Nov 16, 2024 · 2024 #41. Read the transcript grouped by speaker, inspect word-level timecodes, and optionally turn subtitles on for direct video playback
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Elon, Silicon Valley and Government
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Speaker 1
almost two weeks after the election, but lots of ramifications. I was just in Northern Virginia. This week, I saw a sign, Trump Vance 2024. Actually, there are many, many Trump signs, no Harris signs. And someone had stuck up another sign saying, winner. So there's a sense of victory in Trump territory. And victory is the theme of Keith Tears. That was the week editorial this week. Elon, Silicon Valley and government. Keith suggests there is one winner regarding the most significant developments this week. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Keith, those are two winners, aren't they? Or are you really just talking about Elon? Or is it Elon and Vivek? And do they somehow come together as one entity in terms of your editorial?
Yeah, I mean, look, it's unprecedented, I think, in recent history, for two leading tech people, well, one very leading and the other one somewhat in his shadow, to be given a lot of authority over what the meaning is of government. The Department of Government Efficiency is really all about redefining government. And I don't know that that's been done ever.
Another example of Keith Teer beginning to maybe not change his mind, but accept that a Trump victory isn't quite as bad as most of your friends believe?
Well, I don't think we have the luxury to decide, you know, to get bogged down with regret about him winning. I mean, that would seem to be pretty useless and self-defeating. So... The spirit of the editorial this week is to accept reality and then figure out how to make it work well. And that involves engaging, not disengaging. And I think it behooves anyone really who's a thinking person to have a point of view about this, because something is going to happen.
Although with Trump, it's not always something happens. So as you say, one winner, Elon and Vivek, advisors to the Trump administration on government efficiency. They're just advisors, what that means. Let me ask you the core question here, which I don't know the answer to this. It's one question that is really intriguing to me. I mean, maybe I'm not quite even sure how to express it, but is there a, in your view, clearly there is from Trump and Musk's point of view, but in your view, is there a fundamental problem with American government? Is it broken?
I think just a citizen, Andrew, not MAGA. I mean, look, as a social liberal, I want services to be delivered, but I don't want people lining their pockets and um or being or you know unnecessarily large numbers of people engaged in activities for us that could be done with way less people or more technology that all seems good to me i i don't think we have any interest in in protecting inefficient
Well, corruption is all about lobbying and payoffs.
Words and timings
Well,corruptionisallaboutlobbyingandpayoffs.
Speaker 1
Well, in your editorial, you mentioned the DMV, which is always exhibit A when it comes to government inefficiency. My daughter took a driving test a couple of weeks ago and she asked me to take it. I had to take it because she obviously couldn't drive the car. It was in Daly City. And even though she had a resume, I mean, this is just my anecdotal horror story of the DMV. Even though she had a reservation for her test, the whole thing still took five or six hours, which was one of the biggest wastes of five or six hours in my life. But is the DMV just an absurd extreme? I mean, it's not corrupt. It's just inefficient.
No one's benefited from five or six hours wasted at the DMV. Yeah, I don't mean to imply that everything to do with government is corrupt. There is corruption in government, but it's not everywhere. And the DMV is more of a sign of an unchanging way of doing things. They have introduced, to be fair, some technology. You can renew your driver's license online now without going there. So there is some technology, but very little. It looks very like it would have looked in the 1950s. Same with passport issuance. I mean, you've got to go to a little office and fill in paper forms, which is ridiculous. So given what Elon did with space travel, which is make it better and cheaper, one would assume if he's...
Yeah, yeah. He's achieved way more than NASA at way smaller cost, but basically by reinventing all the processes. So you've got to assume that his mindset going into this is going to be that kind of a mindset, which when it's all said and done, wouldn't be a bad thing. It'd be a very good thing.
Well, some people might say, that the other model is the X model, where he came in and fired most of the people at Twitter. I guess in his defense, it doesn't seem to have made much difference to the product. Well,
from a business point of view, aside from the political backlash that impacted advertisers, he's made it better. I mean, Twitter's a lot better than it used to be.
But it's a lot. Again, I mean, I don't want to turn this into an ex-Twitter conversation. I'm not sure it's better, but certainly it works. It doesn't crash every fight.
Yeah, it doesn't crash, and it's done at much lower cost. And as the advertisers come back in, and there were signs this week that they are coming back in, it may turn out to be a very wise and smart decision.
The SpaceX example is interesting. I have to admit, I don't know enough about what he has and hasn't done at SpaceX versus what NASA has and hasn't done. Clearly, the old state is in a moment of dramatic transformation. Are you suggesting that... NASA couldn't have done what SpaceX has done? Is that?
Well, they wouldn't have had the mindset to even try because they're basically on an unlimited government stipend, which really doesn't promote efficiency. It is the case that the need to compete with NASA led Musk to do things. They're now his biggest customer. And he's got that mindset of just doing things better, cheaper. He's a startup guy. So when he thinks of a problem, he starts with the latest techniques. He doesn't start with what exists in the existing organization. He starts with, what can I do given existing techniques? And so it's a very different way of thinking about a problem. So you've got to believe if he looks at the post office, if he looks at the health service, if he looks at state-level things like the DMV, he's not going to come up with old-fashioned ideas that are just incrementally changing from what exists. He's going to come up with a whole... hopefully better way of doing things.
There's a number of fears. You don't need me to tell you this. The first is that he's just going to strip the state and essentially do away with it, which would undermine many essential services. The second, and maybe this is more relevant, is you mentioned that currently the state, that the American state is expensive, inefficient, and corrupt. But isn't, as a lot of people are arguing, isn't uh masks involvement in this by definition corrupt i think that spacex he has about a hundred billion dollars worth of contracts with the state so how can how can you allow him to re-architect the state i mean it's isn't it letting the the the poacher uh run yeah well that that that what's the turn the poacher you know turning the poacher into the the the gamekeeper the gamekeeper i mean isn't it slightly absurd
I think you could look at it that way and many people do. A lot of my friends do. I don't think it would be easy for him to avoid that accusation given that he has his finger in so many pies and the government is a customer of some of his businesses. But I actually don't believe for a second that that's in his head going into this. I think his purpose genuinely will be to make government more efficient. And that could involve firing a lot of people, which isn't really the same as destroying. It's what you replace it with. And with AI, with technology, the cloud, with smartphones, re-imagining almost any government service is certainly possible. Just think of voting. I mean, it's a controversial one, voting, but why do people have to walk to a polling booth and fill in a piece of paper?
I wonder, though, when you look at, say, the health care service, which is an odd sort of dysfunctional mix of state and private enterprise, health insurance doesn't work any more inefficient any more efficiently when whenever i go to my doctor it's the only time i ever use the telephone they're just as archaic as the dmv yeah is it something i use the facts with mine right so is there something about the state as a kind of monopoly and medicare or the medical system as a monopoly and by definition whether or not it's a state they're inefficient
Look, I think without any intent, the state, you know, in the best case, the state becomes a bureaucracy. And the bureaucracy is lethargic and self-serving. There's no accountability to deliver services, really. Thatcher made this point in the UK a long time ago when she privatized stuff.
And you're no great fan of Mrs. Thatcher, are you? As you get older, Keith, are you becoming a little bit more sympathetic to the Elons of the world who are unleashed on inefficiency?
I'm not just a little bit sympathetic. I'm very sympathetic. I mean, I think, why would we want to tolerate inefficiency, any of us? It doesn't make sense. And it isn't political, by the way. I mean, I'm definitely not... It is political. I mean, I'm not trying to... What I mean by it isn't left and right, I consider myself very, very left.
Well, because the right is super individualistic and anti-state for ideological reasons, which is a completely different mindset. I'm not against the state. I believe the state should be the deliverer of human services required by people like dealing with homelessness, health, it's fine that the state also is focused on defending the country, the military and so on.
So you believe in the Pentagon? You believe in what, Medicare? I mean, what parts of the American state would you get nervous if Elon started chopping it up?
It's a very different thing. I'm entirely, I earned my pension. I actually, I'm old enough to draw a pension and I earned it. And if anyone takes it away, I'll fight to keep it. Medicare is great as far as it, It works, but it doesn't go far enough. I'm a strong believer in universal health care free at the point of consumption. And I think that should be delivered and could be delivered efficiently by getting rid of all the insurance industry that rakes money in from us.
Well, you could deliver healthcare way cheaper than is currently delivered and maintain its quality if you wanted to. And I don't know why anyone going in wouldn't start with that idea. How to deliver a better service more cheaply, surely that should be the mantra of anyone delivering a service.
You're beginning to sound for Beryl Wurst more and more like Mrs. Thatcher. One of the pieces that you link to this week is Douglas Murray, who's a very popular conservative writer. Welcome to Life on Planet Elon from The Spectator. I didn't actually read it. Is it supportive or critical of Musk, this piece?
Do you think that's true, though? I mean, some people have suggested he's really, you know, talking about winners, Trump, Vance 2024. The real winner is Musk, and it's really Trump-Musk 2024.
We don't really know, do we? But it would not surprise me, based on what we do know, that Trump feels like he's landed the golden ball with Musk. He's got a person who will be obsessive, put in the effort and deliver results that Trump himself with standard politicians would be unlikely to be able to achieve. So I think if I'm Trump, I'm thinking of delegating a lot of thinking to Musk and Ramaswamy without making them accountable because therein lies the conflict issue. So they make them advisors.
They're the advisors. So, I mean, if you put Musk and Ramaswamy together with RFK Jr., there's a lot of fear, a lot of hysteria over these first Trump appointments. Are you... I mean, is it possible that what Trump will do is actually re-architect a more efficient state?
I'm not really an RFK antagonist. His core point, which is that the human body needs viruses in order to fight them, and that drugs, especially antibiotics and antiviral drugs, actually make the immune system weaker, not stronger is not a weird point. I mean, it's a completely reasonable piece of science. So he's pretty clearly not anti-vax. Whenever asked, he says he's completely for the freedom of the individual to take vaccines. So there's a lot of mythology around him.
I'm not sure, Keith, whether you may be expelled from Palo Alto after this show. You're defending RFK Jr., Elon, Vivek. We will see. Meanwhile, the ramifications of the election continue. Another piece that you linked to, which I actually thought was very good from my old friend, Yasha Munk. Dear journalists, stop trying to save democracy. He basically argues in this. It's a really good piece. the mistake journalists made was taking an anti-Trump position, which has actually undermined even more trust most people have in journalism. Did you like his argument? I believed that for a long time.
I could barely watch my favorite morning news show is Morning Joe on MSNBC. And for the last two or three years, I could barely watch it because they They just kept repeating the same anti-Trump stuff over and over, which even if I agreed with it, which I mostly did, it was completely boring. And it turns journalism into... You know, they're joining the army on one side and become combatants. And you really don't want journalists to do that. It's fine if there's opinion pieces that do that as an adjunct. But for the most part, you want journalists to be journalists. And they do undermine themselves if they start to be arguers for opinion, which I think they are on both left and right. That has happened. So, yeah, I think it's a great piece and it's a reminder of what a free press is meant to do. It's meant to hold people accountable. It's meant to ask questions, but it's not meant to form political movements on one side or the other.
Yeah, I thought it was a good piece too. I mean, one of my concerns is that in the run-up to the election, you know, on these CBS and ABC and NBC and CNN shows, the podcast shows, when they had panels, they never even invited Trump people on. The only people they had, or mostly, were Republicans who were anti-Trump. So it was actually rather hard to hear a pro-Trump person on mainstream media. It's no wonder that they seem so out of touch. I mean, every... Ever since I've lived in America, and particularly since the creation of the internet, there's been this obsession with the crisis of mainstream media. Do you think that there's a particular crisis? I mean, the numbers on CNN and some of the other networks are dramatically down.
Yeah, I think it's a massive crisis. There's another article, which will be in next week's newsletter, about the decentralization of media, talking about podcasts, Substack, and lots of other forums. Like ours, Keith. Like ours.
But I think that those are symptoms. The cause is that the media became the equivalent of a group of protesters going to a rally and trying to shout down the speaker. There was no ability for anyone to articulate a coherent point of view without being labeled, screamed at, demonized. And by the way, that's on both sides. So that is kind of kindergarten politics, the screaming match politics, with journalists joining sides on one screaming group or the other.
Yeah, and I didn't watch much of the election night because it was very, so repetitive and boring. And it was obvious who was going to win after about 10 minutes of returns. But it struck me of how archaic some of the people are, particularly on CNN. And meanwhile, it's the independent media that's strong. And Harris's failure to even appear on The Rogan Show is astonishing. It's breathtaking and it's stupidity. And the argument was that she, one argument, I mean, I'm not sure if it's true, that she chose not to go on to Rogan because he offended some of her staff, somehow captures just how absurd her candidacy was.
Well, I read this week that the actual explanation is that the left of the Democratic Party basically would have objected to her going on and that she didn't want to open up a fight within the Democratic Party. And thank you, Jeff Robinson, for saying we sound like Republicans with a small R. I don't think I am a Republican with a small R. I think I'm basically...
You're on the extreme left, Keith. You're on your own. I don't buy that. But I think you are, for better or worse, a Republican, which is... It just means you're going to get expelled from Palo Alto. You'll have to come and... San Francisco. You could probably go and live in Sacramento or the Valley. They'll have you. So enough politics. I'm sure people are already bored with it. Interesting other essays. One piece in particular is AI progress hitting a wall. Lots of reports this week that the AI technological revolution is beginning to splutter. Is there any truth to this, Juni?
It's hard to tell as an outsider, although I will say that Sam Altman tweeted, there is no wall. And there's a more substantive piece that got published this morning by a third party saying that, firstly, there is no scaling problem. But secondly, that the introduction of AI agents is gonna, even on existing architecture, make it incredibly much more useful than it's so far been to carry out tasks and so on. And the end of that game is very far in the future, even if there was a scaling problem. But I think I'm beginning to think there is no scaling problem. This is just another one of those scare stories.
Another one, all the stories seem to be scarce stories. To toot the keen on horn for a minute, the interview of the week or my interview of the week is with Parmy Olsen. uh she she's the bloomberg she's a bloomberg writer in london she has a new book out supremacy ai chat gpt and the race that will change the world it's an interesting book in the sense that keith you've always been incredibly bullish on open ai and you slightly dismissive of google Her argument is that the race for AI supremacy is between deep mind slash alphabet and open AI. And she makes Demis Hassabis the central character in this book. It's been shortlisted for the Financial Times Book of the Year Award. So it's a major new book. I'm not sure if you saw the interview or read the book, but is it credible that... Hassabis might be as influential. I mean, of course, he won the Nobel Prize a few weeks ago, the chemistry prize. But do you accept that her argument in supremacy might be true, that the real race for supremacy is between Altman and Hassabis?
Well, I definitely think, I mean, Altman isn't a data scientist and Hassabis is. So there's no comparison. This is clearly the thought leader stroke capable person in the space. And that DeepMind's approach, by the way, is very different. DeepMind is not an LLM technology at all.
It's important to note that one of the changes in Google is that Hassabis now is essentially in charge of all AI initiatives at Google and DeepMind. So it's just a piece now of his control.
It is, but he's not an expert in LLMs. He probably has really good people who are. He's an expert in what's called reinforcement learning. And reinforcement learning is the approach that led to the Go outcome and to the discovery of all these proteins that were previously unknowable. And he's a super, super clever guy. And what it really points to is that the reduction of AI down to LLMs is a mistake. AI is not... reducible down to LLMs. LLMs is just a branch of AI, as Gary Marcus keeps pointing out. There's lots of others. And there are super good results from other approaches, neural networks, reinforcement learning being one of them. So I think we're at a moment when there's going to be a flowering of capability across lots of domains using lots of different techniques.
But I think that actually might make, in a sense, Olsen's point in the sense that, firstly, Altman isn't a technologist, really, and secondly, that he's put all his eggs in one basket with LLMs at OpenAI. She reminded me, it's a really interesting narrative. I'm sure at some point someone's going to make it into a movie. It was Google who, it was researchers at Google who authored the Transformer peace or technology which underlies the LLM. So Google's been involved in this narrative right from the beginning. And of course, the godfather of AI, who won the Nobel Prize also in physics, Jeffrey Hinton, was with Google. I think her argument, though, is interesting in that she predicted, and she did this publicly in terms of our conversation, that she thinks Hassabis might eventually take over at Google. Which would make Google incredibly formidable if he controls the entire company as it transforms itself from a search company to an AI company.
But the current leader is a, is a, is a technologist.
Words and timings
Butthecurrentleaderisa,isa,isatechnologist.
Speaker 3
Therein lies part of the problem that, you know, Google has to have business strategy supported by technology, not technical strategy that figures out slowly how to make a business out of it. And, and, and that's its weakness. It's also its strength. So, so both things are true. Um, I think Altman leading OpenAI is testament to that. I mean, if Altman was a technologist, he probably would be nowhere near as effective as he is because he's a business thinker.
So you remain as bullish on OpenAI. I mean, you don't have any links in this week's newsletter. It was late breaking news, but Musk is openly suing OpenAI. And
Reid Hoffman, and it's becoming, in some ways, almost a Silicon Valley civil war, especially given Elon's political strength. It must concern some of the open AI people, doesn't it?
Well, at the root of that, and it's really hard to disentangle, I don't know if you have succeeded in your head to disentangle it. Well, I've read some of the pieces. Well, so the question really is, OpenAI as an open source not-for-profit, which then pivoted to being for-profit, that's at the core of Musk's criticism because he was an investor of the not-for-profit OpenAI and is looking like he's not going to make any money from his investment because in the transition, he had more money to do that. So is Musk angry that he's lost money? or is he a kind of an ethical zealot for not-for-profit open AI that supports humanity? I actually don't know the answer. I don't know what his motivation is. I don't object to open AI becoming a full profit myself, and any more than I object to Google being for profit. So I don't really know what I think. I just know it's a mess.
I know what I think is that OpenAI, there are so many now potential political legal problems the company has. There are so many questions about Sam Altman and those come out this week, and particularly in his relations with most of the senior scientists, many of whom have left, that if I was to bet on a winner, it wouldn't be OpenAI. But you're still keeping your chips, Keith, on OpenAI?
You sound like... Well, that's a technical judgment and a business judgment. Their technology is well ahead and their business positioning inside Microsoft and Apple is fantastic. So... Google only has its self-contained AI. It's really not. And so does Facebook with its open source stuff, which is all great technology, by the way, just not as good as open AIs. So I at least would need a reason to believe they're going to fail. And I can't see one.
Look, he is what he is. There was rumours this week that he tried to, in the lawsuit actually, that he tried to get OpenAI to produce a cryptocurrency, which may be a misreading of the whole world kind thing, by the way. So I think we shouldn't rush to judgment.
I think that's different. But I'm quoting you here, and I'm going to quote this now every week. Token AI, you said, is completely impossible to defeat. We will see. I mean, I'm always very wary when words like completely impossible defeat are used in any context.
Well, like anything... the board game could change with a player coming to the table. Like Jeff Robinson in the chat just asked, what about Grok? And it's true that Grok is super good, especially at image generation, although it's on technology. It's using a third-party technology for that from, I forget the name of the company, Third Labs or something.
So Grok is good. It's just that OpenAI is literally like It's like the floods in Valencia. It gets everywhere simply from the flow of developer adoption and things being built using it. It's getting everywhere. And it stays there because it's good enough to achieve the tasks.
I'm not sure if OpenAI would be thrilled, Keith, to be compared with the floods in Valencia. But we will see. We'll come back to that. It's worth noting the FT books of the year have been very good this year. In addition to the Parmy Olsen book, Supremacy, another of the books is Unit X, a book about Pentagon and Silicon Valley. uh planning together for war and there's an interesting piece uh you link to about how silicon valley is prepping for war it seems to me to be an increasingly new silicon valley maybe post election silicon valley the last few days uh palantir's price stock market price has gone up about 25 percent is this increasingly down in palo alto keith um are people still shy to talk about technology and war or are they more comfortable now do you think it's increasingly clear that silicon valley and the pentagon are working closely together
I wouldn't necessarily say Silicon Valley, but Palantir and then Palmer Luckey's Anduril, which is producing low-cost, high-explosive-value drones, certainly are attracting a lot of capital, a lot of attention. I think you'll find Joe Lonsdale in that group.
Yeah, and so there is an increasing... And Thiel, of course, who was, I think, the founder of Palantir. Thiel, Marc Andreessen, which is this American dynamism kind of overarching theme, is somewhat sympathetic to that. So I do think there is... You could think of it as real politic, accepting the reality that America is... At the end of the day, the state is an armed body of men, as a famous philosopher once said.
Although Elon wants to do away with that state, but maybe they'll just be Silicon Valley companies like Palantir. My sense is also there's no love lost between Thiel and Musk, whether this will all break down into one kind of civil war or another. But it is a little concerning. I mean, in the old days, we used to go after Facebook and Google and Instagram.
But now, I mean, companies like Palantir, aren't they rather troubling, do you think, or not? You accept them? Are you in that, even though you're far on the left, Keith, are you far on the left as a real politic guy?
I'm... Look, I'm a globalist at core, although by globalism, I don't think in terms of a top-down bureaucracy. I think more Bitcoin equates to globalism for me or the internet. Technology equates to globalism for me. That is to say, I believe the world is shrinking through technology and human beings are getting closer and closer together at the very moment that governments are getting further and further apart. So I fear that governments, which is another way of thinking about elites, will talk themselves into military conflicts, which I think entirely opposite of the trajectory of normal.
But you can't have it both ways. You can't blame government for war when Silicon Valley is prepping for war and arming the government, whether it's the US or the Chinese government. I mean, when bad things happen, you can't just blame your bogeymen.
Well, no, I think Silicon Valley, which is too broad a category for what's happening, but Anduril, Palantir, and the like, are basically capitalist enterprises seeing an opportunity due to government And they're right to. There's a ready-made buyer, just as Musk sees NASA as a buyer.
Right. So you're suggesting that really SpaceX and Adriel or Palantir, they're all part of the same world. And that's what the Unit X book talks about. I'm chilled by it. Let's talk about startup of the week. And it's a less controversial one. Writer. Or is it writerly? It's just Writer. They raised $200 million at a $2 billion valuation, which isn't that much these days. It's got nothing to do with writing, or at least traditional writing. What does Writer do?
Well, Writer applies AI to writing. It actually does do that. Let's just get their webpage up and... use their own self description of what they do. It's basically an AI studio, the fastest way to build apps and workflows. Um, but it's for corporate.
It is for corporates. Yeah. But it's, it's doing everything that, uh, you know, if you look at their website, it says a workflow based financial services and insurance, healthcare and life sciences, retail and consumer goods, technology companies,
I mean, you just talked about open AI, I'm quoting you again, completely impossible to defeat. These kind of relatively small companies, I mean, $2 billion companies now are relatively small. Are they going to be able to survive in this world where giants like open AI dominate? I mean, I know what the, what was the last open AI valuation was about $150 billion. So do you think there is hope for companies like Wright?
I think there is if you build a timeline. There's an article by Edan Beck in this week's newsletter called something like software that builds itself. I can't remember the exact title of the... Just-in-time software. Just-in-time software. And he's focused on the gaming industry and is saying that you will be able to conjure up software for purpose instantly. And that's in a way what writer is saying as well, that it can build apps. And so the just-in-time software, thanks, Idan. Thank you for the – he's actually listening to us. No, he is? Yeah, and Idan's a super clever guy, by the way. He's done a lot of interesting things in the past, so he deserves being listened to. And this idea of software becoming the output of AI, including how it's wrapped, apps, games, workflows, tasks linked together through agents, all kinds of different ways, clearly is going to happen. OpenAI and Anthropic and their models and Llama will probably be deep underneath all of that. They'll be used.
No, it isn't a stack. If you think about it, it's a UI and a foundation. There isn't much of a stack in the middle, actually. And so it's a slightly flatter architecture. But just like Instagram could become huge because of a feature, which was, in its case, filters on images, It didn't really add any tech to the world at all, just a feature, but it was a just-in-time feature that captured the imagination and became big. I think there are definitely going to be consumer-facing and enterprise-facing AI companies that get ahead of that feature game and build things that are sticky and get big because of it. It's just that there isn't going to be the cloud SaaS stack in the middle.
Sitting on top of ledgering. And we're going to have equivalents then, you think, for Ryder in government services? Do you think that Elon and Vivek will... develop products like writer to make government more efficient that it's inevitable
they do interesting well at the beginning of all this finally your post of the week and it's oddly enough an editorial from the august new york times from a particularly August, New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, who talks about Democrats and the case for mistaken identity politics. How did you, this is the first time you've ever picked a columnist, Keith. What was she saying that's so exciting?
Well, now, now we've changed it to post of the week. I can define post as almost anything. So, and, and, To be honest, reading this, and it's quite dated, it's about a week old, so she was one of the first people to go on the record with this point of view, certainly struck me as very prescient when I read it.
quoting the first paragraph from maureen dowd who seems indestructible i don't know how many years she's been writing some democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke you always knew woke was broke you've never been a big fan of woke what what does she mean in her piece basically that ordinary people
don't like being talked down to and told that they've got to uh if you will, despise themselves and favor people unlike themselves. So identity politics, which is basically asking everybody to look at specific identities and lionize them, is not a message that ordinary people, masses of people want to hear, because it undermines them in their eyes. Now, of course, there's a lot of nuance in there. And if we tore it apart, There's some, there's a lot of ugly.
You're definitely going to get thrown out of Palo Alto now, Keith. You've come out, you're against woke, you're in favor of Elon re-architecting government. What makes you still, I mean, you should be celebrating the Trump victory. End of woke, no more of this nonsense.
Oh, well, someone sent me an email a couple of weeks ago saying Musk was going to become president, which is impossible since he wasn't born in the US. But Keith will vote for Musk, even if he's not allowed to run. That was the week, Keith. Very interesting week. Too much politics, probably. But we will be back next week, same time. If you're interested in technology, Keith is your guy. Thank you so much, Keith. Thanks, Andrew.