. You don't, I mean, I just, the first time you
1:03:26
change a baby's diaper in an airport, in an airplane bathroom, where there's nothing to,
1:03:33
you're just like, oh my God, this is the least family-friendly situation in the world. But also
1:03:38
everything about Australia seemed really built for families in a way that you don't see as much
1:03:43
here. And it did seem like a genuinely great place to raise children. Yeah, exactly. That was
1:03:48
it as well. I mean, it's like, who wants to be, you know, I love New York City, but who wants to
1:03:52
be struggling with a scroll that are going down and I see, you know, steps into into the subway
1:03:59
station and worrying about what private school your kid is going to get into in order to, you know,
1:04:04
like preschool to get into the right, you know, high school and the health care and just,
1:04:10
it lasts more. Americans like making things complicated for themselves when they're actually
1:04:15
fairly easy solutions in some ways that other rich countries have figured out.
1:04:21
Totally. So what do you think, what are you, when you think about going independent,
1:04:27
are there guests and topics that you sort of cautioned yourself away from that now you're thinking,
1:04:34
you're going to run headlong toward them? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't want to, my goal has never
1:04:39
been to just upset Apple cuts for the sake of upsetting Apple cuts. So I'm not going to run
1:04:44
directly towards the electrified fence and, you know, and self-immolate just for the sake of it.
1:04:51
I just want my curiosity to be able to roam when like curiosity wants to roam. I want my
1:04:55
inquisitiveness to feel unbounded. I just want to be able to talk in ways that I think people
1:05:00
will find sane and refreshing without feeling like we're constrained inside the proper ways of
1:05:07
conversing about proper things. There's just so much talking at the moment and I'm not talking
1:05:13
specifically about the ABC, my employer. I'm talking in general terms about culture and media.
1:05:20
There's so much talking in a ways that a design that's seen designed to prove to the audience that
1:05:26
we are on the right side of worthy issues instead of to actually wrestle with the meat and guts and
1:05:32
blood of stuff and get to the bottom of it. So that's all I want to do. I'm not going in with
1:05:36
an agenda apart from it. Are you still going to call it uncomfortable conversation?
1:05:41
Yeah, I think that'll always be the flagship show, but then do we have offshoots and like,
1:05:45
do we have sub podcasts and things and like, I mean, I love what you guys did with the JK Rowling
1:05:51
podcast and there was fabulous. Thank you. And so, you know, sub projects that either I or other
1:05:57
people do within the main project, does that end up having a different umbrella name? I mean,
1:06:03
I quit less than a week ago, Barry. What are you? How much planning do you want?
1:06:08
I have grand ambitions for I mean, I just I just think the opportunity is so like here's the like
1:06:15
specific niche that I think is is so powerful if you can hit it. And I know you will is that
1:06:21
you have the legacy press. I don't even call it the mainstream press anymore because I just don't
1:06:25
think it's like representative of the mainstream, but you have the legacy press that has the prestige
1:06:30
and the glossiness and you know, all of the old rules when they're followed properly like fact
1:06:36
checking like two sources for every single fact in a story that are extremely valuable.
1:06:40
And then you have a lot of people sort of like going wild to go and ham in like the Wild West
1:06:47
pod newsletter, Twitter world. And then you have a sort of great gap between those two things.
1:06:53
And the people that can kind of marry the intellectual freedom of the Wild West world without
1:07:00
giving into the conspiratorial rabbit hole tendencies that capture much of that world and can
1:07:06
marry that genuine freedom with the responsibilities that come with the best parts of the legacy press.
1:07:14
Like I think that the opportunity for that is just enormous. And that's what we're really,
1:07:19
really trying so hard to do here. But I just I think people are so hungry for that specific thing.
1:07:28
And I think that a lot of the people who are willing to take the risk and have the confidence
1:07:34
to leave the old world and build that like those are the people I'm sort of paying the most
1:07:39
attention to because it's like they've had the kind of training that you think that you hope
1:07:45
will give them the ability to pull off that sort of high wire act.
1:07:50
Mmm, it's a good way of putting it. That's the sweet spot. How do you lastly how do you avoid audience
1:07:55
capture? How do you avoid drifting towards crazy town?
1:08:00
It's a great question. I first of all, I think everyone is susceptible to audience capture.
1:08:04
There's lots of little tricks you can do. I know Sam Harris never looks at the numbers.
1:08:08
And you know, I've talked to lots of people who I think are pulling off well.
1:08:12
For me, it's been about not making it very whicing. Like it's, you know, as I said, there are
1:08:19
20 people that work here and they're not just like producing this show. There's one producer
1:08:23
full time on this show. There are reporters who we want to make into, you know, superstars.
1:08:28
There are, you know, hosts of other shows that we're developing. The goal is to sort of
1:08:34
make it the justice league of people that want to do old school, independent-minded,
1:08:39
fearless journalism. And for me, that's the trick. Like if two or three years from now,
1:08:45
someone sends someone a link from the free press and my name's not invoked and it has authority
1:08:50
on its own. Like that's, that's really the goal. And for me, like I, I have strong opinions
1:08:58
about like 10 subjects. There are hundreds of other subjects that I either know nothing about
1:09:03
or bore me or I'm just completely out of my depth. And so for me, it like this formulation
1:09:09
just just makes a lot of sense. And I also think it guards you against audience capture because
1:09:14
there are 20 people here with 20 extremely different views about, say, the war in Ukraine or,
1:09:21
you know, American foreign policy. This is just like a topic we've been talking a lot about.
1:09:25
And that back and forth, I think, keeps you really honest because otherwise you're kind of
1:09:30
just hearing yourself and then hearing the audience talk back to you. But it's also a matter of
1:09:35
just like, frankly, like discipline and a real sense of like what your North Star is because
1:09:43
it was super clear to me from the early days of this that like I could probably run a piece
1:09:48
about how bad cancel culture is every single day and make a lot of money doing it and like maybe
1:09:53
afford a second home for my family. But then I had a, again, a kind of like moment of confronting
1:09:59
myself the way I had it the New York Times and saying like, but wait, like, isn't this, wouldn't this
1:10:03
be replicating exactly the thing that I criticized those people for doing? And like I don't,
1:10:09
I've seen enough people become caricatures of themselves. Like I don't want to do that,
1:10:13
even if it does afford me a second home. Like I'd much rather try and build something that lasts,
1:10:20
you know, to try and build a new institution in a world in which our faith and the old ones has
1:10:24
crumbled. And so in many ways, like the decision to build something that is like a real institution
1:10:31
and not just me is a selfish thing because because I, I so clearly saw what might come of me
1:10:40
if I didn't surround myself with other very, very smart, capable people who had strong views of
1:10:47
their own. And that's a good way. Yeah, that's a good trick. Yeah, I've been having to do it
1:10:54
solo in terms of just batting away the people who want to drag you into their alternative echo
1:10:58
chamber, you know, the number of requests that I've had from Australia's equivalent of Fox News
1:11:03
or, you know, from conservative media outlets saying, oh, come on and talk about, and I'm like,
1:11:08
no, excuse me, I'm not your puppy dog. Don't just think that because I had, you know, some,
1:11:14
you know, particular beef about freedom of speech or cancel culture, that that means that all
1:11:19
of a sudden I'm on your side. Like stop being such ridiculous teen players. Like how do you just
1:11:25
be independent? Sorry, yes, but I think you're, you're wise to create support structures around
1:11:30
yourself that, that keep calling you out. You aren't a bullshit. Yeah, basically. All right,
1:11:36
Barry Weiss, Justice League leader, extraordinaire. Thank you. Come visit us, come visit us in
1:11:42
that way. I will come and I will come and visit next year, and that's a promise. Thanks for
1:11:45
speaking with us. It's great to see you again. Great to see you. I'm so excited to see what you do.