Amjad Masad

Like during medieval Europe, like reading and writing was was regulated, was only like priests were able to do it.

And priests were like controlling the population right before the Protestant Reformation.

And so there's like the priesthood control over the ability to read and write.

And then we had the Gutenberg printing press.

And that was decentralized, the ability to print books and have books available to the population.

People started learning how to read and then learning how to write.

And that caused massive changes in the world.

Uh, and like leading up to revolutions and different religions and democracies and all of that happening because of reading, like none of the world that we, that, that's, that we have today would not have happened without, uh, mass literacy, right?

We have the big media companies, but you're, you can have a sub stack and there are people making millions of dollars on sub stack.

There are people making 10K on sub stack.

There are people making 2K on sub stack.

And so, um,

You know, Instagram is the same thing.

You had to be a professional photographer at some point and only the professional photographers could make some money.

And then later on, anyone could like take photos and make money.

Influencers is the same thing.

Really like every skill and every profession goes through this, where it's usually an elite minority and they're gatekeeping and they don't want other people to do it.

And certainly programmers and big tech felt threatened by, by Repl.ed is because they, they make a lot of money.

Like we were in this like really strange world over the past, you know,

15, 20 years where if you go to computer science school for four years, you're guaranteed like the best life and the best, you know, the upper echelon of income.