On this episode of Invested, Michael hosts Stefan Tompson, founder of Visegrad 24 on X.
Tompson is a London-born Polish-South African PR specialist, the founder of the Visegrad24 account (the largest news aggregator from Central and Eastern Europe, with an average billion views per month across social media), the host and presenter of the historical-documentary program "Polish Heritage" on TVP, a YouTuber, and marketer with many viral campaigns behind him.
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Stefan Tompson
This is the front line. And it's Israelis dying right now, and this war will keep advancing. I mean, we are fighting this allied unholy alliance of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Hamas, and other affiliated terrorist organizations. And they hate the Jews, but they don't love Christians of the West.
They hate us as well.
Michael Eisenberg
I think that's fair.
Stefan Tompson
And I think that's to a certain extent that, that hasn't been - obviously you are in, I love the fact that Israelis refer to this part of the world as their neighborhood. I mean, Europe is a different neighborhood. We don't exactly, we're not surrounded by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.
But nonetheless, obviously, this region of the world hates you first and they hate us second. After the Saturday people come the Sunday people, as the saying goes.
Michael Eisenberg:
Stefan Thompson, welcome to the podcast. Welcome to Invested. It's great to have you here.
Stefan Thompson
Thank you very much, Michael. Appreciate it.
Michael Eisenberg
Before we get started, tell everybody about who [00:01:00] you are.
Stefan Tompson: I'm Stefan Thompson. I'm a Polish South African, but born in London, educated in French schools. I run a PR company in Poland and I'm the founder of Visegrad24, which is one of Europe's biggest social media news aggregators.
And I'm here in Israel on the ground filming. We just filmed an interview with you, Michael, which I'm very excited to release. And yeah that's roughly it.
Michael Eisenberg
And so, for a guy who grew up in South Africa, is Polish, went to French schools, and grew up in England, why exactly did you come to Israel to do media on what's going on here with the war?
Stefan Tompson
There is, I get asked this a lot by Israelis. There's an assumption, there's a suspicion, almost, of people who are non-Jewish, who are supportive of Israel and of the Jewish people. There's an intrinsic suspicion. Why are you doing this?
I'm not suspicious of you for it.
This is not altruistic.
There is a, there's a very definite self interest here. I understand that Israel is part of the West. My fight, my struggle, my battle for Western civilization and our values [00:02:00] is also being fought here. This is an outpost of Western civilization. It's also the birthplace, of course, of Western civilization.
Without Judaism, there is no Christianity. Without the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ here on the ground in Israel, there is no Christendom. Without Christendom, there is no West. This is an incredibly important place to the West, and I am very baffled, upset, confused and shocked that so few people understand that this is not, this is not a fight for just Israel. This is not a fight for the Jewish people. This is a fight for all of us.
And try to dig out for me, what are like your core values, the core things that motivate you? Because you've set up quite the media empire in social media. But it feels to me like this is not just media for the sake of doing media, there's something deep down that drives you.
Absolutely. I mean, we started , the reason I started was, the messaging that was coming out of Central and Eastern Europe where I moved back to, I moved back three, four [00:03:00] generations after my great grandfather was stuck in London. He was the ambassador to London before the war and then couldn't go back because of communism.
I came back three generations later to Poland because I felt a deep connection to the country and I was raised as a Pole. So there was a lack of representation of the media that was coming out that was representing Poland in a very negative light, and I wanted to address that, and I wanted to address the stories of Central and Eastern Europe and how it's being portrayed.
There was a hegemony of left-wing journalists who had access to Le Monde, to The Guardian, to the New York Times. They were writing these very negative stories about these countries. And I wanted to address that. That was the birthplace, really, of Visegrad and how it came about.
And there was an understanding that there is a, we have tools that allow us to bypass that traditional media. And to really get the stories of everyday people. Without having that big entourage of what traditional media is or the barriers of it. But the aim, it's become much bigger than that. It's become a platform in which I have been able to, I wouldn't want to overstate what I've achieved and done, but we have generated at this point in the last three months, it's over three and a half billion impressions on X alone. Over the course of the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, it's several billion impressions as well.
We've been essentially fighting back against Russian, Iranian, Chinese disinformation that is attacking the West. We have been promoting center right and conservative values. So an appreciation of what Western civilization is, a respect for our past, a respect for our history, a respect for our religions as well, which I think has disappeared to a great extent and a respect for the values that have built the West into what it is. And the West at its core is the, it's a pinnacle of human achievement. We have the wealthiest societies in the history of the world, the most equal societies in the history of the world. We have the ability to generate wealth, to generate capital, to pursue happiness.
We have uncountable freedoms, and we have social mobility. This is an extraordinary time to be alive. And those things are all under fundamental attack, under threat. And unlike Israelis and the Jewish diaspora who understands the fragility of life, there is a great understanding of the fragility of order in Israel. The Israelis, even the left wing ones that I have spoken with, they have a deep understanding that all, everything that has been achieved, everything that has been built can collapse and it can go very fast. That knowledge that is so ingrained for many reasons in the Jewish people has disappeared in the West and that is what I'm, that is what I'm attempting to - this is a humongous task, I'm not saying, I'm a very small drop in a very large ocean.
Michael Eisenberg
I have faith in you.
Stefan Tompson
Thank you, Michael, I appreciate it.
Michael Eisenberg:
Let me back up for a second.
Stefan Tompson
Yeah, sure.
Michael Eisenberg:
I'm sitting here listening to you and wondering whether the fact that, so to speak, you were in the Polish diaspora during the time of communism or your grandfather was, that gives you the appreciation for how fragile this is, now that Poland's kind of made a comeback from communism and is now a growing economy of Western values.
Yeah.
Michael Eisenberg:
Is that why you feel so fragile? Is that–
Stefan Tompson:
Definitely, and I'll say something that will make me both unpopular in Israel and both unpopular in Poland. We're very alike. I do believe that there would be no Poland without Jews and without the Jewish example.
When we, when Poland disappeared, there were three partitions in the 18th century and Poland didn't exist for 123 years. How do you maintain an identity without a state? This is obviously a question that the Jews have dealt with much, much longer than the Poles, and the Polish intelligentsia, the Polish elite during the 19th century, during those 123 years until the return and the recreation of the Polish state, based a lot of their thought and a lot of the organic work in maintaining the nation alive and Polish identity alive - whilst there were very severe attempts at Russification and Germanization of the Polish people throughout that 19th century - were based on the Jewish example. We are very alike and obviously our histories have been, the history of the Polish state is very deeply intertwined with the history of a thousand years of Polish Jewish history.
So there is, I think, A, I think we, the Polish people have learned a lot from the Jews. The Jews brought a huge amount of things to Poland. And I do also think that yes, there is, the Poles as a people have been threatened and it's been 250 years of tragedy for our people in the sense of no state, World War I, there's 4 million Poles killed fighting on all fronts because they were simply conscripted into the armies of the occupying empires of Poland.
Then we have 20 brief years of building a state, 1918 to 1939, the tragedy of World War II, Intelligentsia Aktion, A-B Aktion, where the Germans hunted down our elites and massacred them, not to the same extent as the Jewish people, of course but three million Polish Catholics were killed in six years.
The Polish state was decimated. And they really came for the doctors, the lawyers, the accountants, the priests, the aristocracy, the landowners, the professors, the schoolteachers. These people were systematically wiped out. And then we have, obviously, the Soviet invasion that happened simultaneously with the Nazis.
They come in on the 17th of September, 1939. And they come in with lists as well. And they murdered two of my grandfather's brothers who were killed in the death pits of Katyn and Starobelsk, where 22,000 Polish intellectuals and officers were murdered. And then we have 45 years of being under Moscow's boot, implemented by the Red Army.
The Red Army is in Poland until 1993, until December 1993. No ability to create wealth. A system of repression, no freedoms, censorship, being cut off from the world, and essentially state-mandated poverty. So this is the Polish experience of the last 250 years. Again, I'm not, you know, you went through the Holocaust, we didn't go through that, but as you can see, it's 250 years of being threatened as a people.
And I think that that certainly has formulated a deep patriotism in many Poles, a great respect for religion, because the Catholic Church was an important player in keeping the Polish identity alive and of Polish resistance, and of Polish, of Polish fight back against especially communism. But that threat has obviously disappeared. Even though, and this is something that I worry about, I live in Poland. I can see the very rapid change happening, where we have had 30 years, 29 years of uninterrupted economic growth at an average rate of 4.3 percent of GDP per annum between, all the way up to COVID–COVID was the first year that we had a slight recession–but there was uninterrupted economic growth, rapid explosion of wealth, a creation of a middle class, a creation of a wealthy upper middle class, the skyline of Warsaw is changing.
And as these comforts have come in, so has a shift away from religion, and so has a shift away from this sort of patriotism, and love, and respect of the past and tradition. And it's very interesting to see in Tel Aviv, which is such a liberal city. Well, many of the people, and we have spoken to many people, we've done a lot of street interviews, so I've spoken to, I'd say 150 people on the streets, just sort of everyday people in Tel Aviv, and many of them probably left-leaning, all of them with a deep understanding that you, even if you're not religious, you have to have a deep respect for your culture, your heritage, where you've come from. And a very interesting remark that I have about the Israelis, they will use the Bible, you will hear the Bible referenced every day.
Michael Eisenberg:
Yes.
Stefan Tompson:
I mean, it is just, it's normal.
Michael Eisenberg:
Part of the Hebrew language. Yeah, it's part of the Hebrew language.
Stefan Tompson:
It really is. Yeah. Sorry, because I sort of rambled on. My apologies.
Michael Eisenberg:
One of the things that strikes me when you're talking, you know, my family, my personal family was in America before the Holocaust. My wife's family, not - one of the things that I've found striking about the whole current situation and the war, just as it turns of history, is Israel's best friends in the world right now are the United States, obviously, but Germany, Austria, Poland, Greece, you know, that whole kind of region, even Hungary to some extent, which I don't think anyone would have imagined 85 years ago.
It's a stunning turn of history right now. And I'm not exactly sure what to make of it, but it's, but I find it fascinating. And I think a lot of what you're saying is true, which is, there's a set of values that maybe had to do with the intertwined Jewish diaspora, maybe it has to do with other traumas, maybe it has to do with common enemies, I don't exactly know right now. But the world changes and alliances change in that way. It's been heartening on some, you know, some level.
Stefan Tompson:
I do think that one of my worries is that a lot of the framing of Israelis, of this conflict, and the reason perhaps that there hasn't been as much support as there should be, is that Israelis are very often speaking about this in terms, of this conflict in terms of anti-semitism, in terms of attack on just Israel, whereas it's so much broader, that actually there are–this is, I think, what Israel really needs to do, is to inform the Western world that it is an intrinsic part of the Western world, it's an outpost of the Western world, and it's the battle line.
This is the front line. And it's Israelis dying right now. And this war will keep advancing. I mean, we are fighting this allied unholy alliance of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Hamas, and other affiliated terrorist organizations. And they hate the Jews. But they don't love Christians of the West.
They hate us as well.
Michael Eisenberg:
I think that's fair.
And I think that's to a certain extent that, that hasn't been, obviously you are in, I love the fact that Israelis refer to this part of the world as their neighborhood. I've heard that term so often. I don't know if it's a, is there a Hebrew word for neighborhood, Michael?
Is that where...?
“Shchuna.”
Michael Eisenberg: “Shchuna.” But that has, by the way, in slang, some negative connotations too, but-
Stefan Tompson:
Yeah. Yeah, we're in a different neighborhood, of course. I mean, Europe is a different neighborhood. We don't exactly, we're not surrounded by Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. But nonetheless, obviously this region of the world hates you first and they hate us second.
After the Saturday people come the Sunday people, as the saying goes.
Michael Eisenberg:
I want to take you back to Ukraine. So you start, the war starts, Russia attacks Ukraine. Where does that find you, Stefan? And where does, and what happens from there?
Stefan Tompson:
We had a platform at that point. We'd been building up Visegrad slowly but surely, presenting our perspective, countering this very left-leaning narrative that was coming out of Central and Eastern Europe and presenting things the way that we saw them.
And the full scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been an existential threat to my region of the world.
For hundreds of years.
Stefan Tompson:
For a thousand years.
Michael Eisenberg:
Yeah, for a thousand years.
Stefan Tompson:
So we really understand that threat. You know, we went through Russian occupation. We went through wars with Russia.
My family was murdered by the Russians, by the NKVD in Katyn and Starobelsk, as I mentioned. There is a, I have a profound understanding that this is a civilizational threat. This is a great threat. And we intrinsically knew, we just, the people working on Visegrad, it was me, my brother, and our friend Adam–we knew that we had a platform, and we didn't hesitate. The moment the invasion happened, we were on it. Writing about it, fighting Russian disinformation actively. And that was the spurt, the growth spurt that took us to where we are roughly now. And obviously it made sense. Ukraine is our direct neighbor.
So, we immediately got involved in countering disinformation, helping all the initiatives that we could of bringing Ukrainian refugees. So there were, we were connecting drivers from Warsaw, driving to the border to pick up refugees and put them up in their homes. The Poles opened up their homes.
It was incredible. And we had millions of refugees and not a single refugee camp. And that, I know it sounds like a slogan, but it really was the case. That, that magic is slightly gone. It's been almost two years now to the day. And it, obviously the situation is different but, Ukrainians were afforded all the same rights as Poles, all the same benefits as Poles.
The workplace was opened up for them. And they set, they went to work immediately. It was an incredible time. And, there was obviously, out of this great tragedy of the Russian aggression, there's a huge amount of good that came out of it, really. Now it was a beautiful thing to witness, it was an extraordinary thing to witness.
And I think it was the true essence of Christianity, of Poles–and bear in mind that we have a very difficult history with the Ukrainian people. There was a, in 1943, there was a terrible genocide that happened. About 250,000 Poles–ome estimates go as far high as 400,000–were murdered in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
And it was a very brutal genocide that, that was perpetrated by UPA, by Roman Shukhevych and Stefan Bandera, people who are still glorified to this day in Ukraine. And that was, and it's an open wound that, that discussion is still ongoing. The Ukrainians reference UPA because UPA also fought the Soviets very actively.
So it's a complicated history. There was that unfortunate event in the parliament of Canada where Yaroslav Hunka, who's being hunted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was applauded by the Canadian parliament. Because he was a Ukrainian who fought against the Soviets, but he happened to fight in a German unit.
So there was an awkward situation with that -
Michael Eisenberg:
There's a lot of awkwardness in Canada, in Canadian government these days.
Stefan Tompson:
Correct.
Michael Eisenberg:
Is that fair?
Stefan Tompson:
Yeah. But all in all, the incredible essence of it was, that was to me the essence of Christendom, the essence of Christian spirit and values, to help your neighbor in need, to open your home up, to give shelter, to feed the homeless, to house the homeless, and to give clothes to those without clothes.
I mean, there's that saying in the Bible.
Michael Eisenberg:
In Isaiah.
Stefan Tompson:
Yeah. There we are.
Michael Eisenberg:
Why is, what you call Western religion or Christianity so important to you, and why do you think it's so important to Poland?
Stefan Tompson:
I'm a religious man. I grew up with in a very religious mother. She's a practicing Catholic. She instilled things that I assumed were completely natural to everyone. It was quite a discovery to discover that suddenly, that actually not everyone goes to church every Sunday. I mean, you know as a child, you don't think about it, right. I assume as a religious Jew you probably had the same discovery.
Michael Eisenberg:
Oh, I grew up in Manhattan. So it was all different. But yes.
Stefan Tompson:
I mean, I grew up in a very secular London. I went to the French Lise, which is broadly speaking, most people were not Catholics in any way, shape or form. But it was a very important part of growing up. It was, it's what's formed a lot of my conservative beliefs have been formed by it. Yeah. And I do also think that it is a, there's this–Feliks Koneczny, who is a Polish thinker and philosopher, described the West or what he called Latin civilization as built on three hills: the Acropol, the Capitol and Golgotha.
So, Greek philosophy, Roman law and Christianity. And I think it's a good definition of what the West is, though I think it ought to be expanded to Judeo Christian. There is no Christendom without Judaism. There is no Christianity without Jesus. We've asked around, we've walked around the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and asked people, you know, there's two questions we do.
Well, who's the most famous Israeli? They'll say Gal Gadot, or they'll say Bibi, or Golda Meir. And they'll say, who's the most famous Jew? And so, amusingly, the answer is obviously, I mean, the most famous Jew ever was presumably Jesus Christ. People say Moses. They'll say Einstein. They'll say a few other things, but, and then suddenly it'll click. Oh, Jesus. But obviously, right there is, I mean, my belief is that my God was a Jewish man. And I think–
Michael Eisenberg:
By the way, that's become unpopular in social media. And all the kind of misinformation on social media.
Stefan Tompson:
No he’s a Palestinian. Yeah, who is Jesus? He's become controversial. He's a socialist refugee, Palestinian. No, he wasn't. Look, the reason Christendom is so important to the West is that the, it has inspired our architecture, art, our culture and ultimately, it has led the liberal values of the West today, that the liberal in the classical sense of the word have been formed by centuries of Christendom, that there is what we have today is an accumulated wealth that it didn't come overnight. Well, it didn't all happen in the 20th century. It took two millennia to achieve it.
And it took that torch. I mean, when Rome falls, and Rome is sacked, and there's what is referred to as the ‘Dark Ages’ that aren't as dark as people like to refer to them as, but there is that torch of Western civilization of Christian belief, of Roman law, of Greek philosophy, is carried through in what is referred to often as the “Benedict Option,” where in these small towns and villages, small communities kept that light awake.
And this is, I mean, there's this saying that, that says, you know, that “the tradition is not the worship of ashes. It is keeping the flame alive.” And I think there is no West without, without Christianity. I think that without at least a respect for it and an understanding, I see something that, that I don't know if you've seen this across the West, there are churches that are obviously empty.
No one goes to them because of the secularization of society, and they're being turned into cafes, and libraries, and even nightclubs in some cases. That is, that to me is a very powerful image as to what, that there is a lack of appreciation for the sacred and the profane. And that there is a sort of profanity to turning a church into a library.
I mean, a library might be better than a nightclub or a cafe for sure, but nonetheless, there is a sort of perverse transformation in that. And I do wonder, and actually it's a question for you, do you think that if there was a synagogue here in Tel Aviv or in Jerusalem that wasn't being used, is that something that would be possible, conceivable here?
Michael Eisenberg:
I don't know, they seem to all been taken over by small groups of people here in Tel Aviv. There are a bunch of empty synagogues in Tel Aviv, and now you find the kind of–
Stefan Tompson:
Small squats. Anarchist squats.
Michael Eisenberg:
Well, no, I don't know, religious squats have taken over this area.
Stefan Tompson:
Religious squats, that's a very different story.
Michael Eisenberg:
But you know, I've written this piece called, for Fortune, called ‘Covenantal Capitalism,’ and I actually just wrote a longer piece on the topic for this weekend. And one of the things I argue is that capitalism actually can't exist without the underpinnings of community and taking care of the other.
Stefan Tompson
Absolutely.
Michael Eisenberg:
That has been such a part of the Judeo-Christian ethic because it creates a covenant between me and you, that I want to empower you. And that Adam Smith's capitalism actually, people have forgotten, grows on this Christian covenant that exists in Scotland and the UK, instead of Protestant in that case.
And that's been part of the explosion of prosperity once it put capitalism on top of this structure. And it's not a statist infrastructure. It's actually a religious communal infrastructure that enabled capitalism to grow, and innovation in my view.
Stefan Tompson:
A hundred percent agree. There's one of the sins that calls for the vengeance of the heavens, is not paying your employee. And I think it extends to not paying your employee fairly.
Michael Eisenberg:
It's in the Hebrew Bible, too. Twice.
Stefan Tompson:
The fact that, the fact–and this is the brokenness of capitalism. I think there's genuine critiques of capitalism–and there's people on the left that criticize it, I think, in a very eloquent and interesting way.
What we're seeing now in the West, we have, you know, sort of, employees working for Amazon working in the U.S. and they have to have two jobs. They can't afford to have children. There is a brokenness to the system because there isn't the capitalism detached from the safeguards of religion.
There is an intrinsic safeguard to Judaism and to Christianity that keeps capitalism from becoming this, in essence, a sort of monster that eats away at its own, at its own.
Michael Eisenberg:
Yeah. One of the fascinating stories from the war here is about a guy named Harel Friedman, who has a jewelry store in Dizengoff Boulevard here in Tel Aviv.
He went off to reserve duty for 90 days and basically couldn't make ends meet, etc. He announces that he's going to have a liquidation sale on his jewelry store and on Dizengoff. It gets to two journalists, and they publish it. And all of Israel's turned up to buy this guy's stuff at a fair price and he's staying open because of that.
I think that's part of like, you know, the communal infrastructure that exists here, that communal capitalism.
Stefan Tompson:
That atomization in the West has occurred, I think, to a much greater degree than it has here. Much greater degree.
Michael Eisenberg:
I agree with that. That's what my piece is about.
Stefan Tompson:
Launching this weekend!
Michael Eisenberg:
Yeah. I'll send it to you. I want to switch gears for a second.
Stefan Tompson:
Sure, of course.
Michael Eisenberg:
And go to, it's actually, ironically, it's like connected–like Elon Musk was yesterday in Auschwitz, in Poland, and we've been talking about Poland–and he had this comment about his aspirations and what he's doing, but the interesting thing to me is you mentioned that you've really exploded on X–
Stefan Tompson:
Sure.
Michael Eisenberg:
–in Visegrad, and there's been a fair amount of criticism of Musk. Which I actually defended. It's probably the most viral Tweet ever in Hebrew because Musk, Elon retweeted my Tweet where I said, better an open air of ideas there than controlled media that has an agenda.
It's not that people on social media don't have agendas. They do, but there's enough ideas out there that the open market of ideas, and with Community Notes, that can kind of hold people accountable. This is a better architecture for the future of news. I'm interested in what you think about that.
Stefan Tompson:
I agree with you. I think that you cannot have freedom of expression and freedom of speech without uncomfortable speech. I do also think there is an intrinsic day to, to defend that the mainstream's idea, that attempts to curtail what Elon Musk is trying to do. That there is an issue with the open-air marketplace of ideas that it can be abused by bad actors, and we are under constant threat from a machine that is very powerful, very well organized and very well-funded, of bots, of disinformation accounts, of influencers who are bought and paid for by Iran, China, Russia, but also the Qataris.
So there is, we looked at this with the NCRI. There was this study that Visegrad helped and worked on, which showed that for every one pro-Israeli hashtag be it, ‘bring them home’ or ‘free the hostages’ or ‘stand with Israel.’ There were 57 posts on–this was on TikTok–57 posts with pro-Palestinian or pro Hamas hashtags. Obviously there's 2 billion, almost 2 billion Muslims. So there is a certain organicness to that. But there is no doubt, there is no doubt that there is a machine that is creating content, that is creating influencers, that is funding influencers, that is mass posting. We've seen this with Ukraine, where Russian disinformation–very powerful tool–that has infiltrated mainstream media to a certain extent, that had built its architecture around Russia today.
And we're seeing the same with the Qataris, and they're doing with Al Jazeera, for example. And it's an incredibly powerful tool, because a lot of what they post is actually good journalism, until you get to that part where they're kind of coming through that back door, and they're saying, and here is some pro-Hamas content that's sort of hidden away in this pile of decent content.
So in that sense that the free marketplace of ideas is under attack because of those bad faith actors. And there needs, then we have to build safeguards against them. Because we're seeing what has happened to Gen Z. The studies in the U.S. showed that 67 percent of Gen Zers, it was actually exactly converse–Boomers were 67 percent pro Israel, and Gen Z was 67 percent pro Palestine.
So you've reached a stage where 67 percent of Gen Zers in the U.S. either are at least openly pro-Palestine, potentially openly pro-Hamas.
Michael Eisenberg:
And by the way, a significant percentage is not patriotic to America. And not patriotic
Stefan Tompson:
Yeah. This is exactly, and this is that link of, if they hate Israel, the odds are they also hate the West and they blame it for every single evil in the world.
So, but absolutely. I think what Musk has done is great, I mean, he's an incredible man. He's an incredible entrepreneur. He, I mean, what he has achieved in one lifetime, you know, millions of people could never achieve in thousands of lifetimes. But it's so many fields. And he has, you know, he's bequeathed a great gift to all of us by doing what he did with X, by ending the shadow-banning process, by own by ending arbitrary takedowns of accounts by reducing cancel culture.
And I think, and I, you know, these accounts like Jackson Hinkle, for example, or Salman Syed, and a few other, sort of, blatantly, I mean, blatant bad actors–
Michael Eisenberg:
Owned actors, probably.
Stefan Tompson:
Owned actors, probably. Most likely. But in fact, having that there, and being able to challenge it, and being able to argue back and fight back and have that debate in the open–I actually think it's objectively a good thing for society, and I think it's a good thing for free speech.
Michael Eisenberg:
I want to tease this open a bit, because I think this is like the heart of a big conversation right now, which is, you said you got started because of Le Monde and The Guardian, etc. which kind of projected a certain image, which we couldn't see what was behind or who was behind–but certainly caused a certain narrative to take hold.
You also got started because of Russian disinformation, which by the way, acts on both mainstream media and social media. We talked about this war with Hamas, in which social media and mainstream media, whether it's Al Jazeera, as the case may be–
Stefan Tompson:
Or the BBC, Sky News. For sure. And social media accounts.
Michael Eisenberg:
And it feels like there isn't a perfect system.
Stefan Tompson:
No.
Michael Eisenberg:
Obviously. And I think that the question comes down to, or part of the question is as we kind of project this forward, and technology gets a lot better, and AI gets a lot better, in creating more and different and fake content, and some real content–what is the better architecture for media and for narratives for you, for Visegrad, for me, for society going forward?
Stefan Tompson:
I think there is a great future for citizen journalism, where the truth is not owned by anyone and everyone is a journalist. There is a great beauty to that, and that gives a great fairness and there's a, there's almost a justice to it that there isn't someone who detains the keys to the truth and says, I have, you know, the ability to create, write up, interpret, and then distribute the end of that is, is a great thing.
And I, I think, and this is very much the project that Visegrad24 is here doing in Israel on the ground. We've gone around, and my team is right now in Sarona market filming; there’s two crews with multiple presenters taking turns asking questions, and giving the mic to the people and saying, you know, and it's a range of questions and we're going to air all these different opinions.
We want different opinions. We don't, I'm not, you know, Visegrad doesn't hold the key to the truth. I don't know what the truth is. I'm trying to get it. And obviously the truth depends on, on, on the–I mean, that's a dangerous statement right there. It's a very postmodernist statement. I was about to say, you know, the truth depends on your perspective.
Michael Eisenberg:
Well, there's a lot of perspectives–
Stefan Tompson:
Sure. There's a lot of perspectives that convince people of what their truth is, because we all have some psychological bias that we view the world. By the way, in the late 90s, a journalist at the time for the San Jose Mercury News named Dan Gilmore wrote a book called “We the Media” about the future of citizen journalism.
I actually think it's taken more than 20 additional years until almost everything he wrote came true. I think we're living in that era right now. But, like, you look at Instagram, you look at TikTok, and you look at X, right, or Twitter, what was formerly called Twitter. And I ask you, what's the best architecture for the future of journalism, and news, and technology?
Which of the three is it?
Stefan Tompson:
I think it's, I think it's all three. I mean, obviously bear in mind that TikTok is a CCCP disinformation tool. CCP, not CCCP.
Michael Eisenberg:
CCCP was the Russian hockey team in the Olympics.
Stefan Tompson:
Correct. Yeah. No, I mean, it is a communist tool.
It is a PSYOP. It is designed to demoralize the West, and it has demoralized the West to a great extent, but it is also a great platform for virality. It is, there are some subjects that have no censorship in the sense of–there's a lot of educational videos that we've done with Visegrad talking about, just European matters that have done very well, that have reached Gen Z, that have reached audiences that we wouldn't reach in other places.
Instagram again, is a place that is, it's an aesthetic space. So it reaches again, a slightly different audience. Videos that perform fairly well. Again, you reach a Gen-Z and millennial audience, so you reach people you wouldn't normally reach. Facebook, you're reaching primarily a slightly older demographic, so Gen X, and you're reaching Boomers as well.
X is the place, it's the cross-section of thought leaders, of journalists, of politicians, X really is where news happens. It truly has become that space. Mainstream media gets its news off of X.
Michael Eisenberg:
Right.
Stefan Tompson:
Because we've reached an interesting point where actually if you have a big enough platform, a social media account that's big enough, you don't need to, if you're a prime minister's office, you don't need to call up the BBC and say, hey, I have something important to say, you just post it to X.
And and the media is gonna have it, you know, any minute they will write up the article. So I think X is the place where, obviously the masses–I, I don't like that word because, you know, people are people–but the, in the colloquial sense of the word, the masses aren't on X.
X is a space of–
Michael Eisenberg:
Opinion leadership.
Stefan Tompson:
Opinion leadership.
Michael Eisenberg:
Yeah, I agree.
Stefan Tompson:
And that does get disseminated further. And Visegrad24 is at a very interesting place where we have several hundred members of various European parliaments who follow us, about 150 ministers from multiple countries, several current prime ministers, I think five sitting prime ministers follow Visegrad right now, and several thousand journalists from across Europe, the US, but also the Middle East now.
Many of them are our detractors, many of them don't like our content and disagree with it, but we have reached an incredible place where we have been able to break multiple stories. A recent one that we did was the balloons that were flown over JFK to disrupt air traffic.
Michael Eisenberg:
Unbelievable work you did there.
Thank you, I appreciate it. And that, but that was, that is the essence of citizen journalism. A worker of the airport messaged us, said, “I want you to break this story, I love your content, I love your work.” An FBI investigation has now been launched into the people who–
Michael Eisenberg:
But why didn’t mainstream media pick that up?
Because they didn't. Even after you published it, it was barely visible in mainstream media.
Stefan Tompson:
It was, I mean, it was a very uncomfortable thing having, I mean, essentially domestic terrorists. This is an act of domestic terrorism.
Michael Eisenberg:
A hundred percent.
Stefan Tompson:
To launch balloons over an airport. I mean, imagine if a plane had crashed because of it and they'd killed people. I mean, I think they'd probably celebrate. They'd think it's some great win for their cause.But it was–no, so the FBI did launch an investigation. And that was, to have that as something under my belt, I am very proud of that. I think it's a great achievement. I think it was a great achievement.
The fact that the man who filmed it trusted us enough with that story and wanted us to break it. And that's happening more and more. There's people who trust us. There's people who understand that we're, I'm not impartial, I am biased, I'm, and I'm biased, because I oppose–I'm pro-Israeli because I oppose Islamist, fundamentalist, terrorist organizations who want to wipe out the Jewish people and then Christians next.
That's not a radical position to hold, it's a sensible one to hold. And people have, we've had some great content being sent to us some, and now we're making great original content, and my hope is that in the coming months and coming years, we will be able to scale this into a more serious news outlet with a bigger team.
And I think that's very likely to happen. I think we've reached a point of momentum, a point of trust, a point where we have a proven audience. We're reaching a billion impressions a month consistently now, for multiple months. And I think that there will be people who believe in us sufficiently to make it happen.
Michael Eisenberg:
What would you do about all the fake that is on X, or Instagram or TikTok? Like, how do we handle that?
Stefan Tompson:
I don't have an answer for you, Michael. That is a question for greater minds than mine. I have no idea how–
Michael Eisenberg:
Do you worry about AI? You worry about AI in that context?
Stefan Tompson:
I, yes, very much so. I, obviously I, my primary line of work was, has been PR for years.
It's been very interesting to watch how fakes are disseminated in political campaigns. Very strategically.
Stefan Tompson:
You worked on a lot of political campaigns.
Michael Eisenberg:
I worked on a lot of political campaigns. I've seen fakes be deployed. It's very interesting to see how they are released and how they manipulate campaigns.
And the thing is they happen faster. They're released faster than they can be counted. I don't know where the answer lies. I don't, it's a threat that is, that’s beyond my comprehension and beyond, I don't have an answer.
Michael Eisenberg:
If you were going to give one piece of advice to Elon Musk on what to do with X, what would it be?
Stefan Tompson:
The bots. More actively, I am struggling with Iranian, Chinese, and Russian bots. If I posted something right now, it could be, we could Tweet ‘hello’ right now. And within one second, we'd have about 25 comments saying free Palestine, some swear words about Visegrad, just automated bots. Doesn't matter how many of them I block, it's always about 25 of them within one second that come. That, that's an irritation, and I think there must be a sensible way to clean that up. Perhaps by making everyone pay, even a dollar a year, whatever it is, but that is definitely an issue.
Michael Eisenberg:
Going back to, kind of, the impact of fake news on political campaigns, so you've been involved in a number of political campaigns.
Stefan Tompson:
A number, yes.
Michael Eisenberg:
I’m not going to ask you if you publish fake information, I'm sure you haven't. What do we do? Like, we're going to have an election in Israel soon. This year is going to be a U.S. election.
Stefan Tompson:
Sure.
Michael Eisenberg:
There's an incredible amount of fake news, usually A.I. For example, you know. You can make President Biden say anything, and it's indistinguishable. It's reached the point where it's almost indistinguishable from the real thing, right? Difficult to watch. Did you watch Javier Milei’s speech at Davos?
Stefan Tompson:
I did.
Michael Eisenberg:
Right? Which was dubbed. I don't speak any Spanish, but it was dubbed. He was sort of lip synced as if he's spoken in English, his own voice, his own accent. It was incredible. It's incredible. And if I didn't know he didn't speak English, or he didn't speak English at all, I wouldn't know
Stefan Tompson:
You'd assume, you would have intuitively assumed, ‘Oh, Javier Melei is making a speech.’
Michael Eisenberg:
And by the way, I bet you I had a better experience than people in Davos, who had to have it simultaneously translated by some talking head behind a booth. Yeah. Like, what do they do about that? You just think about the following circumstance. Somebody deepfakes Jerome Powell, the chair of the Fed, saying, “I'm reducing interest rates, you know, 100 basis points.”
You know, market takes off, somebody makes it. Or, I'm raising interest rates 100 basis points, the market tanks, I got a big short, and I'm off to the races. What do we do about this?
Stefan Tompson:
That happened when, right–
Michael Eisenberg:
With the Bitcoin ETF! That was hacked.
Stefan Tompson:
I was going to mention something else. I was going to mention when Elon Musk introduced verified users, there were a few accounts that these guys, they basically renamed something and they did crash some stock prices.
They Tweeted out, I think one of them was a pharmaceutical company. I can't remember the exact story, but I think they were this–I think it was insulin. I think they said insulin would be free, and it came from an account that was verified. And the price actually did crash.
You're asking, again, an incredibly complex question. I don't have the answer. I think the answer lies probably somewhere in technical ability to, I mean, I don't know, in having–I was almost going to say something ridiculous, like saying, you know, it should all be on the blockchain. The Bitcoin bros will say that, you know, the blockchain will solve absolutely every single problem in humanity.
Michael Eisenberg:
My own framework, for what it's worth, is like, yeah, you have two choices. Like we always trusted the, call it the New York Times, had a brand that was trustworthy. I'm not sure it's true anymore. And so like our trust sensors have kind of got up on the New York Times. And so everything you look at on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, needs to be looked at with a high level of skepticism.
It's a, is that real? Maybe there’s Community Notes, in the case of Twitter–we got to question that. So everything over time might be perceived to be fake before it's proven real. One of the things I always do when I see something like that is, I don't answer. Like, I don't reply. I'm gonna wait 24 hours to see if something sorts out here because it may not be real.
Stefan Tompson:
But isn't that actually a good thing? To have that assumption at all times. It might be a good thing for society.
Michael Eisenberg:
I think, yes, schools should teach critical thinking about facts, or about history, or about all these things. I'm a big believer in that. We should teach critical thinking. That's one of the things you learn in orthodox Jewish education, is critical thinking on texts.
But it's hard in the 24/7, every microsecond, news cycle to go do that all the time.
Stefan Tompson:
No I agree, and Community Notes actually has been a really interesting tool and interesting solution–but I don't know the extent you could do that on a YouTube video.
Yeah, I don't either. I don't know. The answer again is yeah, so–
Michael Eisenberg:
Is fake news with us to probably stay for the rest of our lives?
Stefan Tompson:
Feels that way. Yeah, I think so. Also, the other thing is that–news ultimately, there's this belief that there is objective news. I don't think that is true. I think everyone has, everyone is biased. And you can take a story, and you can frame that same story in two ways that turn it into a completely different story.
And we're seeing that happening in, in real time, right? We're also seeing real time denial of true events. So October 7th–the evidence is overwhelming, I mean, there is really no, there should be no question about the fact that it happened. There was a massacre. Over a thousand people were killed. Innocent civilians were attacked.
3000 Hamas fighters poured into Israel, committed horrific atrocities, documented them, live streamed most of it, and you're getting in real time–and I'm not even talking about the Arab world, I'm talking about the Western world–where you get people in the West saying, “Oh, it may have been AI, we don't really know what happened.”
It's not even, they're not, it's not even them saying, “Oh this is a response to 70 years of Israeli crimes on the Palestinian people, blah, blah, blah.” No, they're saying, I don't know, it didn't happen. In real time. There's that famous, you know, Eisenhower saying, “please take photographs of evidence. Because in 20 years, there's gonna be people who are gonna say it didn't happen.” It's happening, you know, one month, two months, three months after the event. And the overwhelming evidence.
Michael Eisenberg:
There's this incredible video yesterday of Noa Tishby going around. In Utah, right?
Stefan Tompson:
Yeah, I watched it.
Michael Eisenberg:
And people don't know anything. I sometimes wonder, you know, we have this narrative, it's called the Flynn Effect, that, you know, IQs increase over the last decades. And I'm starting to wonder whether there's been a massive dumbing down of society due to social media, or people have always been this dumb, they just never got on camera?
Stefan Tompson
Have you watched Idiocracy?
Michael Eisenberg:
No, what is that? Idiocracy!
Stefan Tompson
Oh, you gotta watch Idiocracy, Michael. One of the, it's a cult movie. It is an incredible film. It's the exact reverse of what you said.
Michael Eisenberg:
I've never even heard of it.
Stefan Tompson:
The concept of the film is, essentially, all the clever people are too busy being clever to have children.
They're considering it, they're thinking about it, they wonder if they can afford it financially. And all the idiots in the world were just procreating en masse. So the IQ drops dramatically, I mean off a cliff, and there's two people with an IQ, I think, I believe it's a hundred. So they take a soldier and they take a prostitute, and they freeze them and get, keep them in time and they wake up.
And they're the cleverest people in the world. And there's an incredible moment of them discovering this completely dumbed down society that tried to go back home in time. It's a wonderful film and it's, it answers a lot of your questions actually. It's actually–
Michael Eisenberg:
It's distressing. I feel primed to believe fake news.
Stefan Tompson:
I do believe we're reaching a point where IQs have risen, and they've risen for many reasons, including simply diet, for example, and access to food, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And average heights have gone up in the West. For example, in the West, there's an incredible statistic in Poland where you have a certain decade where there was malnutrition because of communist mismanagement.
And then there was another decade where the Polish government borrowed a stack of money, and there were bananas in Poland. There's even a famous saying about bananas in Poland because that era was, it was such an important thing as shipping containers arrived with bananas in Poland. You couldn't have–I mean, the incredible fact that, you know, under a communist regime, the fact that bananas have been shipped to a country is a success, tells you everything you need to know about communism. But anyway, there's one decade where Poles are on average shorter than they are in the next decade because of malnutrition, which, and you know, the same thing happened with IQ.
And I mean, I do think that there are, we are reaching a point where cousin marriage, for example in, in Gaza or the West Bank is not exactly a good thing for the gene pool. It has real ramifications and serious consequences. I dunno, I think we might be, I mean, I guess Steven Pinker and others would, Jonathan Haidt would disagree on this, but I do think we're going to reach a period of dropping IQs again.
Michael Eisenberg:
Interesting. By the way, would you ban TikTok in the West?
Stefan Tompson:
Yes, I would. And I say this as someone who does use it. Our Visegrad is on TikTok. We have hundreds of thousands of followers there. Generated hundreds of millions of views. And we've done objectively good work there that I'm proud of. Work that has been educational, that has been quality, that has been using good vocab—I mean, even raising the level. Just raising the level of just providing content that is well spoken, well presented. That has some merit. That in and of itself in this absolute ocean of trash of vulgarity, of swear words, of crassness, of sexualization. Just vulgarity.
That in and of itself was a good thing. But I would. I think it's a tool. I think it's a very dangerous tool. Because it is so addictive. Because of the, it's been destroying attention spans. It context-switches you. You're unable to focus. It sexualized young girls in a very meaningful way. These girls, I think there's a process they go through where they post videos to TikTok, they get some views, and then they realize that slightly more sexual content, more sexualized content, will give them even more views, so there's a dopamine hit, and the algorithm rewards them immediately.
And suddenly you have incredibly vulgar stuff. And the same with the crassness. You do something stupid, and crass, and silly. I don't know. There was a trend of people crawling around shopping malls as if they were a sort of caterpillar. It was bizarre. It was stupid, and it wasn't funny. And it was a public nuisance, but it was generating millions of views. So suddenly you had idiots crawling around shopping malls across Europe. And then you had, obviously, the letter to Bin Laden. How is it possible that in the span of two, three days, Osama Bin Laden is rehabilitated in the mind of Gen Z?
In two, three days, that level of influence on young people, that is manipulated. The algorithm is obviously manipulated. And then you see obviously the Chinese version, the Douyin version of TikTok, which is promoting an entirely different algorithm. Every seventh video is a video that is from the CCP.
It's an extraordinary fac,t that actually, they are making sure that their young people, even though there is the context switch and there's the dopamine rush of every new video you watch. And you always think the next one is going to be–just another one. Right? And they're promoting educational content that they're–
Michael Eisenberg:
They’re sitting at the poker table or the blackjack table. Just one more hand, I'm going to win.
Stefan Tompson:
It's exactly that. And it really is. They've, it's a beautifully designed tool. Yeah, it really is. A weapon.
Michael Eisenberg:
How would you feel–I'm just going back to fake media for a second.
Stefan Tompson:
Sure.
Michael Eisenberg:
How would you feel if you, kind of, knew that the campaign for President of the United States was influenced by some fake item, or the Prime Minister of Poland was elected because of some massive fake campaign?
I know this kind of harkens back to Russian propaganda, but you don't have to be that sophisticated.
Stefan Tompson:
You don't have to be that sophisticated.
Michael Eisenberg:
You know, it doesn't have to be a giant operation. A simple AI tool, you know, propagates something fake about Biden, and he's not elected, or the Prime Minister of Poland, like–
Stefan Tompson:
I mean, I think over the course of multiple elections that, that has been the case, right?
I mean, there's the famous argument that, goes that those who watched, I believe it was Kennedy was campaigning against Nixon at the time. Was it Nixon in the sixties? And those who listened to it on radio believed that Nixon had won the debate. Those who watched it on TV assumed that Kennedy had won.
Based on the aesthetics and those who are listening is an interesting distinction, right? Where you get, for example, on average, taller candidates perform better in elections than those who are short. On average, you will not find bald heads of state, it's a rarity, since the TV world has become a thing and we've had, you know, photography of everything and video footage of everything–generally speaking, you do not get bald elected heads of state.
It's just, it's an interesting fact, right? I mean, but the bias is massive, where you reach that stage of life that the voter is influenced by the fact whether or not the candidate has hair or not. Or whether he's, or whether he's, you know, six foot one or whether he's five foot eight. It's a massive difference.
And so if that, if just that impacts an election–I think they have, obviously in the past they've been impacted by fake news. Also by the fact that some things get unreported. I mean, an element of fake news is news not getting reported. That's an important part of it, right? That you don't hear something about a candidate, because it's been made to disappear, because the media collectively chooses to ignore it.
Or simply because it doesn't, the story isn't broken.
Michael Eisenberg:
How do you choose what to ignore?
How do I choose what to ignore? Well, the thing is I'm at a place where Visegrad is a relatively small team of five, six, seven, depending on how you count, you know, it's less than 10 people.
Any which way you counted is less than 10. So we're limited in that sense in having to cover specific topics. At the moment, I would say that 50 to 60 percent of what we are posting to social media is related to Israel. And the reason is, we do not have the capacity to focus and to have, you know, people who genuinely know about a topic covering that topic.
The Israeli topic, I believe the team has been focused on this for several months, is well versed in the topic, and we have very good sources on the ground. I mean, we have people we trust, we have people who send us things that we trust, we have an established network of people who are quasi-contributors at this point, really.
But we'd be incapable of, I don't know, if something major happens suddenly, it'd be very difficult to cover both things at once. So we're limited just by the virtue of–and that actually solves the problem. What do I ignore? Well, I ignore, you know, the rest of world news, because we're busy on one topic and we can only meaningfully focus on one at a time.
Michael Eisenberg:
How do you see the rise of antisemitism affecting global politics?
Stefan Tompson:
I think there's a genuine threat in the West because of mass migration, where you're seeing candidates like Jean Luc Mélenchon in France, and the rise of Jean Luc Mélenchon, a far left candidate who is openly antisemitic, and that is going to be replicated across European states.
There is going to be a normalization of antisemitism–we're already seeing it–and one of the reasons is the demographic change of the West is going to lead to that normalization. Because Arab populations, migrant populations, third, second generation, third generation even, will hold views–or not even that, they already hold them, views that are antisemitic.
So I think there will be normalization.
Michael Eisenberg:
Will France exist like we know it today in 50 years?
Stefan Tompson:
France doesn't exist in the way–I've lived in France in the late 90s, early 2000s, as a child, I grew up in France partially. France doesn't exist in that way already.
Michael Eisenberg:
Oh wow. I wasn't expecting that answer. Okay. What's the most important piece of technology for your business in the next five to 10 years?
Stefan Tompson:
X.
Michael Eisenberg:
That already exists. What else?
Stefan Tompson:
Oh something that’s coming up? I think that the tools offered up by AI that will help us edit editing tools, the editing process itself, and you know this, because we, this is going to be edited by someone
Michael Eisenberg:
Yeah, it's time consuming. By the way, our normal editor is in reserve duty for the last hundred days. So it's been really tough. But yes, keep going.
Stefan Tompson:
That, I mean the ability to have–and some of it is already available. I mean, Descript, for example, which will do your subtitles for you fairly accurately, you have to go through it, but it's fairly accurate.
The ability to dub things in different languages. We discussed this briefly. But even the ability to–there's three cameras here, so there's a shot of the two of us, one of you, one of me–even to have that, you know, the editing process of, an editor has to sit usually, and go, here's one cut here, and change from one camera to the other, that, that's already happening as well, where you can almost semi automate that, that's going to save thousands of hours.
Michael Eisenberg:
In a hundred years when they write the biography of Stefan, what's the title going to be?
Stefan Tompson:
Man of the West.
Michael Eisenberg:
Man of the West.
Stefan Tompson:
That's what I hope–something like that.
Michael Eisenberg:
You may need to move to Israel. I got one last question for you. In this era of fake news, if you had to bet on one person to solve it or the one place you'd have to go, is it TikTok, Zuckerberg, or Musk?
Stefan Tompson: 100%--I mean, as a problem to solve?
Michael Eisenberg:
Yeah. Who's going to solve the problem and where would you want to go first?
Stefan Tompson:
Oh, I think it's Musk. I, albeit Zuckerberg has been becoming more conservative, generally more conservative as he's been, as Facebook has become a publisher in the sense of, it is also a platform to publish news.
He's found himself at war with establishment media. It's an interesting shift that he's had. I think Zuckerberg is a very interesting man as well. I think he's an incredible human being. I mean, he's achieved incredible things at an incredibly young age.
Michael Eisenberg:
If you had to be left with one social media platform, would it be–
Stefan Tompson:
X?
Without a doubt. Yeah, without a doubt.
Michael Eisenberg:
All right, Stefan, thank you for coming.
Stefan Tompson:
Michael, thank you.
Michael Eisenberg:
You can learn more about Stefan on X, formerly Twitter, Stefan Thompson, that's S T E F A N T O M P S O N. You can also follow him on YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook. And if you haven't yet checked out Visegrad, that's V I S E G R A D, 24, on Twitter, you should definitely go do that. It's some of the highest quality content out there and they actually break real news. Thank you for coming. Thanks for spending time in Israel. Thank you.
Executive Producer: Erica Marom
Producer: Sofi Levak
Video: Yair Cymerman
Editing: Ron Baranov
Music and Art: Uri Ar
Design: Rony Karadi
