Full Episode Transcript
- Hi everyone. I’m Doug DeVos and welcome back to Believe. If you’re new to the show, you can find more episodes on Apple, Google, Spotify, and YouTube, and you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. My guest today is Blake Masters, had a great conversation with him recently. He’s a long time Silicon Valley entrepreneur and U.S. Senate candidate from Arizona. We’re gonna talk about big tech. Are we using it right? Are we building it wrong? Is big tech our future? Well, these questions are out there and they’ll affect us all. So now, let’s see what Blake Masters believes.
- We believe and have always believed in this country that man was created in the image of God, that he was given talents and responsibility and was instructed to use them to make this world a better place in which to live. And you see, this is the really great thing of America.
- It’s time to discover what binds us together and finding it has the power to transform our world. That’s what I believe. How about you? So I am tremendously honored to have Blake Masters with us today. Blake, welcome. We’re glad to have you here. Blake knows tech inside and out. Blake has been in Silicon valley for a long time, worked alongside a legendary entrepreneur, Peter Thiel. Blake, he’s well familiar with the principles around this and Blake has a lot going on. Blake’s running for the U.S. Senate in the state of Arizona. So Blake, before we start, I have to ask you about that. Public service and from a public service aspect, it’s hard, being in public service today is hard. And then to pursue something like that, I have a lot of admiration for you and for so many others who do it ’cause it’s tough to watch. So maybe tell us a little bit about why you’re doing that.
- Well, thanks Doug. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I get this question a lot. A lot of people wanna say like, “What are you doing? Like you work with Peter Thiel. You get to invest in all these cool technology companies. Why on earth would you give that up to go run for office?” And fair enough. It’s a good question. Maybe there’s a little something crazy about it, but I actually think that running for office and winning this Senate seat in Arizona right now is the most important thing I could be doing. I look around at what’s happening to the country and I think it’s unacceptable quite frankly. And we’ll talk a lot about big tech today, one reason I wanna get in there is because I know with my experience, I’m one of the few people who could actually write an advanced legislation that would meaningfully restrain some of these big tech companies from some of their worst offenses. I don’t think that’s gonna happen by default. I don’t think it’s gonna happen by accident. So I think you need a new generation of actually younger, more competent leadership to get in there and get some of the stuff done. So that’s what I’m gonna do. What’s the worst case? I think I’m gonna win, but if I didn’t, I can go back to my comfortable life, making money, having fun, working with Peter Thiel, but right now this just feels important. I feel called to do it.
- Oh, that’s great and I really appreciate that. My brother ran for governor of the state of Michigan years ago and the same thing, he felt called to do it. And so I’m really proud of you and your willingness to take that risk to step out there and to serve others in that way. So we appreciate it. So thanks for what you’re doing.
- Thank you.
- Blake, we’re gonna have some fun today talking about technology and the impact that it has in our life, but we wanna hear from you. Tell us, give us your perspective about not just technology, but big tech, this idea of these huge companies that have had such an influence, is that our future? Is that what we as a society or individuals need to be prepared for? And if so, what’s that future look like?
- Well, unfortunately I think big tech is gonna be a big part of the future. It’s precisely why we need to get in and get serious about helping shape that because I think if we just let it happen, which is kind of our attitude right now towards big tech, laissez-faire, then I think it’s an uglier future, just kinda like many aspects of the big tech present I think are pretty ugly now. Now, I’m pro-technology. You said this in your introduction, like everybody is enamored with the possibility and promise of technology. I think technology actually just means being able to do more with less. More output with less resources, that is the technology. And so we do need better technology in almost every aspect of our lives. The problem is, I think in the last 30 or 40 years, we’ve had this narrow cone of progress, the technological development only in this sort of narrow band of IT. And so yeah, your smartphone gets better. Now you have all these social media companies, but that’s not really progress. I actually think in a lot of ways that helps us live worse lives, not better lives. And so we’ll talk about all the giant network monopolies, but the key point is I think they’re here to stay. And so it’s not like an upstart rival that’s just gonna displace Facebook in two years. Facebook is here, it’s powerful. I think in many ways it’s a problem and we got to address that.
- I had an interesting conversation with another technology executive and talked about the promise of technology, when it started really from applying the principles of empowerment. And I remember early in the stages of e‑commerce with the Amway business, I remember my father and Van Andel go, “Wow, if we would’ve had these tools when we were direct sellers, think of what we could have done,” but somehow that promise seems to be elusive to find. But I have to recognize and acknowledge, look at what technology is providing us to do right now, have this conversation, have a bit of a voice. So there are some good things happening, but how do we stay focused on the good and avoid the things that maybe aren’t as good?
- Well, I think, I mean, this is neat. It’s good to be able to video chat with you. You’re in Michigan, right? I’m over here in Arizona.
- [Doug] Right.
- Sure, that’s neat, but there’s all these other ways to cut this stuff. Like, how many times a day do you rely on your GPS app on your phone? I mean, I use that all the time. And I can feel my spatial awareness, whatever module in my brain is responsible for telling me where I am in the world, that thing just shrinks, because we’re so reliant on this stuff. Go back and read letters that the founding fathers wrote to each other or that Carlisle wrote to Emerson or something. That’s what’s possible when people aren’t always looking at a phone or thinking in sort of 140 characters or TikTok sound bite. So yeah, some of this stuff is good, some of it’s neutral and it’s just the way it is, but a lot of it, I think has a very dark underbelly. But how do we focus on the good and sort of excise the bad? I think you just look at the biggest abuses and you start from there. So conservatives, certainly the ones I’m talking to in my political race, they’re upset about censorship. And I totally understand why, Whatever you think of president Trump, you have to agree, it’s crazy that he was ripped off of Facebook and Twitter while he was still president. I think that’s just really crazy. I don’t think that should be allowed. I don’t think that these big tech companies should be able to censor based on political speech. And so that’s an issue. I think even sort of in a politically neutral context, look at addiction. People are addicted to their smartphones. It’s a problem that not enough people talk about. And Facebook and Twitter, they employ psychologists right next to the software engineers to try to make these products, make these algorithms as addicting as possible. And so I think that’s a problem. Maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Devil’s in the details. We got to go and figure out what’s going on and what to do about it, but high level, I do think we can identify some very discrete abuses that these companies are perpetrating and just zoom in on those. I’m not trying to say you can’t have Facebook. I’m trying to say Facebook should not be allowed legally to serve targeted advertising to people it knows are under 18 years old.
- Well, you have young children and the idea of technology in one space, but social media seems like another application of it in a whole different way. Technology, whether it’s in the healthcare field, what they’re doing today, how they’re using technology to create better health outcomes, and as I’m involved with the local hospitals, and just to see how many advances that they can take in a relatively short period of time considering the scope of history, but social media seems to be a different take on it. And so maybe help us understand that distinction a little bit.
- Well, I think there’s something really unhealthy about social media. The promise of the internet in general was that it was gonna be liberating, it was gonna be individualistic. Everybody was gonna get to speak their mind. And we saw that, I think in the early web. And then I think because of just this hidden power of the targeted advertising business model, what you saw were the emergence of these giant network monopolies. Facebook is a monopoly. Twitter is a monopoly. And Google, slightly different contexts, less social, more search, but Google has a monopoly, and these companies are so entrenched and so powerful. You basically can’t hope to compete with them. Anytime someone does, the line is always, “If you don’t like it, just go build your own Twitter, go build your own Facebook.” Well, a company called Parler tried to do that and because they didn’t own the whole stack and the internet infrastructure, they were beholden to Amazon Web Services and Apple, to just let them on the App Store, they got shut down. And there was some political pretext for why it was appropriate, but actually it was just crushing upstart rivals. So these companies are very powerful. And then, yeah, I actually think social media isn’t so great. Like I think it’s actually really bad for people to focus on the screen. And Facebook is trying to tell us with the metaverse that we’re all just gonna be jacked into virtual reality headsets for hours a day, and I think that’s such a cope. We live in the real world. We should be using technology, as you said, in the healthcare sector, other sectors to make our real lives better and we shouldn’t be using it as an escape from those real lives. And I think that’s where it gets really dark and ugly. Most people spend over an hour a day on social media, scrolling through that endless feed. I think it’s actually really bad for people psychologically. That does not mean we should ban it, but it does mean we should have a government I think that’s tracking the problem and serious about making sure that it doesn’t get out of hand and I think it’s at least starting to get there.
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let’s take a different trail. Let’s go to your experience a little bit more. You’ve been in Silicon valley. You’ve been part of this. One of the aspects of the technology companies is this incredible, at least at some point in our history, unbelievable entrepreneurial space, just this explosion of ideas and creativity and look at the impact it’s had. Technology is now 12% of our GDP and it’s growing fast. It’s this huge, huge element. Somewhere in there, can you give us an insight in Silicon Valley about the culture? Because the culture always can take something and it can shift it a little bit to being positive or it can shift it a little bit to big negative. So as our listeners are kinda going through this, help us understand or give us some insights as to the culture behind some of the work that’s being done at these companies and what we need to know or what we should know as we kind of form our own belief.
- Yeah. It’s interesting. The culture, I think changes so much depending on the size and the scale of the company. And San Francisco, Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, these cultures, the wider sort of Silicon Valley tech cultures, they’re also not what they used to be. Unfortunately, they’re deteriorating. I think a lot of talent is leaving Silicon Valley. Things are becoming much more decentralized, but with those caveats, if you think about like classic Silicon Valley culture, maybe circa 2013, 2014, it was just very dynamic. And this was before Facebook and Google were around. They were ascendant, but they weren’t yet sort of super, super dominant in that you couldn’t possibly do something adjacent to their businesses. And so you had all these small companies, a dozen people working together, maybe a hundred people, once the company got to a series B level and each company has its own unique culture. And I think in a healthy startup, the mission of the company becomes the company culture. It’s very different from like a bank or an insurance brokerage or something where you’re doing your thing and that’s a well known, understood process. And then you try to have certain best HR practices, a good company culture. In a healthy dynamic startup that’s actually building new technology, I’ve seen how the culture is actually the mission. You wanna look at like Elon Musk and SpaceX. The culture at SpaceX was when he founded it and always has been, we got to build the best rockets for cheaper, that was it. That’s what people are obsessed with. And I think when you get really smart, talented people together and they’re all excited about “changing the world” is the cliché way to put it, but actually just building something that allows humans to do something they couldn’t do before, that’s technology that’s got a charisma of its own. And that’s when you get these really good cultures, and I think Facebook used to have that, to be clear. I think it was probably very exciting to work at Facebook, 2004 – 2010. But once you become a giant network monopoly, Twitter’s the best example of this, Twitter’s incredibly mismanaged. It’s horribly run. The culture’s horrible. But once they have that monopoly where they get to be Twitter and no one else does and no one can hope to compete it and all the journalists are on it and politicians are on it, that’s frozen, they have their monopoly profit stream, and then I think the culture really suffers. That’s where I think it gets very vulnerable to being infected by whatever you wanna call it, wokeism or social justice, where you get these huge copywriters in the company that are obsessed with politics, obsessed with social issues. This is not what tech companies should be focused on. They should be focused on innovating, making new tech, but once these companies become huge, giant administrative bureaucracies, I think they lose the culture and they become stagnant and you see that in the products that they build.
- Yeah, fascinating, and how culture is so elusive once you lose it, getting it back and bringing it back. You wrote something and talked about the idea and you’re in this space of innovation. Help us understand how that culture has shifted in the entrepreneurial space. ‘Cause you’ve written and talked about the fact that, the startups today aren’t looking to change the world. They’re just looking to get to a size so they can sell to Facebook or they can sell to some of the other big tech. Help us understand what that means and what impact that has on our innovation, our ability to innovate and our ability to keep moving forward in this space.
- Yup, well, if you imagine a spectrum and on one end is Elon Musk. He was not trying to sell a company. He wasn’t trying to make money. After he sold PayPal, he made a lot of money. He made 50 million or $100 million. He could have just retired. He put all that money back into his new companies, Tesla and SpaceX, he risked it all. Like I’ve never seen anybody in the whole world with a risk tolerance, with an appetite for risk like Elon. And so, okay, maybe you can’t actually do that, but people should directionally be more like that on the spectrum. On the other side of the spectrum, you’ve got a founder with a very consultant-like mindset and kinda just build some humble product or service that could never be a standalone business. You could never imagine it going public someday, but you’re doing it just because you’ve identified some niche in some giant corporate environment, Oracle or Facebook or something. And you think you can build something not to stand on its own, but just to fold in, just to sell to these companies. And maybe that’s still good in some sense. Good for you if you can get it to work. In theory, everybody wins, but the danger is if most tech entrepreneurs start gravitating too much to that side of the spectrum. And I’m seeing that, most people, young people, they know if they can just build something that could credibly threaten to compete with Facebook, someday, Facebook will just buy it and they’ll often buy it in its infancy for 5 or 10 million bucks. And okay, that’s good for the founders. And if you’re a 20-something founder, you’ve just made a little bit of money, but what would that founder have done with that company without Facebook? The world is sort of deprived I think of a realistic shot at getting some new product. And I’ve just seen too much of the culture as too little Elon and too more, “how do I sell to Zuckerberg?” That’s not what Zuckerberg was thinking when he built Facebook. In fact, he turned down a 1 billion offer, $1 billion from Yahoo. And I think his quote at the time was, someone said like “Mark,” ’cause Facebook probably wasn’t worth $1 billion at the time, and they’re like, “why did you turn down that enormous amount of money?” And he said, “Well, I like running Facebook and I’ve big plans for it. And yeah, it’s a lot of money, but I’m not sure what I would do with the money. I’d probably just wanna go start Facebook again.” and I think this was 2005 or six or whatever. And that was a healthy attitude that people who are building the future, that are building technology should have. And of course, I think Facebook became too big and too powerful and went down a lot of wrong paths, but that early entrepreneurial mindset was why it was able to also be so big and now I just think we have a lowering of ambition. This isn’t unique to tech. I think this is endemic in our society, but we just lower the bar for individual ambition. People start to think they have less agency. “Certainly I couldn’t be Elon Musk, so I wouldn’t even try,” and then you just end up doing something that’s more formulaic and boring.
- That’s a powerful thought and a scary thought. It’s really kinda saying we’re losing our edge, and the entrepreneurial spirit. In the Amway history, my father and Jay had an experience that we talk about it often where somebody wanted to buy them and they said, “No, we wanna have our own business.” They said, “Well, if you don’t sell, we’ll just compete with you, we’re pretty good. We can make those products. We can do this stuff. And they’re like, “No,” you know?
- Yeah. We started a business ’cause we wanted a business. And to see, in your experience, if that’s going away, that’s really scary, but you’re in the middle of also creating, through this fellowship, you’re creating entrepreneurs, you’re investing, you’re staying close to. And so how are you keeping that entrepreneurial spirit alive and what are you seeing in there? Are you seeing enough of those people who just wanna have their own business and are absolutely committed to keep moving forward?
- Well, I’d like to see more, certainly like to see more and-
- Yeah. Okay.
- but it is heartening to see that there are still are so many, actually, and young people, especially. So we started the Thiel Fellowship Program in 2011. And so it’s been running for about 10 years. I think there’s something like 200 – 240 fellows. And this is one of my favorite things that I’ve done professionally is just sort of be involved, shepherd this program. We pay-
- That’s fantastic. 240 fellows, that’s fantastic.
- We paid all of them $100,000 to drop out of college or stop.
- Wow.
- Like 10% of the kids go back, but if they go back, they go back to school with renewed clarity and focus. Like this time, they actually know why they’re going, but 90% don’t go back, and some of those, some start companies and they’re modest successes or the companies don’t work and people go start something else or get a job, but some have been fantastically successful. And it’s these young kids who are just basically accepting the offer that we provide. We don’t do the work. They build their companies. We just sort of, we’re out there and we’re saying, “Hi, it’s okay, if you’re really smart and talented, it’s okay not to go to college. In fact, you’d be better served trying to actually build something, develop your skills, build a product, go sell it, see what you can learn, see what you can figure out.” That’s a much better education for a whole lot of people than going to a modern university today and sitting in a classroom for five, six hours a day, just listening to what some professor tells you. The university education system is not all that it used to be and I think there’s tremendous opportunity for young people who just wanna build something. And so that’s what the Fellowship exists to do, not just to help the 20 – 25 kids that get it every year, but also to be a beacon and to show people that you should at least ask the question before going to college, is, does this make sense for me, or would I be better served and better serve my fellow man by getting out there and building something?
- What a great idea, what a great theory to go through and engage people and give them the opportunity. Because if you have that thought and somebody doesn’t come alongside you, it’s hard to move forward, but this idea of using technology or using, in this case, investment, as empowering for those folks and where so many times in tech, we’re missing that. So, let me ask you, let me shift just a little bit here. Talk about the perspective of big technology from us as users or consumers. How do we think about consuming? As you say, anything could be addictive. If you wanna have a glass of wine, that’s great, but if it becomes addictive… Anything that you kinda do in life in moderation seems to be generally okay, but in this space, it seems we need a little education, especially for those of us who might be a little older, who are not native to the use of technology. How do we think about it and how do we, in your situation with young children, think about creating an environment where as a consumer of technology, we’re a little smarter about it and we search for the good side and avoid the bad stuff?
- Yep. No, it’s a great question. It’s tough ’cause the real answer is that people need to be disciplined, like self-discipline. Like, we know what it looks like. It looks like keeping everything in moderation and doing what you know is good for you, what you know is healthy. People know that sitting on their smartphones for hours on end, just like being addicted to Netflix, or bad food, or sort of lack of exercise, like we know that’s bad for us, but the default is the path of least resistance. And so people do it. I mean, self-discipline is a real problem. I think in big tech contexts, it’s compounded because it’s actually a little bit less clear that this stuff is bad for us. I think we know it intellectually, but in the moment, what this stuff does is it really does hack our psychology. You see having the algorithms are so good at knowing what you like, what you’re likely to like based on content that you’ve consumed for the last year or however long you’ve been on the platforms. These things just get better and better and I think that starts to look predatory. We give so much information as consumers to Google, to Facebook, to Apple, if you have an iPhone, and these companies build a profile of everywhere you’ve been. They know when you go to the dry cleaners. They know, oh, this ad, you watched the whole ad versus only five seconds of that ad. And they’ve got smart machine learning algorithms to make inferences about your preferences based on your consumption patterns. And so when you see something in your feed, I think it’s easy for most people to just say, “Oh, well this is my feed. It’s a greeting on the newspaper. It’s right there.” People don’t quite realize how hyper-targeted that feed is to you. It’s designed to make you spend more time on the platforms and it’s designed to make you click on ads that will make those companies money. And I think people know this, again, but they know it at some high level intellectual thing. They don’t really know how the sausage gets made, which is what I’ve seen. They don’t really know how vulnerable, everybody, myself included. I’m biased to say this advertising stuff doesn’t work on me. No, it works on everybody. That’s the point. It can short circuit our psychology. And so I really worry about it. I mean, I think Apple doing the screen time reminders, you can set reminders to say, Hey, you’ve been on this app for 30 minutes and you can even shut the app down, I think that’s like a pretty good tool to give to people, but it requires self-discipline. You can just hit ignore and I think a lot of people do that. The biggest thing that we can do here is look out for our children. And I will tell you most of the CEOs and software designers that I know in Silicon Valley, they do not let their kids play with screens. They don’t give their kids devices, whether your kids are 2 years old or 12 years old. These people know what their products are doing. Like me, I don’t give my kids an iPhone. My kids are seven, five, and two. We give the boys wooden blocks carved from Amish country or whatever and we let them play in the mud outside. We try to give them a real childhood ’cause we know how destructive these screens can be. So it’s a hard problem to solve, but I think it starts by being hyper aware that it’s much worse than people think.
- And I’ll bet your kids love those wooden blocks.
- Oh, they love them.
- I bet they love being in the mud.
- And they make cardboard forts. I mean, this is what kids should be doing, not just looking at an iPhone, but you go to a family restaurant and you look around and you see families and they should be having a dinner table conversation, but they’re not because every kid is just glued to a phone, right?
- Right.
- And that’s really bad, like it’s really, really bad.
- Yeah, exactly. There’s this idea of being out and I don’t know. I hate to say the good old days, but the good old days before that, you didn’t have anything. Parents just said, “Go outside, and when it gets dark, come home.”
- Yeah, figure it out. Have fun.
- Yeah, figure out what you gotta do. Take care of yourself. Climb a tree, do something. And if you hurt yourself really bad, we’ll hear you yell, I guess.
- Yeah.
- We’ll go from there. So we talked about self-discipline on the user side, but for these big companies, to a certain extent, these are smart people and they know if they overstep or maybe if they go too far, they may hurt their market. Is there a calculation that’s being made that this can be done and it’s gonna be okay or is it, like you said, so Apple creates a tool to at least give you an option to discipline yourself? Are big tech companies going to be serious about pursuing that, be serious about limiting themselves for how far they might reach or is the culture too far gone?
- Well, I do agree that they’re smart people and I know these questions are on their radar. I think you’re right though. I think they make the calculation that it’s fine. Like it’s good for the business model, both to pursue all these things that I think are predatory or exploitative. It’s also good for the business model to have some good PR around all the things that you’re doing to curb the abuses. So Facebook gets out and says, here’s our teen mental health initiative, and they’re trying to undo some of the damage that they’ve done. I think a lot of that is a PR stunt. Some of it may be sincere, but the point is they’re actively doing damage every day. And so if you roll out a program that’s trying to mitigate some of that, like fine, but it’s actually, they’re not going to go as far as they need to. And I also think these companies are emboldened because they know that as it’s currently constituted, Congress has no chance, no prayer of meaningfully restraining these companies. Like you’ve seen the tech hearings and what an opportunity it is to get Mark Zuckerberg in the hot seat, you get to grill him. There’s a lot of questions that I would love to ask him in a Senate hearing, but some of these senators and I know many of them, some of them, God bless them, some of the nicest people you’ll meet, but they’re like 75 or 80 years old.
- Yeah.
- And they get Mark Zuckerberg in the hot seat and it’s just, they don’t even know the basic vocabulary. And Mark Zuckerberg is smart. I disagree with him on so many things, but he is a smart person. And he will just evade you and walk circles around you. I mean, the man built Facebook and you get these senators that are talking about the internet in ways that make any person under the age of 40 absolutely keel over with laughter, and Wall Street sees this. And so after the hearings, Facebook stock price goes up and Zuckerberg is, he’s up there saying, “Regulate me, like, bring it on, please help me, please regulate me.” I mean, he knows that these people don’t have a chance. And so I think the companies know, yeah, ultimately the market decides, but if the market is hundreds of millions of people who are basically addicted to your monopoly product, I think that’s a pretty inefficient market. And so I think the companies know that, for the time being, they can basically get away with whatever they want.
- Elaborate on that a little bit for the time being. Are we gonna learn as a society or as consumers, are we gonna learn? Irregardless of government interaction or intervention or anything like that, over time, generally people learn. Can we learn before it’s too late?
- I think that’s an open question here. I’m optimistic, but I’m only optimistic because I think the government has a role to play here. And I think we’re gonna get politicians like myself in office, others will join me and help. And I think it’s gonna take that. I don’t think consumers will just decide not to like Facebook or… Okay, there’s a good version of this already happening. People are peeling off of Facebook classics product. That product is aging. Young people, 20 year olds, they don’t use Facebook classic, but they do use Instagram and they do use WhatsApp, also properties owned by Facebook or Meta, is the Meta company now. And Facebook can just buy anything new that’s taking hold and I think that’s a problem.
- Keep finding the next one.
- Yeah, but the corporate power behind this. And Facebook is pretty good at integrating all of this data. They get data from people from WhatsApp, from Instagram, from Facebook classic, because it’s the same corporation. They roll it all up, manipulate it and turn it around to do what they do, which is serve targeted advertising in hyper efficient ways. So I think they’ll find a new front end to addict people, to serve the youth that’s always looking for the next thing. It’s not the social media app that their parents are on, but I don’t think this is a happy tale of, oh, in 10 years, people will just get tired of this and innovation will happen and Facebook won’t be a thing. I think these network monopolies are probably gonna be here with us for a lot longer than we’d want to admit.
- One of the things that you touched on earlier, but you talked about the ability to turn on the machine so people have a voice or can participate in technology, primarily social platforms, or turn it off with regard to censorship. I’m engaged with the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and free speech. It’s not only an element of the First Amendment, but it just, it’s so central to freedom. And how should we be thinking about this concept of the ability, our founders, the framers of the constitution, the declaration of independence, this idea to speak your mind, that you have a right to speak your mind? And then now, we seem to be in an era where the public square tends to be these platforms, but somebody else makes a decision of whether you can speak your mind or not. How should we be thinking about free speech in this environment?
- Yeah, I think it’s a huge problem. I think these big tech companies and the platforms they offer have become the new town squares. It doesn’t mean you need to nationalize them and seize them as public utilities exactly, but it means it’s a new ballgame. This is a new ballgame and you can’t just say, oh, well, Facebook’s a private company. Well, first of all, no, it’s not because in some key sense, it’s like working closely with say, this current Biden White House. White House Communications Office flags certain posts about vaccines or whatever and they request that Facebook removes those because they’re misinformation and Facebook is happy to comply because they want a good relationship with the government. And that right there, that’s a fusion of corporate and state power that makes me very uncomfortable. It should make all sorts of civil libertarians uncomfortable. But even if you wanted to say, Facebook is a private company, okay, fine. It’s also more powerful than most governments. It’s absolutely huge, genuinely multinational. And I think we can afford, because it’s got a billion people on the platform or whatever, to treat it differently than a local bakery or a local hair salon, and I think we have to. So the easiest fix here for the First Amendment free speech stuff is to simply treat these companies as common carriers. We already know how to do this. This is how we treat the phone company. This is how we treat a train or an airline. And these companies, they can be private, quasi private, anyway. They can make returns for their shareholders, but they’re not allowed to discriminate against their customers based on the content of their speech. The phone company can’t kick you right off because they’re listening in and we’re having a political conversation. So I have no idea why we would treat Facebook or Twitter to a different standard and be more permissive, especially when we see all this evidence that these companies censoring people based on their political speech. So that’s not an innovative solution. We already know how to do it. That just takes political will. And you could draw the line somewhere that doesn’t impact small businesses or startups trying to get off the ground, but once you have, I don’t know, 50 million users in a communications utility or platform, we’re gonna regulate you like a common carrier and you’re not gonna be able to discriminate against users based on the content of their political speech. Hard to get done, but it’s actually a simple solution and you can imagine in the next few years, us being successful at getting that done.
- Fascinating to think through this, the will to really think about this differently. And what you’re bringing up to me, what I’m hearing from you is we have to think differently, that there may be some old models we can use, like you say, a common carrier model that we’ve applied to other things, but this is here to stay.
- Yeah.
- And we’re gonna have to figure out how to… What I’m hearing from you is you’re talking about the different roles and responsibilities either the companies have, or the regulators have, or consumers have, or the marketplace has, or innovators have of how we play in this. And because this is so big, pervasive, and impactful, it’s really challenging us.
- Yup.
- [Doug] Am I hearing that correctly?
- That’s right and we’re only talking about what we understand well now, which is sort of like Facebook and censorship. And what about all the future developments? What about facial recognition technology? As that becomes more and more ubiquitous, every time you step outside your house, your face is getting captured by government entities, also by private businesses. Where does that data go? Who owns it? Who can do what with it? Deep fakes. this idea that as technology gets good enough, video rendering and stuff, anybody can make a video of you or anybody else that looks 100% lifelike, realistic. They match vocal patterns. I can make a video of a political opponent saying whatever I want them to say and it would almost be indistinguishable from reality. I don’t think people realize how much of a game changer that is, how much of a live electrical wire that is. Like if you could just see a video of somebody and not know if it was actually them or a simulation, because the video is so good, all bets are off there. Like it starts to look really weird, especially in this current internet culture where you can get a mob, Twitter mob, ginned up and excited about any perceived impropriety. And so I don’t pretend to have the solutions about that, but these are the problems. It’s, we need to start to think about the problems that we’re gonna see in three, four or five years, because if we wait until they’re just here on us, I think the regulatory response will be either inadequate or maybe overkill and ham-handed, but it’s a brave new world out there with all this new technology. And so we need to think creatively and differently about how do we make this work for us? How do we make sure that this helps humans and families to flourish instead of just destroy us maybe slowly or more dramatically?
- The timeframe that that tech works in, sometimes it’s easy for me or my generation when you’re a little older to, “well, next 3 to 5, 7 to 10 years.” You’re talking about massive shifts in a short amount of time-
- Everything’s fast, yeah.
- that we’re not prepared to think about, and that’s what we’re trying to do I think here with this discussion has helped us to be prepared to think about these sorts of things so that we can get ahead a little bit so we’re not reacting. I got a couple more things, and then I’ll let you go. Blake has just been so fun and your insights into technology, just wonderful, so thank you. You touched on civility or the mob that jumps on. And again, I’ll go back to what I’ve learned with my work with the National Constitution Center, that this was a huge fear, that you would have big crowds that would gather. And I remember when my my dad would yell at us as kids and say, “I’m gonna read you the Riot Act.” I learned that that was a real thing.
- [Blake] Right. There was a real Riot Act, that that’s what would had to calm the mob. Here’s the laws concerning a mob, but on a social platform, the mobs can get going. It has devastating impact on an individual.
- [Blake] That’s right.
- How do you see that impacting our culture as a society?
- Well, I think it has a huge negative effect. I think it has a chilling effect on free speech. If you’ve got an opinion that you suspect might be unpopular, you’re not gonna say it. You need to either be so independently wealthy and not beholden to anybody, or you just need to have an enormous appetite for risk that most people don’t have, sensibly, to actually speak your mind, and I think that’s a problem. It’d be one thing if these online mobs just stayed online. If it’s just about people saying mean things about you online, well, they’ve got a right to do that. You’ve got a right to say what you think. They’ve got a right to say what they think. And if that gets ugly and insulting or whatever, I mean, I believe in tools to filter that stuff out, but I believe people should say whatever they want, as long as it’s legal, literally as long as it’s not like immediately inciting violence. The problem is these online mobs, when they form, they don’t stay online. There are very real world consequences for the people who get targeted, who gets scapegoated. It’s very easy to direct that mob to call that person’s employer and demand that they be fired. And very often the employers cave, even though maybe the target offense or alleged offense was, just purely private in nature, had nothing to do with the employer. Maybe it was at the employee’s house, but the employer, they have their own set of incentives and they wanna get the PR crisis away. And so they fire the person, or people actually get stalked and doxed and harassed and people show up at their house and protest, I mean, true mob behavior. And once that gets going, once it goes too far, it’s very hard to put that cat back in the bag. And so I really worry about the consequences of this online behavior and you’re gonna think it’s so easy for these algorithms and viral videos to get people excited about stuff that they would have never seen before. And the counterpoint is the transparency is really good. Now, all of a sudden, every police officer’s wearing body cameras. I think in some ways that’s really good, actually probably net protects the police officers too. But when one viral video, especially when it can be clipped to not show the full context and therefore sometimes, very misleading, when that can get out, and boom, in the next one hour, millions of people have made up a judgment and they’re targeting an individual. That can get really out of hand. We’ve seen some examples of that. And I think frankly, the worst examples are still yet to come. So just a huge problem, frankly.
- Yeah. We need to stay aware of it. We’ve had your time, Blake. This has just been such an enlightening and informative conversation. We’ll kinda wrap it here. You talked about, on this topic, you talked about kind of the the linkage where a political arm or the government talks to a social media company and says, Hey, this is now misinformation, or they’ve made a decision that it’s right or wrong, and then a company responds. And you’ve talked about competition trying to find their way in, but going through the infrastructure of actually competing with a tech giant today. There’s so many bits and pieces that are controlled by other tech giants that this idea of speaking truth to power or being able to compete seems to be more elusive than we may wanna believe-
- That’s true.
- as a society. But is that real? I mean, it’s a pretty scary thing. And if it is, then help us understand some of the things we could be thinking about or should be doing to restore the ideas of entrepreneurship, empowerment, freedom, individual character, and civility in our dialogue. Help us understand. Maybe we can kinda close with that topic. It’s a real simple one. I know.
- Yeah. Well, the problem is as bad as you say. I mean, I think the government is very interested right now in working with and controlling these big tech companies, I think in a bad way, like the Biden administration fusing with Facebook. And so much of the internet infrastructure is owned by the same handful of companies that all kind of have the same politics and the same thoughts on this stuff. So that’s dangerous, but I think there’s two things I’d say. One, on the entrepreneur side of things, people really can build good things if they feel like they have individual agency and if they set out to do something very ambitious, Elon Musk at SpaceX. Like he is the reason why we’re able to take U.S. astronauts to the space station now ’cause the space shuttle was decommissioned. Elon knew he could build a better rocket company. He did it by being vertically integrated and by not relying on the big defense contractor primes. So he knew that he had to go outside the system, a really hard thing to do, but he got it done. Another example, a company that we invested in is Rumble. Rumble is kind of a online video platform, best thought of as maybe a alternative to YouTube that’s truly about free speech and the way Rumble… And the founder Chris Pavlovski is really talented. They started in like 2013 and they own so much of their own infrastructure, like all the servers, almost every nut and bolt, as much as you can own, without building sort of parallel internet. It works on the real internet, but like they own all their stuff and they built that company up that way so that they could be censorship-resistant. And so things like that give me hope, but not every entrepreneur is Elon or Chris P. And so I do think we need a political solution here too. And this is why I’m running. This is why I’m excited to get in office and we need new legislative solutions. Like we need to make sure… I don’t want the government to regulate absolutely everything. Like I’m a pro free market guy, but I think the government’s job is to set the conditions of fair play that then these companies can operate freely within. And right now, it’s just a little too laissez-faire and you get so much corporate concentration. Frankly, I think it’s bad for consumers and it’s gonna be a really interesting fight in the next 5 or 10 years, but I’m optimistic both on the legislative side and if we can encourage more individual founders to have high agency, high ambition, like Elon and Chris P. there are some good counter examples to this worrying trend.
- Well, Blake Masters, I thank you so much for your time. It’s been a fascinating conversation. Blake, for our audience’s insight, in the technology space has worked with Peter Thiel, but your work individually and your commitment to public service, you talk a lot about legislative about the right, smart solutions and the proper role of government. And so your willingness to put your neck out there and take risks in search of serving in public office is admirable. So thank you for that and thank you for enlightening all of us about these ideas of freedom, and empowerment, of individual agency, and character, and entrepreneurship, and innovation, these ideas and how they apply to this question of big tech in our future and how we need to think about it. So, Blake, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us and love to check back in with you as time goes on to keep this topic fresh ’cause as you said, it’s not going away and it’s moving fast.
- That’s right. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
- Great, take care. Have a great day, Blake. Thanks for everybody. We’ll wrap up this episode of Believe and a great appreciation for Blake Masters. Thanks, everybody.