Mixed Signals: Nick Denton’s surprising return, courtesy of Elon Musk, Denmark, and Chinese cars

Max Tani: I also do kind of like that we’re not doing it on camera. I do feel like it makes it... I don’t know, I get self-conscious about whatever weird face I’m making and-

Nick Denton: I have now vowed never to do a Zoom call again.

Ben Smith: I would just wind up contemplating my own mortality.

Max Tani: Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Denton: I think a natural way, certainly, for a lot of guys is to be a little bit like you’re in a Mediterranean cafe, maybe there’s a friend next to you, but you actually make no eye contact whatsoever.

Max Tani: Yeah.

Nick Denton: And basically, you’re commenting to each other on the world as it goes by, and that seems, to me, to be a civilized kind of conversation.

Max Tani: Yeah. Yeah.

Ben Smith: No eye contact.

Max Tani: Yeah.

Ben Smith: Not only we’ll not have cameras, no eye contact.

Max Tani: Welcome to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media where we explore the tectonic shifts in media that are changing how we see the world today. I’m Max Tani, Media Editor at Semafor. And with me as always here in an actual physical studio together is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. Hi Ben.

Ben Smith: Nice to be here in person.

Max Tani: It is. This week we’re sitting down with Nick Denton. Nick is, of course, the iconic founder of Gawker, the massively influential 2000s web blog. And recently, he re-emerged after a nearly 10-year absence from public life following the Peter Thiel-funded lawsuit that forced Gawker to close. So we wanted to talk to him about why he returned to the internet, his kind of surprising views on the tech titans who are shaping our politics and culture and why he’s short Tesla and long China.

Ben Smith: Yeah, I think this will be Nick’s first podcast interview. And although, like a lot of journalists of my generation, I spent a lot of time thinking about and reading Nick Denton, this will be the longest I’ve ever spent with him, I believe.

Max Tani: Well, we’ll dig into all of that and chat with Nick Denton right after the break.
So Ben, as we were kind of discussing who we wanted to have as a guest on the show this week, you sent me and our producer, Sheena, a few tweets from Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, noting that you had been getting texts from various people in media, colleagues of ours begging for us to bring him on the show because he basically has been gone from the kind of public sphere for the last 10 years since his site was brought down by this Peter Thiel-kind-of-backed lawsuit. You have this long relationship with him and with Gawker, you wrote about him for your book. Can you kind of explain who Nick is and why so many people have been texting you trying to get him onto our show?

Ben Smith: Yeah, I mean, Nick is an enormously consequential figure, really, in the history of media. Was a very ambitious, smart FT, Financial Times, reporter who was sent to San Francisco to cover the tech boom in the ’90s, got the bug and started a series of blogs. Gizmodo and Gawker were the sort of first ones that really brought a kind of authentic internet conversation to journalism.
And they really blew up traditional New York media. Everybody was obsessed with them. They wrote things that nobody else would publish and honestly, that nobody would publish now, like scurrilous rumors and whatever you happen to hear. And really reshaped a lot of the way media worked as people realized, oh wow, you can just put things on the internet and move a lot faster and in a much more authentic way.
Looking back, I think they were as much the precursors of Twitter as they were of kind of the web-based internet. Turned into these powerful juggernauts that really drove culture that a lot of media copied. And that, at some point, I think like not really realizing their own power were publishing sex tapes, were publishing things that were pretty hurtful to the targets and outrageous to a wide variety of people, including the jury in a defamation case that Hulk Hogan brought, the former professional wrestler, over a sex tape that Gawker published. That lawsuit was financed by Peter Thiel who says that he was upset that, not only did Gawker write about his being gay, but that Nick Denton, our guest, made a sort of obnoxious comment about his sexuality. Nick is also gay.
Be that as it may, this was a real moment of these tech moguls realizing, oh, we can take on the media, we can destroy media companies that we don’t like for whatever reason. And was a very important moment, in 2016, of the swing of the pendulum kind of away from internet media and toward these powerful, wealthy individuals who, I think, are now these central, central figures in American life.

Max Tani: And of course, this lawsuit did work, Gawker went away. It’s kind of tried to be revived at various points, largely unsuccessfully. And throughout that time, Nick has kind of, since the lawsuit, basically, been largely absent from public life, but of course, over the last week, he started tweeting again. He’s tweeted now hundreds of times over the last week, which is insane. But I’m curious, what has he been saying in these tweets? Why are they interesting? Why were they interesting to you and what stuck out to you about his new internet presence?

Ben Smith: We’re all, to some degree, living in a media world that he’s shaped and that he just absolutely vanished from 10 years ago. And I think a lot of people have been wondering, “What is he thinking? How does he see the world now?” And I think in his tweets, he’s both, I think, very critical of Elon Musk and writes that he sees himself and sees what he thinks is going wrong with Musk in his own experience. And I think that’s interesting.

Max Tani: Well, I think he’s actually waiting for us so why don’t we bring in Nick Denton.

Ben Smith: Thank you for coming in. And this is like particularly kind of fun and odd for me because I wrote a book about you in which you participated very, very generously, but we never met.

Nick Denton: We did meet once, we arranged to meet for lunch.

Ben Smith: But that was before the book.

Nick Denton: It was before the book.

Ben Smith: Yeah.

Nick Denton: I assumed the idea was germinating, but-

Ben Smith: But then, once I started writing the book, you would only communicate through text message.

Nick Denton: Well, it was kind of like, you know what? There’s been enough written on this. I think you did manage to take the right angle. I certainly look on it now, I’m not sure whether I liked the angle at the time, the traffic angle, but now that I look back on that time and also how it connects with where we are now, I do see that it was the opposite.

Max Tani: But why didn’t you like the angle?

Nick Denton: I guess because I cared about the journalism. So there was actually something about the story and the conversation around the story that got lost in a battle with Jonah Peretti, which was definitely one side of my existence then, a big side of my existence then, but it wasn’t everything about me.

Ben Smith: Yeah. Though, actually, I’m not sure I ever told you this, but one of the real problems with the book, and to me, what I feel sort of denied it its rightful place on the New York Times Bestseller List, was that one of the characters just drops out two-thirds of the way through and totally screws up the narrative, which is you. And I guess I was sort of delighted, slightly freaked out, to see, a couple of weeks ago, that you had popped back up on Twitter with lots of thoughts that had obviously been germinating a long time. I just counted this morning, you’ve basically barely tweeted since you signed off in 2017 and then have tweeted 230 times across two accounts since mid-March. What brought you back?

Nick Denton: I had a likes feed, which was public until they made it private, and that was kind of an expression of my interests. So I wasn’t entirely silent, but I was lurking. What brought me back? A story, really. It’s the biggest, best ever business and financial story that I’ve ever seen in my life, in my career, from Eastern Europe through derivatives scandals, through to Silicon Valley technology. This one has it all.

Ben Smith: Which story?

Nick Denton: I mean, this story, Trump, Musk, Vance, the end of the American Empire, the crumbling of dollar supremacy, the story.

Max Tani: So you decided to kind of pop back on. Do you miss covering it as a journalist or does talking about it on Twitter kind of scratch that same itch?

Nick Denton: Well, I mean, it just seems like all of this is on a spectrum from this conversation that we’re having right here to what I read on the subway on the way up and the tweets that are germinating in my head and whatever articles or essays may result. And I don’t really see a line between any of that, nor between that and actually acting on your insight and trading on your insight, which is what I’m doing now.

Ben Smith: You wrote that Musk did not take over Twitter, this is the one that sort of got me, “Musk did not take over Twitter, it was Twitter that took him over.” And you said that you sort of saw it and related because you kind of had the same experience, and I wasn’t sure what you meant about the second part because I always thought you had a level of distance actually.

Nick Denton: I mean, I might’ve had personal distance, but I said I set up a page view system and then a-

Ben Smith: One of the first.

Nick Denton: ... system for maximizing uniques, so basically, new visitors. Inspired by Jonah Peretti. I’m going to put that one at least partly at his doorstep because that was like supercharging the system, looking always for new validation, for new shock. And I think that combined with the growth of Twitter pretty much drove Gawker writers into their great derangement of maybe 2012 to ’15. There was something around that time period, basically, between kind of the run-up to AJ Daulerio’s story on Hogan through to the story on the CFO of Conde Nast, which then led to me to fire half the Gawker staff in one afternoon.

Ben Smith: Did you ever feel that you yourself got pulled into it or was it more watching your writers get sort of, as you see, kind of radicalized in a way?

Nick Denton: I think I always had some detachment. Look, I was complicit in that I needed the numbers. I needed the numbers partly for people like you, media critics who would be judging Buzzfeed and Huffington Post and Gawker and others according to their position in some league table. So let’s be clear, absolutely, everybody was part of this traffic system. And so, I was coming into it to that extent. But the truth is that I was deeply ashamed of the Hogan video. I was deeply ashamed of the Hogan video, not the story, and I couldn’t even face looking at it. And so, I did have that kind of detachment in me, but part of me saw the logic behind the people who were trying to put Gawker.com out of business, part of me sympathized with them.

Ben Smith: And that being Peter Thiel. I guess Elon is part of that world, although he wasn’t particularly involved. I have been surprised to see, I guess it seems like really ever since you’ve had a level of sort of sympathy and interest in the people who drove you out of business.

Nick Denton: There’s an interesting backstory. I’m not sure whether you picked up on this one. Since I left the Financial Times, the one time I was really a journalist was when I actually wrote Valleywag myself in 2007, I think it was, it was for a large part of the year. And that was pretty much the fullest expression of myself as a journalist doing kind of what I used to do at the FT, which was trying to put myself in the middle as a node and act as a switchboard for information. And for that time, I had pretty much all of them passing through me, all of the Andreessens and the Musks with their multi-thousand word essays or complaints. Like these people actually care very, very deeply about their public image. And I guess, now I feel like let’s put aside all that nastiness about the court case. I feel like that period of observation and then also just observing my own sites go a bit crazy during the heyday of progressive boom in digital media. I feel like it’s kind of given me quite a lot of insight into what’s going on right now.

Max Tani: Have you kept in touch with some of the subjects of your coverage since, or have you reconnected with any of those folks?

Nick Denton: Since 2016, not. I mean, obviously, I was in touch with Thiel inadvertently during the court cases when it became evident that he was the one behind the court cases when we were trying to actually settle with the person who could actually settle.

Ben Smith: Did you ever have sort of a real conversation with him?

Nick Denton: Yeah.

Ben Smith: What did you make of him?

Nick Denton: I mean, he’s a very intelligent, man. What more can I say? Look, you might as well start from this position, that they are all very smart, they’re probably all in the elite of this society, which, for better or worse, has left them on top. They play the game in terms of technology, business and media, they play it at a very high level. So respect for the players.

Max Tani: What have you thought about some of their complaints about the coverage of them that’s been absorbed into the bloodstream of the New York Times? I think about one of the complaints by the All-In guys, the podcasters and Zuckerberg and some of these folks, is that they get covered very, very skeptically by the New York Times and the Journal, these places that used to cover them as geniuses and kind of laud them. And I think one could maybe draw a line between that coverage and some of the more skeptical coverage from the early digital media days, in part because some of the folks that are now at those big institutions actually started in the kind of early blogging days. So what have you thought about their critique of the mainstream coverage?

Nick Denton: In retrospect, I see how amazingly balanced we were, that we were in equal parts, enthusiastic and critical. Elon Musk was absolutely not demonized, nor was Peter Thiel, nor were any of these people. We did and I did personally look at them as inspirations, as leaders. If there were more of them, America would be better off. That was my feeling about pretty much all of them and still, through the conflicts with them, I felt that. Elon Musk, I didn’t really turn against, I guess, financially, until very recently. We like the Cybertruck. Darren’s persuaded me that the Cybertruck was cool. It’s a freaking teenage fantasy. Somebody’s sketched it out on a piece of paper and it actually got made, which is-

Max Tani: It’s amazing.

Nick Denton: Hats off to that. I think what’s been damaging for them is not the Cybertrucks being burned or whatever, but the pictures of the metal panels coming off because the glue isn’t strong enough.

Max Tani: Yeah, I mean, there’s those embarrassing videos of them not being able to get out of the snow and things like that. It definitely is an aesthetically interesting car that its mainly accomplishing that. And that’s what I feel like causes most of its problems. Right?

Nick Denton: This is a meme war now. And this is why I feel like this is comfortable ground for us to be talking about. And actually, it has a direct relevance, direct relation to the stock price. So again, this is a financial sort of-

Ben Smith: It’s a meme stock, it’s a meme car to some degree. Yeah.

Nick Denton: The dollar is a freaking meme security. A lot of America is a meme so let’s analyze it as that.

Ben Smith: Do you think that Elon and the sort of folks around him sort of see the media, and the media as broadly as you say it, the whole thing, clearly and accurately or do you think they’ve lost their minds in terms of how they see us, how they see people talking about them?

Nick Denton: I think they’ve fallen for audience capture, just like Joe Rogan has in the podcast world, just like the Gawker writers did in the peak of lefty Twitter. Elon Musk is doubling down and doubling down on the most right-wing elements in his audience. Whenever he feels insecure, he gives them some Nazi dog whistle, he’ll throw in some story about white babies on bayonets in a South African demonstration against white farmers. So he’s absolutely race-baiting. And it looks to me like somebody who’s over-serving 3% of their potential audience, that this is a country in which policy is being made by several hundred people max on X, and they’re all, Rubio, Musk, Vance, Trump, they’re all competing for the applause from these 500 nuts on X. And that’s my media criticism of this society right now.

Max Tani: Don’t you think that that’s kind of one of the challenges that every single media company today faces because of fragmentation? Right? There are so many options for places to get your information or so many viewpoints that are able to be expressed and surfaced to you. It’s actually quite difficult to go against your audience because once you do, somebody else is going to come and snatch them right up. It strikes me that as far as media companies go, the only company that can really go against its audience and survive is the New York Times, everyone else-

Nick Denton: [inaudible 00:17:07].

Max Tani: I mean, if we pissed off our audience today, I think that would be quite damaging.

Nick Denton: It’s like we’re stuck in some eternal MAGA online primary in which, no, they can’t go and tack to the center, tack to the median voter in the way that administrations have always done throughout all time. They have to keep on throwing some meat to these 500 nuts on X because that appears to be where the electorate is at, where their primary electorate really is at. But there is a median voter out there, and the median voter will be heard from. And there is a stock market out there and the stock market is being heard from right now.

Max Tani: Well, I think we need to take a short break, so why don’t we do that and we’ll be right back with Nick Denton?

Ben Smith: So I want to ask you about this media moment because it reminds me a little of the moment when you really exploded into the sort of New York world. And I was a kid kind of looking at it from the outside because I’m a couple of years younger than you. But in the early aughts, when it really felt like very wide open, there was tons of space, tons of new stuff being born, old things collapsing. I mean, does this moment remind you of that one at all?

Nick Denton: I mean, there’s a continuing collapse. I mean, I don’t really want to talk about the liberal Democratic Party-aligned media because I think that’s kind of like a sideshow at this point. Really, the divisions that matter are within the Trump coalition and within the online influential parts of Trump coalition.

Ben Smith: What do you consume? What Trump media do you find most interesting?

Nick Denton: I mean, I follow individual accounts. So Joe Lonsdale is interesting because he’s cross-conflicted with partly Jewish background. And so, he’s an indication of who in the [inaudible 00:18:59] list camp may be feeling a little bit queasy. Curtis Yarvin, Thiel’s philosopher, kind of court philosopher. Recently reappears on Twitter, so that’s fascinating. Richard Hanania, I always find interesting as a kind of a former scientific racist who now seems to be more or less an IQ elitist and dismissive of MAGA from that point of view. I find almost no left-leaning voices, maybe apart from the anti-monopoly types like Stoller. But apart from that, I don’t really care about the abundance debate within the Democratic Party, I don’t think any of that’s relevant.

Max Tani: But to return to Ben’s question, because I think what Ben’s getting at is the idea that like there was a reset post Facebook with the end of like Buzzfeed News, the end of Vice, these kind of big, kind of giants. And now, it seems like it’s anyone’s game, it’s smaller, it’s uncertain. You talk to people who are in charge of media companies or even individuals, some of the platforms, nobody really seems to know what’s going on. People have ideas and theories about where things are going, but we’re curious-

Nick Denton: I gave you my names, I’d add Balaji Srinivasan.

Max Tani: But you’re interested in individuals, not in organizations or-

Nick Denton: The signal comes from individuals and from certain individuals, ones that are actually kind of most close to the edge of their coalitions and would be most likely to flip. So if you’re trying to work out kind of the power dynamics, at what point does Musk get kicked out, at what point does Trump separate himself from Musk’s declining numbers, which they’re afraid even to poll, those kind of questions, which are actually interesting and market-moving questions, are the ones that you can only really analyze by looking at the dynamics between these individuals.

Max Tani: Given that this is a media show, we have to kind of keep bringing it back here, which is, I’m very curious, do people still tap you up for advice?

Nick Denton: Yes, occasionally they do. And usually, I say, “I’ve really got nothing to say.” I don’t really think about traditional media businesses. I think there’s some interesting opportunities in an AI world because I think journalists or people who can ask questions and shape narratives can work with an AI very, very well if they choose to do so. I’ve found it delightfully empowering.

Ben Smith: Yeah, me too. What do you do? Like do you vibe code? Do you-

Nick Denton: I play games with it. I give it a set of facts and then I ask it to re-engineer my arguments. I starve it of information and then drip feed it. Yeah.

Ben Smith: You mentioned in an interview that you’re working on a private AI company that sounds like it’s trying to make predictions. Can you tell us more like how does it work? What’s it called?

Nick Denton: It’s called Futura Kiado, which means future publishing in Hungarian. And we’re exploring near-future timelines. So a simple one, something which is the basis of one of the trades that we have right now, BYD versus Tesla. So let’s just do a simple Financial Times-style, where Tesla sales going to be in 2030 and where BYD sales going to be in 2030. Let’s take current trajectories, let’s factor in some extra factors. Oh, Musk just said something that might compromise his sales in Europe, let’s adjust the timeline for that particular factor. So let’s drop in new facts as they come, or even starve the model at the very beginning and then drop the facts in and then train it up to the reality and then use the narratives and I guess how plausible they sound to decide. That’s kind of financial journalism for the purpose that I think it kind of always was designed, which is to help people make decisions about their money, and which a lot of financial newspapers, I think, have forgotten.

Ben Smith: Are you long or short Tesla?

Nick Denton: Short. And I think what’s happening right now is maybe the grandest displacement activity the world has ever seen, that you have a great engineer, salesman, businessman in Elon Musk, and he has finally met a challenge that he cannot handle, a competitor that he cannot defeat. And I’m talking about China Inc, not just BYD, but BYD and Xiaomi and Unitree and NIO and a whole host of other companies that you haven’t even heard of yet. And he’s basically single-handedly taking them on, took them on and I think has recognized some points in the last two years that he cannot win with things as they are now. So I think his grand effort to reform the US government is focusing on the easier task rather than the one that his CEO job would entail.

Ben Smith: You’re obviously preoccupied with Chinese tech economy. Where does your preoccupation with these Chinese tech companies come from? What kind of caught your attention?

Nick Denton: I’ve been interested in the Chinese-sphere probably since I was in Singapore working on the Barings book back in 1995. And then, my TikTok is full of especially Singapore government officials’ speech. I’ve been propagandized-

Ben Smith: By old Lee Kuan Yew clips, I get a lot of those too.

Nick Denton: You do?

Ben Smith: Very strange. Yeah.

Nick Denton: That’s worrying authoritarian tendencies there revealed, dangerously technocratic.

Ben Smith: Some people are getting sort of soft core porn and we’re getting Lee Kuan Yew speeches.

Nick Denton: But they just have a higher caliber of official. I mean, I’m sorry, but they pay them well enough and you feel like you’ve just gone up 20 points of IQ when you’re listening to them. So when the pandemic came down, I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening to Cuomo, I was listening to Lee Kuan Yew’s son.

Max Tani: You’re fascinated by Musk. We’re all interested in Elon, obviously. And I feel like Elon now has kind of a 2017 Trump parallel in terms of people’s interest. I feel like when we write stories about Elon and we talk about Elon, everything just kind of goes nuts in a way that content about Trump kind of used to do quite well. Have you ever met him? Have you ever interacted with him at all?

Nick Denton: No.

Max Tani: No?

Nick Denton: Just email.

Max Tani: What was he like over email? Was he similar to-

Nick Denton: Whiny CEO who was complaining about the coverage and was explaining what had really happened, which I was perfectly happy to... I’m sure we posted it all up or whatever.

Ben Smith: Do you remember what annoyed him most?

Nick Denton: No. I know what I think annoyed Thiel the most, which was not the latest story about the most powerful investor in Silicon Valley being gay and the crime of noticing a fact that everybody knew in Silicon Valley. Now, the story that he really didn’t like was the story of the PayPal origins and Musk being pushed out of PayPal because one thing, those guys like their copybook storylines, they want every single move to have been thought out, genius from beginning to end. They can’t abide any kind of mess in the storyline. I’m trying to say to them, “It’s fine. It’s fine, guys. You’re super successful. You are brilliant. You are absolutely brilliant. Just don’t mind this, it gives you extra personality and depth.” But somehow, they’ve never ever been persuaded of that.

Max Tani: No, it’s interesting. It strikes me that one of the things that Trump and Musk and a lot of these guys have the most in common is their shared sensitivity regarding media coverage and the inability to talk them out of the idea that one story that’s kind of negative or whatever, it’s not the end of the world, and in fact, being the richest person in the world should be quite a salve for that.

Nick Denton: And all those Tesla rave reviews, we love your products. You are bringing the electric power and modernizing this entire economy. So how much more do you need? We’re not allowed to joke about you?

Ben Smith: Just talk about Hungary a little bit because I think in some ways, I mean, if I was the government of Hungary, I would be pretty psyched that this quite prominent entrepreneur of Hungarian descent, but who grew up in London, is moving back. Are they rolling out the red carpet for you? Have you gotten a call from Orban welcoming you?

Nick Denton: I’m wondering how many... I mean, I know there’s a lot of people looking for their passports, Polish passports, Austrian passports, German passports, especially European Jews who came here maybe after World War II.

Ben Smith: We should say you are Jewish.

Nick Denton: Yeah, on my mother’s side-

Ben Smith: I’ll just mention it for the listeners.

Nick Denton: ... I’m Hungarian Jewish. So again, it’s a trickle, but I’m often early to these things. I can see some kind of Aliyah, some homecoming for European Jews. “Come back. Think of Como. Think of the Alps. Think of the beauty. Think of the more relaxed pace of life, the sanity.”

Ben Smith: You have to try that timeline out on your media-

Nick Denton: Oh, I have, it does very well. It’s very robust.

Max Tani: So as part of that, obviously, you’re selling your iconic loft space here. Saying goodbye to that, do you have any sort of nostalgia or?

Nick Denton: I didn’t, but then I came across some pictures from 2005, I think it was September 2005. It was Arianna Huffington’s launch party and I was hosting it. And just looking around at the pictures, everybody was there from new and old media. I think Michael Stipe was there for goodness how. And everybody looks happy, optimistic. I guess I’m retrofitting those pictures too because it’s 2005 so capital hasn’t really come in yet, hasn’t poisoned the sector. I look at the sector as in 2013, Andreessen Horowitz dumping however many hundred million they did-

Ben Smith: It’s 50 million at Buzzfeed, I believe.

Nick Denton: But then, wasn’t there more after?

Ben Smith: Yeah. And there was other investments.

Nick Denton: And then others followed them. And that, basically, started a stampede into a sector that, really, was too small and fragile to handle that kind of capital. And I was very clear in my head that I needed to get out.

Ben Smith: And you never raised money or you basically didn’t, you resisted that even as we were, and I was at Buzzfeed at the time, just outspending you, basically.

Nick Denton: I mean, I was quite-

Ben Smith: I remember you complaining about that.

Nick Denton: I was quite happy just to keep it going the way it had been going.

Ben Smith: And running a profitable business, which then went totally out of fashion.

Nick Denton: Uh-huh. I mean, arguably, I should have sold right there, as soon as Andreessen put the money in. I mean, I knew I had to, but it was very hard with the lawsuits that Thiel was firing at us and the union drive from within the company.

Ben Smith: Did you ever say no to a serious offer?

Nick Denton: Ever say no? There was a Murdoch, indirect Murdoch offer. I thought to myself, how the hell am I ever going to get the writers to agree to this one?

Ben Smith: Amazing.

Nick Denton: I mean, I was laughing to myself because-

Ben Smith: Who did it come through? How did it come in?

Nick Denton: I probably shouldn’t say.

Ben Smith: Oh, it’s been a long time.

Nick Denton: Yeah.

Ben Smith: So you’re discreet. You’ve developed a lot of discretion in your old age.

Nick Denton: No, I’m very indiscreet about the facts, but I’m usually discreet about the source of the facts.

Ben Smith: Yeah, fair.

Max Tani: So the reason we wanted to have you on was because you kind of re-emerged. Can we expect more from you? Is this a limited-

Nick Denton: I don’t know. It kind of depends what they do, because I didn’t start writing because of any plan, it really just started coming out. I guess it was, I didn’t like Denmark being insulted. I have a very soft spot for Denmark, they saved all their Jews, they run a budget surplus, they’re prosperous, they’ve dealt largely with the political question of migration, they’ve defanged it. You can’t say that the Danes are in the vanguard of civilizational suicide or anything like that. So when you come for the Danes, I get worked up and I’m not rational anymore. So my patriotism is excited. So if there’s more of that, which I expect, I guess I’ll be writing more too.

Ben Smith: All right, well, we kind of do need some combative European voices. I kind of like that role for you.

Nick Denton: I think Donald Tusk is actually that voice.

Ben Smith: Yeah, I know he’s your guy.

Nick Denton: He has that great line, it’s like, “How the hell,” I’m adding a bit here, “How the hell are 500 million Europeans begging 300 million Americans,” I would add, indebted Americans, “for help dealing with a hundred million Russians who can’t even handle 40 million Ukrainians?” So that’s my motto at the moment.

Max Tani: Absolutely. Thanks Nick, really appreciate it.

Ben Smith: Thank you, Nick. This was fun.
So Max, I’ve spent like much of my adult life thinking in some way or other about Nick Denton. So that was totally fascinating for me.

Max Tani: Yeah.

Ben Smith: What struck you?

Max Tani: I mean, the most obvious thing that struck me is the fact that he seems to have scratched his media itch and there’s pretty much nothing in the field of journalism that seems to interest him anymore or the media business and that maybe people took the wrong thing away from him for a long time in the sense that I think he clearly was always interested in the stories more than he was interested in the business side of it. And maybe he was a media business person as a consequence of being interested in these bigger stories. What did you think?

Ben Smith: Oh yeah, I totally agree with you. I think that’s actually what’s great about media. It’s funny, I was on Jessica Lessin’s podcast yesterday with Brit Morin. And they were asking like, how do you think, that incredible Jeffrey Goldberg story?

Max Tani: Yeah.

Ben Smith: And Brit, who’s an entrepreneur, was asking, “So what do you do when you get a story like that? You call your marketing team, you call...” And it’s like, “No, no, no.”

Max Tani: What? Yeah.

Ben Smith: You’re just like, “What an amazing story.”

Max Tani: Right.

Ben Smith: And like, “Oh my God, did you see what JD Vance-

Max Tani: And call your lawyer? That’s it. Yeah.

Ben Smith: But also, you mostly say like, “Oh my God, did you see what JD Vance said?” You think of it.

Max Tani: Right.

Ben Smith: And I do think, actually, great media entrepreneurs are usually obsessed with the content. I mean, probably the way great ice cream entrepreneurs are obsessed with the ice cream.

Max Tani: Yeah, of course.

Ben Smith: But I mean, I do think when historians look back at, let’s say the last 10 years, and they’re trying to understand what happened in the world, they’ll be looking at Twitter, they’re not going to be looking at the New York Times. I think Nick is basically right. And this was his insight in 2000, 2001, 2002, that like, oh no, these conversations that are happening on the internet, those are the real ones. The ones that are happening in print, these newspapers and magazines that are getting churned out and shipped around, that’s something else. But the most important, most authentic conversations that are happening in the whole world are like between Elon Musk and crazy Anons, that’s the real media.

Max Tani: Yeah.

Ben Smith: And I think it’s sort of refreshing just to hear him say it.

Max Tani: What did you make of his feeling that the only interesting media entities these days are the conservative, intellectual backbone, philosophizer kind of class, the folks who are in the ears of Thiel and of Elon, but also just kind of posting online for the rest of us as well?

Ben Smith: I think that people don’t take them seriously enough. I think people like Balaji are really interesting, Balaji Srinivasan, yeah, really interesting. They’re shaping the kind of intellectual environment around both this administration and I think around what Democrats are going to wind up reacting to.
There is a big argument going on about China right now in that space around Trump that Nick is clearly very, very engaged in. And I think that’s a real TikTok phenomenon. We’ve already talked about that, but he’s obviously spending a lot on TikTok, watching speeches by Singapore’s authoritarian founder and videos of how awesome Chinese cars are. And again, TikTok obviously optimizes for your own interests and reflects yourself back to you so putting all that aside, it is really, at least for me, an incredible channel for Chinese propaganda. And I know the Trump administration’s about to serve it for all sorts of, I think, reasonable free speech, et cetera, reasons, but you do have a lot of Americans getting videos about how futuristic Chinese cities are, how much better and cheaper Chinese cars are. I don’t know. I think Nick’s clearly consuming a lot of that content and it’s very persuasive.

Max Tani: Yeah. How much of all of this do you think is just a strategy for Nick to re-raise his own profile and the lore around his apartment as he tries to sell it here in New York? And do you think that it has been an effective real estate selling strategy?

Ben Smith: I mean, one of the great truths of media is that, half the time, it always just comes back to some New York real estate deal. And Nick is in town, when he got up, he was telling us about how our friend, Lachlan Cartwright, was trying to get him to give exclusives to his site, his new-

Max Tani: Media newsletter.

Ben Smith: ... media newsletter called Breaker. And Nick was like, “What are you talking about? I’m trying to sell an apartment here. I’m going to put it in New York Magazine and Vanity Fair.” But I actually think that, like a lot of people, he’s at least as much impulsive as he is strategic, and he’s obviously interested in reclaiming this space. And honestly, I do think, what I said at the end, that there is space for sort of fighting, for sort of European voices that have the level of kind of combativeness and understanding of the English language internet, which again, America may have lost a lot of ground in a lot of places, but it just dominates posting still. And I do think there’s space-

Max Tani: Yes, we’re still great posters.

Ben Smith: Yeah, Nick’s an extremely gifted poster, and I think that there’s space for Europeans who can really mix it up with their noisy American cousins.

Max Tani: Well, I think that we should leave it there. That is it for us this week. Thank you for listening to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. Our show is produced by Sheena Ozaki, with special thanks to Max Toomey, Britta Galanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pezzino, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern, and Tori Kaur. Our engineer is Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Billy Libby. And special thanks this week to CDM Studios and Cathleen Conte. We’re here and it’s actually quite lovely. We get to do this in person. Our public editor is Choire Sicha, the Gawker alum who can tell us all the difficult questions we should have asked Nick.

Ben Smith: Yeah, maybe he’ll pick this up in his excellent New York Magazine newsletter. And if you like Mixed Signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And feel free to review us.

Max Tani: And if you still want more, you can always sign up for Semafor’s Media Newsletter out every Sunday night.