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Blowing in the Wind [2025 Edition]
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Andrew Keen
Hello, everybody. It is Sunday, January the 19th. That was the week with my old friend Keith Teer. We haven't done it for three weeks or almost four weeks, I think, Keith. I've been in Chile and at DLD in Munich. Keith has been working on his startup. But we are back looking at the tech news for January. Another piece of news in early January, one of the big films of the year is the movie about... Bob Dylan, a complete unknown that's getting very good reviews. I saw it and didn't think it was so good, but what do I know? And Keith borrows a Dylan phrase for this week's newsletter, blowing in the wind. But rather than having Bob Dylan, a complete unknown, we have Mark Zuckerberg, who is anything but unknown. Keith, have you seen a complete unknown?
I have seen it. What an amazingly good film. It's fantastic. If you haven't seen it, go see it in a theatre. It's really good. Why is it good? The singing is excellent. You wouldn't think Chalamet could do a Dylan, but he actually does it very well, both the personality and the singing. But the storyline is great as well. It shows Dylan's alienation from his own fame really well. Have you seen it?
Well, anyway, why is this week's That Was The Week newsletter, why are you stealing some words from Bob Dylan, blowing in the wind? And what does that have to do with Mark Zuckerberg?
Honestly, I could have had Zuckerberg, Musk, David Sachs and Trump on there. But the point of blowing in the wind is to make the point they don't stand for anything. Who doesn't stand for anything? What Joe Biden this week called the oligarchy. They don't stand for anything. They're not a threat because they haven't got an agenda or a goal they're just blowing in the wind they're doing what any smart businessman would do which is making friends with the new authorities to try to ingratiate themselves with them and doing it successfully and the reaction against them would suggest that they're kind of like a political movement with a manifesto, which of course they're not.
So let's be clear. So you're responding in this editorial to the Biden remarks about a technology complex now coming in to dominate America with the Trump regime. Is that right? And the title of your editorial this week is how AI politics and capital are reshaping our future. Is that a fair summary?
I think that's a big part of it. The other part of it that I'm reacting to is Zuckerberg changing all the rules at Facebook and trying to understand why he's doing it. There's been a big backlash against him doing it. I, of course, I'm in favor of the new regime and didn't like the old one, but I may be in a minority there.
Yeah, you link to two pieces on it, one on Spike, Zuckerberg's Bonfire of the Orthodoxes, which is a nice title, and another from Information, suggesting that Mark Zuckerberg acts like Elon Musk, but isn't. Maybe he has better. He certainly has. I think Zuckerberg has better hair than Musk, doesn't he?
Well, the rumor is that that is fake hair. Is it? There are rumors that it's fake, you know. Well, he certainly looks the part. Not a wig, but some kind of... I like his new look, I have to say.
you know what he looks like now? He looks like the son of a dentist from New Jersey, which is what he is. I'm not mentioning the J word here because I get into trouble, but certainly Zuckerberg looks culturally more authentic. But anyway, enough of Mark Zuckerberg. Let's talk then, Keith, about your understanding of what's happening. In the editorial, you suggest that AI politics and capital are reshaping our future. Has anything happened in the first three weeks of January to underline that, or is it just all the complaining of Joe Biden?
No, I think it goes deeper. The resignations from various federal bodies is part of it as well. The DOJ, the FTC. I think what you're seeing is the, you know, it's like the bonfire of the vanities rewritten.
Are you stealing from... From Brendan. inadvertently but um yeah i think i think what you're seeing andrew is the backlash against the regulatory regime of the last four years where the democrats decided that tech was an enemy and tried to stop whatever kind of progress tech was trying to make things like adobe not being allowed to buy figma ridiculousness in in many ways and Slowly but surely, over the years, and there's a New York Times piece about this, people in tech started to hate the Democrats, not because of their social ideas, but because of their anti-tech. Yeah,
saying the same thing. So you've got to a place in history where the main driver of future wealth is hated by the democratic elite. And the framing is oligarchs. That seems to me to be an entirely wrong framing. Although there are a lot of people...
I blame your dog must be in the play of big tech. Just keep talking for one minute. Keith's gone off to shut his dog out. but we've been talking about political realignment and tech policy from his editorial this week. He is very critical, Keith, of what he believes is the democratic reaction to the success of big tech. Although I wonder, Keith, and we've had this conversation so many times, you always claim to be a progressive and on the left. But is this just your way of basically legitimizing your shift to the right and your embrace of Trump and Musk and all these other nasty characters in the Republican Party?
Absolutely not. I mean, at heart, I'm still driven by Hegelian philosophy. I believe in progress in the Enlightenment sense. I think that innovation is the engine of progress. Innovation, I think of as a human thing, is what we humans can do. And I think, you know, you look at Musk and, you know, try to understand his impact on humanity. It's not about his views on immigrants, is it? It's what he's done despite his views on immigrants that drive us all forward. Well, I don't want to turn this again into another conversation. I'm just using him as an example.
So let's talk then about this political realignment and tech policy. I mean, it's very hard to tell as we speak. It's Sunday. Trump is going to be inaugurated tomorrow, Monday. He's made it clear that He hasn't made up his mind on TikTok. So a lot of stuff's still unclear. But is there a real political realignment? Is Silicon Valley pretty much now behind Trump?
I think it goes way beyond Silicon Valley, but yes to that question. You know, look at the elections in Europe. Look at how quickly Starmer in England has become unpopular and Farage has gone up. There's a huge political realignment in the world, which is a reaction against liberal politics. And liberal politics are no longer progressive.
So is there anyone on the left who still believes in technology, apart from you, claims to be on the left? I'm personally not particularly convinced of that.
Um... I think the answer has to be yes, Andrew. But it's a struggle. But no one comes to mind. A struggle. I think Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman would be one.
Right. So would your advice be to democratic strategists who are trying to rethink the party that they need to rethink their relationship with technology and progress?
And capitalism, actually. They have to be able to answer the question, how are people's lives going to get better? And they don't seem to have an answer other than in the realm of identity politics, they can answer by protecting you from the majority. And that's a reasonable answer that has backfired on them. But when it comes to all of us, how are all of our lives going to get better? They don't have an answer. Now, at least the techies in Silicon Valley will say innovation and this optimism, the stuff we talked about last year a lot, this technology optimism, at least they have an answer to the question. So they can be relevant. I don't think the Democrats are even relevant to the question anymore. And that doesn't make me right wing. In fact, I'm probably to the left of the Democrats because I still want to believe in a social justice future where people have wealth.
Right. Well, you were kind enough to make my conversation at DLD with Albert Wenger, the interview of the week. And Albert is actually an example of someone who, who is a progressive, who sees technology as central in making the world a better place. So there still are people on the left who believe in technology.
No, Albert's very thoughtful. I think he's frustrated as well, right? I mean, your interview, he expressed some frustration with his... Frustration with who? With the left, generally? With his own inability to get his point across, is what I thought. But you tell me, because you were in the room with him.
Well, I think what Albert's trying to do is... use some of his initiatives in upstate New York, in Hudson, as, I don't know, experiments as a laboratory for guaranteed minimum income, regenerative farming, all sorts of other initiatives, rather than using the state, which is the old... progressive or left strategy. And it's ironic he's doing it in upstate New York, which is, of course, the homeland of FDR and the old New Deal. But this is something completely different. But I agree with you. I do think that progressives need to fundamentally rethink how to use potentially technology and rethink their relationship with big tech. You also talk in your editorial about a venture capital revolution. Your professional work, of course, focuses on that. How central is the VC revolution in the future, Keith?
Well, sadly, the word revolution there is an appropriate word given the scale of the change, but it's not necessarily a positive change. What's happening is there are far less small venture capital funds investing in startups very early in their life. Most of the money is going to a very small number of very large funds and being channeled in huge checks into AI companies, leaving the rest of the ecosystem, in a pretty sorry state.
Well, except you can predict failure here. Winner-takes-nothing might be more appropriate because the venture ecosystem relies on thousands of companies being seed-funded every year, of which some emerge as winners. But if the seed ecosystem is being starved of money, that's going to stop. And then you end up with what I would think of as artificial unicorns. Unicorns that are made valuable, over a billion dollars of value, with a single round of investment, with a lot of very large checks. That really isn't venture capital anymore. That's kind of king making. So the venture revolution is the antithesis, and it does beg the question how you can go back to basics with venture capital and just play the game as it's meant to be played, which is discovering talent, ideas.
Another of the themes that you talk about in your interesting editorial, setting us up for 2025, is two other big issues. The China question and what you call the moderation over correction and the return of free speech. Let's talk about the China question first. As we speak, it's still not clear on what Trump's going to do on TikTok. He says, stay tuned. It's classic Trump. How important do you think the China question in tech terms will be in 2025?
It really isn't very important in tech terms because the separation of China and US tech is now pretty much absolute. And so it's like a parallel universe as opposed to an overlapping one. What that really means is that China is building its own capabilities separate from the US. The tariffs and trade wars are forcing that to be even a wider separation. However... So what's the China question then?
Well, Noah Smith, who wrote that piece, is basically arguing that China is weaker than we all think. And I disagree with him. I think China's stronger than we all think. And the TikTok thing is a bit of a sideshow to what's really happening, which is probably best observed by looking at the Chinese electric vehicle industry, which is now dominating everywhere in the world except the United States, because it's not allowed in.
So I think the China question is, you know, who... the the gdp of the world the the pie chart of the gdp of the world the chinese slice is growing and the american slice is roughly being maintained shrinking a little bit relatively speaking but in absolute terms still growing europe is shrinking big time and and so you go you're getting to a kind of a bipolar asia america's globe that is highly competitive at the nation state level and the tick tock thing is just a disgusting demonstration of how nation states will pick fake battles in order to fight each other because it because tick tock clearly is not a threat to
anyone yeah and you and i don't agree on everything but we agree 100 on this tick tock thing it's It's ugly and absurd. And what about, this is one area where I think we don't agree. You've always been obsessed with free speech and the moderation overcorrection. You use the word woke all the time. What do you mean by this?
Moderation overcorrection is what happened in the last 10 years. And it really, honestly, it's very personal to me, Andrew. I've told you the story before, but As early as 1994, I was visited by Scotland Yard at EasyNet in London and asked to spy on people on the internet. And I said no, because that was the right thing to say. But slowly and surely, the state has more and more sought to influence how content on the internet is moderated, in quotes, or censored, if you want to think of it that way. When Zuckerberg, and I think he did this for business reasons, announced that they're gonna stop doing it, I applauded. Even though I think he's doing it for self-serving and the wrong reasons, I think it's a good thing. Because, you know, Francis Fukuyama's piece this morning is interesting.
Yeah, and you didn't, I'm not sure if you include that in the newsletter, but it's a piece that Fukuyama wrote in Persuasion entitled, Elon Musk and the Decline of Western Civilization.
Correct. And what Fukuyama argues there is that because you can't trust Musk and Zuckerberg and others to, in quotes, moderate, there has to be a new layer of software forced on them that does it for them and protects us, you know, vulnerable humans from being influenced by them. And so he's basically arguing for a state software layer that censors what is underneath.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that's entirely. I mean, Fukuyama, Francis Fukuyama is about a... liberal in a classical sense as you're going to get i'm not sure if he quite means
interesting piece i'm not sure he's particularly sophisticated in these middle layers i would also say that there's a great difference between zuckerberg and musk or between facebook and x when it comes to social media i mean the the The Fukuyama piece is about how Musk is using X now to essentially promote his own agenda, whereas the Zuckerberg issue is entirely different. I mean, Zuckerberg, as you suggest, he doesn't really have any issues except promoting Facebook as a business. He doesn't have an ideological agenda, whereas Musk spent $40 billion or whatever it was on X to basically pursue his own ideological agenda. So they're entirely different.
Well, I'd say that Musk did do that, but he doesn't ban people who disagree with him. And in fact, what's happened is people who disagree with him, like Paul Krugman, of abandoned X and gone to threads or substack. And so Musk has a louder voice due to decision by, let's call them the left, although I don't really think they're very left. They're the woke left, Keith, in your language. The left has abandoned ship and doesn't want to have a discussion. It's very hard.
I mean, I take your point in a sense, but it's very hard. have a serious debate on x with musk who owns the platform and god knows how he uses it to promote himself given his own manner his his own sort of bully bullying
quality bullying nature so i well unfortunately i'm not very influential but i will say i've responded to musk's calls for uh doge the cheapening of the of the state um by engaging with him and saying modernizing the state is the right thing to do, improving the services, and you can do that for less money. And he responds. So it really is, engagement is the source of all knowledge. If you disengage, by definition, you can't win. Yeah, well.
I'm not so sure, but let's look forward a bit in your editorial. You look forward to where we're going in 2025. You talk about AI's impact on wealth inequality. We already did a show at the end of last year on looking forward to 2025. We're three weeks, Keith, into 2025. What else should we be looking forward to or fearing in 2025?
Most fear to me is on the global stage in the competition between nations. I don't feel at all good that we're becoming more nationalistic and saber rattling. I do think that AI is moving much faster than any of us thought it could, including me. The agent stuff we've been talking about is now real. There are people building entire org charts for companies based on defining agents to do tasks collectively. So they'll have a director agent, a communications agent, a marketing agent, an engineer.
One of the people I met at DLD this year, Richard Socha, who I actually have an upcoming interview with, he is the founder and CEO of u.com, and I think that's what they're focused on.
Yeah, and everyone is. I mean, ChatGPT just launched tasks. So you can now go to ChatGPT and give it a task that you want to be repeated every day. For example, collecting articles that you care about off the internet would be a task or putting something in your calendar once a week might be a task. But you basically give the agent work, busy work that you don't wanna have to do yourself.
Will the agent understand your Yorkshire accent, Keith, when you say task? Funnily enough, it does, yeah. Well, so you're expecting dramatic change, even more than some people expect, promise, or even fear in 2025. Yeah,
I think pretty much everyone in the world that has a smartphone, which is about 4 billion people, is gonna have access to a knowledge base which is trustworthy and pretty complete and able to carry out tasks. So robotics is probably emerging but not gonna happen this year. But how far away are we from asking a robot to go to Safeway and buy the groceries and bring them home? Probably single digit years away.
What we're not far from is a robot determining what we want at Safeway, ordering it online and having it delivered. It doesn't have to go to Safeway. Isn't that rather old-fashioned?
Interesting discussion. We're now getting into a product discussion. It's decentralized versus centralized robots. I think they're going to be decentralized. I think people, especially in America, are so individualistic. They're going to want their own robot.
Well, a lot of things to look forward to or fear, perhaps, Keith. Let's move on to your startup of the week. This is not speculative. It's Shield AI, which...
according to the FT, hit a $5 billion valuation. And according to the information, Palantir is in talks to invest in Shield. It's a drone startup. Why did you choose Shield AI?
Well, this is an area that concerns me because I think this is tech seeking to reinforce national conflict and participate in it, which I personally don't think is equal to progress. But it's real and it's everywhere. One of the signal rank companies is in this space, Saronic, they do naval AI. And... you know, Palantir and Anduril.
Palantir, of course, is named after Lord of the Rings. It's Peter Thiel's startup. Coming back to your friend Elon Musk, and I don't mean that metaphorically, you seem to like the guy. I mean, he's embracing all these blood and soil companies from Trump to the AFD to Maloney. Isn't he part of the problem of the tech military complex? at least his ideology of nationalism of of encouraging nationalism he wants to bankroll a farage style party in the uk even if he's no great fan of nigel farage
yeah it's a com is i think it's a complicated and nuanced conversation because in other words i'm right i think i think there's a lot right in what you say at the same time i do think that the populist uh parties in europe that i get that are attracting a lot of votes, to some extent represents a backlash against a lack of concern by liberal parties for ordinary people. And so I think there's a genuine bottoms up rejection of some parts of what the liberal establishment has been doing for the last decade or so, that is more genuine. Then I think, of course, there's all kinds of bad people who try to galvanize that into movements that we'd all disapprove of.
Yeah, so let's go back to shield. So what should we be fearful if Palantir becomes an investor, maybe even acquires a company like shield AI with men like Peter Thiel, who have agendas, which a lot of people are chilled by?
I think we should be concerned at the inevitability of robotic warfare. That's really what's at the root of all this. It's robotic warfare done cheaply, highly destructive and not very expensive. And that is the goal. It's well stated and not hidden at all. And then the question becomes, is the world unstable enough for those weapons to be used?
That's your progress, Keith, the thing that you believe in. I don't know how you would draw that conclusion. Well, that's one of the consequences of all this technology. I mean, it's not just accidental or haphazard.
Well, clearly, it's easy to predict, right? It's not that complicated. America, because it is the most threatened due to its power, is the most likely user of such technologies. And one would imagine China therefore will become the second most likely user and Europe will be kind of on the sidelines, not participating. And so we're heading to a China-US
That's the China question for you, at least. Right. Now... It could be a US question, or at least the China-US question. So we've got two things going on simultaneously, it seems. On the one hand, the automation of warfare, drone AIs, shield AI, and all the rest of it. On the other hand, this return to the 19th century obsession with soil, whether it's Trump's ambition of acquiring Greenland or the Panama Canal or Mexico... the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China's interest in Taiwan. So these two things seem to be happening simultaneously.
Well, that's the breakdown of globalism. And, you know, globalism, is both alienating and unifying at the same time, depending on how you think about it. I personally think the human race ultimately is global and nations don't define us, but that's not true right now. And a lot of the tech bros as they're thought of are only too happy to get behind American militarism in this context.
There's a growing corridor between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon. There's a new book, Unit X, which is an important book in that area. We will return to that. And I wonder whether the Russian-Ukrainian war will be the first war where a lot of this AI stuff is being used. I know that drone technology is increasingly influential. We will see. We will return to that. Finally, our post of the week Keith you're not shy you've chosen one by yourself an ex post uh criticizing the DLD conference where I've just returned from what what did DLD do wrong this year
We'll read it. And I'm quoting Keith Teer here on his at KTeer account. This is a very tone deaf at DLD conference meme. The problem is seen by most is unchecked. woke power, AI optimism is far stronger than AI pessimism. And you were critical of a session with Mariette Kasharka and Gary Marcus, who's been on the show, I know you've debated. So what did DLD do wrong?
So this bit, put it back up. Unchecked corporate power is reshaping politics, global policies and democratic safeguards. Can public awareness, grassroots movements and regulatory frameworks restore balance? What DLD, at least this panel at DLD, and DLD chose to send this out in an email to everyone who's ever been associated with it, seems to be defining this era as unchecked corporate power, which is what Elizabeth Warren and Lena Kahn have been trying to do for the last four years and continue to try to do. And it's just the wrong framing, an unchecked corporate power has not been what we've been seeing. What we've been seeing is, you know, a kind of an intellectual left seeking to redefine speech by drawing lines about what is not acceptable. Redefining biology is a big part of that. What's redefining biology got to do with it? Well, saying there's more than two genders, for example.
If you want to understand what's happening in the elections around the world, it isn't to do with unchecked corporate power. It's more to do with a rejection of of what is represented as liberal ideas. And liberal ideas seem unwilling to accept that. And this DLD conference, I could be wrong, you were there, I wasn't, you should tell us, appears to be clinging on to the past and not acknowledging.
Yeah, I mean, in defense of DLD, they had lots of speakers there who share your opinion. I mean, Richard Socher, for example, the founder of you.com, was there Astro Teller, Azim Azar exponential view. So lots of people actually are more positive and optimistic. So you picked on one panel that happened to be.
I picked on it just because they sent the email and so it stood out to me. But clearly, the spirit of what I'm saying is, we should be wanting to build a future where ordinary people, of all kinds have a an optimistic reasonable optimistic expectation of a better life yeah but let's go back to that we're starting fights with corporate but let's
return to the dld the the particular dld email that you didn't like. They say, can public awareness, grassroots movements, and regulatory frameworks restore balance? I mean, isn't that a credible point? I mean, you've got these trillion dollar, multi-trillion dollar companies that are pulling all the shots that are determining policy. You've got multi-billionaires, maybe even trillionaires like Musk now. acquiring the platforms. This is the new William Randolph Hearst of the 21st century. They're not talking about disempowering them. They're simply talking about restoring balance. What's wrong with that?
Well, I think that's equivalent to wanting to go back in time. No, it isn't. They don't say that. No, restoring balance means going backwards to what it was before, in their view. And You can never go back. That's the whole point of history and understanding history is that you have to, all transformations are based on what exists today. And successful capitalism produces billionaires and companies worth trillions. That is symbolic of human achievement. It's not a bad thing.
Yeah, but then going back to the conversation I had with Albert Wenger, one of the partners at Union Square Ventures, certainly one of the most imaginative and progressive of venture capitalists, he has his own plans. He's not going backwards. So I think you're just riding everyone else. And I think the point about restoring balance is an important one.
It means, for example, what Albert's doing of small-scale experiments in new ideas, whether it's citizen assemblies or guaranteed minimum income projects or other privately funded local public works on different kinds of farming that offer an alternative to... the the nature of big tech you're just writing off you're saying there's no alternative it's either big tech or or reaction actually no i i think of big tech
as transitional uh not an end game but it's i think it's an inevitable transitional stage because successful capitalism breeds wealth and wealth is the yeah that's not
Coming back to balance, I think most people coming back to the DLD quote, restoring balance doesn't mean banning them. I mean, they include regulatory frameworks, but it means giving people a sense that they're determining their own futures as opposed to it being determined by the Musks and the Googles and the Zuckerbergs of the world. Most people feel an absence of agency, I think. And you're right, certainly the left has done a bad job generating uh political success they haven't figured out how to translate that sense of the absence of agency into successful political movements the right is doing a better job but it doesn't mean that the left can't do that i think i think
the left has to do that but to do that it has to abandon this framing the framing has to be to embrace the success and transform it into social good instead of trying to stop success. And the left has become the no people, which isn't attractive. They're not going to win any hearts and minds by being the no people. They have to be the yes people. And the yes people have to believe that wealth is the source of individual freedom. Individual freedom, where you have choice in your life, how to spend your day can't happen unless there's wealth. And unfortunately, the transitional stage to that wealth is capitalism, and big companies are part of that. And so instead of embracing the stage we're at and transforming it, there are no people, and no people aren't attractive.
Yeah, I got a nice, no people aren't attractive. I don't disagree with you on that. And certainly one of the lessons from Europe is that Europe is becoming the no continent, which is disappointing and depressing.
Well, there we have it. Lots more on this, I'm sure, as the year unfolds. Keith believes that the left needs to learn how to become the yes people as opposed to the no people. I agree with that. And we'll try and spend some of this year at least trying to figure out what yes on the progressive front looks like. Keith, have a good week. And we're back on our regular schedule. We'll do the show again next week. So that was excellent. And we have fortunately avoided talking about either Manchester United or Tottenham Hotspur. That's deeply depressing, even more depressing than the state of Europe. Thank you, Key. Bye.