Nadia Asparouhova: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, that's really interesting. It's interesting because if you identify the current mainstream media as affiliated with that Davos elite, then there is a growing field of independent media that is a new media. But you would not identify somebody like Joe Rogan as being in the Silicon Valley sphere, right? I guess these startup people don't have that much influence over them yet. I think they're trying to take that strategy. You have a bunch of founders Palmer Luckey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Brian Armstrong that will not really talk to mainstream media anymore. They will not give an interview to The New York Times but they will go to an individual influencer or an individual creator and do an interview with them. When Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta, he did not grant interviews to mainstream publications, but he went and talked to Ben Thompson at Stratechery. It fits really well with that mindset of — We're not necessarily institution building, we're going to focus on the power of individuals who defy institutions. And that is kind of an open question that I have about, what will the long term influence of the tech elite look like? Human history tells us that eventually all individual behaviors kind of get codified into institutions but we're obviously living in a very different time now. And I think the way that the Davos elite managed to really codify and extend their influence across all these different sectors was by taking that institutional mindset and thinking about academic institutions and media institutions, all that stuff. If the startup mindset is really inherently anti-institution and says we don't want to build the next Harvard necessarily, we just want to blow apart the concept of universities. Or we don't want to create a new CNN or a new Fox News, we want to just fund individual creators to do that same work but in this very decentralized way. Will that work long term? I don't know. Is that just a temporary state that we're in right now where no one really knows what the next institutions will look like? Or is that really an important part of this generation where we shouldn't be asking the question of “How do you build a new media network?”We should just be saying, “The answer is there is no media network. We just go to all these individuals instead.” Yeah, that's interesting. What do you make of this idea that these idea machines might be limited by the fact that if you're going to start some organization in them, you're very much depending on somebody who has made a lot of money independently to fund you and grant you approval. I just have a hard time seeing somebody who is a Napoleon-like figure being willing to live long term under that arrangement. The people who have this desire to dominate and be recognized, who are probably pretty important to any movement you want to create, will want to go off and just build a company or something that gives them an independent footing first. And they just won't fall under any umbrella.…

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