Balaji on How Tech Truly Wins Media

22:23We want to build Googles and Facebooks and AI and all this kind of stuff drones, and we want to build giant companies, giant cryptocurrencies and now internet communities. What they want to do is they want to 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 you look at these prizes, they'll all say something like, are reporting held, you know, these so -and -so accountable and led to an FTC investigation blah blah blah. So they're really willing to take credit when their words on the page lead to the state golem going and animating and smashing somebody, right?

23:00It led to an FTC investigation. It led to a new FAA regulation led to this led to that, right? Leading to some person getting fired, some program getting set up and the ultimate thing obviously is to get the president of the United States fire. That's why they wanted to get Nixon fired, right? We wanted to get right. They were essentially like think of Wall Street Journal NYT and Washington Post as a three board of director seats on top of the presidency. The president was like the titular CEO, but the journal, the Times, and Washington Post, if they all put their multi -sick key in the lock, they did their board of directors vote, they'd get them fired, right?

23:31So that was actually the state of affairs. That's what it meant by holding the government accountable. Nobody in the government was really in power. The journals could write up negative stories and they were out of power, right? So the thing is that when it comes to policy time, they will admit that their stories led to something. But when it comes Because BLM time, they deny that their stories led to, you know, half American game burned down, right? So it's a one way ratchet where they take all the credit and avoid all the blame because could you actually show the trace of that image coming into somebody's eye and then them setting fire to this building.

24:04Once in a while, you might be able to show it, right? They publish a manifesto saying, I read X, Y, and Z and that's why I burned it down. But that causal effect, right? The cause and effect and basically demonstrating that is, you know, there's an impression of page view that comes in over here through the eyes and the ears. And then there is a burn down the building kind of action on their side. It's funny because they're quick to use causal and no direction. They're quick to say, hey, Facebook is causing people to be depressed or to whatever, turn the right wing or whatever. Yes, that's right.

24:33So tech, there's a causal effect for everything negative. Yeah. Turnos is a causal effect for everything positive. was that's amazing. Wow. What an amazing right? Everything you do is bad. Everything they do is good. Amazing flipping. Once you see this though, you can basically be like Neo, you know, in the matrix I'm just like block everything like this, right? And they're a big piece of this. They stop doing this But one of the things they were doing years ago is they're like, oh my guy everybody in tacky so why and blah blah blah, right? And Obviously it's so much more international than the journals.

25:03If you go and take that famous photo of Elon in the conference room and you compare the people there versus the NYT editorial boat photo, right? And you'll see they're like well -dressed, essentially mostly European ancestry people. Again, I'm not the kind of person who thinks like white is an insult, but they do, right? So it's all projection, right? The journals themselves have these tyrannical, evil, meritless nepotists as bosses, right? The journals themselves can never actually make it anywhere. It's all favoritism and glad -hanging, and there's no merit, and it's all luck and connections.

25:34and the journeys themselves essentially are these envious people who exist to harm you to increase their career prospects and they project that all that out into everybody else, right? So once you see that, like every accusations of confession or whatever, you realize, oh, this is how the world works in their stupid Brooklyn side of things and you think of us as a rival tribe that acts the same way, right? Okay. So now that's like part of the macro. Now bad news for them, which is to say that I bad news for us and also bad news for them. But a lot of the bad news for them. The bad news for them is that they and the gigantic war between the internet and blue America, right?

26:11And by the way, we didn't actually intend to start that war. We were just building great stuff. And it became so popular that we took away all of the customers of these guys. But it's not like you set up Twitter or Facebook or Google to go and blow up the times and the posts in the journal, right? That was just something like Bezos got the post out of Petty Cash, right? Like it was just something where we built a valuable enough business that it generates so much wealth that, okay, you can just go and acquire this thing, right? And of course, I understand why they got mad, but what they should have just done is rather than try to beat us, join us, or whatever.

26:42Part of it is also, there's three or four different things. There's a scenario where Steve Jobs had lived that when Bezos bought the post, Jobs buys the times and Larry Page buys a Wall Street Journal, and we be on Mars by now. Yep. Okay, so like, the thing is, at the end of the day, there's actually, as much as I think there are like evil twin in some ways. There's a deep sense, which is similarity, which is we're all about the collection dissemination and presentation of information. That's the similarity to intact media, the collection of information like the raw data, whether it's user generated content or so on, dissemination, which is a distribution, the posting circulation and presentation, user interface.

27:21They do think about their charts or infographics. They also obsess about copy and so so forth, right? So we're a fork of them. In the same way that like Yale was a fork of Harvard or America was a fork of Britain, then should it's a fork of the East Coast culture. And that goes deeper. People like Paul Graham, Katherine Boyle, Mike Moritz. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's right. So in another life, right? Yeah. Mike Moritz was a journalist, became an investor. Katherine Boyle also journalist became an investor, right? Peter Till would have been probably, they'd been more than 20 years earlier, probably would have been a Supreme court jurist, right?

27:55You probably would be in like chief judges, Supreme court or something. Paul Graham would be in a professor, dire page of professor, sir, Gibri and professor, what makes a lot of in Brooklyn probably for for sure, but you'd probably be a book publisher or something like that, right? I probably would have been a professor and so forth. And that's true for Andrew Angdafney, Kohler, Martian Kassato, right? Dixon, because the thing is with computer science, there is a amazing connection between the word and the deed. Actually, AI makes that even closer. You write it down and it's done. It's this amazing thing, right?

28:24So ultimately what we're doing is we're also writing all day, right? We're writing all day to see an impact in the world, right? So the difference is they're impact because they're doing it through the state and a failed state at that is almost invariably negative, right? And because we're doing it through the network, we have feedback loops where, for example, when we type something in and it's actually factually wrong, like the compiler throws up on it and it just doesn't compile. There's fact checking like on the page when we type something. They have no such thing. Their only fact check is actually crucially, not by the world, but by their peers.

28:56That is to say, it's only when they lose status among other journals that they actually ever course correct, right? Ever. And that's like very rare, right? So long as within their tribe, they're not losing status. There's nothing. Okay. Now, basically what happened is once you see this kind of model by the going back to the original point, the internet to Shrupting Blue America, China Shrupting Red America, you can understand essentially the last 18 years in the following way. Blue America was disrupted by the internet, and so they began wopeness to take a piece of Red America's pie and the tech lash to try and take back control from the internet.

29:31Red America was disrupted by China, so the trade war was against China and Trump was against Blue America, right? Because both their pies they felt they were shrinking and so they launched two front wars on Blue America and Red America and the internet, Red America and Blue America and China. Okay, we'll do the China bit later, okay? But Blue America versus red American internet after a massive push has lost, right? I mean it was close, but basically Elon and X -Day. It's like literally D -Day. This feels like Eons goes only three years ago. Literally three years ago X still had him being a part.

30:05Twitter was still Twitter. We are in like wartime speed of things happening and seeing how quickly things are ready. Okay, so X -Day was something where, by the way, it wasn't just Elon. $44 billion, even Elon, as amazing as Elon is. That's like at the right tail of what even Elon was capable of actually having as a race. That's a big race for anybody, right? So it took, but the richest man in the world, the wealthy, he's launching Brock his doing ships. He's all the stuff and he decided to take on this enormous extra thing and somehow manage it, which is actually crazy to think about because everything else, Elon is the end of one because whenever I talk to a founder, I'm like, focus, focus, focus.

30:40Okay, after you have your first whatever billion dollar company and it's 10 billion and it's 100 bill and then you could do your next or whatever, right? Fine. But so Elon's end of one point is in 22, where it looked like the free world was just completely on the ropes by these like ratio obsessed wook psychos just having a pinned like this. You couldn't even say whether men and women exist like we're generally talking about like a permanent midnight like the settings really, really bad stuff right? How evil they were. They just burned out half America. They were just getting psycho more and more and more psycho, right?

31:10it. And so it admits that basically all the resource of all the centrist tech and finance guys, because that's what the 44 billion. There's that famous message of Elon to Ellison that's being made public or that he's like, what are you in for like one or two? Okay, but okay, Ellison could put him one or two, but like so many other people who's like Avengers assemble put in a mill, whatever they could afford a mill, 10, 20, I mean, 50 is a big investment for almost anybody, right? Like 50 is like, you know, it's 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 your book X day, right?

31:51And so the landing was extremely contested, right? They basically wanted whatever the opposite of what you wanted. Yes, that's right. So she basically essentially with her forced a quitter acquisition or not, right? Or I think like Elon is actually 40 chess, right? So he actually is that smart, right? So it is possible that Elon just essentially made people think just a reverse psychology got the judge who had negated his pay package or like forced him through this whole court process to get it back to say, okay, a same judge now this time will do reverse psychology. So net net, he got Twitter.

32:26So anyway, point as X Day was the day. X Day was also the liberation of meta and liberation of YouTube, right? All the countries that these racial fanatics at the NYT had occupied, right? The networks they had occupied. You know how like the Nazi Empire was at like its peak and they thought they were going to win and then D day and then they just collapse like this, right? So Salzburger and Soros, they thought they were going to win and then X Day boom came in And then just there like with X flipping YouTube uncensored like meta uncensored, everything uncensored and so and so forth, because X was upstream of the conversation.

33:05Anyway, point is it took Elon's personal intervention in June 23, three. See 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 wolves that had just infested Twitter, right? To actually change things. And by the way, you know, again, Elon's intuitive more than a philosopher per se, just his philosophy is his execution, right? But there's actually a real logic to why you renamed it X, you know why? Among other things, there's one of many reasons. What? I'm not saying this is why he did it, but it is an implicit aspect of how he did it.

33:37It's just like them renaming all the schools and like tearing down the statues and so on, right? Every turno had put years of effort into building up their profiles and all their blue checks were stripped and all their profiles got renamed and it was just X, right? I know the example is fake news, right? Fake news are actually being 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. And Trump turned it on them and it's like, actually the NYT is fake news, the fake news media, right? It was a perfect, right? So in the same way, the blue check went from something that was something that Jirenos valued something that just Elon just stripped from all of them, right?

34:17He just stripped their status, stripped their distribution. I don't know whether the ban on outbound links again, whether it's intentional or not. I have no personal information to do what I just speculate or again, and even if it wasn't intentional, this is just like part of the effect of it. The band and Alpah and Lynx meant that suddenly X became the place you just go for the information and you don'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 Lynx. He renamed the whole thing to show that he had root control over it because you know what a pain in the ass is to do a rename, right?

34:48This x .com was in a sense, texture of age, for making every fucking GitHub rename from master to main. Okay. Now, is Yale renaming its master's degree? No. Okay, of course not, right? His master class would I write? Like, anybody who's at the end of your time, started saying, I've got a main degree now, rather than a master's in journalism. I think Columbia says a master's in journalism, right? So the whole point was, again, the journalists have a double standard. They would impose that on us, right? You won a million GitHub repos after a rename from master to main, whatever, 100 million GitHub.

35:24You don't have to pay in the ass that was. You pay in the ass. Every single dev had to go through some stupid exercise on this, which was just a demonstration of their power over us at that time. That was what renaming means. It means you cause a massive inconvenience for everybody to show that you have institutional power. So now, Elon returns a favor and does it at even greater scale, right? Okay. So now what that is is network overstate where we fought in the domain which we were stronger. And in a sense also by the way, taking back X and renaming X, you know, there's like a hard fought city in some countries or some wars.

35:53Gosh, there's a city, I think. How many times did Seoul change hands during the Korean War? It was like several times, right? So yeah, it's just so, Seoul changed hands for four times. Okay, went back and forth, right? And so 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 tribe and actually just to make that really explicit. This is a good visual. All right, so this is from 2017 and the interesting thing is it's the same on both Twitter and Facebook, right? Since from eight years ago, you can see they labeled notes as blue and red based on whether they'd said I'm voting for Clinton or Trump, just parsing the text, right?

36:35And they looked at their connections and blue people were connected to blues and reds were connected to reds. And the only large red media outlet was Breitbart. And blue was over here, and the hill was one of the very few outlets on both sides, 10 to link, because it just gave neutral political news. Like, so and so was running, so and so results, one truly neutral outlet, right? And so here, you could actually see that this was a social war, right? And you know, I've made this point in the past that in 1861, like when it was in North versus South, we take for granted that the ideological and the geographical coincided, right?

37:09The North was the Union and the South had the slaves and slavery is legal here and illegal here and the Cheergrafkland ideological coincide, right? But by 2016 the Cheergrafkland ideological did not coincide. You didn't have a clean red states and blue states, very fractal. Red states and blue states do exist, but it's a preponderance as opposed to something that's as clean as this. Now to be clear, if you showed ideology here, it also looked more fractal, but it was more distinct ideologically back then, and here it's much more geographically overlapping, with me so far. Yep. Okay. But there is a domain where these two factions are completely distinct, and that is the domain of the cloud, right?

37:49So on the land, red and blue are higgledy -piggledy right next to each other. They can't invade each other's territory, like what you're going to invade, like the cities, or the cornfields, or something. You can't invade the lands. So instead, the social war is fighting over the mines. invading the minds, right? Now, once you see this, you can actually understand a lot about the last 10 years, right? We've basically been in the middle of this gigantic social war. And the goal was for blue, like how do you win a social war against red? They're gold, you're playing the game with Thela? No, I know the game, but I never played it.

38:23It's like you flip tiles. You've got black and white tiles, and you surround other tiles, and you flip them from black to white or white to black. Okay. And so essentially the goal for blue was to win ideologically and flip every red node to blue. One way to think about it is you know how an ant colony individual ants they don't actually know what they're doing but the colony has an intelligence. So even if the ants don't do it during the colony has an intelligence, right? This is same for a flock of seagulls or a school of fish, right? There's colony intelligence that insects in in particular are like this, right?

38:57So once you start thinking about ideology is just like that, right? Think of woke as like blue, right? Or like radicalized blue. It's like laser eyes, right? Like basically go broke, go woke. They lost all this money as the interest dropped to them. Blue laser eyes come online and they start going to their old religion because they don't have the money anymore. So go back to the old civil rights rhetoric and so on. It's like basically when countries got blown up in the Middle East, other places, when countries go on hard times, that's when fundamentalism returns, right? Because they don't have the economics anymore.

39:32So their economics went away, laser eyes glowing blue. So the eyes glow blue of these sharenotes. And they basically were like, okay, it's life or death for us. And they started going and trying to capture as many institutions as possible in the social war. So that's why they were just going after random seeming nodes and forcing, canceling them. Remember how they wanted Amazon to put BLM on it so they did get Amazon I'm gonna put BLM on some page. Like for a long time, you'd load Google and it'd have some BLM thing on there, right? You know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah, just. So everybody, you know, Brian Armstrong during the 2020 BLM riots, like if people were like trying to force him to say Black Lives Matter on Twitter, what was the point of that?

40:09It's like the Shahada in Islam, right? The point of that was to show your convert to blue, right? To flip a red node blue, because it's a check mark over your head to show you they flip that node. Now that's part of blue tribe, and now they can turn attention on the next one, right? And so all of the cancellation, all of this censorship, all the de -platforming, all of the unbanking, all of the insane ideological fervor, you can conceptualize 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 versus worthless DI jobs and every red into somebody who is paying tribute to blue by essentially not just giving up the presidency, but assuming the position, like for example, why do they wanna defund the police?

40:57They wanna fund their NGOs. That's what it was all about. They wanted to redirect the budget. That's why there's like 200 homeless NGOs in San Francisco alone. The homeless industrial complex, that shows that the NGOs 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 Department, right? And so the point is that basically all of this stuff with defund the police to fund the NGOs, all of that can be conceptualized as this broad social war of blue against red to flip all red nodes blue, right? And what was our main weapon?

41:34Your racist, your sexist, your homophobic, your this, your that, transphobic blah blah blah blah. And with this language that same language they could use to force you out of their institution because they'd fire you for being accused of these things. And they'd also say your institution, they bust your borders and they would swarm you with unqualified hires or else you'd be accused of this. So the same language they'd used to strengthen their borders and deport reds and they'd used to bust your borders and import blues. You see what I'm saying? Right? Because if you're a racist, you should get fired from a blue organization and you're a racist unless you hire blues.

42:08Okay. Now of course, today we see they don't actually care about brown people or black people, only blue people, right? Since more clear in 2025 is less clear, so we're just fine. Okay. So now coming back up the stack. So once we realize that it was a social war, now we can actually understand why the journals want to kill you. Like basically, you know how at various times in history, France and Germany have traded, and France Germany have fought, and France Germany traded, and France Germany have fought, we are in wartime mode with the journals. So it is like extremely stupid for anybody to, now let's go to concrete brass tax.

42:42What should technologists do, and what should we do specifically do generally, right? So first, just at individual level, right? Number one, go direct. Build your own distribution to avoid distortion. Okay? That is to say, any content you have, it 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 because remember, they get hostile to tech guys. If they write a positive story, then it's like, well, you write out you're a flack, you're eroding a press release.

43:19Also, by the way, there's another point, which is conflict is interesting, right? Like any movie, if you're writing a screenplay, and it's just somebody sitting on the grass enjoying a fine sunny day, that's boring, right? But if a meteor hits, suddenly you've got attention, right? So it works in a movie setting, it's not what works in real life, right? So the journals want conflict. And so our concept of, Hey, it's 10 gigs for Dropbox or whatever. That might be helpful to the public, but it doesn't tell a story and 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 and they will get more page use at the expense of your company that you worked on so hard, right?

43:56So number one, go direct. Number two, build your own distribution to avoid distortion. Now, the thing about that is higher creators, there's two kinds of creators. There's those who are at the storyline level and you probably only need like one of those per company because if you have too many very strong willed personalities in a company, you can only have one Steve Jobs' apple, basically. However, you can have a lot of people assisting with production, making content with scaling that creator or what have you. So usually you're going to have a founding creator. And I'm not saying it's 100 % by the way, sometimes once you get to a certain scale, it's good to have some personalities.

44:32For example, actually Jesse Pollock is doing a great job at base for Coinbase, right? He's got his own distinctive style that's complementary to Coinbase's style and so and so on. So at a certain scale, you can have multiple personalities that are driving certain product lines or what have you. And so that's fine, right? But at least for start getting up to a build, you probably only want to have sort of one storyline, one main creator, and you have a lot of production support behind them, right? And that can really work. You can get very far with that. Video, images, all this kind of stuff, right?

44:57So a, go direct. Be, build your own distribution to avoid distortion. And by the way, when we are thinking about that, they call them the media because they mediate your experience or reality. When you're putting anything through a media, it's like an Instagram filter that makes you into a villain. Okay. Why would you do that to yourself? It's like paying the journal with free content to make yourself look bad and get a permalink that's attacking you. I remember our good friend, Flo Cervello was launching his remote office startup during COVID and he gave TechCrunch the exclusive and they criticized it.

45:28They basically didn't make it look good. And he's like, well, why would I give you my launching 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. Like, why would I ever do that? And the fundamental thing is, it's a business development relationship. Literally think of it as tech crunch is a corporation. Why are you giving them something for free? Right? Literally it's that. It's like that journal has a spreadsheet, whether it's them or their manager who's looking at it. And there's a row of the spreadsheet for that URL.

45:59And it's got the number of clicks and the number of conversions and the ad revenue on that article. And that's the only thing they care about. That's the only thing they care about. You know, it'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 journal would light your house on fire and sell tickets to the place. Okay. That's their business model. Right. And so obviously it's like the dumbest possible deal. People still do this stuff. And I'm like, I mean, Elon uncensored Twitter. You can post whatever you want, right?

46:30YouTube's uncensored. Like everything's uncensored now. Get good, right? Anybody who's talking to journalists in 2025, hiring public relations. What are you doing? What are you even doing, right? Okay. Now, I will say one thing, this is very important. Over the last several years, when we've done like the tech and media kind of ecosystem, there has been something that's worked and there's something that didn't work. What worked? Individual led projects, right? Mike Slann is Pirate Rires, that has a real style to it. Tbpn, right? Which exists to, I think, make ramp, get more conversions. This is very funny, right?

47:04It's very funny. Of course, ramp is our main sponsor. they've got them on the hats. They've NASCAR to it. It's funny. Gramps a good product, by the way. And so, so 2 pn, great, right? Kuggen, he stuck with it. He did a lot, you know, and obviously all in has done very well, right? Obviously Elon has done very well. And, you know, I think you do the mauson now, you know, as you can see, I think it's, right? But what I think has not done as well is the things that are institutional. Because if it's too institutional, you're playing it safe. And you're playing it safe. And there isn't any conflict.

47:34There isn't any opinion. there isn't anything novel, it's focus grouped, right? Certain things benefit from averaging, right? For example, the velocity of a plane or something like that, you don't want large deviations, you want it to be within an envelope, right? So there's certain kinds of phenomena where you want averaging. Opinions and theses are usually not like that, right? So one way to think about it is the entire 20th century was the centralized century, and even the movement from the wide screen to the portrait size, like a phone is like nine by 16. The movement from widescreen to portrait size is visually the movement from institutional to individual.

48:13Because a portrait kind of thing, a tiktok cell thing doesn't have room for a panoramic shot of a huge crowd is for a person standing there, right? So it's amazing that even the screen itself captures that move from institutional to individual, right? And you see this also on X and other platforms, these journals, I don't know what they were doing if they're faking numbers or whatever, they have like 20 million followers or whatever, and they have three likes on their tweets now. Right? So something happened there where either it was all fake or there's just low engagement or just boring, but people just don't trust those institutions anymore.

48:42Right? So 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? And the founding creator is as important as a founding engineer because a founding engineer is implementation, but the founding creator is the distribution. The founding engineer is the how, but the founding creator is the why. Because the founding creator has a community that they're tapped into and they're saying, why should this product exist? Right? So you can often start by understanding your community and building a product for them, and then hiring the engineer, it's actually like a third kind of person, right?

49:19Normally it's being like, there's like the engineering founder and there's like the business founder, this is like the content founder, right? And actually this is where call son and Altman have observed where are the Gen Z, where are the younger founders who are not in attack? They're in content. Yeah. Right? Because actually that's where extreme leverage is. That's a Mr. Beast. That's the guy who actually looks like you, Aiden Ross. Some of the younger guys are there, right? I show speed is like that, right? And they're very talented at what they do. And it's just not something that we thought of as a thing because, you know, they're still like the startup kind of thing.

49:51But that's actually now a, I shouldn't say it's a game for 30 and 40 somethings. But millennials are good at startups and we're still good at startups and we still are you know Palmer is doing a new thing all men's doing thing obviously not new thing. I mean like we keep doing stuff Right, but the 20 somethings are often very good at content and content is actually upstream of product There's a room for a lot of collaboration there potentially where they're doing the marketing It's kind of like beats by Dre. We start with Dre rather than Apple, right? I'm not saying anything people don't know but right now those have been I think doing things that are relatively low tech, like Mr.

50:25Beast Feastables or T -shirts or stuff like that. Brian Johnson, I think with Blueprints, starting to get higher tech, where you start with a creator, and then ideally you can distribute, like, quantified self -suff through that. If that makes any sense, right? Human could also do something like this, if you said it's again to that area. Any biotech company, genomics company, CBC company could do deals with human men, for example, for distribution, right? Okay. So this, by the way, is starting to make the case for why don't outsource your creation or outsourcing your engineering, don't outsource your creating, right?

50:56Don't outsource your content. Contents as key as code. Content happens in the house, right? Content you have to sweat over it. And actually, so for example, here's a few things that I like half implementing, partially implementing, or I am implementing, but I want to implement more, right? And this is kind of thing you want. I've seen come to Aston Z or come to network school, come to NS .com, come to network school, come and work with us. But 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?

51:24Something like frame .io is pretty good. You know, frame .io. You can put all these clips in there, all these images in there, and then you have something for people to work with. Or a cap cut, web interface, right? You can log into that and just basically load stuff in there, and you have a few accounts that are shared among team members, right? So now you actually have something where creation was a single player app. You start making the multiplayer app, And now, internet connections are good enough that you can do versioning on big files and reviews of big files and so and so forth. Start thinking about your content base like your code base.

51:55Okay. And obviously, AI is a big part of that. Though it's not the only thing, since I think, you know, any new tool, people use the tool and they overuse the tool and you bring it back and you're like, okay, it's a percentage of my thing, but it's not everything, right? If we did this whole podcast as AI and we had like computer generated us, it wouldn't be as interesting or heavy, right? Because it's generic. AI is necessarily. It's almost like a search engine. It pulls like the, it's funny I was saying this our day. Midwit writing used to be woke. Now all Midwit writing is AI. It's not this, it's that, right?

52:25So it's like a super intelligence yet midwit, right? But that's because it's building the average from the whole entrance. It's useful when you prompt it. Anyway, point is, so that's another piece on media. So build your own distribution to avoid distortion. Go direct if you have something to say. Higher creators, no journals only influencers. or that's a related point. Do not bring journalists to your conference. Do not bring journalists to your event. Do not bring journalists anywhere. Just like they would try to unperson you and cancel you on everything. Like you need hard borders, no journals, right?

53:04The reason is, because as Janet Malcolm said, they're like a con man, right? There's normal people who talk to you like a normal person as there's a journal who come there with a mic and try to get someone to say something and then attack them, right? And the problem is, this is another big piece of it. Like a lot of people, you know how the journals get them, is they get them on ego. Okay. So it's actually very similar to like the CIA, you know what I'm saying? Like, yeah, it's like Michigan. Yeah, exactly. See, most people are going to understand this. Like, much about the NYT and what these guys do, and they're so much weaker than they used to be.

53:36Like, so, so, so much weaker. Thank God, they've lost the center, right? What happened is they just piled up the subscriptions and they got all the wine moms and lost the Anderson's Amazing trade for us. Oh my god. They lost Glenn Greenwall. They lost Mark Anderson. They lost Nate Silver They lost Barry Weiss, right amazing trade for us, right like for the center Because they actually got tech envy and they just optimized the money and they lost actually all influence and power over the center Thank God, right fine And actually, that's a good trade, by the way, to be clear, I actually want everybody to have a good life.

54:12It's possible that in some alternate realities, some of the journals would be good people. Not all, some of them are genuinely like evil people, like a stalkerish personality. But a good chunk of them, like, for example, Derek Thompson is not a hater. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, but that's why he left the Atlantic. Right? So all the ones who are not haters, eventually leave, because you have to have the soul of a hater to be a journal today. You have to like a soul, which is like a stalker, envy is kind of person, gollum like personality or whatever, to be a journal, right? And also you have to not get it.

54:43You have to be like not numerical enough, because the pay is better in tech in general, the employees are treated better. You see, you have to be like a hater of a certain kind, a very specific kind, right? Anyway, point is, the journals and other key concepts when interacting with them, or not interacting, you shouldn't interact with them, but let's say when dealing with them, is there like a private, a for -profit CIA or FBI? Should I explain this point? Actually, especially, see, okay. So the thing is, most people think from, again, remember the Paul Graham thing about, you learn from the movies that dress, so most people think that what the CIA does is like assassination.

55:16But a lot of what it does is actually character assassination. It plants stories, isn't that much cleaner? To just have somebody plant a story and then they're discredited and it's so much cleaner than bullets and blood and so and so forth, right? In fact, they do this in East Germany as well. By the Wikipedia is actually just as bad as the media because Wikipedia, it's garbage and garbage out. What happens is you can only cite articles from legacy media, you can't cite social media directly, so it could be a rehash. So in anything that's contemporaneous, political, they're really terrible. Nevertheless, there's some articles when they didn't get corrupted.

55:50So a psychological warfare used by the Ministry of Security, it served to combat alleged through covert means. Basically, Zerset Song was because the communists were also fighting a similar social war. They had conservatives, they had libertarians, they had non -communists on their territory, they didn't want to kill them, they wanted to convert them, just like the blues flipping the reds to convert to blue. They were targeted to stop activities of political dissent and cultural incorrectness, and it wasn't the kinds of things they did. They do things like go and mess up your sock drawer to make you think you're insane or tell people you're having an affair.

56:23So it's like subvert and undermine an opponent. So disrupt the target's private life, so I'm able to continue their hostile negative activities for the state. This is what they did to Luke Faradah just now. Yeah. Exactly this. The aim is to disrupt the targets private or family life so they're unable to continue their hostile negative activities for the state. Do you see that? What they're mad is that Luke, they didn't care when Luke was just analyzing some old, you know, museum pieces or whatever, right? But once they're going after the state, when does going after state, that's their bread, right?

56:53That's their power center. That's their golem. The FTC investigated this after our articles, right? So anything that's upstream of that, they don't want us to be upstream of that. They want to be upstream of that. Makes sense. So as there's that song, you know, like the Communists and the journalists are the same, but I repeat myself, right? And the reason, by the way, I say that is all, I may have mentioned this, but like John Reed, Walter Veranti, Herbert Matthews, like David Hallibur, Sam, Edgar Snow, just take all those names and those are all the journalists who did the PR for the Communists.

57:25It's literally the reason that Castro's in power, For example, there's this book, The Man Who Created Fidell, right? The Man Who Invented Fidell, Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times. You see that one, right? Here's another one, which is Duranty, Ukraine, Amazon, like basically, Stalin's Apologist. Isn't that amazing? Stalin's Apologist works at the New York Times, Castro's Apologist works at the New York Times? Crazy stuff. Actually, there's another one, Perfect Spy, right? right, which is the Vietnam one, right? The incredible story of double life of Pham's one on a time magazine reporter in Vietnamese conversation.

58:01Isn't that interesting? See, when I say journalists and comments, but I repeat myself, I'm like being completely literal. We just pulled up three books in 30 seconds that were about journalist communist. So, Dylan Matthews from Voxie talking about the Luke Faradar argument. He says the negative reaction to this is wild. If you join the government in your primary legacy is helping to kill millions of people through aid cuts, you can handle some criticism if you can live with yourself. The Salisbury primary legacy is killing, not like through aid cuts. The Salisbury primary legacy is killing millions of Ukrainians.

58:32Where's their criticism, huh? Right? Again, Dylan Matthews is too much of a coward to do that, right? The logic is just insane. It's claiming that by Dylan Matthews not giving all of his money to aid, he's killing people or by not making more money, he's killing, I mean, just, it's, you know, it keeps his 23 -year -old killing millions of people. Why are we giving money in the first place? Why are we selling the money? Every policy, one of the things about it, and that's what they're doing here, with the hall de mor, there's actually a very clear cut case where Duranty wrote 13 articles that basically said Stalin wasn't liquidating the Ukrainians, he just meant it metaphorically.

59:04They're literally covering up like a murder in progress, okay? So that was like a very clear cut case. Here you're talking about, okay, this is the Fee the Pigeon Society argument, by the way, Right? Like essentially, as the number of the population grows as dependent, any cut to budget whatsoever for the blues is equated with murdering their dependents. And they probably believe that, right? So it grows to the sky and everybody gets arms that of course the blues get nice paid non -profit jobs out of, right? And of course you have more and more depend. And by the way, guess what? He's absolutely wrong here as well.

59:35You know why? Go to Easterly and Levine. Easterly and Levine said, stop the aid, right? Why? Why? Because all the aid is used for these warlords in Africa, right? Actually, there's something where in Nigeria, there's a business plan competition that was the most successful quote aid project ever because they're making businesses. Like, the thing is, I saw this myself in India. Guys like these effective altruists or these guys, they don't want peers, they want ponds, right? Brown people in India were starving in the 80s or whatever and they were pawns of these NGOs who sent the aid. Now India doesn't need aid.

1:00:13India is actually number three in unicorns. 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 because aid, you know, it's kind of like to sossuron supplementation of biosynthetic pathway. If somebody takes too much of an exogenous hormone, it cuts off their natural production, right? Like basically if people take too much of the way steroids, it's like, you know, it can cut off your natural hormonal production. You have to get it exactly right. The actual charity is investment.

1:00:46This is actually a deep point. Should I explain this point? Yeah. So imagine you've got two quote, rich guys, okay? And one of them is Soros or USAID. It's kind of like a rich guy's recent solution. Or somebody's just handing out aid, okay? Grant, seeming grants. And there's another person as an investor. So for the people who are queuing up to write those grants to seek aid, okay? They are making themselves as sympathetic or as pathetic as possible. And in the limit, it's like the movie Slumdog Millionaire, right? Where you see it's dramatized, but the limbs of the kid are cut off to make them more sympathetic.

1:01:23It's almost learned or caused helplessness. It's either become, pretend to or become as helpless and pathetic 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, right? That's what wokeness is, right? By contrast, you think about our culture in tech and VC, right? But we respect more than the sales, else is strength, right? Essentially, you come to us, you come to us for a check. And what we respect the most in a sense is if we didn't put a check in you, but you still win, and you raised from someone else, or you do it on your own, you bootstrap, and then a year later, we're like, I respect you, I was wrong, you were strong enough on your own.

1:02:03And one way I've talked about this is fake it till you make it. But another way of putting it is rather than the slumdog millionaire are people chopping off their limbs and thinking about how depressed and pathetically are to compete for grants and aid. Instead imagine a bunch of people who are all running a race like a mile or whatever, right? They're running a mile and 20 people compete only one wins, but the other 19 at least got to work out, right? So everybody who's in the process of trying to raise venture or not that you have to raise money, obviously, you can just totally bootstrap it yourself now.

1:02:31It's the single person sorry, as much easier than it's been. But anybody who's in that process becomes stronger as a consequence of it because you constantly want to keep giving updates to the investor on all the stuff you're shipping. And that means like sometimes the easiest way to do that is to actually just ship. I mean, most of the time, these wait, right? So in the process of proving yourself to others, you prove yourself to yourself, right? So that's why a small a capital when 20 people compete for it, strengthen the whole ecosystem. But a small amount of aid when 20 people compete for it weakens the entire ecosystem.

1:03:06So another way of putting this also is take these wokes who purport to believe in equality, okay, the Soros types or whatever. Are they blocking the other street and they're saying, oh, here's some guy in the street, I'm going to give them half my fortune. Now we've achieved equality. Are they going to knock it down? So let's say they've got a billion dollars. Are they going to find a hundred thousand people and each give them a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars so they've all got ten thousand dollars in their down to ten thousand dollars so they're all equal? It's within their power to do so.

1:03:33They could literally hit a button to do so. If they actually believe in equality, they could instantly achieve equality right now. Okay? And indeed, I actually do believe in registration for every self -proplanned socialist just for them to take their fortunes and and redistribute them opt in to socialism will take all their money, all the walks, right? You should be able. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Look, we basically opt in to that, right? 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 that are looking up at, they're not thinking about all the people who they're wealthier than or whatever, and that's it, okay, fine.

1:04:09And the only way of putting it is, if somebody's walking on the street and they see somebody and they're down their luck, they might give them a dollar or $10. They're not gonna give them half their salary. So charity decelerates. The more somebody rises, the less sympathetic and pathetic they are. And in fact, people have talked about like how once somebody gets out of the total underclass into the working poor, they actually sometimes make less money from all the grants and stuff because all those cutoffs and sound they're considered self -sufficient, right? You actually can earn your way into a local valley before you earn your way out of it.

1:04:37It's a distance engine to work. Okay. On the other side of things, for example, take teal and zuck. This is a very famous example. as many more like this. Zuck started out much in a sense poorer than Tiel. Tiel put in 500K, Zuck is now much richer than Tiel, but Tiel also became much richer in the conspense. Right? So that's an example of investment actually achieves redistribution of fortunes or creation of fortunes or greater equality in a way that charity never would. Right? So capitalism's the ultimate socialness. Same way like the phones that got to everybody in the world, the billions of phones, capitalism did that, aid didn't do that, right?

1:05:16All this USAID stuff is just it's aiding blue NGOs. What he's actually mad about, go ahead. You know, there's laughing at the truth of it. That's the truth of it, right? So the fundamental premise of his point is exactly wrong. And so you're taking away their pets, you're taking away their ponds, you're taking away their reason for existing, and of course, they'll pathologize that, right? But actually they're doing harm to them, right? They're not helping them. Helping is investment. I mean, it obviously goes to the old saw of like teacher man to fish versus give a man a fish, right? But give a man a thousand fish forever.

1:05:48They become completely dependent. And that's actually the goal of it. Really what's happening is the cutoff of USA is rolling up blue empire. So it's killing the blue business model. That's what they're mad about. Look at. Okay, keep going. I think going back to Luke. What's our advice to him or how do you sort of react to the situation? Which, yeah, what should he say now? I don't know how they got that photo of him. Did he sit for that photo? No, I don't think so. Yeah, so point is I think overall he didn't talk to journals, which is good. I look look will be fine. Do I will be fine because his tribe supports him, right?

1:06:18And the journals ability to impact somebody's with that said, the reason they do this stuff now is and this unfortunate part, they do this stuff and they post this take this Dylan thing. Like by his logic, oh, then someone would be just fired in Luigi type stuff, right? This is really the very dangerous thing about what these journals are doing. They're trying to essentially form an hatred against tech guys. What have we done besides make things cheaper, faster, better? Wow, I can now communicate with anybody anywhere, anytime, for no money. I can find all the rules of information on my fingertips.

1:06:51I can do math and computer science. I can do simulations. We can launch rockets. We've got electric cars. Oh, we're the bad guys. Right? Versus the people who are just like stalking and spamming everybody all the time. Right? So first thing is just have incredibly strong moral bedrock frame. understand that everything that journalists are doing is projection. I think advice to Luke, the first thing by the way is I actually think that had tech ignore that article it wouldn't have gone anywhere, right? That's another piece about it. Don't take the bait. The irony is that this is the opposite of a hit piece for him in that he's now got defenders.

1:07:22We know it's a puff piece in our circles like it's a badger on our own. That's right. So I think what I would say is I take his family and friends should consider going to star based Texas or something like that, right? Basically, you want to now sort at this point, and you want to sort and be amidst communities of people who share your values, right? And the sooner you do that, the better. And the reason is you just don't want to have crazy blue people around you, the Tesla terrorists and so on who are blowing things up, the Luigi's phone and so forth, right? So that is actually the danger here.

1:07:53And I don't say that lightly. And in fact, if you want, we can just bleep out Luke's name, you know, and so and so because I don't want it, you know, but basically, I think the issue with this is, here's kind of recommendation for tech guys. There's a decision rule. Don't take the bait. The journals only get traffic for their articles when they get rage views from us. And guess what? They got 700K views or whatever for this tweet and they got conversions because they sold ads, right? And so that's a dub for them in a sense, right? I mean, look, it's not like a total dub because it's certainly not getting being fired or anything like that.

1:08:28So it's much less of a dub, but it's some kind of dub. So okay, a while ago, there were some, Jerno who was like doing some like, conversation or something like that. They put people on a tech eye for like 15 months or something. And he just completely ignored the entire thing. And it got no clicks and it got no views or anything. The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference, right? The fact that like, and every putting it is, So we've built up much of the supply chain, but not all of it, right? So the most important thing is 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 Citadel, right?

1:09:08Like our VC firms. So one of the things they were doing is they're trying to target the stuff that's upstream, the platforms, the venture capitalists and so on to try to hit the, you know, why they go after Uber, right? They didn't want to know the trillion dollar company, certainly not a libertarian one. Why the Guarphiro VCs? They're the ones distributing capital. If they go after these Nexus points, these critical nodes, they could 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, right?

1:09:35So they're deep in our territory. So now we took back the platform. That's good. And we're flanking mainstream media with tweets and podcasts, right? Ultra short form and ultra long form content, where they don't have as much establishment oomph, right? 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 five years or so, the ledger of record. Ultimately, you can't be a critic. You have to be a constructive critic. Like Ron Paul said, end the fed, and Satoshi implemented Bitcoin. So you have the criticism, then you have the construction.

1:10:12So we actually have to build something better. We have to build internet first meeting. So that is that whole talk I gave on the ledger of record. And that, by the way, that talk was originally from like 2020. And I actually feel pretty good about that essentially predicting that GPT -3, the next version of it would be able to summarize things. It happened faster than I thought, but like I think the projection was correct, right? And the fundamental covers, the box score, exactly. The fundamental premise is if you think about a sports article, it's essentially, now we use it and I phrase it slightly differently then, but it's essentially a wrapper around a box score.

1:10:46Or if you take a financial article, it's essentially a wrapper around stock ticker symbols. And you take a political article and it's a wrapper around tweets. That's a raw feed. It's the numbers that underpin the letters, right? So now if you think about what a blockchain is, it's a cryptographically verifiable feed. That's in a sense what Bitcoin is, right? What a blockchain is, it's a stream of events similar to Twitter or any other event -based feed, except it's got much harder cryptographically verifiable guarantees. Proof of what, when and where, right? or proof of what went and who, what is the hash when it's a time stamp, who is the digital signature.

1:11:18You can also do like proof of location, proof of where, and other kinds of proofs, right? So 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, right? That's a high level concept of the ledger of record that replaces the paper record. We have to play to win. And so we have to essentially realize that that is the center of the whole thing, right? Truth. And actually, we have a better format truth. You know what that is? It's a form that is native to us. Crypto. Yes. And specifically, there is a good book actually by a reform journal or to somewhat reform journals.

1:11:59These are like the ones who are not here, right? Vignain Casey, they're okay. But the truth machine, the blockchain, if you should have anything, this is like seven years ago. And the thing is, this just basically puts in book form a concept that existed for a long time. So I've just got a citation for the concept, right? So essentially the point is that Bitcoin is decentralized cryptographic truth. Like essentially the whole thing about Bitcoin that's so hard is how do you get global consensus on who owns what BTC? And we have something now where whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, Japanese or Chinese, is in J .R.

1:12:32Paxhtani, everybody agrees on the state of the Bitcoin blockchain. They have global consensus on this thing, which is worth $3 ,000. People fight wars over billions of dollars, millions of dollars. They kill people with a thousand dollars sometimes. So to have global consensus on this, we know police men are no military backing it. You know that saying, like how many divisions has the Pope, which Stalin would say? How many long divisions has the New York Times? They don't have any. Bitcoin has. So we actually have truth on our side. A more powerful form of decentralized cryptographic truth. It's not headquartered in downtown Manhattan.

1:13:06It's on the internet. Let me wait for a second. It's all sounds compelling, but I also just want to celebrate right now we have John Cougan and Mike Slana and us and lots of other folks doing such a great work without sort of the crypto elements. And so why is that necessary? Like what's missing? Yes, great question. So what we're doing with all the commentary is necessary but not sufficient, right? Because commentary, it's humorous, it's opinion, right? We need reporting. We need news. You need reporting exactly. That's right. So commentary and summarization, right, is over here. But news is the update.

1:13:43Now, the thing is, Twitter is obviously a feed of raw facts that people are putting out there and decentralized. Right. Bitcoin increases that because it actually says, once you can get consensus on who owns what BTC, you can also get consensus on who owns what stocks, what bonds, what Ethereum, smart contracts. And actually, as I've did an article that our day, all the property becomes cryptography, that we can do that in a different session, you basically have consensus on who owns what property. So all valuable things you can get cryptographic consensus on, right? And chain link and stuff like that, they've built essentially armored cars for information, sending it up and down to the blockchain, polymarket armored cars for information where information on the internet that's commercially valuable can be protected by cryptography and set there.

1:14:25So let's take the case of Pirate wires and 2PN. That's great. But let's say there's some dispute over whether a photo is real or not, right? Like a great example is the Atlantic published this crazy piece calling for invading Brazil because they saw a photo of the Brazilian fires, okay? And it's like here, it's like this crazy piece. That was the photo not real? Yes, exactly. Right? That's a very clear example. Okay. The Amazon fires are more dangerous to WMD. Okay. This is a great example of when I said, they'll literally kill you for clicks. Right? This was something they're calling for the invasion of Brazil on this basis.

1:15:03Right? Because they're like, Oh, the Amazon fires are burning. And it was all on the basis of a fake photo that actually Macron had tweeted out, which turned out to be a photo that was taken by a photojournalists who died years ago. So it's from like some stock. So there was a timestamp that showed that that photo existed many years ago, right? So it wasn't of a current event. Okay. And so, is that amazing, right? That's something where etiology, right? Cryptographic, in a sense cryptographic, why? Because you load the website, you see that it's H -C -P -S, right? That means there's actually a cryptographic authentication that it's like, getty images or wherever it was.

1:15:42It was basically at some stock photo thing. as we could see the old time stamp you might hit archive that is, right? So you have implicit cryptographic verification of the time stamp of that image that was going to be used to cause a war. Right? So that's a concrete example of why control over truth is so important to them. Why did they put up the billboards there? Because once you determine what is true and false, did Russia collude with Trump? Right? No, it's all fake, right? It took a massive court process to to a judge -gate that and fortunately, of course, this one wasn't corrupted enough that it went through, but the New York Times collect all these polyd series for this for basically false information, right?

1:16:22One way it was interesting, though, and this actually helps give some insight into it. There's a tech person who's a lib, okay? Who I own name, but basically during the whole Recigate thing said, oh yeah, I know this is just as good as like a, this game of thrones or something. And I realized, oh wow, I'm gonna have that polygram thing about the movies. These people were treating this as if it was like an entertainment show with Trump as a villain with the times or with any legacy media. And this is very obvious, say, but you know, it was obvious in the past. You can predict what they're going to say about somebody before they say it.

1:16:54They have very low information content on each thing, right? It's Trump bad, blue America good, and it's like a cast of characters almost like Seinfeld or the same cast of characters. A good guy and bad guy appears on the page. And you could just auto do it, right? In fact, did I show you the Robo Journal from three years ago? I'm sorry, remember. No, I was. Oh, yeah. So this was a bounty. I just put up a prize. I put up where as soon as AI came out and we can do a lot more with this, by the way, but I'll show you this. So I put out a call to use AI to generate NYT tier clickbait from tweets. Remember my thing?

1:17:27See it first. Yeah. I put up a theory. Yeah, the theoretical article was in 2020 where I'm like, you know what? We could have a feed of data and all of these journals are just a wrapper around that feed And the reason I knew GPG3 might get there is there's a company called Narrative Science actually a vericinum. No So narrative science it went bust. It was a good company just a little too early, okay? So this was a few years before the chat GPT moment, okay? And Narrative Science what it did which it was the time is really cool is it took your Financial reports, right? And it would say revenue was high in the northeastern segment 65K So it would basically generate a narrative from your raw data.

1:18:10So it was like a readable narrative. Makes sense? Yep. So because I saw that I knew that it was probably possible as this technology advanced to take raw feeds of data and summarize them in essentially story form, right? Looming so far? Yep. Okay. So that was the kind of theory in 2020. And then the practice by 2022 was once ChatGPT came out, right? I put it a call to you say I had to generate NYT tier clickbait from tweets. One brave engineer answered a call, a student who learned how to code and wrap up with starting to see his app takes the tweet, jitters and articles already in the ballpark.

1:18:42And you can see from this video the GPT times, right? You see this, right? Yep. Okay. Let me just, I'll remind this, okay? So here it takes the Elon thing, right? Elon tweet, it goes here, paste it in, it churns a little bit, okay? Calculates. He's showing all the other articles. you look at the generally with the aesthetics, it looks like NYT, right? Yes, so good. Oh my God. All right. This was three years ago. We can do so much more with this. All right. Now, boom, put into cocaine back in Coca -Cola. And look, it looks exactly like NYT or clickbait, right? No journal, only Robo. Okay. No journal, only crypto, because we can also have these be, look, see there's a code and so and so forth.

1:19:27There's a saying the system ministers have be careful. Well, replace you with a very tiny shell script. We can just automate, right? Automate and completely obviate. And the thing is actually all the journals have these unions, whether they're against AI, they're against AI, they're in AI. This is by the way similar to, I think the US imposing tariffs or the red American imposing tariffs in China. It's like blue American imposing tariffs on AI. I don't think it's going to work. But basically blue American 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.

1:20:04And they're going to be interesting at first because there's a lot of English speakers online and most of them don't live in the US. And so there's a lot of talent online. And so one piece of this is what I just showed. And the crucial thing about that is those stories there can have all the backlinks and citations, right? So they show the raw tweets that are underpinning it. 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. Russell conjugation is, you're doing a bad thing, but I'm doing a good thing.

1:20:40Like Zuckerberg has another great one, they attack Zuck for having dual -class stock. Just to show you how just 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's all like, presence or not, kings, right? So now this 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 punch protected the times, right? So here the solution was to give that so 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 like I have a long context I remember this article from 2012 and I remember this one from 2019, right?

1:21:20You have to have the long context window and until recently I didn't know how to show somebody else to find all these internal contradictions. But guess what? AI can do that. AI can do that. AI can find every internal contradiction than NYT ever. Okay. And so you could just have them, NYT or NYT, they're enslaving people and then they're pretending they're on the set. There's just so many things like that, right? Do you crane pro and con, right? Okay. So coming back to your point, we need to have a stronger form of truth. truth. Because if we don't have that, you're essentially accepting their premise that this event happened, right?

1:21:57Right. The cryptos have I buy, but even before that, we haven't been able, we've been able to build commentary, but we haven't to your point had enough sort of protect reporters. So the ecosystem had to be there, right? The ecosystem had to be there. Things had to work. Blocks be said to get there. AI had to get there. Like, we needed the field clear for what we're going to do, which is decentralized cryptographic truth. All right, decentralized cryptographic truth, where it's free, it's verifiable on your computer, right? That's the thing about the Bitcoin blockchain you can verify. Now, one of the things I should be more clear about exactly what I mean by true or whatever.

1:22:31When a statement is posted on chain, what you can verify is the metadata, right? You can say it is very hard to falsify the time at which this was posted. It's very hard to falsify the hash because of properties of cryptographic caches. and it's very hard to falsify the digital signature of what entity posted it, right? Each of those two things has certain cryptographic guarantees that I can get into why they're hard, but they're hard to falsify that. That doesn't mean that it could be an AI image that you posted on chain, but it would have been hard to five years later to say that AI image never exists before when I can see proof, it's like the Brazilian fires photo was a great example of that, right?

1:23:10Another example in a Chinese court actually, blockchain evidence was used to show that someone had a patent that was invalid because somebody had posted something very similar to it many years ago, so it could use the hash to show they had priority. Does that make sense? Right? So there's enough stuff that we've done in crypto with proof of location, proof of this, proof of that, proof of solvency. There's many kinds of addestations 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, right?

1:23:45And they can't do math. They're anti -selective. They can do math. They'd be in tech, usually, right? But math is universal property of humans. You don't need a subscription to the New York Times to do math. That don't need to pay Salisberger to do math, right? 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, right? Like the truth is actually everybody's thing, right? Everybody should have access to the truth. You should have to pay the salesperson for the truth. And in fact, I refuse to pay the salesperson for the truth.

1:24:11Right? I don't allow them to centrally determine what truth is. That's exactly the same thing as propped on the Soviet Union, right? So it's 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 parameters, as I mentioned, the who, the what, the when, and then, with other things, we can send that to the where, that we can actually have a feed of facts, right? So once you have the root feed effects and think of it as like Twitter, but with decentralized Tripographic verification.

1:24:42That's one way of thinking about it, right? Imagine you have a bunch of checks, community notes But a bunch of check marks at the bottom like a continuous integration with GitHub, right? Where you have a bunch of checkers green or red with the site is deploying properly your bunch of assertions on it think of it as Trugal, right? It's like Google but for truths and you just run every assert and all these models are saying whether something is true or not, right? And there's some computation there, but if it's valuable enough, I should put out a prize just for this by the way. You know what? Actually, at NS .com, we'll put out a prize.

1:25:12Good NS .com process your earn. Actually, we'll put that up on screen. I'll send that link to you right after this. I'll put out a prize for decentralized cryptographic truth and Farcaster, right? Where essentially you can maybe pay a little bit of crypto for model evaluations to just fact check something. It's sort of like at Grock do this, but I think a better way of doing it is to have multiple models do it, give like the premises, give the back links and so on and so forth. And then eventually those things should be on chain where it links to. And by the, you know, who agrees with me so much, I think on this is Salana, where he's like, needs to do more reporting, not just commentary and so on.

1:25:42And a good version of that is Nick Carter's work on Operation Choke Point. Right? That's a great. So that's a great example of something which is reporting and not just summary, right? Not just commentary. Another example of this, and what's interesting, by the way, is notice that our first party testimony, when we give first party testimony in aggregate, that's actually reporting. So we're doing things like, you know how someone who has like raw talent in basketball or football or something can do things and they don't have great form that they can just somehow get it done with just raw athletic talent.

1:26:16There's a lot of things we're doing that are good that are done on raw like intuition because when you have a bunch of people who are posting on X and not talking to journalists, then the quotes get pulled because people would use 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 on moss. See, they can get another subscriber, but they can't get another quarter, right? They can't get another supplier of quotes, right? Because there's only one A6 and C. There's only one Elon.

1:26:47What is Elon? When you email like PR Tesla or something, it just replies back with a poop emoji. What do you reply back to Washington Post? He's like, send my regards to your puppet master, right? because he knows, right? He knows that basically like that they won't criticize their boss on the yours, right? So we did this thing intuitively by freezing them out, of course, not talking to them and posting them stuff ourselves. Now they're just reduced to bloggers. Now they're not sourced. See, that's another thing, by the way. Like an important concept is like how did the good journals operate? You see some of them, they are almost like a CIA station chief.

1:27:22They'll post in their Twitter for tips, email, message me at Signal Distant 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 like 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 because they're like some embassy rights, right? So they're like spying on Facebook, they're spying on meta, they're trying to solicit leaks and why do people leak at these companies, if they leak at these companies? It's for the same reasons. No, I think it's like MICE, You know what that is?

1:27:53In 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 where there's, for example, at Uber, like the VCs there wanted money and a Traveston wanted 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. That's often sometimes the journal will have something on somebody and they'll say, I won't print this if you give something else. That's on economic transaction, but that's a very dastardly thing.

1:28:31So it's like, yeah, don't talk to journals. Everybody, what happens is the NYT or WSHR or whatever, they'll message you and they'll put on their nicest kind of thing. They're taught to flatter and sympathize in the email. You know what it's like?

1:28:49Actually, Our sales guys, right? They send out emails that are really crafted cold email, blah, blah, blah, things, right? To make the sale. And it's a completely calculated thing, okay? Go and look at, I don't know, Mark Cranie stuff on sales. If you need a filter and analysis, you understand the journals. The journals are sending you sales emails. The difference is, they're scam sales emails. It's like a Nigerian, but whatever. It's like a scammer, you know, right? So at least when we're doing enterprise sales, maybe it's an aggressive sale at times, or it's under some of the internet, but the product has to work they can cancel subscription or whatever.

1:29:20It's, ah, you bought the product. Now we got malware and you're property. You're going to destroy your company. That's actually what the journal sales email is like. Okay. So there's an analogy. You can only go so far, right? And the point being that the ego part, MICE, just like the CIA, the bureau chiefs, 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? I do want to call out that there are some, you know, we named some of them, but there's some other new media folks who are sub -stackers, etc.

1:29:53who are doing journalism, but are not the same journal. Okay. Okay. So now let me get to very, very, very, very, very important point. Okay. Many words have been corrupted in a certain way. So when I say journalism, I mean blue journalism. Okay. Because if you were to ask some journal, know, is Ben Shapiro a journalist? They'd say, no, of course not, right? If you ask them is Nate Silver, silver journalist is Glenn Greenwald, silver journalist? Very way. Yeah, very, are they sort of, no, they're just running a blog, right? Obviously, NYT is Silver's blog. And the same way free press is very wise is outlet, right?

1:30:29Okay. So this is a very important point. Let's say that Zuck could piece with TikTok, right? Zuck would never say TikTok is not doing technology, right? Yeah, that's Chinese technology versus American technology, but they're still doing so. They're recognizing we playing the same sport. You might say they're like, it's under the Communist Party surveillance. Whatever, you can make all those points and argue all that and Trump is flipped on whatever. Leading 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?

1:31:01Versus the blue journalists will actually deny that sub -sac is journalism, right? That Ben Shapiro's journalism. them because even if Ben Shapiro has like millions more followers than they do in a much larger audience and so and so forth, even if he's smarter than they are in many ways and, you know, and like a better comp certainly he's better than like their opinion editors and so on. And he used the sub -sacrace by their report doing original reporting. What they say when they say journalism, they mean he's not in the club, right? So remember the social network thing with the blue and the red?

1:31:31Once you think about it as a network, right? Where the borders are fuzzy, but no less real for being fuzzy. A network of blues, right? So like Glenn Greenwell is on the boundary of that, right? Seymour Hirsch may be arguably on the boundary because on Substach and so on and so forth. Like Barry Weiss, arguably is on the boundary in some ways because she was formerly in the club and so on and so forth. So it's a little bit like being an MD or a JD where you have a formal state license to be a blue churno is to have an informal state license. Why is it informal? Because if they were formally state license, since they could say that it's a state control press.

1:32:09Yeah. So instead, what they get is a White House press pass. It's a press control state. The point about that is that what you can 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? And when I say tech journalists doesn't count either, just tech journalists, like tech branches on that word has been the problem is words have been tortured to mean the opposite of what they mean, right? Like, like science. Yeah, it's anti -tactualist, right? Exactly. Like science got tortured to me and masks don't work before they do, right?

1:32:46So you actually have to have some prefix or something which is like science in the form of independent replication, non -procedure citation, right? We're trying to coin new media, something new. That's right. In another example, this is democracy. Like for the Democrats, it means it California is a one party state, right? Here, let me show you this. just to show you. So Democrats and Communists have both built one -party states, right? So here is Newsom taking lessons from Xi and he's explaining.

1:33:15This is an amazing, amazing visual, right? Where total Democrat party control, right? Democrats and Communists have both built one -party states, right? This is more than just like a one -liner. It's a deep point. Just like when they said science, and they turn into the opposite of science, right, which was mass don't work before they do. Just like they said media, or they said journalism, and they turn into opposite journalism, which is basically, it's not neutral reporting on anything. It's reporting on the enemies of blues and protecting blues, right? Here, they turn democracy into the opposite democracy where they destroyed competitive multi -party elections, right?

1:33:53In California, elections are held, but the party always wins, exactly like China. Okay, Democrats destroyed democracy in California. Deep point, this is why things got so bad there. Because with no Republican check, with no multi -party competition, this is when the California train of $100 billion, this is when the graft really got underway, the homeless industrial and complex explosion, because there was no accountability at government level for all the Democrat abuses. They built a one party state and started looting it just like the communist did, but I to repeat myself, right? When a Republican is elected, that's a threat to democracy.

1:34:31But when a Democrat surveils or sanctions or de -platforms or unbanks, that's just democracy, right? Now, the thing is, to be fair, it is true that many Republicans in response to this have started to build Florida, especially into their own word party states. So the problem is that you have Democrats, Republicans, and communists that 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. That's yeah, that's a perfect place to wrap this episode in terms of it gets to your the network state. The network state.

1:35:04Now 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 these because star based shows that you can combine all threes and I'll end with just two things. So essentially, this is a really important point. We reclaim free speech. We need to reclaimed democracy, right? We cannot give up on democracy. Democracy is actually, first of all, that's an important interpretation. We just said it was not in abundance, but a deficit of democracy that resulted in California's downfall because the Democrats built a one party state, destroyed all multibody competition.

1:35:34They jerrymandered 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. And maybe we can do our next talk of the democracy is creating startup cities, right? Why? They voted people voted over their feet to move to starbase. They voted their wall to build up starbase. And then finally, they incorporated starbase by voting with their ballot. That's the future democracy, not a two -party system with the illusion of choice, but a thousand city system with the reality of choice. 97 % for Elon, right? This is essentially a precursor to what's coming next, where you vote with your feet, your wall, and your ballot at the same time.

1:36:10And 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 true the true vote is. And what we need to do is reduce the barred exit to give everybody that practical franchise, right? Reduce lock -in, make it possible for people to actually have 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, of science. And we actually mean it in the uncorrupted versions. So they actually do believe in those things unironically, right?

1:36:44I do believe in media in books and writing and all this kind of stuff. As I said, remember, we're a fork of the East Coast, right? We're a fork of that assessment. So we basically, with technology, we can have a new birth of media science, democracy, 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 sales -rich property. It's cryptography. So I thought that's a great place to wrap. you'll have more fun with this story. And that's it for today's video. Thank you so much for coming to the podcast.

1:37:13Thanks for listening to the A16z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast .com slash A16z. You've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time.