The Man Who Helped Destroy Gawker Is Coming Back For The Rest of Media

[00:00:00] I actually think if you talk to Nick Denton, Nick would say that he's actually very thankful that this lawsuit happened. Because the entire pure set of Gawker, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, etc., are now basically worthless. If you're a journalist at the New York Times, you probably have more power than your average billionaire. But with great power comes great responsibility. Man, Spider-Man has changed our culture for this. I don't even know what a public service Pulitzer is. It's the biggest one. Okay, great. The answer is maybe start building new religions.

[00:00:25] Do you agree with this premise that there are important things that society would like to know that don't just come online? It's 2009. 24-year-old Oxford Law student meets Peter Thiel on a campus tour and casually suggests the idea that would eventually bring down Gawker. Today on Newcomer, we hear from the man who planted that seed, Aaron D'Souza.

[00:00:49] Now he's back with the PED-fueled Enhanced Games and Objection AI, a Peter Thiel-backed platform that lets anyone challenge a news article, triggering a line-by-line investigation by former CIA and FBI agents. I'm Eric Newcomer, author of the Newcomer Newsletter, where I cover startups and venture capital. Let's get into it. So it was October 2009.

[00:01:18] I was a 24-year-old first-year law student at Oxford University. I had literally been on campus for like five days. Remember, this was about nearly 20 years ago. A friend of mine was dating Peter Thiel at the time. And he said to me, oh, me and my boyfriend are coming to campus. And, you know, I knew a little bit about Peter, PayPal Peter, as we knew him then.

[00:01:45] And he said, oh, can you like show us around campus? So I was like, yeah, sure. So I gave them a tour around the campus of Oxford, and we were just like walking around the gardens. And Peter was the very first billionaire I had ever met. And I said to him, oh, you're a billionaire. You must not have any problems. And he said, oh, yeah, I've got lots of problems. And I said, well, what is your greatest problem? And what can I do to help you solve it?

[00:02:12] And he said, oh, there's this gossip outlet, Gawker. They're writing this horrible stuff about me. And I don't know what to do. And I said, well, why don't you sue them? He said, well, if I sue them, we'll get more attention. I said, well, what are you going to do? He said, well, you know, me and my friends are thinking about buying them for $30 million. And I said, well, that's terrible because you're going to reward bad behavior.

[00:02:36] And I said, well, aren't there lots of people who are in your similar position who don't have the resources to sue Gawker who aren't billionaires? And I said, probably the most important words of my life. I said, maybe you can just fund someone to sue Gawker on your behalf in sort of like a proxy war. And Peter was like, oh, that's really interesting. I said, oh, let me go write you a paper about it. I'm not sure if it's legally possible. Maybe that's why it hasn't been done. Student solution. It's like, I'm at school. What's the thing I will deliver? A paper.

[00:03:05] Yes, I will write you a paper. Yeah. So I went back and I went back to my little desk, my little room. And I wrote a paper about whether or not this would be legal. I literally like, you know, this is before chat GPT or anything. I went to the law library. I looked at the rules about litigation financing. I think I talked to a couple of professors. And a couple of weeks later, Peter was back in Europe. And we met up and I presented him this idea. I wasn't looking for a job or anything. And he said, how much and how long would it take to destroy, like bankrupt them?

[00:03:36] And I had no clue. So I said, oh, that's a big number. And a lot of times, five years and $10 million. And he was like, great. I'll send you the money. Let's get started. And it took exactly five years. And it took exactly $10 million. And we approached it not like a legal case, but more like a startup. And so we built a focus team. How many people? At its peak, we were employing 20 people. Including people working for the law firm you brought on?

[00:04:04] Yeah, we set up the law firm specifically for this. Oh, really? Oh, okay. Yeah. So you go to find the lawyer before you found the case. Is that right? Yeah. So we knew that there were going to be cases because Gawker published so many articles. So they would publish several hundred articles a day. And their back corpus was like a million articles or something. So we were like, there must be a target. There must be a target. Right. I mean, that in some ways is the intellectual argument against this.

[00:04:34] That like somebody who produces that much stuff is, you know, everybody breaks the law in some way. Exactly. Like if you produce that much content that quickly with such low editorial standards and compliance processes, you must break the law at some point.

[00:04:48] And so if you're just, you know, my thesis was, well, we can just consistently monitor this every single day, taxonomize all the articles, and then reach out to the lawyers to reach out to the subjects of the articles and say, hey, you know, we have a philanthropist who does not like Gawker. Do you want to sue them? And that's literally what we did. And then we knew we hit the jackpot the morning of the Hulk Hogan. They literally posted 10 seconds of people having sex, which… Yeah, which is unauthorized. Right.

[00:05:18] And then Charles Harder, who is our lead lawyer, was friends with Hulk Hogan's lawyer. And so the minute that article got published, phone call David Houston, who was Hulk's lawyer, said, yeah, we're definitely in. What can we do? Let's Hulk smash them. And that began the journey. What? So, you know, Gawker, owned by Nick Denton. Yeah. And run by Nick Denton, had Valleywag, which was…

[00:05:46] If you were in Silicon Valley, I mean, it was a force to be reckoned with. It was a key sort of publication shaping the narrative. I mean, not a lot of respect for privacy. Owen Thomas, the reporter, famously said, Peter Thiel is gay. Is that the exact headline? I'm sure you know. Yeah. Peter Thiel, what was the headline? Yeah. Peter Thiel is gay. It was before my time. I think probably… It was 2007. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:06:15] I don't even think I graduated high school yet. Yeah. That's how long the saga went on for. I mean, Owen Thomas says, oh, everybody knew. And so it was just a matter of just like putting online a thing that like all the insiders knew. So that happens. Also, you know, Valleywag was obsessed. You can respond to that. But I just want to give… Yeah. It was obsessed with like Clarium. And then it was also just like, you know, you know, I know people where they post pictures of them like at a hot dog. You know, it's just like everything, you know, it'd just be tracking. It was just awesome. In terms of the rich people. Yeah.

[00:06:43] So what was it the outing that made Peter Thiel the angriest? It was. But we also have to remember, you know, 2007 is 20 years ago. The attitude towards being gay has changed very rapidly. And Nick Denton is also gay. And Owen Thomas who wrote the story. And Owen Thomas is gay. And so it was this, you know, very homophobic attack by gay people themselves. Yeah. And I always say that Nick Denton is…

[00:07:13] Wished he was Peter Thiel. Right? He's like an Oxford educated philosopher who tried to be a tech entrepreneur and like really failed. And is gay too. And I think he was always quite jealous of Peter and his success. And, you know, coming out is a very personal thing. And, you know, no one should be outed against their will without their consent. And I think we can all agree upon that today.

[00:07:42] And it was something like very wrong that they did. And it wasn't just that. They just attacked everyone in Silicon Valley. They attacked everyone in Hollywood without any journalistic integrity. And, you know, I talked to a lot of journalists now and I use, you know, the Gawker example. And they say, oh, well, Gawker wasn't journalist. You know, they weren't… At the time people definitely thought it was. Yeah, absolutely. Right? You know, when we came out of the woodwork in 2015, 2016 to disclose that we had funded

[00:08:10] the lawsuit, it was, you know, the New York Times and the Combine Journalism Review all were saying that this was the most terrible thing imaginable, this chilling effect on journalism. Well, I definitely… Yeah, I oppose the lawsuit to be clear. I mean, probably less stridently than I did at the time. I mean, I do think there's… Are you a libertarian? Very libertarian. Right.

[00:08:35] I mean, isn't the best answer to like a free press problem just like more speech? And just by saying, okay, you could get sued, you create fear among even sort of more sensible publications instead of just answering the problem with more speech. Like what's your response to that argument? No, I think that the courts are a very important process and like the rule of law is remarkably important. As we'll get to with objection AI, obviously.

[00:09:03] And, you know, the problem that I observed with Hulk Hogan is Hulk Hogan is, you know, a true celebrity. He is very wealthy by, you know, the standards of an average American and yet he could not afford access to justice. You know, to go through the entire court process cost $10 million. It took years. And I think we can all agree that is the dysfunction of modern life. Like the rule of law is the backbone of a capitalist economy.

[00:09:33] If you can't have rule of law, you can't have capitalism, you can't enforce contracts. And, you know, if the court system is so slow and so expensive, how do we have justice? And the Gawker case, Gawker would make a similar argument to what you just made, which is that they might've prevailed if they weren't bankrupt sort of by the time, you know, because they had to, what, pay the bond. The bond made them unable to stay alive. You don't buy that. No, I don't buy that.

[00:10:00] I actually think if you talk to Nick Denton, Nick would say that he's actually very thankful that this lawsuit happened because the entire peer set of Gawker, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, et cetera, are now basically worthless. And so he was able to, you know, Ariana Huffington really like she sold out at peak moment. He just got out of a business that was never going to succeed anyway, you're saying. It's like it was a wake up call to like, this isn't going to work. Right. You know, Gawker was going to be destroyed by the changes. The markets. Yeah.

[00:10:29] By changes to the algorithms on the platforms. You know, the advertising based model would never have worked. You know, it was like kind of profitable because it was like run as a very scrappy operation. They were never able to raise external capital. But I'm just saying. But the bankruptcy in 2016 actually helped Nick Denton get to an exit much faster. And he admitted this in an article, I think in a vanity fair a few months ago. Right.

[00:10:55] But in terms of like the legal process playing out and getting justice, if you assume justice is the actual like all the appeals have been made. Yeah. Gawker couldn't even afford to get to the end. You know, it didn't even play out. It played out in a particular jurisdiction in Florida that seems more hostile to the sort of San Francisco, New York media set, you know, than if you sued them. Well, they were sued in a court that like normal American people. Right. Appear it. Not like.

[00:11:25] But us New York elites are not normal. Yeah. Yeah. The jury of the peers of Nick Denton is, you know, elites in Fifth Avenue. Not what he got, you know. It was actually quite a telling moment in court that in our opening statements, we referenced the fact that Gawker had just leased these very expensive offices on Fifth Avenue. And we and we use this as an example. Like, well, you know, these fancy. You're demonizing the wealthy here. Wealthy elites in Fifth Avenue. Right.

[00:11:53] And everyday Americans like, you know, Hulk Hogan, Terry Bollea, you know, he's like this hometown hero. He played baseball for like. Right. You know, the the Pinellas County. Peter Thiel obviously has no problem with being wealthy. I mean, he celebrates. Yeah. Wealthy. There's an argument made in court to a jury. Who's the. How did you pick the lawyer? It's like Charles Harder. Charles Harder. Yeah. Who has become now a very famous defamation lawyer. He's counseled to Melania Trump among many others.

[00:12:24] You know, Charles is a very special individual among lawyers because he doesn't think like a traditional lawyer. Most lawyers are like, how do I bill more hours? Right. That's all they think about. How do I bill more hours? How do I make this more common loaded? Because they're always acting in their own incentive. Charles, you know, would be a startup entrepreneur. He thinks outside of the box and because this wasn't just a legal strategy. It was also PR. It was data. It was technology.

[00:12:54] You know, it's capital financing, structuring, tax. And there are so many dimensions to this, which, you know, Charles and I sort of co-founders of this project brought together. And, you know, I've never found another lawyer like him. The idea that, as I do now for all conversations, I prepped with Claude, not even an advertisement. And its biggest concern with the Gawker suit wasn't the actual like substance, but just

[00:13:22] the sort of financing issue. Or like what is your view? Like if we lived in a culture where people are sort of funding all these lawsuits on other people's behalf. But that is the culture today. So, you know, if you slip and fall at a podcast studio, you will get a no win, no fee contingency lawyer. The lawyers do it, you're saying. Yeah, the lawyers are financed by hedge funds. Gawker was financed by a sketchy Russian oligarch named Victor Vittlesberg, who was eventually

[00:13:53] sanctioned after the Ukraine war. And so ultimately, like, you know, financing is just a normal part of this equation. And like, should an individual not be able to access like philanthropic funding to pursue justice? Like, you know, you would say, can the ACLU and other NGOs not bring lawsuits or, you know, support lawsuits? Right. I don't think so. Do you like some of media? I mean, this is going to be relevant to later in our conversation. Like, what do you like about media? Yeah.

[00:14:24] I think media has a very important job to communicate facts, right? You know, it's the only constitutionally enshrined private sector position in most countries, right? You know, like doctors, lawyers, engineers, you know, teachers are not enumerated with special powers in the United States Constitution, yet the press is. And so I think the press does have a very special role to play. But with great power comes great responsibility.

[00:14:53] And Spider-Man has changed our culture. Yeah. Is there a... Right here in New York City, right? You know. Is there a news outfit or individual journalist that you think embodies like, you know, that's good journalism? I think as a category, I think podcasters are very interesting because they have to build an emotional relationship with their listeners in a way that... You're like, right here, we're doing it. This is the best thing. Right now, yeah.

[00:15:20] And I think, you know, there's a higher degree of trust that podcasters have to have. There's something... There's an emotional abstraction that happens with print journalism or written journalism that you don't feel that the reader is interacting with a human being. And I think podcasting has... And sort of content creation community has shown that trust is actually the most valuable commodity.

[00:15:45] Like Joe Rogan would not breach trust with his listenership versus, I think, text-based publications are much more willing to break that trust in the goal of achieving clicks. I mean, there's a way to frame what Gawker did, which is stripping the humanity of sort of the rich people it's focusing on. It's writing about them in a way you would never want to write about individuals. It sort of like shows them in sort of like the, they're nothing like you.

[00:16:10] And just sort of the early demonization of sort of the rich in a way that the podcast is sort of the opposite. You have somebody on, you're like, oh, you're a person. You're not like so... You're a real person and we're talking about real people. And, you know, you can't like selectively quote me. You can't... It's much harder for you to inject your opinion. I have a right of rebuttal right here. It's...

[00:16:34] I think it's a much better format than narrative construction, text-based media. It just doesn't seem scalable for... You couldn't cover the Trump administration through a podcast alone. I think you could. Yeah. Yeah. So have you seen the Epstein Files podcast? No, I haven't. So this is the number one podcast in the world right now. And it's 100% agentic. So they downloaded the three and a half million Epstein Files emails, dropped them into an LLM and then used 11 labs to produce all the...

[00:17:04] There's no humans involved in it. And so, you know, my... And we'll get to this with objection. It's like media does three things. Research, synthesis, and distribution. Distribution got unbundled by the social platforms. Synthesis is being unbundled right now by AI. And then the final step is that research is going to be unbundled from the traditional media owners.

[00:17:29] And so I'm of the view that in 10 years time, all content will be individually agentically generated for each consumer. And so you can get your like customized podcast exactly what you want, right? Your daily dose of the Trump administration if you wanted that. But that... I mean, that makes it very easy to live in sort of a fictionalized world, right? If it's I hear what I want to hear, it's not rooted in what's happening necessarily.

[00:17:58] Well, you can hear what you want to hear, but you could also agentically dial up and dial down the bias, right? So you could actually say, you know what? I want to, you know, the Rush Limbaugh version of the Trump administration today. Or I want, you know, the economist version of it, right? And I think that would be like a very powerful way to consume media. And yes, it's going to come with a lot of complications. It's going to disintermediate like traditional power brokers in the media, you know, Rupert

[00:18:25] Murdoch, who was probably arguably the most powerful man in the world 20 years ago. You know, his empire will be practically worth it. So I would imagine. Are you down on Rupert Murdoch or? I will, you know... I know we have only like... Yeah, yeah. No, as an Australian, you know, I see the power that the Murdoch empire has wielded. And like, you know, as an Australian who lives in the UK, two countries that for certainly

[00:18:51] several decades, the Murdoch media empire controlled, right? You know, the prime minister of Australia was effectively appointed by Rupert Murdoch. Yet, like News Corporation, which is the greatest media empire, certain greatest newspaper empire ever produced. That includes the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, all the papers in Australia. Do you know what its market capitalization is?

[00:19:20] No, I'm sure it's something embarrassingly small. Yeah. So like Tesla is like several trillion. Apple is several trillion. I'm trying to guess what I... You know... Do you know it fresh or what is it? 15 billion. Okay. One five. Yeah. Right. You know, Enhanced Games, which is like, you know, a wonderful company that I do to over the back of a cocktail napkin is worth $1.2 billion on the NYSE today. So let's get into Enhanced Games. And then I want to keep going to objection. Like... Yeah. So Enhanced Games, it's steroids, right? Or what...

[00:19:49] The idea is athletes can take whatever they want. No, athletes can take whatever is legal. Legal. And medically prescribed. And so, you know, my... Legal in their country, in the United States? Legal where they can... Where they take it, fly over. Yeah. Well, they've actually been in Abu Dhabi where we have a clinical trial being undertaken with their equivalent of the FDA.

[00:20:16] And it's all medically supervised and doctor prescribed. And so, you know, where Enhanced Games came from is that I learned that 47% of elite track and field athletes admitted that they are using banned performance enhancing drugs. Yet only 2% were getting caught. And this is like peer-reviewed scientific research that was actually funded by the World Anti-Doping Agency. And I said, well, why should we be lying? Right?

[00:20:41] Shouldn't we be able to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be? Like, you know, and the media is actually really amazing. Like, social media is unbelievable. So I made a video. I dropped it on a zero-follower account on Twitter. And it got 9 million views in the first 24 hours. And like, within a day, investors started messaging me and saying, oh, this is really cool. And very interesting. The funny thing about being a great foe to the media is the media loves it.

[00:21:11] Yeah, yeah. The media wants to talk about itself. So if you're willing to argue with them as sort of this booking point in case, you know, it's, we're happy to sort of hear it out and talk about it. Yeah. On your, all your websites is like media contacts here. Like, yeah, no, no. I'm super open about this. It's like, yeah, if you're interested in having me on your podcast, you can email me at Aaron at Aaron. Businesses are built to be consumed, like to be exciting to people in a way that they want to talk about it. And so the most important conversation I've ever had in my life was with the Nobel Peace Prize

[00:21:41] winner, Maria Russo. Peter's going to be pissed about that. I'm number two. I'm number two. Yeah. So Maria got the Nobel Peace Prize. She's a blogger in the Philippines. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. For fighting the dictator of Robert Duterte. And she said to me, to understand the world, you have to understand just one thing, which is social media.

[00:22:05] And to understand social media, you need to understand just one fact, which is that controversy travels nine times faster than truth. And if you understand that, you understand why we have crazy Donald Trump not boring Jimmy Carter. Why we have wild Kim Kardashian not boring Humphrey Bogart. Right. And I was like, wow, that makes a lot of sense. And so when I was conceptualizing the idea of the enhanced games, I was like, oh, this

[00:22:30] is going to go so viral because everyone in the sports establishment, every journalist will want to talk about it. And the very first reply on that tweet was from an Olympian named Anson Henry. And he wrote, please don't engage with this. If it gets attention, this will be very bad or something to that effect. It's like, and there you are doing it. You can't help yourself. It's like 200,000 followers. They were like, oh, wow. Like, what is this thing?

[00:22:59] And then it was like, should we not engage with this? And then bang, like a few big accounts retweeted it. And, you know, not a billion dollar company. But athletes are largely resisting it, right? I mean, you're going to have your first games, but it's not clear that this is actually going to succeed as a cultural product. Well, so the reason I was so confident in it is that it is very simple. As human beings, we are only interested in seeing the very best of human performance.

[00:23:28] And so if at the end of the month in Las Vegas, a lot of world records are broken, or like Hussein Belt's 100 meter world record is broken, then we are the fastest sporting event in the world. And if you're a Nike, do you want to sponsor the fastest natural athlete or just the fastest athlete, period? Right. And I think there's something very important about being the best. And as humans, we don't really care, you know, whether they're natural or enhanced. Yeah.

[00:23:57] Why call it enhanced at all? I mean, in some ways what you're saying is... It's the open games. Right. It's just everything. It's just like to be human is to take advantage of any whatever... Well, so the Olympics used to be from 1896 until 1992, the Olympics were only for amateur athletes. And it was viewed that professional compensation was somehow diluting the integrity of sport. It was cheating.

[00:24:21] And, you know, if you were an athlete who had ever accepted even $1 in professional compensation, you were banned from Olympic competition for life. And now, like, high school athletes are professionals. And, you know, like, that's all NIL stuff. And so I think we're going in that similar direction, both in terms of sport and in culture. Right. You know, I got up at 630 this morning and went to work out at Equinox and Hudson Yards. I'm like... I look around there. I'm like, everyone is enhanced. Like, everyone is enhanced.

[00:24:48] And if you're not enhanced, you are giving up an advantage. Right. And we are in this now competition between humans and machines with AI. And as human beings, we need to become... We need every edge we can get. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it is sad, you know, with cycling that just like... That they were all... That so many people were using drugs that it became a game of getting away with it. And so many of them... But don't lie. Just do it all out in the open. Right.

[00:25:17] And that's the same thing I feel with journalism. Right. So it's like some journalists want to be objective and just produce facts. And some want to be highly subjective and push their own narrative. It's like, don't hide behind the veil of objectivity. Just say that you are constructing a narrative. I mean, you know, I was at Bloomberg for six years. And so let's move into your new company. I mean, I just think, you know, I was at Bloomberg for six years.

[00:25:47] And, you know, it was the view from nowhere type reporting where you don't really say what the writer thinks. Though, obviously, as you drift, you know, if you write for Business Week, it has more of a tone. Yeah. And then we would write newsletters that almost had even more of a tone. Yeah. And it just becomes... I get the value. It's like for the AP and Reuters and some parts of Bloomberg where it's like, even if the reporter has a perspective trying to have you from nowhere when you cover the Fed or something, has a lot of value.

[00:26:14] But for a lot of types of stories that are so complicated and there's so much perspective involved, I think just admitting, as I do now with my sub stack, that I have a point of view. This comes from me. This is my perspective. And trying to say what's... And readers want that. Yeah. And they're willing to pay for that. Right. And they're saying, you know, I like your point of view. Right. I like the vision you bring to the world. And I'm willing to subscribe for that. And I think that is very powerful.

[00:26:40] But like when you're Fox News and your slogan is like fair and balanced, right? Or the Washington Post or, you know, the worst is the New York Times, right? So 20 years ago, the New York Times, according to YouGov, was equally trusted by Democrats and Republicans. And now effectively, it has zero trust among Republicans because what they discovered is that if they're willing to, you know, confirm the bias of their readers, they're more willing to subscribe.

[00:27:09] And that's why they have such a very healthy subscriber base right now is... I mean, Republicans largely consume their news on TV, right? I mean, they print news consumers are just Democrats by and large. Well, yeah, it's like... But also like, you know, millennials trust TikTok as much as they trust the New York Times. Which is sort of incoherent. What does it mean to trust TikTok? It's like whatever's in your feed you trust. Yeah, you trust... Trust what shows up.

[00:27:39] Like, I mean, I like TikTok, but I don't know what it means to trust it. But the New York Times has a feed too, right? It's just a feed of... I love Jamel Bowie's TikTok feed. Yeah. He's a New York Times columnist. But anyway, let's... It's Objection AI, right? Objection AI, yeah. So, yeah, explain the thesis behind the company. So, the thesis... This is very new, right? Very new. Seed funding. Peter Thiel is a funder. Peter Thiel is an investor. Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase. Who's who of media haters? Yeah. Oh, media skeptics. Yeah.

[00:28:08] I mean, they love it in certain ways. I mean, Balaji was just... Balaji, is it? Balaji. Balaji, is that what he goes by? The... He was just on with Taylor Lorenz, which I loved. And obviously, Peter Thiel is obsessed with media in certain ways and tracks it very closely. I think everyone who is powerful has to understand the media. Like, you cannot be powerful and not participate in the media.

[00:28:32] And so, the point of objection is that the Gawker lawsuit took five years and $10 million. And that is not accessible to anyone. And we have created the first accountability system for journalists. So, anyone, but particularly subjects of media reporting, can file an objection to a piece of content. Then, a team of investigators who are former CIA and FBI agents will get to work.

[00:28:58] They will investigate that article line by line, source by source, and try and basically replicate what the author has written and verify it. They will, importantly, put all that information into a public data room, which the original author can rebut. And then AI looks at that data room and comes to an analysis about what is true.

[00:29:20] And I think this brings to an important point is that, like, journalists say that their job is to hold truth to power. And that powerful actors, whether they're politicians, billionaires, or CEOs, should be subject to high transparency. But if you're a journalist at the New York Times, you probably have more power than your average billionaire. This, I think, is a core conflict, right? That the media often says, we have no power. And the billionaires have unlimited power.

[00:29:50] And then the billionaires are like, listen, with all the money in the world, the thing I care most about is reputation. And the people who control it are these random reporters who've never even, you know, worked in the industry. You make like a hundred thousand bucks a year. Right, yeah. And so, they both, like, it's like, you're rich and you control reputation. And what journalists forget is that they are part of these media empires that, by and large, are owned by billionaires. I just don't think there is command control. Like, I really do think one way. Come on, come on. I was a New York Times intern.

[00:30:20] Like, the Solsberger. There's a culture, like, journalism, you know, but I think it was sort of a good culture. It's like, you know, you check your sources. You give people a chance to respond. Like, there are lots of things that, like, I've joked before that there's, like, a priesthood of media, right? Like, media is sort of, like, non-economic in certain ways. There are all these, like, you win by, you know, getting awards, not necessarily by building the biggest business. So there are these cultural and sort of, you know, inbred sort of principles. Yeah.

[00:30:48] But I just never really felt working at any media organization. I think you're lying to yourself. There's, like... I think you're totally lying to yourself. The most egregious, like, I tried to write an essay, so it was subjective, in the opening remarks for Business Week, criticizing, like, billionaires sort of having too much control. And it felt like that piece sort of got killed for, like... I was basically saying it's not their money that's the problem. It's, like, if you control platforms. Anyway. Yeah. So there have been, like... But they're sort of the outlier, right?

[00:31:17] Like, on random controversial, like, the fall of Uber or whatever. Yeah. It's not like Bloomberg was, like, weighing in, like, I'm team benchmarker team Travis, right? No, no, no. For most of these things, they don't care, you know? No, no, no. But, like, you know, go over to Rockefeller Center, 6th Avenue, walk into the News Corporation building. You feel the presence of Rupert Murdoch. On the sort of key political... Absolutely. Every detail in that building, you can feel the presence of Rupert Murdoch.

[00:31:45] But, of course, that's a sort of conservative outlet that many of the New York Times... You know, the side that I'm more aligned with would say, yes, that's deeply flawed. No, no. But I think that liberal journalists don't have the self-awareness to realize that, like, Sulzberger and the Sulzberger family, which have owned the New York Times for, what, a century now, have that same influence in building the culture of an organization. Maybe not in the day-to-day operations, but it is the culture of the organization.

[00:32:15] So, like, you talk to any CEO of, like, an NYSE company, they will always say that culture is the number one asset of any organization. The culture of Gawker was created by Nick Denton. The culture of Fox was created by Murdoch. The culture of the New York Times was created by Sulzberger, right? And ultimately, that is the core value of the organization. And there are now economic motivations, right?

[00:32:42] So, like, Nick Denton was very famous for being the very first media proprietor to have, like, a dashboard up on the wall showing how many clicks articles were getting, right? And this was, like, and he would directly incentivize journalists based on how many clicks. So, they would get bonuses every day. And now that is perfectly normal. I mean, I think the New York Times is one of the best institutions in America. So, we are extremely far apart and we can debate it. I want to come back to it, but I want to finish explaining what objection AI is before.

[00:33:10] And I agree that you create a culture and that decides sort of what the publication is about. But aren't you a conservative? I don't know. You believe in culture, right? Like, isn't culture, like, important? Like, you want companies with good cultures. So, the fact that there is a culture itself isn't a problem. No, no, no. Absolutely not. Right. Every organization has a culture, right? So, it's impossible to have a cultureless organization. But let's be frank and honest about what that culture is, right?

[00:33:36] So, the New York Times is a Democratic paper now. But it's not a Republican paper. It is not a neutral paper. Right. It is not a neutral arbiter of truth. Right. It is a political masthead. And it's obvious that it is a conscious business decision that has been very profitable for them over the last 10 years. Okay. We're going to talk about the New York Times a little bit. I mean, they certainly could be more to the left, right?

[00:34:05] I mean, there are traditions of journalism where you would be more on a team. Like, you know, The Guardian. Yeah, like in the UK. In the UK, there's much more clearly, like, we're on this team, we're on this team, we're on this team. In America, you know, I think the argument is that they're, you know, fundamentally these newspapers are, like, pro-democracy. And there's sort of one party consolidating power, you know. Like, just like, if you look at that. That's like a crazy argument.

[00:34:34] Well, literally the House of Representatives is moving away. Like, the percentage that Democrats would have to win to win the House of Representatives is going up by percent. It's now like 4%. They'd need a 4% swing to win. But like, to suggest that one party doesn't believe in democracy? Yeah. Like, is that your engineering? Well, Trump is literally flirting with whether he would have another term regularly. He gives out, I think, hats that say he would have another term.

[00:35:04] He is a president that had summoned his followers to put pressure on the House of Representatives by sort of coming into it to dispute an election result. But like, a democratically elected president of the United States who won the popular vote, right? Right. And a democratically elected Congress, right?

[00:35:27] Who fully, in full compliance with the Constitution of the United States, has appointed the Supreme Court. Right. I don't see anything undemocratic. Well, they're... Right. The idea, you know, this idea, like the Washington Post slogan, like, democracy dies in darkness. Like, and when Basil's cut 30% of the WAPO's newsroom, like, people felt like this was like the end of democracy. Right? Like, be honest with yourself. Right?

[00:35:56] Media, you are generating clicks by writing articles for billionaires. You are not the guardians of democracy. Take the... Like, get off your moral high horse. Take the New York Times story on Cesar Chavez. Like, that's one. Right? That story doesn't happen without the New York Times doing reporting. It's on a leftist saying that he, you know, abused some of his followers. I mean, the biggest, like, I've been canceled.

[00:36:25] I wasn't really canceled, but people were screaming at me on Twitter was, like, the New York Times had broken this story on George Santos. And there were a lot of people on the left attacking the New York Times for failing to do it before he'd been elected. Yeah. Yeah. We've learned this thing.

[00:36:50] And so these outlets, like the Washington Post, New York Times, are the ones most frequently doing those types of novel stories that without them would never have been published. And so we lose that when those papers lose capacity. Now, I'm not saying every reporter at the Washington Post was delivering that kind of story. The New York Times is a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company. Sure. Are they losing capacity? No, they're gaining capacity. They are doing well. Giant skyscraper. It was the Washington Post.

[00:37:16] I do think it's helpful to have multiple of these outlets that are doing sort of novel reporting. Well, it's like, do we really need, like, lots of local newspapers? Do you agree with this premise? I like to have lots of local newspapers. Do you agree with this premise that there are important things that society would like to know that don't just come online?

[00:37:44] But does that mean that we have to, like, create a special privileged position for the New York Times? So you agree? You just think that I'm just saying it's part of what gives the New York Times value. If you don't give them any credit for the fact that, like, the core thing they do is this really hard thing, that there are sort of facts about the world that are not online, especially as we enter an AI world, this matters more and more. But, like, what Sam Altman is doing or, like, what I'm doing is, like, I think really important to our society.

[00:38:12] But we don't get a special constitutionally enshrined position in society. But you were defending the constitutionally enshrined position, right? No, no. I was noting that it exists. You don't think there should be a constitutionally enshrined position? Well, I think with great power comes great responsibility, right? If it is for the distribution of facts, right, then I believe that there should be a constitutionally enshrined privilege.

[00:38:38] But then, you know, there should be a very high liability for libel, for invasion of privacy, you know, to the point where I think it actually should be criminalized. Right? Because if you – it's the same thing with politicians. If you give politicians great power, right, in the corollary, if they are corrupt, there should be huge consequences. So this is what Lee Kuan Yew did with Singapore.

[00:39:07] He said, yes, we're going to pay our ministers extremely well. They wield almost dictatorial power. And they were able to take a mosquito-infested swamp and make it the richest country in the world. But he said, if you're corrupt, straight to jail. Straight to Changi Prison, right? Brutal. And I don't believe that – there has to be both sides of the coin. Sure. There's a lot to unpack there, but I want to go back to objection. Okay.

[00:39:38] I guess first of all, from the sort of I've been maligned by media side, why do they want to come to you? Like, if I'm paying someone – I've been maligned. I want the person I'm paying to deliver, like, the result I want, which is, like, I'm the good guy. Whereas you're saying we're going to deliver the sort of objective truth. Yes, exactly. And so if you've been maligned by the media, you would say the media got the facts wrong, right? They strung a bunch of anonymous sources together.

[00:40:08] They selectively quoted a bunch of people, right? So, you know, I think the example I frequently use is the Ronan Farrell article about Sam Altman in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, right? Ronan clearly went out and said, I'm going to write an article about how bad Sam Altman is. He didn't say, I'm going to go gather a bunch of facts and then be an objective viewer of this. He clearly had a narrative and he found a lot of sources that would confirm that, some of which were on the record and some were off the record.

[00:40:36] But he admitted he spoke to 150 people and he distilled that down to deliver the narrative he exactly wanted to deliver. And what was the consequence of that? Two days later, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam's house. So this story should never exist because they're random crazy people? That, number one, Ronan should be held to an extremely high standard because he's wielding monopoly power greater than one of the wealthiest individuals. Wait, why is it monopoly power?

[00:41:06] Because he has an immense ability to distribute, right? In The New Yorker? Yeah. It's like a dying publication. That's laughable. The New Yorker has prestige, but it is certainly in no way a monopoly. It's like... Not a financial monopoly, but it is a cultural monopoly. No. There are other publications. You could run in my substack. No, but running a narrative like that, you're a substack versus the cover of the New Yorker.

[00:41:35] The New Yorker in no way has a monopoly. I don't know how you're... It's a powerful culture. It's a powerful cultural institution. But isn't... Free press culture in America, you don't even think it should be more speech? Like... No, it should be more accountability, right? So every on the record source... Isn't this going to ruin the internet? Because the most sloppy people with their speech are random commoners online, right? Commoners. Commenters. Oh, commentor.

[00:42:05] Commenters. We're not supposed to say that. But whatever. Same difference. The elite media, you know, is far more intentional with what they say. They at least talk to lawyers. Random people like opining online are much sloppier. Although, you know, the corollary to that is, you know, you have a citizen journalist like Nick Shirley, who's just like a kid with an iPhone that did better investigative reporting than anyone at the New York Times. That's definitely not true.

[00:42:35] I mean, it's not clear. It's clear. It's very hard to assess what he's presenting. Well, but it's also very hard to assess what Ronan Farrow and the New Yorker is presenting. So like, how can we make journalism better? But I mean, Sam Altman is going to be a figure of like many profiles. Like to me, the answer on Sam Altman is definitely Ronan Farrow like has a narrative. People, it is a, we call it a story. Like people want a story to have some, he talks to a bunch of people.

[00:43:02] And even if you were arguing in court, opening arguments, closing arguments, they have a narrative. You're presenting, you organize the facts. But you need to present evidence. Well, you present evidence in a story. You're like, I talked about why. No, no, no, no, no. No, because this is what happened. They get corrections. I go to court and I present my narrative. It's adversarial. It's adversarial. And the documentary evidence must be presented. So the average federal court case in the United States has a quarter of a million documents supporting it. Right? Outcomes a 50 page judgment.

[00:43:31] So there's like a 99.99% compression ratio. The New York Times writes a big investigative piece. It might be like 2,000 words long. On average, according to ChatGPT, they have 10 on the record sources. And if you assume they speak for an hour, that's about 100,000 words of information that is distilled down to like 2,000. So you have like a 98% compression ratio.

[00:43:57] And so what I'm trying to do with objection is to fix the decline of media. So according to the Gallup poll in 1970, 70% of Americans trusted the news media. That's down to 28% today and 8% among Republicans. And, you know, I'm here in New York City today. I'm going to talk to some of the biggest media proprietors in the world. None of them are really focused on solving this trust dimension. Like, you know, if you talk to journalists and say, well, why don't you just pay journalists more money? Right?

[00:44:27] That doesn't actually solve the structural problem. So how can we actually fix the structural problem of the decline of journalism? Number one, journalists need to show their work. Right? So if you're going to write a story and it's backed up by sources, like just upload the source videos. Right? Upload the source documents. I'm not against what you're saying necessarily. I just think that like practically my readers are not going to go and spend the time to audit. No, no, no. But this is a silly.

[00:44:57] It helps you, like it helps another company potentially mind my work. But my actual readers are sort of deciding do I trust him or not? No, no, no. I think that the trust will be higher if you presented all of your background material. Right? So this is why podcasts are very powerful. It's like, you know, if they're consumed mostly through clips, like people, it's like nice to have the whole thing. But like most people in the core monetizable audience wants...

[00:45:22] They want a clip, but the clip is the opening wedge to watching the full unredacted transcript. And so maybe only like a small percentage of your audience wants to go like really deep, but that's like very meaningful. And in the era of AI, our capacity to read is unlimited. So having an open public data room attached to every story would actually substantially improve the quality of reporting. And I don't think you can doubt this at all.

[00:45:51] I think it could be valuable. And I agree. I think journalism will be open to it if like the reader shows interest in this stuff. Like I think if you can convince journalism, you know, companies that people will trust them more because, you know, you can have a nice way to show like the sort of archives of their reporting. That could be the case. I'm somewhat skeptical. You'll succeed in getting enough readers to like engage with it that it really changes their reputation.

[00:46:20] I actually, I don't think it's about readers engaging for generating monetization. It's actually for AI training. Right. So 20% of all the data that ChatGPT is trained on is news data. But as I said, news data is like 99% compressed. And so if one had access to the, you know, unique first party recordings,

[00:46:44] this is a constantly refreshing source of data that could be used to train the most advanced AI model that it's ever existed. I want to get back into like the pieces of what objection is. So one is sort of, you've been, you know, there's been a hit piece about you. Have an investment. Have a response, independent investigation. There's another piece, which is, I guess, maybe not a profit center for you, but I don't know if it's brand exercise or what,

[00:47:10] but like we'll create a contractual agreement for whenever you talk to a journalist. You should sign in advance. So one thing that's like really shocking about journalism is that. Jesus. One thing that's. You can keep that in. So yeah, you're slick and who's not on this show. Yeah.

[00:47:32] One thing that's really shocking about journalism is that we sign terms and conditions when we do everything in life. You know, when I go to the physiotherapist, when I go to the swimming pool, when I check into a hotel, but when we do an on the record media interview. Right. There's, there's no paperwork. Right. I came here to your studio today. I know. I was going to laugh about this. I didn't say anything. Yeah. Right. And it, and it, and it should I have said, why? I mean, for a podcast, why should we say anything?

[00:48:01] Well, what is, what are the usage rights of all this? I guess I cut it all down. Yeah. Like, are you going to like, you know, shouldn't it be better if I say, okay, you, you assure me that you will not, that like you will publish the full unredacted version of this, including you spilling the water on your shoe. Right. It's like, I want that in there. If I spilled water on my shoe, it would definitely go in there. It'd be like, repeat, repeat. Yeah, exactly. Right. So you have the full unredacted version of this publicly available on your YouTube channel. Right.

[00:48:31] Yeah. If you're thinking of such a shitty business as it is, like, it's going to be hard, you know, any more like burden, like, oh, this is going to make it slightly more likely I get sued. But I think this is actually what structurally needs to happen is that someone needs to come through. And I, and this is now my job to say, how are we going to restore trust in this very important institution? Right. So subjects need to have contractual relationships with reporters.

[00:49:02] Reporters need to show their work. Right. They need to show it in the most comprehensive way possible. Like, why do we trust courts? Why do we trust science so much more than we trust journalists? Even though 50 years ago, trusting these institutions was all about the same. And journalists have fallen off the cliff. It's because in science, you have to show your work. Right. It's peer review. Right. Right.

[00:49:26] So it wouldn't be better if the New York Times was going to publish a massive investigative piece that it goes to, like, Fox News first for an independent review to make sure that, you know, if they're using anonymous sources, it's been correctly done. That, you know, they've weighed both sides correctly. Right. Because that's what would happen in science. Right. I want to dig in. I mean, a piece of this is you don't like anonymous sources. Is that fair? I mean, are you coming around a little bit on this?

[00:49:56] Anonymous sources are a massive power asymmetry and that there is a technological solution to solving it. Okay. Oh, that might answer. I mean, because, like, in tech reporting, like, a lot of deals are just reported anonymously before they're announced. Yeah. And as someone who is, you know, a technology venture capitalist and founder, right, you know, the quality of this is just so sloppy. Right. But it's like. No, more often than not.

[00:50:25] Like, if you report, like, the valuation terms, like, they're right. And people want to know that information. And a lot of these, like, rounds are, like, widely known among, like, lots of people who haven't even, like, signed contractual agreements. No, no. But, like, you know, I saw an article in the FT a couple days ago. It's like early open AI investors are criticizing Sam Allman. Sure. Yeah. And then it's like, well, you know, there were lots of people who were early investors. Are they people who invested in a triple wrapped SPV?

[00:50:55] I'm just trying to point out that there are a lot. There are plenty of genres of reporting, whether it's, like, factual, like, financial information, like, where it's almost become part of the process. That, like, even the people involved are leaking it. Sometimes people involved are leaking it. But, like, ultimately, there should be external verification of the use of any anonymous source. Yeah. I think if you can figure out, like, verifying anonymous sources that come true.

[00:51:24] We were talking about this. Yeah, yeah. I think if you can verify that anonymous sources come true, those people should get extra credit. It's like, because that's the hard, that's good journalism. And so one thing that we'll be releasing in a couple of weeks is the first ranking system. I know. I thought you were going to have in time for me to know where I stand. Where do you stand on the list? And, you know, journalists rank hospitals, restaurants, universities, you know, every. Yeah. I think bring it on.

[00:51:54] Journalists will love it. But I just think any fair list is going to put, like, Reuters and AP at the top. And Reuters at the AP write stories that are generally. And also far more favorable to, like, Democrats than most. You know, like, Fox is not going to do well. Like, Fox got sued and settled for what? A huge sum of them. Pink Slime or the Dominion voting case. Yeah. Right. There are many there. Right. And, you know, my first real job after I was a New York Times intern,

[00:52:23] I worked for the Washington Examiner. But the reason why the New York Times doesn't get sued is because of New York Times v. Sullivan. Because there's such a high standard. There's such a crazy high standard that was lobbied in for by the media industry. But my point is just I've worked in conservative media. Like, I was writing about, like, local. There's the Washington Examiner covering D.C. City Hall, which was more even handed, just a little bit like we love cars and hate unbalanced budgets, you know. Yeah, yeah. Like, it was like, oh, my God, they're going to, you know, kill.

[00:52:53] They're going to create traffic. But I just felt conservative media, like, pretty sloppy. Like, I do think, like, print media is more buttoned up than TV journalism. Like, the New York Times is more buttoned up than. I'm not sure that. OK, so the New York Times is an outlier because they have an economic model that actually works. WAPO doesn't have an economic model. They're not doing great right now. Like WSJ. I mean, the Washington Post, what, just won.

[00:53:19] I think the public service Pulitzer for covering Trump's, like, administrative state. Like, I think those were good stories. No one cares. No one cares about this stuff. Like, I don't even know what a public service Pulitzer is. It's the biggest one. It's. Yeah. Great. But that's. I don't know what the argument embedded in that is. I do think the news consumer being sort of pretty low quality is part of the problem. Right. We don't have a discerning news consumer. You stupid Americans aren't smart enough to read the newspaper. It feels that way right now. That is such an elitist.

[00:53:50] You're elitist. Are you kidding me? Like, I admit that I'm an elitist. Let me get in my limousine. But like, you know, I'm a capitalist. Like, I don't. I don't. You know, I don't apologize for this. I like. I don't apologize in believing the elite. Like, yeah, part of what makes The New York Times work is those reporters are very sophisticated. No way of practicing their craft. But then the problem is there that, you know, it's this oppressive economic model. Right. The average journalist in The New York Times earns like 120 grand a year.

[00:54:17] You can't even afford like a walk up studio in the West Village. I agree. Let's figure out how to make them more money. Or I don't know what your point is. Is that that number one, the economic model doesn't stack up. Right. Right. And, you know, my concern principally is that the media proprietors were caught off guard by tech 20 years ago. So the first unbundling of distribution, you know, people like Salzberger and Murdoch did not understand.

[00:54:45] Now they really understand that this unbundling of synthesis is happening. And they're petrified by AI. Because ultimately, the core task of journalism, which is the synthesis of narrative, is going to be completely unbundled. Yeah. I don't know that they actually get it yet. I don't think they get it. Because I just had somebody, I can't even remember who it was, but some journalist was like, journalism, I mean, AI is never going to get a scoop.

[00:55:12] I'm like, there are all these public records online where they just pull something out, like distill it in a, like scoop of idea, but also scoop of fact and like public filings. Like AI is definitely going to get scoops in those domains. So I definitely agree with you. The AI is coming for. Not all of journalism. In fact, the key thing it's not coming for is the human anonymous source, you know, the thing that's not getting put online. So a lot of the things you don't like about media, that's what media is going to need to become even more in a world of AI.

[00:55:41] But this is the, you know, I'm actually like here in New York, not to do podcasts, but to meet with media owners, is that media owners understand that the second unbundling is happening with AI and synthesis now. What they don't understand is that the unbundling of research is going to happen. And that's going to be the death knell in the coffin of traditional media, right?

[00:56:06] Because if the research component of news gathering, right, that empathy of sources and that very humanized element can become unbundled through technology, then the power of the traditional media apparatus is to clients completely. But what do you see? You see this as like Tegas type, like sort of research, like we're going to pay people to make calls, like AI to make calls? No, no, no.

[00:56:31] I think it's a combination of AI and humans to work as a sort of like an expert network or Hive. So are you familiar with GLG? Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. That's like GLG, but, you know, with a strong technology platform for doing unique first party research. So you say, okay, we want to research if Equinox is underpaying its employees, right?

[00:56:57] So instead of one reporter going there and like talking to every staff member about their pay rates, what if there were like hundreds of people simultaneously working on that story? You confuse me because that's like extreme journalism. It's like, I love it. Like we need more of that stuff. This is what I'm, I'm not anti-journalism. I'm, my goal is to increase the trust of journalism. So like it's, it's just gone down for 50 years. And so I will know if I'm successful if in like 10 years time we're like, oh, wow, it's

[00:57:25] suddenly gone back to like north of 50%. And I don't think anyone wakes up every morning trying to fix this problem. Like Rupert Murdoch doesn't, the Salzburgers don't. Well, they try to do it by practicing the journalism that they believe in, but. No, they're trying to make money, right? I do not think the Salzburgers are like optimizing for, when they want to make money and I'm glad they figured out games. They're optimizing for subscriptions. But of all publications, they, I mean, sorry, of all industries, media has tried to hold on

[00:57:52] to some sort of principles even as it's hurt their business model. They're just trying to patch the leaking ship, right? Most of them. But like, that's what they're trying to do right now. And, you know, they're not thinking about like this massive structural transition that is going on. Like, you know, there's probably like one or two like very good thinkers in the top echelons of these media companies who are thinking about AI and the synthesis unbundling. But I can assure you that no one is thinking about the research unbundling. The actual accumulation.

[00:58:22] Yeah. How information is acquired. And there's some elements of how human thought is used to adjudicate, rank, train, tag that information. But Balaji has expressed this point of view recently that sort of like everything that should be written about is sort of the stuff we put online. Like that it's sort of like online is our self-presentation. Yeah. And that the stuff offline, that's like private. Do you agree with that?

[00:58:53] Because I find it, I feel like a key part of understanding how society works is like, what's your life actually look like? Like to me, I feel like we don't have nearly enough visibility into all these people we hear from all the time. Like, don't we need to know what like. Do you need to know? I feel like we need more of a portrait. We all become the part of what people like about podcasts is that they get a little bit more of the humanity. But I want an even more extreme, like let's give a real sense of like. But I think AI is actually like very good at that.

[00:59:21] So it's like, you know, I was talking to a journalist and they were like, oh, you know, what color is like Peter Thiel's couch? And they're like, I want to write this like in-depth, very personal piece. And I'm like, don't you know how to use Google? Like, you know, you could like if you knew what you were looking for and AI can do this very well, you would be able to figure out where his houses are, who his interior designer is and, you know, what his taste in art and architecture is. Well, journalists don't want to be like probably right.

[00:59:51] They want to know. They want somebody who's seen the couch, not like, oh, it could be. No, but like you could actually find all of the stuff. It's already all on the internet. I'll throw up the gauntlet. Find a, I don't think you can find Peter Thiel's couch. You might see a picture that is of Peter Thiel, but it'd be sort of hard to know that it's like. No, but AI is actually very good at that. You could, you know, get qualified. Come back right in the comments. Here's a picture of Peter Thiel's couch. Please, people, smart engineers out there, can you figure out what kind of couch Peter Thiel has?

[01:00:22] I wanted to ask specifically the whole like antichrist sort of thing. I mean, you made a point earlier in this discussion that the stuff that gets people's attention is, you know, sort of controversial. Like, do you think this, the antichrist thing is like a, an attention seeking strategy? No, no, no, no, no. I think, you know. This is Peter Thiel giving a bunch of essays about the antichrist. Yeah. So. And it potentially being like Greta. Greta Thunberg. Yeah.

[01:00:48] So, no, I think what's more important is to think about the place of, of God in our society. And so, um, all great businesses are cults. Yeah. Right. And like, we know this from like Apple and like AI is kind of this cult dimension to it. The New York Times is a cult. Uh, media, late media circles are definitely a cult. Um, and. It's amazing leaving a company and you're like, oh my God, I cared about all these like weird. Weird things. Weird things. And then you're out of it. You're like, I don't care about that at all anymore. Yeah.

[01:01:17] So I definitely agree with you. I mean. But. But they're called in a non-negative way. It's sort of, that's how humans work. Um, it's how humans work. And so why do we work that way? And so Jean-Paul's Sartre, uh, had this thesis is that human being that on evolutionary biology level, species that cooperate will, will outcompete those that do not cooperate. And, uh, the manifestation of this in humans is religion. It's like this like social glue that pulls us together.

[01:01:47] And in the, in every civilization for the entire history of the world up until the fall of the atomic bomb, we were religious. And then after the atomic bomb, we have become an atheistic society. And Sartre called this the God-shaped hole. And so we now fill this God-shaped hole with things like the cult of, of, of carbon, right? Greta Thunberg is like this, uh, you know, it's almost like praying to the weather gods.

[01:02:17] Oh, please. You know, if we sacrifice enough of ourselves, sacrifice our young, sacrifice our old, we'll, we, we will appease the weather gods. Um, and, and, and, uh, you know, Taylor Swift is a goddess, right? And there's a sort of cult of slavery. Fairly innocuous one. Um, well, maybe, you know, the, the cult of Athena was fairly innocuous. So, but, so the point about Peter is that, and the Antichrist essays is that I think that

[01:02:44] the, the, the God-shaped hole, the, the lack of religion in our society is deeply under theorized and helps explain why Taylor Swift has become a goddess because we lack goddesses in our society. But I don't think the answer is just then start believing in religion again because we need it. The answer is, the answer is maybe start building new religions. An AI, an AI God or what do you think it's going to be?

[01:03:12] Well, like the rise of AI is according to Professor Peter Franco-Pan from Oxford, um, has a historic analogy of the rise of organized religion, right? There is this, you know, priesthood that understands the sacred texts and that no one else does. Like, do you actually know how an LLM works? Somewhat, but certainly not on a level of a Dario or whatever. Yeah, exactly. A general purpose transform. So there, there's this now priestly caste who has special access to the divine and that,

[01:03:41] you know, normal humans, uh, must, uh, uh, prostrate themselves too, to have access to the divine. Why focus on, I know you didn't write the essays, but you're, you're maybe as close as, maybe you'll help me get Peter Thiel on here someday if I, he can watch this and decide for himself. But I mean, why focus on the negative instead of the positive? Like, I just feel like the antichrist. Yeah. It's the darkest thing in the world. Like what we need is positive value.

[01:04:10] Like what should we be worshiping? Right. Yes. And I, I, well, but you know, to understand what we should be worshiping, we must understand what we shouldn't be. No, I think it's easier. It's much easier. Like humans love to like hate the other. It's easy to like come up with like hate them. Like, you know, that's sort of the problem. The challenging one is to come up with like, who should we worship? You know, but if there's anything to admire about Jesus Christ is that he built the greatest narrative in the history of the world. Right. You know, so it's Ronan Farrow.

[01:04:39] He's, he's a monopolist level narrative speaker. He's there. He's our new God. I mean, I, I want to end on that one. I mean, I just think like my view of the culture is that like Sam Altman is going to be profiled endlessly that Ronan has built a reputation with story after story that people can assess for itself. Like, sure. Maybe if there was a lot of like skepticism, he could release more, more information. But, but I just think the answer is more journalism.

[01:05:07] Whereas your answer is scare Ronan out of doing that through like legal process. No, my, my answer is better structured journalism. Just have you. I mean, one interesting idea you have is like have it, have like the anonymous sources in some sort of like. Cryptographic hash. Yeah, exactly. So cryptographic hashes, data rooms, show your work, peer review. Like, I think these are all tools that can be combined to raise the quality of journalism. And I can, I can see it.

[01:05:37] I don't, making up anonymous sources. I just don't know that it's like, I don't think that's Ronan Farrow's like problem. I think your issue with Ronan Farrow is much more likely to be just like his selection of which, how to present the narrative. Exactly. And so if we now have the tools to judge the presentation of narrative. And that's what AI. I mean, this is, I mean, you're the guy who like brought down Gawker, which. I'm the guy who's done many things. Yeah, you've done many things.

[01:06:04] But I'm just saying part of, you're now building a company that sort of needs equally the people who hate the media and the media to like them. Like, what is your message for journalists when one of the things you're most known for is sort of what many journalists see as like a hostile act? Like, how are you going to get journalists to the table? But your own owners are very hostile. Hostile to? Journalism.

[01:06:27] Like Rupert Murdoch and the clickbait incentive structure of journalism today is very hostile to the art of journalism that, you know, you go to journalism school for. Yeah, well, I mean, clickbait sort of on the way. That problem was a sort of Facebook specific. Yeah. And some of the clickbait stuff. Yeah, it was more media reacting to the pressures of social media than something they necessarily wanted to do. The thing is that media is not in the driver's seat anymore. Right. Right.

[01:06:55] And it's because, you know, people like Rupert Murdoch and the Salzburgers 20 years ago didn't understand the unbundling of technology. And now that is, you know, it's ever present in their face. And they still don't understand it. Like, it's so painful to watch these legacy media owners. Like, you know, years ago I was talking to them about AI and they had no clue what was going on. And, you know, they did these sort of cash licensing deals with people like OpenAI. But they should have done equity deals. But they didn't.

[01:07:24] I mean, my worry with you is just the sort of, you know, if I think a lot of what you're doing is like very interesting and I support. And I like this idea of like having to actually like rank reporters and like assess them over time and trying to sort of figure out the objective truth online. And we're going to have all these problems like with AI. Like right now they depend on the media in some ways to adjudicate like prediction markets and stuff like that.

[01:07:48] But I do worry that a lot of it, like what you're actually doing in the beginning is sort of just the like go after stories and sort of for hire. Like we're going to, you know, figure out all the information we can to undermine like this story. Yes, absolutely. We should undermine. But you want to undermine fairly, right? It's like undermine. No, no. It's an editorial process. It's like undermine, you know, find all the information that could undermine the story.

[01:08:12] Because if I'm, you know, assigned to peer review a scientific publication that's going to go in like the journal of nature, I should do absolutely everything I can to find any flaws in the argument. Because if a major publication like the New England Journal of Medicine or The Lancet publishes even a modicum of false information, that can have disastrous consequences.

[01:08:33] And in particular, I point to the MMR causing autism scandal, right, where The Lancet published that article. And, you know, in retrospect, they should have done a lot more peer review. And to this day, you know, I think if you talk to your average American, they would think that the MMR vaccine causes autism. Right. And as someone who got measles or sorry, mumps when I was in college. Oh, yeah.

[01:09:02] Because there's not enough herd immunity. I think that very seriously. Right. And so you think about what damage has been done because journalists are not subject to that same level of peer review and scrutiny. Right. I agree with you. I mean, I think sometimes and I'll wrap up soon. I know I'm sure you have to go like the. You know, reporters sometimes because their employees are at a disadvantage on these like online, like talking about their stories. Like I feel like one thing that I've really had as an advantage is just like being self-published.

[01:09:32] Yeah, this is the subject. Then I can actually like respond. Whereas The New York Times is sort of like we want to publish the story and let that speak for itself. That's our editorial process. And so then you don't have this like a dialogue. Yeah. Whereas like for me, it's like I need the dialogue. I want more engagement. You want more. Yeah, exactly. So I support a lot of these things and I think some of it is just like the media industry shifting still to this online world where you have to be sort of like open. Yeah.

[01:09:57] And I don't think the legacy institutions, you know, they're adjusting now to the to the first unbundling of distribution. But there's they have no more coming. There's so much more coming and it's going to hit them like a tsunami. And they haven't even properly like thought about it. Aaron, thanks so much for coming on the show. Hopefully the first of many. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Thanks. That's The Newcomer Pod. Thanks for listening. Please like, comment, subscribe. Check out my other show, The Cerebral Valley Show. Also on YouTube.

[01:10:27] Go to the substack newcomer.co and read our coverage of Starps and Venture Capital. I'm Eric Newcomer, a longtime journalist. Now I say I'm an influencer who exceeds expectations. I ask hard questions about the startup and venture capital industry. Follow along wherever watching, reading and even coming to our events. I host The Cerebral Valley AI Summit. Thanks for all your support. I love the comments. I love the likes. Please keep them coming. Thanks so much. I'll see you next week.