Balaji Srinivasan | NYT vs Tech, Go Direct, Prove Correct | 🟡🔴🔵 MTS Live

Erik Torenberg (0:00)

And we have Balaji Srinivasan, the founder of Network State, who is our first special guest live in the Situation Room. Balaji, welcome to the Situation Room for the very first time.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:12)

Well, thank you. And, oh, technically, by the way, I'm the author of Network State, founder of Network School, ns.com. But I'm also an investor in MTS. Wow, how about that? Erik is going to RT that, or something like that after this. So I'm very pleased. And I've been talking about media stuff for a long time. Erik's been crushing it. And this looks like it's going to be fun.

Go ahead, Theo.

Theo Jaffee (0:37)

Balaji, why don't you contextualize where we are right now in this media moment, right? We've been talking about where tech fits in, how tech needs to build its own media landscape. We've also been talking about how the New York Times has continued to grow.

How do you kind of make sense of where we're at in 2026, as you've been on this sort of 10-plus year quest to not just understand the media landscape, but also build within it?

Balaji Srinivasan (1:05)

That's right. So, okay, essentially, there's a long version and there's a short version, which is tech and media actually share a common root in that we're both about the collection, presentation and dissemination of information, right? So, the collection of information, like their sourcing, our data, right? Presentation, user interface or articles, dissemination, distribution, whether on social feeds or newsprint or what have you, right? So, at a very structural level, we are the internet first digital alternative to the 20th century printing press newspaper kind of model. We are essentially a contender, a competitor for what is upstream. If you ask the question of what is upstream of, at least in the West or in the Anglosphere, and you keep asking the question, what's upstream of a factory? Well, it's political, this, and it's capital. And what's upstream of that? Well, eventually, you get to money and media, because media is upstream of politics, and money is upstream of media, but media is also upstream of money, and that's in Ouroboros where that circle eats its tail. So, the venture capitalists and the journalist, the tech and media are actually sort of locked in a struggle for what is upstream.

And that's a good way of seeing it. Like, who is at the control panel flipping the switches, hitting the buttons, and so on and so forth. And with the advent of the internet, over the last 10 years, really the last 3 years, essentially, speech has actually been freed for the first time in our lifetimes, because until, you know, essentially the 2010s, like, you know, there's that saying, freedom of speech belongs to those who... freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, or never argue with the man who buys ink by the barrel, which meant that unless you had a newspaper that you inherited, or a TV license, or a radio license, all of which cost many millions of dollars, you could talk to your neighbor in the 80s or 90s, but nobody could hear you, right? With the advent of social media and Twitter and blogs and so on and so forth, all these voices that previously had no distribution had distribution, which caused a cacophony and all of this kinds of chaos in the 2000s and 2010s and early 2020s. And there was a counterreaction that tried to censor all those voices and a counter counterreaction that uncensored them with Elon's purchase of X. And that has brought us to the present day. And one of the consequences of that was the media was, though we didn't set out to do it, like Twitter set out to basically be tweeting breakfast, right? Facebook set out to share likes and poke people or what have you. And those ended up disrupting classifieds and disrupted legacy media, disrupted print media. There's a great graph of the print media disruption.

So as a consequence, imagine like a kid who just grows to be 6'6, 250 in an elevator and squashes everybody against the wall, right? That's like what the internet was, right? Where we just like grew and just added all of this, you know, muscle mass and we didn't mean to do it, right? But we became really, really, really, really big and went from cute gadget makers and toaster makers to, in my view, the single most important force in the world that's still underestimated. You know Orwell, the writer, obviously? Yeah, so he had this saying which is, it takes an enormous effort to see what is in front of one's own face. And what's in front of our own face basically every single moment of the working day?