Blake Masters warns Big Tech’s dominance—Google’s 92% search monopoly, Apple’s GDP-sized profits, and Amazon’s book bans like Harry Became Sally—fuels censorship (e.g., Trump bans vs. Taliban accounts) and addictive design harming teens. He frames these firms as "common carriers" demanding neutrality, exposing partisan bias (Republicans blocked 53x more often) and surveillance capitalism’s election manipulation risks. Masters ties their globalist ideology to open borders and woke conformity, urging regulation despite libertarian skepticism, while contrasting Silicon Valley’s elite hypocrisy on screen time with its addictive products. The fight, he argues, is pivotal for free markets and American values. [Automatically generated summary]
So if there is one issue that I get beaten up over more than any other, it is my approach to big tech and my feeling that big tech needs to be stopped from censoring our ideas and from threatening our free speech.
And the libertarians especially climb down my throat whenever I say anything about this because they are supposedly independent actors, not government actors.
And for some reason, independent actors are allowed to take away the rights with which our creator endowed us.
Blake Masters, who is currently running for Senate in Arizona, wrote a terrific piece about this in the Wall Street Journal.
Blake Masters is the president of the Thiel Foundation to promote science and innovation.
He is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, the co-author with Peter Thiel of Zero to One Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future.
Blake, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks, Andrew.
Great to be here with you.
So I just want to read a little bit of your op-ed in the journal.
It's called Reclaiming Our Independence from Big Tech.
And the subhead was Companies that Censor Political Speech, Harm Competition, and Ruin Our Brains Need Regulation.
The first paragraph is, Google can swing an election.
Facebook knows more about you than your spouse does.
Amazon's Alexa can record your living room conversations.
Yet for all the talk about the big tech threat, these companies keep getting bigger, more powerful, and more abusive.
Can you describe these abuses a little more detail?
Sure.
Yeah.
I think conservatives rightly focus on censorship, right?
But it's obvious that's a problem.
I don't think Facebook or Twitter should be allowed to, say, kick off a sitting United States president while he's in office.
And they do that obviously because they don't like Donald Trump's politics.
Meanwhile, you've got Taliban commanders with verified accounts on Twitter.
So the censorship, the political censorship is a real problem.
I think we should treat these companies more like the phone company, common carriers, right?
Can't discriminate against users based on the content of their speech.
But I also just think censorship is one of the kind of harms from big tech.
I also worry a lot about just their sheer bigness and their ability to squash competitors.
You know, Google buys one company every week and they've been doing that for about a dozen years, not because they care about that new technology that they're requiring, but they just care that that technology can't get so big that it competes with Google someday.
So they buy these companies to squash them.
I think that's bad for the market.
I think that's bad for competition.
And then I also worry about something like addictiveness, right?
These products are intentionally engineered to addict people to them, especially children.
Just a study last week came out that showed how bad Instagram is for the mental health of teenagers, particularly teenage women.
And so I think, you know, just like cigarettes or gambling, we should recognize sort of unlimited social media use can actually be intentionally addictive.
Maybe we should do something about that.
So I want to get back to the addictive thing because that's an argument I hadn't actually heard before, even though obviously it's true.
But whenever I talk about this, and I think it's urgently important, I mean, the censorship thing especially drives me crazy because I think free speech is essential.
But the attacks, there are several attacks.
Let me give them to you in order.
We'll talk about them one at a time.
One is, well, you have no, there's no God-given right to have a Twitter account.
This is a company that you can build your own Twitter.
You know, why should you have a right to be on Twitter?
That's absurd.
You know, God didn't invent you with a create you and endow you with the right to be on Twitter.
And these guys have their free speech rights because they are not government actors, and you're essentially declaring what they have to allow on their platform.
What's the answer to that?
Well, we do that for the phone company.
You know, all I'm saying is maybe at a certain point, Facebook and Twitter look more like the phone company than your local bakery or something like that.
Right.
And, you know, you hear a lot, go build your own Google.
Go build your own Twitter.
Well, it's like some people tried to build their own conservative social networking site with Parlor.
Right.
And you saw AWS and you saw Amazon.
It ripped Parlor off, right?
They denied Parler the critical infrastructure you needed to exist.
And you can't just go build your own internet.
You know, go build your own Google.
Well, that's naive.
You can't actually do it.
It misunderstands what Google is.
Google has a monopoly on search because of its first mover advantage and because of its massive network effects.
So you can't go build your own.
And at a certain point, these companies, they get so big that they're bigger and more powerful than many governments around the world.
And I think when that happens, conservatives and people who actually care about the free market can say, these companies are so big, they're actually throwing this market out of whack.
There is no free market here.
And you may have to regulate them differently than a local small business.
You know, one of the things where I do believe there's a gray area here, and it does disturb me, but when I saw, for instance, Amazon knock, was it Ryan Anderson?
Is that the guy, the author I'm thinking of?
He had a book about transgenderism when Harry Becomes Sally.
Now, listen, I love Amazon.
They bring books to my house.
Anybody who brings books to my house is welcome.
It's a great, great system.
All that Bezos had to do to get me to build a statue to him was not become a censorious tyrant.
And yet, when he knocks a book off, that means not only is that book harder to get, but it means publishers will not, he's selling something like 90% of new books in America.
And it sends a message.
Like Ryan Anderson is a serious person.
He's a serious academic.
That book is a serious book.
It is not some hate-filled invective or some screet.
It's a real book.
And so that sends a message to every young and enterprising thinker.
Like, no, stay within the lines.
If you ever want to have a commercially successful book, if you ever want to have a good career, stay within the lines.
Don't try to move or change the Overton window.
That really stifles speech.
I mean, it just does.
I think it's a huge problem.
So what do you do with a guy like Bezos with Amazon?
How do you regulate that?
You can't call that, that's not the phone company.
That's an actual store of some sort.
Yeah, I think you take a look at Amazon's market sales.
I bet they have a pretty big monopoly on sort of online book sales.
And past a certain point, I think you can say you're a platform and you have to be facially neutral with respect to your content.
Like you don't get to kick all conservative books off.
And if you want to be a smaller niche liberal bookstore, you can do that.
But that's not what Amazon.com is.
And so I think what people need to reacquaint themselves with here is a sense of scale.
Like when Amazon becomes more dominant than any other company in the whole world, again, you can treat it differently than your local bookstore.
Otherwise, you're just going to bury your head in the sand and get crushed by your political opposition.
Amazon doesn't share our values.
And so if we don't make sure that they play by, I think, commonsensical notions of fair play, they'll just crush us.
You won't be able to buy conservative books in five years.
It is, it's so dated to me.
You know, it seems to me that, but their argument is, is the First Amendment only stops the government from censoring us.
And that's true, but it stops us from censoring us because we have a God-given right to free speech and the government is instituted among men to preserve those rights.
So if the threat comes from a private entity, I don't see why that shouldn't be resisted.
I agree with you.
And I'd also point out at a certain point, these companies are so big that they are inextricably linked with the government in all sorts of ways.
And so in only a nominal sense is Facebook truly a private company.
You know, I mean, the White House and Jen Saki, they send communications bulletins to Facebook saying that's COVID misinformation.
You have to rip that piece of information off your platform.
And the ellipsis is, or else, or else we'll come at you and make life hell.
And so Facebook, of course, complies.
And you see this fusion of the state and extreme concentration of corporate power.
And I think that should scare all of us.
At a certain point, these companies are so big, they're not even private.
You know, another argument that I get a lot of is that this is an attack on capitalism.
And unlike Joe Biden, I actually am a capitalist.
I believe it's a wonderful system.
But all systems, all human relationships are regulated.
There's, you know, you and I can have a conversation, but if you start to strangle me, the police come in.
There are certain limits to every human interaction.
But you write in your piece, Amazon controls more than half of all online retail sales in America.
Google is 92% of search.
Apple's annual profit is larger than the gross domestic product of seven U.S. states.
Why is that bad?
I think it's bad because at a certain point, this market dominance, you know, it keeps other competitors out.
Like I said, Google buys people just to shut them down.
You know, I think a healthy version of capitalism is one in America where you have 60 or 70 million capitalists, right?
But not just six or seven.
And so this, if you just get big tech and you let these handful of multinational corporations control the flow of information in our society, again, especially at the direction of a left-wing White House, I think this is really bad.
I think it's just clearly like Barry Goldwater understood this, right?
He said that the enemy of freedom is unrestrained power.
And conservatives are good at understanding this when it's power in governmental hands, right?
We don't want an unlimited, arbitrarily powerful government.
But Barry Goldwater also went further and he said, this is true, whether it's government or in corporate concentration of power.
And we know that Facebook, we know that Google, we know that these super powerful big tech companies, we know that they're very eager to quash our individual liberties.
They just are.
And so the question is, are we going to get serious about that threat?
Or are we just going to plug our ears and say, no, no, it's a private company.
Anything they do to us is fine.
I just think that's naive.
It's so dated.
It's people really talking like, you know, Amazon is the corner bookstore and Facebook is just playing.
Yeah.
Google has repeatedly argued.
Google is really good at this.
I mean, they have an army of people making arguments in defense of themselves.
I'm sure this, I'm absolutely positive.
Some of the people who attack me on Twitter whenever I talk about this stuff are like in their own playroom.
Yeah.
Their argument is, and they've actually said this in so many words, the government is too slow to regulate tech, which moves at the speed of light.
And I think it's Facebook that says move quickly and break things.
And, you know, the government simply can't understand it.
And I have to, you know, to be honest with you, Blake, when I watch some of these hearings, I look at these senators and I think these guys do not know how the internet works.
They use words like algorithm.
They don't know what an algorithm is.
So is there some truth to this argument that a democratic government, democracies move slowly because we're all arguing with each other?
Is it there's some truth to the argument that a democratic government cannot intelligently regulate tech?
Well, I'm somewhat sympathetic to this line of argument just because no, these companies are right.
Like the government has not successfully regulated tech.
They've shown themselves to be incompetent.
I agree.
You watch these hearings and some of these older senators, God bless them, some of the nicest people you ever meet.
It's just they can't even get a grip on Mark Zuckerberg, right?
Who's running circles around them?
And Zuckerberg is smart.
He's saying like, regulate me.
Come on.
Like this content, censorship, editorialization stuff, like this is tough.
Tell me what the rules are.
Regulate me.
Right.
So he invites and he calls their bluff.
And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do anything, though.
It means we should get a new generation of leadership in Congress, younger, smarter people who actually understand the way that these companies work.
You know, I spent the first part of my career in Silicon Valley.
I know the people who run these companies and the rank and file engineers and their business models.
And I think I have a pretty good sense of the acute harms that these companies are perpetrating on people.
So, and it's still going to be hard.
It's still going to be hard to actually come up with the right solutions, but like we're not going to have a prayer of doing it unless we recognize it's a problem and get people in office who are serious about taking it on.
So it doesn't mean it's easy, but fair enough, the government has blown it so far.
Like data privacy in the United States doesn't exist.
We have no comprehensive set of laws that governs how giant multinational corporations can manage and use our data.
And so it's just laissez-faire.
So they take our data and they use it against us every which way, and then they hide behind the complexity and no one does anything about it.
I think that's just a bad, that's a bad equilibrium we've found.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, I wish I had a supercut of Mark Zuckerberg apologizing for abuses, taking full responsibility for them, and then going back and doing exactly.
Nothing happens.
Facebook's stock price goes up after these hearings because Wall Street looks at this and they say, like, wow, God bless the senators.
Like, they're never going to do anything about this.
So I think it's time to do something about it.
So let's talk about this addictive part of it because this is, as I say, something I never thought of before.
I mean, I knew that these things were fashioned to be addictive.
But how is it possible to fight against that?
And first of all, could you describe how they're created to be addictive?
Yeah, I mean, I tell this anecdote when I go and give a stump speech on the campaign trail.
I say, how many times have you gone to a family restaurant and you look at another table, a family who ought to be having a dinner table conversation?
And they're not because every kid is just glued down looking at an iPad.
And that's really disgusting in some sense, but it doesn't happen by accident.
It's not just bad parenting.
It's not just laziness.
The product there is engineered to be addictive.
The software running on that iPad, it's engineered with clever loops of algorithms designed to sort of capture people's attention.
They employ psychologists on staff at many of these companies to keep people going.
They serve teenagers advertising to keep them hooked in and interested in what they're seeing.
And I just think that's a big problem.
The first step is to talk about it and acknowledge it.
It's a really big problem.
I think, especially with kids, it changes the way brains, you know, developing brains are wired.
And so like, we got to get out in front of this because if we're just laissez-faire about it for five or 10 years, like that's going to really make a lasting mark.
It's going to be ugly.
The people who build that iPad, the Apple executives and the Silicon Valley CEOs, they don't let their own kids play with those products.
Yeah, absolutely.
No screen time.
My cohort does not let our kids do screen time.
We do not do that.
You give your kids wooden toys, handcrafted in Amish country or something.
That's what kids should be playing with.
They should be getting outside.
They shouldn't be looking at these damn devices.
Like it's really unhealthy.
It doesn't mean we should ban them.
Maybe that's too stark, obviously.
But it does mean we should get people in office who know that this is a problem, who are willing to talk about it and figure out what the solution should be.
But I'm pretty sure it's not nothing.
You know, a couple of times during this conversation, you have said that their values are not our values.
Now, you're obviously speaking from experience.
You're not just throwing that out there.
Values Divide: Democrats & Globalism00:03:36
Can you expand on that, exactly what you mean?
Yeah, I mean, I think Google has a Google as an entity, right?
And it's maybe just the aggregation of all the individual preferences because it's a left-leaning sort of staff.
But even Google as a corporate entity distinct from its people, it has a view on U.S. politics.
It did not want Donald Trump to be elected.
I'm not saying they changed their search algorithms to suppress Trump information and pump the Biden information, but I'm also not saying they didn't, right?
And one problem is we don't know.
Google with its monopoly in search has the power, I think, to swing a U.S. election.
They've got the power.
I think they've got the motive.
They clearly have a view, you know, just like Xi Jinping in China.
They clearly have a view.
They wanted Biden.
I'm not saying they did anything to get it, but like when giant powerful interests clearly have a view, they wanted Trump out of office.
Who's to say that Google is going to behave?
Who's to say that Google is not going to try to interfere?
And I think it's crazy that we let any company with that sort of market dominance just have a complete black box in terms of their search engine algorithms.
But when you say visibility into that, it's different to say that their values are Democratic, more lean more toward the Democrat Party than toward the Republican Party, than to say that their values are not our values, meaning their values are not American values.
Is that true?
I think it's both.
I think as the Democratic Party, or I'd say the left-wing activists, you know, sort of ideologically in charge of the Democratic Party, as they sort of embrace this political philosophy of globalism, right?
To me, it looks a lot like globalism and not looking out for the interests of Americans.
I think those can shade into the same thing.
You know, I think most Democrats are good people, but I think this ideology, the far left, globalist, open borders, open capital, let every, you know, there's no distinct American identity.
I think that ideology is really bad.
And I think that is the ideology of Silicon Valley.
You know, I don't know if you've read this Shoshona Zuboff book about surveillance capitalism.
She's a Harvard professor.
Yeah, I think she's probably a Marxist, and yet she attacks Google as violating our privacy, stealing essentially our information about us as if it belonged to them instead of to us.
But at the same time, you hear laced in her prose is she wants them to censor more of our ideas.
MRC Newsbusters great site did a study saying big tech overwhelmingly censors Republican members of Congress by a rate of 53 to 1 compared to congressional Democrats.
What motivation do Democrats have to get involved in this fight?
I mean, is this essentially going to just be another one of these things where we divide down left-right lines?
Maybe.
I mean, I was a little bit optimistic with like, I think most of Joe Biden's appointees are horrible, but I was at least a little bit interested in the Lena Kahn nomination to the FTC, because I do think there are intelligent sort of left-of-center critiques of big tech, of corporate concentration of power, right?
The old left used to really worry a lot about this.
Could corporate concentrations of power squash out individual liberty?
I think there's still some of them, but they're not in charge.
The new left, I think, is only too happy to facilitate the rise of corporate power as long as it's going to serve that sort of left-wing globalist agenda.
The woke, you know, this is why you see every Fortune 500 company is basically woke.
You know, they're basically in ideological conformity with the left-wing ruling elite in our country.
New Left's Corporate Conformity00:00:56
And that's very interesting.
I think it would make old leftists roll in their graves, the people who started the sort of labor, labor movement in the 20th century.
But it's just a new Democratic Party.
It's a new hyper-progressive globalist left.
And I think they're only too happy to work with Facebook to suppress their political competition.
Yeah.
Unfortunately.
Blake Masters, the president of the Thiel Foundation that promotes science and innovation, the co-author with Peter Thiel of zero to one and running for Senate in Arizona.
You have a chance?
I've got more than a chance.
We're doing great.
I started the race with basically zero, 1% name ID and Poland in the mid-teens.
So I'm running against an established attorney general.