Latest / Core Memory / On Steve Jobs, Drugs, AI, Risk and the Enduring Magic of Silicon Valley

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On Steve Jobs, Drugs, AI, Risk and the Enduring Magic of Silicon Valley · Core Memory

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The more sort of ironic thing that I like to bring up is I
0:04
delivered newspapers to
0:06
SPEAKER_01: the future homes of both Steve Jobs and Larry Page.
0:09
The irony is that those are the guys I would argue did more
0:12
than any two people on
0:14
SPEAKER_01: the face of the earth to change the way news is delivered.
0:17
SPEAKER_01: So I was their paperboy.
0:18
SPEAKER_01: The microprocessor was going to change the world.
0:20
And I looked at it and I thought,
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well,
0:22
that'd be a good thing to focus on.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: And it turned out it was a great thing to focus on.
0:27
SPEAKER_01: It kept me busy for an entire career.
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The most hypocritical part of Elon's various hypocrisies is his
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notion in setting
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SPEAKER_01: up Neuralink that somehow by binding humans more tightly,
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SPEAKER_01: coupling them more tightly to the machine,
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SPEAKER_01: that was going to allow us to control the machines.
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SPEAKER_01: Did he not watch Star Trek?
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SPEAKER_01: Did he not ever see the board?
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SPEAKER_01: Does he not know what resistance is futile you will be assimilated?
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I think the most important thing in developing this technology
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is you can be able
0:54
SPEAKER_01: to take the glasses off.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk to John Markoff, the famous...
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SPEAKER_00: legend of covering the tech industry for a number of places,
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SPEAKER_00: but most prominently at the New York Times for many years.
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SPEAKER_00: John and I worked together at the New York Times for about three years.
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SPEAKER_00: More to the point, though, he was the figure that I aspired to be like.
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SPEAKER_00: He's always...
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Written about the technology industry with heart and soul and a
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deep interest in
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SPEAKER_00: the actual tech itself and was for sure my role model.
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SPEAKER_00: So this one is an extra special treat for me.
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SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk a little Silicon Valley history,
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SPEAKER_00: a little Elon,
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SPEAKER_00: a little AI,
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SPEAKER_00: where the world is.
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is heading and get John's just amazing perspective on this
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place and what it all means.
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SPEAKER_00: And so I am sure you're going to enjoy the show.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: And as ever, please subscribe, leave a couple reviews.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: It apparently helps us out quite a bit.
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SPEAKER_00: And thank you for listening.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: John Markoff.
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SPEAKER_00: Hello.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: Hey, Ashley.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: Long time no chat.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: I know.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: Too long.
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SPEAKER_00: How are you?
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SPEAKER_01: Above ground and taking solid food.
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SPEAKER_01: I'm good.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: I'm really looking forward to this.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: I think I'm going to be
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SPEAKER_00: A little indulgent.
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SPEAKER_00: We've known each other for a long time,
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but there's a whole bunch of questions about your career and
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thoughts on Silicon
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SPEAKER_00: Valley that I don't think I ever had a proper chat with you about.
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SPEAKER_00: I hope that sounds okay.
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SPEAKER_01: It sounds fine with the caveat you have to realize that
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I feel like I'm Rip Van Winkle in many ways,
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so...
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We'll see what I can remember.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: Do you happen to remember the first time we ever met?
3:07
SPEAKER_00: I suspect you don't, but... I think it was...
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SPEAKER_01: Was it at CNET or something like that?
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SPEAKER_01: It was somewhere Soma kind of?
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SPEAKER_00: Yeah, at a coffee shop.
3:20
Well,
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I was 22 years old,
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and I had just started my first job actually at IDG.
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SPEAKER_00: And I was this cub reporter,
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and I was reading everything I could and trying to figure out
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who I might want to
3:36
SPEAKER_00: try to be like one day.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: And you were the...
3:40
SPEAKER_00: were the standard to which I aspired.
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SPEAKER_00: And I remember I dropped you an email and I thought,
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there's no way this guy's going to write me back and meet up
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for a coffee.
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SPEAKER_00: And you did.
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SPEAKER_00: You had coffee with this young idiot.
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SPEAKER_00: I forgot the coffee.
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SPEAKER_00: That always stood out to me, that you were kind enough to do that.
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SPEAKER_00: You set a good impression.
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SPEAKER_00: I've tried to do that as much as I can, as I've gotten.
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SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00: You always learn a lot.
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I've been fascinated by your life and career and all the
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wonderful things you've
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SPEAKER_00: written and explored.
4:19
SPEAKER_00: And I was digging around the internet.
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SPEAKER_00: I mean,
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SPEAKER_00: there's some information about this and some stuff I know,
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SPEAKER_00: but there's not as much as I thought.
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I mean,
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can you set the stage for people a little bit about growing up
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in Silicon Valley?
4:35
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
4:38
SPEAKER_01: I grew up in Palo Alto before there was a Silicon Valley.
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SPEAKER_01: Silicon Valley was named in 1971 by Don Hoffler.
4:45
SPEAKER_01: So I grew up,
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I literally played in the Hewlett family household when I was
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in elementary school.
4:53
SPEAKER_01: The Hewlett family lived about six blocks away from my house.
4:58
The more sort of ironic thing that I like to bring up is I
5:01
delivered newspapers to
5:03
SPEAKER_01: the future homes of both Steve Jobs and Larry Page and
5:09
SPEAKER_01: which,
5:09
SPEAKER_01: you know,
5:10
the irony is that those are the guys I would argue did more
5:13
than any two people on
5:14
SPEAKER_01: the face of the earth to change the way news is delivered.
5:17
SPEAKER_01: So I was their paper boy.
5:19
SPEAKER_01: I was their pre-paper boy.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: And,
5:23
SPEAKER_01: you know,
5:23
I left in 67 to go to the Northwest where I was for a decade in
5:28
college and
5:28
SPEAKER_01: graduate school.
5:29
And then I came back in 77 and this thing called Silicon Valley
5:32
had emerged and
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SPEAKER_01: I got sort of sucked into,
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I had come back to because I'd given up on my idea of being an
5:40
academic and wanted
5:41
SPEAKER_01: to try to become a reporter.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: I saw you were studying sociology.
5:45
SPEAKER_01: I was studying anti-war organizing under the cover of sociology.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
5:49
SPEAKER_01: No, I was interested in social science stuff.
5:51
SPEAKER_01: And I had gone to school,
5:56
SPEAKER_01: a little college called Whitman College,
5:58
SPEAKER_01: middle of nowhere,
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SPEAKER_01: Walla Walla,
6:00
SPEAKER_01: Washington.
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SPEAKER_01: Town's so nice, they named it twice.
6:03
SPEAKER_01: And then I went to graduate school at the University of Oregon.
6:05
SPEAKER_01: And when I got there, I had a very intellectual kind of college career.
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And I discovered that I was in a vocational training program in
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a graduate school.
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SPEAKER_01: And I really didn't want to teach.
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SPEAKER_01: So it took me about four years to unwind that.
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SPEAKER_01: I had actually applied to Columbia.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: And I was sort of torn.
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And I had this notion somehow at some point that studying
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sociology would be more relevant.
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SPEAKER_01: And I was disabused of that.
6:30
SPEAKER_01: But I had a fellowship.
6:32
SPEAKER_01: And so...
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SPEAKER_01: I hung around in Eugene.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: Eugene was a great place to live.
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SPEAKER_01: I still think fondly of that.
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SPEAKER_01: And for about four years and I decided,
6:40
SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: maybe I should really try to become a reporter,
6:43
SPEAKER_01: a newspaper reporter.
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SPEAKER_01: That's what I wanted to be when I grew up.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: Like when you were delivering papers,
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SPEAKER_00: that's what you wanted to be when you grew up or you came to that?
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SPEAKER_01: I came a little bit later.
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SPEAKER_01: So...
6:54
SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: I,
6:54
SPEAKER_01: I,
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SPEAKER_01: uh,
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SPEAKER_01: I edited my junior,
6:57
SPEAKER_01: uh,
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SPEAKER_01: high school newspaper and then I really wasn't involved in,
7:00
SPEAKER_01: in,
7:01
SPEAKER_01: uh,
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SPEAKER_01: journalism in high school.
7:03
SPEAKER_01: I, I was, I was into racing bicycles.
7:05
SPEAKER_01: That's what I was,
7:06
SPEAKER_01: was way too early for being a bike racer,
7:08
SPEAKER_01: but that's what I was,
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SPEAKER_01: that's all I cared about.
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It was Palo Alto,
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you know,
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that there are these wonderful,
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uh,
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hills behind Stanford.
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SPEAKER_01: I spent all my time there that that's, that's what I did.
7:19
SPEAKER_01: And, um, um,
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SPEAKER_01: But in college, I had grown up on I.F.
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SPEAKER_01: Stone.
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SPEAKER_01: He was an independent investigative reporter.
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SPEAKER_01: And I read a lot about Veblen.
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SPEAKER_01: I ran my college newspaper.
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I read a lot about Veblen,
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Thorsten Veblen,
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the muckrakers,
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the progressive era.
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And that was as close as I was at that point to thinking about
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what I wanted to do
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SPEAKER_01: when I grew up.
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SPEAKER_00: Were you at all,
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when you were going to the Hewlett family house and seeing some
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of the early
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SPEAKER_00: semiconductor stuff,
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SPEAKER_00: was the tech part of that on your radar at all?
7:54
SPEAKER_00: Were you interested in that?
7:56
SPEAKER_01: So I was always kind of interested in science.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: I had this notion that I'd become an astronomer.
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when I went to college,
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and I was disabused of that after a year of calculus.
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SPEAKER_01: I realized I wasn't going to be an astronomer.
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SPEAKER_01: I mean,
8:10
SPEAKER_01: I passed the course,
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SPEAKER_01: but I was clearly not excelling,
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SPEAKER_01: and I sort of got...
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SPEAKER_01: And,
8:15
SPEAKER_01: you know,
8:15
SPEAKER_01: the Vietnam War was on,
8:18
SPEAKER_01: and that became sort of dominant in my consciousness.
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And so,
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actually,
8:22
when I ended up coming back to what then had become Silicon Valley,
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I spent my first five or six years really reporting on the
8:34
relationship between the
8:36
SPEAKER_01: technology companies that were in the Valley and the Pentagon.
8:38
I was interested in the military uses of technology when I
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first started reporting.
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I think an article I wrote for something called the Pacific
8:48
News Service was the
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first time that the phrase Star Wars was used to describe the
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SCI program.
8:58
SPEAKER_01: uh,
8:58
SPEAKER_01: the Reagan era,
9:00
SPEAKER_01: uh,
9:00
SPEAKER_01: you know,
9:00
SPEAKER_01: AB,
9:01
SPEAKER_01: uh,
9:01
SPEAKER_01: the,
9:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
9:02
SPEAKER_01: the,
9:02
SPEAKER_01: uh,
9:02
SPEAKER_01: anti,
9:03
SPEAKER_01: uh,
9:04
SPEAKER_01: weapons and stuff that they were doing.
9:05
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, the space lasers.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: Yes, I know.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: I know.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: Maybe too much about Star Wars at this point.
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SPEAKER_00: I got, got deep on that.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: So did you coin Star Wars or somebody else?
9:15
SPEAKER_01: Well, a headline writer did.
9:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
9:20
SPEAKER_01: It was a syndicate.
9:21
SPEAKER_01: So I'm not sure which paper it was,
9:23
but one of the people who wrote that the word Star Wars was not
9:25
in the story,
9:26
SPEAKER_01: but it was in the headline.
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SPEAKER_00: Wow.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: All right.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: I did not know that, that piece.
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SPEAKER_00: That's fantastic.
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SPEAKER_00: Um, and, and when you come back in, in 77, um,
9:37
SPEAKER_00: I don't know how... So this is the semiconductor industry's booming.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: The PC hasn't quite hit.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: It's a few years away.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: What's the energy?
9:49
SPEAKER_01: Actually, the PC thing was clearly happening when I came back.
9:53
SPEAKER_01: I'd run across a couple of things before I came back.
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SPEAKER_01: Ted Nelson's dual book I'd read.
10:00
SPEAKER_01: I'd read Stuart Brand's piece of the Rolling Stone.
10:03
SPEAKER_01: So I had this sense that
10:05
SPEAKER_01: computers were coming personal.
10:07
SPEAKER_01: That was on my radar.
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SPEAKER_01: I went to early homebrew meetings.
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SPEAKER_01: I wasn't at the first meetings.
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SPEAKER_01: I mean,
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SPEAKER_01: I think it started in 75,
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but I was going to meetings as early as 78 or 79 just as a
10:19
journalist trying to
10:20
SPEAKER_01: meet people.
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SPEAKER_01: And so that was a very neat scene.
10:25
Although I have to say the thing that sort of set me on my path
10:29
was stumbling
10:29
across a book by a British computer scientist and psychologist
10:34
whose name was
10:34
SPEAKER_01: Christopher Evans.
10:36
SPEAKER_01: And he wrote this book called The Micromillennium.
10:39
And the argument that he made in this book was that the
10:42
microprocessor was going to
10:43
SPEAKER_01: change the world.
10:45
And I looked at it and I thought,
10:46
well,
10:46
that'd be a good thing to focus on.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: It turned out it was a great thing to focus on.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: It kept me busy for an entire career.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that was well played on his part and on your part.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: What was...
11:02
SPEAKER_00: For people who don't know what the Homebrew Computer Club was,
11:05
SPEAKER_00: could you,
11:06
SPEAKER_00: could you describe it a little and what it was like?
11:09
SPEAKER_01: You know,
11:09
this sort of was one of the serendipitous things that
11:12
indirectly came out of,
11:15
SPEAKER_01: to a large extent,
11:16
SPEAKER_01: out of Stuart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog.
11:18
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Stuart was there circa 66, 67.
11:23
SPEAKER_01: The Whole Earth Truck Store had opened up in Menlo Park, California.
11:27
And there was also a computer center based on a mini computer
11:32
called the People's
11:33
SPEAKER_01: Computer Center,
11:35
SPEAKER_01: started by Bob Albrecht.
11:38
SPEAKER_01: who was really using computers for education for kids.
11:44
SPEAKER_01: And in between those two groups,
11:47
SPEAKER_01: there was an annual,
11:49
SPEAKER_01: there was a monthly potluck for people who were interested in computers.
11:53
SPEAKER_01: And for some reason, the PCC potluck was ending.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: I can't remember why it was ending.
11:59
SPEAKER_01: And that led these two guys to...
12:04
SPEAKER_01: One,
12:05
SPEAKER_01: an itinerant draft resistor,
12:06
SPEAKER_01: his name I'm blanking on at the moment,
12:08
SPEAKER_01: and the other,
12:09
SPEAKER_01: Gordon French,
12:10
SPEAKER_01: who was an engineer,
12:11
SPEAKER_01: to basically send out a
12:14
SPEAKER_01: A call,
12:15
SPEAKER_01: they did it by putting pieces of paper on,
12:17
SPEAKER_01: like,
12:17
SPEAKER_01: telephone poles and things like that at that point for people to meet.
12:22
SPEAKER_01: People were interested in building their own computers to meet.
12:26
SPEAKER_01: And so I think it was April 75.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, the Altair existed by that time.
12:31
SPEAKER_01: Microsoft with micro slash soft existed at that time.
12:35
SPEAKER_01: So the stuff was bubbling.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: The microprocessor, you know, was clearly, you know...
12:43
it made it possible for people to think about having their own computers.
12:47
SPEAKER_01: That was a big deal.
12:48
If I remember right,
12:49
even Wozniak and Jobs present at the Homebrew Computer Club.
12:55
SPEAKER_01: To me,
12:55
SPEAKER_01: that's one of those cultural moments that really defined Silicon Valley,
12:59
SPEAKER_01: a generation of Silicon Valley.
13:03
SPEAKER_01: Wozniak simply wanted to build that computer to share with his friends.
13:06
SPEAKER_01: It was the complete open-source sort of...
13:12
SPEAKER_01: value thing.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he didn't want to start a company.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he went to HP and offered it to them, right?
13:19
SPEAKER_01: But Jobs had the sense to realize there might be a market there.
13:22
And it was putting those two things together,
13:24
I think,
13:24
that defined sort of that.
13:26
SPEAKER_01: It still defines the canonical Silicon Valley startup.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: And you, even back then, 77, 78, 79, are you running in?
13:35
SPEAKER_00: It sounds like you were.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, are you running into Steve Jobs and Bill Gates?
13:39
SPEAKER_01: Well, Gates wasn't in the Valley.
13:41
SPEAKER_01: I remember Gates was, he was on his way to Bellevue before Redmond.
13:47
SPEAKER_01: I think he didn't get to Redmond until 80.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: Even New Mexico, right?
13:52
SPEAKER_01: He was in New Mexico.
13:53
SPEAKER_01: He left Harvard.
13:54
SPEAKER_01: He was in New Mexico.
13:56
SPEAKER_01: He just wrote the first volume of his trilogy biography.
14:01
So there's two chapters in there,
14:02
which deal with Harvard and Albuquerque.
14:05
SPEAKER_01: He sent that famous letter to Homebrew, accusing them of being thieves.
14:09
SPEAKER_01: There was this wonderful moment when the Altair was touring the country,
14:12
SPEAKER_01: and they stopped at Ricky's Hyatt House to demo it for a weekend.
14:16
And while it was there,
14:16
somebody borrowed the paper tape and took it to a homebrew meeting.
14:23
SPEAKER_01: And a friend of Wozniak had access to a high-speed paper tape copy.
14:28
SPEAKER_01: So they used that to make 70 copies.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: And they gave them out at the homebrew meeting.
14:33
And the deal was,
14:34
you could get a copy if you made a copy and gave it to somebody else.
14:39
SPEAKER_01: So that was the nature of, that was the cultural values of the hobbyist.
14:43
And then Gates wrote this angry letter saying,
14:45
you know,
14:46
you're ripping me off.
14:47
And what I didn't know that I learned from Bill's autobiography
14:51
is that he wrote a
14:51
SPEAKER_01: second letter.
14:52
I mean,
14:53
his letter really pissed off Altair,
14:54
as it turned out,
14:55
because,
14:55
you know,
14:56
SPEAKER_01: Altair just wanted software to be out there.
14:58
SPEAKER_01: They didn't care if Bill was making money.
14:59
SPEAKER_01: And so he had to write a second letter, but it wasn't really contrite.
15:03
SPEAKER_01: But I didn't know about the second letter until recently.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
15:06
SPEAKER_00: I haven't read the book yet,
15:07
but I saw an interview he did with Patrick Collison at the
15:10
Computer History Museum.
15:11
It sounds like there's a few gems in there that we didn't know
15:15
about Bill.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize his...
15:18
SPEAKER_00: You know,
15:18
it was always famous that Steve Jobs did acid and had this
15:22
awakening and gave Bill
15:24
SPEAKER_00: grief for not being of like mind.
15:26
SPEAKER_00: And then it turns out Bill was dropping acid.
15:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he dropped a bit, but he never really liked the experience.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: Right.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: Bill wanted to be in control of his...
15:37
SPEAKER_01: his emotions, I think.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: Hey you,
15:40
SPEAKER_00: obviously you've written an entire wonderful book about this,
15:45
SPEAKER_00: but this overlap between the sixties counterculture and,
15:49
SPEAKER_00: and the technology industry,
15:51
SPEAKER_00: um,
15:52
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:52
SPEAKER_00: I,
15:53
SPEAKER_00: I guess maybe that begins earlier,
15:56
SPEAKER_00: but are you still feeling that in the late seventies,
16:00
SPEAKER_00: early eighties,
16:01
SPEAKER_00: what's the vibe as this is starting?
16:03
SPEAKER_01: So very much so.
16:05
SPEAKER_01: I mean, um,
16:07
SPEAKER_01: you know, the, the, the counterculture was still around at that point.
16:10
SPEAKER_01: The anti-war movement was tailing off.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
16:12
that's actually what led me to look for a day job was I
16:16
realized that the anti-war
16:17
SPEAKER_01: movement was over and I hadn't gotten the memo.
16:20
So at a certain point,
16:20
like 79,
16:21
80,
16:21
I decided I better get a real,
16:24
a real job.
16:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah.
16:26
SPEAKER_01: So,
16:27
SPEAKER_01: you know,
16:28
SPEAKER_01: it was,
16:29
SPEAKER_01: it was still,
16:30
SPEAKER_01: uh,
16:31
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
16:32
SPEAKER_01: how do you,
16:32
SPEAKER_01: I'm,
16:33
SPEAKER_01: I'm,
16:33
SPEAKER_01: I'm actually,
16:34
SPEAKER_01: uh,
16:34
SPEAKER_01: thinking a lot about that because,
16:36
SPEAKER_01: um,
16:37
I've been trying to write something coming up with yet another
16:41
explanation for why
16:42
SPEAKER_01: Silicon Valley happened.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: And I think there,
16:46
SPEAKER_01: depending on how you count,
16:47
there are at least five to seven different theories on why
16:50
Silicon Valley happened
16:52
SPEAKER_01: in the 60s on the Mid-Peninsula.
16:56
SPEAKER_01: And I want to add another one, which is more software-oriented.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
16:59
I think most of the logic around the emergence of Silicon
17:04
Valley is what I call the
17:05
SPEAKER_01: semiconductor narrative.
17:07
SPEAKER_01: But there were these three laboratories around Stanford.
17:12
Engelbart's laboratory and McCarthy's laboratories opened both
17:15
in the same year,
17:17
1963.
17:18
And the really striking thing about those two labs is one guy
17:21
set out to replace the human.
17:23
McCarthy thought it would take about a decade to build a
17:25
thinking machine in 1963.
17:28
And Engelbart rejected that the year before he coined the term
17:32
intelligence augmentation,
17:33
SPEAKER_01: or IA.
17:34
SPEAKER_01: And so you had this dichotomy between AI,
17:36
SPEAKER_01: which McCarthy had coined that term,
17:38
SPEAKER_01: artificial intelligence.
17:40
SPEAKER_01: And that dichotomy has been at the heart of computing ever since.
17:44
SPEAKER_01: And now, of course, it's sharply...
17:48
at the heart of what's going on at the moment now that you can
17:50
actually do AI.
17:52
SPEAKER_01: Which, yeah, and I'm saving that for a little bit later.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: Your thoughts on that?
17:56
SPEAKER_00: And if I could ask, is this a new book or this is just a piece?
18:00
SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, I thought about it as a book.
18:03
I think probably I'm just going to write it as a long essay and
18:07
get it out of my
18:08
SPEAKER_01: system and get on with things.
18:09
SPEAKER_01: I don't think, I mean, the publishing industry has changed so much.
18:12
SPEAKER_01: There's not a big appetite for history.
18:14
SPEAKER_01: And I kind of,
18:15
I mean,
18:15
I've been writing,
18:16
you know,
18:16
they say,
18:17
what's that journalism saying?
18:18
SPEAKER_01: If you have a good story, write it often.
18:20
And I've kind of been writing that a lot,
18:21
although I do think that there's something missing.
18:24
SPEAKER_01: And,
18:24
SPEAKER_01: you know,
18:25
SPEAKER_01: after I finished Dormouse,
18:27
which was this basically effort to explain why the personal
18:30
computer industry
18:31
SPEAKER_01: happened right around Stanford in the mid-60s,
18:33
SPEAKER_01: I did that completely as a journalist.
18:35
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was empirical.
18:36
SPEAKER_01: I didn't have a theory to explain it.
18:39
SPEAKER_01: And then about...
18:41
Two years afterwards,
18:42
I ran into this work by these people at the Santa Fe Institute.
18:47
These are complexity theorists,
18:48
mostly physicists,
18:49
Stuart Kaufman and some other people.
18:52
SPEAKER_01: Focusing on this idea,
18:54
SPEAKER_01: they began to dabble in the social sciences,
18:57
SPEAKER_01: and their argument was that creativity happens on the edge of chaos.
19:01
And I looked at the Mid-Peninsula in the 60s and those three laboratories.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: Xerox PARC was the third laboratory, which started in 1979.
19:07
SPEAKER_01: This exactly is an example of this theory.
19:12
And I still think that there's something significant there that
19:15
adds to the
19:16
explanation for why this unique culture emerged on the
19:19
mid-Poninsular in the 60s.
19:21
SPEAKER_01: And it speaks to the question of whether you could,
19:23
SPEAKER_01: you know,
19:24
SPEAKER_01: when I was at InfoWorld,
19:25
SPEAKER_01: which was this weekly,
19:26
SPEAKER_01: the first weekly of personal computing,
19:28
SPEAKER_01: it had already started,
19:29
SPEAKER_01: this is 1981,
19:31
where the delegations would come from all over the world to try
19:33
to figure out what
19:34
the magic was so they could take it back and create a Silicon
19:37
Mountain or a Silicon
19:38
SPEAKER_01: Beach or a Silicon Desert.
19:40
SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't that simple.
19:41
SPEAKER_01: You know, it turned out you couldn't just export the culture easily.
19:45
And I think,
19:46
I mean,
19:46
there are a couple of reasons why I think the valley is a
19:49
unique place.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: And one of them,
19:52
SPEAKER_01: you know,
19:52
SPEAKER_01: the original spark,
19:54
SPEAKER_01: I think,
19:54
SPEAKER_01: was related to that unique situation on the peninsula in the mid-1960s.
19:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
19:59
SPEAKER_01: Which wasn't all hardware.
20:01
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't all chips.
20:03
SPEAKER_01: There were some big ideas were floating around that drove the culture.
20:06
And yeah,
20:07
I'm always amused by how many attempts I've seen to recreate
20:11
Silicon Valley.
20:12
And it really does seem to be this very strange brew of
20:17
different factors.
20:19
I always go back even to the gold rush and then to the very
20:25
early electronics in
20:27
SPEAKER_00: the early 1900s where you
20:29
You've just got people out here who are doing things a little
20:32
bit differently than
20:33
SPEAKER_00: even the existing burgeoning East Coast electronics companies.
20:41
SPEAKER_00: It's simplistic in some ways to argue like,
20:43
SPEAKER_00: oh,
20:43
SPEAKER_00: you go to 1849 and this vibe,
20:46
SPEAKER_00: for lack of a better word,
20:48
SPEAKER_00: is still carrying over just this acceptance of...
20:51
SPEAKER_00: boom and bust cycle, this belief that this is just how we live out here.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: We chase the next big thing constantly and are always trying to
21:02
hit the payday and people have this risk tolerance that seems
21:08
nowhere else in the world.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: I haven't found anywhere that really just accepts risk.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: You know this stuff way better than I do.
21:16
I mean,
21:16
is there any possibility this can actually be traced back that far?
21:20
Or maybe it's even just California and it being this new place
21:24
to do things.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
21:26
i i i've seen the the the gold rush argument a lot and the you
21:30
know the the
21:31
cultural values in the area and i'm sure that's part of the um
21:36
the larger construct
21:37
it's hard to um you know it's hard to connect the dots you can
21:41
make a statement
21:42
like that in general like for example um one of the big
21:45
differences between route
21:47
128 and um and silicon valley that people like anisexinian
21:51
identified is that um
21:54
It became the case in Silicon Valley that failure was a badge
21:57
of honor,
21:58
not a badge of failure.
21:59
SPEAKER_01: That was a big cultural difference.
22:01
SPEAKER_01: You could fail and you could start again, and failure wasn't shame.
22:05
SPEAKER_01: So where did that come from?
22:07
SPEAKER_01: Clearly it was part of the water here,
22:09
SPEAKER_01: but I'd never seen a good analysis explaining why that was true.
22:14
SPEAKER_01: Lots of things about the looser culture I think are true,
22:18
SPEAKER_01: but to actually connect the dots is really challenging.
22:21
SPEAKER_01: The 49ers and that risk-taking thing, I think,
22:25
SPEAKER_01: That's true,
22:25
but I have trouble sort of once again connecting the dots
22:28
directly to what was happening.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: And so I'm looking a little, I'm trying to look more closely.
22:34
SPEAKER_01: You know,
22:34
SPEAKER_01: the notion of,
22:36
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
22:37
SPEAKER_01: those laboratories were right in the midst of just the very,
22:40
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
22:41
SPEAKER_01: you can't,
22:42
You have no idea how different the area in the Midden Peninsula
22:46
was in the 1960s.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
22:48
SPEAKER_01: you know,
22:49
there were buildings on the Stanford campus where the windows
22:52
were boarded up for
22:53
SPEAKER_01: four or five years because every time they put new glass in,
22:57
SPEAKER_01: the windows were broken again.
23:00
SPEAKER_01: It was much more, you know, there was lots of street violence.
23:03
SPEAKER_01: There were lots of protests going on every day.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: There was lots of psychedelics around.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: People were trying to do all kinds of things to expand consciousness.
23:11
SPEAKER_01: from drugs to religion to cults.
23:15
SPEAKER_01: It just, you know, it's Silicon Valley.
23:19
The wealthy Silicon Valley of today was not what was happening
23:22
on the Mid-Minnesota
23:23
SPEAKER_01: in the 1960s.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: I love reading stories about all this stuff.
23:26
I was a huge Ken Kesey and Mary Prankster fan,
23:30
and I will confess to being a deadhead.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: I would have loved, it's like all my...
23:37
SPEAKER_00: All my passions feel like they were combined in this era.
23:41
That's the amazing thing about Stuart Brand,
23:42
who created the Whole Earth Catalog.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: I came away from the biography I wrote about Stuart with a very different
23:48
SPEAKER_01: understanding of the Whole Earth Catalog than I think is a popular one.
23:53
SPEAKER_01: It was very pro-technology.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: Stuart was pro-technology.
23:57
But the most striking thing that I found was in this lost
24:00
journal that he had that
24:01
he didn't give to the Stanford Library that I hadn't seen the
24:03
first time I read it.
24:05
He saw something in the summer of 1966 that caused him to move
24:10
to Menlo Park.
24:11
And there's a cryptic sentence that I've gone over with him a
24:15
number of times that
24:16
SPEAKER_01: he has no idea why he wrote it.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: But he came to Menlo Park to, quote, let his technology happen.
24:22
SPEAKER_01: So what did Stuart Brand see so much earlier than everybody else?
24:25
SPEAKER_01: He saw something.
24:26
SPEAKER_01: And he was very early to that.
24:30
SPEAKER_01: And so I came away with a different...
24:34
SPEAKER_01: there were,
24:35
SPEAKER_01: when,
24:35
SPEAKER_01: when Trump was elected in 2017,
24:36
SPEAKER_01: you know,
24:38
the zeitgeist from the Valley overnight went from Silicon
24:41
Valley can do no wrong to
24:42
SPEAKER_01: Silicon Valley can do no right.
24:43
SPEAKER_01: And two books came out,
24:44
SPEAKER_01: um,
24:46
SPEAKER_01: one by Franklin Foyer,
24:47
SPEAKER_01: world without mind,
24:47
SPEAKER_01: the other by Jonathan Taplin,
24:49
SPEAKER_01: um,
24:50
SPEAKER_01: move fast to break things.
24:51
SPEAKER_01: And I picked those two books up.
24:52
SPEAKER_01: I was,
24:53
SPEAKER_01: you know,
24:53
I'd become Stuart Brand's biographer and they both began with
24:57
biographical sketches
24:58
SPEAKER_01: of Stuart Brand.
24:58
SPEAKER_01: I thought, what the, what the hell is this about?
25:00
SPEAKER_01: You know?
25:01
SPEAKER_01: Um, and, and, you know, uh,
25:04
SPEAKER_01: I think Taplin got it right.
25:06
SPEAKER_01: Taplin was looking,
25:08
he had this notion of a culture of digital utopians and he
25:12
traced that back to brand.
25:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
25:13
that would completely freak Stuart out because Stuart thinks of
25:16
himself as a pragmatist,
25:18
SPEAKER_01: not as a utopian.
25:20
SPEAKER_01: But whichever the case,
25:23
SPEAKER_01: I came to think,
25:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
25:25
SPEAKER_01: and you know,
25:25
SPEAKER_01: Fred Turner and I had different takes on that.
25:26
SPEAKER_01: Fred Turner wrote this book from counterculture to cyberculture.
25:30
SPEAKER_01: I don't think of Stuart as being the guy who created that culture.
25:35
I think Stuart was the first guy to understand that that
25:37
culture was there and he
25:39
SPEAKER_01: was the first messenger,
25:40
SPEAKER_01: which is a different thing.
25:40
And I think of the whole earth catalog is the first statement
25:44
to the world that
25:44
SPEAKER_01: something was going on on the,
25:47
SPEAKER_01: on the mid peninsula.
25:48
SPEAKER_01: And he announced it to a broader world that became a bestseller.
25:51
SPEAKER_01: You know, there were,
25:52
SPEAKER_01: Three million copies of the whole catalog.
25:54
And it was taking that message of what was going on in Silicon
25:56
Valley that
25:57
SPEAKER_01: technology can change the world to an entire generation.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: Well,
26:02
I'm going to fast forward unintentionally just because you
26:05
brought us here to,
26:06
SPEAKER_00: you know,
26:06
SPEAKER_00: that 2017 moment is fascinating to me.
26:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: It's something I've just been experiencing so much in my career.
26:16
SPEAKER_00: Because I tend to come at my stories,
26:19
SPEAKER_00: I think,
26:21
similar to you on some stuff with this kind of genuine interest
26:24
in the technology.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: You and I have always...
26:27
SPEAKER_00: leaned more towards the science and the engineering and,
26:30
SPEAKER_00: and,
26:31
SPEAKER_00: and what makes all this stuff tick,
26:32
SPEAKER_00: but you know,
26:33
SPEAKER_00: it,
26:33
SPEAKER_00: it got hard.
26:34
SPEAKER_00: It's it, to be totally honest, it's like harder for me.
26:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, it got harder to do some of those stories because it was like, even
26:43
SPEAKER_00: Um,
26:43
SPEAKER_00: if I was just covering something that I thought was so geeky and nerdy,
26:47
SPEAKER_00: um,
26:47
SPEAKER_00: and,
26:47
SPEAKER_00: and almost esoteric,
26:49
SPEAKER_00: it was like,
26:50
SPEAKER_00: oh,
26:50
SPEAKER_00: well,
26:50
SPEAKER_00: you know,
26:50
SPEAKER_00: why is this bad?
26:51
SPEAKER_00: What's the evil behind this thing?
26:53
SPEAKER_00: I was like,
26:54
SPEAKER_00: I was like,
26:54
SPEAKER_00: I understand that of course,
26:56
SPEAKER_00: yes,
26:56
SPEAKER_00: I get that these companies are huge and powerful and Facebook and Google,
27:00
SPEAKER_00: whoever are doing strange things.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: But I was like, some of this is just, is just kind of fascinating.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: And, and I don't know, there's not much tolerance for, for,
27:09
looking at things that way now um to some degree but i was i
27:14
was curious like what
27:15
you make i don't know if you're if you're i was curious of what
27:19
you make of the
27:20
where we've ended up with the culture i was i just wrote a
27:23
story um a couple weeks
27:25
SPEAKER_00: ago i went to
27:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
27:27
SPEAKER_00: I've been going to these communal houses for years,
27:29
SPEAKER_00: but I went to this hacker house of a bunch of 20-year-olds,
27:33
SPEAKER_00: and it was like an AI house.
27:34
I mean,
27:35
they had these GPU clusters all over the floor,
27:38
and they were using computers in ways.
27:40
I use all the AI tools,
27:42
but they were using them in ways that I was unfamiliar with.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was like they were...
27:48
SPEAKER_00: turned on and tuned in and this,
27:50
SPEAKER_00: this,
27:50
SPEAKER_00: it was like a,
27:51
SPEAKER_00: they were like AI natives is kind of how I put it in the story.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: And then in the background of all this,
27:56
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's nearly as pronounced as the sixties,
28:00
SPEAKER_00: but you do still have this among the AI crowd.
28:04
SPEAKER_00: You've got this hallucinogenic, um, lots of people doing, um,
28:10
SPEAKER_00: mushrooms and acid and DMT,
28:12
SPEAKER_00: and then you've got these weird sort of polycule sex cults and all this.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: You know,
28:17
it's like this weird version of it where it's the people who
28:20
are living in this are hardcore,
28:23
SPEAKER_00: and this is a...
28:25
very broad stroke,
28:26
but are hardcore math nerds and sort of like AI cultists.
28:32
And then they still have some of these remnants of things that
28:36
I associate,
28:36
SPEAKER_00: you know,
28:37
SPEAKER_00: with a previous era of the Valley.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: And I've been trying to wrap my head around this.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if...
28:43
i don't i honestly don't know what to make of it i don't know
28:45
if you've run across
28:46
any of this i admire that you you're staying in touch i mean
28:49
you know like i said
28:50
at the very start i feel like rip van winkle i disappeared into
28:53
the archives at
28:54
stanford library in 2017 and i barely came out and blinked my
28:58
eyes so i you know
28:59
the fact that you're sort of still trying to stay in direct
29:03
contact with the people
29:04
who are sort of boots on the ground and doing this is i think
29:06
really good and the
29:07
SPEAKER_01: cultures that you're finding um
29:11
SPEAKER_01: You know, there was that kind of experimentation.
29:14
SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about psychedelics.
29:15
SPEAKER_01: And there is still, I think, a general belief in Silicon Valley that
29:20
amongst working engineers that somehow you can take a
29:24
psychedelic and you can
29:25
SPEAKER_01: become more creative.
29:27
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm sorry.
29:28
SPEAKER_01: I want to see the evidence.
29:31
SPEAKER_01: I wrote about this in Dormouse,
29:35
and the very first effort at this was an organization mostly of
29:39
engineers in the
29:41
SPEAKER_01: 1960s called the International Foundation for Advanced Study.
29:44
SPEAKER_01: I may have the name wrong, but it was in Menlo Park.
29:47
SPEAKER_01: And they took 300 of
29:50
500 mostly engineers through this intense LSD experience and
29:54
tried to do research
29:57
SPEAKER_01: that showed that it made people more creative.
29:59
And if you look at their research studies,
30:01
it's like the stuff you see on late night TV.
30:03
SPEAKER_01: You have brighter teeth, your smile's brighter, all of that stuff.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: I was never trying to make that point about LSD.
30:10
I was trying to make a point about adjacency as opposed to this
30:16
causal relationship.
30:17
My best example of that is that Engelbart invented the mouse
30:21
before he took mescaline.
30:22
SPEAKER_01: The causal chain runs the wrong direction.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: And all he did after taking...
30:27
taking an intense dose of psychedelics was he invented this
30:32
thing he called a
30:33
SPEAKER_01: tinkle toilet,
30:34
SPEAKER_01: the toilet-trained young boy.
30:38
SPEAKER_01: Great name.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: So, okay.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: So you,
30:43
SPEAKER_00: you,
30:43
SPEAKER_00: the,
30:44
SPEAKER_00: as far as,
30:45
as the counterculture and people who are inclined to do those
30:50
things informing technology,
30:53
SPEAKER_00: it's more of just a mindset than,
30:55
SPEAKER_00: than the actual hallucinogens opening people up to,
30:59
SPEAKER_00: um,
30:59
SPEAKER_00: to new way of thinking.
31:01
SPEAKER_01: It was, it was adjacency.
31:02
SPEAKER_01: It's about a culture that it created rather than,
31:04
SPEAKER_01: I think,
31:05
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
31:06
SPEAKER_01: I,
31:06
SPEAKER_01: you know,
31:06
SPEAKER_01: I haven't,
31:07
SPEAKER_01: I,
31:07
SPEAKER_01: you show me the evidence.
31:08
SPEAKER_01: I, I've, I've read, um,
31:11
SPEAKER_01: how to change your mind and stuff like that.
31:13
And I still maintain that creativity is a mystery and it's not
31:18
something you can get in a pill
31:21
SPEAKER_00: I've been working on an AI book and I've,
31:23
SPEAKER_00: I do have one,
31:24
SPEAKER_00: and I have one anecdote that,
31:26
SPEAKER_00: uh,
31:27
SPEAKER_00: I'll save it for the book,
31:28
SPEAKER_00: but,
31:28
SPEAKER_00: um,
31:29
SPEAKER_00: it involves DMT and a transformer breakthrough.
31:32
SPEAKER_00: So we'll see how, see what you make of it.
31:35
SPEAKER_01: That's classic.
31:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
31:36
So,
31:36
um,
31:37
you know,
31:37
the famous example,
31:38
the most famous example of this is Kelly.
31:40
SPEAKER_01: Um, who's the guy who, uh, um, uh,
31:44
SPEAKER_01: did the original recombinant DNA stuff.
31:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
31:47
SPEAKER_01: you know,
31:48
SPEAKER_01: he describes in his autobiography how he,
31:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm blanking on the name of the technique,
31:56
SPEAKER_01: but basically,
31:57
SPEAKER_01: you know,
31:58
SPEAKER_01: this was long before the current wave of DNA stuff.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: Not shotgun sequencing or?
32:07
No,
32:07
no,
32:07
this is,
32:08
oh God,
32:10
you know,
32:11
I'm a computer guy,
32:12
I'm not a biology guy.
32:14
SPEAKER_01: Kelly,
32:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm blanking right now,
32:17
but he describes how he came up with a technique on a long
32:22
drive up to his cabin in
32:23
SPEAKER_01: Mendocino and what he described as an LSD fugue state.
32:27
SPEAKER_01: And I tried to,
32:28
SPEAKER_01: you know,
32:28
the equivalent for me that I tried to look at carefully was the
32:31
invention of
32:32
SPEAKER_01: BitBlit at Xerox PARC,
32:34
which is a graphical technique for controlling stuff on the
32:38
screen and basically
32:41
SPEAKER_01: made the graphical user interface possible.
32:44
SPEAKER_01: And the guys who did that said,
32:45
SPEAKER_01: yeah,
32:46
SPEAKER_01: sometimes we'd smoke some dope to get in mood to program,
32:49
SPEAKER_01: but they never put the,
32:51
SPEAKER_01: you know,
32:53
SPEAKER_01: linking the dots is harder.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, there may be specific examples.
32:57
SPEAKER_01: I'm not disputing that.
32:59
SPEAKER_01: But your mileage may vary.
33:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: Don't do drugs, kids.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: You mentioned a few government labs and then places like PARC.
33:10
SPEAKER_00: When I was starting out in my career,
33:12
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
33:12
SPEAKER_00: we used to have these great days where you'd go to Sun Microsystems,
33:17
SPEAKER_00: R&D Lab,
33:18
SPEAKER_00: and Intels,
33:18
SPEAKER_00: and you'd go to IBM Almaden,
33:20
and you'd just get this window into where it felt like
33:24
computing was going for the
33:25
SPEAKER_00: next 10,
33:26
SPEAKER_00: 20 years.
33:27
Clearly,
33:28
some of those things exist in various forms,
33:30
but it feels different to me
33:32
now um do you feel the same way do you feel like the valley has
33:36
has lost this this
33:38
labby um i don't know it feels very different to me than it
33:41
used to yeah that's
33:42
that's a really good good question do i feel like it's it's
33:46
entirely different i
33:47
mean you know the valley lived off of darpa for decades and
33:50
decades so um you know
33:54
SPEAKER_01: a google x um
33:57
SPEAKER_01: when they first started out was,
33:59
SPEAKER_01: uh,
33:59
SPEAKER_01: an effort,
34:00
SPEAKER_01: uh,
34:00
SPEAKER_01: well,
34:01
SPEAKER_01: actually I've gotten different,
34:02
SPEAKER_01: different views from the two co-founders of X.
34:05
SPEAKER_01: Um,
34:05
SPEAKER_01: you know,
34:05
Sebastian Thrun clearly told me that they were trying to build
34:08
a Xerox PARC at Google.
34:10
SPEAKER_01: And I just interviewed Astro and he said,
34:12
SPEAKER_01: well,
34:13
SPEAKER_01: we were using PARC as an example of what not to do.
34:15
SPEAKER_01: Well, the both could be true actually, you know, it, um, uh, but, um,
34:22
SPEAKER_01: And yeah,
34:23
it's a really great question now because a lot of this funding
34:26
is going to go away,
34:27
SPEAKER_01: right?
34:28
The people who have significant government grants must just be
34:33
freaking out everywhere.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: We'll see what difference it makes.
34:37
SPEAKER_01: It's not clear to me.
34:39
SPEAKER_01: The big difference was the original DARPA funding was blue sky funding.
34:44
And that was the theory of laboratories like Watson and AT&T
34:48
Bell Labs and Almaden.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, there was open-ended research to be done.
34:55
SPEAKER_01: And as opposed to research,
34:57
SPEAKER_01: you know,
34:57
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
34:58
SPEAKER_01: Jobs famously killed Apple's advanced technology group because he didn't,
35:03
SPEAKER_01: you know,
35:03
SPEAKER_01: he didn't see the value.
35:05
SPEAKER_01: And he had constrained, budget constraints at that point.
35:10
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, where do the next big ideas come from?
35:15
SPEAKER_01: It's an interesting question.
35:16
SPEAKER_01: I don't have a good answer.
35:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm curious about it.
35:19
It feels like hard tech type startups can access so much more
35:25
capital now and that
35:28
SPEAKER_00: maybe it's just these little...
35:30
SPEAKER_00: individual labs,
35:32
SPEAKER_00: I guess the,
35:32
SPEAKER_00: the feeling,
35:33
SPEAKER_00: and I don't know if it's just nostalgia,
35:35
SPEAKER_00: um,
35:36
SPEAKER_00: you know,
35:36
SPEAKER_00: Google X is the closest thing for sure to,
35:39
SPEAKER_00: to what I was describing and used to experience.
35:42
SPEAKER_00: It's just that I remember every company, you know, you'd go to HP.
35:46
SPEAKER_00: And they would be doing crazy photonics and quantum research.
35:49
And clearly,
35:50
yes,
35:50
you're at Microsoft,
35:51
other companies doing some of this.
35:53
It just used to be the thing that all the major tech companies
35:56
of a decent size
35:58
would show off and have this part of their company that really
36:02
was academics just
36:03
SPEAKER_00: noodling on things.
36:05
And I don't think I've received an invite to something like
36:08
that in like a decade.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: So it must be a little different.
36:12
SPEAKER_01: They're venture capital incubators now.
36:14
SPEAKER_01: Maybe they picked up a little bit of that.
36:17
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
36:17
SPEAKER_01: maybe more of it's moved back to the university,
36:20
SPEAKER_01: which of course now is a huge risk even more.
36:23
SPEAKER_01: You know, they're going to take away the overhead.
36:26
SPEAKER_01: It's not clear that those models will continue to work, you know.
36:32
SPEAKER_01: that, that we're entering unknown territory right now.
36:34
SPEAKER_00: So, so yeah, I mean, I've seen you, you don't seem like a big Elon fan.
36:39
SPEAKER_01: Well, that was one of the questions I wanted to ask.
36:41
SPEAKER_01: Can you square the Elon you wrote about with the Elon of today?
36:45
SPEAKER_00: Oh, uh, in some ways.
36:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:47
SPEAKER_00: Some ways.
36:48
SPEAKER_00: No, this might be, this might take a lot of time.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I think, um,
36:56
It's been this progression in a lot of ways that's been sort of fascinating.
37:00
I mean,
37:01
even the Elon that I was running into in 2012,
37:04
I would say,
37:05
was still this shyer.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: There was a vein of insecurity in that Tesla and SpaceX,
37:17
SPEAKER_00: when I first met him,
37:17
SPEAKER_00: were just barely starting to be successful.
37:20
SPEAKER_00: And I think...
37:23
SPEAKER_00: He was wealthy, but nothing.
37:24
Like today,
37:25
the people who had made it were Larry and Sergey and Zuck and Bezos.
37:32
SPEAKER_00: And I think Elon felt, you know, he was kind of pulled back a little bit.
37:37
SPEAKER_00: And so you would see glimpses,
37:38
SPEAKER_00: obviously,
37:39
SPEAKER_00: of how he went about running his business inside the business.
37:42
SPEAKER_00: But outward facing, definitely not.
37:45
If people go back to like his Twitter feed back in the day,
37:48
I mean,
37:48
he was quite...
37:49
SPEAKER_00: mild and, and not, uh, not controversial.
37:53
SPEAKER_00: Um,
37:53
SPEAKER_00: so,
37:54
SPEAKER_00: and then clearly like on the,
37:57
SPEAKER_00: on a human personal level,
37:59
SPEAKER_00: socially left and,
38:01
SPEAKER_00: and,
38:02
SPEAKER_00: and his,
38:03
SPEAKER_00: and his technology was clearly left,
38:05
SPEAKER_00: left leaning.
38:06
SPEAKER_00: So yeah,
38:06
SPEAKER_00: no,
38:07
SPEAKER_00: I,
38:07
SPEAKER_00: I would not,
38:08
SPEAKER_00: I would,
38:09
would I have pictured that Elon and Donald Trump would be like
38:12
running the white
38:13
SPEAKER_00: house together?
38:13
SPEAKER_00: Definitely not.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then, you know, I think there's been this progression, um,
38:20
SPEAKER_00: It's hardwired into him to always chase,
38:23
SPEAKER_00: to always be risking everything,
38:25
SPEAKER_00: chasing something bigger.
38:27
SPEAKER_00: And that went from,
38:29
SPEAKER_00: it went from business to kind of celebrity and then into politics,
38:34
which I actually thought politics would be forever kind of too
38:38
gross and messy for
38:40
SPEAKER_00: him to want to deal with.
38:41
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, clearly it's been this upward.
38:44
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what's next after this.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: Like after you're running...
38:48
SPEAKER_00: the United States, what do you do after that?
38:51
SPEAKER_01: Let's give him a ticket to Mars and see if we can test that question,
38:54
SPEAKER_01: that he wants to die on Mars but just not on impact.
38:57
SPEAKER_01: I'm willing to let him test that.
39:00
SPEAKER_01: I know way too much about his activities at Burning Man,
39:04
SPEAKER_01: not because I was ever a burner,
39:05
SPEAKER_01: but because I had friends in his camp.
39:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
39:08
SPEAKER_01: And the last time I actually saw Elon in person was this bizarre event.
39:14
SPEAKER_01: He underwrote an AI is going to eat the world documentary.
39:18
SPEAKER_01: Right.
39:18
And I was the talking head in that documentary where they put
39:21
me out of context and
39:22
SPEAKER_01: had me saying things I didn't mean to say.
39:24
SPEAKER_01: But I went down there with Jerry Kaplan, who's a friend of mine.
39:28
SPEAKER_01: And because Elon had underwrote that,
39:30
SPEAKER_01: this was at one of those giant theaters,
39:32
SPEAKER_01: 2,000 people in the audience.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: And during COVID, and he got up and spoke at the beginning.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: And it was a word salad where he made no sense.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: And they literally had to get a hook and drag him off the stage.
39:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was one of the most bizarre things I'd seen.
39:48
SPEAKER_01: Very different than the Elon I'd been in.
39:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was never a big Elon reporter.
39:53
SPEAKER_01: You know, I spent some time at the SpaceX factory.
39:55
SPEAKER_01: I spent some time at the Tesla factory.
39:56
SPEAKER_01: I agree with you.
39:57
SPEAKER_01: I saw those factories and the way they were organized.
40:01
SPEAKER_01: And that was impressive.
40:04
SPEAKER_01: Um,
40:04
SPEAKER_01: but I couldn't,
40:05
SPEAKER_01: I couldn't connect the dots between the guy I saw on that stage and,
40:09
SPEAKER_01: you know,
40:09
SPEAKER_01: it was not Steve jobs.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: Let's put it that way.
40:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:13
SPEAKER_00: Do you, I mean, okay, this could be controversial.
40:17
SPEAKER_00: I suspect you might not agree,
40:19
SPEAKER_00: but I,
40:19
SPEAKER_00: you know,
40:20
SPEAKER_00: when he took over Twitter,
40:21
SPEAKER_00: um,
40:22
I remember many of my media friends freaking out in the first
40:27
two weeks after he
40:28
SPEAKER_00: did the layoffs,
40:28
SPEAKER_00: um,
40:30
SPEAKER_00: Twitter's broken,
40:31
SPEAKER_00: he's destroyed it,
40:32
and clearly the version of Twitter of X that is around now is
40:39
content-wise quite different.
40:43
SPEAKER_00: But infrastructure-wise,
40:45
what strikes me is mostly working despite having 20% of the
40:49
people there to run the company.
40:52
SPEAKER_00: Do you...
40:53
SPEAKER_00: Is there any shred of you that thinks,
40:55
SPEAKER_00: you know,
40:56
SPEAKER_00: you barge in,
40:57
SPEAKER_00: rewire the government and,
40:59
SPEAKER_00: and yes,
41:00
SPEAKER_00: it's,
41:00
SPEAKER_00: it looks horrific and brutal in the,
41:03
SPEAKER_00: in the short term,
41:04
SPEAKER_00: but it comes up.
41:04
SPEAKER_01: I think that,
41:05
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
41:05
SPEAKER_01: you know,
41:06
SPEAKER_01: this is a real,
41:08
SPEAKER_01: you know,
41:08
SPEAKER_01: the,
41:09
SPEAKER_01: first of all,
41:10
SPEAKER_01: let's get the facts straight.
41:12
SPEAKER_01: The, the, the, the size of the government has not grown since Eisenhower.
41:16
SPEAKER_01: In terms of workforce, you know, that's a half a century.
41:21
SPEAKER_01: And the number of people in the country has more than doubled.
41:24
So this whole notion that there's this bloated bureaucracy is
41:28
completely ridiculous.
41:29
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, put that to rest.
41:31
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, the other thing is the kind of workforce, it's a pimple.
41:37
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's 4% of the budget.
41:39
SPEAKER_01: If he cuts 20% of it, no one will notice.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: This is not about doing that.
41:44
SPEAKER_01: Let's be real.
41:45
SPEAKER_01: This is about creating a bureaucracy that's loyal to Donald Trump.
41:48
SPEAKER_01: And Elon's enabling that.
41:52
SPEAKER_01: Whatever he says,
41:53
SPEAKER_01: the reality is he's getting rid of traditional,
41:57
SPEAKER_01: independent federal workers,
41:59
SPEAKER_01: public servants,
42:00
SPEAKER_01: which I thought was a good thing.
42:02
SPEAKER_01: And I'm a believer in good government.
42:04
SPEAKER_01: I don't think...
42:05
SPEAKER_01: Governments should run like businesses.
42:07
You know,
42:07
they should run in the interest of the people of the United States.
42:10
SPEAKER_01: And I think that, you know, we had a pretty good government.
42:13
SPEAKER_01: I think it's being torn apart, and we'll see what we get.
42:17
SPEAKER_01: You know,
42:18
SPEAKER_01: if we get bird flu and it spreads to humans,
42:20
SPEAKER_01: let's see how they do,
42:22
SPEAKER_01: you know,
42:22
SPEAKER_01: this time around with a disease that has a 50% mortality rate.
42:26
SPEAKER_00: I hear what you're saying on tons of that.
42:29
SPEAKER_00: I think all my SpaceX reporting has made me so...
42:35
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if horrified is the right word,
42:37
SPEAKER_00: but you know,
42:37
SPEAKER_00: when,
42:38
SPEAKER_00: every time I deal with Boeing,
42:39
SPEAKER_00: Lockheed,
42:40
SPEAKER_00: Northrop,
42:41
SPEAKER_00: any of this stuff,
42:42
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
42:42
SPEAKER_00: it's like,
42:44
sometimes I think people have okay intentions and it's sort of
42:48
the system that,
42:49
SPEAKER_00: that sends it awry,
42:50
SPEAKER_00: but man,
42:51
SPEAKER_00: it is like,
42:51
SPEAKER_00: there is on the,
42:54
SPEAKER_00: on the government bloats and bureaucracy part,
42:57
SPEAKER_00: you know,
42:57
SPEAKER_00: that some of that stuff is horrifying.
42:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:00
SPEAKER_01: But you, that's not what Elon's cutting.
43:03
SPEAKER_01: That's not what's being cut.
43:04
SPEAKER_01: As a matter of fact,
43:07
I saw this stuff that the new defense secretary has sort of
43:10
pushed for 8% cuts,
43:12
but the first thing that the Senate is doing is trying to
43:15
increase the Defense
43:16
SPEAKER_01: Department budget.
43:17
SPEAKER_01: So there's some real contradictory stuff going on.
43:20
Yes,
43:23
Trump has made this noise that you can cut the defense budget
43:25
in half.
43:25
SPEAKER_01: I haven't seen that in the budget.
43:27
SPEAKER_01: I haven't seen them do anything to touch the defense budget.
43:31
SPEAKER_01: Are they going to cut
43:33
Are they going to cut Boeing out of the space world so Elon has
43:38
no competitors?
43:39
SPEAKER_01: I think that would be interesting if that happened.
43:41
SPEAKER_01: I think that's certainly Boeing saying that's a possibility inside.
43:45
SPEAKER_01: That's the stuff that's been reported.
43:49
SPEAKER_00: I saw you write an opinion piece on...
43:54
SPEAKER_00: I think it just came out, right?
43:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was yesterday in the LA Times.
43:57
SPEAKER_00: In the LA Times.
43:59
SPEAKER_00: And I don't remember you writing opinion pieces before.
44:03
SPEAKER_01: I have written them.
44:05
You know,
44:05
the Times had this Week in Review section,
44:08
which were,
44:08
you know,
44:09
reported op-eds.
44:10
SPEAKER_01: So I would do them occasionally.
44:11
SPEAKER_01: But they were very reported.
44:12
SPEAKER_01: And I consider this to be reported, too.
44:14
You know,
44:15
I'm kind of dismayed with this meme that Silicon Valley has
44:20
backed Trump.
44:21
And we wrote that piece because we actually looked at how the
44:24
people in Silicon Valley voted.
44:26
SPEAKER_01: And the very simple fact, if you say,
44:29
the leaders of Silicon Valley have turned because you have 10
44:33
voices that you can
44:34
SPEAKER_01: point to,
44:35
SPEAKER_01: doesn't reflect reality.
44:38
I was simply wanting to call to people's attention that if you
44:42
looked at the
44:43
SPEAKER_01: wealthiest communities in Silicon Valley,
44:46
if you look at the woodsides and the Portola Valleys and the
44:48
Palo Altos and the
44:49
SPEAKER_01: Menlo Parks and Los Altos Hills,
44:53
SPEAKER_01: they voted by over 75% for Kamala Harris.
44:56
SPEAKER_01: So what are you saying about the leadership of Silicon Valley?
45:00
SPEAKER_01: That's all I wanted to say,
45:01
SPEAKER_01: is that the notion that because you have five voices,
45:05
SPEAKER_01: three of whom left Silicon Valley and live in Austin or Malibu or Miami,
45:10
SPEAKER_01: what are you saying about Silicon Valley?
45:12
SPEAKER_01: The fact is the rank and file and much of the leadership of the
45:17
SPEAKER_01: of Silicon Valley is liberal to centrist.
45:19
SPEAKER_01: That hasn't changed.
45:20
SPEAKER_01: That's all I was saying.
45:21
SPEAKER_00: So,
45:22
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
45:22
what do you think happened that figures the people coming to
45:26
mind immediately are
45:27
SPEAKER_00: like Bill Ackman,
45:28
SPEAKER_00: Mark Andreessen?
45:30
You know,
45:30
this isn't necessarily just sort of Elon and the PayPal crew
45:38
sort of
45:39
changing a bit and going from this libertarian way of thinking
45:44
to this more,
45:46
SPEAKER_00: you know,
45:46
SPEAKER_00: Trumpian way of thinking.
45:47
I mean,
45:47
it feels broader than that,
45:49
at least among some very high profile figures.
45:53
SPEAKER_00: I still don't know how to wrap my head around this.
45:57
SPEAKER_01: I don't think I do completely either.
45:59
SPEAKER_01: But there's always been a libertarian thread in Silicon Valley.
46:04
I don't think it's been the dominant value structure of Silicon
46:07
Valley ever.
46:07
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, it's been there.
46:09
SPEAKER_01: There used to be sort of the classic Reagan Democrats, people like T.J.
46:13
SPEAKER_01: Rogers come to mind.
46:14
SPEAKER_01: A lot of the semiconductor guys were Republicans.
46:18
SPEAKER_01: And the shift to...
46:20
The broad democratic shift in Silicon Valley has been
46:24
relatively recent over the
46:26
SPEAKER_01: last two decades.
46:26
Yeah,
46:26
because Bob Noyce,
46:28
Hewlett,
46:28
and Packard,
46:29
they were all Republicans,
46:30
right?
46:31
SPEAKER_01: But they were Nixon Republicans, right?
46:34
SPEAKER_01: Remember, Nixon created the EPA.
46:37
SPEAKER_01: Nixon believed in a basic income.
46:42
SPEAKER_01: They're not Republicans like the Republicans in Congress today.
46:45
SPEAKER_01: But,
46:46
SPEAKER_01: you know,
46:47
SPEAKER_01: Jonathan Taplin in his book,
46:49
SPEAKER_01: Move Fast and Break Things,
46:50
talks about this demarcation between the digital utopians of
46:54
Brand's era and the
46:57
digital libertarians that emerged in Stanford right before the
47:01
dot-com era that were,
47:03
SPEAKER_01: you know,
47:03
SPEAKER_01: the Peter Thiel people.
47:05
And I think that probably that shift or that emergence of that
47:08
digital libertarian,
47:09
SPEAKER_01: you know,
47:10
SPEAKER_01: thread,
47:11
SPEAKER_01: you know,
47:13
SPEAKER_01: To me, Andreessen seems like an opportunist.
47:17
SPEAKER_01: He saw the way the wind was blowing.
47:20
SPEAKER_01: He had a huge commitment in Andreessen Horowitz to cryptocurrency.
47:27
SPEAKER_01: He's buttering his bread, and I think it's unseemly.
47:31
SPEAKER_01: The gradual mark said, these are my principles.
47:36
SPEAKER_01: If you don't like them, I have others.
47:40
The last time I saw him in public was at the HIA 5th
47:45
anniversary where Fei-Fei Li
47:46
SPEAKER_01: interviewed him,
47:47
and his rant was entirely about his dissatisfaction with this
47:52
thing called the
47:52
SPEAKER_01: precautionary principle,
47:53
SPEAKER_01: which he thought was limiting innovation.
47:56
SPEAKER_01: which I think is just a crock.
48:00
There's been this interesting ongoing debate in the AI
48:03
community since 2009,
48:05
where trying to mimic the biotechnologists they met at Isilamar
48:09
to try to weigh the
48:12
SPEAKER_01: potential danger of artificial intelligence to the species.
48:18
The biologists,
48:19
to their credit,
48:19
when they were worried about their technology having to
48:22
SPEAKER_01: deleterious effects, they actually stopped doing research for a while.
48:25
SPEAKER_01: They actually stopped.
48:27
And that was entertained within the AI community until there
48:31
was money on the table.
48:33
And as soon as there was a little money on the table,
48:35
ethics went completely out the window.
48:37
SPEAKER_01: We've seen this play out.
48:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is probably the heart of your book, I would imagine.
48:41
SPEAKER_00: I was going to ask you about all this.
48:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's pretty interesting.
48:44
SPEAKER_00: As far as I can tell, I mean, you sort of have...
48:50
these are broad strokes again,
48:51
but you've got,
48:52
you've got Demis from deep mind.
48:54
You've got Dario at Anthropic,
48:56
Sam Altman,
48:57
Elon,
48:59
Zuck,
48:59
maybe to a lesser degree.
49:01
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
49:01
SPEAKER_00: you get,
49:03
SPEAKER_00: you get figures who are obviously brilliant,
49:06
SPEAKER_00: brilliant people,
49:07
SPEAKER_00: but you know,
49:07
SPEAKER_00: each one of them,
49:08
SPEAKER_00: uh,
49:09
SPEAKER_00: you get the sense that they,
49:11
SPEAKER_00: they kind of feel like,
49:11
SPEAKER_00: well,
49:12
SPEAKER_00: I am,
49:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm the best person to kind of lead this forward.
49:15
And if,
49:15
if,
49:16
if I could shepherd this exactly the way I pictured in my head
49:20
will be okay.
49:21
And,
49:22
and,
49:22
but then you end up with,
49:23
you know,
49:23
five competing versions of that simultaneously.
49:27
SPEAKER_00: And, and yeah, I mean, I think, I think you're exactly right.
49:29
SPEAKER_00: Once, once,
49:31
SPEAKER_00: whatever you want to call it, maybe chat GPT came out.
49:34
Uh,
49:35
it just became such a race that,
49:37
that I don't see there's too much money involved.
49:39
SPEAKER_00: There's too much competition.
49:40
SPEAKER_00: Um,
49:41
SPEAKER_00: especially now that we see interesting things coming out of China,
49:45
SPEAKER_00: I don't see,
49:46
SPEAKER_00: I don't see anybody slowing down,
49:47
SPEAKER_00: um,
49:48
SPEAKER_00: at all.
49:49
SPEAKER_00: And, and so this, so I was curious about this.
49:52
SPEAKER_00: So this is like a point of concern for you.
49:55
SPEAKER_01: Well, absolutely.
49:56
SPEAKER_01: But not in the way I'm not an AGI believer.
49:59
SPEAKER_01: I, you know, I,
50:01
If anything,
50:01
I worship at the Church of Gary Marcus,
50:03
who's a notorious AI critic.
50:05
SPEAKER_01: And when Gary believes that these things are thinking machines,
50:08
SPEAKER_01: I'll believe they're thinking machines.
50:09
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he has a better technical grasp of these things.
50:14
SPEAKER_01: Although, you know, I use these things all the time.
50:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm more of...
50:22
I'm more worried about the sociological and economic
50:25
consequences than this notion
50:27
SPEAKER_01: that these things might develop agency.
50:31
So let's put the AGI thing aside and let's talk about whether
50:35
they're going to
50:35
SPEAKER_01: change the job structure in some meaningful way.
50:39
And I think the significant thing that's happened here is that
50:44
computers have
50:45
SPEAKER_01: mastered human language.
50:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
50:48
SPEAKER_01: And that's changed the nature of interface.
50:51
SPEAKER_01: You know,
50:52
SPEAKER_01: one of the things that I used to track and following Moore's law,
50:55
SPEAKER_01: which I was accused of writing about way too often,
50:58
SPEAKER_01: but it was a good metric.
51:00
Every turn of the crank,
51:01
computing would reach more of the human population.
51:05
SPEAKER_01: And the last turn of the crank was the smartphone.
51:07
SPEAKER_01: And that meant that about half of the human population is connected.
51:11
And now it seems that,
51:13
you know,
51:14
generative AI is the final,
51:16
you know,
51:17
the final frontier.
51:17
SPEAKER_01: Now,
51:18
SPEAKER_01: computing is ubiquitous amongst humanity.
51:22
SPEAKER_01: And the thing I worry about more,
51:25
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
51:25
this is where I think the most hypocritical part of Elon's
51:32
various hypocrisies is
51:34
his notion in setting up Neuralink that somehow by binding
51:38
humans more tightly,
51:40
SPEAKER_01: coupling them more tightly to the machine,
51:41
SPEAKER_01: that was going to allow them to control,
51:44
SPEAKER_01: allow us to control them,
51:46
SPEAKER_01: the machines.
51:47
SPEAKER_01: Did he not watch Star Trek
51:49
SPEAKER_01: Does he not ever see the Borg?
51:51
SPEAKER_01: Does he not know what resistance is futile, you will be assimilated?
51:54
SPEAKER_01: I think the most important thing in developing this technology,
51:57
SPEAKER_01: you can be able to take the glasses off,
51:59
SPEAKER_01: right?
51:59
SPEAKER_01: That there be a bright line between what is human and what is machine.
52:05
SPEAKER_01: Because I think that we're moving up against that boundary.
52:08
SPEAKER_00: Well, and I find...
52:12
SPEAKER_00: obviously Elon is always,
52:14
SPEAKER_00: he's been afraid of AI,
52:15
SPEAKER_00: but then funding multiple AI projects at the same time.
52:18
SPEAKER_00: Although he's not like unique in that.
52:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
52:20
SPEAKER_00: it's kind of the craziest thing I found reporting this book and it's,
52:23
SPEAKER_00: it's not like this is some novel insight.
52:26
SPEAKER_00: It's just sitting out there,
52:27
SPEAKER_00: but you know,
52:28
SPEAKER_00: I'm just in room after room with people who are,
52:32
SPEAKER_00: um,
52:32
SPEAKER_00: it's really the people who are working on this stuff who,
52:35
SPEAKER_00: who might be the most concerned about where it's heading.
52:38
SPEAKER_00: Some of them.
52:38
SPEAKER_00: And then, um,
52:40
SPEAKER_00: are just uniquely compelled to keep advancing it as fast as they can.
52:44
SPEAKER_00: I feel like I'm always sitting with like Bilbo Baggins with the,
52:47
SPEAKER_00: the ring in his pocket and it's like,
52:49
SPEAKER_00: he wants to,
52:50
SPEAKER_00: he wants to touch the ring and,
52:52
SPEAKER_00: and feel it every now and then,
52:54
but it wants to be able to take it off and he knows he can't
52:57
wear it all the time
52:58
SPEAKER_00: or something really bad happens,
52:59
SPEAKER_00: but yet is compelled to live his entire life around,
53:02
SPEAKER_00: around this object.
53:04
SPEAKER_00: And, and, um, having covered the,
53:08
SPEAKER_00: technology for a long time.
53:09
SPEAKER_00: I've definitely never felt anything like this,
53:11
SPEAKER_00: where it's just this,
53:12
SPEAKER_00: this,
53:13
it's strikes me as such a bizarre job to go in day after day
53:16
and just sit at your
53:17
SPEAKER_00: desk and be in this existential,
53:20
SPEAKER_00: you know,
53:20
SPEAKER_00: conundrum.
53:22
SPEAKER_00: I don't even, that's another thing.
53:24
SPEAKER_00: I still don't even know how to wrap my head around this fully.
53:28
SPEAKER_01: Let's look at the,
53:29
SPEAKER_01: you know,
53:29
SPEAKER_01: I,
53:30
SPEAKER_01: I was,
53:31
SPEAKER_01: I had in 2012 when I was reporting in the robotics world extensively,
53:35
SPEAKER_01: I,
53:36
SPEAKER_01: for a while I was sort of really
53:38
bought into that notion that we were in imminent danger of
53:43
obsoleting lots of human workers.
53:45
SPEAKER_01: And I had this dinner with Danny Kahneman,
53:48
SPEAKER_01: the Nobel Prize winning economist,
53:50
where I was making this argument that automation was going to
53:53
come to China,
53:53
was going to lead to social disruption because you're going to
53:55
throw an entire
53:56
SPEAKER_01: portion of the workforce out of work.
53:59
SPEAKER_01: And he stopped me and said, you don't get it.
54:02
If automation comes to China,
54:03
robots come to China,
54:04
it'll be just in time.
54:06
SPEAKER_01: I said, what do you mean?
54:06
And he walked me through what was going on with the demography
54:10
of China and the
54:11
SPEAKER_01: aging of the workforce.
54:13
SPEAKER_01: And I literally changed the way I thought about it.
54:17
SPEAKER_01: And I stopped asking when there will be a self-driving car.
54:19
SPEAKER_01: And by the way,
54:20
I'm on record as saying if an Uber at that point picked me up
54:24
in 2025 and drove me
54:25
SPEAKER_01: to dinner from San Francisco to Palo Alto,
54:27
SPEAKER_01: I was buying dinner.
54:29
SPEAKER_01: That's still not happening.
54:30
SPEAKER_01: I haven't lost that bet yet.
54:31
SPEAKER_01: I don't think I'm going to lose.
54:33
SPEAKER_01: But anyway,
54:34
so the question I began asking the roboticist I was talking
54:36
about is when would
54:37
SPEAKER_01: there be a robot that could safely give an aging human a shower?
54:41
SPEAKER_01: Much harder problem.
54:43
SPEAKER_01: I've basically seen zero progress toward that,
54:46
SPEAKER_01: meaningful progress,
54:47
SPEAKER_01: since I started asking that question a decade ago.
54:50
SPEAKER_01: And,
54:50
SPEAKER_01: you know,
54:52
now this technology is moving out into the robotics world and
54:56
there's all kinds of,
54:57
SPEAKER_01: you know,
54:57
SPEAKER_01: a wave of robotic startups again.
55:00
SPEAKER_01: We've seen this.
55:03
SPEAKER_01: I still don't think it's much nearer.
55:05
And I don't think it's near enough because we have the same
55:08
problem with aging and,
55:09
SPEAKER_01: you know,
55:09
SPEAKER_01: having a population that is,
55:12
SPEAKER_01: you know,
55:12
SPEAKER_01: you need caregivers and you're not going to have enough caregivers,
55:16
SPEAKER_01: particularly since we're deporting them all.
55:19
SPEAKER_01: But that's another question.
55:22
What I'm most interested in about this first wave of generative
55:26
AI in terms of its
55:26
SPEAKER_01: impact on the economy is call centers and tech support.
55:31
SPEAKER_01: Most of that's going to happen if it happens outside of the country,
55:35
because that labor force is largely in places like India and
55:39
the Philippines,
55:40
SPEAKER_01: I think.
55:43
SPEAKER_01: I just haven't been running into that many...
55:46
SPEAKER_01: I haven't run into that many really intelligent robots online yet.
55:50
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
55:50
SPEAKER_01: Have you seen that?
55:52
SPEAKER_00: A little bit.
55:53
SPEAKER_00: I would fully... I would suspect that that stuff gets dialed in.
55:57
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm always trying to recalibrate myself, right?
56:00
And that things change so quick and then sometimes your brain
56:04
leaps to like,
56:05
SPEAKER_00: oh,
56:05
SPEAKER_00: is this the final form of this thing?
56:07
SPEAKER_00: I mean...
56:09
SPEAKER_00: I think you're 100% right.
56:10
SPEAKER_00: I think what we did is we mathematically solved language.
56:14
SPEAKER_00: And,
56:14
SPEAKER_00: you know,
56:15
SPEAKER_00: so I suspect things like you're talking about will get very,
56:20
SPEAKER_00: very,
56:20
SPEAKER_00: very good very quickly.
56:22
SPEAKER_00: The question in my head is how far does this stretch out?
56:26
So,
56:26
you know,
56:27
the new reasoning models that we've seen,
56:32
there's no question.
56:33
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm just getting emails from scientists.
56:37
there's people who work on complex problems that swear that
56:40
this is now changing,
56:42
SPEAKER_00: um,
56:43
SPEAKER_00: how they go about their work and is,
56:45
SPEAKER_00: is this phenomenal thing that I,
56:47
SPEAKER_00: it's just,
56:47
SPEAKER_00: it's like,
56:48
SPEAKER_00: does that become broadly applicable or not?
56:51
SPEAKER_00: You know,
56:51
SPEAKER_00: is it,
56:51
SPEAKER_00: is it,
56:53
SPEAKER_00: is it chat bots and Nobel prize winners and nothing in between or,
56:57
SPEAKER_00: or,
56:57
SPEAKER_00: or what,
56:57
SPEAKER_00: I guess,
56:58
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
56:58
SPEAKER_00: I, and I'm, I was wondering if you've,
57:02
SPEAKER_00: like if this resonates with any other era that you've seen where we,
57:08
SPEAKER_00: Silicon Valley always has this habit,
57:10
SPEAKER_00: right?
57:10
The next big thing is this overnight sensation and the world is
57:15
going to change.
57:16
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
57:16
SPEAKER_00: we're famous,
57:17
SPEAKER_00: we're cliche for talking about saving the world,
57:19
SPEAKER_00: changing the world,
57:20
SPEAKER_00: all that.
57:21
SPEAKER_00: I don't know that I've been
57:24
SPEAKER_00: where I will use this technology and be impressed one day and then really
57:29
SPEAKER_00: underwhelmed the next day.
57:31
And then I'll be sitting in a room with somebody who I consider
57:34
very rational,
57:35
SPEAKER_00: extremely intelligent,
57:37
SPEAKER_00: kind of quite down to earth.
57:38
SPEAKER_00: And they will just tell me straight to my face that...
57:42
SPEAKER_00: in 18 months,
57:43
the entire world will be upside down and whatever I'm doing
57:46
right now is pointless.
57:47
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a strange experience.
57:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
57:50
SPEAKER_00: have you,
57:51
have there been any other eras where it was like quite this
57:55
dramatic that we were
57:57
SPEAKER_00: on the precipice of,
57:58
SPEAKER_00: cause I was even thinking back to the rise of the consumer internet.
58:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the prevailing
58:04
thing that I remembered then was just that the world's
58:08
information was at your
58:09
SPEAKER_00: fingertips and,
58:11
SPEAKER_00: and this would be a revolution,
58:12
SPEAKER_00: but it didn't feel like,
58:14
SPEAKER_00: it just felt like opportunity.
58:15
SPEAKER_00: It didn't feel like, um, they would turn everything.
58:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm still on the Sappho, Paul Sappho camp.
58:21
It wasn't Sappho first said this,
58:22
but I heard it first from him and is,
58:24
you know,
58:24
in the,
58:25
SPEAKER_01: In the short term, we always overestimate technologies.
58:27
SPEAKER_01: In the long run, we always underestimate them.
58:29
But since we're so much in the midst of this right now,
58:33
I don't trust any of my emotions.
58:35
SPEAKER_01: First of all,
58:35
SPEAKER_01: when you're sitting in a room with those guys,
58:37
SPEAKER_01: if they've got any skin in the game,
58:39
how much of this are they in an ideological framework that
58:43
shapes their view?
58:44
SPEAKER_01: Remember, 90% of these companies fail.
58:47
SPEAKER_01: That's the constant.
58:48
SPEAKER_01: And so a lot of these people who are
58:51
SPEAKER_01: shoveling smoke about accelerationist ideas are not going to be around.
58:57
I still find in my day-to-day use of language models that any
59:04
area where I know a
59:05
SPEAKER_01: lot about,
59:06
I routinely see 15% to 30% of the stuff I see from these things
59:10
being wrong.
59:13
SPEAKER_01: Remember Reagan said, trust but verify?
59:15
SPEAKER_01: I think that the way you have to deal with these systems is
59:20
SPEAKER_01: Don't trust, but verify anyway.
59:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
59:25
SPEAKER_01: You can't believe anything you get from a chatbot.
59:27
SPEAKER_01: So where are we?
59:28
SPEAKER_00: I did.
59:29
I asked one of the most advanced reasoning models to do some
59:33
research on you.
59:35
SPEAKER_00: And the first thing it said was that you grew up in New York.
59:38
SPEAKER_00: And then I was like, I don't think that is true.
59:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
59:42
SPEAKER_00: Um, and, and so I did, did have to check that.
59:45
SPEAKER_00: Um, I want to be mindful of your time.
59:47
I,
59:47
I can,
59:49
I,
59:49
I just want to do rapid fire on a couple of things,
59:52
if that's okay.
59:53
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
59:53
SPEAKER_00: Um,
59:54
SPEAKER_00: I,
59:54
SPEAKER_00: I can't help,
59:55
SPEAKER_00: but wonder your take on,
59:58
SPEAKER_00: on Intel and what has happened,
1:00:01
SPEAKER_00: the,
1:00:02
SPEAKER_00: the sort of situation we've emerged,
1:00:04
SPEAKER_00: we've ended up in where.
1:00:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:00:07
nvidia is so much larger than intel that intel is this this
1:00:11
fading um you know
1:00:13
might be sold for parts like 20 years ago this would have been
1:00:17
unfathomable to me
1:00:19
when i see people write about it i think sometimes they're
1:00:23
they're they're not
1:00:24
really appreciating even what like intel not just meant to
1:00:28
silicon valley back in
1:00:29
SPEAKER_00: the
1:00:31
70s,
1:00:31
80s,
1:00:31
90s,
1:00:32
but just culturally as this icon of everything this place stood for.
1:00:37
SPEAKER_00: I get a little emotional about all this stuff.
1:00:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's like almost a Detroit moment, isn't it?
1:00:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that one strikes me as particularly sad.
1:00:47
SPEAKER_00: I was curious if you think about this at all.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: I do,
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: and I grew up with people at Intel,
1:00:52
SPEAKER_01: and people are retired now and no longer working there,
1:00:55
SPEAKER_01: but were instrumental in some of the important technological advances.
1:00:58
SPEAKER_01: Just briefly, I just...
1:01:00
SPEAKER_01: Great sadness because,
1:01:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:01:02
SPEAKER_01: I grew up with Intel and it was one of these icons of Silicon Valley.
1:01:06
And I think if I had to look at one thing briefly about where
1:01:10
the failure was,
1:01:11
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:01:13
SPEAKER_01: they pioneered with the U.S.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_01: government EUV, extreme EUV, and then they didn't invest in it, right?
1:01:21
SPEAKER_01: TSMC invested in it.
1:01:23
SPEAKER_01: They didn't buy the steppers that they needed to buy.
1:01:25
SPEAKER_01: They made this bet on immersion lithography.
1:01:26
SPEAKER_01: I think that was the branch point where they failed.
1:01:31
SPEAKER_01: I haven't been reporting this and been close to it,
1:01:32
but I believe that it was a business decision not to sort of
1:01:37
pursue a technological
1:01:38
SPEAKER_01: branch point that they needed to take.
1:01:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:01:41
Um,
1:01:42
if that's true,
1:01:43
uh,
1:01:44
it's a question of the leadership of the company at that point.
1:01:47
SPEAKER_01: And,
1:01:47
SPEAKER_01: uh,
1:01:48
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:01:48
SPEAKER_01: I have my theories,
1:01:49
SPEAKER_01: but,
1:01:50
SPEAKER_01: uh,
1:01:50
SPEAKER_01: I don't,
1:01:50
SPEAKER_01: I wasn't reporting it,
1:01:52
SPEAKER_01: so I'm not certain.
1:01:53
SPEAKER_00: Would you ever have guessed that NVIDIA would be, what is it?
1:01:57
SPEAKER_00: It's probably like 20 times, a hundred times bigger than Intel.
1:02:00
SPEAKER_00: I don't even know what it is at the moment.
1:02:03
SPEAKER_01: Jensen's a sharp guy.
1:02:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh, no, I never, I never would have.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, they made the right bet.
1:02:08
SPEAKER_01: It's very, and now, you know, uh,
1:02:11
now everything's deep seek's throwing everything up in the air
1:02:14
you know there's
1:02:15
this this this rich debate about whether i mean i just love the
1:02:18
fact that the deep
1:02:19
seek announcement was like what a day or two days after um the
1:02:24
announcement of this
1:02:25
SPEAKER_01: half trillion dollar investment in big data centers and what have you and
1:02:29
SPEAKER_01: oh, by the way, maybe there's a different way to do this.
1:02:31
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
1:02:31
that seemed inevitable to me that they would find shortcuts
1:02:34
that wouldn't...
1:02:37
SPEAKER_01: And also,
1:02:37
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:02:37
this stuff is consuming so many resources that it seems like we
1:02:42
have to think about
1:02:42
SPEAKER_01: alternative ways to get...
1:02:45
SPEAKER_00: To you,
1:02:45
SPEAKER_00: do you think at all...
1:02:49
SPEAKER_00: Again,
1:02:49
SPEAKER_00: I get a little nostalgic of the Linux desktop,
1:02:52
SPEAKER_00: BOS,
1:02:54
SPEAKER_00: Transmeta,
1:02:55
SPEAKER_00: Crusoe chip,
1:02:57
SPEAKER_00: new laptops coming out,
1:02:58
SPEAKER_00: all these different form factors.
1:03:00
There used to be real competition to make computers of
1:03:06
different shapes and sizes and software.
1:03:09
SPEAKER_00: And it feels like, obviously, the Apple world is dominant.
1:03:12
SPEAKER_00: And then it's Apple versus PC.
1:03:15
SPEAKER_00: And yes, we have smartphones now.
1:03:18
I get slightly excited by the idea that somebody takes AI and
1:03:25
really rethinks
1:03:27
SPEAKER_00: computing and maybe we end up with something new.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_00: Have you batted that around in your head at all?
1:03:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I'm enough of a Werner Vinge fan.
1:03:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:03:42
to believe there will be this juncture to augmented reality
1:03:46
glasses at some point,
1:03:47
SPEAKER_01: that there is a new metaphor.
1:03:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
1:03:51
SPEAKER_01: when Magic Leap came along,
1:03:53
I loved the notion of being able to sort of change the notion
1:03:55
of a computing desktop.
1:03:57
I mean,
1:03:57
I saw this as a journalist,
1:04:00
and what kind of tools would you like to have?
1:04:02
SPEAKER_01: Well,
1:04:02
the notion of just being able to go like this and have a super
1:04:04
high-definition
1:04:05
SPEAKER_01: display hanging in the air,
1:04:06
SPEAKER_01: and you could have another one over here,
1:04:08
SPEAKER_01: I thought that was a super cool vision.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if it's the next vision, but it seems like it's possible.
1:04:15
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, that's a decade out now.
1:04:18
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you need to do a lot of technology innovation to make that.
1:04:22
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, meta Ray-Bans are not the answer to that question.
1:04:27
SPEAKER_01: Although I know people in the Valley who believe that that's the path,
1:04:30
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:04:31
that that will kill this billion dollar display industry and
1:04:34
change the form factor.
1:04:36
SPEAKER_01: And,
1:04:36
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:04:38
what's interesting to me in terms of Apple's intelligence stuff
1:04:43
at this point is in 1987,
1:04:48
SPEAKER_01: John Scully,
1:04:49
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:04:49
SPEAKER_01: Steve had left.
1:04:50
SPEAKER_01: John Scully had to come up with these, you know, a new vision.
1:04:52
And he went to Alan Kay's group and they came up with this idea
1:04:55
of knowledge navigator.
1:04:57
SPEAKER_01: And I don't know.
1:04:58
SPEAKER_01: People don't even remember Knowledge Navigator right now,
1:05:00
SPEAKER_01: but it had a huge impact on Silicon Valley.
1:05:03
SPEAKER_01: One thing, everybody came out with their own vision videos.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_01: They became really a fad after that.
1:05:08
But it really was a,
1:05:09
you know,
1:05:10
we're a half a step away from Knowledge Navigator right now.
1:05:14
And it's not clear to me that that's not the path that we're
1:05:17
going to go down in
1:05:19
SPEAKER_01: terms of the future of computing.
1:05:21
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, you know that what we can't predict is pace.
1:05:26
SPEAKER_01: And then always,
1:05:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
1:05:28
one of my favorite things to say about Silicon Valley has been
1:05:32
the visionaries are
1:05:33
SPEAKER_01: always wrong.
1:05:34
SPEAKER_01: And we always get surprised.
1:05:36
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, transformers were the best example of that ever.
1:05:39
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
1:05:39
even the guys who invented transformers didn't expect them to
1:05:41
have the impact that
1:05:42
SPEAKER_01: they did.
1:05:43
SPEAKER_01: Nobody saw that coming.
1:05:45
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, except in general terms.
1:05:48
So that,
1:05:48
you know,
1:05:48
the previous era for me like that in Silicon Valley was mobile computing.
1:05:54
SPEAKER_01: Because I was spending a lot of time in Europe in 2005 and 2006.
1:05:57
SPEAKER_01: And it seemed like innovation had all moved to Europe.
1:06:00
SPEAKER_01: Symbium, Nokia, mobile apps, they were all happening at first.
1:06:03
And then the iPhone shows up and everything gets reset to
1:06:06
Silicon Valley.
1:06:07
SPEAKER_00: It was unbelievable.
1:06:09
SPEAKER_00: I remember,
1:06:09
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
1:06:09
SPEAKER_00: I used to go to Mobile World Congress and you're like,
1:06:11
SPEAKER_00: God,
1:06:12
these Europeans are living in a futuristic world that we just
1:06:17
seem to not want any
1:06:18
SPEAKER_00: part of.
1:06:19
SPEAKER_00: And then, man, overnight, the U.S.
1:06:22
SPEAKER_00: When was the last time you were in China?
1:06:25
SPEAKER_00: It was probably 2017 or 18.
1:06:28
SPEAKER_00: I remember going to Shenzhen and being quite blown away.
1:06:34
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that's where you're going, but I went to
1:06:38
I went to the headquarters of DJI and then to a pretty
1:06:42
cutting-edge factory and
1:06:43
SPEAKER_00: just saw a bunch of 25-year-olds building machines in the hallways,
1:06:49
SPEAKER_00: and the energy was just insane.
1:06:53
SPEAKER_00: And going way back to the first part of what we were talking about,
1:06:57
SPEAKER_00: I think I've only ever had this experience three times,
1:06:59
SPEAKER_00: which is...
1:07:01
SPEAKER_00: That acceptance of failure,
1:07:04
SPEAKER_00: which I still think Silicon Valley has more than anywhere else,
1:07:08
SPEAKER_00: but the risk tolerance I've only ever really found in three places,
1:07:12
SPEAKER_00: which is here,
1:07:13
SPEAKER_00: China,
1:07:14
SPEAKER_00: and Israel are the only places where I've felt that vibe.
1:07:18
SPEAKER_00: When I go to Europe, Australia, South America, you can just tell that...
1:07:26
SPEAKER_00: if you mess this thing up, you're looked down upon.
1:07:29
SPEAKER_00: It's just too risky to do that.
1:07:31
SPEAKER_00: But I don't know if that's where you were going.
1:07:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was.
1:07:34
SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, Xi shut all that down.
1:07:37
SPEAKER_01: Most of the startups are gone.
1:07:39
SPEAKER_01: But I had that.
1:07:39
I was there at the end of 2016 on the third ring,
1:07:43
and it was like Silicon Valley on steroids.
1:07:46
SPEAKER_01: And the thing was,
1:07:47
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:07:48
SPEAKER_01: Peter Thiel likes to rant about China stealing from the United States.
1:07:52
SPEAKER_01: And yes, that's true.
1:07:52
SPEAKER_01: But what they really were stealing at that point was our culture.
1:07:55
they were borrowing Silicon Valley ideology,
1:07:58
um,
1:07:58
not Silicon Valley technology.
1:08:00
SPEAKER_01: And that was the frightening thing to me about what I saw.
1:08:03
SPEAKER_00: It was,
1:08:03
SPEAKER_00: yeah,
1:08:04
SPEAKER_00: it reminded me of just like everything I'd ever read about the true,
1:08:07
SPEAKER_00: true glory days of the,
1:08:09
SPEAKER_00: the Valley.
1:08:09
SPEAKER_00: Um, so, okay.
1:08:11
SPEAKER_00: Last question then just in not to,
1:08:14
SPEAKER_00: I don't,
1:08:15
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if this will end us on a positive note or a negative note,
1:08:19
SPEAKER_00: but,
1:08:19
SPEAKER_00: um,
1:08:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:08:21
SPEAKER_00: just given your,
1:08:23
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:08:23
SPEAKER_00: so how do you feel about Silicon Valley in this particular moment?
1:08:28
SPEAKER_00: Um,
1:08:30
SPEAKER_00: as innovative as ever,
1:08:34
SPEAKER_00: or has it got too much going on now politically and it's a cultural mess?
1:08:39
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
1:08:39
SPEAKER_00: Are you bull or bear on this place moving forward?
1:08:44
There was a period where I read about this,
1:08:46
like everybody else,
1:08:47
about Silicon Valley dead.
1:08:48
SPEAKER_01: This was, what was it?
1:08:49
SPEAKER_01: Right before Transformers, right?
1:08:51
SPEAKER_01: There were people who were going into Austin.
1:08:52
SPEAKER_01: People were going to Miami.
1:08:54
SPEAKER_01: Guess what?
1:08:55
SPEAKER_01: They're all back.
1:08:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:08:56
I mean,
1:08:56
I've seen that three times now,
1:08:58
you know,
1:08:59
the boom and bust cycle.
1:09:00
But I'm very aware that Detroit lasted for a half century and
1:09:05
then it went away.
1:09:06
SPEAKER_01: And there's nothing to my mind that says the Valley has to stay,
1:09:12
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:09:12
SPEAKER_01: the innovative center of information technology for the world.
1:09:16
SPEAKER_01: I keep looking for,
1:09:17
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:09:18
the next platform like technology advanced that comes from
1:09:21
somewhere other than
1:09:22
SPEAKER_01: Silicon Valley.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_01: I haven't seen that yet.
1:09:24
SPEAKER_01: So,
1:09:25
SPEAKER_01: um,
1:09:26
SPEAKER_01: I don't see,
1:09:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
1:09:27
SPEAKER_01: we're in the,
1:09:28
SPEAKER_01: it's so hard to get outside this particular,
1:09:31
SPEAKER_01: uh,
1:09:31
SPEAKER_01: investment bubble to understand what's going on.
1:09:34
SPEAKER_01: That's what I like about what you do is you try to look beyond the, you
1:09:40
world covers about technology because the interesting
1:09:42
technologies always come from
1:09:44
SPEAKER_01: out of left field and surprise us.
1:09:47
And there still seems to be a critical mass of people here that
1:09:52
you don't find
1:09:53
SPEAKER_01: anywhere else in the world.
1:09:54
SPEAKER_01: Let me just say one other thing.
1:09:55
I think the thing we didn't mention about the particular
1:09:58
chemistry of Silicon
1:09:59
SPEAKER_01: Valley is its remarkable diversity.
1:10:03
SPEAKER_01: You know, it was the magnet for the best and the brightest.
1:10:06
SPEAKER_01: And if you go around the different communities in Silicon Valley,
1:10:09
There are different ethnic populations all around here that is
1:10:14
a unique thing to
1:10:15
SPEAKER_01: any place in the world.
1:10:16
And that may be actually what separates Silicon Valley and
1:10:18
makes it an innovation
1:10:20
SPEAKER_01: hub more than anything else.
1:10:22
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
1:10:22
I always picture it like you tipped the earth and all the best
1:10:28
and brightest people
1:10:29
SPEAKER_00: from all over tumbled into this place.
1:10:32
SPEAKER_00: And it's fascinating.
1:10:34
SPEAKER_00: Well, John, this was...
1:10:37
SPEAKER_00: a dream come true for me.
1:10:39
SPEAKER_00: I've always wanted to ask you a bunch of these questions.
1:10:41
SPEAKER_00: Um,
1:10:42
SPEAKER_00: and,
1:10:42
SPEAKER_00: and I'll put,
1:10:43
SPEAKER_00: I would urge everyone to read all your wonderful books,
1:10:47
SPEAKER_00: um,
1:10:47
SPEAKER_00: which I will put in the show notes.
1:10:49
SPEAKER_00: Um,
1:10:50
SPEAKER_00: are there like,
1:10:51
is there like one or two favorite stories you did over the
1:10:54
years that I should,
1:10:56
SPEAKER_00: that's hard.
1:10:57
SPEAKER_00: I know that's hard.
1:10:57
SPEAKER_00: You probably wrote like, like 30,000.
1:10:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:11:01
You know,
1:11:01
if people want to,
1:11:03
there's my entanglement with Kevin Mitnick,
1:11:07
rest in peace.
1:11:08
SPEAKER_01: That was that demarketed era.
1:11:11
SPEAKER_01: I wrote the first article about the World Wide Web.
1:11:13
SPEAKER_01: That was a case of getting it all right and all wrong.
1:11:16
SPEAKER_01: I wrote, I think it was a map to buried treasures in the information age.
1:11:21
SPEAKER_01: And when I was thinking treasure, I was thinking information, not money.
1:11:24
SPEAKER_01: Turned out it was money.
1:11:25
SPEAKER_01: It really was buried treasure.
1:11:27
SPEAKER_01: I didn't understand that.
1:11:29
SPEAKER_01: Um,
1:11:29
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:11:30
SPEAKER_01: there were a couple more,
1:11:31
SPEAKER_01: but,
1:11:31
SPEAKER_01: uh,
1:11:32
SPEAKER_01: um,
1:11:33
SPEAKER_01: yeah,
1:11:34
SPEAKER_01: no,
1:11:34
SPEAKER_01: it's,
1:11:34
SPEAKER_01: uh,
1:11:36
SPEAKER_01: you had to,
1:11:37
SPEAKER_01: the thing that,
1:11:38
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:11:38
SPEAKER_01: it was a,
1:11:38
SPEAKER_01: a seven by 24 life.
1:11:41
SPEAKER_01: And that's sort of what I'm looking back on now.
1:11:43
SPEAKER_01: You,
1:11:43
you could only do this by living in that sea of technologists
1:11:47
that you're still
1:11:48
SPEAKER_01: spending time with.
1:11:49
SPEAKER_01: And that's where you capture the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley best.
1:11:51
SPEAKER_01: So I'm jealous of what you're doing.
1:11:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, that's very kind of you.
1:11:56
SPEAKER_00: And you were always just an awesome role model and mentor.
1:12:03
SPEAKER_00: Even though I didn't stay at the New York Times that long,
1:12:06
SPEAKER_00: but I was so thrilled to have a chance to work with you when I did.
1:12:09
SPEAKER_00: And thanks for making time for me, man.
1:12:11
SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
1:12:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, good luck on your new chapter.
1:12:15
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:12:16
SPEAKER_01: Take care of it.
1:12:23
SPEAKER_00: Today's episode was hosted by me, Ashley Vance.
1:12:26
SPEAKER_00: Our guest was the great John Markoff.
1:12:30
SPEAKER_00: Core Memory is produced by me and David Nicholson.
1:12:33
SPEAKER_00: Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland.
1:12:38
SPEAKER_00: And our wonderful editor is John Sortland.