Tech vs. Media: Balaji Srinivasan on the Battle Shaping Our Future

We want to build Googles and Facebooks, AI and giant companies, giant cryptocurrencies, and now Internet communities. What they want to do is exert authority over others. For them, the best thing they can do is put a man out of work. For us, the best thing we can do is put a man on the moon.

Another day, another journo hit piece. We were talking offline about Marc and Ben's “Evolution of Media” episode. You and I have been friends and collaborators for the last 10 years, and one of the topics we've spent a lot of time talking about is the media: the state of the media, what needs to be fixed about the media, and how to do that. With your leadership, we've actually been a part of that trend and that evolution, so I wanted to take the opportunity to talk with you, reflect on that evolution, and talk about where we still need to go.

Yeah. Well, okay, so there's so much I can say on this. I'm going to show 1 graph, of course.

It wouldn't be a Balaji podcast if we didn't start with a graph.

Yes, exactly. This shows that newspaper revenue rose to about $70 billion in 2000. Right after the financial crisis, it suddenly collapsed over the course of 4 or 5 years, and Google went vertical and Facebook went vertical, right? The thing about this is, this was the internet disrupting blue America.

Okay, there's a similar graph for manufacturing that shows China disrupting red America at almost exactly the same time. Just to focus on this one for a second, once you see the internet disrupting blue America, because media is a core thing for them, this is actually what led to wokeness. You've heard the saying, “Go woke, go broke,” right?

Yeah.

But in their case, it was actually, “Go broke, go woke.”

Okay. Not my original coinage, but applied to this graph, it's relatively original, because wokeness was what happened: They just fell off a cliff like this. From 2008 to 2012, tech was just part of the Democratic Party. Steve Jobs was there, and there was actually this article from 2012 in The Atlantic, “The Nerds Go Marching In,” about tech helping to reelect Obama, and Facebook was helping.

Yeah, exactly. All that stuff was solidly on the Democratic side up until 2012. After the 2012 election, right after Obama's inauguration, you can date it to right after that, because even in 2012, New York media and so on were saying, “There's no such thing as a programmer.” You can Google that article. In 2012, tech was part of the coalition, so there was no reason to attack them. After the inauguration in 2013—and it was literally that spring and summer—the knives came out and the media started attacking tech. There are these articles, like “Would You Just Look at All These Rich People?” in Slate, before they got radicalized, saying that it's actually bad to attack people just for the sake of being rich. It was before all media had updated to “Tech is our enemy now,” right?

Unless you understand the economics of it, I don't think one can understand why the journos suddenly went crazy. The thing is, we're now in 2025. It is now 17 years after the collapse in media revenue. Somebody who was born then, who is 18 years old, is playing multiplayer video games like Quake or whatever—all new stuff, MOBAs. You can get spawned into the middle of something where everybody's shooting at each other, right? That's what the Gen Z kid is today.

For a kid who's just getting warped into the arena—Luke Farritor, for example.

Yeah, exactly.

That's right. They're just warped in like this. It's like that meme of the guy walking into the apartment after he's been gone for 10 minutes, and everything's on fire or whatever, right?

Okay. From the perspective of someone who's 18 years old, the war with the journos has basically been a feature of their entire existence.

But it actually wasn't like that, because in the 1990s and 2000s, the journos were secure enough in their economic position. You could write 4 or 6 articles for Time magazine a year, get paid a nice salary, and travel around the world. They didn't feel the need to kill all the time. Did they kill? Yes, they killed. It's funny, because the way I'm putting it, Nellie Bowles actually did a piece for Bari Weiss a few years ago. It's like “Learning How Not to Kill.”

Well, it's funny because she's one of the few converts. She made the transition. She was able to get to the other side.

When you look at that, or you look at another one by Hamilton Nolan at CJR, it's basically, “The powerful don't need the media. Journalism, particularly at its highest level, is about raw power.”

See, they admit it, right? Go ahead.

I remember you had this old quote by—was it some journalist?—who said that our profession, we know our profession is kind of immoral. That's an old quote.

Oh, yeah. That's actually a great one also. Ready? This is a book report. Anybody who has read this book cannot look at the journos the same way. Janet Malcolm talks about this in the great book The Journalist and the Murderer, and its opening line is this famous thing:

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man praying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust, and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings on. So the consenting subject of a piece of non-fiction writing learns when the article or book appears his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and the public's right to know. The least talented talk about art. The seamless murmur about earning a living. Okay. And now this is actually a very important thing because this is, by the way, rated one of the top 100 non-fiction books of the 20th century by the Modern Library. This is like Wolf of Wall Street, where there are some finance guys who incorrectly say, “We are actually boiler-room pumpers,” or whatever, right? The Wolf of Wall Street guy. This is like that for the journos. They're like, “Yeah, actually, the journos are defamers, and it's just like a mercenary thing,” or whatever. So this is a great book to read. There's another book you should also read, The Great Lady Winged by Ashley Rensburg. Okay, so those prerequisites out of the way, let's talk about the specifics. First is—there are like 10 or 15 things I can say. Let me go point by point. The first is: what is the reason for the hostility between media and tech? It's actually that the master framework on the whole thing is state versus network. This is basically from my book, The Network State. I think it's a useful frame. For example, Elon versus mainstream media is network versus state; social media versus mainstream media is network versus state; or when you look at this whole article that was attacking Luke Farritor, it's like: why did this programmer attack the institutions of the U.S. government? Network versus state. This tech programmer attacking the state institutions, right? A state-aligned institution is attacking our tech people. Once you apply that framework, it applies to everything. For example, SpaceX is network, NASA is state. Uber is a network. Taxi medallions are the state. Bitcoin is a network, the Fed is the state, and so on and so forth, right? Those are two different organizing principles for how you think about the world. Basically, the state is someone should pass a law, and the network is someone should write some code. The state is everybody who is directly or indirectly paid by essentially either the U.S. government or a government more generally, and the network is all those people who are directly or indirectly monetized and make their living on the network. So when someone goes from NYT to Substack, they're moving from state to network, right? And now the network is actually taking parts of the state, where all these tech guys are getting into government, getting into politics, getting into media, getting into finance, getting into the traditional niches that were for the state. That's why they're so mad, because their share of the global pie and the local and American pie is shrinking, and the network's pie is expanding, right? And we're getting into—they're like, stay in your lane. Why are they saying that? They're like, you should just be hitting keys on computers and being a nerd and making LED light bulbs that flash. You should not be rewriting the codebase of how the world works, right? And as I'll get to, there's a deep question of legitimacy, right? The network is new money. The state is old money, right? And when I say the state, by the way, there's the literal state in the sense of the U.S. government, and there's the unelected institutions that surround the U.S. government in a ring that give it instruction. For example, the newspapers tell the state what to do. The universities tell the state what to do. The philanthropies tell the state what to do, and so on and so forth, right? But they’re also, in turn, funded by the state. Universities obviously get federal funding directly, and some of them are literally public colleges. But they’re very dependent on tax exemptions and so on that the state grants them. They only exist because of that.

The philanthropies are the same. NGOs have compounding foundations, or their foundation endowments compound, because they get favorable tax treatment that normal companies don’t get. But they’re state-affiliated. Finally, the media—that’s the least obvious. How are they upstream of the state? Well, obviously, they “hold somebody accountable” by publishing a negative article about them. Of course, they never hold themselves accountable, because they’re always like, “We’re speaking truth to power.” I’m like, obviously they’re not. Why is every journo so courageous as to attack your boss whenever they’re wrong?

Okay, that’s basically it: whenever you’re talking to a journo, you’re not talking to the journo; you’re talking to their boss. Who is ultimately, for example, Bloomberg? When Bloomberg was running for president—actually, Michael Bloomberg is one of the better of them because he’s a tech entrepreneur. I’m not completely anti–Michael Bloomberg. But when Michael Bloomberg was running for president, Bloomberg News—his pit bulls—published this amazing thing that said, “We will report on but not investigate Michael Bloomberg.”

Amazing. What an amazing phrase: “Report on.” What that means is, if somebody else says something, we’ll reprint it in Bloomberg, so you can’t say we didn’t report on him. But we’re not going to go and dig through his trash. We’re not going to do it adversarially. We’re not going to stalk him. We’re not going to spam his family like they did to our boy Luke Farritor.

They massacred our boy.

They didn’t massacre him because he’s got our support, right?

I’m just referencing the meme.

I know, I know. That’s right. But the thing is, they don’t do that because if you were a Bloomberg journo and you went after Michael Bloomberg, that’s known as a CLM—a career-limiting move.

In fact, the entire journo establishment—that’s all nepotism. That’s all old money, right? They project onto us what their lifestyle is. They like Sulzberger, who inherited the New York Times; Murdoch, the guy who inherited Fox News; and the Newhouses, who inherited Wired and Condé Nast. Basically, Condé Nast was the parent company. They’re all heirs, right? They’re not self-made.

The journos don’t have equity. Old money treats the journalists much worse. Tech people, we treat our employees so much better because we give them equity. They level up. Journalism is a completely two-tier system: there are the publishers, the owners of these papers, and there are these serfs, the journos. How do they compensate them? They compensate them with status, making the journo believe that they’re some independent, freewheeling attack dog. Of course, they can’t actually attack true power, which is their bosses. They’ll never even mention them.

That’s the thing: if I say Zuck—if I say Zuckerberg—whether you like him or not, Zuckerberg deserves our respect because he’s the man. He really is the man in the arena. He’s taken the hits for 20 years, and he has survived so many things. Crucially, he is CEO, he is founder, and he’s out there. You can criticize him by name, and if I say “Zuckerberg,” everybody can summon a face to the name. They can summon all this biography.

If I say “Sulzberger,” it’s a blank. Ninety-nine percent of people don’t even know the guy exists. He’s like the usual suspects.

Yeah. Yeah.

He’s like Keyser. Keyser Sulzberger. This guy—I’ll put him on screen so you can see.

I honestly have heard his name a million times, but I don’t even know what he looks like.

You don’t even know what he looks like. But the thing is, basically, Zuckerberg is somebody who, again, for better or worse, runs a major communications channel, and so he’s covered, right? But Sulzberger doesn’t get good coverage. He gets no coverage.

Yeah.

That is actually really interesting, right? The guy who—you know, let me share this. Put this on screen. Ready?

Who’s holding him accountable, right? I’ll tell you.

Yeah. Journalism is privacy for him.

Exactly. The guy who’s surrounded by thousands of journalists at all times is the only person in the world who has any privacy.

Okay. You’ve never seen this guy’s face, right? Who is this guy? Yes, he’s on the New York Times. People say, “Oh my God, he’s in the New York Times.” You’ve never seen his face. But the point is, if you did word-face association, in terms of the number of impressions, it’s a quantitative thing, right? If I use AI, I could quantify it: how many people can summon the face of Zuckerberg to the word? Millions, billions, probably. How many even know that Sulzberger exists? Basically nobody.

Why? Because Zuckerberg’s company—whether you like it or not—is considered a person who is in charge of the company. People don’t just say, “Facebook has some policy issue” or “Facebook has this policy issue.” They go after Zuck personally. But with the New York Times, they’re granted the enormous shield of calling it the New York Times, calling it the institution, as opposed to Sulzberger’s paper. It is just Sulzberger’s paper. It’s his blog. There’s nothing that is printed there without his approval, right? He inherited it from his father’s father’s father’s father’s father. It’s like 5 generations. Here’s a big one.

And then let’s get back to poor old Luke. Okay, Walter Duranty. Let me show you. Journos never hold themselves accountable, right? Here’s a great tweet by Paul Graham, and then I think here’s my reply to it. Look at Paul: “One of the biggest surprises of my adult life is how unethical reporters are. In movies, they’re always the good guys.” Everyone in tech knows stories like this.

Now, this is actually a deep point. Why is Paul saying, “In movies, they’re always the good guys”? This is a concept I call Jurassic Ballpark. Paul has said something like this many times, right? Jurassic Ballpark is like the movie Jurassic Park. In it, they’re missing some DNA for the dinosaurs, so they use amphibian DNA. Of course, that leads to issues because then the dinosaurs can reproduce, and so on and so forth.

In the same way, when you have a missing segment of history or culture, you just ballpark it with what comes out of a movie. Jurassic Ballpark, right? You just ballpark it. But that could be really wrong or fake because it’s a movie, after all. Unless you have personal experience of something, your impression of it is the movie version. This is a non-obvious point, right?

How else could it be? Visuals are very persuasive. Video is a high-bandwidth pathway to the human brain. It’s not like your brain was built, maybe, in System 2 versus System 1. System 1 is instinctive, and System 2 is logical thinking. Maybe your System 2 can distinguish between true and false with video, but your System 1 can’t.

So, essentially, people see all these things like journos are the good guys and so on. We just saw The Journalist and the Murderer. We just saw that, once you actually understand the space, they’re more like Keyser Söze, where they are the unreliable narrator. They write the story, everybody else dies, and they’re the good guys. You never actually hear the story of how the story is written, which is actually much more important than the story.

Whenever you see, “The New York Times has obtained…” how did they obtain it? They got some stolen documents. Or they told the source, “Give me this and then I’ll write favorably about you. Don’t give me this and I’m going to name you in the piece, and you’re going to lose your job and get attacked.” They do all that kind of stuff. Go ahead.

I remember your definition of journalism: invasion of privacy for profit.

Yeah, exactly. The nonconsensual invasion of privacy for profit is what legacy media is. Let’s take that definition: nonconsensual. Can you opt out? Can you say, “Journo, stop stalking me”? Can you say, “Journo, stop spamming me”? Can you say, “Don’t mention my family”?

Don’t mention my family.

And so, see, in normal English, we have words for this when journos go through your garbage. There was somebody who was stalking people online and looking at all their files. If Luke Farritor had had somebody going and spamming all of his friends and contacts and whatever, and they were just some drug addict or crazy person, he could say, “Okay, that’s stalking. That’s spamming.” You could get a 50-foot restraining order.

I actually want to see, by the way, today’s court system use anti-stalking and anti-spam kinds of things against the journos. CAN-SPAM is about unsolicited messages, right? You can try and use that on the journos, and maybe there’s a sympathetic court system now. Basically, they get one warning: “Go the fuck away.”

And the second is that they've got money, so go after them on that, right? Okay, fine. So now I'm sure there's some process where basically there's New York Times v. Sullivan. There are various things where they've had historical precedents that protect them. But once you think of them as spammers, stalkers, and scammers—because they are scammers—in The Journalist and the Murderer, what was the definition she used? A con man, right?

The journo is a con man because they'll always write this email to you, fluffing you up and flattering you and saying how great you are, blah blah blah, and pretending that they come in under a flag of parley. They get their quote, if you're dumb enough to talk to them, and then they stab you in the article. That's why Janet Malcolm said, “The consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns when the article appears his hard lesson, because you talk to this person, they present themselves as a human being, as a person you're having a conversation with, and actually they twisted every word to try to stab you,” right?

So, point being, they're actually the stalkers, the spammers, and the scammers. That's what the journos are. You can't get them to go away. So that's the nonconsensual part: the nonconsensual invasion of privacy for profit.

There's a saying that sometimes journos use as a self-defense saying: “Journalism is printing what someone does not wish printed. Everything else is public relations,” right? Hold on, I'll find the exact quote. “Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” Right. Now, what does that mean? Why does someone not want it printed? Usually because it's private information, right? So, the nonconsensual invasion of privacy for profit.

Let us not forget that these are multibillion-dollar media corporations, right? It took people a long time in the 2010s to finally realize the New York Times and the Journal are just dot-coms, right? They absolutely are not referees. They're not neutral.

For some reason, people give them the imprimatur of an institution. We need to save our institution. But what's the difference between the New York Times and Facebook? They're companies.

Exactly. They're a corporation. Fair game. Fair game, right? And in fact, that's why they got so mad at us, because we actually believed in what they said—that we had freedom of speech and that free markets existed.

Until really the early 2010s, there was no practical freedom of speech. You know the saying: “Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.” Basically, freedom of the press belonged to those who owned one. Think about how expensive it was to get a radio license, a TV license, to own a newspaper, and to send trucks to people's houses with all the ink and the printing press. That was a super-high capital cost, right?

These were guys who essentially owned factories that cranked out papers. You at home could say something to your friend, but you didn't have distribution, right? And we understand what distribution is. Thiel talked about distribution years ago, before it was quantified with social media. Now, very roughly, distribution is the number of followers, the number of people on your email list, but also the quality of them, right? Not just quantity, but quality and quantity of your follower base is roughly distribution.

In the early ’90s, I mentioned this before, there was the Unabomber.

Yeah, of course.

Why did he kill all those people? He killed those people so he could get an op-ed in the Washington Post. Why? Because distribution was so scarce back then that he wanted to get his manifesto out. So he'd literally kill people for the distribution, right? That was just within our lifetimes, 30 years ago. That's how scarce distribution was.

Today, he'd be a crazy person on the internet, right? He'd get his message out there. But if you realize the Unabomber was willing to kill to get his message out, you also realize why there are some people who are crazy trolls on X. They might not be willing to kill, but they're certainly willing to attack somebody else, attack their character, or engage in reputation assassination.

And now you get to the journalists, right? Journalism as the nonconsensual invasion of privacy for profit really captures what these critters do. Up until about 2020 or so, there was no force that could resist them. They were just rampaging, right? I mean, we could resist them economically, but especially in the 2010s, they were so mad at us for taking their money.

What does that mean, by the way? It just meant that you refreshed NYTimes.com and saw a Rolex ad or some car ad, or you saw a clothing ad. If you refreshed Meta.com, Facebook, or Instagram, what did you see? You saw an ad for the exact same company, right?

Yep.

And so that means the sales account executives at both of these organizations were competing for literally the same customer. Obviously, Facebook and Google ads have much more scale and much more analytics. They're built internet-first, and so on and so forth. So the NYT just starts bleeding ad revenue.

But essentially, the point is that we're beating them economically. They couldn't code search engines or social networks, but they could write stories and shape narratives. And you know the difference between a Dropbox product announcement and an NYT story? Their stories have villains. Our product announcements are all basically about making the world a better place. It's like, guess what? 10 gigabytes more storage, or now you can do comic-book-style AI, or here's a new robot. That's what we're doing. We're adding cool things to the world.

And what are they doing? What's the most prestigious thing you can do? They want to catch Theranos.

Well, even higher than that is Watergate.

Right. Whereas for us, it's SpaceX. For them, the highest, best thing they can do is put a man out of work. For us, the best thing we can do is put a man on the Moon.

Literally, the number-one thing that they can see—and this is, again, state versus network—is that we want to build Googles and Facebooks and AI and all this kind of stuff, drones, giant companies, giant cryptocurrencies, and now internet communities. What they want to do is exert authority over others, but they want to do so in a deniable way, right?

Because if you go to the Pulitzer website or something like that and look at these prizes, they'll all say something like, “Our reporting held so-and-so accountable and led to an FTC investigation,” blah blah blah blah. So they're really willing to take credit when their words on the page lead to the state golem animating and smashing somebody, right? It led to an FTC investigation. It led to a new FDA regulation. It led to this, led to that—leading to somebody getting fired, some program getting set up. The ultimate thing, obviously, is to get the president of the United States fired. That's why they wanted to get Nixon fired, right? Watergate.

It was just showing that they had, essentially, three board seats on top of the presidency: the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. The president was the titular CEO, but if the Journal, the Times, and the Washington Post all put their multisig key in the lock and held their board-of-directors vote, they'd get him fired, right? So that was actually the state of affairs. That's what I meant by holding the government accountable. Nobody in the government was really in power. The journos could write enough negative stories, and they were out of power.

The thing is that when it comes to Pulitzer time, they'll admit that their stories led to something. But when it comes to BLM time, they deny that their stories led to half of America getting burned down, right? So it's a one-way ratchet where they take all the credit and avoid all the blame.

Could you actually show the trace of that image coming into somebody's eyes and then them setting fire to this building? Once in a while, you might be able to show it. They publish a manifesto saying, “I read X, Y, and Z, and that's why I burned it down.” But that causal effect—demonstrating that there’s an impression, a page view that comes in over here through the eyes and ears, and then there's a burn-down-the-building kind of action on their side—is difficult to show.

They're quick—it's funny, because they're quick to use causal direction. They're quick to say, “Hey, Facebook is causing people to be depressed, or to turn right-wing, or whatever.”

That's right. So, for tech, there's a causal effect for everything negative.

Yeah.

For journos, there's a causal effect for everything positive. What? That's amazing. Wow, what an amazing—everything you do is bad.

Everything they do is good. Amazing—flip it. Once you see this, you can basically be Neo in The Matrix and block everything like this. Another big piece of this—they stopped doing this, but years ago one of the things they were doing was saying, “Oh my God, everybody in tech is so white,” and blah, blah, blah. Obviously, tech is so much more international than the journos. If you take that famous photo of Elon in the conference room and compare the people there with the NYT editorial board photo, you’ll see they’re well-dressed, essentially mostly European-ancestry people. Again, I’m not the kind of person who thinks white is an insult, but they do.

So it’s all projection. The journos themselves have these tyrannical, evil, meritless nepotists as bosses. The journalists themselves can never actually make it anywhere, and it’s all favoritism and glad-handing; there’s no merit, and it’s all luck and connections. The journalists themselves are essentially envious people who exist to harm you to increase their career prospects, and they project all that out onto everybody else. Once you see that every accusation is a confession, or whatever, you realize, “Oh, this is how the world works in their stupid Brooklyn side of things,” and they think of us as a rival tribe that acts the same way.

So now that’s part of the macro. I have bad news for them—which is to say, I have bad news for us and also bad news for them. But let’s start with the bad news for them. The bad news for them is that in the gigantic war between the internet and Blue America, we didn’t actually intend to start that war, by the way. We were just building great stuff, and it became so popular that we took away all of these guys’ customers.

It’s not like you set up Twitter or Facebook or Google to blow up the Times, the Post, and the Journal. That was just something where Bezos got the Post out of petty cash. We built a valuable enough business that it generated so much wealth that he could just go and acquire this thing. Of course, I understand why they got mad. What they should have done, rather than try to beat us, was join us or whatever.

There are 3 or 4 different things there. There’s a scenario where, if Steve Jobs had lived…

When Bezos bought the Post, Jobs would have bought the Times, and Larry Page would have bought the Wall Street Journal. We’d be on Mars by now.

Yep.

Okay. So the thing is, at the end of the day, there’s actually—as much as I think they are evil twins in some ways—a deep sense in which there’s a similarity: we’re all about the collection, dissemination, and presentation of information.

That’s the similarity between tech and media: the collection of information, the raw data, whether it’s user-generated content or so on; dissemination, which is distribution, posting, and circulation; and presentation, the user interface. They think about their charts or infographics; they also obsess about copy, and so on and so forth.

People like you, Paul Graham, Katherine Boyle, and Mike Moritz.

Yeah. Exactly. That’s right. In another life, right?

Yeah.

Mike Moritz was a journalist who became an investor. Katherine Boyle was also a journalist who became an investor. Peter Thiel, if he’d been born 20 years earlier, probably would have been a Supreme Court jurist. He probably would have been chief justice of the Supreme Court or something.

Larry Page would have been a professor. Sergey Brin would have been a professor. Mike Solana in Brooklyn probably—

For sure. He probably would have been a book publisher or something like that.

I probably would have been a professor, and so on and so forth. That’s true for Andrew Ng, Daphne Koller, and many, many people—Martin Casado, Chris Dixon, and so many of us. The thing is, with computer science, there is an amazing connection between the word and the deed. AI makes that even closer: you write it down and it’s done. It’s this amazing thing.

Ultimately, what we’re doing is also writing all day. We’re writing all day to see an impact in the world. The difference is that their impact, because they’re doing it through the state—and a failed state at that—is almost invariably negative.

Because we’re doing it through the network, we have feedback loops. For example, when we type something in and it’s factually wrong, the compiler throws up on it and it just doesn’t compile. There’s fact-checking on the page when we type something. They have no such thing. Their only fact check is, crucially, not by the world but by their peers. That is to say, it’s only when they lose status among other journos that they ever course-correct, and that’s very rare. So long as within their tribe they’re not losing status, nothing changes.

Basically, what happened is, once you see this kind of model, going back to the original point—the internet disrupting Blue America, China disrupting Red America—you can understand essentially the last 18 years in the following way. Blue America was disrupted by the internet, so they began wokeness to take a piece of Red America’s pie and the techlash to try to take back control from the internet. Red America was disrupted by China, so the trade war was against China and Trump was against Blue America. Both their pies, they felt, were shrinking, and they launched 2-front wars: Blue America on Red America and the internet; Red America on Blue America and China.

Okay, we’ll do the China bit later. But Blue America versus Red America and the internet, after a massive push, has lost. I mean, it was close, but basically Elon and X Day—it’s literally D-Day. This feels like eons ago; it’s only 3 years ago. Literally 3 years ago, X still hadn’t been acquired. Twitter was still Twitter. It’s incredible. We are in wartime speed of things happening. It’s insane how quickly things happen.

It took the richest man in the world—he’s launching rockets, building ships, doing all this other stuff—and he decided to take on this enormous extra thing. He somehow managed it, which is crazy to think about, because everything else Elon does is N of 1. Whenever I talk to a founder, I’m like, “Focus, focus, focus.” After you have your first whatever-billion-dollar company, and it’s $10 billion, it’s $100 billion, then you can do your next one or whatever. Fine.

But Elon—the N of 1—was facing a situation in 2022 where it looked like the free world was completely on the ropes because these racially obsessed woke psychos had us pinned like this. You couldn’t even say whether men and women existed. We were genuinely talking about a permanent midnight descending. Really, really bad stuff. Look at how evil they were: they just burned down half of America, and they were getting more and more psycho.

Meanwhile, all the resources of all the centrist tech and finance guys were mobilized, because that’s what the $44 billion was. There’s that famous message from Elon to Larry Ellison that’s been made public, where he’s like, “What are you in for—$1 billion or $2 billion?” Ellison could put in $1 billion or $2 billion, but for so many other people it was like Avengers assemble: putting in a million, whatever they could afford—a million, $10 million, $20 million.

I mean, $50 million is a big investment for almost anybody, right? Fifty million is a serious LP meeting. So Elon, being Elon, was able to pass the hat and assemble this gigantic coalition of $44 billion—all of our remaining forces—for X Day. The landing was extremely contested.

They basically wanted the opposite of whatever he wanted.

Yes, that’s right. Anyway, the point is, X Day was also the liberation of Meta and the liberation of YouTube—all the companies that these racial fanatics at the NYT had occupied, all the networks they had occupied. It was like how the Nazi empire was at its peak and thought it was going to win, and then D-Day came and it just collapsed.

Sulzberger and Soros thought they were going to win, and then X Day came in and—boom—there they were, with X flipping, YouTube uncensored, Meta uncensored, everything uncensored, and so on and so forth, because X was upstream of the conversation.

Anyway, the point is, it took Elon’s personal intervention in June 2023. His first round of firings hadn’t done it; his second round hadn’t done it. It was like the third round of chemo to get rid of the wokes that had just infested Twitter, to actually change things.

And, by the way, part of it again is Elon’s intuition. He’s more of an intuitive person than a philosopher, per se; his philosophy is his execution. There’s actually a real logic to why he renamed it X. This is one of many reasons.

Why?

I’m not saying this is why he did it, but it is an implicit aspect of how he did it, just like them renaming all the schools, tearing down the statues, and so on. Every journo had put years of effort into building up their profiles, and all their blue checks were stripped, all their profiles got renamed, and it was just X.

Another example is “fake news,” right? “Fake news” had actually been used in 2016 for a few weeks in the context of, “All that social media news is fake, but the New York Times is real news.” Trump turned it on them, and it was like, actually, the New York Times is fake news—the fake-news media, right? Which is perfect.

So, in the same way, the blue check went from something that the journos valued to something that Elon just stripped from all of them. He stripped their status and their distribution. I don't know whether the ban on outbound links was intentional or not; I have no personal information. This is just what I speculate.

Even if it wasn't intentional, this was part of the effect of it: the ban on outbound links meant that suddenly X became the place you went for the information, and you didn't go to the journals anymore, right? So he stripped their status. He stripped their control over the central stream of media. He stripped their traffic from links. He renamed the whole thing to show that he had root control over it, because you know what a pain in the ass it is to do a rename, right?

This was, in a sense, tech's revenge for making every fucking GitHub repo rename “master” to “main.” Is Yale renaming its master's degree? No. Of course not, right? It's MasterClass, whatever. Anybody who's at the New York Times, are they saying, “I've got a main degree now rather than a master's in journalism?” I think Columbia still has a master's in journalism, right?

So the whole point was, again, these journos have a double standard. They would impose that on us, right? One million GitHub repos had to be renamed from “master” to “main.” Do you know what a pain in the ass that was? It was a huge pain in the ass. Every single developer had to go through some stupid exercise on this, which was just a demonstration of their power over us at that time.

That's what renaming means. It means you cause a massive inconvenience for everybody to show that you have institutional power. So now Elon returns the favor and does it at an even greater scale, right?

So, now, what that is is network over state, where we fought in the domain in which we were stronger. In a sense, also, by the way, taking back X and renaming X—there's a hard-fought city in some countries or some wars. Gosh, there's a city—I think, how many times did Seoul change hands during the Korean War? It was several times, right?

So Seoul changed hands 4 times, okay? It went back and forth, right? You think of X as being like Seoul during the Korean War, okay? Because it's a social war. It's a digital war where blue and red tribes. Actually, to make that really explicit, this is a good visual. All right. So this is from 2017. The interesting thing is, it's the same on both Twitter and Facebook, right? This is from 8 years ago. You can see they label nodes as blue and red based on whether they had said, “I'm voting for Clinton” or “I'm voting for Trump,” just parsing the text, right?

They looked at their connections, and blue people were connected to blues, and reds were connected to reds. The only large red media outlet was Breitbart, and the blue media was over here. The Hill was one of the very few outlets that both sides tended to link because it just gave neutral political news, like, “So-and-so was running,” or “These were the results”—one neutral, truly neutral, arguably, right?

So here you could actually see that this was a social war, right? I've made this point in the past: in 1861, when it was North versus South, we take for granted that the ideological and the geographical coincided, right? The North was the Union, and the South had the slaves and slavers. Slavery was legal here and illegal here, and the geographical and ideological coincided, right?

But by 2016, the geographical and ideological did not coincide. You didn't have clean red states and blue states. It was very fractal. You do have red states and blue states, but it's a preponderance as opposed to something that's as clean as this. Now, to be clear, if you showed it here, it also looked more fractal, but it was more distinct ideologically back then. Here, it's much more geographically overlapping. You with me so far?

Yep.

Okay. But there is a domain where these 2 factions are completely distinct, and that is the domain of the cloud, right?

On the land, red and blue are higgledy-piggledy right next to each other. They can't invade each other's territory. What are you going to invade—the cities or the cornfields or something? You can't invade the land.

So instead, the social war is fighting over the minds, invading the minds. Once you see this, you can actually understand a lot about the last 10 years. We've basically been in the middle of this gigantic social war, and the goal was for blue—how do you win a social war against red? Their goal was to flip every red node to blue.

Have you ever played the game of Othello?

No. I know the game, but I've never played it. It's like you flip tiles. You've got black and white tiles, and you surround other tiles and flip them from black to white or white to black.

And so, essentially, the goal for blue was to win ideologically and flip every red node to blue.

One way of thinking about it is: you know how, in an ant colony, individual ants don't actually know what they're doing, but the colony has an intelligence? The same is true for a flock of seagulls or a school of fish, right? There's colony intelligence, and insects in particular are like this, right?

Once you start thinking about ideologies like that, think of woke as blue, or radicalized blue. It's like laser eyes, right? Basically, go woke, go broke. They lost all this money as the internet disrupted them. Blue laser eyes came online, and they started going to their old religion because they didn't have the money anymore to go back to the old civil-rights rhetoric and so on.

It's like when countries got blown up in the Middle East and other places. When countries go on hard times, that's when fundamentalism returns, right? Because they don't have the economics anymore. So their economics went away, their laser eyes were glowing blue, and these journos were basically like, “Okay, it's life or death for us.” They started trying to capture as many institutions as possible in the social war.

That's why they were going after random-seeming nodes and forcing cancellations. Remember how they wanted Amazon to put BLM on its homepage? They did get Amazon to put BLM on its homepage. For a long time, you'd load Google and it would have some BLM thing on there, right? You know what I'm talking about, right?

Brian Armstrong, during the 2020 BLM riots, had people trying to force him to say “Black Lives Matter” on Twitter. What was the point of that? It's like the shahada in Islam. The point of that was to show you're a convert to blue.

Yeah.

Right. To flip a red node blue, because they can get it—it's sort of like a check mark over your head to show they flipped that node. Now that's part of the blue tribe, and they can turn their attention to the next one, right?

All of the cancellations, all of the censorship, all of the deplatforming, all of the unbanking, all of the insane ideological fervor—you can conceptualize it as an attempt from blue to reunify red versus blue on blue terms, by turning every internet company into something that was paying tribute to blue through worthless DEI jobs, and every red into somebody who was paying tribute to blue by essentially not just giving up the presidency, but assuming the position.

For example, why did they want to defund the police? They wanted to fund their NGOs.

Yeah.

Right. That's what it was all about. They wanted to redirect the budget. That's why there are, like, 200 homeless NGOs in San Francisco alone—the homeless industrial complex. So that shows that, as their budget rises, the homeless population rises with it. They're basically paid to get people addicted to drugs. It's the Department of Dependency, right?

The point is that all of this stuff with “defund the police,” “defund the NGOs”—all of that can be conceptualized as this broad social war against reds to flip all red nodes blue, right?

What was their main weapon? “You're racist. You're sexist. You're homophobic. You're this, you're that, transphobic,” blah, blah, blah, blah. With this language, it was the same way that they could use that language to force you out of their institution, because they'd fire you for being accused of any of these things.

They'd also say, “Your institution—” They'd bust your borders and swarm you with unqualified hires, or else you'd be accused of these things. So the same language they used to strengthen their borders and deport reds, they used to bust your borders and import blues. Do you see what I'm saying?

It's actually because, if you're a racist, you get fired from a blue organization, and you're a racist unless you hire blues.

Okay.

Now, of course, today we see they don't actually care about brown people or black people, only blue people, right? It's more clear in 2025; it was less clear several years ago. Fine.

So now, coming back up the stack: once we realize that it was a social war, we can actually understand why the journos want to kill you. Basically, you know how, at various times in history, France and Germany have traded, and France and Germany have fought? France and Germany have traded, and France and Germany have fought. We are in wartime mode with the journos.

So it is extremely stupid for anybody to do that. Now, let's go to concrete brass tacks: What should technologists do? What should we do specifically and generally?

So first, just at the individual level. Number 1: go direct. Build your own distribution to avoid distortion.

That is to say, any content you have should be posted on your feeds. Why would you go and feed it to some journal? You've got some scoop; you don't need them for distribution anymore. It's more obvious that they need your content to build up their channel, and they will distort it in the process. Remember, they get credibility within other journals by being hostile to tech guys. If they write a positive story, then it's, “Well, you're a flack. You're writing a press release.”

There's another point: conflict is interesting. If you're writing a screenplay and it's just somebody sitting on the grass enjoying a fine, sunny day, that's boring. But if a meteor hit, suddenly you've got attention. What works in a movie setting is not what works in real life. The journos want conflict.

Our concept of, “Hey, it's 10 gigs for Dropbox,” or whatever, might be helpful to the public, but it doesn't tell a story. They want a story. So they're always going to take what you do and put it through some distorting lens to get to the other side. They will get more page views at the expense of the company that you worked so hard on.

So, number 1: go direct. Number 2: build your own distribution to avoid distortion. The thing about that is, hire creators.

There are 2 kinds of creators. There are those who are at the storyline level, and you probably only need 1 of those per company, because if you have too many strong-willed personalities in a company, you can only have 1 Steve Jobs at Apple, basically. However, you could have a lot of people assisting with production, making content, scaling that creator, or whatever.

Usually, you're going to have a founding creator. I'm not saying it's 100%. Sometimes, once you get to a certain scale, it's good to have sub-personalities. For example, Jesse Pollak is doing a great job at Base for Coinbase. He's got his own distinctive style that's complementary to Coinbase's style. At a certain scale, you can have multiple personalities driving certain product lines or whatever, and so that's fine. But at least for a startup getting up to a billion, you probably only want to have 1 storyline, 1 main creator, and a lot of production support behind them. That can really work. You can get very far with video, images, and all this kind of stuff.

So: A, go direct. B, build your own distribution to avoid distortion. One way of thinking about that is that they call them “the media” because they mediate your experience of reality. When you're putting anything through the media, it's like an Instagram filter that makes you into a villain. Why would you do that to yourself? You're basically paying the journo with free content to make yourself look bad and get a permalink that's attacking you.

I remember our good friend Flo Carvello was launching a remote-office startup during COVID, and he gave TechCrunch the exclusive. They criticized it. They basically didn't make it look good. He said, “Why would I give you my launch announcement? I'm here to advertise my company. I gave it to you guys. I gave you the exclusive, and you made me look stupid. Why would I ever do that?”

The fundamental thing is, it's a business-development relationship. Literally, think of TechCrunch as a corporation. Why are you giving them something for free?

Right. Literally, it's like that. The journo has a spreadsheet—whether it's them or their manager who's looking at it—and there's a row in the spreadsheet for that URL. It's got the number of clicks, the number of conversions, and the ad revenue on that article. That's the only thing they care about. That's the only thing they care about.

What's not there? The valuation or health of your company. Obviously, they don't care. They would literally light it on fire. That's what they did during BLM. The journo would light your house on fire and sell tickets to the blaze. That's their business model.

Obviously, it's the dumbest possible deal. People still do this stuff, and I'm like, Elon uncensored Twitter. You can post whatever you want. YouTube's uncensored. Everything's uncensored now. Get good.

I will say one thing. This is very important. Over the last several years, when we've done the tech-and-media ecosystem, there has been something that worked and something that didn't work.

What worked was individual projects. Mike Solana's Pirate Wires has a real style to it. TBPN, right? Which exists to, I think, make Ramp get more conversions, which is very funny, right? It's very funny. Of course, Ramp is our main sponsor. They've got them on the hats. They've NASCAR. It's funny. Ramp's a good product, by the way. Coogan, he stuck with it. He did a lot. All-In has done very well. Elon has done very well. And I think, you know, you did with Moz and now, you know, Z is, I think, that's great.

What I think has not done as well are the things that are institutional. If it's too institutional, you're playing it safe, and if you're playing it safe, there isn't any conflict, opinion, or novelty. It's focus-grouped.

Certain things benefit from averaging. For example, with the velocity of a plane or something like that, you don't want large deviations; you want it to be within an envelope. There are certain kinds of phenomena where you want averaging. Opinions and theses are usually not like that.

One way of thinking about it is that the entire 20th century was the centralized century. Even the movement from widescreen to portrait size—like a phone is 9 by 16—is visually the movement from institutional to individual. A TikTok-style thing doesn't have room for a panoramic shot of a huge crowd; it's for a person standing there. It's amazing that even the screen itself captures that move from institutional to individual.

You see this also on X and other platforms. These journalists—I don't know what they were doing, whether they were faking numbers or whatever—had 20 million followers, and now they have 3 likes on their tweets. Something happened there. Either it was all fake, or there's just low engagement, or it's boring. People just don't trust those institutions anymore.

That's another really important lesson: individual over institutional. If you're doing social media, it should be the amplified voice of your founding creator.

Right.

The founding creator is as important as the founding engineer. The founding engineer is implementation, but the founding creator is distribution. The founding engineer is the how, but the founding creator is the why.

The founding creator has a community that they're tapped into, and they're saying, “Why should this product exist?” You can often start by understanding your community, building a product for them, and then hiring the engineer. That's actually a 3rd kind of person.

Normally, it's been the engineering founder and the business founder. This is the content founder.

And actually, this is where Collison and Altman have observed: Where are the Gen Z? Where are the younger founders? They're not in tech. They're in content.

Yeah.

Right, because that's where extreme leverage is. That's MrBeast. That's the guy who actually looks kind of like you. Adin Ross kind of looks like you, right?

A little bit. Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah. Some of the younger guys are there, right? Speed—IShowSpeed—is like that. They're very talented at what they do.

And that's actually not something that we thought of as a thing, because there's still the startup kind of thing. But that's actually now a game for 30- and 40-somethings. I shouldn't say it's a game for 30- and 40-somethings, but millennials are good at startups. We're still good at startups, and we still are. Palmer's doing a new thing, Altman's doing a thing—you know what I mean. We keep doing stuff.

But 20-somethings are often very good at content, and content is actually upstream of product. There's room for a lot of collaboration there, potentially, where they're doing the marketing.

It's kind of like Beats by Dre, but you start with Dre rather than Apple. I'm not saying anything people don't know, but right now those have been doing things that are relatively low-tech, like MrBeast's Feastables, T-shirts, or stuff like that.

Bryan Johnson, I think, with Blueprint, is starting to get higher-tech, where you start with a creator and then ideally distribute quantified-self stuff through that, if that makes any sense. You could also do something like this if you decide to get into that area. Any biotech company, genomics company, or sequencing company could do deals with Huberman, for example, for distribution.

This is starting to make the case for why you shouldn't outsource your creation. Are you outsourcing your engineering? Don't outsource your creating. Don't outsource your content. Content is as key as code. Content happens in-house.

Here are a few things I'm half implementing—partially implementing—but I actually want to implement more. For example, GitHub allows a bunch of people to contribute to code at the same time. We take that for granted. How do you get a bunch of people to contribute to content at the same time? Something like Frame.io is pretty good.

You know, with Frame.io, you can put all these clips and images in there, and then you have something for people to work with. Or take the CapCut web interface: you can log into that and basically load stuff in there, and you have an account, or a few accounts, shared among team members. So now you actually have something where creation, which was a single-player app, starts becoming a multiplayer app.

Internet connections are good enough that you can do versioning on big files, reviews of big files, and so on. Start thinking about your content base like your codebase. Obviously, AI is a big part of that, though it’s not the only thing. Any time people get a new tool, they use it and overuse it, and then you bring it back and say, “Okay, it’s a percentage of my thing, but it’s not everything,” right?

If we did this whole podcast with AI and had computer-generated versions of us, it wouldn’t be as interesting. AI is necessarily generic. It’s almost like a search engine; it pulls the average from the whole internet. It’s useful when you prompt it.

It’s funny—I was saying this the other day: midwit writing used to be woke; now all midwit writing is AI. It’s not “this”; it’s “that,” right? Anyway, the point is, that’s another piece of media: build your own distribution to avoid distortion. Go direct if you have something to say. Hire creators.

So it’s like a superintelligence, yet midwit?

Right, but that’s because it’s building the average from the whole internet.

Okay, so it’s actually very similar to the CIA. Do you know what I’m saying? Like—

Yeah, like mission—

CIA.

Yeah, exactly. See, most people don’t understand this. Much of what the NYT and these guys do—and they’re so much weaker than they used to be, so much weaker. Thank God. They’ve lost the center.

What happened is they piled up the subscriptions and got all the wine moms, but lost the Andreessens. Amazing trade for us. They lost Glenn Greenwald, Marc Andreessen, Nate Silver, and Bari Weiss. An amazing trade for us, for the center, because they got tech envy, optimized for money, and actually lost all influence and power over the center. Thank God.

That’s a good trade. All the ones who aren’t haters eventually leave when they’re dealing with them. Is there a private, for-profit CIA or FBI? Should I explain this point?

Actually, especially—

Okay, so the thing is, most people think—from that Paul Graham point about how you learn from the movies, like Jurassic Park—that what the CIA does is assassination. But a lot of what it does is actually character assassination. It plants stories. Isn’t it much cleaner to have somebody plant a story and then have them discredited? That’s so much cleaner than bullets and blood, and so on and so forth.

They did this in East Germany as well, by the way. Wikipedia is just as bad as the media because it’s garbage in, garbage out. You can only cite articles from legacy media; you can’t cite social media directly. So Wikipedia rehashes the legacy media. In anything contemporary, anything political, they’re really terrible. Nevertheless, there are some articles from before they got corrupted.

Zersetzung was a psychological-warfare technique used by the Ministry of State Security. It served to combat alleged political enemies through covert means. The communists were also fighting a similar social war. They had conservatives, libertarians, and noncommunists on their territory. They didn’t want to kill them; they wanted to convert them, just like the blues flipping the reds to convert them to blue.

They targeted people to stop activities of political dissent and cultural incorrectness. What kinds of things did they do? They would mess up your sock drawer to make you think you were insane, or tell people you were having an affair. They would subvert and undermine an opponent, disrupting the target’s private life so that they were unable to continue their hostile, negative activities toward the state.

This is what they did to Luke Farritor just now.

Yeah.

Exactly this. The aim was to disrupt the target’s private or family life so they were unable to continue their hostile, negative activities toward the state. Do you see that? They weren’t mad when Luke was just analyzing some old museum pieces or whatever. But once Luke started going after the state, that’s their bread. That’s their power center. That’s their Golem.

The FTC investigated this after our articles. Anything that’s upstream of that, they don’t want us to be upstream of it. They want to be upstream of it. Make sense?

Zersetzung. The communists and the journalists are the same, but I repeat myself. The reason I say that is—I may have mentioned this—but John Reed, Walter Duranty, Herbert Matthews, David Halberstam, Edgar Snow: take all those names. Those are all journalists who did PR for the communists. It’s literally the reason Castro is in power.

There’s this book, The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times. You see that one? Here’s another one: Walter Duranty, Ukraine, Amazon. Basically, Stalin’s apologist. Isn’t that amazing? Stalin’s apologist worked at The New York Times. Castro’s apologist worked at The New York Times. Crazy stuff.

There’s another one, The Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent. Isn’t that interesting? When I say “journalist and communist, but I repeat myself,” I’m being completely literal. We just pulled up 3 books in 30 seconds that were about journalist-communists.

Dylan Matthews from Vox is talking about the Luke Farritor argument. He says, “The negative reaction to this is wild. If you join the government and your primary legacy is helping to kill millions of people through aid cuts, you can handle some criticism. If you can live with yourself—”

Sulzberger’s primary legacy is killing—not just through aid cuts. Sulzberger’s primary legacy is killing millions of Ukrainians. Where’s their criticism? Again, Dylan Matthews is too much of a coward to do that. These people—

The logic is just insane. It’s claiming that by not giving all of his money to aid, he’s killing people, or by not making more money, he’s killing people. To accuse this 23-year-old of killing millions of people is just—

One of the things to notice here is what they’re doing with the Holodomor. There’s actually a very clear-cut case where Duranty wrote 13 articles that basically said Stalin wasn’t liquidating the Ukrainians. He was literally covering up a murder in progress.

Here, you’re talking about the “pigeon society” argument, by the way. Essentially, as the dependent population grows, any cut to the budget whatsoever for the blues is equated with murdering their dependents. They probably believe that, right? So it grows to the sky, and everybody gets alms. Of course, the blues get nice, paid nonprofit jobs out of it, and of course you have more and more dependents.

By the way, he’s absolutely, completely wrong here as well. Go to Easterly and Levine. Easterly and Levine said, “Stop the aid,” right? Why? Because all the aid is used for these warlords in Africa.

Actually, in Nigeria, there was a business-plan competition that was the most successful aid project ever because they were making businesses. I saw this myself in India. Guys like these effective altruists and these NGOs—they don’t want peers; they want pawns. Brown people in India were starving in the ’80s or whatever, and they were pawns of these NGOs that sent the aid.

Now India doesn’t need aid. India is number 3 in unicorns, and it’s landing on the dark side of the moon. I’m not saying everything is perfect, but it’s rising. So the fundamental premise of his point—that aid helps—is incorrect. Aid actually hurts.

It’s kind of like testosterone supplementation in a biosynthetic pathway. If somebody takes too much of an exogenous hormone, it cuts off their natural production. Basically, if people take too much in the way of steroids, it can cut off their natural hormonal production. You have to get it exactly right.

The actual charity is investment. This is a deep point. Should I explain this point? Basically, imagine you’ve got 2 rich guys. One of them is Soros, or a rich guy’s rich institution, or somebody handing out aid—grants, seeming grants—and another person is an investor.

The people who are queuing up to write those grants, to seek aid, are making themselves as sympathetic or as pathetic as possible. In the limit, it’s like the movie Slumdog Millionaire, where you see—it’s dramatized, but—the limbs of the kid are cut off to make him more sympathetic. It’s almost like learned or caused helplessness: trying to present yourself, to either pretend to or become as helpless, empathetic, and sympathetic as possible so you get the maximum amount of money. You win the competition for being the biggest loser, in a sense—the biggest victim.

That’s what wokeness is. By contrast, if you think about our culture in tech and VC, what we respect more than anything else is strength. Essentially, you come to us for a check. What we respect most is if we didn’t put a check in you, but you still win, raise from someone else, or do it on your own—you bootstrap it.

Then a year later, we’re like, “I respect you. I was wrong. You were strong enough on your own.” One way of talking about this is “fake it till you make it.” But another way of putting it is: rather than the Slumdog Millionaire of people chopping off their limbs and thinking about how depressed and pathetic they are to compete for grants and aid, imagine a bunch of people who are all running a race.

They’re running a mile or whatever. Twenty people compete, only 1 wins, but the other 19 at least got a workout. Everybody who’s in the process of trying to raise venture capital—or, obviously, you don’t have to raise money; you can totally bootstrap it yourself nowadays, and the single-person startup is much easier than it’s been—becomes stronger as a consequence of that process.

You constantly want to keep giving updates to the investor on all the stuff you’re shipping. Sometimes the easiest way to do that is to just ship. Most of the time, that’s the way. In the process of proving yourself to others, you prove yourself to yourself.

Yeah.

That’s why a small amount of capital, when 20 people compete for it, strengthens the whole ecosystem, but a small amount of aid, when 20 people compete for it, weakens the entire ecosystem.

Take these people who purport to believe in equality—the Soros types or whatever. Are they walking down the street saying, “Here’s some guy on the street. I’m going to give him half my fortune. Now we’ve achieved equality”? Are they going to knock it down? Let’s say they’ve got $1 billion. Are they going to find 100,000 people and give each of them $1,000 or $10,000, so they’ve all got $10,000 and they’re down to $10,000? Then they’re all equal.

It’s within their power to do so. They could literally hit a button to do so. If they actually believed in equality, they could instantly achieve equality right now. Indeed, I actually do believe in redistribution for every self-proclaimed socialist—just take their fortunes and redistribute them. Opt in to socialism. We’ll take all their money, all the books, and redistribute it.

Yeah, exactly. That’s right. We basically opt into that.

What they actually want, of course, is to take your money and do something with it. But you take them at their word: they actually believe in equality. What they mean by equality, by the way, is equality between themselves and the people they’re looking up at. They’re not thinking about all the people who they’re wealthier than in that sense.

Fine. The point is, if somebody’s walking on the street and they see somebody down on their luck, they might give them $1 or $10. They’re not going to give them half their salary. Charity decelerates: the more somebody rises, the less sympathetic and empathetic they are.

People have talked about how, once somebody gets out of the total underclass and into the working poor, they sometimes actually make less money from all the grants and stuff because of all those cutoffs. Now they’re considered self-sufficient. You can earn your way into a local valley before you earn your way out of it. It’s a disincentive to work.

On the other side of things, take Thiel and Zuck. This is a very famous example; there are many more like this. Zuck started out, in a sense, much poorer than Thiel. Thiel put in $500,000. Zuck is now much richer than Thiel, but Thiel also became much richer as a consequence. That’s an example of investment actually achieving redistribution of fortunes, or creation of fortunes, or greater equality in a way that charity never would.

Capitalism is the ultimate social system. In the same way, the billions of phones that got to everybody in the world—capitalism did that; aid didn’t do that. All this USAID stuff is just aiding blue noses. That’s what he’s actually mad about.

That’s the truth of it. The fundamental premise of his point is exactly wrong. You’re taking away their pets, you’re taking away their pawns, you’re taking away their reason for existing. Of course, they’ll pathologize that. But they’re actually doing harm to them; they’re not helping them.

Helping is investment. It obviously goes to the old saw of “teach a man to fish” versus “give a man a fish.” Give a man 1,000 fish forever, and he becomes completely dependent. That’s actually the goal of it. Really, what’s happening is the cutoff of USAID is rolling up Blue Empire. It’s killing the blue business model. That’s what they’re mad about. Okay, keep going.

Yeah. Well, going back to Luke, what’s our advice to him, or how do you react to or reflect on the situation? What should he do now?

I don’t know how they got that photo of him. Did he sit for that photo?

No, no, no. I don’t think so.

Yeah. So the point is, I think overall he didn’t talk to the journos, which is good. Look, Luke will be fine. Why will Luke be fine? Because his tribe supports him, right? And the journos' ability to impact so many. With that said, the reason they do this stuff now is, and this is the unfortunate part, they do this stuff and they post this like—take this Dylan thing. By his logic, someone would be justified in Luigi-type stuff. This is the very dangerous thing about what these journos are doing. They’re trying to essentially foment hatred against tech guys.

What have we done besides make things cheaper, faster, and better? I can now communicate with anybody, anywhere, any time, for no money. I can find all the world’s information at my fingertips. I can do math and computer science. I can do simulations. We can launch rockets. We’ve got electric cars. We’re the bad guys? Versus the people who are just stalking and spamming everybody all the time?

The first thing is to have an incredibly strong moral bedrock and frame. Understand that everything the journos are doing is projection. There’s a decision rule: don’t take the bait. The journos only get traffic for their articles when they get rage views from us.

Guess what? They got 700,000 views or whatever for this tweet, and they got conversions because they sold ads. That’s a win for them, in a sense. It’s not a total win because they’re certainly not getting anybody fired or anything like that, so it’s much less of a win, but it’s some kind of win.

A while ago, there was some journo who was doing a cover story or something like that, and they put a hit on a tech guy for 15 months. He completely ignored the entire thing, and it got no clicks or views. The opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s indifference.

Another way of putting it is that we’ve built up much of this supply chain, but not all of it. The most important thing is that we’ve gotten X, and we’ve reestablished control over the platform, because they had gone deep into our territory and actually had crazy blue stuff in some of our citadels, like our VC firms.

One of the things they were doing was trying to target the stuff that’s upstream—the platforms, the venture capitalists, and so on—to try to hit the nexus points. Why do they go after Uber? They didn’t want a trillion-dollar company, certainly not a libertarian one. Why do they go after VCs? They’re the ones distributing capital.

If they go after these nexus points, these critical nodes, they can try to hit those. If you’re in a social war, it’s like taking a capital city or a town. These are important nexus points. You don’t want to go after a desert; you go after nexus points.

They were deep in our territory, so now we took back the platform. That’s good. We’re also flanking mainstream media with tweets and podcasts—ultra-short-form and ultra-long-form content—where they don’t have as much establishment oomph. We figured out the formula that works, which is individual over institutional.

Now the next step—and this is the big story for the next 5 years or so—is the ledger of record. Ultimately, you can’t be a critic.

You have to be a constructive critic. Ron Paul said, “End the Fed,” and Satoshi implemented Bitcoin. You have the criticism, then you have the construction. So we actually have to build something better. We have to build internet-first media.

That is that whole talk I gave on the ledger of record. By the way, that talk was originally from 2020, and I feel pretty good about essentially predicting that GPT-3—or the next version of it—would be able to summarize things. It happened faster than I thought, but I think the projection was correct.

The box score, exactly.

The fundamental premise is, if you think about a sports article, it's essentially a wrapper around a box score. If you take a financial article, it's essentially a wrapper around stock ticker symbols. If you take a political article, it's a wrapper around tweets. That's the raw feed. It's the numbers that underpin the letters.

If you think about what a blockchain is, it's a cryptographically verifiable feed. That's, in a sense, what Bitcoin is. A blockchain is a stream of events, similar to Twitter or any other event-based feed, except it has much harder, cryptographically verifiable guarantees: proof of what, when, and where—or proof of what, when, and who. What is the hash? When is the timestamp? Who is the digital signer? You can also do proof of location, proof of where, and other kinds of proofs.

That stream of cryptographic proof is like a better Twitter in that sense—cryptographically verifiable Twitter. Then you have AI referencing that to create articles. That's the high-level concept of the ledger of record that replaces the paper record.

We have to play to win. So we have to realize that this is the center of the whole thing: truth. And, actually, we have a better form of truth. You know what that is? It's a form that is native to us.

Crypto.

Yes. Specifically, there's a good book by a reformed journo—or two somewhat reformed journos. These are the ones who are not haters. Some of them, I assume, are good people, as I said. No, actually, Vigna's okay. The book is The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything. This was 7 years ago.

The thing is, this basically puts into book form a concept that had existed for a long time. I've just got a citation for the concept. The point is that Bitcoin is decentralized, cryptographic truth.

The whole thing about Bitcoin that's so hard is: How do you get global consensus on who owns what BTC? We now have something where, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, Japanese or Chinese, Indian or Pakistani, everybody agrees on the state of the Bitcoin blockchain. They have global consensus on this thing, which is worth trillions of dollars.

People fight wars over billions of dollars, millions of dollars. They kill people over thousands of dollars sometimes. To have global consensus on this with no policemen or military backing it is extraordinary. You know that saying, “How many divisions does the Pope have?”—which Stalin would say. How many long divisions does The New York Times have? They don't have any. Bitcoin has, right?

We actually have truth on our side—a more powerful form of decentralized, cryptographic truth. It's not headquartered in downtown Manhattan. It's on the internet.

Let me weigh in for a second, because this all sounds compelling, but I also just want to celebrate what we're doing. Right now, we have John Coogan, Mike Solana, us, and lots of other folks doing such great work without the crypto elements. So why is that necessary? What's missing?

Yes, great question. What we're doing with all the commentary is necessary but not sufficient. We also need reporting, because commentary is humorous. It's opinion.

You think we need reporting. We need news.

You need reporting. Exactly. That's right. Commentary and summarization are over here, but news is the update.

The thing is, Twitter is obviously a feed of raw facts that people are putting out there in a decentralized way. Bitcoin increases that because, once you can get consensus on who owns what BTC, you can also get consensus on who owns what stocks, what bonds, and what Ethereum smart contracts. Actually, as I wrote in an article the other day, all property becomes cryptography. We can do that in a different session.

Chainlink and things like that have built essentially armored cars for information, sending it up and down to the blockchain. Polymarket is an armored car for information, where information on the internet that's commercially valuable can be protected by cryptography and sent there.

So let's take the case of Pirate Wires and TPM. That's great, but let's say there's some dispute over whether a photo is real or not. A great example is The Atlantic publishing this crazy piece calling for invading Brazil because they saw a photo of the Brazilian fires.

Was the photo not real?

Yes, exactly. That's a very clear example. “The Amazon fires are more dangerous than WMDs.” This is a great example of when I said they'll literally kill you for clicks. They were calling for the invasion of Brazil on this basis. They were saying, “The Amazon fires are burning,” and it was all based on a fake photo that Macron had tweeted out. It turned out to be a photo taken by a photojournalist who had died years ago. It was from some stock-photo site.

There was a timestamp that showed that the photo had existed many years ago, so it wasn't of a current event. That's amazing, right? That's something where epistemology is, in a sense, cryptographic. Why? Because you load the website and see that it's HTTPS. That means there's actually cryptographic authentication that it's at Getty Images or wherever it was. It was basically some stock-photo thing.

You might hit archive.is, so you have implicit cryptographic verification of the timestamp of that image that was going to be used to cause a war. That's a concrete example of why control over truth is so important to them.

Why do they put up the billboards there? Because once you determine what is true and false—did Russia collude with Trump? No, it was all fake—it took a massive court process to adjudicate that. Fortunately, the court system wasn't corrupted enough, and that went through. But The New York Times collects all these Pulitzers for basically false information.

One thing was interesting, though, and this actually helps give some insight into it. There was a tech person who was a lib—I won't name them—but during the whole Russiagate thing said, “Oh, yeah, I know this is just as good as Game of Thrones or something.” I realized, wow, remember that Paul Graham thing about the movies? These people were treating this as if it were an entertainment show, with Trump as a villain.

With The Times or with any legacy media—and this is very obvious today, but it was obvious in the past—you can predict what they're going to say about somebody before they say it. They have very low information content in each thing. It's like: Trump bad, blue America good. It's like a cast of characters. It's almost like Seinfeld, where the same cast of characters—the good guy and bad guy—appears on the page, and you could just auto-do it.

In fact, did I show you the robo-journalist from 3 years ago?

I'm trying to remember. No.

Oh, yeah. So this was a bounty. I put up a prize. As soon as AI came out—and we can do a lot more with this, by the way—I'll show you this.

I put out a call to use AI to generate NYT-tier clickbait from tweets. Remember my thing? The theoretical article was in 2020, where I said, “You know what? We could have a feed of data, and all of these journals are just a wrapper around that feed.”

The reason I knew GPT-3 might get there is that there was a company called Narrative Science. Have you ever seen them?

No.

Narrative Science went bust. It was a good company, just a little too early. This was a few years before the ChatGPT moment. What Narrative Science did at the time was really cool: It took your financial reports and would say, “Revenue was high in the northeastern segment: 65K, 40...” So it would basically generate a narrative from your raw data. It was a readable narrative. Makes sense?

Yeah.

Because I saw that, I knew it was probably possible, as this technology advanced, to take raw feeds of data and summarize them in essentially story form. With me so far?

Yep.

Okay. So that was the theory in 2020, and then the practice by 2022 was, once ChatGPT came out, I put out a call to use AI to generate NYT-tier clickbait from tweets. One brave engineer answered the call—a student who learned how to code in Replit. His app takes a tweet and generates an article. It's already in the ballpark, and you can see from this video the GPT Times. You see this, right?

Yep.

Okay.

So let me just rewind this. Okay, here it takes the Elon thing—the Elon tweet. It goes here, you paste it in, and it churns a little bit. Okay, it calculates. He's showing all the other articles he's generated with the aesthetics. It looks like NYT, right?

Yeah. So good. Oh my God.

All right. This is 3 years ago. We can do so much more with this. All right, now, boom: putting the cocaine back in Coca-Cola. And look, it looks exactly like NYT or clickbait, right? No journo, only robo.

Okay, no journo, only crypto, because we can also have these be—look, see, there's a code, and so on and so forth. You know, there's a saying system administrators have: “Be careful; I'll replace you with a very tiny shell script.” We can just automate—just automate and completely obviate.

And the thing is, actually, all the journals have these unions where they're against AI. They're against AI, they're against AI. This is, by the way, similar to, I think, the U.S. imposing tariffs—or Red America imposing tariffs—on China. It's like Blue America imposing tariffs on AI. I don't think it's going to work.

But basically, Blue America imposing tariffs on AI is a protectionist, late-breaking thing where they think, “Okay, we can protect our revenue from this, and there won't be any AI-based disruptors of us.” But there will be, and they're going to be internet-first, because there are a lot of English speakers online, and most of them don't live in the U.S. There's a lot of talent online.

So one piece of this is what I just showed, and the crucial thing about that is those stories can have all the backlinks and citations, right? They show the raw tweets that are underpinning them. And if you click, you can just change the style: “I want this conservative. I want this liberal. I want this.” You essentially now have turned all of the massaging and Russell conjugation—you know the Russell conjugation concept, right?

You know, I dox, you leak, but The New York Times investigates, right? I sweat, you perspire, but she glows, right?

Okay. So Russell conjugation is: you're doing a bad thing, but I'm doing a good thing. Zuckerberg has another great one. They attack Zuck for having dual-class stock. “Here's just to show you how evil these guys are: You can't fire Mark Zuckerberg's kids. That's a problem with tech companies using dual-class stock schemes,” right?

So it all presents as “presidents are not kings,” right? Now, maybe you'd believe this argument on its own. Okay? But the next day, what do they do? Or the previous article—it's like, “How Pinch Saved the Times.” Right? Dual-class is good when they do it, and it's bad when tech does it.

Right.

Now, the thing is, you have to have a long context window. I have a long context window because I remember this article from 2012, and I remember this one from 2019. You have to have a long context window, and until recently, I didn't know how to show somebody else how to find all these internal contradictions. But guess what? AI can do that. AI can find every internal contradiction in the NYT ever.

And so you could just have NYT versus NYT. They're enslaving people, and then they're pretending they're on the side of—there are so many things like that, right? The Ukraine pro and con, right? Okay, okay. So, coming back to your point, we need to have a stronger form of truth, because if we don't have that, then you're essentially accepting their premise that this event happened.

Right. And I guess what I'm curious about is why—yeah, but the crypto stuff I buy. Even before that, we've been able to build commentary, but we haven't, to your point, had enough pro-tech reporters or—

So the ecosystem had to be there. Things had to work. Blockspace had to get there. AI had to get there. We needed the field clear for what we're going to do, which is decentralized cryptographic truth.

Decentralized cryptographic truth where it's free, it's verifiable on your computer. That's the thing about the Bitcoin blockchain: you can verify.

Now, one of the things I should be more clear about is exactly what I mean by true or whatever. When a statement is posted on-chain, what you can verify is the metadata. You can say it was very hard to falsify the time at which this was posted. It's very hard to falsify the hash because of the properties of cryptographic hashes, and it's very hard to falsify the digital signature of what entity posted it.

Each of those 3 things has certain cryptographic guarantees that I can get into why they're hard, but they're hard to falsify. That doesn't mean that it couldn't be an AI image that you posted on-chain, but it would have been hard, 5 years later, to say that that AI image never existed before when I can see proof of it. The Brazilian fires photo is a great example of that.

Another example: in a Chinese court, blockchain evidence was used to show that someone had a patent that was invalid because someone had posted something very similar to it many years ago. So you could use the hash to show they had priority. Does that make sense?

Right.

So there's enough stuff we've done in crypto—proof of location, proof of this, proof of that, proof of solvency. There are many kinds of attestations and proofs that you can put on-chain that are pretty hard to fake.

That is a fundamentally new set of primitives that journals aren't equipped to deal with, because we're talking about math. And they can't do math. They're negatively selected. If they could do math, they'd be in tech, usually, right?

But math is a universal property of humans. You don't need a subscription to the New York Times to do math. I don't need to pay Sulzberger to do math. Someone in India, someone in the Philippines, someone in the South, someone in the North—wherever—you can do math. You don't have to subscribe here for the truth. The truth is actually everybody's thing. Everybody should have access to the truth.

So it gets to a very fundamental thing where tech guys are sensing there's something here, but ultimately the network has to supplant the state as the form of truth. That's what Bitcoin represents: the truth machine. And it gives a set of primitives, as I mentioned—the who, the what, the when—and then, with other things, we can extend that to the where, so that we can actually have a feed of facts.

So once you have the root feed of facts, think of it as Twitter but with decentralized cryptographic verification. That's one way of thinking about it. Imagine you have a bunch of checks, sort of like community notes, but a bunch of check marks at the bottom—like continuous integration with GitHub, where you have a bunch of checks, green or red, to show if the site is deploying properly. You have a bunch of assertions on it.

Think of it as Trugle. It's like Google but for truths, and you just run every assertion. All these models are saying whether something is true or not. There's some computation there.

But if it's valuable enough, I should put out a prize just for this. Actually, I'll put out a prize for decentralized cryptographic truth and Forecaster, where essentially you can maybe pay a little bit of crypto for model evaluations to fact-check something. It's sort of like Grok does this. But I think a better way of doing it is to have multiple models do it, give the premises, give the backlinks, and so on and so forth.

And, by the way, you know who agrees with me somewhat, I think, on this is Salana, where he's like, “We need to do more reporting, not just commentary,” and so on. And a good version of that is Nick Carter's work on Operation Choke Point.

So that's a great example of something which is reporting and not just summary, not just commentary.

Another example of this—and what's interesting, by the way, is notice that our first-party testimony, in aggregate, is actually reporting. We're doing things like—you know how someone who has raw talent in basketball or football or something can do things and they don't necessarily have great form, but they can somehow get it done with raw athletic talent? There's a lot of things we're doing that are good, that are done on raw intuition.

When you have a bunch of people who are posting on X and not talking to journalists, the quotes get pulled. People used to say, “I'm canceling my subscription,” and that was always fake and stupid, right? Because who cares? They've got a million subscribers. That doesn't do anything, really, except en masse they can get another subscriber. But they can't get another quoter, right? They can't get another supplier of quotes.

Because there's only one a16z. There's only one Elon. What does Elon do when you email PR at Tesla or something? He just replies back with a poop emoji. What do you reply back to The Washington Post? He's like, “Send my regards to your puppet master,” right?

Because he knows. He knows that basically they won't criticize their boss, only yours. We did this thing intuitively by freezing them out of quotes, not talking to them, and posting the stuff ourselves. Now they're just reduced to bloggers.

Now, they're not sourced. That's another thing, by the way: an important concept is how the good journals operate. You'll see some of them. They're almost like a CIA station chief. They'll post on Twitter for tips: “Email me. Message me on Signal,” this, that, and the other, right?

They're literally saying—it's like a CIA bureau chief who's set up their office there in this country, and some weak country can't do anything about that, right? It's like a KGB officer who's there in the country, and they can't be deported or whatever because of some embassy rights, right? So, they're spying on Facebook. They're spying on Meta. They're trying to solicit leaks.

Why do people leak at these companies? If they leak at these companies, it's for the same reasons. I think it's like MICE. You know what that is in the CIA? Money, ideology, compromise, and ego. Right? So, why do people leak to journals? Why do people talk to journals? Sometimes it's money. For example, at Uber, the VCs there wanted money and Travis didn't want to sell or IPO, so that's why they did it.

In part, ideology—why? Because sometimes they're far-left within an organization and they want to attack that organization. Compromise—well, that's interesting. Often the journo will have something on somebody and they'll say, “I won't print this if you give me something else.” That's not an economic transaction, but that's a very dastardly thing. So, yeah, don't talk to journals.

Everybody—what happens is the NYT or WaPo or whatever, they'll message you and put on their nicest tone. They're taught to flatter and sympathize in the email. You know what it's like, actually? It's exactly like our SDRs, our sales development guys, our sales guys, right? They send out emails that are really crafted cold-email things to make the sale, and it's a completely calculated thing.

Go and look at, I don't know, Mark Cranney's stuff on sales. If you need a filter—an analogy to understand the journals—the journals are sending you sales emails. The difference is they're scam sales emails. It's like a Nigerian whatever; it's like a scammer email, right?

At least when we're doing enterprise sales, maybe it's an aggressive sale at times or whatever someone's doing, but the product has to work. They can cancel the subscription or whatever. It's not like, “Ha-ha, you bought the product. Now we've got malware on your property. We're going to destroy your company.” That's actually what the journo sales email is like. Okay? So, this analogy can only go so far, right?

The point being that the ego part—MICE—just like the CIA bureau chief, people will do it to get their name in the press. They'll do it because they think, “Oh, it'll work for me. I'll be the one. I can charm them.” Everybody has to learn this lesson somehow, right?

Well, I do want to call out that there are some—we named some of them—but there are some other new-media folks who are Substackers, et cetera, who are doing journalism but are not the same journal.

Okay. So, now let me get to a very important point. Many words have been corrupted in a certain way. So, when I say journalism, I mean blue journalism. Because if you were to ask some journo, “Is Ben Shapiro a journalist?” they'd say, “No, of course not,” right? If you ask them, “Is Nate Silver still a journalist? Is Glenn Greenwald still a journalist?”

Yeah. Bari Weiss?

No, they're just running a blog, you know? Obviously, the NYT is Sulzberger's blog, in the same way The Free Press is Bari Weiss's outlet, right? So, this is a very important point. Let's say that Zuck competes with TikTok. Zuck would never say TikTok isn't doing technology, right? That's Chinese technology versus American technology, but they're still recognizably playing the same sport, you might say. They're under Communist Party surveillance; you can make all those points and argue all that. Trump has flipped on whatever. Leaving that aside, the point is that you wouldn't say they're not doing technology just because they're adversarial. They are doing technology. They're just doing it on the Chinese side, right?

They will actually—the blue journalists will actually deny that Substack is journalism, right? That Ben Shapiro is a journalist, because even if Ben Shapiro has millions more followers than they do, in a much larger audience, and so on and so forth—even if he's smarter than they are in many ways and a better communicator, certainly better than their opinion editors—and even if the Substackers, by the way, are doing original reporting, what they mean when they say “journalism” is that he's not in the club.

So, remember the social-network thing with the blue and the red. Once you think about it as a network, where the borders are fuzzy but no less real for being fuzzy—a network of blues, right? Glenn Greenwald is on the boundary of that, right? Seymour Hersh maybe arguably is on the boundary. Bari Weiss arguably is on the boundary in some ways because she was formerly in the club, and so forth.

It's a little bit like being an MD or a JD, where you have a formal state license. To be a blue journo is to have an informal state license, right? Why is it informal? Because if they were formally state-licensed, they could say that it's a state-controlled press.

Yeah.

So, instead, what they get is a White House press pass and, you know, it's a press-controlled state. The point about that is that once you kind of see that it's a network—it's a club, right?—that's when you realize, “Oh, ‘don't talk to blue journalists’ is actually really what I'm saying,” right?

So, that's an important clarification. Talking to a tech journalist doesn't count either?

Tech journalists like TechCrunch—

Anti-tech journalist.

Like science. Yeah, it's anti-tech journalism. Right, exactly. Science got tortured to mean “masks don't work” before they do, right? So, you actually have to have some prefix or something. It's science in the form of independent replication, not prestige citation.

Yeah. We're trying to coin new media, like something new.

That's right. Another example of this is democracy. For the Democrats, it means California is a one-party state. Here, let me show you this. Hold on, just to show you. Democrats and communists have both built one-party states, right?

Here is Newsom taking lessons from Xi, and he's explaining how this is an amazing, amazing visual: “Total Democratic Party control.” Democrats and communists have both built one-party states, right? This is more than just a one-liner; it's a deep point. Just like when they said “science” and turned it into the opposite of science, which was “masks don't work” before they do, just like they said “media” or “journalism” and turned it into the opposite of journalism—which is basically not neutral reporting on anything, but reporting on the enemies of blues and protecting blues—here they turned democracy into the opposite of democracy, where they destroyed competitive, multiparty elections.

In California, elections are held but the party always wins. Exactly like China. Okay? Democrats destroy democracy in California. Deep point. This is why things got so bad there.

Yeah.

Because with no Republican check, with no multiparty competition, this is when the California drain of $100 billion—this is when the graft really got underway. The homeless-industrial-complex explosion, because there was no accountability at the government level for all the Democratic abuses. They built a one-party state and started looting it, just like the communists did. But I repeat myself, right?

So, when a Republican is elected, that's a threat to democracy. But when a Democrat surveils, sanctions, deplatforms, or unbanks, that's just democracy, right? Now, to be fair, it is true that many Republicans, in response to this, have started to build Florida especially into their own party states. So, the problem is that Democrats, Republicans, and communists have all created basically one-party states, where the only democracy then is going to be the right to exit.

To vote with your feet, right? Go ahead.

Yeah, that's a perfect place to wrap this episode. It gets to your network state. Now you can vote with your feet and go to California or go to Florida or go to wherever.

That's right. And we want to combine all 3, because Starbase shows that you can combine all 3. I'll end with just 2 things. Essentially, this is a really important point: we reclaimed free speech. We need to reclaim democracy, right? We cannot give up on democracy.

First of all, that's an important interpretation of what I just said. It was not an abundance but a deficit of democracy that resulted in California's downfall, because the Democrats built a one-party state, destroyed all multiparty competition, gerrymandered it, and that's how they started all the looting—the hundreds of billions of dollars in looting, right?

But we can have a rebirth of democracy. Maybe we can do our next talk on democracy creating startup cities. Why? People vote with their feet to move to Starbase, they vote with their wallets to build up Starbase, and then, finally, they incorporated Starbase by voting with their ballots.

That's a future democracy. Not a 2-party system with the illusion of choice, but a 1,000-city system with the reality of choice. Ninety-seven percent for Elon, right? This is essentially a precursor to what's coming next, where you vote with your feet, your wallet, and your ballot at the same time.

And that's the only way that you can vote against the Democrats or the Communists. The only remaining vote is that vote. That's where the true vote is. What we need to do is reduce the barrier to exit to give everybody that practical franchise, right? Reduce lock-in, make it possible for people to actually have a choice over the government that rules them, right?

And this is also, of course, basically—we need to become the largest funders in the world of media, of democracy, and of science. We actually mean it in the uncorrupted versions because I actually do believe in those things unironically, right? I do believe in media and journalism, books and writing, and all this kind of stuff. As I said, remember, we're a fork of the East Coast.

Yeah.

Right. We're a fork of that establishment. So, basically, with technology, we can have a new birth of media, science, democracy, and equality on the internet, because that's what the internet is. It's a peer-to-peer network. We're all equal on the internet. And truth is everybody's property. It is not one person's property. It's cryptography.

That's a great place to wrap. Balaji, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming to the podcast.

Thanks.