The Free Press founder, Bari Weiss, recently hosted Peter Thiel on her podcast. While The FP markets itself as as a return to independent and non-partisan real journalism, Julian and Derek point out that's not the case at all—especially when the organization's $15M in funding comes from rightwing and libertarian VCs. Will Weiss factcheck Thiel's misinformation in real-time, as a "non-partisan" outlet should?
Show Notes
Lapdogs Of The "Counter-Elite" Authoritarians
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Hey, everyone.
Welcome to a Conspirituality Brief called the $100 Million Free Press.
That title signifies the valuation of the main topic today, which will be the free press.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Julian Walker.
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We're going to talk today about an interview hosted by Barry Weiss with Peter Thiel.
At the Free Press.
Let's talk about the Free Press first.
They present themselves as a return to independent and nonpartisan real journalism.
The Free Press claims to be the antidote to the madness of our times, an alternative to a corrupt and captured legacy media.
That all sounds good.
Certainly, there are hyper-partisan news outlets.
And there can be bias in reporting and financial incentives that drive sensationalism, that filter perspectives and prop up moneyed interests.
And all of that leaves plenty to be critiqued and reformed.
So far, so good.
But as with so much of the digital information revolution, the free press is worse than what it claims to replace.
This is my argument.
In fact, the interview we were about to discuss perfectly exposes the lie, both of independence and of neutrality.
The madness of our times that Barry Weiss and her staff seek to remedy is not MAGA.
It's not anti-vax conspiracism.
It's not Christian nationalism.
It's not the unprecedented rise of Trump 2.0 after criminal indictments, convictions, and at least a couple strategies to pull off an attempted coup.
I mean, they might mention some of those things in passing, but the real focus is wokeness.
It's how out of touch the Democrat elites are, really.
It's an embrace of the exact undermining of democratic values that Barry Weiss once decried on Bill Maher back in 2018 when she said a lot of people in her Jewish community were praising Trump and sort of joining forces with Trump over his decision to move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, but that they were in a way making a deal with the devil is how she framed it.
Now, so much for nonpartisan neutrality.
Let's talk now about the claim of being independent.
From its inception in 2022, the free press has been heavily funded by the same group of tech billionaires who've backed Trump and J.D. Vance and other far-right candidates like Blake Masters and who have ties to Leonard Leo and the dark money network that has taken over the Supreme Court and has set its sights on gaining more power, explicitly, over media, arts, and culture.
I go into detail on all of the facts and figures and receipts in a Substack piece that we'll link to in the show notes.
But for now, I want to flag that Weiss is also one of the primary founders, this is in 2021, of the so-called University of Austin.
Which, as it turns out, is really, for the moment, a glorified little conservative anti-woke think tank.
And that organization is funded by several of these same conservative billionaires, and Peter Thiel is intimately linked to several of them, either as a mentor, a friend, a business partner, or in one case, the co-author of a book.
And we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into two organizations in which Barry Weiss is at the top of the food chain.
So, in terms of how I think about journalistic independence, I don't think it's anywhere to be found when Barry Weiss sits down with Peter Thiel to talk about the outcome of the 2024 election, nor is some kind of nonpartisan neutrality, which the free press prides itself on, given his politics and the fact that Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is a close friend whose campaign for the Senate Peter Thiel funded.
Hey, Julian, can you believe I had a good interaction on social media about this topic?
I can't.
Taylor Lorenz posted about Barry Weiss on Blue Sky critically, and then I replied something about the donors behind Free Press.
And then someone replied to me, and I do believe it was in good faith, saying, who is funding the Free Press?
And I went to look at his feed and I saw he was sharing Free Press articles.
So all I did was share the donor list, which includes David Sachs and Marc Andreessen putting in $15 million on a $100 million valuation.
And he replied saying, you know, I really like some of their articles, but this really makes me suspicious knowing that these are the people behind it.
And I was like, oh, you know, because I wasn't sarcastic to him, I just replied being like, here's who's behind it.
And hopefully that little degree of skepticism makes him think a little bit differently about it.
But I also understand his perspective that, sure, there might be some good articles on the free press.
They have a range of writers.
Sure.
The idea that they're nonpartisan or neutral journalism, though, I have to say, I believe is bullshit.
If you know, I've done several episodes now on the history of media.
Media has always been partisan, often due to funding.
I mean, some companies have tried.
The New York Times is really the first organization ever that tried to do centrist things.
fair reporting.
So when Barry Weiss, her star really rose from being a New York Times columnist and then saying that it was totally fucked on the inside and now she decries it, even though her wife has written for them as well.
So it gets really muddled.
And that's some of what we're going to talk about today, I think.
But let's look at Peter Thiel for a moment before we go into the interview because he's, unlike Elon Musk, who is his former business partner, He prefers to say behind the scenes.
And he comes out once in a while, he leaves his cavern.
But he was born in West Germany in 1967. His family migrated to the US when he was young.
He went to Stanford, another Stanford here.
He co-founded the Stanford Review, which was a conservative and libertarian newspaper.
This was in 1987. He earned his JD from Stanford Law School in 1992. And then Teal went on to work as a securities lawyer and derivatives trader, though he found his love as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist.
This happened in 1996 when he founded Teal Capital Management.
And two years later, he founded a little company called PayPal, which he sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
And of course, this was alongside people like Elon Musk.
Now, following PayPal, Thiel founded Clarion Capital, which is a global macro hedge fund.
Then he launched Palantir Technologies in 2003. His founder's fund was the first outside investor in Facebook, and this helped him become the 212th richest person on the planet, just edging out Julian, who's at 213. Yeah.
Thiel has an estimated net worth of $11.2 billion.
Now, if you know nothing about politics, you probably know at least one of the consequences of Thiel's political activism, and that's that he secretly funded multiple lawsuits against Gawker Media, most notably the high-profile case involving Hulk Hogan, our next...
Ambassador to nutrition science, whatever the fuck Trump is putting him in.
This was in 2016. So Teal paid $10 million in legal expenses to finance several lawsuits, including Hogan's invasion of privacy suit against Gawker.
Now, is he just buddies with Hogan?
I don't know their relationship, but it was really about retribution because Gawker broke a story in 2007 that Teal is gay and he did not like that.
And it's at least one major reason for his disdain of media, though as we'll hear in the clips today, that's mostly aimed at media that contradicts his own beliefs.
So unlike Elon Musk, Thiel generally likes to remain behind the scenes, as I flagged, and it might be because he's not the most charismatic of speakers.
Oh, understatement, yeah.
So it's ironic that Thiel is among the cohort that rails against the deep state when you can argue he is a leading figure in that deep state.
In 2011, he was granted citizenship in New Zealand after spending 12 days there.
Now, New Zealand law requires that you live in the country for 1,350 days over five years to be able to claim residency.
So how did he become...
A resident?
Well, he's the 212th richest person in the world.
That helps.
He donated a million dollars, New Zealand dollars, in philanthropic donations as well as his extensive political connections and that all helped.
So he claimed he was going to be active in local business and help entrepreneurs.
That was his selling point.
That's how the government ended up giving him residency.
But all that's resulted is him buying up a whole bunch of real estate and then trying to build a doomsday bunker on 477 acres of land.
And the government actually, to their credit, rejected that.
Now, besides that New Zealand scam, Thiel has also been criticized for exploiting Roth IRAs, which is a retirement vehicle.
And he's done it to his advantage for tax-free gains.
In 1999, he invested just $1,700 into his Roth IRA to purchase 1.7 million shares of PayPal at 0.001 cent per share.
That's the company he co-founded and owned, and he's using the IRA to basically exploit a loophole.
So when eBay bought PayPal three years later, his account shot up to $20.5 million.
But then he kept using it in that same fashion to take tax-free gains he made on a $1,700 investment.
So in 2004, he invested $500,000 in Facebook.
As of 2021, his IRA was worth an estimated $5 billion dollars.
So what does this mean?
When he turns 59.5 in 2027, all of that money starting from $1,700 will be his tax-free IRA. Yeah, smart.
teal in a nutshell.
And so I'm sure some of his stands will be just like Trump when he bragged about not paying taxes.
Yeah, smart.
Yeah, exactly.
They say, well, that's just smart.
And these are the same people who are trying to deregulate the hell out of all government agencies right now while lowering taxes for billionaires because apparently being tax-free on $5 billion isn't enough for them.
Alright, let's get into the interview, Julian.
So, Teal says...
Okay, so first of all, it's a long interview.
It's two hours, 20 minutes, and it's a lot to take in.
So, I'm going to set up some of the clips.
I'm going to give you some of the pretext for each clip because he just rambles, just straight up.
He goes all over the place.
So, I've tried to select for...
Well, you did the macro of selecting the moments we want to clip, and then I kind of tried to take out some of the fluff here.
Yeah, yeah.
And let's just say that, to set it up, this is framed as Barry Weiss sitting down for a very serious conversation with Peter Thiel right after the election, a few days after the election.
Let's talk about what happened.
What does this mean in terms of how the Democrats got everything so terribly wrong and why Trump won?
Good.
Thank you for that context.
So Thiel says that there's a sense that there's more elites on the left than the right, but in reality, there's no individuality left whatsoever, his quote, on the left.
Then he talks about the supposed liberal to conservative pipeline that he and others, like he namechecks Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., and Barry Weiss, have gone down.
So here's him.
That's where he starts and here he explains.
At some point, this sort of straitjacket where you're just joining the Borg is not what you signed up when you started as liberals.
I've known Elon since 2000, 24, almost 25 years.
And...
You know, he was never doctrinaire, but for the first 20 years, you know, he was left of center.
You know, Tesla was a clean energy electric vehicle company.
The Republicans were these people who didn't believe in climate change.
And so it was sort of naturally much more comfortable in sort of Deep blue, democratic California.
And then at some point, Elon shifted, and it's overdetermined why he shifted or why you shifted or some of these other people did.
I didn't shift, Peter.
Everyone else just moved.
But everyone feels that way, of course.
And I know these things are overdetermined, but I keep thinking part of it is just this sort of straitjacket is not what you all signed up for.
Well, this intellectual straitjacket where you're not allowed to have ideas, even if you agree with 80%, it's never enough.
You have to be 100%.
Yeah, a scintillating analysis from the nimble-witted Peter Thiel there, just repeating some 2015 culture war notion that there's this incredible authoritarian purity requirement to be anywhere to the left of Donald Trump, and that unless you go along with everything and you conform...
You're going to be cancelled, etc.
And so that would make people turn more toward the right.
And this whole idea that Elon Musk and his transition, shall we say, is overdetermined.
No, I don't think so.
He's actually been very clear about the absolute anguish he's gone through coming to terms with having a transgender child.
And he's gotten hooked by all of the right-wing propaganda that says, the Democrats all want to just trans all the kids, and so they're crazy and they're dangerous, and Trump is somehow normal.
Throughout this conversation, Teal, it just creates, and Weiss goes along, they create caricatures of the left.
I mean, this does happen all across.
If we're not embedded in certain communities, we just believe in stereotypes and we think everyone thinks the same way.
But what he's doing is he's identifying a very particular strain of social justice warrior that mostly exists online that is real and that is a very small minority.
Totally.
Early in this podcast, I had criticized acupuncture due to the clinical studies that don't show efficacy except outside of mostly electric acupuncture, and people were attacking me for being anti-Asian, which is just ridiculous.
You can't...
Go and talk about clinical trials, a lot of them which are done in Asian countries, and then use that.
But that's the sort of leaps that people make because they have this romanticism about different cultures without probably ever having actually experienced them and knowing the diversity within those cultures as well.
So Teal picks this one particular very, very social justice-focused minority that exists and then extrapolates from that and pretends that represents everyone on the left.
Yeah, and this is something that we saw during COVID-19.
It exploded.
This whole sort of idea coming from the right that COVID is another example of quote-unquote left-wing authoritarianism and you're not allowed to ask questions.
And so anyone who was relying on pseudoscience, anyone who was proposing crazy conspiracy theories...
The moment you criticize them, well, what about my free speech?
And what about this sort of epistemic humility and ability to just have conversations about absolutely everything?
You're saying certain points of view are off limits.
No, we're saying certain points of view are not supported by the evidence.
And that's not left-wing authoritarianism.
That's basics.
been deranged.
They go on to talk about elite education.
This is truly one of the strangest moments in the interview because Thiel and Weiss, and you actually hear Weiss kind of push back a little bit, but then also cave to Thiel's ideas here.
But Thiel is the anti-elite.
That's his whole shtick in a lot of ways.
And he starts by talking about the fact that J.D. Vance went to Yale Law School, Trump went to Wharton.
Then he starts running down the list of Democratic leaders over the last 30 years.
And it's a longer clip.
I cut it down a bit, but you'll see where it goes and then we can talk on the other side.
I don't know.
In the 90s, Bill Clinton was Yale Law, Rhodes Scholar.
Obama was Harvard Law.
Hillary Clinton was Yale Law.
They had impressive elite credentials.
And there was a collapse with Biden.
I think in retrospect, we can say it was a transition from smart to dumb or elite to non-elite.
And it was University of Delaware.
And then Kamala was Howard, UC Hastings, law school.
Waltz, even dumber, even more mediocre.
And there is nothing elite left.
And I think, you know, I don't know, Gavin Newsom was University of Santa Clara, not a very elite place at all.
Shapiro was a little bit smarter, but it's like Georgetown Law School, which is still a lot less elite than...
But this is hilarious because you're someone who does not believe...
In the fact that these places should still hold the prestige that they do, you think that they're corrupt and rotten.
So square the paradox that's coming through here.
I can believe they're corrupt and rotten.
And that they still select for very smart people?
And find it amazing that the Democrats no longer believe in them, and that they've come around to my point of view, that there's...
Or maybe that they are so rotten that they are no longer good places to learn how to defend liberalism.
Maybe there are good places for training conservatives.
You know, if you go to Yale Law School and if you're one of, you know, five people in the class of 170 who's still conservative at the end, you'll be pretty good at understanding what's wrong with liberalism.
You'll have thought about it a lot and you'll be a more thoughtful person.
And so it will actually train you well to be a conservative.
Yeah, this is actually, I think, the key moment in the interview because Barry is legitimately surprised.
She's like, wait, wait, wait, hold on a second.
You're saying that being elite is good?
And then this ends up being the title of the episode is that it's the triumph of the counter elite.
So it's like she very quickly figures out how to spin this.
In real time, you can hear it in the interview.
She's like, oh, okay.
And then he switches to his rebel ragtag alliance and using Star Wars metaphors to talk about his group of billionaires and how somehow they're not actually the bad guys who are the Empire.
And yeah, this whole idea, this is the thing that I think is so deeply corrosive.
The idea that because there were some perhaps overly zealous and rigid and intensely vocal social justice activists on campuses going back maybe 10 years that You know, not everyone agreed with and that they gained a certain amount of influence over discourse on the Democrat side, shall we say, for a little while.
And that that therefore means that our most prestigious academic institutions are absolutely rotten and corrupt and no longer able to provide good education.
This is the thing that's running through our entire society.
Crisis of trust in institutions.
And it's not because the institutions have failed.
It's because of this kind of propaganda.
It's also, I mean, first of all, throwing shade at Harris for going to a historically black college and the reasons why someone might want to actually attend that college there and then saying Walls is even dumber.
First of all, we know, I sent you a video that someone showed that if you take out the Trump vote this year for non-college educated white men, Harris wins all the swing states.
She wins.
Almost every state.
Almost every state.
Yeah.
So the fact that they're sitting here talking about elite educations, I had a decision when I was going to college.
I went to Rutgers, which is a state school in New Jersey.
I could go and I had some money saved and then my father helped so that I didn't have school debt.
And at the time...
A four-year education, including housing and meal plans and books, was under $30,000 for all four years.
Now that school is over that per year.
But I didn't have choices.
If I wanted to go to a more elite school, then I would have been in debt for who knows how long after that.
And so just comparing different colleges on rankings like that is just gross.
These are all people who went to school and have tried to make something of themselves with a career.
It just shows you how sure-sighted and how much of an asshole he is.
And they're also career public servants who actually are qualified and have intelligent takes about the world and about the function of government.
And then also this idea that the Democrats have now come around to agreeing with me.
Yeah.
He pulls random stuff out of the air.
He goes on and he starts getting pretty conspiratorial about elections.
And I just want the listener to notice how he conflates real issues here with invented ones.
We always debate the election shenanigans in November of 2020. The far more extraordinary thing was March of 2020. Where Biden comes in fourth place, fifth place in Iowa, New Hampshire, and then somehow gets rammed through South Carolina.
All the other candidates drop off as an extremely non-democratic primary in the Democratic Party in 2020. And then an even less democratic process by which Biden was replaced with Harris.
Yeah, it's amazing how concerned a lot of these people are with the internal workings of the Democratic Party's bureaucracy.
And to say that, the attempt, the second time in, what is it, 200 years that the Capitol has been breached, the fake elector scheme, the number of things, the threatening of the life of Mike Pence, the number of things that Trump did around 2020, pales in comparison to these little things like, well, you didn't do the primary in the way that we think you should.
And also, again, notice the theme here.
He criticizes Harris who went to a historically black college.
When he references South Carolina, he's insinuating that something nefarious happened.
No, it was called Jim Clyburn.
It's well known.
And it was at that point in the primary that Biden started reaching states.
with larger numbers of black voters.
And Clyburn helped push him over and that gave him the momentum he needed.
So to claim that that's something nefarious on the inside, no, that's what happens in a primary when you have to roll out over different states and hit different communities over time.
But again, it just fits into this overarching narrative that there's something going on.
And when I said in the pretext to this real issues with conflated ones.
I think a lot of Democrats were genuinely a little upset with the fact that Harris just kind of got pushed into that role.
There are a lot of factors there, and I actually think that's something debatable.
And we know that the Democratic Party has put its hand on the scale in 2016 and 2020 to push out Bernie Sanders, for example.
Those are real issues.
But he doesn't really counter for nuance and context in these clips.
It's a false equivalency.
It's It's a massive false equivalency.
The real threats to American democracy writ large versus some complaint you have about internal machinations within the Democratic Party's power structure, that never rises to the level of being a threat to democracy.
Right after that clip, he starts referencing the Democratic machine.
Weiss asks him, what do you mean by that?
And then here's his response.
When you say the machine, explain what you mean by that.
Well, it's sort of a question of what is actually going on in the Democratic Party or in this progressive cult that is the left.
And again, maybe a cult is too kind a word because a cult normally has a cult leader.
There's one person who's thinking inside a cult, the cult leader.
And It is, again, it's a machine because there are no individuals.
And it's like, you know, it's like you are just a small cog in the machine and you're destined to become an ever smaller cog in this ever bigger machine.
And that's kind of the vibe of it.
And Ideas don't matter.
Debates don't matter.
Speech doesn't matter.
It's just some kind of fast consensus formation process.
We get to an answer, and then we rigorously enforce it.
Sounds like he's pitching a bad idea for a Netflix sci-fi movie.
They do this throughout.
There are all of these like, oh, let's use this metaphor.
Let's make this reference to movies.
It reminds me of the Dave Rubin school of political analysis, which is very, very low intelligence.
And once again, him referencing the Democratic Party as worse than a cult, do you look in a mirror?
And I know he's not a huge Trump supporter.
He's been critical of him.
But he definitely aligns with the right-wing and libertarian ideologies, and his money is going into those sorts of causes.
But look at the people who are mostly following those causes and the way that they cave to a party that does have a leader.
The idea, again, within the Democratic Party, sure, there were some people we saw who were all like, don't question Biden.
We need to just support him and push him through.
Same thing happened with Harris.
But this, again, was a minority of people.
I saw much more discord among the Democrats and anyone who's left of center in this last election cycle, whereas on the right, you just didn't see it.
They just fell in line, which is the definition of a cult.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's a cult in which there are all these different opinions and all of these fractious agendas and people refusing to support Kamala because she's not left-wing enough on this.
But yeah, they're all marching in lockstep in a straitjacket.
So the next hour of this conversation goes in a lot of directions, including extensive thoughts about Ukraine, Russia, a really weird diversion centered on the differences between World War I and II. Let's Pick it back up when Thiel offers his thoughts on populism and democracy by invoking your favorite philosopher, Julian.
Oh, good.
Let me start in a slightly different way.
And this is plagiarizing sort of an idea that Eric Weinstein likes to popularize a lot.
Oh, boy.
This thing called a Russell conjugate, which is two words that are synonyms but are emotional antonyms.
And so a think and a whistleblower.
Maybe it's the same thing, but a whistleblower is a good person and a think is a bad person.
So they're emotional antonyms, even though they're kind of the same thing, if you think about it.
And I would submit that a Russell conjugate of sorts is populism and democracy.
And democracy is good, populism is bad, and it's democracy when people vote the right way, and it's populism when they vote the wrong way.
And what that tells us is that there's probably a lot in these concepts that needs to be really, really unpacked.
And so, yeah, I, you know...
I share your concerns about populism.
I also have concerns about democracy for the exact same reason.
If everyone just gets to vote on everything...
That's just rampant majoritarianism, and there obviously are all sorts of ways that minority rights get oppressed.
The libertarian version is that wealthy people probably just have their property voted away from them, so you don't have to respect property rights.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Let's see, which of those two are you really concerned about, Peter?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, this is so nuts.
To Barry's credit, okay, this is one of those rare moments where she actually says to him, listen, We've seen the rise of populism all around the world, and populism is associated with right-wing ideologies, and that is often associated with anti-Semitism, which is something Barry Weiss is very focused on.
And so, you know, talk to us about that.
And what does he do?
He says, well, you know, populism is kind of just like a mean word that people use when the candidate they don't like wins the election, because populism and democracy really mean the same thing.
It just depends on your bias, which is this whole, like, Eric Weinstein and Russell conjugate thing Populism is this idea that there are the real, good, ordinary people in the society, and they are being held down and lied to and exploited by the elites.
And we're going to come in and fix that, right?
That's what populism is.
We're going to rise up.
And the common man, the good person, the salt of the earth, the person who has the right kind of blood, these are the people who are going – and that's why it is linked then to nationalism and to anti-Semitism and racism.
So this is very disingenuous of him.
And then I was making funny gestures to you as we were listening because you can hear him tiptoeing and being careful about how he says it.
He says, I'm as concerned about populism as you are, but I'm as concerned about democracy.
And then he goes into this weird, democracy is just majoritarianism and minorities are going to be oppressed, but then so people are going to have their property taken away from them by the tax system.
Peter Thiel...
Is perhaps most infamous for an essay he wrote called The Straussian Moment, in which he talks about politically a move away from democracy and towards more kind of strongman politics.
And he says, I have come to believe that democracy and freedom are incompatible.
And Barry Weiss knows this, if she knows anything about Peter Thiel.
And that's a perfect moment to say, well, you made this interesting statement once.
Would you like to talk about that?
And she doesn't.
She just carries on.
I would love to hear his explanation of what minority rights are being trampled on due to democracy.
I would truly love to hear.
The more democracy increases, the more minorities are oppressed, Derek.
You could make an argument that with a Trump victory, minority rights are about to be trampled on.
I don't think that's what he's thinking though.
I think it's one of those moments where he has to cover his bases and he's like, let me slip this in there because again, property rights, if you go back before America to Europe and colonialism, property rights is basically the bane of existence in a lot of ways.
And it runs throughout every generation of America that in some way the infringement on property rights, whether that was physical real estate or whether it was people as property, has kind of defined the American experience.
We are the counter-elites.
Our main issue is capital gains taxes.
We don't want to pay any.
So let's move to the final clips.
It's one clip that I broke up into because I want to first play one of Barry asking a question about gatekeeping.
I think the arc of her question is good and she brings up good points as well as the pipeline from actually asking credible questions to slipping into conspiracy theories.
And I want listeners to notice if you can identify the two places where she herself becomes a victim of what she seems to be warning against.
And I just want to flag that throughout this entire interview, they've been using Star Wars analogies.
They're this Rebel Alliance, to be clear, and the left is all on the Death Star.
That probably deserves its own episode, but let's get to her question.
There's a debate, I think, happening inside the rebel alliance between people who are maybe on the more radical fringe of it, who say, we don't need institutions, really.
We don't need gatekeepers, or there's something about gatekeeping in and of itself that's corrupting.
And I think you can see this.
Let's just – I'll use a specific example.
Part of this whole, like, make America healthy again, Maha movement, RFK phenomenon, I think is very healthy.
And it's about a skepticism of big pharma and a skepticism, you know, an idea that, you know, why should we go along with the fact that there's chemicals in all of our food?
Why shouldn't we be skeptical of the fact that, you know, 35% or something crazy like that of American kids have prediabetes, these crazy health outcomes, so let's be skeptical.
But then it can tip just so fast into...
Vaccines cause autism territory.
And I guess I wonder how you think about the fine line between skepticism of maybe an elite whose gatekeeping has been too strident or too zealous or too narrow and falling into a rabbit hole or falling maybe off the map where you're in a place where there's sort of No gatekeeping and no institutional authority at all.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, these are not...
Man, you always ask really easy questions, Barry.
I've just been thinking about this one so much because I've watched as...
I've watched the understandable emotional arc where people who were told, you're a conspiracy theorist, only to have their conspiracy, let's say, about the origins of COVID be proven right.
But by that time, they've already fallen off into the deep end where they're trafficking and all kinds of things that seem truly crazy.
Did you catch the two moments, Julianne?
Oh, hell yeah.
Yeah, no, this is where Barry Weiss's laziness and the laziness of so many people who do what she does really shines through because there's this uncritically taking on of right-wing and conspiratorial talking points.
And so what's happening now, and we're going to – I mean, I'm really – I'm despairing about this.
To where, and she's been saying this for a while, to where the claim that, oh, the lab leak hypothesis has been proven to be true.
It hasn't.
Every single examination of the evidence of that has only moved away from that hypothesis as being likely.
In the beginning, it was like, well, maybe.
We don't really know.
Let's look at it.
We've looked at it in the same way that we've looked at vaccines don't cause autism.
She keeps repeating this thing, and then she adds to it this idea that, well, we used to call these people conspiracy theorists, but they turned out to be right.
And so conspiracy theorists are perhaps turning out to be right about a lot of things, and that's just where we're at in the world right now.
And so what does that do?
Then it also normalizes the pseudoscience claims of Maha.
And she lists several of these things as if, well, these are just normal, obvious things that everyone knows, you know, that we should be skeptical of big pharma and that there's chemicals in the food and there's chemicals in the soil and all of that is good.
But then there are these fringe things that are a concern.
Yeah, this is how it's going.
The lab leak, yeah, she treats it as fact.
But even the second one I'm flagging is what you just flagged, the chemicals in the food.
And people who don't know anything about toxicology or chemistry will just hear that and say, yeah, I can't pronounce this ingredient on this package of food.
It must be bad for me.
I have a new podcast coming out in January for my nonprofit.
It's short Science Explainers with Experts.
And I was interviewing Jen Novakovich last night, who is a cosmetic chemist.
Elitist.
You're an elitist.
We were talking about this in terms of parabens, which are used in cosmetics.
It just tracks with vaccines so well.
These are one of the safest and most regulated preservatives that exist, and yet there's this whole paraben-free movement, which actually, and Jen points this out, you don't want microbes growing in your cosmetics because if you have a microbial outbreak in your mascara, you can go blind.
But parabens help to negate that or help so they don't grow.
That's what the role of preservatives are in cosmetics and food and vaccines.
But if you don't know any of these things, you just assume that natural is better.
And so someone like Barry Weiss, who I'm guessing doesn't have a deep background in health, can just repeat that.
And that's how the propaganda spreads.
So let's hear for the final clip here.
This is Thiel responding to our question.
I did cut it up a little.
So he begins by saying he can answer by looking at all sorts of institutions, but he lands on science to respond.
And he claims that the history of science always needs to buffer against either extreme dogmatism and extreme skepticism, which he then unpacks like this.
My feel for it would be that in the 17th and 18th century.
You know, it was probably more anti-dogmatic than anti-skeptical, but it was, you know, some of both.
But if we fast forward to 2024, and you asked scientists, you know, where is science too dogmatic?
And where is science too...
where are people too skeptical?
Where are people being too dogmatic?
And I think there are a whole long list of things where they say there are climate change skeptics, there are vaccine skeptics, there are Darwin skeptics, there are all these people who are too skeptical and the skepticism is undercutting science.
So we're on war of skeptics of all sorts.
And then if you asked the scientists, where are the scientists too dogmatic?
I don't think they could tell you a single thing where science is too dogmatic.
And doesn't that tell you that we have completely lost the sense of balance and we are way too...
What has become science, I'll use air quotes around science, is something that is more dogmatic than the Catholic Church was in the 17th century.
It tells me you have no fucking clue how the scientific process works.
Yeah, he's going to go from like, in the 18th century, we want to make science great again.
We want to go back to the 18th century when people were truly skeptical.
This is boilerplate.
This is something you would hear from Rupert Sheldrake.
This is something you would hear from Deepak Chopra.
This is radically like stupid philosophy of science 101, where you're like, Science is too dogmatic.
It should be more open-minded.
And if it was more open-minded, then people might really listen to what RFK Jr. is trying to say.
And they wouldn't make those silly dogmatic objections like none of the evidence supports a single thing that he says.
And it just shows not only does he not know how the scientific process works, he knows nothing about the history of science.
I'm reading The Ghost Map by Stephen Johnson right now, which is an excellent book about the cholera outbreak in the 19th century in London and the Broad Street Pump.
I knew the story, but he unpacks it in an amazing way in this book.
And both skepticism and dogmatism were rampant for decades on the opposing ideas about whether it was miasma or as Jon Snow eventually discovered, it was in the water supply.
But he goes through all of the different beliefs and all the different testing that was done at the time and everything that people were trying to figure out and assess and weigh as they were trying to stop these outbreaks and to flatten it in the way that, oh, it's probably more of this then and now it's more of this.
It's just pure ignorance.
Yeah, and he's leaning into that same idea that everyone to the left of Trump has this censorious, authoritarian, Dogmatic set of ideas where if you bring up anything that sounds like a conspiracy theory, they're going to shut you down.
And if you try to say this about COVID or that about vaccines, they're going to tell you that that's anti-science and you need to follow the science.
But really, that's just code for their elitist authoritarianism.
And that is complete garbage.
As you said, it's not how the scientific process works.
