Diabolical Lies - August 17, 2025


Bonus： Bari Weiss Again, Somehow


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

191.54

Word count

1,067

Sentence count

55


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Okay, so first announcement in this bonus app is that I got my lashes tinted and curled.
00:00:04.200 Katie, I have gotten more feedback from this on social media than when I sold my motherfucking book.
00:00:10.380 It is crazy.
00:00:12.820 I love that you were like, so yeah, I will be chasing more of this feeling.
00:00:17.260 It feels good to feel hot and powerful.
00:00:19.340 This just in, guys.
00:00:20.820 Yeah, I forgot how much superficial affirmation can really goose your feathers,
00:00:25.660 which is a metaphor I just made up.
00:00:27.240 um okay we need to be efficient today because we both just took edibles and we're going to be
00:00:33.120 talking about barry weiss again somehow katie we have been talking about barry weiss on and off
00:00:38.520 since the beginning of this podcast can you give me like a quick elevator pitch on what you know
00:00:43.360 about barry weiss and the free press more than i would like to know at this phase of my life
00:00:49.660 Barry Weiss is what I would say the final boss of I'm-a-liberal-butt-style, brave, independent thinking.
00:01:01.020 The Free Press is kind of this outlet that she started when she parlayed a very dramatic exit from being the editor of the op-ed section of the New York Times, just kind of this classic, like, I'm being silenced and censored from my post as the editor at the largest English-speaking newspaper in the world,
00:01:24.200 into a shtick that has quickly been co-opted or commandeered maybe by design
00:01:31.300 by this kind of, like, techno-fascist billionaire class
00:01:34.760 who, like, need a young, nominally liberal lesbian
00:01:39.900 to essentially, like, launder all their bad takes.
00:01:44.940 I really like the way that Gia Tolentino describes her in Trick Mirror,
00:01:49.220 which, like, the first time I read Trick Mirror,
00:01:51.000 I actually didn't know who Barry Weiss was.
00:01:52.460 but I was thinking about it again how I was like I think she kind of talks about this in one of her
00:01:58.260 sections about scamming maybe I think it might be the the essay about scamming yeah Katie I got the
00:02:03.900 quote right fucking here because you and I have the same sources all the time so you can read it
00:02:07.580 read it outright a little quote from our girl Gia all right at times it seems that Weiss's
00:02:14.200 main strategy is to make an argument that's bad enough to attract criticism and then to cherry
00:02:19.100 pick the worst of that criticism into the foundation for another bad argument. Her worldview
00:02:24.960 requires the specter of a vast, angry, inferior mob. Yup. Love her.
00:02:30.300 Yeah.
00:02:30.960 That pretty much nails it. Are you going to introduce me to some more intellectual
00:02:35.140 renegades today?
00:02:37.580 Yeah, we're going to meet a number of berries, which is what I call the people who work at
00:02:42.080 the Free Press. So the Free Press is the number one...
00:02:45.080 Wait, wait, wait. Should we make a preemptive apology to PC?
00:02:48.220 PC. Yeah, yeah, yeah. PC is going to, you know what, buddy? You might just want to turn this
00:02:53.000 one off. I don't know. Yeah, we have one paid subscriber who we both really enjoy engaging
00:02:57.080 with, who's always very respectful, even when they disagree. But they subscribe to the free
00:03:01.600 press. And so we love you, but you might want to turn this one off. It's kind of been an ongoing
00:03:05.260 joke that he thinks that we rag on them too much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should also just say, like,
00:03:10.400 we found out that there might be more men in the audience than we think. So if you're a man and
00:03:14.700 you listen to this podcast, please. What's wrong with you? I actually, when we go live,
00:03:21.040 when we do a live tour, I really want to do men drink free. So that's a promise for you guys to
00:03:25.320 keep going. Don't spit out your Topo Chico again. Okay. So the Free Press is the number one political
00:03:32.080 newsletter on Substack. Right now it earns over a million dollars a month. It is currently
00:03:36.480 reportedly seeking a $200 million sale. In 2022, okay, the Free Press had 250,000 subscribers.
00:03:44.700 So that's good, but not crazy, okay?
00:03:46.540 There are a lot of subscribers on Substack who have that.
00:03:49.260 By 2024, they had a million.
00:03:51.020 So our, like, rough goal today is to understand how that happened,
00:03:54.280 although I got to be honest, this is a bonus up.
00:03:56.240 And we're high. Yeah, we're about to be high.
00:03:58.200 Which is honestly the only state of being that either of us could agree to
00:04:01.360 in order to talk about Barry Weiss for two hours.
00:04:03.180 I also feel like you just have to note that a $200 million valuation
00:04:07.660 on a business that makes $12 million a year is a 16x multiple,
00:04:12.400 which like really really scalable software companies don't get 16x don't sell for 16x
00:04:19.520 multiples so like even that should indicate that there is something i don't want to use the word
00:04:24.580 nefarious but like there is something strange happening here that like those fundamentals
00:04:30.040 just don't make sense right um so barry weiss is basically she has become known as like sort
00:04:36.460 of a billionaire whisperer her glow up is kind of remarkable there are a lot of people who write
00:04:41.520 op-eds full-time about how no one gets to say what they want anymore. But she is the only one.
00:04:46.560 She started doing that, and now she has a media company where everyone talks about how no one
00:04:50.640 gets to say what they want to say anymore. And she also gets paid $100,000 per speaking engagement
00:04:55.360 to also say that no one gets to say what they want to say anymore. So amazingly, in spite of
00:05:00.640 all of that, her beat has remained that free speech is being suppressed and that she is a victim.
00:05:06.400 So, Katie, you mentioned that as women who speak in the public space, we always want to be careful to not come across as like mean girls, even though that moniker is something that probably chases you regardless.
00:05:18.260 But because of that, I wanted to start this by doing a little compliment sandwich.
00:05:21.520 So I'm going to give a compliment at the beginning of this episode, and then I will give a compliment at the end of this episode.
00:05:27.240 And in the middle will be my criticisms, and we'll treat this like kindergarten.
00:05:31.660 So, compliment sandwich. Compliment number one.