Barry Weiss
speaker
976 appearances
13 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Barry Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Why?
One of the things that we cover a lot in the free press and on this show is the way that our institutions that are meant to sort of be in the public interest have betrayed public trust. And the thing that's been described as sort of a crisis of trust in the public is actually a crisis of trustworthiness in those institutions. Like they have betrayed people.
And yet I don't think either of us wants to live in a world in which we have no institution. We have no public health institutions because we do need some shared reality in a country with 330 million people.
Are there, in the same way that you had your five rules for how to get back to better health for those of us that don't want to do the full blueprint, are there things you feel that the CDC and other organizations can be doing to win back the trust that felt so demolished during the pandemic?
But this gets to something I think about almost every day. Do you think individuals can actually replace institutions? Because individuals are flawed. You know, I'm trying to do that in my own way, I guess, in the media.
But the reason I decided not to be a sort of singular, you know, writer in the world, which would have been much more lucrative for me in trying to build a new institution instead, is I felt I am limited. I am flawed. It is much more sort of anti-fragile to create, I guess, a consortium or an institution of lots of journalists who share the same sort of old school journalistic values as me.
And also there's a much greater chance of scale. And frankly, if I get hit by a truck, it continuing. So like what are the limits of it being sort of the Brian Johnson show? And do you think about that?
Okay, let's talk about some of the criticisms you've received briefly. In the new Netflix documentary about you and Blueprint, there are some longevity scientists who are interviewed who say, this is a really neat way to do your life. They're very curious about you. But the idea that this is scientific, they say, is bogus. What do you say to that criticism?
Mm-hmm.
Okay, that's really interesting because if the goal is shifting the cultural norm, how much do you worry about some of the really experimental things that you're doing? In other words, you're saying, I want people to watch what I'm doing so they imitate it in the same way they once imitated sleeping under the desk. Right.
So you do things, for example, like taking rapamycin, this organ transplant drug, please correct me if I'm wrong, that suppresses your immune system. You decided to stop because of the harsh side effects of it that you said didn't justify the benefits. Knowing that you're trying to be sort of a beacon for people to ask themselves, wait, I can live a different life.
How does that affect your decision of whether or not to do or not do certain things and whether or not to, you've been very transparent, to not share all of them given the risk of some of the things you might personally want to try?
iced coffee and I know that you're going to judge that.
It's a Yeti. It's a Yeti full of microplastics probably.
The New York Times asked you at one point if you were building a religion and you said yes. Others have described the Don't Die movement as a cult. What's the difference between a cult and a religion if there is one? And what would the world look like if we all signed up for the Don't Die, I'll call it a movement?
We're having a crisis of meaning in the West right now, as you know, that's making a lot of people depressed, a lot of people addicted to things, a lot of people amazingly lonely. How does this solve it?
When people say, life wouldn't have meaning if we didn't die, is that just a cope?
Does it hurt you when people say that about you?
Are you a disagreeable person by nature?
Do you think that you're going to die?
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