I Know What All the Tech Bros Want from Trump | The Daily Beast Podcast

There are. probably people listening, thinking, well, it's good to hold companies up. This is a new technology, you know, who knows what's going to happen. In fact, there's in fact there's disagreement. about that within the community. If there are a bunch of people who are like, hey, like, this could have the potential to kill us all on the other side of the coin. You've got people in the industry. and inside these companies who will say, if we don't do it, China's going to do it. And if China wins the air race, we're screwed. And so we have to get there first. And the way to get there first is take the brakes off.

and go as fast as possible. I'm trying to close this is the Daily Beast podcast, and this is a bonus episode where we're going to ask. what is going on with the government and AI, and. what is this new advisory committee that's been set up by the Trump administration? What is David Sachs the A's are actually doing there? And how is the tech community set to benefit from him?

Being there and talking about this today is going to be our guest, Dick. Costolo, who is himself an AI investor and was the CEO of Twitter. So he sat in rooms with President Obama. talking about the tech community and about the white House. And he's got very interesting observations about why the tech community. went from feeling that politics was nothing to do with them, and they didn't want to be involved. to, oh, we need to have a role in this government.

So on to that in one second. But before I do just reminding you, we are independent media, please press the subscribe button. Join the Daily Beast community. You can become a beast tier of membership and leave us a comment. telling us what you think about the conversation. And don't forget to subscribe to The Daily Beast itself. We keep you up to date on how to navigate the zone, which I think it's fair to say has been well and truly flooded. Let's get into it with Dick Costello.

Dick Costolo I have been trying to have. this conversation with you for so long, and now we're finding having it. because you've launched your own podcast, the Nick, Dick and Pool Show. I'm the middle name in the Nick Dick and balls show, okay? And we're going to come on to that in a bit. Let's do. But for people who don't know you, you've had an incredible impact. actually on social media and the way we all talk to each other. and the and the whole sort of run up, the good parts, the good, the good parts, the good parts and some of the bad parts and some of the bad parts.

But but let's start with, let's start with the fact that you left university. and you went to Second City to become a comedian, and of course. you ended up, well, not ended up, but one of the most important jobs. on the on the way to where you are now is you as CEO of Twitter. But let's start with your comedy background. Yeah. So I actually studied computer science at University of Michigan. I have a UX degree, but I'm when I graduated, I decided, I started doing comedy my second semester, senior year.

and decided it would be a lot more fun to be on Saturday Night Live. So the way to get on Saturday Live at the time, was you either were in. Second City in Chicago or Lorne Michaels found you through some other means. There are lots of ways to get there now, but at the time, you kind of had to go. to Second City in Chicago and improvise there and eventually audition, I got there, I actually got there the same day Steve Carell did. He and I were in the same sort of training center group at Second City, working our way up,

and ended up being there for 6 or 7 years and performing. at a bunch of other improv places around town. But I was at Second City at the same time as Adam McKay, who, you know, famously. went on to be head writer at SNL and then directed and Anchorman. and The Big Short and a bunch of other great movies. Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch was a good friend of mine. I mean, all these folks were all there at the same time. So it was a it was an amazing time to be there. I ended up auditioning for SNL twice and didn't get it either time. I was like, okay, it's time to go put the computer science degree to use.

So you were one of the few people in tech who knew how to present. and connect with an audience, and they had a sense of humor. Yeah. Who wasn't staring at their shoes. while they were talking world into the into the abyss or whatever. I remember I got asked, my first, when I first joined Twitter, I was on a CNBC hit live from some conference, and the producer was like, you know, are you going to be okay? There's live TV. And I was like, I've been booed in front of thousands of people at midnight.

And, you know, that's going to be this is not going to be a problem. So, so there's so many aspects of tech I want to talk to you about, but let's kick off talking about Trump and tech and this new advisory. committee that he set up, which has got Marc Andreessen on. It's got Mark Zuckerberg on it. It's got Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia, on it. It's got the great and the good, the big billionaire multi multi. billionaire founders on it.

What are they going to be doing. Because I know you were on the tech advisory for Obama, which I want to come on to, but what is this new advisory going to do. First of all is very Facebook slash meta heavy Mark. Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg are both on the Facebook board, so. one might imagine some of the suggestions coming out of the advisory board. would be would be to do things that Mr. Zuckerberg would appreciate. But secondly, I believe David Sachs.

is chairing it, who's who's been in the white House for a while now. And we can we can talk about his background as well. I find it hard to believe that, it was initiated by President Trump because he I would imagine. he would think like, I don't, you know, what are you guys going to advise me on that I need help with? I just doesn't seem like his personality. Meanwhile, the Biden administration, on the other hand, I think would have. set up like 17 different advisory boards, some of which would advise each other. on what they should be talking about at the next advisory board meeting. One might imagine it's,

further deregulation. You know, they've done a bunch of deregulation and, freeing up. the crypto, the crypto companies to to have more free rein to do things. I'm guessing it'll be more of that. Or maybe doing the same with the AI. So when you saw all those founders of the tech companies. at the inauguration for Trump the second time around. Yeah. What did you think? There's been this interesting migration in Silicon Valley from, I would say 20 years ago.

There was very there was very much like politics is something that happens there. And we don't get wrapped up in that. We're doing our own stuff over here. And that's this other thing that, you know, other people worry about that literally. You know, we don't really care about, my I think what happened was. during the Biden administration, you may remember Lina. Khan came in as chairperson of the FTC, and she was the 35 year old who'd never created a job in her life.

But she'd written a thesis at Yale saying that Amazon should be broken up. Correct. And had never I mean, you just made the key. point, never had created a single job in her life. Wrote this thesis on why Amazon should be broken up and then, you know, putting her instincts to work. Adobe, the company Adobe offered to buy Figma for $20 billion. Figma is a design, a design company. And, she and the FTC, essentially, to make a long story short, she and her FTC blocked it.

And that was really, I think the beginning of. or the middle, the middle of Silicon Valley saying, wait a minute. We got to start paying a lot more attention here. because they're starting to mess with our ability to, you know, create, you know, entrepreneurs built build great companies, have them exit with the, you know, the entrepreneur or the CEO. in this case and founder Dylan Figma going on to Adobe. And, you know, maybe becoming an investor later and running is running this group.

within Adobe and making a everyone making a tremendous amount of money. Once she blocked that, I think that was really part. of the beginning of Silicon Valley saying, all right, this is not okay. We need to get we need to get more involved. Her no longer answer is it was much more than just Lina Khan. There's the CFTC, there's the SEC, which was heavily regulating crypto. And, you know, no, you know, Robinhood you can't do x, y, z with crypto in Coinbase. No, you can't do these sorts of things. Now, I'll say one other thing, which is it's perfectly reasonable to say.

you shouldn't have giant monopolies that just can turn the screws on people. and, you know, cost consumers, you know, a fortune. But again, going back to the explicit Adobe Figma case, there's very few people in the country. who would have had any, you know, for whom the Adobe Figma merger. acquisition would have had any effect or, you know, any impact on their ability to save money or affordability or anything like that.

It was just sort of like, we're just going to be meddlesome. Prior to the Obama administration, Silicon Valley sort of UDC is like, they do their thing. We do our thing. As long as everybody. leaves each other alone, where, you know, we don't really care about what's going. on over there. I think it would be fair to say. most of Silicon Valley was left leaning or, you know, Democratic leaning, like, right, like the population of California, mostly a blue state, and fairly liberal. So, it was early 2011.

I as in the morning, I've said this before, but. but I was in my morning status meeting with my with my direct reports, and my assistant comes to the office and whispers, phone call for you. I was like, I'll call him back. You know, I'm going to be I'm in a meeting, whatever, you know? And she goes, It's the white House. And my, you know, I'm born and raised in the Midwest, the United States. Immediately my immediate thought was, I didn't do anything. What did I do? Why? Like I didn't do anything. Trouble? Yeah, I'm in trouble, master. I'm in trouble. Why? Why are they calling me? So I got on, and then I was also like, wait, how do you know it's.

the white House? Did someone just call in anyway, Valerie Jarrett and she wanted me. You know, she's. Can you come to, you know, Washington, DC on Friday and meet. And Valerie Jarrett was his chief of staff. Valerie Jarrett was Obama's chief of staff at the time. Of course, the answer is, I think I think I think the answer is yes. Yeah. And so we go, I go and we're in the Lincoln, room. and the white House, and it's me and let's see. Gosh, Brian Roberts. from Comcast and Eric Schmidt from Google and Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook.

And you know, Randall Stephenson from AT&T. And you know, all the way at Reed Hastings and sort of all around the table. And Obama asked me the first question. I'm like, you know, like you're in the room with all these people. who have been in business like, you know, and he asked me the first question. and I answer it, and, I remember this like it was yesterday. And the president turns to. Sheryl Sandberg and says, Sheryl, what do you think about that? And Sheryl says, well, first of all, Mr.

President, I just want to thank you for inviting us all here. And I was like, shit, damn it. You know, the the protocol. Yeah. I just I just answered the question. and, and Sheryl does the, you know, correct first. And I was like, and I hit the table, I like slammed the table down. And everyone stopped and looked at me and I was like, I meant to say that, you know, and Sheryl was it wasn't so wasn't what? She wasn't to me. But I'm amused by me interrupting the table laugh. But you brought some humor to the. I, Brian Roberts kicked me under the table anyway. Okay.

And then what? What were your future relationships like with the Obama government? It was they want to interfere with a curious. Well, I would say that they would. You would get requests. And I have to be clear, it's. not like it's not necessarily that this was all the Obama administration. It would it would be like, the FBI would send some request for like, hey, we or the or, some federal bureau would send a request and it would generally be things like,

you know, for example, I'll give you a, for example, we think these 2 or 3 accounts are terrorist accounts, and we want access to the direct messages to see if they're, you know, planning something. In the US. One of the things that's been reported is, well, Twitter would just do. whatever the, you know, Biden administration. or Obama administration asked them to do is simply not true. We would, go back to the agency and say, you have to have a valid court order. You can't just say, we can't tell you why we think this, but we want to see the DMs for this account. You have to have you have to go to some court.

to which you can show the reasons you think it's, you know, we don't need to see it, but you have to go to some federal court. to whom you can show the reasons you think it's a terrorist account. And if you get a valid court order saying you have to hand over the, you know, the information from account X and Y, then we'll, you know, we'll obey a valid court order, but we're not just going to respond to whatever requests you send over the wall. So you wanted a proper process in place? Yeah. We were just weren't going to just hand over random requests for, you know, we want to look at this account because we, you know, we think it's a bad guy.

You have to go get some court to validate that you've got a good reason to lie. And how often was that happening? Let's say like a couple times a year at the time, 2010 to 2015, ISIS, the terrorist group ISIS and al-Qaida were active on the social network. So it wasn't like it wasn't like we didn't think there were any accounts. There were. there were lots of accounts that were pretty clearly, you know, promoting, you know, the bad guys and, and, and ISIS. We just wanted to have a, you know, look, we've got to.

we've got to have something that we can fall back on to say. there was a valid court order for this thing. Otherwise we start handing over random accounts. And one of them, some like American citizen who hasn't done. anything wrong and, you know, sues us or takes action against the government. What are we going to why are we going to say we did it? So were you constantly combing accounts and when you saw. suspicious activity, what closing them down? Or if. Because I'm assuming you didn't want ISIS on the platform. Yeah. We would close down accounts that were clearly terrorist accounts.

promoting terrorist activity publicly. I'll give you a like. the classic, canonical example from my years running Twitter. where ISIS, gets these pilots that have been shot down in a jet, and they put them in a cage in orange jumpsuits, and they basically light them on fire inside these cages and kill them. And they start posting the photos and videos to Twitter and YouTube. and on and on and on. And, you know, we set up our trust and safety team and our general counsel.

say, just delete, you know, any accounts, suspend any account that posts. these photos and videos of these pilots being, you know, lit on fire. And. the New York Post posts the photo. to their Twitter account of the pilot in the cage being lit on fire. And you use trust and safety, like, suspend, you know, going about my day, doing whatever I'm doing, and I get, I think I get a text from, like, it might have been Kara swisher or someone's like,

why did you guys suspend the New York Post account? Like what? No. Find the general counsel. General counsel is like, you know, I'm sure. And then sure enough and then we're like, okay. And that was really maybe my first exposure to. you can create these hard and fast rules that seem. totally obvious and like, why wouldn't you just shut down any account? The post this and inevitably there's some exception. And so these things were just super, super challenging to like, should we delete this one or not delete this one?

You know, I remember when Elon bought the company years after I was gone, Elon Musk. Yeah. Elon Musk sorry. When Elon bought Twitter, years after 7 or 7 or so years after I had left, and Jack had been CEO in the interim, Prague. and Jack Dorsey and then, Prague for a while, for a little bit. He was like, well, we have to get rid of all the bots, you know, we're going to there's too many bots. We got to get rid of the bots. Well, the New York Times weather account is a bot. It just tweets out the weather every morning. Okay, well, I mean, all the bots except the New York, I mean, you know.

Well, the U.S. Geological Survey account, when it detects an earthquake as a bot. Well, I mean, you know, anyway, all these things are like. when people make these blanket statements about, why don't you just do X? I have in the back of my mind the 19 reasons why. Yeah. It's not like we didn't think of that. There are just a million exceptions to the rule, and it's never as obvious. as you thought it was going to be. Right? And the New York Post never let Twitter forget that it did. They never left. Said that was one of the things that was that was like. that was one of those got brought up very, very frequently as they once.

a as you'll remember, they censored us. Yeah. It was like, okay, we created a rule that we thought. was going to only apply to the terrorist accounts. because they were all promoting it, and you guys did the same thing. And someone on the trust and safety team and, you know, wherever country went, oh, that meets that rule delete. It wasn't like we're going to get you know, there was no. we're out to get the right wing media or whoever. Yeah. Right. So what do you make of Twitter now? And I will say I don't go on it nearly as much as I used to. I think of your days.

And this isn't just because we're friends, but the whole the whole all of them. The glory days, the glory days, the glory days. Now three days, if you will. That Substack has become the new Twitter in many ways. Okay, but but what what do you make of Twitter now? It's still very, very relevant. It just is. I mean, if you're, if you're a tech, I mean, maybe be more specific if you're a technology investor or venture. capitalist or you're a tech founder in San Francisco or New York or wherever,

and, and you're, you know, you're very, very much a part of the tech scene. You you have to be on Twitter. It's all the announcements, all the discussions about fundings, all the product launches, all the back. and forth about the merits of a product launch or an acquisition or whatever. That's all still happening on Twitter. But that's an even more group, isn't it? Okay, that's fair, that's fair. It's, you know, you can say it's it's a it's a niche, I get that. But for me, and, you know, the business I'm in as a tech investor,

it's you have to be on it and you have to be on it regularly. It's still all happens there. But but what about the argument. that it's just become full of AI slop, that it's unbelievably unpleasant? That every time I go on it, I just get sort of inundated. by bot hate, which is just completely uninteresting. Yeah, there's a there's a lot of that on there for sure. And I think a fair criticism of all of these platforms is they optimize. for sending you down the vortex of, you know, making you, you know, angry.

Well, conflict, right. They serve up conflict because the bot saying you're a piece of shit or whatever, which aren't even real. So why would I engage? And there are, you know, look, there are influencers, as we know, on. both the right and the left who monetize hatred. Right. They're like, in fact, I'm sure there are people on the right. and again, on the left who are like, oh, shoot that guy or that woman. is outright winging me or out, out, out, out, far left wing mate. I gotta go even further to get my engagement back up.

to to get as many people to like you're a jerk or I can't believe you, you know? Right. That's what feeds. the beast and causes your, post to be promoted on the platform. So there's no question that that is a big problem. And, you know, I hear regularly from people who are like, I can't go on these things anymore. I just end up angry and, you know, yelling at the wall after five minutes. And do you think that they've actually coarsened the discourse?

Of course they've. I would say they've, they polarize the. discourse because you're served up the polarizing response. You're not served up the, you know, the reasonable response. I'll give you a specific example. Marc Andreessen this morning, and Marc. is on this sort of like, you know, Men of Action. But he's, he's, he's on and he, he's the founder of. Sorry. I'm sorry. No, wait. Just people who are recent basically invented the web browser, basically.

invented, you know, Mozilla and went on to be one of the founders of Netscape. And then, along with Ben Horowitz, who was an engineering manager at Netscape, they founded a company called Loud Cloud, sold that, and then went on to found Andreessen Horowitz, which is one of, if not the biggest venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. And so Mark has been on this, you know, Men of Action series of posts on Twitter about, you know, like introspection is you know, recent. phenomenon and, you know, men of action, you know, they.

they can't they can't sit there and dwell on the consequences too long. And, you know, otherwise, it's it's a waste of time. And then I'm summarizing. But anyway, he had this post this morning and that was like, you know, really dumb people say things like, just do it. And you know, sort of smart middle management. people write a 20 page strategy deck. And Napoleon said, you know, you know, you can't dwell on the potential consequences for too long. because it might have, you know, might even waste more time than it should.

You should have just acted and moved, calling forth, like all great men. And it turns out to be an apocryphal tweet. It's actually from a a book of maxims, by Napoleon, many of which are fabricated, and and and one person actually written a response like that. That's not the first response, which would sort of further the discourse. And actually, it's interesting. There's this book of you know, Napoleon aphorisms, many of which are fabricated. And the first response is, you know, you're you're a moron, you know?

Right. Stoics all of Buddhism, Saint Augustine, these people were all great. introspective men, you know, you idiot, or whatever, you know, and so you don't. get the discourse unless you like, scroll past the, you know, you're a jerk. No, you're a jerk. And then there's someone responding back with like, you know, yeah, or whatever. And so it's unfortunate, but, that's, that's. that's the stuff that gets the most engagement is the angry retort.

So this and the and the and the hyperbolic post. Right. The if the initial post had been less hyperbolic. or more like, you know, I don't know longer. And here's how I think about the world. People be like, I don't have time to read that. They're just right. I want to see the you know, give me the punch in the face. Will we ever put the genie back in the book? Well, interestingly enough, so great article about this. Just the other day, interestingly enough, I the Lem's like,

ChatGPT and clod from anthropic and Gemini from Google. They actually, tend to bring people back toward the middle. So to the extent you give them that, I mean, if you think about what what they're trained on, right, these great, these AI tools have read the entirety of the internet. and all the posts on Reddit and all the and so they'll tend to feed you, they'll tend to funnel you toward a reasoned middle ground. Answer. But but what do you mean answer to a specific question.

because you're not on it like a thread, like you are an answer to the question. Like, right. I think, you know, the this conservative politician in, you know, or Viktor Orban is a jerk and blah, blah, blah, like, you know, is. what's the right way to think about these things. or any, any such question about a left wing or right wing. politician or or policy, even the. the AI tools will tend to guide you toward a middle ground opinion. And there are a number, any number of people out there now who will say, look, you know,

I have this sort of view of the world that was X, and I've been brought back toward that a little bit back toward the center. by arguing it out with the with the AI tool. So it's possible and it's because the AI is, you know, taking the sort. of the middle ground of all these things and coming up with some answer. Right. If you ask if you ask, go to. ChatGPT and just say pick any random number one through ten. It will always come back with seven. And it's because seven is the when you go out and look at the internet.

and look for the 35 year old guys on Reddit. saying a random number one through ten, the most often one is seven. So interest. So you're getting this sort of average. of all of the responses response. And it's possible that, hey, I sort of, you know, pulls everyone. If social media pushed everyone to the sides, in the margins, the margins, it's possible that AI brings everybody back toward the middle. So are you an AI optimist?

I'm an AI pragmatist. Okay. So what does that mean? I think the AI optimists would tell you, one of the things that AI. optimists would tell you was, is it's not going to, eliminate jobs. It actually turns out that any time there's a great new technology innovation, more jobs are created. And in fact, one of the things that the optimists like to throw out. there is proof of this is, you know, when ATMs were created, when cash. machines were created, the number of bank tellers in the US went up. So did it. It did, however. Right.

So the chart they show you is the invention of ATMs, number of bank teller jobs going up, and you're like, oh, that's so bad. It's not so bad. Look. However, what happened was around. the same time the ATMs were, you know, started to be rolled out. and in large quantities in the 80s, banking was deregulated. and banks, flourished. and lots more branches of banks were opened around the entire country.

And so there were tons more bank branches opened around the country. The number of tellers per bank branch went down. Okay. That's it. So you see this chart that goes like this. And then eventually there's banking consolidation. and they start buying each other. And now not only do the number of tellers per bank start to decrease. dramatically, the number of overall tellers decreases dramatically. There were lots and lots more branches. Not because ATMs created yet more job opportunities for tellers. All by way of setting up. I think it's crazy to think that you're going to be able to use AI to make you.

and your company lots and lots and lots and lots and lots more productive. And also going to need a lot more people in roles. It's already the case that, cloud. Code, for instance, is so extraordinarily powerful. And in fact, I think the people at anthropic. would tell you that. the next version of Cloud Code was written by the previous version of Claude Code. Oh, wow. And, it's just it's just going to be the case.

that there will be fewer programing jobs. because I will write the code, so that will be true. And then that will be true for lots and lots of other industries. But we've been through these stages before the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the tech revolution. What are what do you see as likely. being the jobs that will be created by AI? It's a good question. I mean, there are probably lots, but I think we're very. we have historically, we as humans have been historically very bad.

at predicting even the first derivative consequences. of the next the next technology that rolls out, as evidenced by, I mean, go back and look at any of the predictions about, you know, various. now infamous predictions about any technology rolling out, like Steve Ballmer's famous prediction about the iPhone, you know, like, okay, you know, that that's not going to basically like, that's not going to work or certainly not going to cause people to. And he was a co-founder of my he was a CEO of my the CEO of Microsoft, Bill gates.

Right. And the owner of the Clippers. When you look at the actual predictions about these things, it's very, very rarely do we nail it on the head with what's about to happen. Okay, so one of Silicon Valley's own sons, David Sax, has gone to run AI policy in the white House. Yeah. What is he actually doing there? Is he just, as a lot of people say, helping himself or trying to figure out the best. investments he can make? Because if you have a government contract. and you're an AI company or you're a tech company, then you are,

you know, ten times as likely to a grow and B survive. Yeah. So maybe I'll step back and like describe David's talk about who he is. David Sax is a technology executive. who was actually the first, chief operating officer at PayPal. If I remember correctly, there's a whole PayPal mafia of, you know, Elon Musk and, and Peter Thiel. and David Sachs and, and Reid Hoffman and Kevin Hart and, and Joe Lonsdale. I think Joe was there. And they're actually incredible liner notes.

It's also go on to do other things. Reed Hoffman started LinkedIn. Yeah. And I mean, Elon started everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean it's it's pretty it's pretty remarkable. And I it's it'll be curious to see whether that ends up. being rivaled by one of the AI companies here going forward or not. But it's a pretty incredible lineup of people and what they've gone on to do. Anyway, so David, I was the was the first CEO over there. I think he went on to found a company called Yammer, which was kind of like slack.

It was like slack for enterprise workers that sold to Microsoft in 2012. I think he was a reason. I know this is because Yammer was in the Twitter building, so he was on the floor. He was a couple floors below us in the Twitter. building in on what was that on off on Market Street. And I remember coming. See you in that. Yeah. Thank you. That was very kind of you to do that. And he sold that for $1.2 billion. to Microsoft in 2012, which was a lot of money at the time. Right. The numbers thrown around today are like 1.2 billion,

you know, why did you how many people were there for. Yeah, right. It's amazing to think Instagram was sold for a billion with eight people. Right. You look at it. Yeah, yeah. Although at the time I knew, you know, as you may know, I tried to buy it a month earlier, unsuccessfully. And when that was sold and the media was shouting, can you believe they bought this company for $1 billion? It's only eight people. I we sort of knew inside Twitter like, oh, man, they they got it and we didn't. And that's going to hurt. And it did.

Anyway so David he's been the point being he's been in Silicon Valley forever. He's also a member of this All In podcast, which is based on these, these guys who play poker all the time. And the title of their podcast is All in. And that's Jason Calacanis and, Sharma, David Freberg and and, and David Sax. I'm sorry. He's he's part of that crew, by the way. He's also on the founding partner of a venture firm called Kraft Ventures. Right. So when he took this job, there was a lot of, oh, he's just going.

to, you know, favor his investments and and pump them. My understanding is, I know you have to sort of, divest yourself of a bunch of your investments. when you go take these jobs and put them in a blind trust. Yeah, you're supposed to put them in a blind trust. And, to be perfectly frank, I'm not. It's not it's not clear. how how well that's ever worked or how much of that has ever been done. I'm sure some people do. It fully, and I'm sure some people do it like it's an a blind trust. that's run by my cousin Phil. Right.

Who I have who has a burner phone that gets an occasional text. Right. I mean, I don't know why he wanted to go into the administration. I don't know why anyone would want to go into politics, frankly, and leave. What is what what does seem would seem to be a pretty nice life, having been the cloud PayPal and sold a company to Microsoft. that you were the founder and CEO for over $1 billion. and having a great time on your podcast, it seems like going. it seems like going to politics would be a lot of pain and suffering. And, mostly what I think they've been working toward is.

trying to, remember I earlier said that the Biden administration. has sort of ground some of the gears of a crypto advancement. and, and I to a little bit of a halt, with, you know, regulation and then, well, we can't do we. we got to be careful about x, y, z, and let's not make any decisions yet. I think what David has gone there to do is like, let's like, speed. a bunch of this up and get out of the way and let people go as fast as possible. So, and is that a good thing? I mean, I well,

there's, there are probably people listening, thinking, well, it's good to hold companies up. This is a new technology. You know, who knows what's going to happen. In fact, there's in fact there's disagreement about that within the community. If there are a bunch of people who are like, hey, like, this could have the potential to kill us. all, let's not let's let's, you know, they even they even, there are entire organizations. within OpenAI and, and anthropic and Google, Google on the Gemini team working on, on safety and precaution and, and writing,

you know, paper after paper after paper on how are we going to do this? And here are the challenges with doing. And there are things that these things called red teams, within these organizations that work to try to see if they can figure out a way. to break the safety, the guardrails that have been put in place in the latest versions, etc.. On the other side of the coin, you've got people in the industry and inside these companies. who will say, if we don't do it, China is going to do it.

And if China wins the race, we're screwed, right? And so we have to get there first. And the way to get there first is take the brakes off and go as fast as possible. The reality, of course, is that, you know, it's not it's not A or B. You can you can do one and you can, you can go quickly. and still try to have guardrails and make sure you're doing things. the right way and have red teams testing things and so forth. Okay. So how significant was it when the founder of anthropic said. to Pete Hegseth and the Department of Defense, well,

okay, you cannot just use our products any way you want. They've been working with them for some time. and anthropic sort of said, nope, you can't do that. Then OpenAI came in and said, here you go. You can do whatever you like. What was that actually about? The guess answer is something like this. My understanding is that anthropic. reasonably has some, again, guardrails, guardrails in place. to make sure that things like, I'm going to be.

I'm just going to give us give a simple example, via the I can't make a decision. to, to kill someone or, or. or blow up a building without a human in the loop. You've got to have a human in the loop to verify. Like, is this really the bad guy we want to shoot? Is this really the building we want to take out? And and my understanding. this again, this is all like, I don't know, this hypothetical. That's hypothetical. My understanding is that the, the, the Pentagon and the military are like,

no, we want to be like, we need to be able to vet. Once the AI makes a decision, we want it to be able to. we want to be able to go forward with wherever it's decided to. Do, you know, with or without a human in the loop. So with something like that, right. Anthropic had some set of guardrails there, like, it's very dangerous. if you start letting the AI decide who and what to shoot and kill. without somebody confirming something, and the Pentagon saying like, we gotta, you know, we want to use it to blow up things or whatever.

So that's some form of that was the argument. Now, the people who think that, anthropic and Dario are wrong, and Dario is the founder and founder of co-founder and CEO of anthropic. The people who think that Dario and Anthropic were wrong say, well, when you buy Microsoft Excel, Microsoft doesn't get to tell you, here's here are two things you can't do with Excel, right? Like they don't get to tell you how to use the product. In fact, when you buy any tech product, the the, you know,

the person who sold it to you, the vendor doesn't get to say, here's the product, but you, you know, you can't use it for this. Look, the whole threat of AGI, artificial general intelligence. and I see artificial superintelligence, the entire threat is. what if we take out humans out of the loop and it becomes Hal from the movie 2001. and just decides, I'm sorry, Dave, I can't let you open the hatch doors. and you're going to die, or I've decided to do this and there's no human in the loop. And that decision is to wipe out, you know, some population.

In other words, the people who are who take Dario's side are. This isn't Microsoft Excel. This is something that can make a decision about some portion. of the future of humanity at some point. And if we take the guardrails down now, people are going to look back and go, remember when those idiots decided to take the guardrails down, right? That's why, you know, Manhattan doesn't exist anymore or right. That's that's in that's what the right Dario supporters would tell you.

You can't get rid of the guardrails. You have to have these things in place. Otherwise we're all in big big trouble. And the things are humans right. You've got to have humans signing off. Yeah. Things are humans that you have got to have humans signing off. Again. This is a very also simplified version of the discussions. that are actually going on. Right. People like if Dario were watching. and they'd be like, that's not technically what happened. But you get it. This is the kind of. this is the kind of discussion that was taking place with the Pentagon saying, hey, man, you're going to get to tell us how to use your thing. We just paid hundreds of millions of dollars for.

this is what we want to do with it. And I'm saying, like, I won't sign off on you, allowing the, you know, letting what you can't use the product if you're going to use that way. Right. So. talk a little bit. about your own podcast because. you're now having these kinds of discussions with the writer. Yeah. Elton. And then Paul could ski. Yeah, he's a polkadot ski guy who's an investor in polymath. So the idea behind the podcast is instead of. having one of the kind of going back to our discussion about social media,

instead of having one of these polarizing, you know, those people are idiots. Here's what's really happening, and this is why this is going on. We want to have this. We wanted to have the actual pick a topic. and then have real discourse about the pros and cons of it here. What some people believe. This is why the other people, this is why people on the other side of the coin believe this other thing. And here's some interesting middle ground and some potential implications of it. That's not like mired in politics and hyperbole.

And you know, those those guys over there are jerks. So everything's just so hyper politicized now. Right. And and are you enjoying doing it? Yeah, I'm we're loving doing it. And it's, it's it's sort of media technology and current events. But I have watched several episodes and they're hilarious. Well, and also, you know, they're full of interesting. slightly, lateral thinking about. Yeah. Well, for example, it was a good way of putting it lateral thinking. And there was a very good one about actually whether or not you go.

to war is dictated by the average age of the population. There's a there's a whole correlation that turns out that the likelihood. of a country to go to war can be directly. correlated to the average average age of the population. And the younger the average age of the population of the country, the more likely they are to go to war right linearly, like it's literally a direct drops as the population here. So the average and one of the stats I found really interesting was that.

in the Civil War, the American Civil War, the average age of the population was 19. Yeah. When you ask people to get seen, they never get there. Yeah. No. I was like, yeah, yeah. I literally thought, oh it's 27. It must be 27. But in fact it's 19. And of course they're the the group that end up losing the most lives. Yeah. What is the average age of the American population now? Well, it's much it's much higher. So it sort of goes against the that particular trend. Well, well punk goes against a trend, right?

I don't think I don't, I'm not sure the entire country. even knew we were going to war until we woke up on Saturday. And he was like, surprise. I mean, you can sort of see it, right? If you're a 19 year old male and you're across the table or the see. from someone you hate, you know, and you've got testosterone coursing. through your veins, you're like, man, I really want to punch that guy, you know? And then when you're 52, when you're across the table from, you know, you're like, man, I really want soup. You know, we want soup.

I love talking to you. And I'm so glad that you found time. to come and talk to us in between your investments. All right. So very quickly, give us a sense of the investments that you're excited about. It's mostly artificial intelligence right now, but it's it's. bled into every possible nook and cranny of the economy. I'll give you just a couple quick examples. And those include, there will be, autonomous. construction companies like the diggers, the backhoes, etc. that are just like, the autonomous cars that Elon Musk and others.

talk about when they talk about the robotaxi or Waymo's, there will be entire construction sites that are automated and AI based, which is really feels like you're in the future. when you start talking about that kind of thing. But it's real. Will they be able to do the Balram? Or the. They'll be the I'm sure that I'm sure they would. I'm sure that that's why Dave is really the. the ballroom is of the ballroom looms larger than it really should.

It sort of seems to be always discussed all the time. And it may be a function of the president. doing that, but it really looms large over like the country. It's it's just a, it's just an a. an an adjacent space. It's so much more than that. It seems like it's so much more oriented with polarized where polarized. it goes to show you how naive I am about some things. All right. Dick, thank you for coming. Thanks for having me. If you have been, thank you for joining us.

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