Nick Denton: Our New Chinese Overlords

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan

Politics, News, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 836 Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com

Nick is an entrepreneur and journalist. He was the founder of Gawker Media, the publisher of Gizmodo, and the editor of Valleywag. He began his career as a journalist with the Financial Times — as a derivatives and tech correspondent — and later founded a Silicon Valley news aggregator called Moreover Technologies. He’s now working on Maze.com, which hosts a network map of near-future timelines.

For two clips of our convo — on the growing global dominance of China, and the Chinese outcompeting Elon Musk — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: raised in Hampstead in the lower-middle class; a Jewish mom who fled the Communists in Hungary; growing up on sci-fi; Asimov’s Foundation; attending Oxford like his father; game theory; being a young reporter in London, Hungary, Romania, and Singapore; pioneering the internet in the ‘90s; Foundation parallels with Singapore; Lee Kuan Yew; Chinese pragmatism; Taiwan; EVs in China; Musk’s companies; tech theft between the US and China; DOGE and Trump reigning in Musk; Peter Thiel; Andy Grove; Uber’s Travis Kalanick; Kara Swisher; Oculus’ Palmer Luckey; how Silicon Valley is PR obsessed; Zuckerberg; David Sacks and crypto; Andreessen; drones; Ukraine; Thatcher; housing crisis in the UK; Orbán; the German Greens; Russian expansionism; the Poles and nukes; Trump’s tariffs; Tucker’s interview with Putin; the growing US-Europe rift; Greenland; AI and DeepSeek; and Nick’s predictions as a futurist.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Douglas Murray on Israel and Gaza, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Francis Collins on faith and science and Covid, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee on Covid’s fallout, and Paul Elie on his book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to [email protected].

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Hi there. Welcome to another dishcast in the great new era of Trump 2.0.
0:36.1	If you have not subscribed, please subscribe. Otherwise, this riveting conversation
0:42.7	that is about to take place will disappear within not that long and you won't hear the rest of it.
0:49.1	All of you have subscribed. I just want to thank you again for supporting us.
0:53.4	Over 20,000 paid subscribers,
0:56.7	200,000 or so, almost 200,000. Subscribers in total, which is fantastic, but more importantly,
1:05.0	for me at least, it's the right 20,000, the right 200,000. I'm, I can't tell you how gratifying and wonderful it is when you see the entry and you just see that there is,
1:18.5	there are so many still very engaged, smart people able to engage ideas, to disagree with you civilly,
1:33.3	to enjoy having a difference of opinion as opposed to be scared of it. And dishheads give me hope. And I'm not doing this just a flattery, you know,
1:40.2	I don't do that, generally speaking, but I am doing it to say I'm grateful because you have
1:45.9	created a space where people like me can actually exist and do what we want without fear or
1:52.4	favor. And that's incredibly important. No advertising on this thing. No one else is paying my money.
1:58.5	No foundation is helping me anywhere. What you see is what you
2:02.4	get. And that's always been the case with the dish and it will always be the case. Coming up,
2:08.4	we have Francis Collins coming on to talk about faith and science. Francis, who was the head of
2:14.5	NIH, and it's just quit. and we'll have a lot of interesting things
2:18.4	to talk to him about, not just, obviously, religion and evangelicalism and science, but also
2:25.1	some of the more controversial parts of recent NIH endeavors. Anyway, today, we have a very special guest, someone I've known for a very long time,
2:36.6	old friend, his name is Nick Denton. He's an entrepreneur and a journalist. He's probably
2:41.8	heard of him. He was the founder. This is what you probably heard most about him of Gorka Media,
2:46.6	the publisher of Gizmodo, the editor of Valleywag, a real pioneer of new media when we were all doing it.
2:54.0	He began his career as a journalist with the Financial Times as a derivatives and tech correspondent
	...

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