Balaji Srinivasan: Prove Correct, Not Just Go Direct

27:03Does that make sense, right? So easy to verify, difficult to fake becomes a critical thing in any system that deals with strangers, which is lots of systems. It's an untrusted environment. I haven't even gotten to fake video, fake photos. this gets me back to media, right? The reason, can we go back to that, Philip Lemoyne? All right, here is the - Pull it up. Yes. So here is part of the reason that's happening. It's not just, right? It is something where like, you know, I kind of, here, let me put this article on screen. Here we go, new one. you know old olology like i'm a reality shell right so it's about just observable reality what our constraints are what the battlefield is and so on and so forth right so jason who i like you know if you scroll he is basically posting something that i was posting in 2021 which is go direct and so it's over and if you do from colon bology s you can see go direct nothing wrong with actually, in fact, all in has done a good all great, right?

28:13However, this is necessary but not sufficient. The reason is as follows. If you go back one, the issue is that due to AI, and also due to the fact that, in my view, in some ways, significant ways, MAGA has overcorrected to the right in a huge way. Now, A, people can't tell what's real because when you see a photo or you see a video, it literally, you literally don't know if it's real or not. Crazy bomb or something like that. Maybe it's often like some bombing from Turkey or something like that. I think it's even worse than that, which is that a lot of these things are like obviously fake and then they get tens of thousands of likes anyway.

28:55And X as it exists right now doesn't really have a good mechanism for filtering that garbage out. That's right. So you have A, obviously fake stuff that we know is obviously fake. B, non-obviously fake stuff. see stuff that's real, but it's faked in terms of it's a video. It's presented a video from that time and place and everything there. And that makes you very cautious about like it used to be that video and photos were pretty hard. Though, for example, like the Brazilian fires like of years ago, there was a big, you know, like aerial photo of a fire and it was being used to justify. And it was actually a photo that was from a journalist from like years and years earlier.

29:36and the timestamp that showed that it was here. Let me, I'll find you this thing. Hold on. It was like a fake photo that the Atlantic thought was real, right? And because of that, they were, there's literally a guy who was like calling for invading. The three most viral photos Amazon fire fake. Yes, here we are. So if you click this, right?

30:03Chat to you. All right. This gives you an example of, yeah, so click my thing there. Okay. So just to show you why timestamps and cryptography are so important, right? Click those images, right? Emmanuel Macron used one of these misleading viral photos 40 ,000 times, embedded in a New York Times article. The photo was taken by Lauren McIntyre who died in 2003. In other words, that showed when that photo was taken, it was taken many years ago, right? So these guys were saying like, you know, the case for territorial incursion Amazon is far more than the case for most war. Basically, literally fake photos almost justified some crazy war on Brazil in the Atlantic.

30:49Okay, that's bad. So, and New York Times, Atlantic, like this is a canonical example of where decentralized cryptographic truth was able to defeat. Okay. And so we have to go to our, and I can give more examples of this, right? So basically, you know, three examples. Here, let me show you this.

31:26so here's one okay this now was from years ago when photos fake now this could be faked okay but from years ago vitalik was able to show proof of life when people were saying that he uh was um you know was was not real and tell me if you got that on screen okay then click and click into that thread underneath so you see i've been thinking about this for a long time. Yeah, just click into that. Yeah. In the Brazilian photos, scroll down a little bit further. I'll show you another example. Click this one with a graph there. Yeah, that one, right? So this is something where Tesla had the vehicle log, fake NYT story by a guy named John Broder that claimed that, oh, Teslas were, you know, they ran out of battery on the side, got a photo of a Tesla, you know, being hauled onto a truck.

32:15And Elon actually had the instrumental into logs and was able to use digital evidence to the verbal narrative, right? This, by the way, is one of our core strengths, numbers over letters, okay? We can actually be quantitative. We can verify things numerically. That is actually a power that journos are generally pretty bad at, right? Digital history, unfakeable cryptographic history. Go a little bit further. I'll give you a third example. So yeah, do you see this? Defendant proved that it's content. So this is in a Chinese court. There's a patent suit. And the defendant showed, yeah, so this is like eight years ago.

32:54The defendant proved its content was really produced by showing two hash values, one on the Bitcoin blockchain under a factum. It had hashed relevant data onto relevant chains and a stamp stamp that infringement would have been impossible. Isn't this cool? It is cool. Rule that data stored on the blockchain is admissible as evidence in trial due to the characteristics of the tech. Eight years ago in China. So this stuff is actually almost a decade old at this point. You know, the saying, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed, right? So it's very important that, and this is a broader thing in tech, okay?

33:27Like we as tech guys feel, okay, yeah, we're, you know, we're, and so forth. But the point is to trust us. The point is to not have to trust us, okay? The point is to have systems by math that anybody can look at. And the reason that they would trust what we're doing is they don't have to trust what we're doing. They can cryptographically verify it. In the same way that you can check whether a website has SSL via the HTTPS lock symbol, whether you can check email address, whether you can check whether someone has DNS access with a TXT record. you should be able to check via chain check chain. Another way of thinking about this is, if you send somebody something on, I don't know, a blockchain like Bitcoin or Ethereum, have you ever sent them the either scan or record to show that you sent the money?

34:23Have you done that? I don't think so. Eric, you've definitely done that. Yes. Like, hey, I sent you the money, here's a transaction receipt, right? Yep. And for example, if, to give you a concrete example, if you went to Grok, tell me, you can do this live if you want. You say, hey Grok, use on-chain information, okay, to document the FTX hack that happened in late 2022, okay, and give all references. Grok will tell you about a hack that happened of FTX at the time all the FTX drama was happening. And in particular, it will link to that have on-chain records that show that that event for that amount, right?

35:22There it is, right? So this is what's called on-chain media. Crucially, the source of is not the New York Times and Salzberger and Salzberger employees. It is the blockchain, right? That everybody has free universal access to. It's not paywalled. It's not something where you have to pay Salzberger for him to tell you what the truth is. It is something and see what the truth is, right? See, on-chain evidence and timeline, right? Initial inflows, right? So you can actually click and you can diligence it yourself. And if you ask and say, you know, give the, you know, like click, exactly. See, give the, so this is something which can be done for those that are on chain.

36:13Right. So yeah, exactly. Right. So, but like applying blockchain money trail. So can you, if you go back to the thing and you say, give the specific, give an example, specific either scan link. Right. and this is the raw I mean it's not the raw data it's basically a URL so click that so that's something where with a little bit of technical understanding you can literally look see what happened it went to the FTX account strainer and so on and so forth so you can pull all this data and analyze it yourself have you heard the term OSINT? we're all about that here This is, you're all about that. That's right.

36:56So this is like OSINT, but for on-chain stuff. So on-chain intelligence is like OSINT. Differences, and this is going to be important in my view, right now, the verifiable information in crypto is mainly financial, where there's a major news event and some of the key things were happening on-chain. With Farcaster and, you know, so Dan Romero is the show, Eric, I think it's fair to say, right, our friend, right? Yeah, exactly. Angel, yeah. Sudan came up with a protocol called Farcaster, and it's still an amazing protocol. In fact, you know, he basically, you know, he sold, and, you know, he gave over management to the protocol to someone else, but sometimes protocol is a fan that's beyond any one company, and so him, you know, going and doing something else with the protocol being around, it's still this very, very powerful protocol that I want to do a lot with.

37:52essentially is like Twitter, but on-chain, okay? And allows anybody to post, anybody to read, anybody to write, and crucially, to add, verify photos, verify videos, or at least give on-chain evidence. So imagine if much more was on-chain, not simply financial data, but much of what goes into an article, you know, years ago, I said something as a joke, but then it became true. I said, I gave a talk on what I call the, you know, just like a sports article, right? Here, I'll find the talk. Ready? I said, just like a sports article, it's a box score, right? Where you, you know, basically you have a box score.

38:39You could automatically generate an article. A financial article is often a wrapper around a ticker symbol, right? a news article is often a wrapper around, and I've been thinking about this for years. You can see this post here, right? And then there's like, I just sent you a link there, right?

39:03Basically, let me send you the ledger of record thing. So I've been thinking about this for many years. And the concept is that we can separate fact from narrative. If you have a feed of on-chain data and you have AI that feed, then you can auto-generate stories that have no bias because the AI agent summarized the on-chain data. And it can summarize it in your language with your political orientation. And you can just change the reporter by flicking the AI flags. all the way down to the raw data, which when it's financial, it's on-chain, and eventually when it's social, it's on-chain as well.

39:48Does that make sense, right? I just noticed, by the way, sorry, we have 53K live viewers on the stream right now. We have almost twice as many as Alex Jones, who has what, a million and a half followers? Hold on, should I RT this? Should I RT the stream? I haven't actually even RT'd it from my feed or whatever. Yeah, go for it. Please do. Hold on. All right. Send me the link. I expect that. So, okay. So the reason all this stuff is... Yeah. So, okay. Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. So go ahead. See what you're going to say. Here is the stream link. All right. Let me put this on screen. One second.

40:50is it on this feed it's on my feed it's on Eric's feed also at MTS live MTS live at X MTS live alright let me go there oh that's ministry training strategy no MTS live we're meta-monitoring again alright here we are monitor situation alright so it's the alright here we go bang alright so so let's just QT so on the new monitoring the situations with Eric what's your what's your Twitter Theo Jaffe T-H-E-O-J-A-F-F-E-E. All right, there we go.

41:50Bang, bang. All right. Oh. All right, so coming back. What's my point? I have a talk on the Ledger of Record. You can put that on screen. It was also a good post, actually. hold on let me show you this there's

42:13the reason is I got to thinking about how would you actually adjudicate truth if you just take a look at this this is my kind of Twitter thread on it but I will show you a pretty good post by a guy who actually deleted it but then I

42:33let me see if I can find it

42:42if you look at this post, this is from 2020, right? You see where it says the ledger, do you have it on the screen? This one? Yeah. Yes. The set of all cryptos on-chain data, social media feeds, ZD APIs, event streams, newsletters, RSS, it'll take years to build will ultimately become the decentralized layer of facts that underpins all narratives. Closer to this, if you scroll down a little bit further, right? So click that if you just click into that, right? So right now people were thinking about this in terms of payments, sale payments, backend system, bank payments, market data, events data.

43:16But obviously polymarket, all these prediction markets, they need to have news data on chain, right? So take all these on chain for trading purposes, but you need them for other purposes as well. The financial stuff incentivizes the information feeds, right? Like in a sense, why does this? So people can, in a sense, bet on the Bloomberg terminal, right? So the Oracle services that actually put this information on chain contracts for various kinds of markets, right? So the news, the media actually influences the flow of money. There's a vortex that is pulling verifiable information. Market wants it there.

43:53And in a sense, what the blockchain is, is like an armored car for information where you can transport that information on chain. And so if you scroll down a little bit further, and again, this is like six years, because I've been thinking about this for a long time. So the Weather Channel posts cryptographically, if you click into this, right, this shows all the feeds that can be posted. So the Weather Channel could post signed feeds of weather data, Redfin posts real estate transactions, Foursquare's location data. They can make them free or they can crypto pay. And so now you have this stream of the raw data and then you have AI on top of it that turns that into legible text.

44:32I only saw a GPT-2, and maybe GPT-3 had been out by that point, but there was actually a company called Narrative Science, which went bust, but it was a cool company. They had something which would, let me show you what it looks like. Ready? Take this in. It's a little small, but put this on screen. okay narrative science show the possibility of something like what we again you know the thing about the future is already here it's just not evenly distributed right if you put that on screen and zoom in okay zoom zoom zoom so that would take it's a little blur it would take your financial data and it'd say like you know bookings were strong this month but new pipeline blah blah blah you know it kind of gives like sports commentary on top of numbers does that make sense right so So it was like a domain-specific AI, right, that would turn numbers into legible text.

45:32Yeah. And that was there back in the day. So I saw that and I knew about that. I'm like, you know, as AI improves, it's possible to make streams of not just financial and other data and automate the process of turning box scores into sports articles, the process of turning weather feeds into sports, reports, turning financial feeds into financial reports, turning lists of tweets into political articles. And what I didn't know is how fast it would happen, right? Actually already, you know, I actually built some prototypes on this already. For example, here's a fun one where, um, so I, up, uh, a year ago, actually like, as soon as ChatGPD came out, I knew the potential of this.

46:19Hold on. It's pretty funny. We basically did an NYT, but an AI NYT. We did two versions of that, right? Find this. We set this up as a repli bounty, and it was so, so, so fast, in fact. Hold on. Where is this? Here. This is the original bounty. I'm pasting this into you, and then I'll show you what happened to it.

46:52Ah, yes, here we go. Bingo. Okay, so I put that bounty up and then there's a kid who literally learned to code that year in replets like Summer of Code. So I said, actually, go back for a second. Hold on. Go back. So just click into my tweet first and then we'll play this video, right? Just click into my tweet. Let's scroll a little bit further. Yeah, prompt with a few tweets. output an article in the style of NYT, WSG, et cetera, make the aesthetic look exactly the same, compare the speed and cost of having an AI do it versus a traditional... Oh, I think that's funny. Okay, fine. That's funny, yeah.

47:25All right. So do view quotes, right? No, yeah. Then, exactly, traditional... Right, so there we go. Pow days. Look at his thing, okay? And let's zoom in on this. Let's maximize this. so basically post in a tweet right and you know basically he'll hit submit right this is back when it was called and this is elon musk on twitter yeah this is this is four years goes right after elon took over twitter right the gpt times right and so now he had submit and literally it turned to a image and headline that looked exactly like you know coca-cola is being a part of America. The same tone and everything.

48:12Okay? That was four years ago, right? And the full thing was open source and so on and so forth. Now, I actually did a follow-up on this. So as much as I love Twitter and Twitter's great, I did a follow-up where basically the main issue is Twitter's still a commercial service and so it's a closed service and so on and so forth, right? And it's fine. It's good. It does a lot of good stuff and I think it does a lot of good for the world. But we also want open source, right? So a year later, this guy, the RoboJourno, right? And here was the result of that. This was actually on Farcaster. All of that, which actually was even better.

48:54So tell me if you got that on screen, right? The RoboJourno, right? So you scroll down a little bit further, the quotes or whatever. Let me see if I can load this.

49:08Erik Torenberg:But Balaji, the thing I want to ask you, though, is what is their business ripping? Why is their business absolutely crushed despite their credibility? Your audio, just say, sorry, save it one time. Go ahead. Hold on. Why is New York Times ripping? Despite their credibility being sort of by a large set of people, why is their business crushing? Isn't it just the games? Well, the thing is, they traded Anderson for 10 ,000, essentially, you know, Democrat Party members, right? So, basically, there's all of these party faces who, you know, the equivalent is, you know, the Chinese Communist Party has an outlet.

49:57It's called QSHA. Do you know what that is, right? If you go to en.qstheory.cn, okay? and they put out a bimonthly called Kyushia and it's actually very, it's turgid party actually want to know what China's doing this is in English and you can actually read it you can actually learn a lot about, you know, just to know what they're doing, they put it all out there, right? So the Kyushia subscriber is a lot like the NYT subscriber it's like the party member in China who reads the party newsletter and says, they're expected to like repeat what the them to say and to change their narrative as the party changed their narrative we're for russia we're against russia we're this we're that right in the same way the nyt subscriber is whatever the democrat party wants we will say and they just kind of go back and forth in the wind like this is you know they they're for this they're against this and they're for this again right they acknowledge something several years ago and vice versa right so once you kind of see nyt equals ccp in this sense right Right.

51:02It is they traded the the dissidents, the people who they couldn't control, the tech guys, for thousands of essentially. And so they traded power for money. Right. That's what NYT did. They lost influence over the center. They lost. But they did. It's a little bit like, honestly, like like Alex Jones or something like that. Right. They built an audience on farther and farther into that audience, and they never say anything. They have what people would call audience capture.

51:42I think that a lot of the reason that the New York Times business is booming now is just because of the games, like Wordle, the mini crossword. I think more than half— And cooking and stuff like that. Yeah, more than half of New York Times app's screen time is. So I think without the games, they would be doing a lot worse financially. That's true. That's exactly right. But basically, what about that is they cross-subsidize it in the same way like everything gets cross-subsidized where they have the fun stuff and then they have the eat your vegetable stuff. The thing I said is they lost tech, right?

52:28They lost Anderson. They lost all kinds of people who thought that they were actually good and so on and so forth, right? And here we go. Let me show you this. Ready? Hold on. Link. Here we go. Hold on. Bang, bang. Fully automated laissez-faire journalism. Hold on. This was basically... Just finding the link here. This is from a few years ago, and it got done. Hold on. You can put this one on screen if you want. Let's copy-paste this. that's the only thing about a

53:28does this work

53:33Eric Eric maybe you can put that on screen here I'll type it in here

53:42Erik Torenberg:i got another topic for you i just texted you send in the zoom chat yeah

53:53yeah here i'll just put in the same chat with the here we go this is just yeah so this was fully automated laissez-faire journalism and um there's like a video version of this which i can find, but basically you get the concept, right? There's actually a nicer version of this actually in the later thread, much nicer version, if I can find it. And the point being that this was something that we could take the open source feed and we could turn it into something which looked like an NYT kind of thing. I really want to find the actual version of this because there's a better version of it. The problem is I've posted so much that it's kind of hard to find.

54:41Let's see if I can. It's like from two years ago. Give me a second. Ask me a question while I'm finding this. Go, go, go.

54:47Erik Torenberg:Apology, I want to hear your thoughts on clavicular.

54:53Go ahead.

54:54Erik Torenberg:Clavicular. What about, oh, about clavicular? Yeah. I mean, I feel like you were on looks maxing years ago. Well, I mean, I myself am certainly not on looks maxing. But what I do agree with, okay, one cheer for it, because biotech is the, what I did say is that the bro science was going to become a huge, huge, huge thing, right? and it did and basically that is going to become something which is you know a major market right something which it's a little bit like you know how Twitter was like a small thing that became a big thing and it went from you know just tweeting your breakfast and so on to you know the center of the world economy where people are quoting you know right so in the same way bro science goes from like the type of thing which people think is sort of a joke to the thing that is completely real, right?

56:06And I think that's already actually midway through that with peptides and so on and so forth. And we have currently a Zempic for weight, but I think we'll get hopefully a Zempic for longevity, maybe a Zempic for cognition, a Zempic for many other kinds of things. We'll get large effect size drugs and that could be a really big deal, right? And so, hold on, I want to find this thing. I think Clapp is not super bro science-y. He seems to align to the mainstream a lot. Go ahead. Yes, but it's something where there is a aspect to what he's talking about, which is self-improvement. Okay, by the way, I found this thing finally.

56:51Hold on, wait, wait, wait, that's not it. Hold on.

56:57There we go. Open. Sometimes copy paste isn't hard to make work.

57:12All right, bingo. Click that.

57:17So this just shows a prototype. Let me explain what you're seeing on screen. If you click the first one, the first image. So what that did is that takes the open source, completely free stream of on-chain posts of the Farcaster feed and automatically generates a front page styled to look like NYT, but that's completely free and you can click into and you can see the articles and so on and so forth. If you go to the right, you can compare that to the NYT homepage. Is this live on your own? We're going to actually bring it back. So stay tuned. If you're interested in this kind of thing, I'll announce the launch on monitoring situation.

58:03Okay, we're going to have... I'm going to become, hopefully, one of the largest funders of free, open-source citizen journalism in the world, where anybody from anywhere can become a reporter by posting online. And then if we include that in content that we commission, where we're basically, we're covering the stuff that is useful for techno-capitalists. For example, what happened in India with thorium is so important, right? They've actually figured out how to get breeder reactors working. All kinds of countries should know about this. Everybody should know about Thorium. There should be tutorials about, you know, exactly what they did and so forth.

58:42There's a really good Monella Academy YouTube video on Thorium, which everyone should watch. Oh, great. He's very funny. Thorium rocks. Oh, great. But that's nine years ago. So that's good. So the thing is, this, you know, it's weird that there's so much coverage of like some, look, obviously, you know, if it bleeds, it leads is one model of what news is. And unfortunately, they will make it, bleed, like they'll often cause a conflict to generate the reporting and the content, like set fire to something, sell tickets to the place. There's a completely different view of, you know, what the 8 billion people in the world are doing, where not in a naive Pollyanna way, like, oh, why don't we report the good news of, you know, giving a cookie to somebody.

59:24That's fine. I like that too. Don't get me wrong. But we report the stuff, which is, let's call it investable. Okay. The progress in battery, the progress in solar, the progress in nuclear, the progress also in, let's call it the resilience economy, okay? With this crazy Hormuz thing, everybody's going to be allocating capital from wants to needs, okay? So how, you know, oil is not simply upstream of transportation, but all kinds of things from plastics. It's a hydrocarbon that's an input to many, many different things down the supply chain, right? From medicines, all types of stuff, right? All of that, you know, actually, Eric, did you know I have a professor in chemical engineering from Stanford?

1:00:04Yeah, of course. Yeah. So I actually have a hard science background, right? And in fact, that was actually my initial thing, right? So I want to have citizen journalism, decentralized reporting on hard science, tech across the world, right? And commission that and then pay for that and then have that basically be something where we have a certain number of those and they're just posting on Firecaster and so on and so forth. If you're an engineer or if you want to be like an editor-in-chief or something like that and you want to work with me on this, then reply to me or DM me with what you can do.

1:00:49Like basically non-AI, or rather, if it's AI, disclose AI, right? You should be like a great writer so you can verify, you know, the submissions that are coming in. Or you should be like a great coder or something like that. I'd be interested in essentially taking these prototypes that I've put on screen and turning them into something which is free, verifiable, open source, decentralized, international media for the world. And look, again, I love X. X is great. There's a lot of great stuff about X. But as I said, if we go back to my original post here, you know the thing, we have an unserious problem.

1:01:29We have an unserious problem, yeah. Yeah, we have been in serious trouble. So the thing is, we have to understand that this zombie of NYT is getting back up off the mat, that they are getting traction again, that they are going to, especially with this war, in my view, it's given them a sword. They're going to be attacking all of us. They're going to be yelling at tech guys. They're going to be calling us all kinds of names, whether you were for the war or not, right? And so post this on screen, this thing that I just posted. So you can come back to this post. Pulling up. So the issue we'll need to address with cryptography and AI is some people have started linking to legacy media news sites simply because the URL has a built-in form of validation in it and they can't tell what's true on a social media that's just optimized for views.

1:02:25Right? So that's why I said the sequel to Go Direct is Prove Correct. We must prove correct, not simply Go Direct. Yes, put out your own opinion, but prove the facts. And how do we prove the facts? Cryptography, mathematics. That's a property of all human beings, not some New York media corporation. People don't have to trust the tech zillionaires. They don't have to trust us because they don't have to trust us. They can just look at it on chain, right? And so we turn crypto and cryptography, just like there's cryptocurrency, we call this crypto information, right? Information that's built in verification and validation, okay?

1:03:07Now, by the way, you know, tutorials are actually a pretty good place to start on this. You know why? When you go through a tutorial, you actually verify it line by line in a way that you don't for most content, right? Because you're like typing that into, you know, an editor or you're trying to replicate each step. Like even a recipe actually has a built-in verification to it that most content doesn't. It's not like, you know, if you read some article on Egypt, it's not like you're flying out there like Indiana Jones and verifying every line of the story. You know what I mean, right? This is gel man amnesia, you know, like, do you guys know what that is?

1:03:43Maybe you can put that on screen for the,

1:03:44Erik Torenberg:do you want to explain? Yeah, basically this idea that you read something in the paper, you think it's deeply retarded, and you're like, wait, I know about this topic. They're totally wrong about this. But then when you think about, when you read other things they write about that you don't have expertise in, you sort of give them the benefit of doubt and assume they're right about that. That's exactly right. And don't go to Wikipedia because Wikipedia is itself a terrible source for everything. Only Grokipedia, baby. We're Grokipedia only in this household. It's Wiktionary. So I hope they make a Grok-tionary because Wiktionary is actually really good.

1:04:18Yeah, I know. but we definitely need Grok-tionary, right? So here we go. Hold on. Elon, if you're listening to this, Grok-tionary. Honestly, by the way, Elon, it's actually absolutely insane that like Grokipedia is a world-class thing. And for many people, like it's literally, it's better than we can be. For many people, they'd find it hard to remember it in the top 10 of things from rockets to cars to the Boring Company and so on. By the Boring Company, you know why that's actually way more important than people think? Why? Iran has actually got a form of defense where they've actually put all of their bases, they built these missile cities, these subways, basically, giant subways that are filled with missiles.

1:05:05And so they've got underground bases. And so for both offense and defense, we're going to see a lot more in the way of underground cities. So lots of cities are going to put more and more of their stuff underground because standoff missiles have kind of changed the military, you know. And actually, I think New York City got its first approval. I can't believe they got an approval for this for like a 80-story underground skyscraper kind of thing. And so in a sense, the underground world is like the encrypted world. All the satellite footage can't see what's happening underground because it's underground.

1:05:39And there's a lot of actually space under the Earth and that direction for things underground and in the water and maybe under the oceans, a whole, with modern engineering, we might be able to do a lot more than people think, right? So the boring company is actually potentially a much, much, much bigger thing than people even realize beyond just tunnels for cars and self-driving cars. It might be tunnels for cities and for homes and so on in the medium to long term. Also, you know the term air rights? Have you heard that term? No. I think so. When you're buying property, right? Property has, you know, cadesters.

1:06:14Yeah, so it's like boundaries, like the latitude, longitude coordinates in XY space that define what you're actually buying if you're buying property. In cities, you also have air rights, which add a Z axis because you're going up in the air and you might build a skyscraper. And can you build upward in this way? Because if, you know, are you casting shadows on people nearby and taking away, you know? So now you have, let's call it subterranean rights, which are ground rights. How low can you drill into the ground without, obviously you can desabilize things near you and whatnot, so there's engineering considerations.

1:06:48That's going to become a big thing. Anyway, coming back in a sec. So Elon, Grokipedia, so we got Gelman Amnesia? We got that on screen? I hope Elon is watching this, by the way, because are we the biggest live on X right now? We might be. Yeah. We might, you can at mention. Yeah, there we are. Bigger than Alex Jones. So how do we check? Is there like a trending tab live? I don't think so. Maybe. So, but, well, let's not, let's entertain the audience. So if, yes, all right. So actually, can you look at the thing I just sent you? Not that one, I put it in the Zoom chat, pbs.twimage, this out. The gem anamnesia effect is as follows.

1:07:25You open the newspaper to an article and sub-subject, you know why, well, in, Murray Jell-Mount is a, and this is Michael Crichton talking to late Michael Crichton, late great Michael Crichton. In Murray's case, physics, in Michael Crichton's case, show business, you read the articles, See, the journalist has absolutely no understanding of the fact that the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward, reversing cause and effect. I call these the wet streets, cause rains stories, papers fold them. In any case, amusement with multiple errors and turn the page to national and international affairs.

1:07:55So then you can hit X and close out this. So the point is, basically, this is something where whatever you, if you actually model it, right? NYT was the center. And how would you know something about Japan in the 1980s or the 1990s or the early 2000s? NYT would have a reporter and they would present it to you because you'd have a subscription to NYT. And how do you know about what's going on in Turkey or in the nuclear industry? they would essentially intermediate everybody's perception of each other like a hall of mirrors in the center the Japanese guy would only know through one of these centralized news agencies so you think of it, they call it the media in part because it mediates your experience of reality it's like a shimmery mirror into the shimmery hall of mirrors and of course that power of controlling that centralized hall of mirrors where everybody perceives everybody else through this smoky looking glass power.

1:09:03This is why they were so, so, so, so, so, you know, insistent. They fought this bruising and ultimately losing back. They tried to use their centralized power to censor everybody and to stop people in particular from courting with each other. Do you remember all the freakouts, Eric, about clubhouse? Like people from different walks of life. Unfettered conversations, exactly. Why? Because what it meant was all the spokes, right? You know, celebrity and some tech person and I don't know, some, I don't know, French guy or something like that. Japanese businessmen could actually all a, you know, coffee table, like what we're doing right now, right, in digital space and talk to each other without a member of the party, IT official, essentially, like the Communist Party official, but I repeat myself, there to monitor what we were saying, right?

1:10:00So no journalist, no communist, make sure everything is on message and so on. So they freaked out because they, whether they could articulate the way I just did, they understood that the ability to set the table, set the table to portray themselves as the neutral middle ground that would orbit what is within and outside the boundaries of discourse. If you could do that peer to peer, if you could set your own table, oh my God, your unfettered conversations would break the whole thing. In a sentence, by the way, and this is a funny, this is a Rorschach test. Ready? You ready for a Rorschach test of a tweet?

1:10:30This provoked a lot. I thought it was a good tweet. Ready? Free speech is open borders for ideology. That was a good tweet. Okay, go ahead. And I'll give you my thoughts. Here, I'll put this one on screen. I think it's roughly true. This is what we've seen the last couple of years. It's been open borders, so there's been a rapid flourishing in all kinds of takes, but also a lot of takes. Pretty terrible. A lot of actual total misinformation has been spread. it's probably net good, but there are some negative consequences that could be mitigated. You know, maybe through crypto. That's right. And so actually, that's my follow-up there.

1:11:22So basically, one way of thinking about it is the left cared as much about speech controls as the right cares about border controls. And so the reason they just fought so hard to control speech and the boundaries of acceptable discourse and not allow unfettered conversations is that controlling thoughts is sort of, I mean, it's pretty important, actually, what the over-totone window is. It's literally in its own way, like open borders, but for ideology, right? And so if you think about the negative reaction that someone on the right has to open borders, that the visceral negative reaction is someone in the centralized left has to unfettered conversations, right?

1:12:01And on the centralized left, let's say. And so one way of thinking about it is that what the internet has done is it's busted all the borders, right? Why? Because a post from a long time ago, you know, I use Twitter as sort of a sort of a scratch pad for ideas, you know? So here is a post time ago that I think is a good concept. The internet increases variance. right? So here's, this is it from 2019, right? So from a 30 minute sitcom to 30 second clips and 30 episode Netflix binges, okay? Basically a stable nine to five job to a gig economy task or a crypto windfall. From a standard life script to living with your parents or a startup CEO at 20, right?

1:12:54The internet just increases variance. But why? I'd argue it's because what the internet does is it removes the middleman, the mediator, the moderator, right? Anything that, because it allows you to compare, right? So sometimes that's good. Wow, I've made a new friend in Japan. We can code an open source together. You know, Linux would not have arisen without a guy in Finland being able to reach the world for basically free with computers, right? The bad is you have the crazy groups that can connect to each other and they can be crazy together online, all these crazy Reddit sub-communities or whatever, you know.

1:13:33And so you just get the most good and the most bad, right? So that's a border-busting kind of thing because the borders that existed before each and ideology and communities got busted, at least in the Anglophone world. China's response to that is just to build giant digital borders called the Great Firewall around the linguistic and physical sphere, right? Okay, coming back. Point is that once we realize that we now have speech as open borders for ideology, we have, let's call it American anarchy in the digital world, right? Everybody's yelling at each other, everybody's shouting. The opposite of that, call it Chinese control.

1:14:14Total top-down, centralized, authoritarian, you know, you have no choice, the party determines what can be said, and so on and so forth. And the thing is, a lot of people will, as a prediction, not an endorsement, go to that. Like Carney is, you know, going to that. And Canada is going to that. Europe is going to that. Because the alternative is too much for them. However, I think we can fashion what I call an internet intermediate where people opt in to constraints. Okay? Like, when you sign a contract, that's a right libertarian way of talking about it. Or when you consent to something, That's a left libertarian way of talking about it, right?

1:14:52Consent to a contract. Okay, you've given, you know, ongoing affirmative consent. You can constrain yourself or agree to something in some way. For example, when you walk into somebody's house, you know, actually, you know the Envoy iPad things? Yeah. Right? You sign like a terms of something into somebody's office, right? And it says you can do this, you can't do this, and so on and so forth. If you don't like those terms and conditions, you don't enter. Okay? and it's a little bit of paperwork, but something that's actually pretty standard. You know, the future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

1:15:26So I think you're going to see something like that more and more and more on larger and larger things where you sign our contract before entering a digital or physical territory and you agree to the terms of service of this zone that you're about to enter, which will have some constraints on both digital and physical behavior and that have examples of what is allowed and what is not allowed. and if you don't like it, then you don't have to come in. We have this on Discord. We have rules at discord.vg slash mtslive. Join. Exactly. Can you say what your rules are? Yeah, I mean, it's just very simple stuff.

1:16:02Let me see if I can actually pull it up. It's just like no spamming, no being like something for no reason. Don't make the server a worse place for other people. eggs exactly that's right so that's why most practical blacks to discords have moderators and moderation policies and band hammers like and by the way um so like the baseline is call an in-person level of civility right there's free speech and there's friend speech right like you know in theory each in practice to a friend if you use your full free speech and you start cursing and yelling at them and you're like, you can't throw me in jail for that.

1:16:49Yeah, but they can not be your friend, you know, right? Helping out on them, whatever, right? So friend speech is how you speak to a friend. And, you know, free speech is, you know, the assumption that the interaction between you and a hostile government that's for you and de-platforming you and so, and that does exist, don't get me wrong, it does exist. But it's simply not like how you interface with most people and most things that most times there shouldn't be. So, and within a Discord, yeah, so like the base layer is just, You're not cursing, yelling, making an unpleasant environment, posting spam, porn, malware, you know, like this kind of stuff, of course.

1:17:22But then there's a second level, which is keep things on topic, right? So if, for example, it's a Discord about botany, right? I want to mainly post about plants, okay? If you suddenly started posting about spaceships or something like that, you might even be a great poster. But actually, do you remember the Claude thing where it was all, like, everything was the Golden Gate neuron? Golden Gate Claude. Golden Gate Claude, right? So Golden Gate was an example of somebody who was certainly coherent and polite, but just off topic, where no matter what you asked it about, it was about the, you know, the Golden Gate Bridge, right?

1:18:05And it was like this funny kind of thing or what have you, right, where they could make it just obsess about this. This is like, you know, people are, you know, and it's, you know, it's basically every post, no matter what you asked about, monuments, it would bring it back to Golden Gate Bridge. It was just a monomy. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so no matter what you asked about, it'd say, well, oh, that's a great brain. It's, you know, it reminds me of the arches of the Golden Gate Bridge or whatever, something along those lines. What is the highest calorie food at McDonald's? is the Golgi Bridge, which contains our 1.6 million calories worth of steel can.

1:18:44Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. That's right. However, most people don't plan. Exactly. It's like obsessed with it, right? And what is the meaning of life? That's a better example, the one below it. Yeah. That's a very profound question. Maybe the meaning comes from our own human constructs, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Red River Forest, the San Francisco itself. It's funny, right? Okay. So the point being that within your digital community, A, the base level is the equivalent of like, you know, don't shoot, spam somebody, don't scam, whatever, don't paste porn, malware, blah, blah, blah. Then the B level is keep it on topic, right?

1:19:20Like, for example, in Japanese on a forum, which is all English. That's not that polite, unless they're a Japanese monolingual and they post a translation of it. Like, then that might be okay, right? And then C is don't make personal attacks on other people, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Point is, there's rules of the road. Those rules can be mutually incompatible. You could have a vegan forum and a carnivore forum that could both be internally polite and something that'd be on topic somewhere else. One of the most remarkable things, by the way, how you'll see people online who are just totally crazy in some context.

1:20:02You heard the term code switching? Yeah. Yeah. They'll just be a completely different person in another environment. Completely different person. They'll be foreign flight, you know, professorial even or whatever while they're just wilding out. Go ahead. I'm just laughing at the concept. It's funny, right? Yeah. Yeah. So we can... Slash those discord. That's right. So this concept of the internet intermediate, which we already have online, I think the key insight is we want to print that out offline. Right? The same kind of thing that you've consented to online where you enter a Slack, you enter a Reddit, you enter a Discord, you consent to moderation.

1:20:43If you don't like it, you can leave and pick from another one of those thousand. Right? We bring that concept offline, just like with the Envoy kind of thing, except you sign a social smart contract before you enter a jurisdiction. and in this fashion, you opt into constraints. You start rebuilding conventions of civility, but crucially, we do it from Anglo-American first principles. There's consent and there's contract, right? You're opting into those constraints. You have free choice. It is not opt-in and imposed Chinese communist, you know, censorship and filtering. Does that make sense, right?

1:21:17So we restore order, but through liberty, ordered liberty. Okay. So that might seem very abstract, but kind of like the ledger of record stuff, I think it's going to be pretty important in the years to come. Okay. And so let me pause there. There's a lot I just said, but that's also, that gives a rationale for why the media, A, is mad at us because we've taken over the dissemination, presentation, and collection, presentation, and dissemination of information. We've disrupted them economically. there's a you know the print media disruption graph that i always like right do we show that one we didn't show that one yet right let me show that one this this is maybe this probably should show shown this one first but um basically the internet just disrupted media that's why they're so mad at us right we didn't mean to do it but we did it um and uh here we go on let me put this on screen let me share this with you guys yeah here we go so take this guy put this on screen if you wouldn't mind and then I'll I'll summarize and then let's do Q &A

1:22:26so if you click the second graph there there it is so that shows yeah so this is like the graph to understand tech versus media there's many more graphs but this one is mind you know the rifle man whatever right so this graph it captures a ton where it shows that for decades it was awesome to be in newspaper print media, right? This thing goes from 20 billion a year in 1950 to 67 billion in the year 2000. That was like peak American empire, peak media and so on and so forth. And then it's like kind of flat in the 2000s. And then it's just completely roughly in the late 2000s, especially after the financial crisis, where what happened was everybody was seeking more efficient dollars, right?

1:23:12Like there are dollars for advertising. They didn't just want to throw them away. They needed to make them efficient. And at that point, Google was ready to catch the rain, right? The internet was finally ready. It was no longer just eyeballs and untargeted ads. They could do these personalized, you know, AdWords kind of links, which was still a big thing, but it was a huge innovation then. So they just started capturing all the spend. And then you see Facebook going vertical like this. And actually another big part of this is not shown is Craigslist going after classifieds. So like suddenly, you know, the guy, remember the thing, never argue with the man who buys ink by the barrel.

1:23:44Now the guy who's buying ink by the barrel is just wasting all his money because we don't have to buy ink by the barrel. We can get our information out online. So they drop from 67 billion to like 16, 19 billion if you include, you know, digital revenue. That's like, that's a huge drop. You know, you go from 70 to$20 billion. That's like a, you know, 60, 63, 62 % drop in, actually no, 70 % drop, okay, in just five years, six years, something like that on that chart, right? So the thing about this is, imagine, you know, the journos really weren't that bad going into the early 2000s. Why? They could fly—I mean, yes, they would cancel someone from time to time.

1:24:26And when I say they weren't that bad, to be clear, that's all relative because, you know, Herbert Matthews, you know, was the one who caused Castro. And he was a New York Times reporter who turned Castro into, like, a celebrity figure. John Reed helped create Lenin. Walter Durante helped create Stalin. and covered up the Hall de Moor won a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times. David Hallerstein helped create the Vietnam War and as Ashley Ritzberg is documented, the Great Lady Winked. Yeah, there are lots of journalists where if you actually go and look, actually, in fact, let me just give you that digression, put this on screen.

1:25:01Here's four references that will change your worldview if you aren't aware of this, right? But basically, John Reed, Walter Ranty, Edgar Snow, Herbert Matthews. it's very hard to find a communist dictator that didn't come to power due to some journalists doing PR for them. Okay, basically doing recruiting for them. They basically got them distribution. Okay. And however, with that said, they were not extremely hostile in the, so you can click all those books if you want. Just put them on screen for a second, one by one. Right. So John Reed is literally buried at the Kremlin wall because he was so important to the October revolution.

1:25:41Right. And he was an American who went there and wrote this book, 10 Days That Shook the World, that whitewashed the entire communist revolution. Go back one, click the next one. Like Walter Durante, he won a Pulitzer Prize, Stalin's apologist for covering up the mass murder of millions of Ukrainians. And, you know, by the way, after the whole war in Ukraine, New York Times wrote all these articles on Ukraine. You know what they never mentioned? Walter Durante, which is their own role. The New York Times is a big part of the reason that Ukraine was ever subjugated by Soviet Russia in the first place.

1:26:13And suddenly they reinvented themselves as a champion of Ukraine after they were the ones who like, you know, basically won a Pulitzer and made money. They made money from having, starving out the Ukrainians and they made money from the Ukrainian war. Just got them coming and going. This crazy, crazy thing, which basically this is, you know, the kind of thing they cover up is reporting on themselves, right? No account, you know, really if you just liquidated NYT and took the billions of dollars and gave it to the Ukrainians for reparations, that would be justice, right? If you go and click the next link, back one, Edgar Snow.

1:26:43Right? So this guy, yeah, click this guy, Edgar Park Snow. There we go. This guy, American journalist, the most important Western reporting on the communist movement in China the years before it had power, right? And what was that reporting? It was like, Red Star over China remained a primary source. And he's like, oh yeah, you know, they're for the people and so forth. And everybody got misled by this. Yeah, actually, that's right. Snow depicted, see that thing? Hold on, scroll up a little bit. Snow depicted Mao Zedong and his followers not as the opportunistic red bandits described by the nationalists, but as dedicated revolutionaries who advocated domestic reforms and were eager to resist Japanese aggression in China.

1:27:18They just wanted to reform. In reality, by the way, the Chinese nationalists were the ones who spent most of the blood fighting Japanese aggression. The communists let them fight, and then they attacked them from the back, and their reforms consisted of shooting landlords in the head and, you know, all this bad stuff. Fine. Okay. And you go back, and the reason that they got to power is, again, because of guys like Edgar Snow, who did press coverage for them and basically, you know, like formed the reputation of the Chinese Communist Party before it achieved power. Then go back one.

1:27:48Herbert Matthews, right? This is another New York Times journalist, another communist dictator, another journalist, another communist, but I repeat myself. So the man who invented Fidel, right? Castro, Cuba, Herbert L. Matthews in the New York Times, right? And basically, this shows that, you know, Fidel Castro was on the run. He was in hiding. And then what happened was Herbert Matthews basically wrote this whole thing, which is like, Castro is alive and he's still recruiting. It'd be like saying like, Osama bin Laden is still alive and he's here. And if you want to join Al-Qaeda, go to this location.

1:28:23I didn't say that. You know, it's literally like that kind of thing, right? And so there's actually a good book by this, on all of this, by Ashley Rinsberg on The Great Lady Winged, called The Great Lady Winged, which just goes through all of these episodes, right? And it shows the New York Times is never great, right? The Salzberger family, by the way, you know, just to show you a little bit more, just to show you what we're dealing with, right? Do you remember, you know, BLM and how, like, everybody was a racist other than the New York Times, right? Well, actually, just to know here, this, again, something you'll never see in the New York Times itself.

1:29:00The family that owns the New York Times were reportedly slaveholders. Ta-da. So all white people are racist other than the white people who own the New York Times. All white people are guilty of slavery other than the white people who own the New York Times who are actually enslaved. Yale University and Brown University, they were founded by slave owners. Yeah, and by the way, you know, on GitHub, we had to change master to main. Is Yale giving up the master's degree? I mean, no. Yeah. Right? Come on, right? This is all just stuff, which is basically media attacking tech, right? So the point is, and by the way, who is this guy?

1:29:34Just to know who we're dealing with here, right? This guy is like, look, the thing about tech is everybody in tech is basically new money, right? Which, or not everybody, there's some people who are like second generation VCs, but this guy, by the way, everybody knows Zuckerberg. Okay, Zuck is out there, he's taking the hits, you know his face, okay? Just grow up a little bit, just have the headline there, right? So this is, see, we know what Zuckerberg's face looks like. You can summon it to memory. For better or worse, and I respect Zuck, Zuck is the son of a dentist who built a gigantic platform from scratch from his computer, right?

1:30:16And he's out there. He's taking the hits as CEO, like it or not. You know, he's personally responsible for it. And he's built, you know, like I don't agree with every single thing Meta has done, but overall on balance, I think it's given messaging and all this stuff in general. it's done a lot for the world and for tech. Salzberger is surrounded by a thousand reporters at all times, but you've never heard his, never seen his face for most people, never even heard his name. Am I right, Theo? You probably hadn't seen his name or heard his face until, ah, seen his, you know what I'm saying. Heard his name or seen his face till now, yeah?

1:30:46I had actually, because I read Jarvin. But before that - Okay, fine, fine, fine. All right, but most people have. Most people have not, yeah. Most people have not. And just to give you a sense of this, right? He's inherited the New York Times company, which is a company, by the way, from his father's father's father's father. This is like a fifth generation hereditary dynasty. And what does he say? He's like, oh, you tech guys aren't diverse and meritocratic enough, right? This is literally an organization where it was, you know, like the three competitors for the NYT throne were like three cousins, okay?

1:31:22So their version of the Rooney rule, you know, the Rooney rule, you're supposed to like, you know, like supposed to interview like diverse people for the top role. Their version of the Rooney rule was like interviewing their three cousins for the top role. Okay. Whereas what do we do? We interview people from all around the world, right? We have like the founder of Calendly is Nigerian and, you know, Mercado Libra, Latin American. And, you know, you know, Kareem is Middle Eastern. And we have Indian startups and Japanese startups. Tech technology is global, right? And these guys are nepotists.

1:31:51Okay. So in the battle of nepotists versus technologists, you know, just since you got me on this, right? So basically, let me just show you an amazing contrast. All right, here we go. Look at this one. And most people don't have the context window to remember all of this stuff. And now with AI, we can actually do it. So if you put this one on screen, right? How Punch protected the times, right? And what that's doing is it's extolling the values of dual class stock, okay? It's saying that because Salzberger has dual class stock, then he can run the business and see a given stock. The solution is give that stock class to your shares, not enough to threaten the family's control.

1:32:35That's how they basically were able to... See, I've never had to worry. So scroll up a little bit, right? But I've never had to worry the times would go the way because dual class stock was so good, okay? Right? So here, they're for dual class stock. But now, look at this one You can't fire Mark Zuckerberg's Kids, kids Tech companies using dual class So, dual class stock is good Yeah, yeah When it's for the New York Times company And it's for Salzburg It's good When it's for Zuckerberg Right? It's bad This is the decoder lens You can apply to every single thing they do You know, you may know it also as Russell conjugation Right?

1:33:17Have you heard that before? Yeah Yeah, so should I explain Russell conjugation? is an important conceptual thing here, just a baseline thing. These are like some of the basics from like five years ago as a media. Like, I sweat, you perspire, but she glows, right? He doxes, she leaks, but the New York Times investigates. Okay, so like, you know, how Punch protected the time with dual class talk that allowed him to serve the public interest decade after decade versus unaccountable Mark Zuckerberg dual class talk, blah, blah, blah. Right? Okay? So, they just Russell conjugate everything, and they space it out enough that, you know, they put the negative and pejorative connotation on it when it's tech, and they put the positive connotation on it when it's media.

1:34:04This is like one of their few tricks, right? They have a few other tricks, but the fact that they've lost distribution means that we can actually just punch through the armor, right? We have, you know, infrared cameras, right? We have, you know, we have basically the ability to show A and B. See, the thing is like years ago, like I might have the memory to remember an article from 2012 and 2019 and put them side by side. But now we have the internet, we have links. I can go bing, bing like this and just show the contrast, right? Another example was within a few days of each other in like 2019, for example, they were like, you know, free speech in Russia, try YouTube.

1:34:42They seem to be for free speech, right? This was June 2019. Okay. And then they were also basically, they were also, if you put that one on screen, right? Then like literally the previous day, they were against it, right? Does YouTube radicalize, right? And YouTube, right? So So on the one hand, see, in Russia, they were for YouTube because it helped, in their view, destabilize Russia and or get their content in there and so on and so forth. Within America, though, it was against their interest, so they were against YouTube. And this showed, by the way, they messed up because they published this back to back so people's context window could capture the inverse Russell conjugation of them praising it in one story and critiquing it in another, right?

1:35:32Before, they had better editors and smarter people, so it would space this kind of inversion out over the years. Does that make sense, right? Yeah, but isn't the counter to this that this one was an op-ed and they might have, you know, a range of views in the op-ed? Like, I remember they got in trouble for having Tom Cotton do an op-ed during BLM that was like sending the troops. Yeah, yeah, but that's actually, in fact, you brought up my exact rebuttal. Obviously, the op-ed page ultimately reports to publisher, And so they, of course, they have veto over it. And they demonstrate that veto power with the Tom Cotton op-ed and the firing of, you know, James Bennett and the subsequent departure of Barry Weiss and the free press and so on and so forth.

1:36:13So, yes, of course, they have these various camouflage things they'll do where they're like, oh, we don't actually control the op-ed page. Like, of course they control the op-ed page, right? Like, clearly, they fired the guy who published this op-ed, right? Right. And so, duh. Right. And so. Yeah, exactly. Right. So this, the tone is needlessly harsh, blah, blah, blah. And look, you know, this is from a certain place in time where everybody was, you know, losing their minds in a certain way. Right. In 2020. And it reads like you're reading something from the middle of the Bolshevik Revolution or, you know, Maoist China or whatever.

1:36:54right fine okay um and uh you know because later you know there are other gosh there's a guy josh barrow who pointed out that nyt had no similar reaction to this when um but when some similar kind of event was happening okay i forget exactly what it was but josh barrow you know pointed out the contrast right um and uh he's he's actually yeah it was this was like a 2022 or something like that um i forget i forget what it was but he's like uh i mean it was china and they were shutting down an agency or causing a problem. And anyway, NetNet is, he pointed out that they had nowhere near the level of anger about issue X that they did about the Tom Cotton op-ed, even though it was comparable.

1:37:36I forget what the exact matter was. The point is, recursing back up a sec, you know, as actually, as Mark said, it is not, you know, what did he say? He's like, it is not sufficient to critique the world. The point is to change it, right? One of the few things he got right, okay, And so, let me get the exact quote.

1:38:00Yeah, the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. Absolutely true, okay? And that is why I would never, you know, that's why conservatives always lose. Conservatives, they're, the reason they call them reactionaries is they react. They always move second. They have no idea of what is better. They always want to go back to the old ways that have often been defeated by the time, right? So, yeah, it's like, yeah, that's the one, the quote, right? There, bingo, right? The philosophers only interpret the world in various ways. The point of ours is to change it.

1:38:32So all of these are things which one can critique and say NYT Russell conjugates, anything that's for the NYT Co. By the way, if you Google NYT Co., it's a symbol, right? It's literally a stock symbol, like it has one thing, no space. Right? Like literally it's a thing and it's just go NYT Co price.

1:38:59I think it's just, the ticker's just NYT. Yeah, five, five, five, right. Yeah, so basically, I don't know why it's being so hard to find. There we are, right? So if you go to max, you'll see their price crashed going into 2012, right? Actually, this is another piece of the puzzle just for people who don't know this. So going into this, you can see that their price was low then, right? Then they discovered that saying woke stuff basically got their traffic back up, right? So here, I'll show you this particular very important graphic. Okay.

1:39:41If you look at this link.

1:39:46so this is something which shows 1970 2018 it's a little bit small but if you zoom in at the top notice how right in 2013 okay like mansplaining toxic masculinity these things that had never been said in the paper suddenly went absolutely vertical right that is what's called an editorial decision okay at the very top level of the media establishment they made the decision to start pouring the equivalent of poison into the water supply, it's like putting sugar in all the food so that you get a short-term bump in traffic at the expense of the long-term health of the republic. Okay? They cause trillions of damage to social fabric for a few million dollars worth of clicks.

1:40:28It's like the ethics of a copper thief who steals a hundred bucks in copper, but like destroys the, you know, like a light or like a Tesla supercharger. Okay? enormous damage to the commons by causing all of this conflict. But, you know what, it did benefit the New York Times company, where if you go back to NYT stock, that started going up around that time, right? So go back to 2013, you can see it was in the doldrums, and then suddenly they start roaring upward, especially post-Trump, boom, boom, boom, boom, like this. So all this kind of stuff is something that sent their stock roaring up. I mean, it's only in our, like, you know, from our standpoint, but my God, has it done more than$12 billion of damage?

1:41:14Holy moly, right? It's crazy how much damage it's done. So what we need is something which actually is not simply critiquing. Like you can go through a million examples of, like, it's funny to put it this way. Like, yes, did they cause, did they help cause the Hall of D 'Amour with Walter Drante? Yes. Did they help cause the Cuban revolution with Herbert Matthews? Unfortunately, yes. They helped cause the Vietnam War with David Halversam's false reporting. Unfortunately, yes. And on and on. You could go through this. You could go through, you know, Jason Blair, and you can go through all the other fake stories at MIT and all the other journalists.

1:41:50You could go through Russell Conjugation. You could go through the fact that they're nepotists who inherited their paper, and, you know, they call meritocratic tech new money all these names when those names are better applied to them. You can make all those points, but the point is not to critique the world. The point is to change it. So how do we change it? decentralized cryptographic truth. Decentralized cryptographic truth where if you go to coinmarketcap.com for a second, here's a great stat. You ready? This site, coinmarketcap.com, the seemingly, you know, small site. Do you know that since 2017, in 2017, it actually passed wsj.com in traffic?

1:42:33Wow. Yes, here you go. Ready?

1:42:39So put this on screen.

1:42:44So click that. This is almost 10 years ago, nine years ago. Click that. Yeah, this is Alexa. The reason is, at first you might think, oh, is that comparing apples to apples? Well, WCA has news, but you know what else it has? It has stock prices. And in fact, in the 80s, if you did some leverage,

1:43:12Erik Torenberg:we seem to have lost apology stream I mean this guy's got a lot of endurance huh no but we lost you for a second keep going

1:43:38and the equity is valued for the purchase of the transaction, we're going to use the closing price in the Wall Street Journal on the day that the contract was signed. Right? So above, you know, like are the letters, but below the Wall Street Journal was bought for the numbers. It was literally bought for the feed of stock prices. Right? So looked at in that way, coin market cap is, of course it's a global WSJ, where it started with the numbers, which are the coins. The coins are the global stock market that are actually, by some measures, already the number four stock market coins since, you know, someone from Japan and Brazil and Turkey can trade coins on an equal basis even if they can't get a brokerage account, right?

1:44:15So by some measures, the NYSE, the NASDAQ, and crypto are the three largest markets in the world, and crypto will become the number one, I think, over time as NYSE and NASDAQ go crypto, you know, with tokenized stocks, tokenized equities. So it's actually not that crazy to realize, actually, yeah, for many people around the world, CoinMarketCap is the new WSA, and now they start to add content and analysis and so on of where coins are going and so on. With me so far? Yep. All right, so that is the financial information resulted in an internet-first news source that at least from a pure traffic standpoint has disrupted WSA.com.

1:44:47I do believe as we start putting facts on chain, like via a vehicle like Farcaster, we can have something that flips nytimes.com because every article is verifiable, because it's coming from decentralized citizen journalists on the ground. This is another major point, by the way. You know, the founding fathers of America were against a standing military. You know, have you heard that? Yeah. Yeah, the reason is, if they had a Praetorian class, right, a group of guys who were armed when everybody else was disarmed, they knew from history that that group of people would see themselves as special and so on and so forth, versus if you had a farmer soldier who was drawn from the population, then that would be represented to the population.

1:45:30It wouldn't oppress the population and so on and so forth, right? Now, because of the advent of industrialization and so on and so forth, it became economically infeasible. The farmer soldier couldn't just, you know, make a tank out of a shovel or whatever. They couldn't just beat plowshares into swords. So that's why you got these professionalized militaries over time. And now it's actually re-decentralizing with drones and for cyber war and so on and so forth. It's a whole separate topic. But in the same way that you don't want a standing military, you don't want a standing media, which is not representative of the population.

1:46:00The reason being, because then that standing media, who can check them? Only another journo. Only WHA could check NYT, could check WAPO. So there's an incentive for collusion, just like there is between any set of corporations. And what they do is they collude, and this is what they did in the 2010s and so on, where they could never be wrong about a story like Russiagate or something because they all just basically repeated the same thing ad nauseum. And you were misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, blah, blah, blah, for contesting that story, which eventually later they all admitted together was false.

1:46:32But by admitting it together, that's another concept, the school of fish strategy, right? Lots of these false stories we now know are false, but there's no accountability for them because you are an individual, but they are a school of fish. Okay. So that's the, the school of fish strategy is basically this. Here's a great visual of it. Ready? Put this on screen.

1:46:56So you are the individual, but all the NPCs just turn as a group. Okay? Right? So that is this key concept where all the journos see that this is the advantage of being an NPC. If you're an NPC, you're just repeating what everybody else is saying. Because you're repeating what everybody else is saying, you can't be singled out. The strength in numbers. And then when the conventional wisdom shifts from, oh, you know, a lab leak was a conspiracy theory to a lab leak is within the range of acceptable things, they can just shift what they're saying and they don't pay any penalty. But if you're the first to say something that's outside of the spectrum, then you can get attacked like this, okay?

1:47:37Once you actually see that and you realize, oh, okay, that's why there's no accountability for all the fake news because, and our version is the head of the Hydra, right? One reporter print something fake, but all the other reporters repeat it, now they've got strength in numbers, right? This is actually something that they do very well, is they actually have a better esprit de corps and a better loyalty to each other, in a sense, than all these libertarian individualists, the sovereign individuals who ever do, right? They don't want to listen to each other, right? Like the independence is both their strength and their weakness, just like the NPC-ness is both their weakness and their strength, right?

1:48:08Okay, the other side. Point being, once you understand the school of fish strategy, like Russell conjugations, just like gives you conceptual frames to understand the strengths of the legacy media and also their weaknesses. Okay. And only by doing this, you know, the Sun Tzu thing, right? If you know, let me make sure you get it right. It's like, if you know yourself and you know your rival, you will never lose a thousand battles. Yeah. If you know the enemy, know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. Okay. And why is that? That means that you don't get in a fight unless you know you can win.

1:48:46Another version of it is, another thing he says is, successful generals win first and then go to war. Unsuccessful generals go to war first and then expect to win, right? To be clear, we never wanted to fight the media. I never had any issues with them. But they decided to fight us. Why? Because we disrupted all their economics, as I showed you earlier. Go ahead.

1:49:03Erik Torenberg:You weren't interested in the media. The media was interested in you. exactly exactly that's right like i didn't care i was just i was you know as i think you know like you know tia we you know eric and i've hung out for a long time but just like i was a career academic right literally all i did was i woke up in the morning and i said um and then i meditated on mathematics okay that's what i did i did computational genomics i did math i only gave my first public talk ever at age 33 okay i was a very private person i just like literally did didn't care about it, you know. And it's only because like the total war that media waged on tech in the 2010s.

1:49:44And now to be empathetic to them, they felt it as if tech was waging a war on them. The difference is we were just building better products and it happened to compete with their products, but their lifestyle got worse. The thing is in the early 2000s, you could have an expense account as like a time reporter and maybe write like, I don't know, six articles a year, fly around the world. You had a pretty high status. You had pretty high income and everybody feared and respected you because you could write a negative article on some politician and nuke them. But you didn't, you know, they weren't that unhappy, right?

1:50:14They weren't that mad. They were still, there was like peak America and so on and so forth, the 90s and 2000s, they had these expense accounts. So they weren't like angry and out to get you. But then when that revenue graph collapsed from 67 billion to 16 billion, and then these nerds, the guy down the haul from them suddenly went totally vertical and became a tech zillionaire and he doesn't know proust or whatever right he doesn't know you know all these literary references he just knows how to do math right why is this guy doing well it's one thing if your house turns into a hovel it's another thing if the guys next door turns into a mansion and yet it's the third thing if that happened because your house turned into a hovel right so we should we should i mean it's funny right?

1:50:57We should be empathetic to them because I actually never wish another man ill, to be clear, right? I always try to seek out the win-win and always try to figure out, okay, how can we come to a win-win relationship? How can you prosper and we prosper? Because capitalism is positive some, right? That's why I'm an internationalist and a capitalist. I try to work across borders and so and so forth. Nevertheless, some people are simply not interested in dialogue. Some people just want to watch the world burn. Some people just want to print fake news. You know, there's an unnamed journo, I'm not going to name the journo, who said, let me see if I can quote it, like, that's why we want to see these CEOs killed, right?

1:51:38You know, what was it? I'm just going to quote without the, said, and people wonder why we want these executives dead, okay? So the anti-tech terrorism, right, of firebombing Teslas, of shooting the Luigi left, of shooting Brian Thompson, the shooting of the Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house, that kind of stuff. Those people have been radicalized in such a way that, yes, it's still important to post the true information out there, but also, at the time they're like foaming at the mouth, yelling at you, certainly let alone shooting at you, you can't reason with them, right? So that kind of person, you know, a lot of tech people really underestimate the level of anger out there.

1:52:31Just to talk about this for a second. I think the technologist is the capitalist of the 21st century. That might be an obvious point, but it's a non-obvious point as well. Should I elaborate on that for a second? Okay. All right. So basically in the 20th century, the Industrial Revolution led to the rise of, you know, capitalism as we, you know, the industrial variety of capitalism. and the captains of industry and whatnot. And this did result in enormous improvements in standard of living. You had, you know, modern homes and you had running water and all this kind of stuff. But it also resulted in obviously huge wars and also a disruption of traditional means of government.

1:53:08All got disrupted. And as a consequence, I mean, America was actually a society that was relatively young and supple. Technological disruption and roll with it, right? but the older governments of Europe were totally disrupted by it. And actually, you know, that also led to the Soviet Union which was in its own way a new government that in a sense was adapted to the age, albeit in a malign adaptation. But the thing is that, you know, did you know Russia's stock market by some reports did better than America's stock market in the 1800s? No. I believe it. Yeah. They were not barbarians, right? Right.

1:53:51And so the reason I say that is, you know, just to calibrate on what the world was, you look at this graph, right? And I'll get to my point in a second.

1:54:08Just click this table, right? Zoom in most of the world, but except for the US, Canada, and Australia. Yeah, you got it on screen, right? So, most, you can actually,

1:54:25Russia, negative 100%. Like, what does communism mean? You go to zero. Do not pass go. Do not collect$200. Right? Go directly to Gulag. Okay? Your farm is seized. You're shot. Wife is, kid is thrown into a Gulag and reeducated, sent to a collective farm. Right? Also, by the way, a farm is a lot like a factory. You know why? Why? You're growing radishes or something. They have to be irrigated. They have to be aerated. They have to be fertilized at a certain time. There's a whole process that's a lot like manufacturing widgets. And a lot of that task knowledge is in the head of the farmer. And when they're shot and the farmer just sees, it doesn't just grow the radishes by itself.

1:55:05It's a whole process of doing that. And where's all the equipment and so on? It's over a tech company and not knowing where any of the code and the private keys or whatever are. You can't deploy that, right? So these communists would seize the farm and they would kill the lingoose, the farmer. And then that's why they got famine because they didn't know how to operate this thing. They had to figure it all out from scratch. And that's why this whole thing was a huge disaster. Anyway, so these retards, basically these communist revolutions and they, it was like why, you know, the thing is you can say there's people who are good, smart, evil, and stupid.

1:55:38These guys retards, they're stupid. Here's why. Good is helping others without concern for yourself. Smart is helping others while also helping yourself. Evil is harming others while helping yourself. And stupid is harming others while also harming yourself, right? So these communists were stupid because they harmed others while also harming themselves. They thought they were going to steal the farms, but they actually stole like a bag of donuts, right? They got nothing, okay? Because they had a famine. Fine. Point is, in this extremely negative sum activity where they envy the capitalists so much.

1:56:09When they said capitalists, by the way, There's a term, great term from Grokipedia. It's called podkulak, okay? And I know this is getting into Russian history, but I'll explain why it's relevant. Basically, at first, the communists were saying, oh, we're only going after the top hat capitalists, right? And then they eventually said, we're going after the kulaks, who are the farmers who were considered prosperous, and they had two cows, okay? You know, like a wealthy farmer had two guys. He's like a small businessman, right? And eventually they went from the top hat billionaires to the small businessman to, click this link I just sent you.

1:56:54Great term. Pod Kolachnik. Okay. Pod Kolachnik encompassed poor peasants, collective farm members, or even non-peasants opposing grain requisition of farm seizures, irrespective of the socioeconomic status. So, even if you were not a capitalist in any way, even if you were not a small businessman or kulak in any way, even if you yourself were poor, if you said, hey, taking these farms to farmers is going to result in a famine, Then you were an enemy of the people too. Okay? This is how psychotic the whole thing got. Podkolodgy term where, why is it important? Because, see, this guy, I'm not sure if he was saying it sarcastic or not, but he's like, first they came for the billionaires and I did not speak out because I was not a billionaire.

1:57:37Then they came for the millionaires. Well, actually, most of the violence in the 20th century was not on the base of race, it was on the base of class. Okay? So they went after the capitalist. Point is, today, the, you know, he's saying this, I couldn't tell if he was saying it sarcastic or not, But if you go back one, that's why I posted this, because that's exactly, if you go back one, just hit back. Yeah, that's exactly what happened in the Soviet Union. First they came for the millionaires, and then they came for the Podkoloshniks, which is anybody who opposed them stealing all the property.

1:58:07Eric, right? Yeah. It's a good term because it literally puts a thumb on exactly an episode in history where that did happen and millions of people were killed in that order, right? It's not a political thing. It actually happened, unfortunately. Okay. Now the issue is today, why do I say the technology is a capitalist of the 21st century? On what level that's completely obvious because we're techno-capitalists? On the other hand, it's non-obvious. Why? Because the capitalist was, the beef with them is they were centralizing the means of production and they had these big factories and so on that nobody could afford.

1:58:37But we're decentralizing production. Everybody has a laptop, right? And the capitalist was central, everything was centralized and it was mass media, mass production. We're decentralizing everything. We're giving equality of opportunity to everybody in the world. Everybody in the world has basically the same, as I've said before, you have essentially the same smartphone experience as Sergey Brin, right? You have the same information at your fingertips as, you know, Elon Musk for the most part, right? Like, what's he on every day? He's on X, just like you and I. Like, in a sense, there's been an enormous global leveling, right?

1:59:09With the internet. The internet is actually global equality. You have all these tools at your disposal, AI tools, this tool, that tool, literally just hit keys on the keyboard and you can create all these things. But bulgy.

1:59:20Erik Torenberg:So in a sense, go ahead. On that note, I'm going to have to wrap because Mark Andreessen is coming in two minutes. Okay, okay, fine. So net-net is we need to, as technologists, build a better form of media, not just tell our own stories and go direct, but prove correct. Because a lot of people will be mad at us since we've been successful. Since often we're ethnically different, immigrants, Indians, Chinese, whatever, whatever, right? foreign in some sense of the term or two class different, two ethnic different, whatever. And so what we have to do is we have to have open source, verifiable, correct information where people trust us.

1:59:59Because they don't have to trust us, they can just verify the information. We decentralize cryptographic truth, citizen journalism, open source media. Because NYT is getting off the mat, we have to come correct by proving correct. That's it.

2:00:12Erik Torenberg:Amen, that's a great place to wrap. Apology, we had almost 80 ,000 people come in live. Thank you for being our first guest ever at MTS and angel investor and supporter and friend. Thank you so much, Apology. Thanks so much for coming on.

2:00:27Erik Torenberg:Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or a review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

2:01:12Erik Torenberg:Capital Management LLC, A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.