A major resignation now. An editor at the New York Times. Showing up for work as a centrist that an American newspaper should not require bravery. She's saying no one should be allowed to criticize me. They thought them very wise. Anyone that departs from woke orthodoxy gets a lot more heat.

A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper. If you don't have the right views, everything is caveated, edited, tripled, quadrupled the amount of crimes. Should it take courage to say that those who praise the pristine subways of Russia are not journalists, but propagandists?

Should it take courage to just say in public, "I disagree"? Join me in welcoming Barry Weiss to the stage. Welcome. Hi, Barry. Barry, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Thanks for the cool weather. Really appreciate it. Yes, Barry made headlines. I'm going to give you a little introduction.

Even though most everyone here knows who you are. But you made headlines in 2020 when you left the New York Times, criticizing its stance on free speech and diversity of thought. And since then, you've launched the Free Press. Congrats. I know a lot of folks here are subscribers. And the Free Press declares itself a free press for free people, honest, independent, and fearless.

I think we all respect and admire you for your fiercely independent thinking and direct and honest takes on current events and social issues. We feel like you're a kindred spirit. Yes, a bestie. I wish. This may be an audition. Let's see. I don't know if you guys can handle having a woman in a bestie.

I'm not sure. No, no, we can. Just not sex. So look, I want to start with a very broad, general question that you can take in any direction you want. What's going on in America? What are the two sides? Because it seems like a lot of what has, as we've been hearing a lot about, and I think we're going to hear more about throughout this conference, there are polarizing forces at play.

And the polls kind of get defined differently. But is there a unifying thesis here? There's the notion of populists and elitists. Are there elitists that say I'm an elitist? There's corporate and government folks. The pocket square says you're an elitist. Yes, like pockets where it keeps slipping. There's the conservatives versus the liberals.

I mean, what is the divide in the United States? And what is causing the polarity? How would you think about the polarity that's emerged? I think there's two ways, broadly, that I would answer that. And obviously, besties push back on me, as I know David Sachs surely will. One way to think about it, and I think Martin Goury has written about this absolutely brilliantly in his book, "The Revolt of the Public," probably the most important book written in the last 25 years.

Read it. If you haven't, "Stripe Press," publish it. Say it again. Martin Goury's book, it's called "The Revolt of the Public." And broadly, what he prophesied, without using the words Donald Trump or BLM or any of the phenomenon that have reshaped American political life over the past several decades, is the sort of-- call it the renegades versus the establishment or the outsiders versus the insiders.

If you want to understand how it can be that Dick Cheney and Kamala Harris are on one side and Donald Trump and Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, whatever you think of any of those people are on the other, that's how you have to understand that, I think. Another way that I've been thinking about a lot, though, is sort of like there are three sides that I see that are emerging.

And I think the free press is trying to position itself in what I believe is the broad, self-silencing majority piece of the pie, which is to say there's a woke left. There's increasingly a woke right. And then there's the normal people. And the normal-- I mean, this is what people come up-- I went to a thing for my daughter's new preschool yesterday, and there were some free press readers.

And they didn't come up to me to talk about any particular piece. They just said, "Thank you for being normal." And normal was the adjective that almost all of them used. And so I think that that's also something that's happening where, you know, I'm sure as has already been discussed at this conference, we have this horseshoe in which the left, the identitarian sort of anti-liberal left, illiberal left, sounds eerily similar at times to the illiberalism of the right.

And they sort of are in this dance with each other. And the rest of us are feeling like, "When did everything get so crazy? And is there a return to normalcy?" And I'm not saying a return to normalcy in the sense of like returning to some kind of neoliberal consensus.

I just mean a return to the things that I think many of us still believe are just basic commonsensical American values that right now feel under siege. - Let's talk about the media's role in this. You and I have been career journalists, editors. And so when we were coming up, they would take your piece, whatever you wrote, and they'd just say, "Well, this is an opinion." They'd strike it out and say, "Who are you attributing this to?" There was a very thoughtful process.

And then something happened economically with link baiting and maybe trying to get more clicks. And then this very strange thing happened when Donald Trump got elected that I think you and I both witnessed, which was journalists who were, you know, thought of themselves as independent. And storytellers who would just present the facts to an audience then saw themselves as part of the resistance and that they had to stop this individual because they believed he was Hitler.

And the marketing when you went to the Guardian or the Washington Post or the New York Times, at the bottom of a Trump story would say, "If you want us to hold truth to power and stop Trump, give us your credit card." - Yeah. - And this seemed like this bizarre moment.

Maybe you could just talk about that paradigm shifting because it happened during the economic turmoil as well when journalism got gutted. - I think it's deeper than... The roots of this are deeper than Trump. We actually have a piece we're running tomorrow afternoon called "When We Started Lying." That's sort of a view from someone that was in the Middle East Bureau of the AP and seeing the roots of this back in 2005, 2006.

And what that piece argues, and I think it's exactly put, is people don't really understand that the fundamental job description of mainstream journalism has changed. It used to be that the job of journalism, and I still believe that this is the job, is to hold up a mirror to the world as it actually is so people can make sensible, rational decisions about where to send their kids to school, about where to live, about who to vote for, about all of the things that are important in this life.

Tell the story about reality as plainly and as truthfully as you can. That is plainly no longer the goal, I think, of many "mainstream," I should put in quotes, American journalists. The job description as they see it is to usher you toward the correct political position. That's it. And once you begin to understand that, things that seem crazy, like, "Wait, how did they not tell me "about the Hunter Biden laptop story?" Or, "Why did they tell me "that the thing that I saw with my own eyes, "which is the obvious mental decline "of the President of the United States, "which is relevant to every single person "in this country and in the world, was a lie?" And once you start to understand that, you understand the misconstrual of certain stories, you understand the absolute silence around others, and frankly, that's why we're all here.

Like, it's given this tremendous opportunity for people who crave that thing that journalism used to do. - The truth? - Can you... - Yeah, the truth, yeah. - Can you just double- - Yeah, the truth. - Just double-click into that. Like, it's not like there's some grand cabal of people that decide, "Let's obfuscate Biden's decline.

"Let's elevate this." So what does it actually mean day-to-day? Like, how is it actually happening? - Okay. - Is it the money? Is it the incentives? What is happening? - There's a few things that happened. The first, as Jason was alluding to, is that the economic model changed. It used to be that if you ran a piece in "The New York Times," your fear was you were gonna piss off the advertiser that was running next to the story.

Once the business model shifted, you no longer were as concerned about, although you still are to some extent, about enraging, you know, Procter & Gamble. You're worried about enraging the reader, right? This is the phenomenon that so many people have talked about, which is audience capture, which is as, you know, the individual sub-stacker is as susceptible to this as "The New York Times." None of us are free from that phenomenon either.

- People respond to your article and say, "That was stupid," or "That pissed me off," and then you feel pressure to change. - Unsubscribe or unsubscribe. - No, so think about this. The court, and I think that these are public figures, but something like 95 to 98% of readers at "The New York Times," and I'm choosing that only 'cause it's the experience I know most intimately, regard themselves as liberals or progressives.

So if you write, and I'm thinking about my wife, who writes about in her book how she, after the violent rioting that happened in places like Kenosha, she was a business reporter, went and reported on those stories and found that the story was unbelievably complicated, that many of these business owners were minority, small business owners, they did not have insurance, they were absolutely devastated by what happened, and you know what happened?

She brought, it was an excellent story, back to her editors, and they said, "Let's wait until after the election to run this." So that's the kind of thing that would happen a lot, and no, there's not like some secret cabal meeting that happens where it says, "Let's make sure "that we lie to our readers about Joe Biden's mental state." It's the exact same phenomenon that everyone here feels in any social scene or company or institution that they're a part of, which is that human beings are social animals, and if you look at the kinds of people that work at the New York Times, they went to the same 10 boarding schools or fancy schools and the same 10 colleges, and they marinated in the same set of ideas, and they want their kids to go to the same schools in Brooklyn Heights or the Upper West Side, and that creates this very particular group thinking phenomenon.

Let me add one thing, which is that was always there. The thing that I think has changed a lot in the past, let's call it 20 years, is that the very places that used to be feeders to the New York Times were no longer feeding in sort of your standard center-left liberal Democrat.

They were feeding in a kind of person who believed in something like revolution and believed that their job was to foment that inside the New York Times. - No, but how does that, say more about what does that, what do you mean? - Well, what I mean by that is that they did not, you could look at the values of the New York Times and-- - Sorry, okay, wait, just go back a step.

So the people in the New York Times are fancy, basically is what you're saying. - I'm not saying, their fanciness is sort of beside the point. - Yeah, but I'm saying there was an archetype. - Yeah, of course. - And then that archetype shifted. - Right. - And is that because the feeder schools changed or is that because what they were taught at those schools changed?

- It's because wokeness happened to American liberalism and the people that were speaking the language of progressivism all of a sudden transformed the notion of what let's say social justice was, right? All of a sudden social justice wasn't about doing good by the poor. It was actually about a kind of neo-racism and a resegregation.

All of a sudden, progressivism wasn't actually about human flourishing and progress. It was about ensuring equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. And I don't think that the sort of that transformation, which some people have said, "Oh, wokeness has peaked, it's over." It cannot be overstated. The thing that began at the margins and at the fringe has moved into the center of American institutional life.

And that is the story of the transformation of the New York Times. And it's the story of the transformation of Harvard and so many other places where people all of a sudden turned around and thought, "When did everything get so insane?" - Is it a story that ends in socialism as it has in past lives?

- I think that, you know, I'm an optimist. This is America. And I think that there's an unbelievable pushback to this phenomenon. But the pushback, I believe... (audience applauding) - We have Elon here this afternoon. - Right. The pushback, and this is where I guess I'm more of a radical than a reformer.

I think I began at the New York Times as a reformer believing that I could make a difference. And God bless the people who are still trying to do that. I think there's a role for both. I think what has made me more of a radical, not politically, but just in terms of my posture, has been that I've become someone who believes that the way to change those institutions is not to give money to those places or join the board of them or delude yourself with the idea that you can transform them from within.

It's to build new things. And in building new things and creating competition, it forces the other people to change. - Sheri, give a voice to the people. (audience applauding) If you wouldn't mind, give a voice to the people that want to buck the trend, that want to be able to respond to the statement that they are morally bankrupt if they identify that this is not the right path.

What's the conversation that, and this is happening with everyone I know in schools, in workplaces. It's not just the institution of the New York Times. It's all institutions. - Okay, it starts with something very simple. Give up the heroin needle of prestige. Rip it out of your arm immediately.

Stop poisoning yourself, your families, and your children with the bankrupt notion that them getting into Harvard or Yale is more important than inculcating in them a sense of love, of family, of country, and of all of the things we used to think were normal. (audience applauding) - That, to-- - That could've been clapping 'cause he went to Stanford, but no.

(audience laughing) - To me, to me, that, it begins with that because I find myself in these baffling conversations with people where they say, "Thank you for what you do. "I'm so grateful for the free press. "I'm so grateful." I'm like, "Yeah, and we're talking, it's great." And I'm like, "Where do your kids go to school?" And then they name a place that's like the center of the mind virus.

And I'm like-- (audience laughing) - Why would you do that? - Well, Al-Qaeda was all filled up. They reached their capacities. - Right, so to me, it's sort of, the beginning of wisdom begins with that and with the confidence that prestige and honor is not something that is granted to you by institutions that have allowed themselves to be corrupted by morally bankrupt people.

You and your values, they're lucky to have you, right? That's what I think the fundamental posture needs to change. - Let's talk about the new stuff we're all building, the Go Direct movement, all these new brands. You're one of them, we're one of them, I suppose. - Are we gonna talk about Founder Mode?

I know you guys can explain to me what that is. - Well, I mean-- - It's cocaine. - No, you're right. - Oh, Barry, it's cocaine. - Really? - Yeah, Founder Mode's cocaine. - Yeah, it's good. We have actually a good-- - I've never done Founder Mode. - I can only guess, but-- - No, my guys got the best Founder Modes.

I put some in your green room. - Thank you so much. - Yeah, yeah. If you need more, let me know. - I think I've been doing Founder Mode. If Founder Mode means working till you collapse every night for three years-- - No, no, that just means being committed and trying to build a business.

- Yeah, we're talking about cocaine. - Founder Mode's being a dealership. (audience laughing) - It's back. But let's seriously talk about-- (Barry laughing) It's so funny. - These are back, baby. - It's back, woo! It's gonna be a great show. So I wanna talk to you about the new stuff that's being built.

Obviously, you have your subscription-based business doing wonderfully. We've got the information. We've got all in. And then you have everybody who got kicked off of broadcast television or for whatever reasons they left, Don Lemon, Megyn Kelly, Tucker-- - Katherine Harridge. - What's that? - Katherine Harridge. - Yeah. - It's fantastic.

- Yeah, so tons of long tail there. But this group is also susceptible to the same things as you pointed out, and perhaps in some ways more susceptible because they've got a less subscriber base, less brand. So Fox News is gonna be fine. New York Times is gonna be fine.

But as we saw this past week, the Russians put $10 million into a little slush fund and then gave it to-- - You're gonna start with Saks again? - For, no, no, I'm not talking to Saks. I'm talking to Barry. - He's talking to Saks through Barry. - I thank God I'm not managing these people.

- Well, no, no, I'm just curious what you're, I mean, these are obviously, as the Russians would call them, the useful idiots, but they didn't even know they were getting millions of dollars. They didn't ask where it was coming from. Obviously you didn't take that money. We didn't get offered that money, unfortunately.

- Otherwise you would have taken it. - Yeah, we would have secured that bag immediately. - Free money from the Russians? - No, we're like the scene in "The Matrix" where Neo's dodging the bullets and one nicks his leg. That's the Russian money 'cause it was flying everywhere. And J.

Cal was trying to jump into the bullets. (audience laughing) - I was trying to collect them. - And it's like, it's all we can do to just, we wanted to get that sweet, sweet Putin money. But what was your, what's your take on this? 'Cause you had some strong feelings when I think Tucker went and did his, what you thought was propaganda for Putin.

And so let's talk about how susceptible, in your mind, these voices are to being bought and paid for, apparently. - To me, it's less about-- - Allegedly. - Being bought and paid for. I think what it is, is there's a really, really understandable risk that once you sort of eject yourself from "The Matrix" or whatever the right metaphor is, stop taking the blue pill.

It's like, once you see one lie, all of a sudden it becomes a world of lies. And what's to stop you sort of from falling down the rabbit hole? And I'll give you an example. There's certain people, I don't wanna name them, who I so admired. And I felt like they were really prescient on standing up against sort of the neo-racism from the left, let's say.

And then all of a sudden I turn around and they're basically talking about how Bill Gates is putting 5G chips in our brain. And I think to myself, how did that happen? And I think the way that it happened is a really understandable human impulse, which is these people lied to me about this thing.

Therefore, everything they say is untrue. Or the Overton window has been narrowed so, so tightly that I'm just gonna bling it open to, I don't know, someone that says that Churchill is a villain and the Nazis may have had a point. So that's what I think is actually happening more broadly.

And I think the, I feel oftentimes at the Free Press, like we're dancing on the edge of a knife, which is to say on one side, you have these institutions that have the poor gatekeeping, but at least it's, I mean, they have gatekeeping, they have fact checkers, they have this whole system, right, that's corrupt, but at least it was supposed to work at one point.

And then you have kind of the Wild West world. And the Wild West world has everything. And so you can see Alex Jones right alongside a fantastic journalist like Megyn Kelly, and how are you supposed to know who is who, right? And so that's the challenge, I think, of the new Wild West world.

And what we're desperately trying to do at the Free Press is to be the bridge. And what I mean by that is to marry the standards that you would once expect from a place like the Washington Post or the New York Times. In other words, everything is rigorously fact-checked.

When we get something wrong, we publicly correct it. Like all of those old rules, but marrying them to the sort of political freedom of the new world. - Can you take us into an instance where a contributor, 'cause you have a lot of freelance contributors or just important people will want to publish now in the Free Press, which I think is a really good sign for you that you're doing something meaningful, that they submit something and you're like, "Okay, this is not actually reporting.

"This is your opinion on a conspiracy. "And we need to maybe get some facts in here "to boister this opinion of yours." Because I mean, these dopes accepted $100,000 and never asked it. So then people are gonna take their opinion on Ukraine and look at that as factual when they don't even question who gave them $100,000 an episode?

I mean, these people are obviously idiots/corrupt. What do you think? - I wish I had read more about this particular story. - Well, no, it's infuriating because if somebody were to drop $100,000 on you to republish the Free Press on another website, you'd say, "Where's the money coming from?" Correct?

- Yeah. - And why are we getting free money? - Yeah, we don't get free money, probably 'cause I'm too stupid to get free money. - No, no, it's the opposite. You're too smart so they wouldn't offer it. - Maybe. I mean, the scenario you're asking me to go into, that happens every single day.

In other words, we're in a really excellent position where we turn down the majority of things that are submitted to us. And I think the thing that's really heartening is what our readers reward is the very thing that we were founded to get. In other words, when I left the New York Times, the Free Press, it was barryweiss.substack.com, and it began as a reactionary product, honestly.

Now it's transformed itself, but it began as me being so pissed that they were ignoring and lying about so much. And those were the stories that I ran sort of headlong into, mostly institutional capture in the areas of law and medicine and education. But just to choose an example, a few hours ago, we sent Leighton Woodhouse, an amazing reporter.

I saw, as everyone here did, that the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis during the BLM protests and rioting burned to the ground and the cops abandoned that station. And I wondered, what do the cops in the 3rd Precinct, what do the small business owners there, what do they think about Tim Walz?

Now that is a natural story that in a normal time, the New York Times would report on immediately when he was chosen, but they didn't. And so then we sent Leighton, and he interviewed two dozen police officers and small business owners, and that is the kind of thing that our readers want.

They want new information, soberly presented and brilliantly written. They want really high quality things. And to me, that's one of the things about building the business has been the most heartening. David Sachs has not said a word. Well, let me, I can actually, let me agree with a few things you said.

So first of all, I agree with you that the mainstream media is not just biased, it's just like all propaganda all the time. And the turning point for me in realizing this was COVID, I think before COVID, I realized that, yeah, the mainstream media is largely consists of liberals, so they're gonna have a liberal bias.

What we saw during COVID was that they were even lying about science, right? It wasn't just politics, it's like everything. You know, we were told that the pandemic was a pandemic of the unvaccinated, even though, even if you got the, what they were calling the vaccine, it didn't actually stop the spread.

You go on and on that, you know, we had to basically do social distancing, except when the riots of 2020 happened, then you're allowed to go outside and actually participate because it's a social justice cause, so therefore the health changes. I mean, it was like on and on. - No church, but you can go to a protest.

- Right, right. - No surfing. - So it was like, for me, it became so obvious that the media is just, again, it goes way beyond bias. You know, it's like, it's just all wrong. Now at the same time, I think that you do raise a good point, which is once you're outside the world of the prestige media, yeah, you are kind of on your own.

- You're naked. - You're on independent platforms. I use X to try and figure out, you know, who I should listen to. And the way I do it is I compare who said what compared to what actually happened. So like, who ended up being right about the issues? And then I will follow them more, and I will de-follow the people who are wrong.

It's really simple. For example, on the issue of Ukraine, the number one quoted source in the mainstream media is a think tank called the Institute for the Study of War. It's basically a neocon-funded think tank who are the relatives of Victoria Nuland, who was the architect of our policy in Ukraine.

Everything they've written over the past two and a half years about Ukraine has been proven wrong. They said that the summer counter-offensive last summer was going to be a giant victory. It ended up being a disaster. - Sorry, these are her relatives you're saying? - Her relatives. And the mainstream media, the New York Times and so on, quotes ISW.

If you go look at the citations, it is the single most cited authority by the mainstream media, and they are consistently wrong. Who was right about the summer counter-offensive? Well, I was, for example. (audience laughing) - While we're handing out credit. - And I certainly didn't need to be paid by the Russians.

I just figured out what the truth was. Okay, J. Cal? So, you know, you bring up these, you know, these stories about Russian influence or whatever. The real influence operation in this country is by the mainstream media. They're the ones who are spreading disinformation about the war in Ukraine and so many other issues on a scale that dwarfs what any of these like handful of podcasters that most people have never heard of can ever hope to accomplish.

So in any event, I agree with you. - When's the foreign policy panel at this conference and can I join it? - Well, yeah, we're going to do. - Meir Scheimer and Sachs. - Jeffrey Sachs. - Meir Scheimer and Sachs. Sachs on Sachs on Meir Scheimer. - Well, look, I would, well, we're having, yeah, John Meir Scheimer and Jeffrey Sachs are speaking tomorrow.

So they're doing a tete-a-tete. But yeah, if you want to stick around and we could have, maybe you and John, we can work that out. - I have a question. - You've got some time right now. - Right now? - You know what I mean? - No, no, go on.

- Last year-- - This would be like a many hours conversation. - Well, last year, one of the most popular things to come out of this was a talk about regulatory capture by Bill Gurley. And you mentioned that the first thing, Bill Gurley, someone-- (audience applauding) - That's cheering for Bill and not regulatory capture.

- Cheering for Bill. - Yeah, he's great. - But you said that when you left the Times, you threw yourself sort of like headfirst into the regulatory capture of the law and medicine and whatnot. What did you learn? - I wouldn't say regulatory capture. I would say ideological capture.

- Ideological capture. Okay, so what did you learn? - Yeah, well, I mean, we've published so much on this. But basically the way in which institutions intended for one purpose have come to serve another one or another god. And in the case of medicine, which I would think would be maybe the most alarming in the law, not actually intending, I mean, the purpose of medicine is to do no harm.

And yet all of a sudden in many hospitals and medical schools across the country, people were being told to do something very different, to mete out care based on race, to shuffle young teenage girls, especially toward irreversible changes in their bodies and things of that nature. So a lot of it comes back to the fundamental theme we've been sort of encircling in this conversation, which is that ideological change that's happened.

And I think just to go back to where we began this conversation, it's like, where did all this come from? I don't think it's possible to understand these changes and like the rebel alliance maybe that's risen up against it without talking about technology and the reality that we, like 20 years ago, 30 years ago, I would have just left the New York Times and just maybe opened a diner and done something completely different.

This would not have been available to me. And it's kind of unbelievable what's been made possible by technology. I mean, I'm not someone who, I've never managed a person in my life. I never raised money in my life. I never imagined I'd be an entrepreneur. I can barely log into Substack.

And now I have a company with 50 full-time employees. It's unbelievable. - That's amazing. Congratulations. - That's founder mode. - That's the real founder mode. - And I would just add that, what the truth is on any particular issue is not always obvious. It's a process to figure it out.

And so we have to have these alternatives in order to debate the issues and then arrive at the truth. And you, again, compare what people said to what actually happens. And you try to figure out who you can trust. And the good news is that today we have these alternatives.

We have alternative media, of which your major part, All in Pod is a major part. And I think these alternatives are building in reaction to basically the corruption of the mainstream media, which I think you're spot on about. - I think that the challenge, at least I'll say for the free press, is there are a lot of people out there who their goal, and they're doing it beautifully, is to make a lot of money really quickly and to be very influential as one man bands.

What we are trying to do is something much more long-term. We are trying in an age where no one trusts institutions anymore and they only trust individuals and influencers to stealthily build an institution. And what that requires is a kind of discipline to give up, and we do. A lot of things that would really stuff our pockets in the short term, not the Russians, but other things, for the sake of building what is to us the thing of the most value, which is trust with the audience.

And they, I believe, see us doing that and see us publishing things that might enrage them, that they might disagree with, that might provoke them. And we think that that's just a part of, that is fundamental to our mission. - That's great. - Ladies and gentlemen, Mary Weiss. - Thank you.

- Thank you very much. (audience applauding)