A Bari Special Bonus Episode [TEASER]
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Michael. Peter. What do you know about Substack? I know that it's where I go when I'm tired of getting the free race science. Welcome to the first bonus episode of If Books Could Kill. Pleasure to be here. You know, it wasn't a given that we were going to be meeting you today. I don't think that either of us thought that the show was going to be quite so successful. Jesus Christ. When we started talking about like doing this, it was like, okay, we're going to record a

And they're going to release them and we'll get like, I don't know, maybe 10,000 downloads or something. It's going to be a really slow build. And then we released the first episode and we were like number one on iTunes within a couple hours. Yeah. We thought maybe we would eventually launch a Patreon if people liked it. We did not expect it to be so clear that people wanted to hear a little bit more so quickly. Yeah. And I certainly did not.

Expect to be above Rachel Maddow on the Apple podcast charts. You're idle. You're finally surpassing the person you think of the most. Yeah. You know, you're crushing it when you're above her and like true crime podcasts. If we're beating the true crimes, we made it.

All right. So obviously the premise of the show is that we like discuss a book in each regular episode. And for the bonus episodes, I don't think we're trying to lock ourselves into any particular format. But I do think it's often going to be a good opportunity to discuss op eds and think pieces. Yes. The short form versions of airport book.

I guess the idea is like, where are the other engines of American bedumming happening? There's the Times op-ed pages, the Atlantic. But I thought it would be fun to start off the beaten path

In a little place called Substack. Yeah, it's just blogs. It's subscription blogs, right? It's just a platform where writers can post their work. And the only difference between it and the old school blogs is that you can subscribe to certain writers, which allows them to build a

financially viable career off of it. I should also, I guess, disclose at the top that I have a Substack. Conflict of interest here. Are we good to go? But I feel weird about it. Is it okay to do things as long as you feel weird about them? I mean, there's a sort of necessity to Substack because it's like the byproduct of a dying old media ecosystem, right? That just like can't sustain the careers of many journalists.

And it's like, why compete for a tiny handful of positions at traditional outlets? Right. You can go independent, in many cases, make more money and not have to worry about an editor telling you like, hey, that's factually incorrect. Please don't write that. That's the thing. I mean, I guess we'll get into this, but it's like Substack has now become part of like the journalism pipeline. Yeah.

That it used to be you'd kind of work your way up from a local paper and then you'd get a job at like the national paper and then oftentimes you'd kind of move into the opinion section once you had gathered enough expertise from reporting. But Substack totally turns that on its head because once you make it, there's now this extra step.

Where it's like, well, you leave the establishment publication and you charge 100,000 people five bucks a month each to get your thoughts directly. And you, A, earn far more money and B, have no accountability whatsoever to like editing and fact checking standards. There's a dynamic where a lot of people in the aughts were bloggers.

rose to prominence in that format, leveraged it to get positions at big media outlets, and now have returned to independent blogging, but this time with money. Right. And...

the dynamic where many of them have left mainstream media has given a lot of them the chance to present themselves as shunned outsiders speaking truth to power, which has attracted a certain type of journalist to the platform and perhaps none more emblematic of the archetype

than Barry Weiss. Oh, fuck. Yeah. And I'm sorry to do this to you, Michael, but this is sort of a Barry Weiss episode and I'm springing it on you. The funny thing is, as you were saying that, I knew you were sub tweeting somebody, but it could have been like seven specific journalists. That's right. All followed exactly the same path. I do think Barry is the funniest of the left the mainstream media outlet and went to substack

And we can get into why that is true. But first, I'll ask, how familiar are you with Barry Weiss? Dude, I am way too familiar with Barry Weiss. I think that she is the archetypal sub-stacker, but I also think that she is one of the most dangerous people on the platform because...

What she is doing is this like brave truth teller shtick. But most of the stuff that she's publishing is like really far right. And it's not like labeled as such. She's not as controversial of a figure as somebody like Glenn Greenwald or something where it's like, OK, you know what you're getting into to some extent.

Barry Weiss has this institutional imprimatur that gives her a kind of credibility. But I mean, I read her sub stack fairly frequently and it's like it's really fucking dark in there. Yeah. And for those not familiar with her, she's a writer, most prominently a New York Times columnist between 2017 and 2020. She worked the cancel culture beat. Yeah.

Somebody's got to talk about the campuses. Yeah. Writing about how liberals on college campuses were becoming authoritarians. You know, they're the real authoritarians. They're suppressing free speech and so forth. History's borne that out. And there's a little bit of irony and trivia. Any real Barry Weiss head knows as an undergrad at Columbia in the mid aughts.

She led a much reported on campaign against professors who she felt opposed Israel and labeled them racist and was like clearly angling to get them fired. The stuff that she is publicly complaining about and has built a career.

complaining about is stuff that she directly engaged in when she was in college. Yeah. I mean, it's almost as if you're implying that nobody has a content neutral belief about quote unquote cancellations. And it's actually the content of the speech that people think should or should not be punished. Interesting. I wonder where you're going with this. Her sub stack is not just her writing. She treats it like a sort of an outlet where she'll host other writers.

I do want to read off a few examples of the top pieces from the last couple of years on her sub stack. Ooh. Yesterday, I was Levi's brand president. I quit so I could be free. Oh!

I have read this one so many times. He was a world-renowned cancer researcher. Now he's collecting unemployment. Another classic cancellation story that I'm sure is not any more complicated upon further investigation. Clear-cut cancellation. I refuse to stand by while my students are indoctrinated. Nice. My university sacrificed ideas for ideology, so today I quit. Hell yeah. I'm a public school teacher. The kids aren't all right. Ha ha.

I'm noticing a theme, Peter. These are the same fucking pieces over and over again. And these are like the most popular in the history of her subsect. So I've chosen a couple of...

entries. What was your criteria for choosing these before we dive in? I sort of just rolled through it. And at first I was like, you know, I'm just going to talk about the dumbest stuff I can find. But that was overwhelming. Yeah, it's incredible. I tried to pick what I thought were emblematic pieces that talked about themes that the Substack constantly hits on. The first one

The title of the piece is Free Bird on Elon Musk and Twitter. Okay. By Walter Kern. Oh, who I like. Yeah. Well, you're going to put that in the past tense soon. He wrote the novel up in the air. Yes. I always sort of appreciated him because he's like a left-wing dude who lives in Montana. He's somebody with actual on-the-ground experience. He's not parachuting in. And I always appreciated that. But then...

A lot of these like rural whisperer people have become reactionary centrists over the last couple of years. And I'm afraid that's what you're about to tell me. That's basically what's happened. And this is a classic reactionary centrist tick where they're like, look, I'm actually quite a liberal. And they list off like 10 issues where they're a liberal, but they never talk about those issues. They only talk about the issues where they're conservative. And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And these causes that you never promote, it's like these private beliefs that like, oh, I believe in climate change. It's like, well, have you ever written about it? Right. You're not advancing these causes in any material way. And you are advancing the cause of like kids these days bullshit. So he writes this on November 2nd.

So right after Elon Musk took over, but before all of like the related drama starts to unfold, he, of course, is a professional writer, which makes some of the writing, which is quite bad, even more embarrassing. The opening line is, let me tell you about my strange time on Twitter, a so-called social media platform of the early 21st century. So-called? Social media platform is in quotes. Yeah.

He lays out a couple of experiences that he claims to have had on Twitter that shaped his perception of the platform. Oh, my fucking God. And I'm going to send you the first one.