Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
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Speaker 1: Hey guys, hope everyone is doing well. I have a
Speaker 1: fantastic interview I want to share with you that I
Speaker 1: think is extraordinarly important given the way that tech oligarchs
Speaker 1: have effectively taken over our government and are operating it
Speaker 1: for their own ends. So you guys know me, Saga, Ryan, Emily,
Speaker 1: the whole team. We've been covering AI, we've been covering Crypto.
Speaker 1: We've been covering both the near term and the long
Speaker 1: term effects. So everything from the immediate electricity price hikes
Speaker 1: because of the data center build out, the way our
Speaker 1: whole economy is apparently now just one big bet on AI,
Speaker 1: the stripping up back of all regulations to rein in
Speaker 1: or have any sort of democrat check on what these
Speaker 1: tech oligarchs ultimately want, and then also the more dire,
Speaker 1: longer term consequences of potentially shredding the social contract, eliminating
Speaker 1: the need for all or most human labor, and ultimately
Speaker 1: an actual existential threat to humanity itself. So my guest
Speaker 1: is Jacob Silverman. He wrote an incredible book about how
Speaker 1: this cast of characters has come to effectively stage a
Speaker 1: coup of our democratic government and are getting everything they
Speaker 1: want in Trump two point zero. His name is Jacob Silverman.
Speaker 1: His book is Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the Radicalization
Speaker 1: of Silicon Valley. Elon Musk is in the title, and
Speaker 1: Elon Musk is definitely in the book. But this is
Speaker 1: really about everyone from Peter Teel, Sam Altman, Mark Andresen
Speaker 1: David Sachs and how they made this. I guess you'd
Speaker 1: call it a right wing turn, although their politics in
Speaker 1: terms of economics have always been very self serving and
Speaker 1: very libertarian. So in any case, if you have to
Speaker 1: read one book over the holiday season to understand how
Speaker 1: we got where we are now with regard to you know, crypto,
Speaker 1: with regard to the wild wild West of AI development,
Speaker 1: just off to the races with that I really recommend
Speaker 1: this particular book. And with that being said, let's bring
Speaker 1: in the guests, all right, guys, So it is my
Speaker 1: pleasure to be joined today by Jacob Silverman, who is
Speaker 1: author of a fantastic new book called Gilded Rage, Elon
Speaker 1: Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. He's an independent
Speaker 1: journalist and also has a limited what four episode series
Speaker 1: at the CBC was at ced DC that is called
Speaker 1: The Making of Musk and focuses on some of the
Speaker 1: topics in the book, but really hones in on Elon
Speaker 1: Musk himself. So great to have you, Jacob, Welcome.
Speaker 3: Thank you, glad to be here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course. So I wanted to start with this
Speaker 1: image actually from Trump's inauguration, which is when it really
Speaker 1: set in for me that oh boy, we have a problem.
Speaker 1: So this was the some of the billionaires and some
Speaker 1: of the specifically tech billionaires who were lined up behind
Speaker 1: Trump at his inauguration. Not lawmakers, you know, there were
Speaker 1: some of those, but further back, these were the guys
Speaker 1: that were in the front row. And so I'm curious
Speaker 1: as someone who has been writing on the tech world
Speaker 1: for about the tech world for quite a while and
Speaker 1: really had your eye on the ball in terms of
Speaker 1: what these guys have been up to. I'm curious what
Speaker 1: you thought when you saw this lineup at Trump's inauguration.
Speaker 3: Well, it's clarifying in some ways to see these guys
Speaker 3: all line up together. I mean, this is the oligarchy
Speaker 3: or the new oligarchy, out in the open, and I
Speaker 3: don't think it's necessarily surprising anymore. I mean, I divide
Speaker 3: some of these tech elites into kind of opportunistic group
Speaker 3: and then some into the more died in the world
Speaker 3: ideological people. But they're all kind of moving in the
Speaker 3: same direction and seek the same favors from the Trump administration.
Speaker 3: And if any of them ever had liberal politics, all
Speaker 3: war them pretty thinly. So you know, I think that
Speaker 3: it's a powerful image and also a good one for
Speaker 3: the public to see in a way, because the people
Speaker 3: who may have been powerful behind the scenes are now
Speaker 3: very much to the fore, you know, going to the inauguration,
Speaker 3: going to Trump's oval office and presenting him with gold gifts.
Speaker 3: So you know, I consider it as a possible.
Speaker 1: Book cover, Yeah, it would, it would be good. The
Speaker 1: book cover you chose is also great, But it is
Speaker 1: a powerful image. I mean, for me, it was really
Speaker 1: striking because obviously there's been a lot to focus on
Speaker 1: in Trump two point Oh, there was a lot to
Speaker 1: focus on going into Trump two point zero. But you know,
Speaker 1: you probably have understood this the whole time, even as
Speaker 1: there is a lot happening. I feel like the tech
Speaker 1: takeover is actually the central project of what is going
Speaker 1: on here. You know, from the beginning, you've had executive
Speaker 1: orders to roll back any Biden era regulation of AI development.
Speaker 1: Obviously Trump going all in on crypto for his own
Speaker 1: personal wealth and corrupt purposes, you know, Elon Musk with
Speaker 1: Doge and the extraordinary and I think criminal acts that
Speaker 1: occurred there. You know, just we were just covering on
Speaker 1: breaking points that Trump just signed a new executive order
Speaker 1: banning states from regulating AI at all for ten years.
Speaker 1: So I wonder how you see this project in Trump
Speaker 1: two point zero and how central you see it as being.
Speaker 3: Well, I think there's been a total and in some
Speaker 3: cases mutually very profitable alignment between the tech industry and
Speaker 3: MAGA and Trump to a degree that I think a
Speaker 3: lot of people didn't anticipate. You know, some people have
Speaker 3: asked me, do you think that they sort of bit
Speaker 3: off more than they could chew the tech industry or
Speaker 3: they have any regrets. But so far, I think it's
Speaker 3: working out very well for both sides. I mean, even
Speaker 3: someone like Elon Musk, there hasn't been a lot of
Speaker 3: blowback towards him. He still has his government contracts, there's
Speaker 3: still that mutual dependency, especially through SpaceX and he's getting
Speaker 3: new contracts through XAI. So, you know, the kind of
Speaker 3: high tech corporate represented by Silicon Valley and their rhetoric
Speaker 3: that somehow they can introduce efficiency and innovate the future
Speaker 3: seems to be actually really amenable to the kind of
Speaker 3: Trump authoritarianism and the things that they want to do.
Speaker 3: And you know, more specifically, the Trump administration doesn't really
Speaker 3: have an industrial policy or a way to bring back
Speaker 3: manufacturing or the other things that they sort of vaguely
Speaker 3: talk about. So just kind of handing it all over
Speaker 3: to the tech industry and saying we'll invest in AI
Speaker 3: data centers is a kind of a solution to that
Speaker 3: and is exactly what the tech industry wants right now.
Speaker 1: You write in the book that these guys are always
Speaker 1: looking for an exit, and right now the exit and
Speaker 1: this has been actually years in the making right now,
Speaker 1: the exit they're looking for is basically from society overall.
Speaker 1: And I mean most extreme example of this is Elon
Speaker 1: Musk with his Mars fantasies. But I'd love for you
Speaker 1: to elaborate on that concept and explain to people what
Speaker 1: is it that these guys actually want.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exit is a specific word that you'll hear sometimes
Speaker 3: from people on the tech right, especially people who might
Speaker 3: style themselves as libertarian, like Peter tel for example. We'll
Speaker 3: talk about there's an interview with him from a podcast
Speaker 3: about how it's increasingly harder to exit, and he specifically
Speaker 3: cites getting your money out of the US into Switzerland.
Speaker 3: But it's a broader idea that you know, they are
Speaker 3: very fed up with mainstream society. They don't want to
Speaker 3: live with the rest of us. I mean, I talk
Speaker 3: about this in more specific sense about Silica, about San
Speaker 3: Francisco and the social problems there and how tech elites
Speaker 3: reacted to it and really kind of gave up on
Speaker 3: San Francisco as this failed city. But it also influences
Speaker 3: things like charter cities or these initiatives to build these
Speaker 3: kind of corporate fiefdoms, these little city states. And very
Speaker 3: relevantly right now, there's one in Honduras on an island
Speaker 3: called Roatan. The settlement itself is called Prospera. This is
Speaker 3: funded by Peter Tile and Mark and Dreesen, other pretty
Speaker 3: well known tech elites. It's basically a startup that under
Speaker 3: a previous right wing government Honduras, not Joh, i believe,
Speaker 3: but a different one allied with him, basically purchase a
Speaker 3: small piece of this island from Honduras and then the
Speaker 3: subsequent left wing governments challenge that in court and want
Speaker 3: to take it back quite understandably, and Prospero is suing
Speaker 3: the government of Honduras for more than the GDP of Honduras,
Speaker 3: and someone like Joho and his party would probably be
Speaker 3: much more minimal to preserving that relationship. So like that
Speaker 3: is probably the most advance of these charter cities or
Speaker 3: city states. But you really see that exit in all
Speaker 3: kinds of forms. You know, it can be more metaphorical
Speaker 3: or sort of figurative, with like a bureaucratic or legal exit,
Speaker 3: like let's find out how to move fast and break
Speaker 3: things and break the law. But it is also a
Speaker 3: very specific idea that, as you said, extends to everything
Speaker 3: from you know, founding new cities to going to Mars.
Speaker 1: And I feel like AI is a version of that
Speaker 1: exit as well. I mean they, I think believe, Well,
Speaker 1: you can tell me, what do they think that the
Speaker 1: AI future is going to look like and what sort
Speaker 1: of power do you they expect to consolidate in their
Speaker 1: own hands if their company is the one that wins
Speaker 1: the race to superintelligence.
Speaker 3: I think the tech industry has been operating on this assumption,
Speaker 3: or at least article of faith, that if they keep
Speaker 3: pouring resources into AI and into the basically the current
Speaker 3: methods largely focused around LMS, that super intelligence or AGI
Speaker 3: or whatever else they might want to call it will
Speaker 3: somehow emerge. And there has been some admission even from
Speaker 3: the industry recently that may not happen, that this may
Speaker 3: not be the proper path for that. What we're more
Speaker 3: likely to see is some sort of big bubble bursts
Speaker 3: in the next year, perhaps or eighteen months, as these
Speaker 3: enormous bets start being called in by perhaps some of
Speaker 3: the lenders who are putting a lot of money into
Speaker 3: data centers, or as a company like open ai can't
Speaker 3: fulfill its promises and it's huge spending promises, so you
Speaker 3: know it. For some reason, the tech industry has aside,
Speaker 3: this is the only game in town, and right now
Speaker 3: with a lot of money coming in from Middle Eastern
Speaker 3: sovereign wealth funds and a lot of support from the
Speaker 3: Trump administration and from Oracle and Larry Ellison, who you
Speaker 3: know is probably the top Trump ally actually in the
Speaker 3: tech world. In some ways this we're still going to
Speaker 3: go down this path, and they're still going to spend
Speaker 3: tens or hundreds of billions of dollars or as much
Speaker 3: as they can over the next few years until it
Speaker 3: kind of all blows up, and maybe Microsoft and Google
Speaker 3: will be able to vacuum up the pieces. But that
Speaker 3: is kind of how I see it going. And I think,
Speaker 3: of course, when it does blow up, it's going to
Speaker 3: affect the rest of us, even if you don't own
Speaker 3: tech stocks. It's going to hurt the market, it's going
Speaker 3: to hurt people's retirement accounts, and they'll be knock on
Speaker 3: effects to the economy. But this is the kind of
Speaker 3: alliance and bet that they're willing to make on almost
Speaker 3: pretty much all our behalfs.
Speaker 1: Right now, let's back up a little bit and talk
Speaker 1: about some of the subject matter or the book, which
Speaker 1: really tracks kind of how we got to this place,
Speaker 1: and use Elon Musk as like, you know, a central
Speaker 1: character to explain this reactionary radicalization and shift. Elon really,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of comes into his own as this
Speaker 1: big time entrepreneur with a lot of help from Barack Obama,
Speaker 1: and they were close, and he was you know, sort
Speaker 1: of seen as a liberal democratic type of ally. Then
Speaker 1: he shifts his politics over the years. Although one of
Speaker 1: the questions I have for you is like how much
Speaker 1: are these guys really changing their politics and how much
Speaker 1: are they just moving with the wins and exploiting opportunities
Speaker 1: as they see them. But let's just start with Elon
Speaker 1: Musk and what his trajectory has been from you know,
Speaker 1: close with Barack Obama to doge and you know, wielding
Speaker 1: the chainsaw and being besties with Trump.
Speaker 3: Yeah, as we could talk about. I think there are
Speaker 3: people who in this group that were very political from
Speaker 3: the start, but someone like Musk obviously did change. I mean,
Speaker 3: you can even watch an interview with him on YouTube
Speaker 3: from ten years ago or fifteen years ago and just
Speaker 3: see a different disposition and different interests and a different
Speaker 3: kind of psychological mind state, if you really want to
Speaker 3: get deep about it, he doesn't seem like the same guy,
Speaker 3: But specifically he was mostly a kind of centrist liberal.
Speaker 3: He didn't donate heavily in the twenty sixteen election. He
Speaker 3: didn't come out strongly for anyone. And I think there
Speaker 3: are things both in the broader culture which I talk
Speaker 3: about in the book, but also personally to him that
Speaker 3: some of which he's acknowledged, and I think we have
Speaker 3: to pay attention to as much as we are sort
Speaker 3: of armchair psychologizing that change. And for one thing, he
Speaker 3: started having more conflicts. A lot of this started, of
Speaker 3: course during COVID, when there were these massive or rapid
Speaker 3: upheavals in the culture and politics around social issues like
Speaker 3: Black Lives Matter, or around quarantine and health care. And
Speaker 3: some of these issues really were and also me too,
Speaker 3: and some of these issues were not handled well. None
Speaker 3: of them are really handled well by Silicon Valley elites.
Speaker 3: And in the specific case of Musk, he really did
Speaker 3: not like lockdowns. He did not like being not invited
Speaker 3: to this EV summit at the Biden White House. He's
Speaker 3: actually made a really big deal about that over the years,
Speaker 3: and so his allies have. We should also note that
Speaker 3: this is someone who during the first Trump administration resigned
Speaker 3: from a Trump advisory board, you know, one of these
Speaker 3: kind of meaningless advisory boards. But because Trump pulled out
Speaker 3: of the Paris Climate Treaty, I mean this, there was
Speaker 3: somewhat of an authent.
Speaker 1: Them all today have that reaction.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there was an authentic like belief in climate
Speaker 3: change at least there. And you know, then you cut
Speaker 3: to the twenty twenty four cycle and he basically was
Speaker 3: doing climate change denial on of Twitter spaces or x spaces.
Speaker 3: Event during the twenty twenty four campaign cycle, we'll talking
Speaker 3: to Trump and so you start seeing things like the
Speaker 3: fight over his factory in Fremont, California, one of his
Speaker 3: most important factories, when the government of Alameda County wanted
Speaker 3: him to at least partially shut it down during the
Speaker 3: height of COVID, and that this is when Mosque is
Speaker 3: going on Twitter, which he didn't yet and was saying
Speaker 3: that COVID was gonna be gone by the end of
Speaker 3: April twenty twenty. You know, this was speaking of delusion
Speaker 3: perhaps but also self interests. And it just kind of
Speaker 3: goes from there and what happens also around this time
Speaker 3: is that his child, Vivian Wilson, she comes out as
Speaker 3: a trans woman, and she changes her name and in
Speaker 3: her name change applications, says I no longer wish to
Speaker 3: be associated with my father. Over the year, summer reporting
Speaker 3: has emerged and she's since sort of come out also
Speaker 3: as her own media figure person, willing to give interviews
Speaker 3: to say that, you know, this guy bullied her for
Speaker 3: being queer, and that I think really did break something
Speaker 3: or change something in Musk. You know, he became very
Speaker 3: openly transphobic after that. It became one basically his main
Speaker 3: cultural issue into like lane cultural lane, into maga reactionarysm
Speaker 3: It's something that he shares, I think with sort of
Speaker 3: the broad sweep of maga people. Trump is amenable to it,
Speaker 3: and he's talked about specifically, especially in that interview he
Speaker 3: did with Geordan Peterson I think summer of twenty twenty four,
Speaker 3: he said that the woke mind virus killed my son,
Speaker 3: referring to his trans daughter. And so the idea of
Speaker 3: this woke mind virus, which of course seems is very
Speaker 3: silly and is silly in some ways, but is also
Speaker 3: very real to him I think did come out of
Speaker 3: his daughter coming out as trans and the broken relationship there.
Speaker 3: So you know, that's why I talk about the political issues.
Speaker 3: Of course, the broader trends in the culture, but also
Speaker 3: some of these guys will go personal on themselves. You see.
Speaker 3: It also even to a degree with someone like Bill
Speaker 3: Ackman who says that Harvard turned his daughter into a communist.
Speaker 3: I believe she wrote her thesis on something about Marxism.
Speaker 3: Like that is actually something I think to listen to,
Speaker 3: to pay attention. These people even think.
Speaker 1: As sort of silly as it sounds, Yeah.
Speaker 3: They think that that America's institutions, and especially it's liberal institutions,
Speaker 3: have turned their kids into you know, lefty trans radicals.
Speaker 3: Moscas said some things about la private schools where Vivian
Speaker 3: went to school. So that's the mix I'm kind of
Speaker 3: bringing here to the analysis.
Speaker 1: Interesting. So there's you know, one part economic self interest,
Speaker 1: there's one part some sort of you know, personal experience
Speaker 1: or kind of like you know, what is experience as
Speaker 1: a personal trauma. With Musk, you know, how much of
Speaker 1: his radical I have a bunch of Musk questions, but
Speaker 1: how much of his radicalization occurs after he buys Twitter,
Speaker 1: and is you know, sort of I mean, Twitter has
Speaker 1: now become its own radicalization machine, because it seemed like he,
Speaker 1: you know what, had already made this shift. Of course
Speaker 1: by the time he buys Twitter, but it also seems
Speaker 1: like once he was swimming in the pools of all
Speaker 1: this like constant great replacement theory, Nazi content, that he
Speaker 1: just goes deeper and deeper and deeper in that direction.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that that's correct. I think you could
Speaker 3: see him trending that way. I meant in tech, you know,
Speaker 3: he's surrounded by people who are sort of tep at
Speaker 3: social liberals, you know, billionaire philanthropic types, but you know,
Speaker 3: mostly also care about the bottom line and their taxes.
Speaker 3: So it's not like he was ever very steeped in
Speaker 3: liberal much less lefty culture or anything like that. And
Speaker 3: then when he starts to spending more and more time
Speaker 3: online as a lot of us did. I mean, one
Speaker 3: comparison I make is that we all know people in
Speaker 3: our lives whose politics change, perhaps our own politics change
Speaker 3: during COVID to one degree or another. And sometimes it's
Speaker 3: your friend or your eccentric cousin who becomes kind of conspiratorial,
Speaker 3: right ring radical and sometimes it is the richest man
Speaker 3: in the world because he's online, as you said in
Speaker 3: this same radioactive stew that a lot of us are
Speaker 3: either in or trying to avoid, and you could see
Speaker 3: it happening. You see who he's interacting with. There's been
Speaker 3: some studies of this, perhaps not enough, but you know
Speaker 3: that he's actually talking to Nazis and talking about the
Speaker 3: great replacement theory, or at least amplifying it. So you know,
Speaker 3: that is one thing in a way that's kind of
Speaker 3: useful for analyzing what happened here to to Musk and
Speaker 3: some of his peers, is that you can watch their
Speaker 3: posts and watch how their online relationships played out, watch
Speaker 3: how often he posted and with whom and we do have,
Speaker 3: of course some understanding of that now. And really this
Speaker 3: is you know, the black pilling of Elon Musk, the
Speaker 3: same way it would be of anyone else on a
Speaker 3: four chan like environment. But you know, of course it's
Speaker 3: very different because of who he is, and because he
Speaker 3: eventually does buy that platform and basically amplify all those
Speaker 3: tendencies and features we're talking about, brings back the Nazis.
Speaker 3: Tilts Twitter slash x to be an overtly right wing,
Speaker 3: pro Trump platform, which of course has electoral implications, but
Speaker 3: it's something that we can see happening right there.
Speaker 1: You know, as someone on the left, you know, I
Speaker 1: always I can't say maybe always, but for a long
Speaker 1: time have seen these guys not as being you know,
Speaker 1: really liberals or on the left. Obviously when it came
Speaker 1: to economics, none of them ever were really I mean,
Speaker 1: they're capitalists, like that's their thing, tech oligarchs, that's who
Speaker 1: they are. But they wore a lot of social liberalism, which,
Speaker 1: you know, given how much of our politics focuses on
Speaker 1: culture war fights, gave them the semblance of being you know,
Speaker 1: on the left or you know, an ally of the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party, at least for some of them. Some of
Speaker 1: these guys have always been you know, Peter Thiel has
Speaker 1: always been like a very ideological libertarian at least in
Speaker 1: a certain sense. But so how much of it is
Speaker 1: for which of these guys? Is it that they are
Speaker 1: just sort of cynically exploiting the fact that like they
Speaker 1: can get what they want out of Trump and he's
Speaker 1: the guy in power right now, and so they're going
Speaker 1: to come with their gold bars and they're gonna you know,
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg caught on a hot mic saying like, oh,
Speaker 1: I hope I said the right number of how much
Speaker 1: we're investing in the US, et cetera, Like how much
Speaker 1: of it is just opportunistic And the next time there's
Speaker 1: a Democratic president in the White House, they're suddenly going
Speaker 1: to you know, oh my gosh, I was so wrong
Speaker 1: about all these things. Turns out Trump was so awful.
Speaker 1: And you know, President AOC, we're here to serve you.
Speaker 1: What can we do for the country under your leadership?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I think, you know, I divide them and sort
Speaker 3: of into a few tranches, and I think the opportunistic
Speaker 3: ones are more like leaders of Microsoft, Apple, Google, you know,
Speaker 3: meta like Zuckerberg, Like you said, he likes to sort
Speaker 3: of blow with the winds or go where the winds
Speaker 3: are blowing and reinvent himself a little bit every few years.
Speaker 1: Or yeah, at that moment when he showed up on
Speaker 1: Rogan with like his like chain and his after he's
Speaker 1: doing this heavy T shirts.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, So I'm wearing sort of a heavy sweasher.
Speaker 3: So who am I to talk? But you know, he
Speaker 3: is very and we heard it very well and very
Speaker 3: vividly on that hot mic when he said to Trump,
Speaker 3: I don't know what number you wanted me to say
Speaker 3: about his data center investment, like how many hundreds of
Speaker 3: billions of dollars? But you know, I think it's worth
Speaker 3: also looking at you have the died in the wool
Speaker 3: ideological conservatives and right wingers and p but like Peter
Speaker 3: Teel or David Sachs who was his Teal's friend and
Speaker 3: writing partner at college at Stanford and in the early
Speaker 3: nineties they wrote this book called The Diversity Myth, which
Speaker 3: was basically like an anti multiculturalist what we now call
Speaker 3: an anti woke screed. And so you know, those people
Speaker 3: have always been there, and Teal sometimes has been the
Speaker 3: lonelier figure, especially during the twenty sixteen election. But I
Speaker 3: think what we've seen is that yes, there is a
Speaker 3: great deal of opportunism and of a typical like corporate
Speaker 3: billionaire type, but there's also what a lot of people
Speaker 3: in the Silicon Valley elite who are kind of ready
Speaker 3: to be activated or ready to be radicalized in their
Speaker 3: own way, I think, and were fed up with some
Speaker 3: of this stuff. And even some of them who you know,
Speaker 3: some of them went one direction and back again, like
Speaker 3: I think of someone like Doug Leone, who's not a
Speaker 3: household name necessarily, but he's a partner Sequoia, the most
Speaker 3: important VC firm in the valley. He was a longtime
Speaker 3: Republican supporter, supported Trump in twenty sixteen after January sixth
Speaker 3: said Trump had to kind of had to go. Elon
Speaker 3: Musk said the same thing in more gentle terms, and
Speaker 3: that Trump should was a little old and should write
Speaker 3: off into the sunset. But then we see these guys
Speaker 3: come back and Doug Leon became a very vocal Trump
Speaker 3: supporter in the valley. So you know, I think that
Speaker 3: that specific cocktail of opportunism and ideology is important with
Speaker 3: some of these guys. But you know, ultimately it is
Speaker 3: about class, you know, as as you were kind of
Speaker 3: alluding to, I think venture capitalists. Capitalist is in the
Speaker 3: title for a lot of these people that we're talking about,
Speaker 3: and so they are so primed to pursue authoritarian politics.
Speaker 3: I think when it's presented to them so easily, like
Speaker 3: that is the world that they swim in in their
Speaker 3: own way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I couldn't you tease that on a little bit more.
Speaker 1: Why it is such a logical fit that you know
Speaker 1: this president who is you know, a core and just authoritarian,
Speaker 1: like that is every instinct and his body thinks that
Speaker 1: it should be basically legal to criticize him constantly consolidating
Speaker 1: power in his own hands and in the executive branch
Speaker 1: constantly you know, flouting the constitution, laws, etc. I mean
Speaker 1: that is just like to the extent he has any ideology,
Speaker 1: it's just like a lust to consolidate power and be
Speaker 1: the you know, the boss. And I guess, I mean
Speaker 1: the obvious thing is like here he is this ceo,
Speaker 1: not nearly as successful as like an Elon Musk or
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos, but he also has that CEO mindset where
Speaker 1: it's like I should have total and complete control. So
Speaker 1: is that where the alignment fits here? Why is the
Speaker 1: authoritarian bent of this administration such as sort of natural
Speaker 1: fit for tech oligarchs.
Speaker 3: Well, I think for one thing, it shows how thin
Speaker 3: their support of freedom or individual liberty and free speech are.
Speaker 3: But more importantly, this is a group of people who
Speaker 3: deal with fabulous amounts of money and also just increasing amounts.
Speaker 3: I mean, one change I try in the book is
Speaker 3: that a lot of that money is now coming from
Speaker 3: dictatorships in the Middle East. I mean it has been
Speaker 3: for a couple of decades, but for at least, you know,
Speaker 3: perhaps the last ten years, maybe a little bit less.
Speaker 3: Saudi Arabia has been probably the biggest funder of tech startups,
Speaker 3: with the UAE and Katark contributing a lot of money
Speaker 3: to So you have people who vcs and tech CEOs
Speaker 3: who venerate this founder led startup model where the founder
Speaker 3: is the supreme decision maker, and they are getting billions
Speaker 3: of dollars from people who are also have an authoritarian
Speaker 3: mode of governance. And you know this is not just metaphorical.
Speaker 3: I mean Ben Horowitz, who is Marc Andreessen's business partner
Speaker 3: at Andresen Horowitz major venture capital firms, said at one
Speaker 3: of these Saudi business summits a few years ago to
Speaker 3: his Saudi counterpart, he said, you have a founder also
Speaker 3: usually call him your highness, And I think you know,
Speaker 3: at all levels there's this authoritarian mindset and way of
Speaker 3: doing business that really appeals to them and that they've
Speaker 3: honed with their Middle Eastern partners. And now you know,
Speaker 3: Trump is more gearish and stupider and more easily bought
Speaker 3: and stuff, but they they don't mind and you know,
Speaker 3: so they're still willing to work with that, and his
Speaker 3: authoritarianism hasn't encroached on them yet, you know, hasn't washed
Speaker 3: up on their shores. Quite the opposite, as we talked
Speaker 3: about earlier. You know, he is pushing AI because it's
Speaker 3: sort of good for business or good for his pocket,
Speaker 3: and that works for them for now. And so if
Speaker 3: Trump's authoritarianism somehow turns against Silicon Valley or specific people, yeah,
Speaker 3: then they might have a problem. But right now, you know,
Speaker 3: these guys think of themselves as kings or dictators of
Speaker 3: their own little empires, so that works very well with
Speaker 3: them when they can just you know, let Trump be Trump.
Speaker 1: Can you talk a little bit about how they used,
Speaker 1: you know, politics in San Francisco to kind of workshop
Speaker 1: some of their reactionary politics and what that looked like.
Speaker 3: So this is really starting around twenty nineteen, twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: Of course, COVID is always a marker here when tech
Speaker 3: elites really start getting fed up vocally, of course, with
Speaker 3: San Francisco seeing it as kind of this failed city.
Speaker 3: I mean, you had articles coming out in national magazines
Speaker 3: about how San Francisco was dead or could ever recover
Speaker 3: from its doom loop. It's actually recovered in a lot
Speaker 3: of ways in the last few years, depending on what
Speaker 3: you're measuring. But that's a kind of different topic. But
Speaker 3: you know, less the sense of, you know, philanthropy or
Speaker 3: government reform, much less activism could fix this, and more
Speaker 3: of a sense of, you know, we need massive intervention
Speaker 3: and we need to kind of take control of the
Speaker 3: political system. Now you have. So what happened was they
Speaker 3: discovered recall politics, really, which is that especially David Sachs,
Speaker 3: who a lot of us know better now as the
Speaker 3: and ai zar in the White House who's profiting from
Speaker 3: that role. But before that he was kind of another
Speaker 3: VC in the PayPal mafia world and was always a
Speaker 3: conservative but wasn't as active. He was the type of
Speaker 3: conservative who would donate to Democrats in California just so
Speaker 3: he had their ear, and to the point where he
Speaker 3: started getting involved in recall politics though and being a
Speaker 3: little more public and vocally radical, as I would say,
Speaker 3: and first supporting this campaign to recall a couple members
Speaker 3: of the San Francisco School Board, which had never happened before.
Speaker 3: This really became a flashpoint over kind of woke politics,
Speaker 3: identity politics, and conservatives in San Francisco and the business
Speaker 3: world there really came out strong and put a lot
Speaker 3: of money in this recall election. It worked, and then
Speaker 3: you had the attempt to recall Gavin Newsom, which did
Speaker 3: not work, but you had the sort of funny spectacle
Speaker 3: of David Sachs both funding the election of Newsom and
Speaker 3: then a year or two later trying to fund his recall.
Speaker 3: But that's just how big money work now. And then
Speaker 3: you had the recall Chase A. Boudin, and this was
Speaker 3: really big because he was the DA in San Francisco.
Speaker 3: He was the figurehead kind of the progressive prosecutor movement
Speaker 3: with people like the LA and San Francisco das and
Speaker 3: in the minds of San Francisco tech elites, he was
Speaker 3: responsible for everything there from you know, kind of hate
Speaker 3: crimes against Asian Americans during the height of COVID or
Speaker 3: increase in property crimes. There was actually a decrease in
Speaker 3: violent crime that was kind of sort of years in
Speaker 3: the making and has increased and has continued beyond him.
Speaker 3: But anyway, he was tarred as this person who had
Speaker 3: left San Francisco's to die or cared more about, cared
Speaker 3: more about criminals supposedly than crime victims, and the establishment
Speaker 3: right made it a point to, you know, get rid
Speaker 3: of this Soros da as they called him, but also
Speaker 3: really the tech elites, and Sacks was the ideological and
Speaker 3: at times the mon monetary leader here, donating millions of dollars.
Speaker 3: I think at one point something like sixty percent or
Speaker 3: more of all money donated to the recall effort of
Speaker 3: Boudin was from Sachs. And they succeeded, and they succeeded
Speaker 3: also in painting for at least for a while. Maybe
Speaker 3: it's rolled back a bit, but this progressive prosecutor movement
Speaker 3: as kind of evil or corrupt, and they were very vocal.
Speaker 3: After that, Sax went on Tucker Carlson who thanked him
Speaker 3: for saving democracy. This was on Fox News. He went
Speaker 3: on Megan Kelly and said, this is a model that
Speaker 3: we play.
Speaker 1: Realized democracy had been saved, has greatiny.
Speaker 3: Right by a billionaire's cash. And this also, I think
Speaker 3: was very reflective, and he went to Megan Kelly and said,
Speaker 3: we're going to replicate this across the country. And I
Speaker 3: think this is also very reflective of one other trend
Speaker 3: you saw on right wing politics, which is that elections
Speaker 3: are going to be contested everywhere. You know, there's going
Speaker 3: to be of course the normal electoral process, there'll be disinformation,
Speaker 3: they'll be you know, at the ballot box, but also
Speaker 3: afterwards with you know, election denial and then recalls whenever
Speaker 3: recalls present an opportunity. And that's something that we've seen
Speaker 3: more nashally, and I think that the money right wing
Speaker 3: elite now sees as another way to pull on the
Speaker 3: levers of powers. You know, you pour a few million
Speaker 3: dollars into some local election that isn't used to seeing that,
Speaker 3: and that is in a sense what happened in San
Speaker 3: Francisco with some of these smaller elections, and that provided
Speaker 3: this this model for them to go nationally and both
Speaker 3: I would say rhetorically and as a matter of strategy.
Speaker 1: How much of this was these guys being annoyed by
Speaker 1: the activism of their employees, like finding their employees activism
Speaker 1: and wokeness irritating to them very much.
Speaker 3: So, you know, again this is something where we can
Speaker 3: go to the tape of these guys saying what they
Speaker 3: actually believe, which is sometimes rather paranoid. Mark and Dreesen
Speaker 3: has said in interviews that he was speaking to the
Speaker 3: CEO of one of his portfolt Olio companies, someone he
Speaker 3: had invested in, and the guy said, you know, I
Speaker 3: think some of these young people from elite computer science
Speaker 3: schools like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon are getting jobs at
Speaker 3: our companies just to destroy them from within, because they
Speaker 3: are Marxists and leftists. I mean, you hear anti communist
Speaker 3: rhetoric from a lot of these guys, now, from Joe Lonsdale,
Speaker 3: who is a right wing conservative and kind of a
Speaker 3: younger member of the PayPal mafia, you could say. And
Speaker 3: you hear from Mark and Dreesen talks about communism too,
Speaker 3: like it's this weird almost fifties throwback red scare throwback
Speaker 3: kind of thing, or even in an earlier era of
Speaker 3: anti communist fervor. But so they do think. They do
Speaker 3: both think this that people are kind of infiltrating their companies,
Speaker 3: and they also at of just very fed up with
Speaker 3: any visible form of activism. And a great example is
Speaker 3: at Google, you know that Don't Be Evil company, that
Speaker 3: they contributed to something called Project Maven, which still exists.
Speaker 3: It's a big DoD project related to kind of drum
Speaker 3: imaging and had targeting air strikes. And in twenty eighteen
Speaker 3: a number of Google employees signed a petition and protested
Speaker 3: against Google's participation this. They were doing image processing essentially
Speaker 3: kind of AI image processing, and Google dropped the contract,
Speaker 3: which wasn't that big at the time by Google standards.
Speaker 3: And you cut to about six years later during protests
Speaker 3: over Google's work for the IDF and Israel during the
Speaker 3: ongoing war in Gouzea. But this started really in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty fourth on the protests and Google fired forty people
Speaker 3: in one day who participated in a silent protests in
Speaker 3: an office that of course didn't disrupt anything. So the
Speaker 3: ad to has completely changed, both within the ostensibly kind
Speaker 3: of liberal companies. It's really worth watching what's happening in Microsoft.
Speaker 3: They've had protests over the last few months. You know,
Speaker 3: I've heard of people trying to emerge as whistleblowers, you
Speaker 3: know about because there's a lot of internal surveillancebably violations
Speaker 3: of labor laws. I mean, all the big tech companies
Speaker 3: have insider threat programs, which is a term we started
Speaker 3: hearing after the Stone revelations, which was something that was
Speaker 3: supposed to only exist within the NSA or CIA or
Speaker 3: something like that, Like you know, they are surveilling their
Speaker 3: own employees and monitoring their activity very heavily. And then
Speaker 3: you have the companies that are overtly ideological, like the
Speaker 3: defense tech companies Palenteer on Durill and the people we
Speaker 3: know associated with them who are saying, you know, building
Speaker 3: weapons for the government is good, and Trump is great,
Speaker 3: and we're glad to be here. And that's what the
Speaker 3: company is about, is defending Western civilization. That's the kind
Speaker 3: of rhetoric you also hear.
Speaker 1: Now, can you talk a little about Alex karp Is,
Speaker 1: the CEO of Palenteer. We were just watching some clips
Speaker 1: of him at some conference where he seemed absolutely oh
Speaker 1: it was with that what was it the deal Book
Speaker 1: conference anyway, some like New York Finance conference or whatever,
Speaker 1: And I mean just seemed like he was on crack
Speaker 1: effectively and saying insane things. W kind of par for
Speaker 1: the course for him. He's another one. He always pretends
Speaker 1: like I don't know, you could tell me if this
Speaker 1: is real or not, but he does the whole shtick
Speaker 1: of like I was a liberal Democrat and they've just
Speaker 1: completely gone crazy. Who is this guy? Where did he
Speaker 1: come from? What is his deal?
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's a really representative figure I would say of
Speaker 3: this type as this very jingoistic nationalist tech elite type
Speaker 3: that you see in venture capital and in the more
Speaker 3: defensive line sectors of tech. Now he does play that
Speaker 3: song of oh I was a Democrat. I mean he
Speaker 3: even claims to have been a Kamala supporter or a
Speaker 3: Kamala supporter in the last election, which I'm a little
Speaker 3: dubious about or what does that really mean? Given also,
Speaker 3: you know the company he keeps, the work he does.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and is there any evidence that you like, contributed
Speaker 1: to her or anything like that, Not.
Speaker 3: That I know of, but you know, I should go
Speaker 3: back and check the donations. But yeah, he Anyway, he
Speaker 3: routinely appears, let's say, very amped and pop and I
Speaker 3: think also, you know, CNBC producers, I'm sure love this
Speaker 3: stuff because the clips get passed around a lot, and
Speaker 3: he'll do things like, well, some of the clips are
Speaker 3: perhaps revealing where he talks about how he wants he
Speaker 3: talks about short sellers who you know, want to try
Speaker 3: to short his company stock, how he wants to send
Speaker 3: their coke dealers to their door. I mean, I wonder
Speaker 3: where he got that idea to beat them up. How
Speaker 3: he wants to drone his enemies like this is the
Speaker 3: kind of thing he does every few months at the
Speaker 3: very least, and now that there are also more of
Speaker 3: these conferences where he can kind of preen and dance
Speaker 3: around on stage. He originally comes from this background where
Speaker 3: he was a PhD student in philosophy at a German university.
Speaker 3: I mean, I believe you guys PhD and they refer
Speaker 3: to him as doctor Karp sometimes at Pallantier, he supposedly
Speaker 3: studied under Jurgen Haber Moss, a great German philosopher and intellectual.
Speaker 3: I think that relationship has been overblown, but you know,
Speaker 3: he was this intellectual of sorts, and somehow he ends
Speaker 3: up in charge of the startup Palanteer, which is comes
Speaker 3: from Peter Teel and Joe Lonsdale I mentioned earlier, and
Speaker 3: is really I mean, there is a larger history here,
Speaker 3: but of the kind of recent defense tech boom, this
Speaker 3: company cannot be more important. I mean it is now
Speaker 3: a huge company on its own, one of the most
Speaker 3: favored companies in Trump world, making so much money thanks
Speaker 3: to the Trump administration. But it exemplifies and in the
Speaker 3: figure of Karp, this new Proud very much like war
Speaker 3: seeking tech elite who thinks that we need to build
Speaker 3: weapons and surveil everyone and project power in order to
Speaker 3: somehow deter aggression against the United States. I mean, they
Speaker 3: operate according to a very crude logic, which is not
Speaker 3: anything about diplomacy. It's just about this idea of dominance,
Speaker 3: as The New York Times calls it, and projecting American
Speaker 3: power making people afraid, you know, China will be too
Speaker 3: afraid to attack us. And it's a very juvenile vision,
Speaker 3: but it's one that he's very willing to dispense at
Speaker 3: a really rapid rate.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, and I think they also exploited, like genuine
Speaker 1: issues with the existing legacy military industrial complex, which you
Speaker 1: know where they are like they are incompetent and there
Speaker 1: are massive cost overruns. So they're able to make this
Speaker 1: pitch of like, oh, we'll be cheaper and will be
Speaker 1: more nimble, and that's part of the appeal as well.
Speaker 3: They're using that silicon valley, the traditional kind of silicon
Speaker 3: valley model which even those use, yeah, which those use too,
Speaker 3: like disruption bringing efficiency. They talk about how the prime
Speaker 3: defense contractors, which is an industry term for you know,
Speaker 3: Boeing and raytheon and those big ones are expensive entrenched,
Speaker 3: and this is the something you hear from, you know,
Speaker 3: some liberal Democrats, more like centrist Democrats or anti trust
Speaker 3: democrats even but they're not of course necessarily better and
Speaker 3: then producing their own you know, ideological agenda. But it
Speaker 3: works for them in a way. It's brought them into
Speaker 3: the corridors of power. It's allowed them to start building
Speaker 3: up these tracks. One thing I'd write about my book
Speaker 3: is that, you know, there was that big meeting of
Speaker 3: Trump and a lot of tech CEOs in November twenty sixteen,
Speaker 3: right after the election at Trump Tower, and this was
Speaker 3: one of those resident images where you had a dozen
Speaker 3: or more top tech industry executives meeting with Trump and
Speaker 3: not quite kissing the ring, but more like, well, we're
Speaker 3: looking forward to doing business with you, and we have to.
Speaker 3: So here we are, and all before cameras and Alex
Speaker 3: KRP was there and Teal had set up the meeting.
Speaker 3: Trump was praising Teal, but at the time Pallenteer was
Speaker 3: a startup that was privately held and not gone public.
Speaker 3: It was a valuable startup, but not nearly worth as
Speaker 3: much as like Cisco or Facebook or Google or any
Speaker 3: of the companies represented there. And now, okay, maybe we'd
Speaker 3: understand Alex Carping at the table, but I think if
Speaker 3: you sort of track that arc from twenty sixteen to
Speaker 3: now where it's it's a publicly traded company with a
Speaker 3: market cap of hundreds of billions of dollars, it really
Speaker 3: reflects this what this era has become and that right
Speaker 3: wing tech and Trump Union has wrought.
Speaker 1: It really seems to me, and you can tell me
Speaker 1: if this is an accurate analysis based on your reporting,
Speaker 1: that the sort of common thread with all the grievances
Speaker 1: that these guys had, whether it was the employees daring
Speaker 1: to speak up about like internal practices or contracts that
Speaker 1: the companies were involved with that they didn't want, whether
Speaker 1: it was personal things like you know, Elon Musk's daughter
Speaker 1: being trans whether it was the Biden era policies around
Speaker 1: crypto and policies at least some AI regulation, and of
Speaker 1: course the antitrust direction with Jonathan Canter and Lena Khan,
Speaker 1: the potential threats to you know, deal making and this
Speaker 1: actually having to undergo scrutiny, whether it was the COVID lockdowns,
Speaker 1: all of this has to do with, like, I can't
Speaker 1: just do whatever I want. You are actually like there
Speaker 1: is some minor check on the power and fortune that
Speaker 1: I can amass, and I find that completely unacceptable. And
Speaker 1: so I'm going to you know, what you really sort
Speaker 1: of make clear when you dive into the politics in
Speaker 1: San Francisco in particular, but other cities as well, is
Speaker 1: they see this sort of zeitgeist of Okay, we can
Speaker 1: tap into cultural disaffection, but as a way also to
Speaker 1: you know, consolidate this right wing shift and consolidate our
Speaker 1: own power and really strip back the sort of any
Speaker 1: sort of regulatory or other hurdles that are getting in
Speaker 1: our in our way. I mean, it seems like, just
Speaker 1: to sort of summarize that, it seems like the common
Speaker 1: thread here is we want as much power as we
Speaker 1: can and even slight, little pesky annoyances within our own
Speaker 1: companies or lives or operations are unacceptable, and we're going
Speaker 1: to move heaven and earth to push all of those
Speaker 1: out of the way.
Speaker 3: Yes, someone recently summarizes to me is they don't want
Speaker 3: to be governed, and yeah, we see that very much
Speaker 3: in practice where they any criticism they cannot tolerate. You
Speaker 3: see this especially people like Mark and Dreesen or Musk himself.
Speaker 3: You know, some times it is baffling, I think are
Speaker 3: striking to most normal people that you know, Like is
Speaker 3: this it? Like was did Musk really get so angry
Speaker 3: because he wasn't invited to abiden Ev summit? And like, yeah,
Speaker 3: like you know, these are I believe them when they
Speaker 3: say that, because these are people who are of course
Speaker 3: surrounded by the most yes of yes men, and are
Speaker 3: you and are not only yeah, as you described, they're
Speaker 3: not only just so rich, but they there's a constant,
Speaker 3: there's a greed and resource accumulation of drive that is
Speaker 3: never ending. I mean, Musc has said that he needs
Speaker 3: to be a trillionaire so that he can get to Mars.
Speaker 3: I mean the ridiculousness of that vision and the very
Speaker 3: much grounded in the laws of physics reasons why it
Speaker 3: won't happen is the whole other thing. But like this
Speaker 3: is the pretense of why he supposedly needs as much
Speaker 3: money as possible, and they are no longer content with
Speaker 3: the whatever might be the conventional checks and bounces and
Speaker 3: regulations of the democratic system, and they certainly saw that
Speaker 3: or thought that the the Biden administration in what we
Speaker 3: would probably agree or some pretty modest reforms or you know,
Speaker 3: effective in the forms of Lena Kon johnthan Canter. But overall,
Speaker 3: you know, they weren't so aggressive. They didn't break any
Speaker 3: up any companies are putting on it in prison, besides
Speaker 3: some obvious crypto criminals. But this is all unacceptable to
Speaker 3: them and they cannot deal with any of that. So,
Speaker 3: you know, we talked about exit earlier. You know, they're
Speaker 3: pursuing two lanes at once. Some of them want to exit.
Speaker 3: At the same time, they're also willing to kind of
Speaker 3: control the levers of power because they see a good
Speaker 3: return on investment by pouring in money or allowing their
Speaker 3: allies in the crypto industry to do the same. And
Speaker 3: so that's where I think it ultimately amounts to, like,
Speaker 3: you know, it's almost like the the Uber model of
Speaker 3: going into a city and basically breaking local laws about
Speaker 3: employment and transit applied to politics, that like, we are
Speaker 3: just going to do what we want because nothing else
Speaker 3: is tolerable. And we also saw that in an example
Speaker 3: of Musk he opened that factory in Fremont, California, and said,
Speaker 3: you can arrest me if you want. You know, he
Speaker 3: did this whole hero thing like, don't arrest my employees,
Speaker 3: but you know, arrest me if you need to. And
Speaker 3: then a week later the Alameda County folded and allowed
Speaker 3: him to basically run the Fremont factory.
Speaker 1: How you were, I mean, it's a story. I'm sure
Speaker 1: if you look at all these guys, I mean, Bezos
Speaker 1: and Amazon, they also were like, yeah, we just don't
Speaker 1: really think that sales tax should be a thing for us,
Speaker 1: I mean all of them, you know, they see the
Speaker 1: laws as optional at best. And Elon and SpaceX too.
Speaker 1: You know, there's obviously, for good reason, a lot of
Speaker 1: regulations and a lot of checks with the government and
Speaker 1: inspections that you are supposed to go through before you
Speaker 1: do massive rocket launches. And at times he was just like, ah,
Speaker 1: that's going to take too long. We're not doing that.
Speaker 1: So it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that they
Speaker 1: don't really see themselves as subject to the laws the
Speaker 1: way that the rest of us do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think actually there's one particle in the book.
Speaker 3: There's this leaked audio from Eric Schmidt, who I talk
Speaker 3: about in the book is sort of an authoritarian bridge
Speaker 3: figure because he's nominally a Democrat, but I think he's
Speaker 3: important to sort of precursor to some of these guys.
Speaker 3: And he basically says to a class of Stanford students,
Speaker 3: you know, if you want to make your own TikTok clone,
Speaker 3: just do it with him ai and then get lawyers
Speaker 3: to clean it up later. Like that. That's very much
Speaker 3: the attitude. Yeah, that that thought problem among some of
Speaker 3: these people, and we see it, you know, manifested everywhere,
Speaker 3: and from their desire to have their own money to
Speaker 3: their own islands and city states they want out well.
Speaker 1: And the irony of them simultaneously like celebrating actually their
Speaker 1: own law breaking and wearing it as a badge of
Speaker 1: like were disruptors and we're founders and we're leaders and
Speaker 1: all of this and also at the same time fixating
Speaker 1: on law and order for you know, the common folk
Speaker 1: is an incredible irony. I Mean, one thing I've always
Speaker 1: found instructive about Elon Mush is you were talking about
Speaker 1: his Mars delusions, Like this is a man not only
Speaker 1: does he not think that our laws should apply to him.
Speaker 1: He doesn't think that the laws of physics apply to him,
Speaker 1: Like that's so much. He has this sort of like
Speaker 1: delusions of grandeur and main character syndrome.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you talk to people like Adam Becker and
Speaker 3: astrophysicist and journalists has a good book. You know that
Speaker 3: stuff is never going to happen. You can no one
Speaker 3: can can live on Mars, and the worst day on
Speaker 3: Earth is going to be better than the best day
Speaker 3: ever on Mars. But they this is where they become
Speaker 3: aristocrats for people who feel entitled to lead or to rule.
Speaker 3: And I also think this is where the fascism really emerges,
Speaker 3: is that they think that the future that they were
Speaker 3: promised has been hasn't been given to them, and that
Speaker 3: they were promised you know, the famous line from Tela
Speaker 3: and Founder's Fund is we were promised flying cars. We
Speaker 3: got one hundred and forty characters like there. And this
Speaker 3: is actually you know, you see some some analogs to
Speaker 3: this in like nineteen twenties futurism and early proto fascism then,
Speaker 3: which is that like this new Industrial Age was supposed
Speaker 3: to give us utopia, was supposed to make everything incredible,
Speaker 3: and it hasn't, and though they are as rich as
Speaker 3: could be, they are very impatient and angry, and they
Speaker 3: see the rest of us or any any critics, journalists,
Speaker 3: the government, anyone who just doesn't understand and praise them
Speaker 3: as impediments to that great future.
Speaker 1: And that.
Speaker 3: Also you can see that manifesting now with the refusal
Speaker 3: to put any checks on AI or whether at the
Speaker 3: state level and policy Trump's executive order, or in the industry,
Speaker 3: they all talk about how it concerns about AI safety
Speaker 3: or bs like or at least among the like the
Speaker 3: right wing tech people like they don't want anything to
Speaker 3: be held back because yes, it's about greed, but also
Speaker 3: this idea that if only they could do what they
Speaker 3: want and pour as much capital into these projects as
Speaker 3: they want, somehow that better future might arrive. And and
Speaker 3: that's what makes them, I think, or what provides that
Speaker 3: final push into fascism in a way, because to do
Speaker 3: that they align fully with the state.
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit of specifics with the
Speaker 1: Trump administration, and you know, starting from the beginning, like
Speaker 1: what was DOGE actually about? What did it actually accomplish
Speaker 1: because we know that it didn't. I don't know if
Speaker 1: they ever really cared about saving money, but it didn't
Speaker 1: do that. It did effectively defenestrate and destroy significant parts
Speaker 1: of the government. So is I mean, was that the
Speaker 1: primary goal was the goal to have lots of data
Speaker 1: that Elon could feed into his LM. Like, how do
Speaker 1: you see the project of DOGE and how we should
Speaker 1: think about it?
Speaker 3: Well, we definitely shouldn't think of it as a failure
Speaker 3: by their standards. You know, it's a huge disaster. It
Speaker 3: was probably a crime or a number of crimes. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I think that the data side is very important.
Speaker 3: That's one way in which it was probably a success
Speaker 3: for Musk and others. I mean, there's been some good reporting,
Speaker 3: but there's just so much we don't know about what
Speaker 3: they were doing inside the government, you know, I think
Speaker 3: it's reasonable to we know that data was taken or
Speaker 3: exposed in the form of everyone's social security information on
Speaker 3: an unsecure server. This is we are of course survealed
Speaker 3: by tech comanies all the time, but this is like
Speaker 3: really important stuff. Someone who used to work at the
Speaker 3: SEC told me, you know what, or texted me earlier
Speaker 3: this year and said, dog is supposedly coming to the
Speaker 3: SEC today. They are going to get their hands on
Speaker 3: so much sensive like private market data, things that the
Speaker 3: government knows that industry doesn't know, you know, like important
Speaker 3: big picture or even really graining their stuff, you know,
Speaker 3: things about the American economy or its people, or you know,
Speaker 3: plans for the government, and that I think the value
Speaker 3: of that, especially when it can't be gleaned elsewhere, is huge,
Speaker 3: and when there is this kind of data war fuel AI.
Speaker 3: The other thing I wonder about, and this is you know,
Speaker 3: we don't I don't have a lot to go on here,
Speaker 3: but was any money taken because you had things like
Speaker 3: doge operatives going into core federal payment systems, not just
Speaker 3: you know, taking over an agency, but like the systems
Speaker 3: that feed that disperse trillions of dollars, and so it's just,
Speaker 3: you know, these are the kinds of things that under
Speaker 3: normal government would be audited in some way, but obviously
Speaker 3: the audits don't matter here. The inspector generals were all
Speaker 3: fired illegally at the beginning of the Trump administration. So
Speaker 3: I think, you know, it succeeded in creating this disruption.
Speaker 3: This may be a proof of concept that I mean,
Speaker 3: at least there's some ideas probably that I think that
Speaker 3: the tech right has about how to do it better
Speaker 3: next time. But it showed that you can launch an
Speaker 3: attack on the administry of state, you could profit from it,
Speaker 3: you could get out some of the people you don't like,
Speaker 3: and there would be no punishment. They you know, a
Speaker 3: lot of people we you know, have have had to
Speaker 3: be brought back by some of these agencies who they've
Speaker 3: deemed them essential or things were just collapsing too much.
Speaker 3: But still, you know, there's been especially in the whole
Speaker 3: cell example, USA D or some of these other agencies,
Speaker 3: but where the now Trump Institute of Peace. But you know,
Speaker 3: I think they got a lot of what they wanted
Speaker 3: and a lot of I think it's also worth noting
Speaker 3: that a lot of those DOGE operatives are still kind
Speaker 3: of scattered throughout government agencies or have government jobs. We
Speaker 3: don't really know what they're doing. And some of them
Speaker 3: are are still twenty two year olds with the resume
Speaker 3: of cyber criminals who have incredible access.
Speaker 1: Terrifying talk about the meshing of the work of ice
Speaker 1: and this, you know, this tech world of palents here
Speaker 1: being the most obvious example. But I don't think by
Speaker 1: any stretch the only one. You know, why is this
Speaker 1: mass deportation effort important? Also for these tech oligarchs, especially
Speaker 1: the ones focused on surveillance capitalism.
Speaker 3: They've really discovered a love of government contracts and it's
Speaker 3: because of their changing politics and of course because of
Speaker 3: the money there and the government can be a very
Speaker 3: reliable client. And it has been of course a deep,
Speaker 3: you know, an intrinsic part of the tech industry for
Speaker 3: many years. But there's such big contracts being handed out now,
Speaker 3: not for AI and other purposes, and of course for
Speaker 3: any kind of technical services for expanding government agencies, and
Speaker 3: that includes border patrol and ice and all the surveillance
Speaker 3: and data processes and that goes with it. So you
Speaker 3: have companies like Palenteer that are very proud to be
Speaker 3: part of this process that can get hundreds of millions
Speaker 3: of dollars worth of contracts. Salesforce has been a vendor
Speaker 3: for this for the border patrol for years, I think
Speaker 3: since at least the first Trump administration maybe And sometimes
Speaker 3: you know, this just means like we're going to help
Speaker 3: you recruit more people by through online ad campaigns and
Speaker 3: ad targeting and stuff like that. I mean, it is,
Speaker 3: it is important it's still work. You're still you know,
Speaker 3: bringing in bodies for the modern data just stoppot. But
Speaker 3: you know, there are all kinds of ways in which
Speaker 3: these companies, some of which seems several degrees removed from
Speaker 3: actually pulling people off the street. But there are all
Speaker 3: kinds of ways in which these tech companies can provide services.
Speaker 3: You know, they're all using Microsoft computer products pretty much
Speaker 3: can provide services to the government and to agencies like ICE.
Speaker 3: So anytime there's a huge growth in one of these
Speaker 3: agencies or not just you know there's huge growth in personnel,
Speaker 3: but also new technical needs or capabilities, the tech industry
Speaker 3: is going to be right there because the moral quandaries
Speaker 3: have all been dispensed with, and they you know, they've
Speaker 3: chosen kind of a repression over diplomacy with their own
Speaker 3: employees who are not all in line with this, and
Speaker 3: I think that will be a source of rising friction.
Speaker 3: But for now, you know, there's a lot of money
Speaker 3: to be made here and they're perfectly happy to do it.
Speaker 3: So you see it especially on anything related to data
Speaker 3: management with a company like Palenteer, or surveillance and or
Speaker 3: just running the day day functions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think Palestine has been a you know,
Speaker 1: a test run or a test and ground for a
Speaker 1: lot of this tech as well, because on the level
Speaker 1: of mass surveillance of Palestinians is just without parallel. So
Speaker 1: you can bring this back home right now with regard
Speaker 1: to immigrants, and then I mean, you tell me if
Speaker 1: this is too conspiratorial, Jacob. But what these guys want
Speaker 1: to do with AI, and perhaps they're delusional, very possible
Speaker 1: they're delusional. It all just blows up in some bubble
Speaker 1: and we never really get beyond you know, making AI
Speaker 1: slot videos or whatever. The night marriage healthscape we live
Speaker 1: in right now is, we never get that far beyond that.
Speaker 1: But what they want to do is replace all human labor. Effectively.
Speaker 1: They want to rip up the entire social contract and
Speaker 1: redraw it from scratch for their own ends. They want
Speaker 1: to be trillionaires. They want all the power in the world,
Speaker 1: you know, they want to consolidate more power than has
Speaker 1: ever been possible to consolidate in human history. That is
Speaker 1: their goal. And these are not stupid people, so I'm
Speaker 1: sure they're thinking about when that happens, people are not
Speaker 1: going to be super happy about that. And so we're
Speaker 1: going to need massively powerful tools of surveillance and repression
Speaker 1: to keep the peasants in line so that you know,
Speaker 1: we can all keep our heads.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that. I don't think that's too conspiratorial.
Speaker 3: I think it matches a lot of things we've heard
Speaker 3: from these people or even you know, reporting from people
Speaker 3: like Douglas Rushkov, a longtime tech writer and critic who
Speaker 3: has talked to some billionaires about their sort of doomsday
Speaker 3: island plans. And you know they do they need to
Speaker 3: kill the pilots who fly them to their doomsday bunkers
Speaker 3: so no one knows where they are. Like just bonkers stuff.
Speaker 3: But you know, Larry Elson has talked about in recent
Speaker 3: months that we are going to have perfect always on
Speaker 3: everywhere AI powered surveillance and everyone will be on their
Speaker 3: best behavior at all times, from you and me to
Speaker 3: police officers to anyone else. You know. Do they believe it,
Speaker 3: I don't know, but they act like they do. And
Speaker 3: in some ways, the nightmare scenario is not necessarily that
Speaker 3: we get kind of a perfect AI dystopia and that
Speaker 3: no one is working. We're all sort of turned into
Speaker 3: goog for the billionaires. But it's in a way and
Speaker 3: acceleration of what we have now, I think, which is
Speaker 3: that we get this really imperfect version where yeah, we
Speaker 3: do have the economic collapse, but it also is taking
Speaker 3: a lot of jobs and also is supercharging repression from
Speaker 3: you know, on a corporate level of course on a
Speaker 3: government federal level. And it's still but it is also
Speaker 3: at the same time like deeply dysfunctional. You know, it's
Speaker 3: all the AI will still be hallucinating, like it's not
Speaker 3: necessarily it won't even be sort of the perfect dystopia.
Speaker 3: It's just going to be a mess. And it will
Speaker 3: but it will enable forces of repression and fascism. And
Speaker 3: I think you're exactly right that they've made a choice.
Speaker 3: You know, you can sort of embrace reform, you can
Speaker 3: try to make societies safe for capitalism or their vision
Speaker 3: of runaway capitalism, or you can choose some kind of repression.
Speaker 3: And I think they essentially chosen the latter.
Speaker 1: My last question for you, Jacob, is, you know, is
Speaker 1: it sort of too far? Like if you did have
Speaker 1: some you know, future president come into office who wants
Speaker 1: to check these guys, wants to rein in their power,
Speaker 1: what would that look like? You know, do some of
Speaker 1: these guys need to go to prison. In my opinion, yes,
Speaker 1: do they have any thought in their head about potential
Speaker 1: future consequences from you know, an administration that has a
Speaker 1: different ideological valance. What is it possible at this point
Speaker 1: to rain these guys back in and get them under control.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that they to pull out one part.
Speaker 3: I think they do fear sort of Democrats, And I mean,
Speaker 3: I don't know to what degree now, but we heard
Speaker 3: this a lot before the election, like must saying if
Speaker 3: she wins, I'm ft, you know, I'm going to prison?
Speaker 3: Will my kids be able to visit me? Like they
Speaker 3: were breaking a lot of laws, they're probably breaking more now,
Speaker 3: I mean. And they also face just a lot of
Speaker 3: regulatory and civil litigation Musk especially, that was making their
Speaker 3: lives pretty difficult. And I don't think, yeah, their sense
Speaker 3: of a binding by the law has gone any better.
Speaker 3: The problem is we haven't talked a lot about Democrats here.
Speaker 3: I assure people that in my book, you know, I
Speaker 3: write a lot about how they've contributed this problem. And
Speaker 3: I think the Democrat Party is so fractured on some
Speaker 3: of the core questions here of tech power, you know,
Speaker 3: is Silicon Valley an adversary, you know, very I think
Speaker 3: very few people in the Democratic Party actually see the
Speaker 3: industry or as leadership, as an adversary. They see it
Speaker 3: as somewhere they based. Does Yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Think the base does matter, and I think this will
Speaker 1: probably be a litmus test in twenty twenty eight if
Speaker 1: I had to guess, Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I think the question is do you want to
Speaker 3: prosecute some of these people, break up the companies, do
Speaker 3: a wealth tax? Like you don't have to get too
Speaker 3: specific or means tester or wonkish or whatever. It's those
Speaker 3: few things, you know, besides also getting big money out
Speaker 3: of politics. I mean, there's a lot of wish casting here.
Speaker 3: But you know, do you want not want to build
Speaker 3: more data centers and instead invest in healthcare and other
Speaker 3: public goods? You know, we are actually seeing right now,
Speaker 3: as you said, you're referring to a litmus test. We're
Speaker 3: seeing in I was in DC recently. There's some sort
Speaker 3: of I think it was a makeup election, but I
Speaker 3: saw some ads on TV about data centers and the
Speaker 3: Democrat advertising himself as against data center construction. Not totally
Speaker 3: frauding of the mouth, but mostly you know, against it
Speaker 3: from a public interest standpoint, So like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are general elections. The Utility Commission Board or
Speaker 1: whatever that thing is called. That was probably the clearest
Speaker 1: cut data center backlash, and directly because of the way
Speaker 1: that electricity prices have been impacted. But yeah, you can
Speaker 1: see the politics here really on a cross partisan basis
Speaker 1: becoming pretty potent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. And you know, people don't like
Speaker 3: that in their communities, and there's sort of a local
Speaker 3: aspect to this, where you know, there are Republicans who
Speaker 3: hear their constituents complaining about rising electricity prices or that
Speaker 3: the water's going away, and they don't like that either.
Speaker 3: But this does connect directly to the authoritarian politics of
Speaker 3: the tech industry, where they are coming into like Texas
Speaker 3: or Georgia or Virginia and promising these like twenty or
Speaker 3: fifty billion dollar projects that are not going to produce
Speaker 3: jobs in the long term and are just going to
Speaker 3: make most people's lives worse. So you know that that
Speaker 3: kind of grassroots backlash as you described is here, and
Speaker 3: it's coming or intensifying, and there is a real opportunity
Speaker 3: for the Democrats to tap it. You know, the problem is,
Speaker 3: of course the Democrats, but Also, the Trump administration has
Speaker 3: kind of eroded or just kicked away so many important
Speaker 3: load bearing institutions that you know, the rule of law
Speaker 3: is really gone, and a lot of criminals have been
Speaker 3: just straight up released from prison that you know, there's
Speaker 3: so much makeup work to do in a way before
Speaker 3: we talk about moving forward or even just like tamping
Speaker 3: down the power of these guys. I mean, I hope
Speaker 3: those things can be done at once. I hope you know,
Speaker 3: there are prosecutions and breakup of companies and wealth taxes,
Speaker 3: big sweeping gestures that say there are other ways of
Speaker 3: relating to these people, like you don't have to surrender
Speaker 3: power to them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just really reasserting, you know, a small d
Speaker 1: democratic approach. You know that we're we're not going to
Speaker 1: just bow to this tech feudalism and you know, surrender
Speaker 1: all of our autonomy, even on issues like you know,
Speaker 1: local land usage and what we have in our backyards,
Speaker 1: you know. And one that's fully nimby when it comes
Speaker 1: to data centers, and they're trying to build too in
Speaker 1: my in my little rural area here. And I've seen
Speaker 1: that there's been, you know, a backlash to that, which
Speaker 1: is partly you know, from the concerance, the conservative area
Speaker 1: I live in. You know, a lot of the concerns
Speaker 1: are that are that sort of nimby, like we want
Speaker 1: to keep the rural character of the community and we
Speaker 1: don't want this big thing built here from you know,
Speaker 1: Amazon and whoever else is coming in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, it doesn't really add a lot
Speaker 3: to the landscape. You're not like, you know, you're not
Speaker 3: really building a factory where even where a lot of
Speaker 3: people are working. And and I think that speaks the
Speaker 3: idea of like what are we getting for all this
Speaker 3: that we've all the political power and the money that
Speaker 3: we've delegated to these guys, And I think that actually
Speaker 3: provides almost a little note of optimism, which is that
Speaker 3: they are not that popular and when they're as people,
Speaker 3: as individuals and not the most charismatic personalities, a lot
Speaker 3: of their policies aren't and their business priorities aren't necessarily
Speaker 3: popular and seem to be growing less. So so you know,
Speaker 3: that's where I think there is kind of room for
Speaker 3: optimism for the future or just political you know, focus
Speaker 3: and strategy. Is that like when you explain this stuff
Speaker 3: to folks or when people see that they're just mostly
Speaker 3: getting AI slop and higher energy prices, and you know
Speaker 3: jerks on X who think that they should rule everything
Speaker 3: for all of this, it's not worth it. And you know,
Speaker 3: hopefully the Democrats can tap some of those more kind
Speaker 3: of grassroots candidates who get that.
Speaker 1: I lie, I do have one more question for you,
Speaker 1: which is JD vance like? Is he just I know
Speaker 1: Teal was involved with Elon Musk, was influential in getting
Speaker 1: him on the ticket. Is he just like a puppet
Speaker 1: for these guys effectively? Is that how you see?
Speaker 3: I think so. I think he's an important bridge figure
Speaker 3: for the kind of new right, the religious right, because
Speaker 3: he you know, he that as he's taken on multiple identities,
Speaker 3: that was one of them. But the VCS really like him.
Speaker 3: You know, they pushed hard, of course, to have him
Speaker 3: be the VP. They all in front of Doug Bergham.
Speaker 3: Apparently there was a dinner at David Sachs's house during
Speaker 3: the twenty twenty four campaign and the Bergram was kind
Speaker 3: of hoping he was a dark horse VP candidate, and
Speaker 3: all the tech guys there said, you gotta choose JD.
Speaker 3: And you know he is Teal's guy. And he's a
Speaker 3: former VC, and so I don't think they see much
Speaker 3: you know, daylight between their views and he may not have.
Speaker 3: The question I think is like does he have sort
Speaker 3: of the unifying or rough charisma of Trump to like
Speaker 3: unify Nagar, you know, but that there may be abillity
Speaker 3: there for something to fall apart. But the tech guys
Speaker 3: I think would be perfectly happy unless someone surprising emerges.
Speaker 3: You know that they try. They road tested DeSantis and
Speaker 3: Ramaswami and a couple other folks, but I think JD
Speaker 3: is really their guy. I mean, some of them have
Speaker 3: money invested in him. Teel put money into his into
Speaker 3: JD Vance's venture capital firm.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that reminds me. There are some great scenes there
Speaker 1: with the vivig Ramaswami in your first hand experience with
Speaker 1: him in the book that people definitely need to check out.
Speaker 1: The book Guys is Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the
Speaker 1: Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Jacob Silverman, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Fascinating look at these extraordinarily powerful and malevolent, frankly characters.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you so thanks so much for your interest