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Blake Masters

Board Member, The Thiel Foundation · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

authorinvestorexecutivefounderpolitician@bgmasters ↗LinkedIn ↗blakemasters.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Blake Masters co-authored the business book Zero to One with Peter Thiel, adapted from notes he took at Stanford Law School. He previously co-founded the legal research startup Judicata, served as Chief Operating Officer of Thiel Capital, and ran as the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Arizona in 2022.

10statements → 2claims → 0claims resolved → 3.7/5average certainty → 2.8/5average debate potential → 1said about them ↓

2 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 1 assertion · 1 opinion · 7 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertion are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Blake argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

286 words/min while actually speaking · 50.8 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Blake Masters: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,500 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Blake Masters said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Masters: Society risks conflating technological progress exclusively with computer innovation
“The more that, that goes we run the risk of just sort of conflating progress with computers and kind of stop, you know, stopping demanding it in all these other, you know, other contexts.”
Blake Masters Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:31 a16z Podcast | Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One”
Insight
Masters: Every great business is built on a secret
“When you come out and declare that, like, hey, secrets exist, and every great business is built on a secret, I think it just I think it just shifts the conversation towards a more, you know, taking a more ambitious tilt.”
Blake Masters Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:46 a16z Podcast | Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Masters: Future trajectory hinges entirely on developing new technology
“Actually the future is going to be, you know, radically better. Than what we have now, or it's going to be radically worse, and that's going to hinge on the question of whether we can develop new technology.”
Blake Masters Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:21 a16z Podcast | Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Masters: Tech progress since the 1970s was mostly limited to IT
“And since since the early seventies we think there's been tons of Globalization and limited progress in technology. Almost all that progress has been confined to IT, which of course we know all about in Silicon Valley.”
Blake Masters Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:12 a16z Podcast | Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One”
Insight
Masters: 'Disruption' framework is designed for incumbent firms, not startups
“Disruption is a term very much anchored in the vantage point of like bigger firms. The book was written for bigger firms as to how to avoid You know, threats from these technology startups.”
Blake Masters Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:17 a16z Podcast | Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One”
Insight
Masters: Focus on becoming the last mover, not a competitor, in an industry
“What you really want to do is, is ignore competition and figure out how you can be the last mover in any industry, how you can define it. You never want to be like a competitive player in social networking. You want to be the company that defines social networ…”
Blake Masters Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:42 a16z Podcast | Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One”
Insight
Masters: Every company is a conspiracy to change the world
“Every company is a conspiracy to change the world. And like when you bring someone on, You can recruit someone if you can successfully convince them that your secret is, is valuable and that you can pull it off.”
Blake Masters Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:47 a16z Podcast | Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One”
Insight
Masters: Publicly sharing all beliefs implies holding only conventional views
“If you're comfortable telling like, you know, everything, you know, or think to be true on a podcast, then it actually literally means like you have purely conventional beliefs.”
Blake Masters Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:15 a16z Podcast | Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One”
Opinion
Masters: Food production cannot achieve Moore's Law-style exponential growth
“It would be really hard actually to like improve you know, global food production in any sort of exponential way that, that resembles Moore's law.”
Blake Masters Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:16 a16z Podcast | Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One”
Insight
Masters: Startups cannot match Google or Facebook compensation to recruit top talent
“And I think that's the only way that if you're a startup, that's the only way that you're going to, you know, you're not going to be able to pay as much as Google or Facebook at this point. And that's the only way to attract people. Probably.”
Blake Masters Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:41 a16z Podcast | Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One”

The other half of the tape: Blake Masters's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Marc Andreessen 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
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0112019episodes it came up in
000.50.5112019episodesmentions per episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One” Jan 2, 2019 10m
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