Nov 9, 2024 · 2024 #40. Read the transcript grouped by speaker, inspect word-level timecodes, and optionally turn subtitles on for direct video playback
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Good Morning America
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Speaker 2
It's early in the morning, Keith. You've just woken up and your newsletter, your tech newsletter for this week, That Was The Week, our weekly tech show. Good morning, America. AI, Trump and the future. You're not happy that Trump won, but have you changed your mind in the few days since the election?
Well, I'm not going to change my mind about who I voted for. I voted for them and I'm happy I did. What I didn't anticipate is the gap between Trump and Harris being so wide. I did anticipate there was a chance he would win, but I thought he wouldn't win the popular vote, for example.
Well, you have to admit, I don't always like to rub it in, but I made it clear to you in several shows that Trump was going to win and you dismissed me.
Why? I'm not a big Trump fan, but it was obvious. Wasn't that obvious, Keith? I mean, you're in the business of looking into the future. You're an investor. How could you have missed it? You're just cleverer than me, Andrew. I mean, it's quite clear. Well, that goes without saying.
I think they thought the worst case scenario was they did win the Electoral College just, and Harris would win the popular vote. That was the consensus. And this idea that it was close, which has clearly been poo-pooed. We did talk last week about how unreliable the polls were due to people with cell phones not answering them and so on. So I think there was a degree of reasonable likelihood that Trump was going to win.
Actually, I disagree on the analysts. Nate Silver at the New York Times made it very clear that he thought that the likeliest outcome with one of the candidates would win reasonably easily. I mean, it wasn't a landslide election. It just won decisively, but it wasn't. Well, it wasn't Mondale and Reagan.
It wasn't. Or Mondale and Nixon. Well, you have to define landslide. I think committed Democrats will feel emotionally, at least, that it is a landslide because they were not even close. And when you consider that out of all the counties in the US, which I believe there's just over 1,300, more than 90% of them improved the trend towards Trump. So even the MSNBC have described it as the broadest, multiracial, class-based coalition that America has ever seen in an election, even though the word coalition...
So is this a reason, Keith, that we should be celebrating? We're going to talk a little bit about your favorite subject, woke politics, later, but Clearly America made it, in the way they voted for Trump, the country made it clear that it's not like perhaps Trump and certainly like the left obsessed with race and cultural identity. Everybody voted, I mean, whatever it was, what were the numbers i think a majority of hispanic americans or certainly close to a majority of 45 uh black man so blah blah we've all heard the numbers does that suggest that america is in a better state than we thought that it's not that it didn't vote tribally
I don't think it did vote tribally. I've been in quite a few back and forths in the last few days with friends of mine who think that all 73 million Trump voters are misogynist, racist,
anti-trans. I'm amazed that you have friends like that.
Words and timings
anti-trans.I'mamazedthatyouhavefriendslikethat.
Speaker 3
Well, acquaintances, let's call them. Former friends, Keith. I hope you put them in their place. If you contrast Kara Swisher with... Joe Scarborough. Joe Scarborough, literally the day after, started talking about all the mistakes the Democrats made and was prepared to acknowledge it and investigate it. But I think a lot of people aren't.
I think in your cycles of Dantean hell, Lena Kahn's at the bottom, but probably Kara Swisher's about one one rung above her. You talk in your editorial about seven stages of grief. One of the things that surprised me, I have to admit about your editorial, was your confession that you spent so much time watching it. I watched for about 10 minutes. It was even before any of the numbers were in on Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It was obvious by the time the numbers were coming in on Virginia and Florida, and and Georgia that that he was gonna win big so why did you actually watch it's like watching Man United or Spurs they always lose you know I want I demanded
myself that I understand how people are thinking and reacting so I watched because I want to I don't just want to have my own point of view I want to know which way the wind is blowing and form a point of view about that as well and to do that you've got to engage with everyone so I so I I toughed it out. I did go to bed around 10 o'clock, by the way. I didn't stay up all night.
Oh, so you weren't up all night. Because I know one of the pieces that you linked to this week by Scott Galloway, I guess he's on the East Coast, or he may even be in London, he talked about staying up all night. And from your editorial, firstly, as you note, you defend Trump voters. They're complicated people, like all of us, you suggest. They're not racists or members of the KKK. They're not fascists. And then at the end of the editorial, Keith, it's almost as if you're beginning to change your mind. I'm quoting you...
uh trump i'm quoting you trump will not deliver good schools in poor neighborhoods or better paying jobs but his rhetoric sounds like he understands he even managed to sound mildly mildly pro-abortion a lot of the time neutralizing the woman's rights vote he sounded pro-innovation by praising spacex and tesla he sounded better on regulation by criticizing lina khan so are you coming around to at least acknowledging that it might be morning in America?
I think from the point of view of tech, if I stop being a political citizen with a point of view and just think about my job, it's definitely better for America, without any question. He's pro-innovation and anti-regulation, as long as he sticks to it. I worded the editorial carefully to imply that you can't trust that he will. Well, you can't trust he will do anything. Who knows? He might die tomorrow for all we know. Exactly. But I do think that Democrats don't know how to make capitalism work for them. Oh, that's a nice one. Say that again, Keith. Democrats don't know how to make capitalism work for them. Is that your phrase or did you steal that from someone else? I just made it up. I won't claim that there isn't someone out there that has said that, but I didn't know.
I'm going to put that in the title. Democrats don't know how to make capitalism work for them. Although some people might push back and say, well, the chips bill under Biden, Bidenomics was making capitalism work for them. They just didn't know how to explain how they were.
Well, I think they see enemies, not friends in tech. They really don't understand that the driver of wealth is the production of values. And the production of values requires innovation and productivity gains. And if the if there are going to be gains, it'll come largely from the application of human inventions to product, you know, problems that we're better now at solving. So AI is generally good. And most of what tech builds is good, including chips. Both parties suffer from this narrow nationalist view, which is American chips are good, but other chips are bad, which I don't sign up to. But the Democrats are too.
But I do think the Democrats are very, very cautious to embrace innovation. You and me are both British. And if you remember, Harold Wilson came to power in 1964.
A fellow Yorkshireman. And his phrase was, the white heat of the technological revolution was going to be what Labour would embrace. And they did actually do it. I remember using a computer in school when I was 10. And you don't get any of that from the Democrats, which is why you end up going to... Did who invent the internet? Al Gore. He did not. It was Vince Cerf and Bob Metcalf.
Maybe things aren't quite as bad. Talking about America, your colleague at SignalRank, very smart young man, Rob Hodgkinson, wrote a really interesting piece, an ode to American exceptionalism. Actually, we've got a bonus interview for this week of That Was The Week. I sat down with Rob and we talked more about American exceptionalism and the role of AI and SpaceX. So we're going to affix that interview to this one. And one of the pieces, speaking of American exceptionalism or American strength, Keith, you linked to in this week's newsletter is... from value capitalists suggesting that the S&P 500 makes up 51% of global stock market value. And as you and I discussed before we went live, what does that number boil down to if you just talk about the magnificent seven, the biggest tech companies?
The whole S&P 500 is $40 trillion. Yeah. Part of it made up by the big seven, the M7, as they're called, is about $14 trillion. So about a third of that. So roughly 15% of world stock markets are accounted for by seven American companies.
Do you think perhaps consciously or otherwise that a lot of the criticism of big tech these days of that magnificent seven is actually a criticism of capitalism?
I think it isn't a criticism of capitalism. In their intellectual framework, They think that capitalism left to its own devices will result in bad outcomes for people, and that only governments can correct that. And so they're a huge believer in top-down regulation. And the spirit of that is to protect people. But what it ends up doing is dampening down progress. And they haven't really found where the line is.
Well, FDR did. And Biden would claim that Bidenomics is a compromise between a completely unregulated free market and careful and responsible government investment and innovations.
But then why does Lena Kahn not allow... Well, Lena Kahn had nothing to do with the chips, actually. She didn't allow Adobe to acquire Figma. Yeah, but what's that got to do with Bidenomics? It's got everything. And we're not talking about Bidenomics. You're talking about Bidenomics. I'm talking about a broader... You've just got an obsession with Lena Kahn.
You've always had an obsession. Admit it, Keith. Ever since we've started this show. Well, just because she's terrible. You've gone after Lena before Lena even existed. I think you dislike Lena more than Musk does.
She thinks that success in tech and getting big as a company and being part of the S&P 500 and global markets is bad. And just as she thinks that men, not her, but the Democrats think that white men you know, are not as worthy as, let's say, trans men.
I'm not going to defend Lena Kahnke, but I don't think you and I know anything about her politics. She's just a... Actually, I wasn't talking about her then. Oh, you're talking about all...
We'll get to that political side for post of the week. But one thing that was interesting I found about the – it's an excellent newsletter, by the way, Keith. Even the art is vaguely amusing, your AI art. One thing I was struck by was you left out your favorite fellow, Elon Musk. He's in the news dramatically. He was on the phone, apparently, with Trump and Zelensky this week. It was a really interesting piece in the Daily Beast about how all this means that he's crushed Jeff Bezos in space. And of course, there are all the pieces about now how the Trump presidency will be a co-presidency. What do you make of... Musk's role in the Trump victory. I mean, it happened very fast. A few months ago, it wasn't even clear if he was in the Trump camp. Was this a conscious plan of his or is it just Musk being Musk and waking up one morning and thinking, well, I'm going to throw a few billion at my friend Donald Trump and I don't care what anyone thinks?
Well, it's another example of the stupidity of the Democrats. They pushed him into Trump's camp by not even inviting him to a summit about electric vehicles. when his cars are the best-selling in the world. Yeah, that was a bit dumb.
Do you think Lena was in charge of the invite list?
Words and timings
DoyouthinkLenawasinchargeoftheinvitelist?
Speaker 3
I don't know who was in charge, but she probably knew about it. And I would say that it's just stupid because he's a doer. Musk is a doer. He's not going to hang around anywhere where he's not allowed to do things. So they pushed him out. He went to Trump. He found reasons to agree with Trump, including some unsavory ones that I completely disagree with them on, like immigration. But he will, I suspect, he will do to the government, if he's allowed, I don't know he'll be allowed, but if he's allowed, he'll do to government what he did to Twitter, which is get rid of a very large percentage of bureaucrats and slim it down and make it, if he can, more efficient.
Although I'm not sure. I mean, I hadn't heard that argument before. I'm not sure... But what he did to what he calls now X is a model for the US government, because it's not as if X is particularly functional, is it?
Well, it is very functional. When you think he's only got 20% of the original workforce, and as far as I can tell, it's fine. And everyone was saying it was going to collapse, and it didn't. And you've got to admit, government is a bit like that. I mean, the fact that most government is analog, you know, when you go and get your driver's license, you have to go to a building and stand in a queue in an era where we have iPhones with digital driver's licenses. Government is incredibly backward and inefficient. And anyone with his brain looking at Any government department is going to come up with ways to improve it.
I hope Musk deals with the DMV because if he is indeed co-president this week, my daughter took her driving test. She made a reservation at the DMV in Daly City, just on the edge of Silicon Valley. And I had to drive her because of course she didn't have a car. We were there six hours. Now that's with a reservation. Of course, fortunately she passed. It would have been even more annoying had she not. So if Elon Musk is watching, I hope he addresses the DMV. A big issue, of course, Keith, is what Trump's going to do with AI.
Jeff Robinson is listening to us, says we'd be better off sticking to tech and not politics. And Jeff, I think we both have some sympathy for that, but I think we thought we could not talk about politics.
Well, you chose. You wrote this. I wrote it. About Good Morning America, AI Trump in the future. So let's get to AI. What Trump's victory could mean for AI regulation from your friends at TechCrunch? What do you think? Is this a big deal?
They want their kind of regulation. And as we all know, Musk and Altman, there's no love lost between them. And I would imagine that Musk is going to get more of his own way than Altman's going to get because he's an insider. So let's see. But it's definitely going to be a lighter touch than it would have been had the Democrats won. I personally think that's a good thing. It didn't make me vote for Trump. I voted for Harris despite being more regulatory for social reasons. But, you know, there is a strong case to be made that less regulation in AI is good. If you contrast it with Europe, where they brought in an AI act. Yeah. Europe is just not in the race.
And in the video that will follow with Rob Hodgkinson, he really talks about that. He's slightly younger than Keith and I. He's a British VC who came over to the U.S. recently. He's been living in Menlo Park for four years. And he really talks about this, his ode to American AI exceptionalism addresses this increasing gap between America and the rest of the world, particularly Europe. So it's an important difference.
Well, do you think that Musk's association, closeness with the current, with the administration, at least in the beginning, who knows what will happen? You note that he's not particularly close to Sam Altman. I think he's suing OpenAI. He's not close to Bezos.
Could this be a little bit of a civil war in Silicon Valley between the, certainly, firstly, Musk against everybody else, and then the pro-Trump camp and the anti-Trump camp? Because there was a lot of ill will before the election.
Yeah. Well, look, I think Trump doesn't have a point of view on almost most things. And so he's going to rely on Musk in domains where he thinks Musk is the right person, other domains, different people. So it's going to be a patchwork quilt. There's going to be no coherent political ideology, I don't think.
Well, the name that always comes up, because it always comes up in these kind of conversations, particularly with Democrats, is is Thiel and his association with J.D. Vance. Was Thiel the puppet master here? Because my understanding was that Thiel didn't give much money to Trump.
Yeah, the PayPal mafia continues to... I wonder how Reid Hoffman is feeling. I wonder if they will make up Hoffman and Thiel and whether the... Because I still think the majority of people in Silicon Valley... especially the wealthy are pro-democrat, don't you think?
But we don't care, because as you said, in the end, it benefits all of us. We all have our portfolios, which dramatically went up this week. We don't have to worry about massive changes in taxation law.
No, I actually think that most of the 70 million people who voted for Trump, 70 million plus, need a higher minimum wage. They need free healthcare. They need better schools in their neighborhood so that their kids can compete with kids from wealthier neighborhoods. And that's a class divide. Maybe they just need AI. AI will be an accelerant for sure. But there has to be a plan. It doesn't just happen.
Your startup of the week is an interesting one. And very much in keeping with the theme of the show, AI. And good morning, America. Perplexity. There's a $9 billion valuation. It's the most direct competitor, I guess, to Google. Is that fair? As an AI, quote unquote, search engine?
It wants to be. I don't know that it really is. Cause I, I'm not convinced that the interface for search is going to be a webpage, which perplexity is a webpage that embeds AI inside. So it's a close cousin of the Google look and feel with better content, I would say. So it could, but you know, Google's very sticky. I think, I think OpenAI is a more dangerous competitor for Google.
Well, that goes without saying. I mean, it has a $150 billion valuation. I agree. I think Perpexity is one of these companies that will get squeezed, is that you can't be half pregnant in the tech market to use some
Oh, so Janae uses it, and she's at, what, Crunchbase? So maybe it's for real. I mean, last week we announced the OpenAI search engine, or OpenAI sort of reimagining itself as a search engine. So what does perplexity do that nobody else does?
It integrates lots of sources into search results, including OpenAI. And so if you type in a keyword like search or a prompt, you'll get back a Google-like user interface, but with much better content from various sources.
So who's behind this valuation? It seems like if you're going to be really betting on this thing, you're better off investing in open AI. Is it VCs who can't afford to invest in open AI?
I doubt it. Institutional venture partners are huge. And so they're doing this out of choice. And I think, the most likely outcome for perplexity is it gets acquired.
And if you look at the big boys in tech, they're really not leading their AI charge. It is Anthropic and OpenAI and Mistral in France and a few others. So the big guys, they've already started acquiring things to try to stay relevant, but they're acquiring features, current features, They're not really building the long term.
Maybe we can make this the interview of the week next week. I did an interview which will run next week on Keenon with Parmy Olson. She's written a book about this imminent competition or real competition between OpenAI and Google to control the AI market. Demis Hassabis is a central figure in her narrative. It's been shortlisted. She's the Bloomberg person in London, and it's been shortlisted for the FT Book of the Year. She suggested in our interview that she thinks Demis will be the next CEO of Google. So she has some very interesting thoughts on that. I mean, in a winner-take-all economy, which we've seen time after time after time when it comes to tech, it's very hard to imagine a place for perplexity.
Yeah, I think every person who knows what they're doing will want to be using the best AI. And at any moment in time, that means one thing. And so there is going to be a trend towards winner takes all, whoever's the best.
Yeah, and coming back to the Google thing, I'm not like you. I'm not cutting edge tech. I'm a lazy tech user, but I use it every second of my life. And Google is already sort of nudging me over to their AI world, because when I enter queries into that search engine box, what I see first now is AI, and I'm not unhappy with that.
Okay, if you were the one who denied that Google has a play and then everything is going to be open AI. So you shifting to just as you've shifting over to Trump?
You're allowed to have two wives don't tell us your name. So we're going to keep it short this week, Keith, because I'm running the Rob Hodgkinson interview after this. But your post of the week, we're not supposed to talk about politics, but you choose to, and you made your post of the week by Noah Smith, who is an excellent writer, and his Substack page, identity politics isn't working. I don't think he mentions Lena Khan, but what is Noah Smith suggesting about the lessons from the elections?
I think it's a well-understood argument that many people disagree with. But he's saying that the Democrats have privileged the underprivileged at the expense of the mass. And by their focus on the underprivileged or the oppressed, they make the archetypal white man feel shamed that he is a white man
I definitely wouldn't, but she might want me to. I don't know her well enough. But I will say, Andrew, identity politics starts life as caring for the underprivileged, but ends up denying normal people the right to a good life. It's almost like you normal people are stealing from the underprivileged, and you set up this contest which doesn't work, and you see what happens is the deplorables, as Hilliard Clinton called them, are super powerful, and they're not really racist. I think most people are fine with helping everyone have the same chances in life,
It really is, Keith. Let's end, and we're going to follow up with the Hodgkinson interview. I'll staple it onto this conversation. But can we perhaps believe that it's morning in America? I mean, everyone hated Reagan. Everyone thought he was going to blow the world up, and then he didn't. So could this be the beginning of a new positive moment in American history, and certainly in the history of tech?
Well, if you want to get there, read Keith's seven stages of grief. He's done it already. And he took about 15 minutes. And now he has a good morning, America, AI, Trump and the future. We're going to run the Rob Hodgkinson after this. Keith, I'll see you next week. I'm sure by next week, it won't be morning in America. It's probably evening. Trump or Musk or someone would have done something outrageous and will be complaining again. But congratulations on trying to be positive and optimistic at a time of confusion and complexity in America. And I'll see you next week. And I hope you'll have an opportunity to have dinner with Lina Khan.