The Exchanges

Q Let's talk a little bit more about your background, Max. You grew up in Iowa and you went to Stanford as did I, and you're also, The editor of the Stanford review. So I was the editor of Stanford review when I was there. Peter Thiel kind of helped get it going. 15 years before me. What was, was being the editor of the review relevant for all this work?

A Oh, totally. I think I published upwards of 50 pieces while I was the editor of the review. Those were all sort of, you know, tirades. They were opinion pieces. They were rants. Uh, there was a funny one where Palantir was recruiting at the Stanford Computer Science Career Fair, and a group of students, uh, students, uh, for the liberation of all people, slap, uh, um, they were protesting Palantir's inclusion, and I was like, oh, that's odd. This was related to Palantir's work with border enforcement. And so, it turned out that at the same career fair, there were four or five Chinese state-owned telecom companies, and so I wrote a little piece that, you know, if you're, if you're really socially conscious, and you're, you know, you're, you don't, you don't want to work at Palantir for ethical reasons, you've got some good options. You can work for the Chinese state. This is sort of tongue-in-cheek. There was a lot of other stuff. I was following campus activists. I was following campus nonsense. I was one of the first people in America to write a big article about Chesa Boudin, who was the DA in San Francisco right after he'd been elected.

AI assessment note: “Oh, totally. I think I published upwards of 50 pieces while I was the editor”

Q So it's not just a magazine. What are you going to, what are we doing to do something that's intergalactic?

A So intergalactic media is It's American propaganda, and arena is our most important organ, but we don't want it to just be limited to a magazine. We're going to be publishing very high-end coffee table books soon. Those are going to be hopefully available for sale early next year. Um, we're going to do some fun stuff around the semi-quincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the United States. Lots of fun stuff being organized at the federal level there, but we think there's going to be some collectibles that people are going to like. Uh, and related to the hostile media outlets, we're going to be doing more breaking news soon with this, with this thing that we're creating called the arena wire service. Uh, the old wire services used to literally send news across the wires so that they would arrive at these desks. So Bloomberg and Reuters and the Associated Press still do this. And so at newsrooms around the world, they have these receivers where the, where the, where the stories will come in. Um, we want to give people an opportunity to do breaking news and, Announce things with an outlet that doesn't totally hate them. It's impractical to do breaking news on a quarterly schedule in print just because it's, uh, you know, it'd be, it'd be late breaking, uh, to, to put it, to put it mildly. So there's going to be a new section on the website soon. The arena, the arena wire service…

AI assessment note: “We're going to be publishing very high-end coffee table books soon.”

Q in general about all these places are broken. And like, how much, how much does that come from the universities? Because you, because you go to Columbia, we all kind of know, we've kind of seen Columbia's clearly corrupt, clearly just like an example of like a terrible place, which is why the administration's had to go after it so hard. Is it the universities themselves in the disruptive journalism?

A I think it's these series of intellectual bubbles, uh, universities and journalism being two extreme liberal bubbles, where they're both sort of elite areas. You have people that are affluent in these areas. And If someone spends enough time in an 80 or 90% left-leaning area, then they'll begin to think that anything other than 80 or 90% left is unfair, and that it's, that the scales are being tilted. I think that this explains why a lot of left-wing journalists, when, when Elon Musk took over Twitter and started, you know, you know, cleaning up shop, they were under the impression that that was, like, explicitly tipping the scales in favor of the right, if it was anything other than 80 to 90% left.

AI assessment note: “I think it's these series of intellectual bubbles, uh, universities and journalism”

Q What are some of the examples that you've seen in, like, I think a lot of our audience might not be familiar with the fact that, like, Wired and TechCrunch have, like, gone crazy. Like, what's the evidence?

A So I was down in Brownsville, Texas, at Starbase for the very first launch of the Starship, which is the biggest rocket in history, um, and it blew up. This was a, what they call a RUD at SpaceX, Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. Uh, it was, like, a few minutes into the flight, and The mood down there was, like, totally electric. The team was going wild, even though it blew up. And all of the headlines that day, you know, Elon Musk's very bad day, Elon Musk fails with rocket, rocket explodes. If you had read the headlines from basically every media outlet down there, you would have thought that it was this catastrophic failure and that, and that Elon Musk was licking his wounds and sort of cowering in fear. You know, if these outlets had known anything about SpaceX, they would have known that the first three SpaceX launches ever in 2008 all blew up on the pad. And then the fourth launch succeeded, and since then, they've launched hundreds and hundreds of rockets successfully. And so, the reaction of the media was to immediately paint it as a failure, and if you had read that that day and believed them, then you would have believed it was a failure too, and there was a bias. They wanted to paint it as a failure, or maybe they were so deluded they drank their own Kool-Aid that they actually did believe it was a failure.

AI assessment note: “the reaction of the media was to immediately paint it as a failure”

Q And now it feels like They've attacked, like, so many of my successful friends unfairly that A, I think it, like, drives these people to, like, to the other side. These people are now, like, more bold in their values and views, and B, it's just, like, people don't believe it anymore, right?

A Yeah. Um, there was a time when people who were leaning toward the right or just, you know, doing their work would get attacked, and they would think that that represented, like, a real groundswell of support against them, and in fact, it's not true. It's just emanating from this sort of hateful element of the media, And today it's become almost a badge of honor because of how ridiculous the attacks have become. It's not just Marc Andreessen. It's not just you. It's not just Elon. It's not just the people with names. You know, they'll, they'll attack anyone that they think they can get a scalp on. It's not working anymore. And it has become an effective tactic to signal to the rest of the public that you're against these people just because of how crazy they are.

AI assessment note: “today it's become almost a badge of honor because of how ridiculous the attacks”

Q It's funny. So, so you have this like decayed thing that's losing even its power to, to attack. Maybe it makes you look good if it attacks you, but it's just kind of fading away. What comes next for media? Like, what do we build? What do we create? Like, like, should our people be creating these things too? Like, like, how do we do it?

A Yeah. There's clearly a lot more room for more media You know, products, projects, companies. Uh, we think that audience trust and, you know, premium media is going to be the future. If people don't believe you, then you've lost before the games even started. And if things feel like they're low end or feel like they're being, they're being produced on a, on a shoestring budget where it's like, why do I even care? Uh, nobody's going to want to pay attention to that. Uh, so we're trying to do the opposite of both of those, make something high end, make something that people trust that people want to show off. And that they're actually proud to be associated with rather than just getting it in the mail or whatnot.

AI assessment note: “we think that audience trust and, you know, premium media is going to be the future.”