a16zTech vs. Media: Balaji Srinivasan on the Battle Shaping Our Future
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
105 min read · 21,294 words- 0:00 – 1:05
Introduction: State vs. Network and the Media Landscape
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
We wanna build Googles and Facebooks and, you know, AI and giant companies, giant cryptocurrencies, and now internet communities. What they wanna do is they want to exert authority over others. For them, the best thing they can do is to put a man out of work. And for us, the best thing we can do is we can put a man on the moon. [upbeat music]
- ETErik Torenberg
Balaji, a- another day, another journo hit piece. Uh, we were sort of ta- talking offline about, about, uh, you know, we were talking about the Mark's and Ben's, uh, e- evolution of the media episode. And w- you know, you know, you and I have been friends and collaborators for the last 10 years, and one of the topics we've spent a lot of time talking about is the media. Sort of the state of the media, what needs to be fixed about the media, and how to do that. And, uh, we, and, a- a- with your leadership, have actually been a, a part of that, that, that, that trend and that, that evolution. And so I, I wanted to take the opportunity to talk with you, kind of reflect about, about that evolution and, and talk about w- where we still need to go.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yeah. Well, okay,
- 1:05 – 2:45
The Collapse of Newspaper Revenue and Rise of Tech
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
so there's so much I can say on this. Um, I'm going to show one graph that-
- ETErik Torenberg
Sure
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... [laughs] of course.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs] It wouldn't be a Balaji podcast if we didn't start it with a graph.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
[laughs] Yes, exactly. This shows that essentially newspaper revenue rose to, like, $70 billion in the year 2000, and then right after the financial crisis, it just suddenly collapsed over the course of, like, four or five years, and Google went vertical and Facebook went vertical, right? And the thing about this is this was the internet disrupting blue America.
- ETErik Torenberg
Okay.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay? There's a similar graph for manufacturing that shows China disrupting red America.
- ETErik Torenberg
Sure.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Almost at exactly the same time, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Wow.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So once you kind of... Just to focus on this one, though, for a second, once you see the internet disrupting blue America, because media's, like, a core thing for them, this is actually what led to wokeness. Because it was... You know, you've heard the saying, "Go woke, go broke," right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
But in their case, it was actually, "Go broke, go woke."
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay? Not my original coinage, but applied to this graph, it's relatively original. Because wokeness w- was... What happened was they just fell off a cliff like this, and for, from 2008 to 2012, tech was just part of the Democrat Party. It was like, you know, Steve Jobs is there and, you know-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... uh, there, there's actually this article from 2012 on The Atlantic, like, "The Nerds Go Marching In" about tech helping to re-elect Obama, and Facebook was helping Obama.
- ETErik Torenberg
The Arab Spring.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yeah, exactly. All that stuff was basically on, solidly on the Democrat side up until 2012. After the 2012 election, right after Obama's inauguration, you can date it to right after that. 'Cause even in 2012, like, New York media and so on was saying there's no such thing as a brogrammer, okay?
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
You can Google that article.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So 2012,
- 2:45 – 7:00
Media, Wokeness, and Political Realignment
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
tech was part of the coalition, so there were no reason to attack, there was no reason to attack them. After the inauguration in 2013, and it's literally that spring and summer, the knives came out and media started attacking tech, okay? And there are these articles, you know, would you just look at all these rich people? Uh, where it's actually in Slate. That was, uh, before, um, you know, they got radicalized and they're saying, "Oh, you know, it's actually bad to attack people just for the sake of being rich." It was before all media had updated to actually tech is our enemy now, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yep.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And so, but, but un- unless you understand the economics of it, I don't think one can understand why the journos suddenly went crazy. Now, the thing is we're now in 2025, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
It is now 17 years after the collapse in media revenue, right? So somebody who was born then, who is 18 years old, y- you're playing any, like, uh, like, multiplayer video games, like-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... like, like Quake or whatever, you know, all the new stuff, you know, MOBAs, right? Uh-
- ETErik Torenberg
Sure.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
You know, you can get spawned into the middle of something where everybody's shooting at each other, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs] Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
That's what, like, the Gen Z kid is today-
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... right? For a kid who's just getting warped into the arena.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Luke Fahey door, you know, for example.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah, [laughs] exactly.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
That's right. They're just, like, warped in like this-
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... and yeah, it's, it's like, uh, you know that thing where the, there's a meme of the guy who's walking into the apartment after he's been gone for 10 minutes, everything's on fire or whatever when he gets back, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah, exactly. [laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay. So from the perspective of someone who's 18 years old, the war with the journos has basically been a feature of their entire existence, okay?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah, yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
But it actually wasn't like that because in the '90s and the 2000s, the journos were secure enough in their economic position, 'cause you could write, like, four or six articles for Time Magazine a year and get paid a nice salary and travel around the world, so they didn't ha- I mean, did they kill? Yes, they killed, but they didn't feel the need to kill all the time. You know, uh, it's funny because of this, the ways I'm putting it, Nellie Bowles actually did a thing for Bari Weiss a few years ago, um, and it's like learning how not to kill.
- ETErik Torenberg
Well, it's funny 'cause she's, she's one of the c- few converts. You know, she, she made the transition. She was able to, to get to the other side.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Um, when you look at that or you look at... There's another one. There's one by Hamilton Nolan at CJR, okay? Which is basically like, the powerful don't need the media. Journalism, particularly at its highest level, is about raw power.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
See, they admit it, right? Go ahead.
- ETErik Torenberg
I remember you had this old quote of by s- was it some journalist who was like, uh, "Our profession, uh, we, we know our profession is, uh, kind of, like, immoral," or you know, what, that's an old quote. It's like-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Oh, yeah, yeah. That's actually a great one also. Ready?
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- 7:00 – 13:00
The State vs. Network Framework Explained
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So with those prerequisites out of the way, let's talk about the specifics. First is, um, there's like 10, 15 things I can say. Let me just go kind of point by point.
- ETErik Torenberg
Sure.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
The first is, what is the reason for the hostility between media and tech, right? It's actually that the master framework of the whole thing is it's State versus Network, right? This is basically from my book, The Network State. I think it's a useful frame, which is, uh, like, for example, um, Elon versus mainstream media is Network versus State, right? Social media versus mainstream media is Network versus State. Um, or when it says, what is this whole article that is attacking Luke Farrer? It's like, why did this programmer attack the institutions of the US government? Network versus State, right? Like, this tech programmer attacking the state institutions, right? And it's the people on social media, the tech people, who are mad at the fact that this state-aligned institution is attacking our tech people. Once you apply that framework, that applies to everything. For example, SpaceX is Network, NASA State. Uber is the Network, taxi medallions are the State. Um, Bitcoin is the Network, the Fed is the State. And so on and so forth, right? And those are two different organizing principles for how you think about the world. Basically, uh, the State is someone should pass a law, and the Network is someone should write some code, right? The State is everybody who is directly or indirectly paid by essentially either the US government or a government more generally, and the Network is all those people who are directly or indirectly monetized and make their living on the network. So when someone goes from NYT to Sub Stack, they're moving from State to Network, right? And now the Network is actually taking parts of the State, where all these tech guys are getting into government, getting into politics, getting into media, getting into finance, getting into the traditional niches that were for the State. That's why they're so mad, because their share of the global pie and the local and the American pie is shrinking, and the Network's pie is expanding, right? And we're getting into... They're like, "Stay in your lane." Why are they saying that? They're like, "You should just be, like, hitting keys on computers and being a nerd and making, like, LED light bulbs that flash. You should not be, like, rewriting the code base of, you know, how, like, the world works," right? And as I'll get to, there's a deep question of legitimacy, right? The Network is new money. The State is old money, right? And when I say the State, by the way, there's, like, the literal State in ter- in the sense of the US government, and there's the unelected institutions that surround the US government in a ring that give it instruction. Example, the newspapers tell the, the State what to do. The, uh, universities tell the State what to do. The philanthropies tell the State what to do, and, and so on and so forth, right? But they're, they're also in turn funded by the State. So universities obviously directly get federal funding, right? Uh, some of them are literally feder- you know, public colleges. Uh, but they're very dependent on tax exemptions and so on and so forth that the State grants. So they only exist because of that. The philanthropies also ditto. NGOs, they have compounding, you know, uh, uh, um, foundations, or their, their, their foundation endowment compounds because they've got favorable tax treatment, which normal companies don't get, but they're State affiliated. And finally, the media, that's the least obvious. How are they upstairing the State? Well, obviously, they quote, "hold somebody accountable" by, uh, publishing a negative article on them. Of course, they never hold themselves accountable, um, because, you know, like-
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... they're always like, "We're speaking truth to power." I'm like, obviously they're not. Why? Every journo is so courageous as to attack your boss but never their own.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay? That's-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Basically, whenever you're talking to a journo, you're not talking to the journo, you're talking to their boss, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Right.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Basically, who is ultimately... For example, Bloomberg, when Bloomberg was running for president. Actually, Bloomberg, you know, Michael Bloomberg is-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... one of the better of them, 'cause he's actually, like, a tech entrepreneur. Uh, so you know, I'm not, like, completely anti Michael Bloomberg, right? But Michael Bloomberg, when he was running for president, Bloomberg News, his pit bulls, they actually published this amazing thing which said, "We will report on but not investigate Michael Bloomberg."
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Amazing. Amazing phrase. Report on... What an amazing phrase. So s- what it means is, we will basically, if somebody else says something, we will reprint it in Bloomberg, so you can't say we didn't report on him.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay? But we're not gonna go and dig through his trash.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
We're not gonna do it adversarially. We're not gonna stalk him. We're not gonna spam his family like they did to our, our, our boy, Luke Farrer, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah. Matt's been our boy. [laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
They ma- they... Well, so that's the thing.
- ETErik Torenberg
He's my new boy.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
They didn't massacre him because he's got, he's got our support, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah, yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
But they did attack him.
- ETErik Torenberg
No, I'm just, I'm re- I'm just referencing the meme that you tried to massacre him.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yes. I know, I know, I know.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
That's right, yeah. But, uh, the thing is, they, uh, they don't do that because if you're a Bloomberg journo and you went after Michael Bloomberg, that's what's known as a CLM, career limiting move. In fact, actually, the entire journo establishment, that's all nepotists. That's all old money, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- 13:00 – 18:00
The Power Structure of Media Institutions
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
guy exists, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
[chuckles]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
He's like, you know The Usual Suspects?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
He's like Keyser Soze. Keyser Sulzberger.
- ETErik Torenberg
[chuckles]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay? Right, this guy, who is the guy... Let me, let me put him on screen so you can just see, okay?
- ETErik Torenberg
I, I, honestly I've heard, I've heard his name a million times, but I've ne- I don't even know what he looks like.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
You don't even know what he looks like.
- ETErik Torenberg
[chuckles]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
But this the thing is, basically Zuckerberg is somebody who, again, for better or worse, he runs a major communications channel, and so he's covered, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
But Sulzberger doesn't get good coverage. He gets no coverage.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? That is actually really interesting, right? The guy who... You know, so let me show you this photo. Put this on screen. Ready?
- ETErik Torenberg
Journo-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Who's holding him accountable, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Jour-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And I'll tell you in a second.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah. Journas- journalism for thee, privacy for me.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Exactly.
- ETErik Torenberg
[chuckles]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
The guy who's surrounded by thousands of journalists at all times is the only person in the world who has any privacy.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah, that's good.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
You've never seen this guy's face, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
[chuckles]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Who is this guy? Yes, he's owned The New York Times, and people say, "Oh my God, he's owned The New York Times, you've never seen his face." But the point is, if you did word-face association in terms of the number of impressions, it's a quantitative thing, right? If I use AI, I could quantify it. How many people can summon the face of Zuckerberg to, to, you know, but with a word? Like millions.
- ETErik Torenberg
Right.
- 18:00 – 23:00
The Role of Distribution and the Scarcity of Attention
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
court system now, right? Like basically they get one warning, go the F away, and the second is they've got money, so go after them on that, right? Okay, fine. So now I'm sure there's some like, you know, um-... processor. Basically, there's all New York Times versus Sullivan. There's various, various things where, you know, they, they, they have, uh, they've had historical precedence that protect them. But basically once you think of them as spammers, as stalkers, as scammers, because they are scammers. The journalists that murder... What, what was the definition she used? A con man, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
The journalist is a con man because they'll always write this email to you which is like fluffing you up and flattering you and saying how great you are, blah, blah, blah, and pretending that... They come in under flag of parley. They get their quote if you're dumb enough to talk to them, and then they stab you in the article. That's why, you know, Janet Malcolm said, "The consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns when the article appears his hard lesson." Because you talk to this person, they present themselves as a human being, as like a person you're having a conversation with, and actually they twisted every word to try to stab you, right? Okay. Coming back up. So, uh, so point being basically they're actually the stalkers, the spammers, the scammers. That's what the journos are. You can't get them to go away. So that's a non-consensual part. The non-consensual invasion of privacy for profit. So there's this saying that sometimes journos use as self-defense, saying this is like, um, journalism is printing what someone does not w-wish printed. Everything else is, you know, advertising or something like that, right? It's like, uh... Hold on. Um, I'll find the exact quote. Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Uh, everything else is public relations, right? Now, what does that mean? Why does someone not want it printed? Usually because it's private information, right? So the non-consensual invasion of privacy for profit. Let us not forget that these are multi-billion dollar media corporations, right? People... It took a long time in the 2010s for people to finally like realize the New York Times, the Journal, they're just dot coms, right? They have absolutely... They're not referees. They're not neutrals.
- ETErik Torenberg
For, for some reason people give them the imprimatur of like an institution. We need to save our institution. Cr- but what's the difference between New York Times and Facebook? They're, they're j- they're companies, right?
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Exactly. They're a corporation. Fair game. Fair game, right? And in fact, that's why they got so mad at us, because we actually believed in what they said, that we had freedom of speech and that free markets existed. Actually, until really the early 2010s, there's no actual practical freedom of speech. You know why? Because you know that saying like, "Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel," right? Basically, freedom of the press belonged to those who owned one. So think about how expensive it was to get a radio license-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... a TV license, to own a newspaper and send trucks to people's houses with, you know, all the ink and the printing press. That was like the super high capital cost, right? These are guys who basically own like essentially factories that chan- cranked out papers, and you at home could say something to your friend, but you didn't have distribution, right? And we understand what distribu- now, you know, Thiel talked about distribution years ago before it was quantified with social media. Now, very roughly, distribution is like number of followers, number of people on your email list, but also quality of them, right? Not just quantity, but quality and quantity of, of your follower base is roughly distribution. So you didn't have distribution and, and I me- I mentioned this before, but in like the early '90s, you know the Unabomber?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah. Of course.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yeah. Why'd he kill all those people? He killed those people so he could get an op-ed in the Washington Post.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? Now, why? Because distribution was so scarce back then that, you know, he wanted to get his manifesto out, so he literally killed people for the distribution, right? That was just within our lifetimes. It was just 30 years ago. That's how scarce distribution was. Today, he'd be a crazy person on the internet, right? He'd get his message out there. But if you realize the Unabomber was willing to kill to get his message out, you also realize why there's some people who are like crazy trolls on X, because they might not be able to kill, but they're certainly willing to attack somebody else, attack their character, or reputation assassination, and now you get to the journos, right? So journalism as the non-consensual invasion of privacy for profit really captures what it is these, these critters do. Now, up until about 2020 or so, um, there was no force that could resist them. They were just like rampaging, right? I mean, we could resist them economically, but especially in the 2010s, uh, they were so mad at us taking their money, right? And what it me- what did that mean, by the way? It just meant that, like you refresh nyt.com, you see a Rolex ad or whatever. You know, you see a, like some car ad, uh, you see some clothes ad. And if you refresh meta.com, right, facebook.com, Instagram, what do you see? You see an ad for the exactly the same company, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yep.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And so that means the sales account executives at both of these organizations, right, what they are, uh, you know what they're doing is they're competing for literally the same customer.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? And obviously the Facebook, Google, et cetera ad has much more scale. It has much more analytics. It's built internet first, and so on and so forth. So the
- 23:00 – 30:00
Social War: Red vs. Blue America and the Internet
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
NYT just starts bleeding ad revenue. But essentially the point being, we're beating them economically. They couldn't code search engines or social networks, but they could write stories and shape narratives. And you know the difference between like a, a Dropbox product announcement and, um, and, and, and a, you know, NYT story, their stories have villains, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Right.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Our product announcements are all basically really making the world a better place. It's like, "Guess what? 10 gigs more storage," or whatever, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
"Guess what? You know, now you can-"
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... "like, you know, do s- you know, like, like comic book style AI or whatever," right? All that stuff doesn't hurt anybody. That's just essentially, you know, um, it's just adding cool things to the world. Oh, here's a new robot. Here's... You know, like that's what we're doing. And what are they doing? They want to... Like the highest award in, in journalism, what is the num- what's the most prestigious you can do- thing you can do?
- ETErik Torenberg
They, they want to catch the Theranos.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Well, even higher than that is Watergate.
- ETErik Torenberg
Right.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? So they like basically... Whereas for us it's like SpaceX, right? So for them, the highest, the best thing they can do is to put a man out of work. And for us, the best thing we can do is we can put a man on the moon.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah. [laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay? So literally the, the, the number one thing that they can see, and this again state versus network, right? We wanna build Googles and Facebooks and, you know, AI and all this kind of stuff, drones. Um, and we wanna build giant companies, giant cryptocurrencies, and now internet communities.What they wanna do is they want to exert authority over others, but they wanna do so in a deniable way, right? 'Cause if you go to the Pulitzer website or something like that and you look at these prizes, they'll all say something like, "Our reporting held, you know, these, so-and-so accountable and led to an FTC investigation," blah, blah, blah, blah. So they're really willing to take credit when their words on the page lead to the state golem going and animating and smashing somebody, right? It led to an FTC investigation. It led to, you know, a new FAA regulation. Led to this, led to that, right? Le- 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 fired. That's why they wanted to get Nixon fired, right, with Watergate, right? It was just showing that they had to- they, they were essentially, like, think of Wall Street Journal, NYT, and Washington Post as the three board of director seats on top of the presidency. The president was, was like the titular CEO, but the Journal, the Times, and The Washington Post, if they all put their multisig key in the lock, they did their board of directors vote, they'd get him fired, right? So that was actually the state of affairs. That's what I meant by holding the government accountable. Nobody in the government was really in power. The journalists could write enough negative stories, and they were out of power, right? So the thing is that when it comes Pulitzer time, they will admit that their stories led to something. But when it comes BLM time, they deny that their stories led to America, you know, half America getting burned down, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Right.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
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, like, that image coming into somebody's eye and then them setting fire to this building? Once 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 showing, demonstrating that is, you know, there's an impression, a page view that comes in over here through the eyes and the ears, and then there's a burn down the building kind of action on their side. And then they just like, you know... Go ahead.
- ETErik Torenberg
They're, they're, they're, they're quick-- It's funny 'cause they're quick to, to use causal in no direction. They're quick to say, "Hey, Facebook is causing people to be depressed," or to whatever, turn right-wing or, you know, uh-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yes, that's right
- ETErik Torenberg
... whatever, whatever.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So, so tech, there's a causal effect for everything negative.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah, exactly.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Journos, there's a causal effect for everything positive. What? That's, that's amazing. Wow. What an amazing... Right? Like, 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 and be like, t- t- to just, like, block everything like this, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And, you know, another, another big piece of this, they stopped doing this, but one of the things they were doing years ago is they're like, "Oh my God, everybody in tech is so" why, and blah, blah, blah.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? And obviously, it's, like, so much more international than the journos.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
If you go and take that famous photo of Elon in the conference room and you compare the people there versus the NYT editorial board photo, right? And you'll see they're, like, well-dressed, you know, essentially, uh, mostly European ancestry people. And again, I'm not the kind of person who thinks-
- ETErik Torenberg
Right
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... like white is an insult, but they do, right? So it's all projection, right? The journalists themselves have these tyrannical, evil, meritless, nepotists as bosses, right? The journalists themselves can never actually make it anywhere, and it's all favoritism and glad-handing, and there's no merit, and it's all luck and, and connections. And the journalists themselves essentially are these envious people who exist to harm you to increase their career prospects, and they project that, all that onto everybody else, right? So once you kinda see that, like every, every accusation's a confession or whatever, you realize, oh, this is how the world works and their stupid Brooklyn side of things, and they think of us as a rival tribe that acts the same way, right? Okay. So now that's, like, part of the macro. Now, I have bad news for them, which is to say that... I have bad news for us and also bad news for them, but, but let's start with the bad news for them. The bad news for them is that they, in the, in the gigantic war between the internet and blue America, right? And 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 Post and The Journal, right? That was just something, like, a- you know, Bezos got The Post out of petty cash, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- 30:00 – 37:00
Cancel Culture, Social Media, and Institutional Capture
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Moritz was a journalist, became an investor. Catherine Boyle, also a journalist, became an investor.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? Uh, Peter Thiel would've been probably, if they'd been born 20 years earlier, probably would've been a Supreme Court jurist, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Probably would've been, like, you know, chief judge of the Supreme Court or something. Paul Graham would've been a professor. Larry Page, a professor. Sergey would've been a professor.
- ETErik Torenberg
Mike, Mike Solana in Brooklyn probably, uh, yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
For, for sure he would've, he'd probably been a book publisher or something like that.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
I probably would've been a professor, and so on and so forth, you know? Um, and, uh, that's true for, you know, Andrew Yang, Daphne Koller.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yep.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
You know, uh-
- ETErik Torenberg
Paul Graham
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... many, many people. Uh, uh, Martine Casado, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Right.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Um, Dixon, you know. Uh, and, um-And so many of us would have... Because the thing is, with computer science, there is a amazing connection between the word and the deed. Actually, AI makes that, you know, even closer. You write it down, and it's done. It's this amazing thing, right? So 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, the difference is their 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, and it just doesn't compile. Like, 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. Like that is to say, it's only when they lose status among other journos that they actually ever course correct, right? Ever. And that's, like, very rare, right? Um, so long as within their tribe they're not losing status, there's nothing. Okay. Now, basically what happened is o- o- once you see this kind of model by the way, going back to the original point, uh, the internet disrupting blue America, China disrupting red America, you can understand essentially the last 18 years in the following way. Blue America was disrupted by the internet, and so they began wokeness to take a piece of red America's pie and the tech lash to try and take back control from the internet. Red America was disrupted by China, so the trade war was against China, and Trump was against blue America, 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 America and the internet after, you know, a massive push has lost, right? I mean, it, it was close. But basically Elon and X Day, it's like literally D-Day. This feels like eons ago. It's only three years ago. Literally three years ago-
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... X still hadn't been a part. Twitter was still Twitter. It's like incre- we are in, like-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... wartime speed of things happening.
- ETErik Torenberg
It's insane.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Seeing how quickly things... Right? Okay. So X Day was something where, uh... By the way, it wasn't just Elon. Forty-four billion dollars, 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 raise. That's a big ra- that's a big raise for anybody, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Um, so it took... But the richest man in the world, the wealthi- he's, he's doing, he's launching rockets, he's doing ships, he's doing all this other stuff, and he decided to take on this enormous extra thing, and he somehow managed it, which is actually crazy to think about-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... 'cause everything else, Elon is N of 1 because every other... You know, whenever I talk to a founder, I'm like, "Focus, focus, focus." Okay, after you have your first whatever billion dollar company, and it's 10 billion, and it's 100 billion, then you can do your next or whatever, right? Fine. But, so Elon's N of 1. Point is, in 2022, where it looked like the free world was just completely on the ropes by these, like, racially obsessed woke psychos just having us, you know, like, pinned like this, you couldn't even say whether men and women exist. Like, we're genuinely talking about, like, a permanent midnight, like descending. It's really, really bad stuff, right? How evil they were. They just burned down half America. They were just getting psycho. More, and more, and more psycho, right? And so amidst that, basically, um, all the resources of all the centrist tech and finance guys, 'cause that's where the 44 billion. You, you... There's that famous message of, like, Elon to Ellison that's been made public or whatever. He's like, "What are you in for, like, one or two?" Okay, but, okay, Ellison could put in one or two. But, like, so many other people, it was like Avengers Assemble, put in a mil, whatever they could afford. A mil, 10, 20, fif- I mean, 50 is a big investment for almost anybody, right? Like, 50 is like, you know, it's a, 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, you know, X Day, right? And so the landing was extremely contested, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
They basically wanted whatever the opposite of what he wanted.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yes, that's right. Anyway, point is, X Day was the day that... And b- the thing is, like, you know, 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? All the n- the networks they had occupied. Um, that was like, you know how, like, the Nazi empire was at, like, its peak, and they thought they were gonna win, and then D-Day, and then they just kind of collapsed like this, right? So Sulzberger and Soros, they thought they were gonna win, and then X Day, boom, came in, and just their, th- like, you know, with X flipping, YouTube uncensored, like, Meta uncensored, everything uncensored, and so on and so forth, because X was upstream of the conversation. Anyway, point is, it took Elon's personal intervention in June 2023. 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 wokes that had just infested Twitter, right? To actually, um, you know, change things. And by the way, you know, uh, part, uh, again, Elon's intuitive, you know, more than a philosopher per se, just his philosophy-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- 37:00 – 44:00
Building Direct Distribution: Advice for Technologists
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
stream of media, he stripped their traffic from links, um, he renamed the whole thing to show that he had root control over it, because you know what a pain in the ass it is to do a rename, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
This x.com was, in a sense, tech's revenge for making every fucking GitHub rename from master to main, okay? Now, is Yale renaming its master's degree?
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
No. Okay, of course not, right? Is master class? Whatever. Like, anybody who's at the New York Times, are they saying, "I've got a main degree now rather than a master's in journalism"? The-- I think Columbia still has a master's in journalism, right? So the whole point was, again, these journos have a double standard. They would impose that on us, right? You, one million GitHub repos have to rename from master to main. A, whatever, 100 million GitHub re- do you know what a pain in the ass that was?
- ETErik Torenberg
It is.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
It was a huge pain in the ass. Every single dev had-
- ETErik Torenberg
Right
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... 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 the favor, and does it at even m- greater scale, right? Okay. So now what that is is network over state, where we fought in the domain in 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, in some countries or some wars, like, um, gosh, there's a, there's a city, I, I think... How many times did Seoul change hands during the Korean War? It was like a-
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... several times, right? Um, so-
- ETErik Torenberg
Out, out of my element, but-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yes. Fine. So Seoul changed hands for four times, okay? It went back and forth, right? And so you think of X as being like Seoul during the Korean War.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
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, um, 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? So this is from eight years ago. You can see they labeled nodes as blue and red based on, um, whether they had said, "I'm voting for Clinton or Trump," just, just parsing the text, right? And 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 that both sides tend to link, 'cause it just gave neutral political news, like so-and-so was running, so-and-so results, you know, z- one neutral, truly neutral outlet, arguably, right? And so here you could actually see that this was a social war, right? And, you know, I've, I've, I've made this point in the past. In 1861, like when it was the North versus South, we take for granted that the ideological and the geographical coincided, right? The North was, you know, the Union, and the South had the slaves, and slavery was legal here and illegal here, and the geographical and ideological coincided, right? But by 2016, the geographical and ideological did not coincide. You didn't have a clean red states and blue states. It's very fractal. You do have, you know, 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, it wasn't... You know, if you had, if you showed ideology here, it'd also look more fractal, but it was more distinct ideologically back then, and here it's much more geographically overlapping. With me so far?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yep.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay. But there is a domain where these two factions are completely distinct, and that is the domain of the cloud, right? So 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 gonna invade, like, you know, the cities or the cornfields or something? You can't invade the lands. So instead, the social war is fighting over the minds, invading the minds, right? Now, once you see this at, like, a-- You can actually understand a lot about the last 10 years, right? We've bas- 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? Their goal-- You ever play the game Othello?
- ETErik Torenberg
Uh, no. I know the game, but I've never played it, no.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Uh, it's like you flip tiles. You know, it's like, um, you've got black and white tiles, and you, um, surround other tiles, and you flip them from black to white or white to black, okay?
- ETErik Torenberg
Got it.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And so essentially, the goal for blue was to win ideologically and flip every red node to blue.
- ETErik Torenberg
Mm-hmm.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Now you can, now one way of thinking about it is, you know how an ant colony, individual ants, they, they don't actually know what they're doing, but the colony has an intelligence. So even if the ants don't know what they're doing, the colony has an intelligence, right? This is the same for, you know, uh, a flock of seagulls or a school of fish, right? There's colony intelligence, and insects in particular are like this, right? So once you start thinking about ideology as just like that, right? Think of woke as, like, blue, right? Or, like, radicalized blue. It's like l- you know laser eyes, right? Like, basically go broke, go woke. They lost all this money as the internet disrupted 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, in, you know, the Middle East and other places. When, when countries go on hard times, that's when fundamentalism returns, right? Because they don't have the economics anymore. So their economics went away. Laser eyes glowing blue. So the eyes glow blue of these journos, 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. They were forcing... Remember how they wanted Amazon to put BLM on its... They did get Amazon to put BLM on its homepage. Like, for a long time, you'd load Google, and it would have some BLM thing on there, right? You know what I'm talking about, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah. Yeah, of course.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So everybody, you know, Bryan Armstrong during, during the 2020, you know, BLM riots, like, people were, like, trying to force him to say Black Lives Matter on, on Twitter. What, what was the point of that? It's like the Shahada in Islam, right? The point of that was to show you're a convert to blue.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? To flip a red node blue, because they can get... It's sort of like, um-It's a check mark over your head to show you they flipped 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 the censorship, all the deplatforming, all of the un-banking, 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 is 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, they wanted-- Why do they wanna defund the police? They wanted to fund their NGOs.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? That's what it was all about. They wanted to redirect the budget from... That's why there's like 200 homeless NGOs in, in San Francisco alone. The homeless industrial complex. So that shows that the NGOs, as their budget rises, the homeless population
- 44:00 – 50:00
Individual vs. Institutional Media: The Rise of Creators
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
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 they, um... 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 their main weapon? You're racist, you're sexist, you're homophobic, you're this, you're that, transphobic, blah, blah, blah, blah. And with this language, it was the same way that, um, th-that same language they could use to force you out of their institution because they'd fire you for having any of, you know, being accused of any of these things, and they'd also say your institution, your-- They'd 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 use to strengthen their borders and deport reds, and they'd use to bust your borders and import blues. Do you see what I'm saying? Right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
It's actually... 'Cause you're, you know, uh, if you're a racist, you get fired from a blue organization, and you're a racist unless you hire blues.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs] Yes.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay?
- ETErik Torenberg
100%.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Now, of course, today we see they don't actually care about brown people or Black people, only blue people, right? So it's more clear in 2025. There's less clear several years ago. Fine. Okay. So now coming back up the stack. So once we realized that it was a social war, now we can actually understand why the journos want to kill you. Like, basically, you know how, uh, at various times in history, France and Germany have traded, and France and Germany have fought, and France and Germany have traded, and France and Germany have fought. We are in wartime mode with the journos. So it is, like extremely stupid for anybody to... Now let's go to concrete brass tacks. What should technologists do, and what should we, you know, do specifically, do generally, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yep.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
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 journo? 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, like, remember, they get credibility within other journos by being hostile to tech guys. If they write a positive story, then it's like, what? You write... You're a flack, you're writing a press release. Also, 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 sun-sunny day, that's boring, right? But if a meteor hits, suddenly you've got attention, right? So what works in a movie setting is not what works in real life, right? So the journalists want conflict, and so our concept of, hey, it's 10 gigs for Dropbox or whatever, that might be helpful to the public, but doesn't tell a story, and they want a story. So they're always gonna take what you do and put it through some distorting lens to get to the other side, and they will get more page views at the expense of your company that you worked on so hard, right? So number one, go direct. Number two, build your own distribution to avoid distortion. Now, the thing about that is, um, hire creators. There's two kinds of creators. There's those who are, uh, at the storyline level, and you probably only need, like, one of those per company, you know? There-- Because if you have too many very strong-willed personalities in a company, it like... You, you can only have one Steve Jobs at Apple, basically, right? Um, however, you can have a lot of people assisting with production, right? With making content, with scaling that creator or what have you. So usually you're gonna have a founding creator. Uh, I don't think it's 100%, by the way. Sometimes you can have... Once you get to a certain scale, it's, it's good to have, like sub personalities. Like, you know, for example, actually, Jesse Pollak's doing a great job at Base for, for Coinbase, right? And he's got his own distinctive style that's complementary to Coinbase's style and so on and so forth. So at a, a certain scale, you can have multiple personalities that are driving certain product lines or what have you, and so then that's fine, right? But at least for a startup getting up to a build, you probably wanna, only wanna have sort of one storyline, one main creator, and you have a lot of production support behind them, right? And that, that can really work. You can get very far with that. Video, images, all this kind of stuff, right? So A, go direct. B, build your own distribution to avoid distortion. And by the way, one way of thinking about that, you can c- they call them the media because they mediate your experience of 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? You're basically-- It's like paying the journo with free content to make yourself look bad and get a permalink that's attacking you.
- ETErik Torenberg
I, I remember-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Go ahead
- ETErik Torenberg
... our, our, our good friend Flo Covello was launching his, uh, what was a kind of remote office startup during COVID, and he gave TechCrunch the exclusive, and they criticized it. They basically didn't make it look good, uh, and he's like, "Why would I give you my launch announcement? I'm, I'm here to, you know, ad-advertise my, my company. I gave it to you guys. I gave you the exclusive, and you made me look stupid."
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yeah.
- ETErik Torenberg
Like, "Why, why would I ever do that?" [laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And, and the fundamental thing is it's a business development relationship. Literally think of it as TechCrunch is a corporation. Why are you giving them something for free?
- ETErik Torenberg
Right.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? Literally, it's that. It's like that journo has a spreadsheet, whether it's them or their manager who's looking at it, and there's a row in the spreadsheet for that URL, and 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. They do not-- You know what's not there? The valuation or health of your company.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Obviously, they don't care. They, they would literally light it on fire. It w- that's what they did during BLM. They would light your house, the journal would light your house on fire and sell tickets to the blaze.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay? That's their business model, right? And so obviously it's like the dumbest possible deal. I, I just don't-- I mean, people still g- still do this stuff, and I'm like... I mean, Elon uncensored Twitter, you can post whatever you want, right? YouTube's uncensored. Like, everything's uncensored now. Get good, right? I will say one thing, and 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.
- 50:00 – 57:00
Decentralized Truth: Crypto, Blockchain, and the Ledger of Record
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
What worked? Individual-led projects, right? Mike Salon's Pirate Wires, that has a real style to it. TVPN, right? Which exists to, I think, make Ramp get more conversions.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Which is very funny, right? It's very funny. Of course, Ramp is our main sponsor. We've got them on the hats. They've NASCAR'd it. It's funny.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Ramp's a good product, by the way, and so.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So TVPN, great, right? Coogan, he stuck with it. He did a lot, you know. And, um, other-- obviously All In has done very well, right? Um, obviously Elon has done very well. Uh, and I think, you know, I think, you know, w- you did it with Moz and now, you know, a16z is I think that's right. But what I think has not done as well is the things that are institutional. 'Cause if it's too institutional, you're playing it safe, and you're playing it safe and there isn't any conflict, there isn't any opinion, there isn't anything novel. It's focus grouped, right? Certain things benefit from averaging, right? Like, um, you know, uh, uh, for example, whe- whe- the velocity of a plane or something like that, you don't want large deviations. You want it to be within an envelope, you know? Right? So there's certain kinds of phenomena where you want averaging. Opinions and theses are usually not like that, right? So one way of thinking about it is, you know, the entire 20th century was the centralized century, and even at the, the movement from the widescreen to the portrait size, you know, like, like a phone is, you know, like, like 9 by 16 versus... The movement from widescreen to portrait size is visually the movement from institutional to individual. 'Cause a portrait, you know, kind of thing, a Tic Tac cell thing doesn't have room for a panoramic shot of a huge crowd. It's for, like, a, a person standing there, right? So it's amazing that even the screen itself captures that move from individual to inst- uh, from in-institutional to individual, right? And you see this also on X and other platforms, like, you know, these journalists, I don't know what they were doing, if they were faking numbers or whatever. They had like 20 million followers or whatever, and they have three likes on their tweets now, right? So, so something, you know, 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, right? Um, so that's, 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?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And the founding creator is as important as the founding engineer, because the founding engineer is implementation, but the founding creator is the distribution, right? The, the, the founding engineer is the how, but the founding creator is the why. 'Cause the founding creator has a community that they're tapped into, and they're saying, "Why should this product exist?" Right? And so you can often start by understanding your community and building a product for them, and then hiring the engineer. You know, that it's actually like a third kind of person, right? Normally it's been like, there's like the engineering founder and there's like the business founder. This is like the content founder, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And actually this is where, you know, Carlson and, and, um, and, and Altman have observed where are the Gen Z, where are the younger founders who are not in tech? They're in content.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? 'Cause actually that's where extreme leverage is. That's a MrBeast, that's the, um, the guy who actually looks kind of like you, Adin Ross, kind of looks, looks like you, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs] A little bit, yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
A little bit, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Twitch guy, yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yeah. And, um, you know, some of, some of the younger guys are, are there, right? Speed, uh, you know, I show Speed is, is like that, right? Bec- And they're, they're very talented at what they do.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Um, and that's actually, uh, it's just not something that we thought of as a thing, you know, because like, you know, there's still like the startup kind of thing, but 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, and we still are, you know, Palmer's doing a new thing, Altman's doing a thing. You know, obviously not a new thing, but you know what I mean. Like-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... 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, there's a l- room for a lot of collaboration there potentially, where they're doing the marketing. It's kind of like Beats by Dre, but you start with Dre rather than Apple, you know? Right? I, 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 MrBeast 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-stuff through that, if that makes any sense, right? Huberman could also do something like this if he decides to get into that area. Any biotech company, genomics company, CNC company could do deals with Huberman, for example, for distribution, right? Okay. So this, by the way, is starting to make the case for why like don't outsource your creation. Are you outsourcing your engineering? Don't outsource your creating, right? Don't outsource your content. Content's 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, uh, that, uh, I'm like, I'm like half implementing, partially implementing, but, but, uh, but actually, or I am implementing, but I want to implement more, right? And it's this kind of thing you want, obviously, j- you know, come to a16z or come to Network School, come to ns.com, come to Network School, come and work with us, you know. But for example, you know GitHub allows a bunch of people to contribute to code at the same time. We take that for granted. How do you get a bunch of people to contribute to content at the same time?Something like Frame.io is pretty good. You know 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 CapCut web interface, right? You can log into that and, and just basically load stuff in there, and you have an acc- or a few accounts that are shared among, you know, team members, right? So now you actually have something where creation was a single-player app. You start making it a multiplayer app, and, uh, now, you know, internet connections are good enough that you can do versioning on big files and, you know, reviews of big files, and so on and so forth. Start thinking about your content base like your code base, okay? And obviously, uh, you know, AI's a big part of that, though it's not the only thing, since I think AI's a... You know, any new tool, people use the tool, then 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?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Like, if we did this whole podcast as AI, and we had, like, computer-generated us, it wouldn't be as interesting or what have you, right, because it's generic. AI is necessarily... It's almost like a search engine. It pulls, like, the... It- it's funny, I was saying this the other day. Midwit writing used to be woke. Now all midwit writing is AI. Like, it's not this, it's that, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs] Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So it's like a super intelligence, yet midwit.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
But that's because it's building the average from the whole internet.
- ETErik Torenberg
Right.
- 57:00 – 1:02:00
The Future of Democracy and Media in a Networked World
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
m- much of what the NYT and what these guys do, and they're so much weaker than they used to be, like, so, so, so much weaker. Thank God. They've lost the center, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yep.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
They've lost much of, you know... Yeah, what, what happened is they just piled up the subscriptions, and they got all the wine moms and lost the Andersens.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs] Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Amazing trade for us.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Oh my God, they lost Glenn Greenwald. They lost Mark Andersen.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
They lost Nate Silver. They lost Bari Weiss, right? I mean, amazing trade for us, right? Like, for the center.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
You know? Because they, 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, you know? And actually, you know, that's a good trade. All the ones who are not haters eventually leave. Let's say when, when dealing with them is they're like a private, a for-profit CIA or FBI. Should I explain this point?
- ETErik Torenberg
Definitely.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Actually, especially since... Okay, so the thing is, most people think from, again, remember the Paul Graham thing about, you know, you learn from the movies-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... the Jurassic Park. So most people think that what the CIA does is, like, assassination, but a lot of what it does is actually character assassination. It plants stories. Isn't that much cleaner to just have somebody, you know, plant a story, and then they're, you know, discredited? And it's so much cleaner than bullets and blood and so on and so forth, right? In fact, uh, they did this in East Germany as well. By the way, Wikipedia is actually just as bad as the media because Wikipedia, it's, it's garbage in, garbage out. What happens is you can only cite articles from legacy media. You can't cite social media directly.
- ETErik Torenberg
Right.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So Wikipedia's a re- rehash. So in anything that's contemporary, anything that's political, they're really terrible. Nevertheless, they have some ar- articles from when they didn't get corrupted. So [clears throat] a psychological warfare used by the Ministry of State Security, it served to combat alleged through covert means. Basically, Zersetzung 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, right? It was... You know, they were targeted to stop activities of political dissent and cultural incorrectness, right? And what are the kinds of things they did, right? Like, they would, uh, they would 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, right? So it's like subvert and undermine an opponent, right? So disrupt the target's private life so they're unable to continue their hostile negative activities toward the state. This is what they did to Luke Rudkowski just now.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Exactly this. The aim was to disrupt the target's private or family life so they're unable to continue their hostile negative activities toward 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 DOGE is going after state, that's their bread, right? That's their power center. That's their Gollum. 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. Make sense? So Zersetzung, you know, like, the communists and the journalists are the same, but I repeat myself, right? You know?
- ETErik Torenberg
Shh, shh.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And the reason, by the way, I say that is all, you know, I, I, I, I may have mentioned this, but, like, John Reed, Walter Duranty, Herbert Matthews, like, David Halberstam, uh, Edgar Snow, just take all those names, and those are all the journalists who did the PR for the communists. Like, it's literally the reason that Castro's in power. You know, for example, there's this book, uh, The Man Who Created Fidel, right? Um, The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times. You see that one, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Or here's, here, here's another one, which is Duranty, Ukraine, Amazon, like, basically Stalin's apologist. Isn't that amazing? Stalin's apologist worked at The New York Times. Castro's apologist worked at The New York Times. Crazy stuff. Actually, there's another one, Perfect Spy, right, which is, uh, the, the Vietnam one, right? The incredible story of, uh, double life of Pham Xuan An, um, a Time magazine reporter and Vietnamese communist agent. Isn't that interesting? See, when I say journalists and communists, but I repeat myself, I'm, like, being completely literal. We just pulled up three books in 30 seconds that were about journalist communists.
- ETErik Torenberg
So Dy- Dylan Matthews from Vox, he's talking about the Luke Rudkowski ar- argument. He says, "The negative reaction to this is wild. If, if you join the government and your primary legacy is helping to kill millions of people through aid cuts, you can handle some criticism if you can live with yourself."
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
The Salzbergers' primary legacy is killing, not, not just ha- not, not like through aid cuts. The Salzbergers' primary legacy is killing millions of Ukrainians. [laughs]
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Where's their criticism, huh? Right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Again, Dylan Matthews is too much of a coward to do that, right? Like-
- ETErik Torenberg
But-
- 1:02:00 – 1:05:47
Tech Envy and Media’s Obsession with Control
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
clear-cut case where Durante wrote 13 articles that basically said Stalin wasn't liquidating the Ukrainians, he just meant it metaphorically. They're literally covering up, like, a murder in progress, okay? So that was, like, a very clear-cut case. Here, you're, you're talking about, uh, okay, you can... This is the feed the pigeons society argument, by the way, right? Like, essentially, as a, as the number of the population grows, is dependent, any cut to budget whatsoever for the blues is equated with murdering their dependents.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And they probably believe that, right? So it grows to the sky-
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... and everybody gets alms, that of course the blues get nice paid non-profit jobs out of.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Right.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And of course you have more and more depend... And by the way, guess what? He, he's absolutely, completely wrong here as well. You know why?
- ETErik Torenberg
Why?
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Go to Easterly and Levine. Easterly and Levine said, "Stop the aid." Right? Why? Because all the aid is used for these warlords in Africa.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? Actually, there's, there's something where in Nigeria, there's a business plan competition that was the most successful, quote, "aid project" ever because they're b- making businesses. Like, the thing is, I, I saw this myself in India. Guys like these effective altruists or these guys, they don't want peers, they want pawns, right? Brown people in India, like, were starving in the '80s or whatever, and they were pawns of these NGOs who sent the aid. Now India doesn't need aid. India 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. Fir- so the fundamental premise of his point, that aid helps, is incorrect. Aid actually hurts because aid, it's like... You know what it's kinda like? Uh, testosterone supplementation in a 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 in the way of steroids, it, you know, it can cut off your natural hormonal production. You have to, you have to get it exactly right. The actual charity is investment. This is actually a deep point. Should I, should I explain this point, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Bas- So imagine you've got two, quote, "rich guys," okay? And one of them is, um, like, you know, Soros or, you know, USAID is kind of like a rich guy's rich institution, or, or somebody who's just handing out aid, okay? Grants, seeming grants. And the, the other person is an investor. So the, 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, you know, it's dra- dramatized, but, uh, you know, the limbs of the, the kid are cut off to make them more sympathetic. They, it's almost like learned or caused helplessness to try to present a, to, to either become, uh, to, to either pretend to or become as helpless and pathetic and sympathetic as possible so you get the max amount of money. You win the competition for being the biggest loser, in a sense. The most, the biggest victim, right? That's what wokeness is, right? By contrast, if you think about our culture in tech and VC, right? What we respect more than anything else, 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, you raise 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." And, you know, the bad, not bad way, one way of talking about this is like fake it till you make it, but another way of putting it is rather than the Slumdog Millionaire of people chopping off their limbs and thinking about how depressed and pathetic they are to compete for grants and aid, instead imagine a bunch of people who are all running a race, like a, a mile or whatever, right? They're running a mile, and 20 people compete, only one wins, but the other 19 at least got a workout, right? So everybody who's in the process of trying to raise
- 1:05:47 – 1:11:00
Woke Media Tactics: From CIA Playbook to Cancel Culture
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
venture or... You know, not that you have to raise money, obviously. You can, you can just totally bootstrap it yourself now. It's, a single-person startup is much easier than it's ever been. But anybody who's in that process becomes stronger as a consequence of it because you, y- you know, you constantly wanna 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 the easiest way, right? So in the process of proving yourself to others, you prove yourself to yourself, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So that's why a small amount of capital, when 20 people compete for it, strengthens the whole ecosystem. But a small amount of aid, when 20 people compete for it, weakens the entire ecosystem. So, and another way of putting this also is, like, take, you know, these, these wokes, you know, who purport to believe in equality, okay, the Soros types or whatever. Are they walking down the street and they're saying, "Oh, here's a, some guy in the street, I'm gonna give them half my fortune. Now we've achieved equality"? Are they gonna knock it down? So let, let's say they've got a billion dollars. Are they gonna find, like, um, a, a, 100,000 people and each give them, um, $1,000 or $10,000 so they've all got $10,000 and they're down to $10,000 so they're all equal? It's within their power to do so. They could literally hit a button to do so. If they actually believed in equality, they could instantly achieve equality right now, okay? And indeed, I actually do believe in redistribution for every self-proclaimed socialist, just for them to take their fortunes and redistribute them. Opt in to socialism. We'll take all their money, all the wokes, right, redistribute it.
- ETErik Torenberg
Lead by example.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yeah, exactly. That's right. Like, we, we basically opt in to that, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Um, what they, what they actually want, of course, is to take your money and do something with it, but, like, you take them at their word, they actually believe in equality. What they mean by equality, by the way, is equality between themselves and the people they're looking up at. They're not thinking about all the people who they're wealthier than or whatever in that sense, right? Okay, fine. Point is-And, and another way of putting it is if, if somebody's walking on the street and they see somebody and they're down on their luck, they might give them a dollar or $10. They're not gonna give them half their, their salary. So charity decelerates. The more somebody rises, the less sympathetic, empathetic they are. And in fact, people have talked about like how once somebody gets out of the total underclass into the working poor, they're, they actually sometimes make less money from all the grants and stuff because all those cutoffs, and now they're considered self-sufficient, right? So it's like a, you actually can earn your way into a local valley before you earn your way out of it. Okay? It's a, it's a disincentive to work. Okay. On the other side of things, for example, take Thiel and, and Zuck. This is a very famous example. There's many more like this. Zuck started out much, in a sense, poorer than Thiel. Thiel put in 500K. Zuck is now much richer than Thiel, but Thiel also became much richer in the consequence, 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 social. In the 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? All, you know, like all this USAID stuff is just, like it's aiding blue NGOs. What he's actually mad about-- Go ahead.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah, I'm just laughing at the, the truth of it.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yeah.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
That's the truth of it, right? So the fundamental premise of his point is exactly wrong. So, you know, you're taking away their pets, you're taking away their pawns, you're taking away their, you know, like 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 teach a man to fish, you know, versus give a man a fish, right? Um, but give a man 1,000 fish forever, they become completely dependent, and that's actually the, the goal of it. Really what's happening is the cutoff of USAID is rolling up blue empire, so it's, it's killing the blue business model. That's what they're mad about Luke at. Okay, keep going.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah. What I think g- going back to, to Luke, what, what, what's our, what's our advice to him or, or how do you sort of react or reflect-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
What's my advice to Luke?
- ETErik Torenberg
... a decision, situation? Which, yeah, what should he do now or-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So I don't know how they got that photo of him. Did he sit for that photo?
- ETErik Torenberg
No, no, no, I don't think so.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yeah. So point is, I think overall he didn't talk to journos, which is good. And look, Luke will be fine. Why will Luke be fine? Because his tribe supports him, right? And the journo's ability to impact somebody is this. With that said, the reason they do this stuff now is, and this is the unfortunate part, they do this stuff and they post this like, take this Dylan thing. Like by his logic, oh, then someone would be justified in Luigi type stuff, right? This is, this is really the very dangerous thing about what these journos are doing. They're trying to essentially foment hatred against tech guys. When I mean, what have we done besides make things cheaper, faster, better, right? Like wow, I can now communicate with anybody, anywhere, at any time for no money. I can find all the world's information at my fingertips. I can do math and computer science. I can do simulations. We can launch rockets. We've got electric cars. That, uh, we're the bad guys, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Versus the people who are just like stalking and spamming everybody all the time, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So, so the point, so first thing is just to have incredibly strong moral bedrock frame, understand that everything the journos are doing is projection. There's a decision rule. Don't take the bait. The journos only get traffic for their articles when they get rage
- 1:11:00 – 1:14:51
The Journalists Who Helped Build Communism
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
views from us. And guess what? They got 700K views or whatever for this tweet, and they got conversions 'cause they sold ads, right? You know, and so that's a, that's a dub for them in a sense, right? Now I mean, look, it's not, it's not like a total dub because they're certainly not getting anybody fired or anything like that, so it's much less of a dub, but it's some kind of dub. The most val- so okay, a while ago there was some journo who was like doing some like cover story or something like that, and they put people o- on, on a tech guy 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, you know, love isn't hate, it's indifference, right? The fact that, like another way of putting it is, um, we have to-- So we've built up much of the supp- uh, supply chain, but not all of it, right? So, uh, we have replaced, the most important thing is we've gotten X and we've de-platform, or we've, we have reestablished control over the platform because they had gone deep into our territory and actually had, you know, crazy blue stuff at, at, in, in some of our citadels, right? Like our VC firms. So one of the things they were doing is they were 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 another trillion-dollar company, certainly not a libertarian one. Why'd they go after 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, a capital city or a town. These are important nexus points, right? You don't wanna go after a desert. You go after nexus points, right? So they were, they were deep in our territory, so now we took back the platform. That's good. And we've got, actually 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?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
We figured out the formula that works, which is individual over institutional. Now the next step, and this is the big, the big story for the next five years or so, the ledger of record, right? Ultimately, you can't be a critic. You have to be a constructive critic, right? Like or right, you can't be-- Like, you know, Ron Paul said end the Fed, and Satoshi implemented Bitcoin, right? So you have the criticism, then you have the construction. So we actually have to build something better. We have to build internet first media, right? So that is, you know, that whole talk I gave on the ledger of record. So 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 would be able to sum- 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-
- ETErik Torenberg
Like box scores.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
The box score, exactly.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
The fundamental premise is if you think about a sports articleIt's essentially, now we'd use it, and I'd phrase it slightly differently then, but it's essentially a wrapper around a box score. Or if you take a financial article, it's essentially a wrapper around stock ticker symbols, and you take a political article, 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, 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? Uh, or pro- proof of what, when, and who. What is the hash? When is the timestamp? Uh, who is the digital signature? You 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, it's a cryptographically verifiable Twitter. Then you have AI referencing that to create articles, right? That's the, that's the high-level concept of the ledger of record that replaces the paper record. We have to play to win, and, um,
- 1:14:51 – 1:21:14
Aid vs. Investment: Redefining Global Help
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
so we have to essentially realize that that is the center of the whole thing, right? Truth. And actually, we have a better form of truth. Do you know what that is? It's a form that is native to us.
- ETErik Torenberg
Crypto.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yes. And specifically, there's a-- There, there is a good book actually by a reformed journo or, you know, two somewhat reformed journos. Um, these are, these are, like, the ones who are not haters, right? They're... Like, some of them I assume are good people, as I said. You know? [laughs] Um, so the, the-- No, actually, Vicknase, they're, they're okay. Uh, but, um, "The Truth Machine: The Blockchain, the Future," I think this is, like, seven years ago. And the thing is, this just basically puts in book form a concept that had 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 Republican, Japanese or Chinese, Indian or Pakistani, everybody agrees on the state of the Bitcoin blockchain. They have global consensus on this thing, which is worth trillions of dollars. People fight wars over billions of dollars, millions of dollars. They kill people over thousands of dollars sometimes. So to have global consensus on this with no policemen or no military backing it, right? Like, you know that saying, like, how many divisions has the Pope, which Stalin would say, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
How many long divisions has The New York Times, right? They don't have any, right? Bitcoin has, you know, right? So we actually have truth on our side, a more powerful form of decentralized cryptographic truth. It's not headquartered in downtown Manhattan. It's on the internet, right? It's-
- ETErik Torenberg
But let me, let me weigh in for a second-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yeah
- ETErik Torenberg
... only because this all sounds compelling, but I also just want to celebrate our-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yeah
- ETErik Torenberg
... you know, right now we have John Coogan and Mike Solana and us, um, and, and lots of other folks doing such great work y- without, without sort of the crypto, um, elements, and so w- why is that, why is that necessary? Like, what, what's, what's missing?
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
It-- Yes. Great question. So what we're doing with all the commentary is necessary but not sufficient, right? We also need-- Because commentary is-- It's humorous. It's opinion, right? It's-
- ETErik Torenberg
You're saying we need reporting. We need news.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
You need reporting, exactly. That's right. So commentary and summarization, right, is over here, but news is the update. Now, 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-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... what Ethereum, smart contracts. And actually, as I've, as I've-- You know, I did an article the other day, all property becomes cryptography, that we can do that in a different, a different, you know, session. Um, you basically have consensus on who owns what property. So all valuable things you can get cryptographic consensus on, right? And, you know, Chainlink 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. So, so let's take, uh, let's take the case of, you know, like, you know, Pirate Wires and TPN. That, 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, you know, here, it's, like, this crazy piece.
- ETErik Torenberg
And was the photo not real?
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yes, exactly. Right? That's a very clear example, okay? The Amazon fires are more dangerous than 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, right? Because they're like, "Oh, you know, the A- the, the Amazon fires are burning," and it's 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 journalist who had died, a photojournalist 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-
- ETErik Torenberg
Right
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... is that amazing, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
That's something where etiology, right, cryptog- in a sense, cryptographic. Why? Because you load the website, you see that it's HTTPS, right? That means there's actually a cryptographic authentication that it's, like, Getty Images or wherever it was. It was basically at some pho- stock photo thing. It's, we could see the, the old timestamp. You might hit archive.is, right? So you, you have implicit cryptographic verification of the timestamp 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 they put up the billboards there, because once you determine what is true and false, like did Russia, you know, collude with Trump, right?No, it's all fake, right? It took a massive court process to adjudicate that, and fortunately, the court system wasn't corrupted enough that, you know, that, like, that went through. But The New York Times collected all these Pulitzers for this for basically false information, right? It-- One way that it's interesting, though, and this, this actually helps give some insight into it. Uh, there's a, there's a, there's a tech person who's a lib, okay, who I, I won't name, but basically during the whole Russiagate thing said, "Oh yeah, I know. This is just as good as, like, a, as Game of Thrones or something." And I realized, oh, wow, remember that Paul Graham 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 a very obvious say, but, you know, it, it was obvious in the past, you can predict what they're gonna say about somebody before they say it. They have very low information content on each thing, right? It's like Trump bad, you know, blue America good, and it's like, it's like a cast of characters. It's almost like Seinfeld, where the same cast of characters, the good guy and bad guy appears on the page, and you can just auto do it, right? In fact, did I, did I show you the robo-journo from three years ago? No?
- ETErik Torenberg
I'm trying to remember. No, it-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
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, we can do a lot more with this, by the way, but I'll show you this. Um, so I put out a call to use AI to generate NYT-tier
- 1:21:14 – 1:22:28
Advice for the Next Generation of Builders
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
clickbait from tweets. Remember my thing?
- ETErik Torenberg
Oh, yeah. [chuckles]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So at first I put... Yeah.
- ETErik Torenberg
I remember. This is amazing.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
I put up the the- 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 journos are just a wrapper around that feed. And it, the reason I knew GPT-3 might get there is there's a company called Narrative Science, actually. Have you ever seen them?
- ETErik Torenberg
Um, no.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So Narrative Science, it, it went bust. It was a, a good company, just a little too early, okay? So this was a few years before, um, the ChatGPT moment, okay? And Narrative Science, what it did, wh-which at the time was really cool, is it took your, um, it took your financial reports, right? And it would say, like, you know, "Revenue is high in the northeastern segment, 65K, 40..." You know. So it would basically generate a narrative from your raw data. So it's like a readable narrative. Make sense?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yep.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So because they 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? With me so far?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yep.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay. So that was the kind of, you know, theory in 2020, and then the practice by 2020, uh, two was once ChatGPT
- 1:22:28 – 1:25:02
From Reaction to Creation: Building Better Media
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
came out, right? Um, let me find the... So I put out a call to use AI to generate NYT-tier clickbait from tweets. One brave engineer answered the call, a student who learned how to code in Replit, starting to see the... His app takes a tweet, generates an article. It's already in the ballpark. And you can see from this video, the GPT Times, right? You see this, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yep.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay. See, let me just... I'll rewind this, okay? So here it takes the Elon thing, right? Elon tweet. It goes here, pastes it in. It churns a little bit, okay? It calculates. And he's showing all the other articles. See, look, he generated with the aesthetics. It looks like NYT, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah. [chuckles] So good. Oh, my God.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
All right? This is three years ago. We can do so much more with this. All right.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Now, boom, putting the cocaine back in Coca-Cola.
- ETErik Torenberg
[chuckles]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And look, it looks exactly like NYT-tier clickbait, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
No journo, only robo.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay?
- ETErik Torenberg
So good.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
No journo, only crypto, because we can also have these be... Look, see? There's a code and so on and so forth. You know, there's a saying that system administrators have. You know, be careful or I'll replace you with a very tiny shell script. We can just automate, right? Just automate and completely obviate. And the thing is, actually, all the journos have these unions where they're against AI. They're against AI, they're against AI. This is, by the way, similar to, I think, the US imposing tariffs or the red America imposing tariffs on China. It's like blue America imposing qu- tariffs on AI. I don't think it's gonna work. But basically, blue America imposing tariffs on AI is a protectionist, late-breaking thing where they think, "Okay, we can protect our revenue from this," and, you know, like, "There won't be any AI-based disruptors of us." But there will be.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And they're gonna be internet first, because there's a lot of English speakers online, and most of them don't live in the US, and, uh, 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 this. You essentially now have turned all of the massaging and Russell conjugation. You know the Russell conjugation concept, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
In query. Yeah, yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Like, you know, I dox, you leak, but The New York Times investigates, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Like, I sweat, you perspire, but she glows, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay. So, uh, Russell conjugation is you're, you know, you're doing a bad thing, but I'm doing a good thing. Like, you know-
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... uh, Zuckerberg has, you know, another great one. You know, they, they attack Zuck for having dual class stock. You know, here's, here's just to show you how just evil these guys are. Uh,
- 1:25:02 – 1:28:02
The Ledger of Record: Blockchain as Truth Infrastructure
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
you can't fire Mark Zuckerberg's kid, Sid. That's a problem with tech companies using dual class stock schemes, right? So it's all like, you know, presidents are not kings, right? So now this, you know, 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, um, the solution was to give that... So dual class is good when they do it, and it's bad when tech does it.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs] Exactly.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? Now, the thing is you have to have a long context window. Like, I have a long context window because I remember this article from 2012-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... and I remember this one from 2019, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So you have to have the long context window, and until recently, I didn't know how to, like, 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 in the NYT ever.Okay? And so you could just have them NYT versus NYT, like, you know, they're enslaving people, and then they're pretending they're on the side-- You know, like there are just so many things like that, right? You-- The Ukraine pro and con, right? Okay, so coming back to your point. We need to have a, a, a stronger form of truth because if we don't have that, then you're just doing com-- You're, you're essentially accepting their premise that this event happened, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Right. And I guess what, what I'm curious is why-- Yeah, but the crypto stuff 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 pro-tech reporters or, or, or, or-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yeah.
- ETErik Torenberg
Or, or-- Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So the ecosystem had to be there, right? The ecosystem had to be there. Things had to work. Block space had to get there. AI had to get there. Like we needed the, the field clear for what we're gonna do, which is decentralized cryptographic truth, 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 it. Now, one, one of the things I should be more clear about exactly what I mean by true or whatever.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
When 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 fa-falsify the hash because of pro-properties of cryptographic hashes, and it's very hard to falsify the digital signature of what entity posted it, right? Each of those three, three 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 that AI image never existed before when I can see proof of it. It's like the Brazilian fires photo is a great example of that, right? Another example, uh, in a Chinese court actually, blockchain evidence was used to show that someone had a patent, um, that was invalid because somebody had posted something very similar to it many years ago, so you could use the hash to show they had priority. Does that make sense, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So there's enough stuff that we've done in crypto with proof of location, proof of this, proof of that,
- 1:28:02 – 1:31:26
Why Commentary Alone Isn’t Enough
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
proof of solvency. There's many kinds of attestations and proofs that you can put on chain that are pretty hard to fake. That is a fundamentally new set of primitives that journos aren't equipped to deal with because we're a- we're talking about math, right? And they can't do math. You know, they're anti-selective. If they could do math, they'd be in tech usually.
- ETErik Torenberg
Right.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? Um, the-- And, um, so but, but math is a universal property of humans. You don't need a subscription to The New York Times to do math. I don't need to pay Salzberger to do math, right? Someone in India, someone in the Philippines, someone in the South, someone, 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. So it gets a very fundamental thing where tech guys are sensing there's something here, but ultimately the network has to supplant the state as the form of truth. That's what Bitcoin represents, the truth machine, and it gives a set of primitives, as I mentioned, the who, the what, the when, the-- And then with other things, we can extend that to the where, that we can actually have a feed of facts. So once you have the root feed of facts, and think of it as like Twitter, but with decentralized cryptographic verification. That's one way of thinking about it, right? Like imagine you have a bunch of checks, sort of like, um, Community Notes, but a bunch of check marks at the bottom, like a continuous integration in it with GitHub, right? Where you have a bunch of checks green or red, if the site is deploying properly. You have a bunch of assertions on it. Think of it as Truogle, 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... You know, I, 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. Go to ns.com/earn. Actually, we'll put that up on screen. I'll send that, that link to you-
- ETErik Torenberg
Sure
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... and, and, you know, right after this. I'll put out a prize for decentralized cryptographic truth in 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 Grok do this, but I think a better way of doing it is to have multiple models do it, give like the premises, give the backlinks, and so on and so forth, and then eventually those things should be on chain where it links to. And by the way, you know who agrees with me somewhat I think on this is Solana, where he's like, "We need to do more reporting, not just commentary," and so on.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah, totally.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
And, and a, and a good version of that is Nick Carter's work on Operation Chokepoint, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
That's great.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So that's a great example of something which is reporting and not just summary, right? Not just commentary. Um, another example of this-- A-and what's interesting, by the way, is notice that our first-party testimony-- See, when we give first-party testimony, in aggregate, that's actually reporting. So we're doing things-- Like, you know how like, uh, someone who has like raw talent in basketball or football or something can do things and they don't necessarily have great form, but they can just somehow get it done with just raw athletic talent, whatever?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
There'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. 'Cause, you know, people would used to say like, "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 Mas. See, they can get another subscriber, but they can't get another quoter, right? They can't get another, uh, supplier of quotes, right? Because there's only one a16z, there's only one Elon. What is Elon when you email like PR Tesla or something? He just replies back with a poop emoji.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
What did he reply back to Washington Post? He's like, you know, "Send my regards
- 1:31:26 – 1:34:32
AI, Robo-Journos, and Russell Conjugation
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
to your puppet master."
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right?
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Be- 'cause he knows, right? He knows that basically like th- that they won't criticize their boss, only yours, right? So we did this thing intuitively by freezing them out of quotes, not talking to them, and posting the stuff ourselves. Now they're just reduced to bloggers. Now they're not sourced. See, that's another thing, by the way. Like an important concept is like how do the good journos operate? You, you'll see some of them, they are almost like a CIA station chief. They'll post in their Twitter, "For tips, email," you know, "message me at Signal," this, that, and the other, right? They're literally saying-- It's like a CIA bureau chief-Who set up their office there in, 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 whatever 'cause there's 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. You know, uh, I think it's like MICE. You know what that is in the CIA? Money, ideology, compromise, and ego, right? So why do people leak to journos? Why do people talk to journos? Sometimes it's money, where there's like, you know, uh, for example, at Uber, like the VCs there wanted money, and, uh, Travis didn't wanna 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 journo will have something on somebody, and they'll say, "I won't print this if you give something else." That's not an economic transaction, but that's a very, you know, dastardly thing. So it's like, yeah, don't talk to journos. E- everybody, what they, what happens is the NYT or WSJ or whatever, they'll, they'll message you, and they'll put on their nicest kinda thing. They're, they're, they're taught to flatter and sympathize in the email. You know, you know what it's like? Actually, you know what it's exactly like? Our SDRs, our sales development guys, 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 Raney's stuff on sales. If you need a filter and analogy to understand the journos, the journos are sending you sales emails. The difference is they're scam sales emails. It's like a Nigerian, you know, whatever.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
You know, it's like a scammer email, right? So at least when we're doing enterprise sales, maybe it's an aggressive sale at times or whatever someone's doing, but the product has to work. They can cancel subscription-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... or whatever. It's not like, "Ha ha, you bought the product. Now we got malware on your property. We're gonna destroy your company." That's actually what the journo sales email is like, okay? So as an analogy, it can only go so far, right? And, uh, the point being that, that the ego part, MICE, just like the CIA, the, the bureau chief, people will do it to get their name in the press. They'll do it because they think, "Oh, it'll work for m- for me. I'll be the one. I can charm them." Everybody has to, you know, learn this lesson somehow, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
But I, I do wanna call out that there are, there are some... You know, we ad- m- named some of them, but there's some other new media folks who are Substackers, et cetera,
- 1:34:32 – 1:37:58
Media Hypocrisy: NYT vs. NYT
- ETErik Torenberg
who are doing journalism but are not the same journalism-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Ah, okay, okay
- ETErik Torenberg
... that we're talking about.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So all right, so now let, let me get to a very, very, very, very, very important point, okay? Many words have been corrupted in a, in, in a certain way. So when I say journalism, I mean blue journalism, okay? Because if, if they, if you were to ask some journo, "Is Ben Shapiro a journalist?" They'd say-
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... "No, of course not," right? If, if they say, if you ask them, "Is, uh, um..." I don't know. "Is, is, is, uh, Nate Silver still a journalist? Is Glenn Greenwald still a journalist?" Is, is... You know, they'd say-
- ETErik Torenberg
Barry Weiss then
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... "Nah." Yeah, Bar- Are they still... No, they're, they're just running a blog, you know? Right? Obviously, NYT is Salzberger's blog.
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
In the same way Free Press is Barry Weiss' you know, outlet, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Okay, so, so, so this is a very important point. Let's say that... T- take, you know, Zuck competes with TikTok, right? Zuck would never say, "TikTok's not doing technology," right? Yeah, that's Chinese technology versus American technology, but they're still doing tech. They're, they're recognized to be playing the same sport. You might say they're like, you know, it's under the communist party's surveillance. You, you, whatever. You can make all those points and argue all that, and Trump is flipped on... Whatever. I, uh... Leaving that aside, the point is that you wouldn't say they're not doing technology just 'cause they're adversarial. They are doing technology. They're just doing it, you know, on the Chinese side, right? Versus they will actually, the, the blue journalists will actually deny that Substack is journalism, right, that Ben Shapiro is journalism, because even if Ben Shapiro has like millions more followers than they do and a much larger audience and so on and so forth, even if he's smarter than they are in many ways and, you know, and like a better com- certainly he's better than like their opinion editors and so on. And even if the Substackers, by the way, are 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? Once 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 Greenwald's on the boundary of that, right? Seymour Hersh maybe arguably is on the boundary 'cause he's on Substack and so on and so forth. Like Barry Weiss arguably is on the boundary in some ways 'cause 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 journo is to have an informal state license, right? Why is it informal? Because if they were formally state licensed, they could say that it's a state-controlled press.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So instead, what they get is a White House press pass, and, you know, uh, it's a press-controlled state. The, the point about that is that, uh, the... Once you kinda see that it's a network of, of 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?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So is that... So important clarification. So talking to... A- and, and when I say, see, tech journalist doesn't count either 'cause tech journalists, like TechCrunch is on... That word has been-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
The problem is words have been tortured to mean the opposite of what they mean, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Like-
- ETErik Torenberg
Anti-tech journalist.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Like science. Yeah, it's anti-tech journalist, right? Exactly.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Like science got tortured to mean masks don't work before they do.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right? So you actually have to have like some prefix or something which is like science in the form of independent replication, not perceived citation,
- 1:37:58 – 1:42:00
New Media Needs New Truth Standards
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah. We're, we're, we're trying to coin new media.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Yeah.
- ETErik Torenberg
Like, uh, something new.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
That's right, and, you know, so if, you know, another example of this is democracy. Like-For the Democrats, it means, you know, uh, California's a one-party state, right? Like, here, let me show you this on, just to, 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-
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
[laughs] ... how... This is an amazing-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... 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. When, just like wh- when they said science and they turned to the opposite of science, right? Which was masks don't work before they do. Just like they said media, or they said journalism, and they turned to the opposite of 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 turned democracy into the opposite of democracy, where they destroyed competitive multi-party elections, right? In 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.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
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 communists did, but I repeat myself, right?
- ETErik Torenberg
[laughs]
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
So when a Republican is elected, that's a threat to democracy. But when they, when a Democrat surveils or sanctions or deplatforms or unbanks, that's, you know, 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-
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah, also one-party states
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... Florida especially into their own one-party states.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
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.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah, and to vote-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
To vote with your feet, right? Go ahead.
- ETErik Torenberg
That's, yeah, that's a perfect place to, to wrap this episode in terms of it gets to your, the network state, um, and now-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
The network state
- ETErik Torenberg
... now you can vote with your feet-
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
That
- ETErik Torenberg
... and go to California or go to Florida or go to wherever.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
That's right, and we, we wanna combine these because Starbase shows that you can combine all threes. And, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll end with just two things. So-
- ETErik Torenberg
Sure
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
... essentially, this is a really important point. We reclaim free speech. We need to reclaim democracy, right? We cannot give up on democracy. Democracy is actually, first of all, that's an important interpretation what I just said. It was not an abundance, but a deficit of democracy that resulted in California's downfall because they, the Democrats built a one-party state, destroyed all multi-party competition. They gerrymandered it, and that's how they started all the looting, the hundreds of billions of dollars in looting, right? But we can have a rebirth of democracy, and maybe we can do our next, you know, talk on that.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Democracy is creating startup cities, right? Why? They voted, people voted with their feet to move to Starbase. They vote with their wa- wallet to build up Starbase, and then finally they incorporated Starbase by voting with their ballot. That's the future of democracy, not a two-party system with the illusion of choice, but a thousand-city system with the reality of choice. 97% for, for Elon, right? This is essentially a precursor to what's coming next, where you vote with your feet, your wallet, and your ballot at the same time, and that's the only way that you can vote against the Democrats or the communists. The only remaining vote is that vote. That's where true, the true vote is. And what we need to do is reduce the barrier to exit to give everybody that practical franchise, right? Reduce lock-in, make it possible for people to actually have choice over the government that rules them, right? And this is also, of course, you know, 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, 'cause I actually do believe in those things unironically,
- 1:42:00 – 1:42:52
Conclusion: Reclaiming Democracy and Truth
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
right? I do believe in, in media, in jour- in books, in writing, and all this kind of stuff. As I said, remember, we're a fork of the East Coast.
- ETErik Torenberg
Yeah.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Right?
- ETErik Torenberg
Right.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
We're a fork of that session. So, you know, we basically, with technology, we can have a new birth of media, science, democracy, equality on the internet, 'cause that's what the internet is, is a peer-to-peer network. We're all equal on the internet. And truth is everybody's property. It is not Salzberg's property. It's cryptography. So that's-
- ETErik Torenberg
That's a great place to, great, great place to wrap. Balaji, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- BSBalaji Srinivasan
Thanks. [upbeat music]
Episode duration: 1:42:52
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