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Individual Freedom and Global Companies
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Speaker 3
roundup of the week and it's on a subject that we've been discussing now for weeks months perhaps even years individual freedom and global companies is the title of Keith's editorial that that was the week editorial can governments help innovation and it's about the way in which companies now seem to have the power of governments the lead essay the one that stimulated Keith's editorial is It's from an excellent online publication. It's excellent because they sometimes publish my stuff called Engelberg Ideas. It's a Swedish publication. And this piece, which is fascinating, is how companies go to war. It's by somebody called Ulrika Franke. I hadn't heard of her. And sometimes I throw things at Keith and he conveniently ignores them. But this one really stuck. What was it, Keith, about the Franke piece that you thought was so interesting?
Yeah, she sounds German from her name, but who knows? Hopefully she'll watch this and she'll tell us. But you almost have to be outside of the US and China to be able to reflect on what's going on at this level of abstraction that she does. She talks about the growing importance of private companies, even when it comes to nation states pursuing their self-interested military goals, military and non-military, actually. So she talks a lot about Starlink, as it pertains to Ukraine she talks a lot about how AWS facilitated the Ukrainian authorities to move their entire databases you know for Social Security their population databases to the cloud so that Russia couldn't bomb the physical data centers um she talks pretty much about every significant company as it pertains to military. Yeah, I mean,
to quote her, we are living through a change in the balance of power between states and the private sector. The implications, I mean, the implications for everything are obviously vast, but she says the implications for modern conflict are vast. And we're already seeing it. I mean, her point is that we're already seeing it in Ukraine. This is not some theoretical observation. It's practical.
Although actually in the Israeli case of what's happened in Lebanon this week, It's the perfect combination of a state that is somehow integrated with technological know-how. I mean, Israel is the startup nation in a militaristic sense as well. So only Israel can pull that kind of thing off. I can't imagine the Americans. Or the Chinese, and certainly not the Russians.
Yeah, the Israeli state is quite unique, really, in understanding the role of technology in pursuing its endgame, and therefore as a hands-on approach to technology. If you look at the United States, when DARPA was the place that Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn invented TCPIP, that era seems to have gone completely.
The other thing, Andrew, just one thing. The other thing is... the changing role of academia. Government and academia used to be very much together. And now the prevailing narrative is don't bother doing a degree, or at least not a doctorate, get into a company. So I think a lot is changing.
Let's just, I wanted to read her conclusion. It's an excellent piece, and it's in Keith's newsletter. All this means that we're living through a change in the balance of power between states and the private sector. For states, this poses a challenge as to which capabilities they want to try and build themselves, cloud, satellite-based internet connectivity, et cetera. Companies must also realize that this changed landscape does not only provide them with more power, but also creates more risks. A new era is dawning which might change the way wars are fought forever. I think you're right, whether this is German or Swedish, what's nice about the piece is it doesn't it's not apocalyptic in any sense. It doesn't suggest that we're at the end of the world, that Elon Musk's going to take the world over or that we're going to see the appearance of a new big brother. It's just a new reality. So it's a very good piece.
Andrew, you normally push back on me when I talk about the growing irrelevance of nation states. But I don't think she's saying that. No, but it speaks to that for me. Does it for you? What does it do to your... your zeitgeist or your Weltanschauung about nations and companies?
I wouldn't say I push back on you. I agree that we're in this structural shift. What I push back at you, Anne, is this endless obsession with free speech and the idea that any government pushback is a bad thing. But I think structurally, you're absolutely right. What I don't see in the other area, I don't necessarily think we need to get into this, is I don't see the appearance of any global institutions, for example, that can be some sort of third way between private companies and nation states. Certainly the UN is increasingly irrelevant, marginalized. I mean, that's why international conflicts like in Israel, Palestine, Gaza are so insoluble because we don't have international organizations or an international balance of power to actually address it. But those are more...
And we'll come to that with our social media post of the week is the classic response. of everyone seems to be put these people in jail. And it's a sort of a childish response, whether it's from the left wanting to put Musk in jail or from the right wanting to put any Trump critics in jail. It's a reactionary idea. let's move on keith um fascinating uh series your your your selections are getting stronger and stronger you are mr editorial one piece i really found interesting was uh you linked to this week was why generalists own the future by dan shipper it's again counterintuitive in the age of ai shipper suggests it's the generalists who are going to have the power and i'm quoting him here
In this age, in the age of LLMs, we'll all have, we generalists, and I'm certainly a generalist, and so are you, we'll all have 10,000 PhDs available at our fingertips. I found this, again, an encouraging piece, and I think you may well be right.
Yeah, it pertains, it's part of his reaction to the new, it's called 01, instance of ChatGPT. There's two of them, 01 Mini and 01 Preview. They're both free if you're a user of ChatGPT.
Yeah, so 01, the human experience of using it is that it thinks, in quotes. So basically, you ask it something, and it doesn't just give you an answer. It goes through an iterative series of steps that show you its reasoning between the steps.
Yeah, and its upgraded math capability and logic and reasoning are pretty striking. And it already is at advanced status. When it does tests, it's as good as the top students in college, that is. And it's very soon projected to become a doctorate level or above. So therein lies the article by Schipper, which is you're going to have a PhD on any topic you want. Yeah, I'm lucky. You got a PhD, right? I got an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge.
Yeah, me too. So we were lucky there. To borrow from, I mean, to play on Shipper's word, we can borrow an old classic Yiddish word. PhDs have become the schleppers for generalists like us, Keith. We can ride on them. And Keith, you're very good at figuring out businesses where you ride on the labor and intelligence of other people.
No, we don't want to talk about abortion, Keith, in this. Enough with the unborn children. And actually, my Keenon interview of the week, it's going to be something we add to That Was The Week today. This week, it was with Toby Walsh, very distinguished... AI expert from Australia, and he is utterly amazed with Notebook LLM, a new Google product. I told Keith about it, and he integrated it into something that I'm going to show you, and then Keith can comment on it. Here we go.
And the really interesting thing here is that they're not just crunching numbers for fun. They're actually using this tech to make real investment decisions.
Putting their money where their algorithm is. It sounds to many of you like those were real people, but they weren't. Tell us, Keith, about this product. It's astonishing. Toby Walsh thinks that it's as big a deal, at least in terms of how he thinks AI is going to change the world from when he first saw GPT-3. This is called Notebook LLM from a little startup around here called Google.
Yeah, so you sent me the article and I read it and immediately wanted to try it out. So I gave it a research paper, which we haven't actually published yet, from SignalRank, written by Yi Ma, who's my data science lead. And that conversation you listened to was produced immediately from it reading the technical paper. It's astonishing that they...
as toby walsh joked with me or it's funny for him less funny for me it's going to make me irrelevant because it really in many ways replicates what i do although
hopefully there'll still be a role for me yeah people would you know andrew people don't get bored with your voice but they will get bored with those two voices so the voices are gonna have to change because you can't have that's not hard that's the that's a cosmetic issue isn't it that's a cosmetic issue But I think the ability to analyze, and by the way, interestingly enough, I gave it a second paper, which was more marketing. And the conversation that it produced was a very negative conversation about the claims being made in the marketing document.
It was a form of, well, it's audiences, you know, horses for courses. There is a role for marketing, but not if people are analyzing it with a scientific...
So, Keith, you've always been very bullish on OpenAI. You've thought that they're miles ahead of everyone else. Did Google's Notebook LM change that for you? I mean, I assume OpenAI are working on something similar too.
It was a bit of a leap forward for me in what I thought was the state of the art and what is possible. The interesting thing about it is the interpretive capability.
Right. It's astonishing. And the conversation flows and it's funny and relevant and listenable. I mean, usually that's why I've always been a little skeptical of a lot of the AI stuff you've shown me, because it always sounds so canned and inoffensive and annoying. But this one is for real.
Well, you're excited with that, Keith. Me, in the church, in the AI church. We'll have to see how that turns out. But it certainly points to the fact that this is about to change the world. We already saw it, even in the Wall Street Journal this week. You don't have this piece in your newsletter. But Joanna Stern, longtime Wall Street Journal tech reporter, very highly respected, created a Joanna bot.
For an iPhone 16 review, again, she's a tech sophisticate, so she had the self-confidence to do it. But this thing is for real and it's happening now, right?
Oh, yeah. You literally won't be able to distinguish... And that will force a review of words like misinformation or disinformation or deep fake, because synthetic content is going to become normalized and acceptable.
Yeah, synthetic content is the thing in itself, to borrow a German philosophical term. There isn't anything else. So we're going to come back to that many times. Another interesting piece of news. Speaking of Google, they won. You linked to Google winning their court challenge to an EU $1.7 billion antitrust fine. Does this point to private companies beating the state, beating international organizations like the EU? Or is it just one case?
At the moment, you have to say it's just one case. All the trends suggest, especially in the case of Apple, the EU is really going after these big companies. They call them gatekeepers, and they measure that by the size of the influence of the company in terms of humans and revenues. So Google won this one. It was on a technicality, actually. So I don't think it's indicative. But it does show that if you work at one of these big companies, increasingly the state is your enemy. It's your constraint. It's providing friction to your progress. And if you're a bad actor, we probably all think that's fine. But most of these companies are not bad actors. They're innovating.
Well, then we can have our Telegram argument again, which I haven't changed my mind on. I mean, Telegram in itself isn't a bad actor. I'm not suggesting that they're in the business of encouraging child pornography or drug trades. But when you have a product that enables bad behavior, it becomes another issue.
Hi to Greg Walters, by the way. He says, hello from the USA. What you don't know, Greg, is that I'm in Palo Alto and Andrew is in San Francisco. So we are actually with you.
Greg Walters. We're getting real tech journalists watching this. Speaking, though, of companies are also... shall we say, calibrating. Another New York Times piece on Instagram, facing pressure over child safety online, has unveiled sweeping changes. So it's not... The Zuckerberg companies tend to be most resistant to government pressure. So they are responding. It's not as if this is a one-way street.
Actually, the main critique I would have had of Meta over the years is it's too responsive. It bends over backwards for the government. In this case, I don't take that view because... This specifically is about preventing underage children from being able to pretend they're older than they really are. And it defaults teenagers under that age band, I think 15 is the cutoff, to default private accounts so that their accounts can't be seen by predators, if you will. I do think the whole predator teen Instagram thing is massively overblown. Yeah, it's a form of hysteria, I agree. But that said, this seems a prudent step. I'm not against it.
We are agreeing too much here, Keith. Maybe we need to create some... A Keith bot and an Andrew bot that will fight more. Another interesting piece of news, which might impact actually on our show, Substack is introducing live video. At the moment, the way we do this is we record this on Restream and then we distribute on Substack. Is this going to change everything for us, Keith? Are we going to do everything on Substack? I'm more and more bullish, by the way, on Substack. I find that my keen on show is... That's where the old Twitter is, where the spirit, the civility, the high quality conversations and people, the absence of anonymity. I think Substack, I mean, maybe they're a bit late to the game, but they are the new Twitters. Well, the old Twitter. They're not the new. They are what Twitter was in 2008 and 2009.
I understand why you would put that in the same sentence. I mean, my view is that sub stacks are quite a unique thing. Obviously, it's much smaller than Twitter in terms of size of people.
Well, my problem with that, I don't want to turn this into another X conversation. My problem with X is I don't use it very often. But when I do, I don't see anything from anyone that I know. It's all propaganda. I don't know whether I'm pressing the wrong buttons, but it just seems to be just pure marketing, particularly on the election.
Yeah. Well, there is a button called For You, which means that you only see stuff for you on X. So you should press that button. But going back to the live video, I'd say not yet. We're not going to move to it yet because right now it's limited to two people broadcast only to your Substack subscribers. In the future, I'm sure they're going to add in the ability to stream to other environments like YouTube and Facebook and X. And they do record it so you can put it into a newsletter. So I think right now I would use it for spontaneous, you know, quick live videos.
Well, I know you're friendly with Hamish, the founder, and he's always responsive. If there's one thing... you'd like from Substack, what would it be that they don't currently have?
I think to think of this video, both live and recorded, the text, the images, the audio, as almost like a production studio for a creator, to think of it like that, and to have a brain about distribution. Their distribution brain is quite weak.
Yeah, they don't have that brain. I certainly agree with the second part. Yeah. I mean, the problem is that they're still, I think, ultimately catering to a tiny group of superstars. They're like VCs, so they bet on a few people. They don't need the ones with 200,000 sub-stack followers. And they're the ones who, for one reason or another, they don't need marketing help. But most of the rest of us do.
Yeah, but you can excuse them based on the fact they're a corporation company. that has to make a profit, and that's where their money comes from. I do think they should include sponsorship capability, as in they should go to people like Pepsi and say, you know, of all of our newsletters, are there any you'd like to sponsor?
Yeah, well, advertising, I think, is... And I came over from podcasting, and I think podcasting has failed on advertising. I think it's... The rates are so dismal. It's just not worth the aggravation, and it destroys the podcast show. So... We are at Startup of the Week. A bit of self-promotion here, Keith. When I first saw this, I thought you were calling it SignalRank, but it isn't. It's Pylon. Tell us about Pylon, why Pylon is your Startup of the Week, the support system for B2B companies.
Yeah. Yeah, it is. Normally, my startup of the week is pretty random, and I thought there's got to be a more scientific way to do it. Then I remembered I run this scientific scoring company called SingleRank. Why don't I use it? So I used it to pick this company. And it is appropriate. They're in the B2B automation space, which is, by the way, going to be huge. Incredibly boring now. Well, boring unless you run a company and then it's incredibly exciting because you can have less humans and more automation. So I think it's raised a significant amount of money from very, very good investors and looks like it's on a path to become part of what we call the single rank index, which by definition, as Notebook LLM told us, is a great algorithmic way to pick companies.
I did suggest one other piece that you chose not to put in. It's by Simon Cooper, the FT columnist, excellent writer. Musk, Teal and the Shadow of Apartheid South Africa. He suggests that Musk and Teal and David Sachs all grew up one way or the other in South Africa and they're bringing a set of values to the US and it explains their support also for Trump and the MAGA movement. But you thought this was a little tasteless?
Which isn't a bad thing. So you think it's entirely wrong that it's purely coincidental that Musk and Sachs and Thiel, perhaps the three most prominent tech right-wingers who have flirted or been in bed, currently in bed with Trump, all grew up in South Africa?
Well, I think Cooper kind of is, but that's another issue.
Words and timings
Well,IthinkCooperkindofis,butthat'sanotherissue.
Speaker 2
He's certainly very blunt. He's not very explicit if he is.
Words and timings
He'scertainlyveryblunt.He'snotveryexplicitifheis.
Speaker 3
And Cooper also has a South African background. So this is a very sensitive... I know your wife's South African, so it has a particular sensitivity to you too.
Yeah, but that's not an argument either. I mean, we're talking about three particular people. I'm not suggesting that most South Africans are racist, most white South Africans who chose to leave are racist.
I just think it's a tenuous, it's like saying they all drink black tea. It's a tenuous causation that just isn't real. So he's having fun with an idea. He probably woke up thinking about it and decided to write about it without really thinking it through because it just is a tenuous correlation. There's absolutely nothing. In fact, the opposite would be true.
The EFT says the parallels between South Africa then and the U.S. today are striking. This is where we will disagree, Keith, but let's agree to disagree. How is the U.S. today? He's not suggesting that. He's simply suggesting that the world they grew up in, of profound inequalities between blacks and whites, may not have been institutionalized. It wasn't the apartheid world. It's certainly something that Trump seems to rather like. He doesn't want to go back to segregation or Jim Crow or slavery, but he's clearly somebody who is enormously popular with white people. Americans who don't like people of different color skins. And he hasn't been shy to associate himself with the radical right. So I think Cooper's onto something.
There is a legitimate conversation there, although I think it's slightly deeper. Trump, and this is where Musk has been backing him strongly, is very anti-immigrant. And this whole correlation between immigrants and crime, which is not true, is being echoed by Musk.
But we're both immigrants, so we have to be pro-immigrant.
Words and timings
Butwe'rebothimmigrants,sowehavetobepro-immigrant.
Speaker 2
We have to be.
Words and timings
Wehavetobe.
Speaker 3
But uncontrolled... And so is he, of course.
Words and timings
Butuncontrolled...Andsoishe,ofcourse.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Words and timings
Yeah.
Speaker 3
And so is Thiel. So it's a complicated thing. Sorry, go on.
Words and timings
AndsoisThiel.Soit'sacomplicatedthing.Sorry,goon.
Speaker 2
And I think they're mainly against... uncontrolled immigration. I think... That's giving them an excuse. Nobody's... No, no. Honestly, if you listen to them, Teal was interviewed this week at the All In podcast, that they are for massive immigration programs, but they want them to be controlled with passports being given as opposed to chaos. Well, I don't think any... But again, that's...
It's just a euphemism for what they really think. Nobody is in favor of open borders. Nobody's in favor of anyone just coming into the country. Anyway, that's another question. Finally, you've changed the name of the X of the Week. It's now Post of the Week. So thank you. But you still have an X theme. Elon Musk writing amazing in response to some news that Gavin Newsom has announced that he's not ruling out legal action against Musk for posting mean memes about him because it hurts democracy. I'm not sure whether that's entirely true. And he's also responding to apparently Hillary Clinton suggesting that Americans should be jailed for posting misinformation. I'm not sure either of these things are true. Why is this the post of the week, Keith?
So I did go and look at the sources. And even if you don't trust him, you can trust me a bit more probably. Maybe not. But it is accurate. And it may have been a slip of the tongue. It may have been a one off. It almost doesn't matter because it's emblematic of the times we live in where criminalizing speech, not just objecting to it or even canceling it, criminalizing it's really one step further. that's a big deal for a society to go down.
You know, like the thing he forwarded, the thing he commented on, on the Hillary remarks was from somebody called or something called end wokeness. So it doesn't sound very reliable to me or certainly not very unbiased.
Well, it certainly comes back to the theme of the week, which is this growing conflict between private companies and states, which is also manifested, I guess, in conflict between powerful individuals like Musk and the state. So I guess it's an appropriate ending. As I said, I'm a great fan of Elon Musk. You seem to be more open to him.
Let's just do one more minute on that. I chose this theme of individual freedom in my title. And I think there's a serious conversation about the relationship between individual freedom and technical progress, as in most of our freedoms come from escaping need, if you will. And if the state is standing in the way of technical progress, which it often is, that does have an impact on freedom. Now, freedom isn't the same thing as democracy. Individual freedom is really choice in how to spend your time, how to live and so on. Democracy is a political system that protects that, hopefully. But if democracy starts to inhibit individual freedom, then you've got a real problem. So I do think there's a kind of an ongoing... Right.
And I think the other side of it, and we've got to end now, is that all this is... All this also suggests that we need to innovate in government. We need to create state institutions that are as innovative and dynamic and perhaps even as entrepreneurial as products like Google's Notebook LM because it's going to change the world. It's been an honor, Keith. We've agreed too much. Next week, we'll probably disagree. We might be doing it live in London. Maybe we can even use the Substack app. Have a great week, everyone, and we'll see you again next week. Thanks, Keith. Bye.