Russell chats to Bari Weiss, founder of ‘The Free Press’, host of the ‘Honestly’ podcast, former Twitter Files journalist and New York Times editor about the future of AI; whether it’s the end of the world, or the dawn of a new one? And the murky world of misinformation. Check out The Free Press: https://www.thefp.comFor a bit more from us join our Stay Free Community here:https://russellbrand.locals.com/ Come to my festival COMMUNITY - https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/ NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
You are awakening and you are wonderful in spite of everything, in spite of it all.
Look at you, continuing to provide, continuing to connect, continuing to awaken.
It's going to be a great show.
If you are watching this on YouTube or Elon Musk's Citadel of Home Trooves, 80% of you, you're Let's have a look at the Google Dude.
Let's have a look at this.
and indeed the vast majority of the show by joining us on Rumble or even better go deeper take a
Deeper dive to the very very depths right down in locals There's a red button on your screen if you're watching us
down run when you can join our community nature's child Let's have a look at the Google dude. Let's have a look at
this. Let's have a let's see how the mainstream media cover this thing
This morning as companies race to integrate artificial intelligence into our everyday lives one man behind that
technology has resigned from Google after more than a decade.
Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, says he stepped down.
I don't want to personify it.
Right.
Don't give it a godparent.
No.
Like in the event that its actual parent dies.
Do you think that he wanted that label or do you think it's Like, how many people do it?
Like, do they approach him out Google and go, Godfather, hello?
I don't think he wants it.
I mean, he's quit his job.
You come to me on my calculator's wedding day and you do not offer respect and you don't think to call me Godfather.
Yeah, I don't know if it's... A lot of nicknames.
People work hard for a nickname, don't they?
A lot of people you can tell really want a nickname to stick.
They do, yeah.
I wonder if old Geoffrey Hinton likes being called Godfather.
It's difficult to know.
Look, really what interests me is... Look, let's not pretend that a king isn't going to get a shiny new hat this weekend.
Here we are, worrying about AI.
Well, it's a bit worrying.
I mean, Elon Musk is worrying about it as well.
Elon Musk is a bag of nerves.
He's always worried about something.
Is that what it is?
Something he's worried about?
He gets jittery, doesn't he?
Oh no, this Twitter, that's not very well run.
We're about to sack half the people that work here.
Eighty percent.
Eighty percent, right.
You're not going to use the job.
You are not going to use it.
You are going to use, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, you are, 80% eh?
Maybe I could do me, a cuddly German shepherd, dear old loyal Dan with his bizarre ankles.
But no, if you have a look at that gallery there, that's a neat, lean, sparse team.
If you defrost that window, have a look.
I can't, you couldn't do without They're a lovely little bunch.
We're a bit lean and light today.
Often we are on Friday show because we want to be able to focus on Barry Weiss.
We want to be able to focus on the coronation.
What's funny when they talk about the coronation, let's have a look at some of the headlines, is they talk as if like there's ways of making it more sensible and practical.
Look at this, King Charles to do a way of outdated silk stockings and breeches for coronation.
One doesn't need all these outdated bridges.
A simple coronation, a simple modern coronation for a modern world.
The whole idea is you've been anointed by God to be the figurehead of a nation.
And all of the, however you shake this down, the wealth of the royal family is accumulated through plunder over centuries.
Yeah, he's not losing those stockings for budgetary reasons, is he?
Let's get rid of these expensive stockings!
And we all remember that phone call and some of the things he wished he was, didn't he?
Yeah.
He wanted to be a sanitary product, a pair of pants.
Oh, of course, yeah.
Didn't he?
He said he wanted to be all sorts of things.
I knew you'd remember those details.
I think about that sometimes.
I'll tell you what you want to have a look on, and this is something you literally have to be careful about talking about on YouTube, because we're going to be giving you some of the best secrets about the Royals and some of the best conspiracies.
If you watch that documentary, bizarrely made by Keith Allen, the actor, you might not be able to find it on YouTube, you definitely better find it on Rumble.
If you have a look at Rumble, the one about Diana, what's it called?
Unlawful killing.
Diana.
Ooh, have a little look at that.
Was it on the telly?
No, mate.
No.
Like Keith Allen, what's amazing about it is Keith Allen, the actor, Lily Allen's dad, just made it himself.
So what, did you have it on a legal VHS or something?
You know sometimes when you look at a Russian version of YouTube and it's all Russian mad letters, you don't know what they are.
They're like spaceships and noughts and crosses and things like that.
I watched it on... Nice reductive...
Do you know Russia?
Interpretation of the Russian language?
Spaceships, Pac-Man, TV aerial ones, one that looks like a fish.
That's their culture.
It's going to a war with Russia.
It's an easy business.
Apparently Russia aren't hard anymore.
They don't need to worry about provoking Russia.
What are they going to do?
Well, use their considerable military might to endlessly respond and grind down NATO forces.
Well, let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments.
You can join us, you can join us on locals and join the chat, participate in this stuff with a delightful community wherever you're from in the world.
Certainly don't mean to make a mockery of the set of semaphores that the Russian people use to communicate with.
No, I think people are I think anyone would have understood what you meant by that.
Just mucking about.
But anyway, so you found it on, you think, some kind of Russian website.
Russian YouTube.
Yeah.
It's pretty interesting.
A lot of stuff went on.
Let me know what you think about that.
I don't think I would like to get into the potentially murky territory around the sad and tragic death of Diana, but Keith Allen, don't mind, so have a look at his documentary.
Wow.
Yeah, it's worth having a look at.
I heartily recommend it, even though...
Did you don't remember in the old days used to just like look at curiosities and things that are a bit peculiar it's like you know oh it's before you had to have a sort of a banal diet of pre-chewed slop like some gray ready brick diet like you're not allowed any spice or flavor I used to be able to look at things and go, well, I think that's a bit mad.
I don't really agree with that.
Quite a peculiar and wonderful theory, but I'm not sure that's actually true.
Let's have a look at some of that evidence.
You used to be able to decide for yourself.
The whole of censorship is underwritten by the idea that we're too bloody stupid to understand anything, and perhaps to a degree we are, because we're willing to put up with expensive ceremonies to anoint further royalty.
Let's face it, the death of Queen Elizabeth II meant that this is time for a radical appraisal and review of whether or not we Hello!
Joining me now is Barry Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press, former Twitter Files journalist and New York Times editor.
Thanks for joining us today, Barry.
It's great to see you on the screen I'm looking at.
Great to see you too, Russell.
What's going on over there?
What are you up to?
What am I up to?
Raising a baby, starting a company, you know, trying to do media the right way.
I presume you're also having a mental breakdown if you're trying to simultaneously start a company and raise a baby.
How old's your baby?
She's seven and a half months, yeah.
I mean, it's a lot.
A lot going on at one time.
What about the sleep and everything, mate?
I mean, I don't look my best, but we only live one life.
When else are we going to do it?
And I should add, by the way, that building the company alongside some of my close friends and also my wife, a journalist that I met at the New York Times, who also left to do this with me.
So there's a lot going on.
There's not really like a work-life balance, I would say, in my life, Russell.
Doesn't sound like there's very much balance.
I suppose at least if both of you are doing nights, then I suppose that's something.
But I won't spend any more time poring over your private business.
Sleep train the baby.
She sleeps the entire night.
I don't understand people that don't choose to do that.
Nor do I!
I don't know what you're using, Benadryl?
Hey Barry, I wanted to ask you some questions about the news but afterwards I'd like to talk to you about how you're convincing your daughter to sleep that long.
Mate, I wanted to ask about firstly a little bit about That dude quitting Google and everything, Geoffrey Hinton, and your conversation with him, and whether you learned anything more detailed about his concerns around AI.
Is it kind of an existential threat?
A pragmatic threat?
Economics?
Is it to do with jobs?
Is it to do with some sci-fi type end of the world scenario?
What did you glean from that, Barry?
The guy that left Google on the podcast.
I had on Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which is the company that runs ChachiBT.
And the title of the podcast, I think, summarizes where a lot of people are thinking this goes.
You know, is AI the end of the world or is it the dawn of a new one?
There's a tremendous amount of hyperbole going on around this new technology.
Some are comparing it to fire.
That's Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google.
Others are comparing it to agriculture, the wheel, electricity, Gutenberg Press, you name it.
Here's what I know.
In the past decade, Russell, as you've surely watched, crypto is the thing that has been absolutely hyped.
This was the thing that was going to get rid of state currency.
It was going to get rid of the dollar bill.
It was going to change the world.
It was going to democratize money.
But my wife was just in Austin at a crypto conference, and you still pay for the swag in dollar bills.
In other words, people are still sort of casting about for the use case of the thing that was meant to change the world as we know it.
Think about ChatGPT in comparison.
That came out basically a week ago.
Something like a few months ago, ChatGPT 4 was unveiled.
100 million people are using that app every day, and it's already changing the way that people work, the way they do research, the way they cheat on tests in college.
News organizations have announced that they're getting rid of certain jobs because they're already outsourcing them to this technology.
So, It's already proven its use, which is extremely exciting and also extremely unnerving.
There's an economist that I love named Tyler Cowen who writes this incredible blog, Marginal Revolution, if your listeners aren't aware of it.
And he had this incredibly succinct, excellent post about this, where he basically says, As much as we have believed that the internet was a seismic technological revolution, the truth is, is that most of us that are alive, save very, very old people that lived through, you know, World War II and the advent of nuclear weapons, we really haven't lived through a fundamental technological revolution.
We haven't lived through what he calls moving history, where we're actually feeling like the tectonic plates shift.
This is that thing.
And as human beings who are only able to think so far into the future, it's really scary.
But probably the cavemen who watched their neighbor invent fire felt the same way.
They probably thought, holy shit, this thing allows us to cook food and stay warm, but also holy shit, someone can come and burn our whole village to the ground.
In other words, every single time this new technology comes into being, there's a kind of moral panic around it.
Right?
There's this really amazing newsletter called Pessimist Archive and they keep track of the panics that are the reaction to new technology.
I read one the other day where it was like, it was a poem that they unearthed from 250 BC, freaking out about the sundial, right?
There's articles about, you know, the extinction of the slide rule and how the calculator is going to ruin education forever for kids.
For people that were living in 1600s in Central Europe, the printing press Probably meant to them war and bloodshed.
To us it meant the advent of the industrial revolution and the scientific revolution.
So my feeling about this new technology, sorry to go on about this, I'm really excited about it because I feel like it's huge, is it's not a question of yes or no.
It's going to happen.
The question is, who is going to do it and what are the guardrails going to be around it?
And those, I think, are the real pressing questions that some of the smartest people in the world, way smarter than me, are grappling with right now.
One of them being the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman.
It's interesting because when you talk about regulation with something like this it can sometimes seem to be at odds with where we might stand elsewhere on the subject of censorship.
I've heard people say that if this isn't like that Elon Musk, for example, said this ought
to be regulated and it's not regulated.
And now I know that when people talk about regulation elsewhere within social media,
the problem ends up being that it's not about regulation of monopolies, it's regulation
of it ends up being sensitive of free speech, essentially.
I'm fascinated, Barry, to hear you say that this is a seismic shift and is epochal and
that you don't think that everyone having a phone in their pocket represents that or
the ability to be contacted.
You think this is beyond that because this is beyond utility because it can actually
transform it's not like, well, it's just a tool we use.
It can become a tool that uses us.
Is this what you're saying?
I mean, that is what I'm increasingly convinced by.
Don't get me wrong.
I am not a futurist.
I am not a technologist.
When everyone was freaking out about Bitcoin and crypto in the beginning of the pandemic, I went and bought $10,000 and then promptly lost my password forever, thus losing the $10,000.
I'm not a sophisticated technologist.
What I know is having spent a little bit of time with chat GPT, it is eerie the way that it can imitate Human intelligence.
And do I...
Far be it for me to suggest that the phone in my pocket that contains more computing power than, you know, what sent rockets to the moon.
I mean, of course I'm blown away by it.
I'm just saying that this thing, in its very, very short few months, has already proven to be extraordinarily transformative.
And so I'm not saying that the internet and the fact that we're talking through a screen right now, and I'm in LA and you're in the UK, it's unbelievable.
I'm just suggesting that this has the ability to be perhaps even more unbelievable, and people that are more sophisticated than me are suggesting so.
And so I think it's incumbent upon all of us to learn about it.
Now, as for the question of regulation and censorship, that really, really scares me.
I mean, go in there and ask—other people have done this, but go in there and type something controversial into chat, GBT.
Type in, tell me about Mao.
Type in, tell me about Jordan Peterson.
You'll immediately see that because, you know, because all technology is ultimately created by human beings, that it has biases.
And unlike Twitter, right, where we could go into the archive, because Elon
Musk allowed journalists into the archive, of course, through the Twitter files, we could
see the choices they were making.
This thing is built on a text corpus of billions and billions of texts, articles, books, documents,
lyrics. It's much harder, I think it's going to be much harder, to sort of ascertain the biases,
because you're not like, you know, it's just different. The scale of it is completely different.
I think that's really worrisome. The other thing that's worrisome, as we saw in the Twitter files,
the amazing Twitter files hearings, where Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger went before
Congress, and we saw, you know, it was a lot of different things being done, and it was a lot of
an incredible display, let's say, by some American politicians who didn't know what Substack was,
who asked if me and Matt and Schellenberger were in a threesome.
I mean, it was incredible.
Like, do we really trust the people who don't know what Substack is to regulate, you know,
chat GBT and open AI? Like, I don't even know if they know what a modem is or know how the
internet works.
And so that I think is really worrisome to me.
And so there are people who are suggesting other kinds of, you know, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, suggests that maybe he should be the head ultimately of OpenAI.
Maybe that's a position that should be democratically elected because that's how significant and important it will be.
Um, so, you know, the jury's out, but when I look at the people who are in Washington and their average age, frankly, the idea of them regulating this technology is worrisome to me.
Yeah, that is cause for concern.
When we have in the media landscape cozy relationships as evidence between the recent White House correspondents' dinner and then adversarial, aggressive, punitive relationships as the aforementioned Tybee Schellenberger What do you think this tells us about the shifting landscape between the media and the powerful?
In particular, I'm noting Matt Taibbi's IRS visit, the threat with jail for perjury or whatever.
How do you feel Barry operating in a comparable space and both of you know Matt Taibbi being a peer and indeed colleague of yours?
I think it is the job of journalists to hold power to account and do that even when it's politically inconvenient for your side.
You know, I think that Nat Taibbi, Michael Schellenberger, me, we're never going to be invited to the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
And I'm okay with that.
Because when I became a journalist, I didn't do it for the money.
I didn't do it for the accolades, and I didn't do it so that I could, you know, drink champagne next to powerful people.
I did it because it's a vocation that allows you to pursue your curiosity and in which you get, you know, a salary to take your flashlight and look into the darkest corners, into the kind of corners that the powers that be don't want you to look.
So, you know, when I see the IRS, Seemingly being weaponized against someone like Matt Taibbi.
I think that that is something that every single journalist in this country, whether they work for an independent site, whether they write for a substack, whether they work at the Washington Post or the New York Times, should be absolutely up in arms about that.
And I think it tells you something really concerning about the state of the legacy press in this country that, you know, the Wall Street Journal thankfully had an editorial, but there should have been editorials about that visit in every single newspaper across the West, in my view.
Why isn't Biden likely to conduct primary debates?
I think many of us would be interested to hear debates between, for example, Robert F. Kennedy and Biden, and Marianne Williamson's doing pretty well also.
Why is the Democrat Party becoming so censorial, so afraid of conversation?
What's going on, Barry?
What do you think?
I mean, look, tells you a lot about the popularity of Joe Biden among voters that Marianne Williamson is pulling at something like nine or 10% and RFK Jr.
that who announced like two weeks ago, I think, is pulling at something like 20% already.
Who knows what will happen when Gavin Newsom, California governor, maybe is reportedly maybe going to get to the race at some point.
People Realize that Joe Biden, though he won the last election, is getting slipped the questions in press conferences to sort of be prepped.
He's someone that they're sort of I don't want to say hiding, but trying to protect from the probing questions of the press as much as possible.
Why?
Why isn't he doing a debate?
Well, for all of those reasons.
How do you think he would fare in a debate against Marianne Williamson, RFK, and to say nothing of other people that might join the race?
So essentially, you have someone in a position of power that's being protected.
You have a relationship between the mainstream press and the government that is consensual, as we saw with a recent report around the Pentagon Papers Part 2, that the content of the leaks was ignored.
You had the ludicrous spectacle of Biden saying that we must protect the free press and that
journalism is not a crime while Assange is still away in a maximum security prison.
And adding to this, this potentially unprecedented tool that we were previously discussing, which
will ultimately, I suppose, end up in the hands of the powerful.
And it seems based on what you're saying about the inflections that AI already bears
culturally that it's a system, and of course we know from the Twitter files what the relationship
is between big tech and the Democrat party in particular, of course, I'm sure they would
be flexible depending on which of those two parties were in power.
It seems that the potential to govern the population is about to become, I would say, what do I want to say, sort of overwhelming.
Overwhelming.
With these new tools, it's possible that freedom could be further eroded.
So, really, at a point where we ought be insisting on new independent movements, a point where we should be insisting on transparency, there is more surveillance, militarization of the police, more protest laws, an inability to conduct public discourse by the most powerful person in the world.
What do you imagine is most immediately required, Barry?
What I think is most immediately required and what I see already happening, and I guess this is the silver lining, is, you know, look at both of us in this moment right now.
I don't even know how big your audience is at this point.
It's astronomical.
Here I am, thinking that I was going to be, you know, I spent my career in the legacy press, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, left the New York Times in 2020 for reasons maybe we can discuss, had no plan, had never, I barely had a credit card, you know, to say nothing of being an entrepreneur.
That was like the furthest thing from my mind.
And now I'm building a media company and I have 20 people working with me.
So the great news is that the technological revolution we're living through, yes, can be used in extraordinarily oppressive ways, and it can also be democratizing.
It's like all technology.
It's neutral.
It can be used for good or bad, like fire, like the printing press, like the iPhones in our pocket, right?
And so while I think we should be concerned, and while I think this technology, AI, as we were talking about before, has the potential to be the big one, so to speak. I think
that, you know, if the past is prelude, it can be used in both ways. And so am I worried that you
can go right now and create a conversation between the two of us, as someone did between Joe Rogan and
Sam Altman, and created an episode of the Joe Rogan experience that looked kind of like them and
sounded kind of like them? Yeah, that really worries me when I think about actual disinformation,
not what people want to believe is disinformation. Very concerning to me. But there's also
incredible things that are going to come from it. So this is something that I'm watching
more as a journalist, wanting to track it, wanting to understand it, wanting to understand who the
players are.
What their motivations are.
Did the people that signed that letter, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak and others, calling for a six-month pause in the advent of increased AI capabilities beyond chat GPT.
Did they sign that letter because they're pure of heart?
Did they sign that letter because they want to catch up to the competition?
What are the motivations?
What are driving people?
And by the way, what's driving other countries?
What's driving China?
Where are they in terms of AI capabilities?
These are the kind of questions that I think are going to be driving the next years of our life, the next years of stories, and it's one that I'm following incredibly, incredibly closely as a journalist above anything else.
Barry, I'm so grateful to you for asking these questions.
I mean, I admire incredibly what you've done and the organization that you are evidently building, not to mention your ability, along with your wife, to expertly manage this child through the night in ways that seem to me to be unprecedented.
I think what's interesting also about what you're saying is that you are journaling what's happening but increasingly I think it's likely that to become a legitimate journalist is to become a de facto activist and perhaps this is something that began with the Greenwald and Assange and certainly it seems likely due to the ongoing increase of censorship to be a necessity that if you're going to tell the truth you are an enemy of the powerful.
So I'm glad that we at least have an allegiance.
Of course, I'll give you the chance to respond.
Yeah, I think.
Look, I'm old school.
I think the job of a journalist, there are different roles in the world, right?
There's the job of the advocate.
There's the job of the columnist.
There's the job of the like all there's there's room for activists.
There's room for all of these things.
I think journalism I think the way to do journalism that maintains integrity and maintains the trust of people has to hew to sort of old school rules that frankly a lot of the legacy press has turned their back on, right?
The thing that used to happen at the New York Times was very clear.
You know, if a certain op-ed, and I was an op-ed editor, editor there for years and then also wrote my own columns,
if an op-ed sort of hewed to the ideological narrative, if an op-ed argued that
Donald Trump was a moral monster that had to be taken down, if an op-ed
claimed that, you know, Joe Biden was the savior of the world, we could go on and on
and on, you know what the arguments are. It would sort of sail into the paper.
And arguments that contradicted that, arguments that complicated it.
Those were ones that sort of were subjected to a much, much, much more rigorous test.
In other words, and I think that that was to the detriment of the audience to the reader.
And I think that when you think about the The old manifesto of the New York Times, the idea of all the news that's fit to print, and the way that it sort of has transformed, and many other papers as well, to all the news that fits the narrative.
I just think that there is a huge, wide-open space for people that are actually interested in treating readers like adults.
that are actually interested in treating listeners as sophisticated people that can make their own decisions, not just shoving propaganda down their throat.
And so that's what we're about at The Free Press.
We're about telling honest stories.
We're about, you know, telling the truth about the world as it actually is, not as we wish it to be.
And we put a special emphasis on stories that are either ignored or misconstrued by the mainstream press.
And God knows there are a lot of those these days.
Barry, thank you so much.
That sounds like a fantastic endeavour and I'm grateful to you for undertaking it.
You can learn more from Barry Weiss by reading the Free Press, listening to her podcast Honestly, reading her book, How to Fight Antisemitism.
She's an incredibly creative person!
She doesn't stop!
This is the only liquid that Barry will consume throughout the live-long day.
Barry, thanks for joining us and thanks for your fantastic contribution.
Thanks for having me, Russell.
Next week on Rumble, our special guest will include presidential candidate RFK Jr.
We thought long and hard about the potential blowback and trouble that may ensue from this booking, but we gotta give RFK the 20% now.
Legit candidate.
Joe Biden may not want to debate him.
People may not want to admit that his book about Charles Anthony Fauci was an incredible success.
But we want to hear from RFK.
You want to hear from RFK.
He's coming next week.
We've got international security expert Max Abrams coming on.
We've got a whole A variety of it.
Look at him just looking off wistfully.
Oh, national security.
It's a bloody nightmare, he seems to be saying, almost to himself as much as anything else.
Thank you so much for joining us.
We've got a fantastic show.
Oh no, this is next week now, isn't it?
Yeah, that's it for the week.
We can't work it out in Sundays, can we, Gal?
Well, no, we can't.
We must.
Maybe to prepare the forthcoming week, but only for that.
All right, guys.
Thank you so much for joining us for another fantastic week of freedom.
Wow.
Look at what we've created on Rumble.
Isn't it extraordinary?
It's wonderful.
What began from a simple dream by a narcissist.
We're not even saying who that is.
It could be me.
No, it's me.
It could be you.
You are that sweet narcissist.
I'm really enjoying that shirt.
Oh, thank you.
Absolutely fantastic.
Bring him up the credits a little bit.
Have you noticed how low down the credits Gareth is?
He's about 9th or 10th.
There's a chat GPT bots are higher up the credits than him.
Mind you, they deserve it, don't they?
Join us next week on Rumble.
Not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
