Siliconsciousness: The Wake Up Call Coming for AI VCs and Silicon Valley

Welcome to Silicon Fitness.

The DSR network podcast focusing

“on the artificial intelligence revolution, politics, and policy.”

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, and welcome to Silicon Fitness. I'm David Rothkoff, you're host. And this week is every week. We're going to take a look at what's going on in AI

in related areas of technology. This week, we're very fortunate to have as our guest Eric newcomer. He is a journalist known for reporting on Silicon Valley in the startup industry.

He's the founder of newcomer, Media Outlet, that covers startups and venture capital, which he launched in 2020, previously, worked for Bloomberg for the L.P. and the New York Times.

And I would like to say that I have subscribed to newcomer on Substack because it is a great place to get a sense of what's going on in the world of money.

“It's kind of an early warning system to me,”

because obviously, VCs are trying to look at a couple of moves. I had-- and I think it's great. So if you are interested in this, you should subscribe to the Substack. That's the end.

I began with an end, or how was that? I love it. Thank you so much for having me. You know, well, it's a pleasure to have you. You know, I follow what you do,

and I think there's so much going on that it's hard for me to sort of pick one place to begin. But let me start with one, since you were dealing with the VC and financing world, that I think is on everybody's mind,

which has to do with, you know, how smarter these guys are, you know, and I'll follow that up in a couple of different ways.

“But I had a dinner or lunch the other day with a friend of mine.”

And these are very smart guys. It's the editor of two big newspapers that he heard of. And, and he's a finance smarty and now VC, because that's what happens to people. And, you know, he said that he did a little experiment.

And as experiment was that he took Elon Musk's company. And he valued the companies based on the other comparable companies in their space that weren't AI companies. And so, you know, instead of SpaceX, he would look at what was the multiple unlocking.

And, you know, similarly, you know, Tesla for something like. And all of a sudden, Elon Musk went from being

the richest guy in the world to being worth about $40 billion,

which was not chicken feed, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't, you know, totally, dearly a trillion. And then 100, I would say don't hang all Silicon Valley on Elon Musk. I mean, there are certainly plenty, you know,

top investors who made a killing betting on Elon. And they've gone rich doing it, but certainly they're plenty of, you know, venture capitalists who, like you, try to run some, saying analysis on what his companies are worth compared to,

even other technology companies and it's remarkable. So Elon is definitely, you know, he's a cliche, one of one. Well, yeah, it's true, but you know, a lot of the valuations of these companies have, I don't know, a souffle like quality to them. You know, there's, there's a lot of warm air breads into them,

including that just by the VCs, but say by investment banks, look at SpaceX, SpaceX went out. And it had this ridiculous multiple and it said, well, why do you ever ridiculous multiple and said, well, we're going to go to Mars and you said, okay,

well, what if we don't go to Mars and then it said, well, we're going to build, we're going to build a lot of AI platforms, data centers in outer space. And okay, well, that could happen. And so, you know, you got some questions,

but then you look at Goldman Sachs who helps bring it public and they say, bye. And there's this kind of, it's, it's a little incestuous to know who to believe. Well, even even the investors don't know what to believe. We're working, a newcomer honest sort of anonymous survey

of like 25 top venture capitalists, you know,

basically, you know, do you think it's a bubble,

blah, blah, blah, you know, these are people on, you know, the mightest list who have their own funds, serious VCs. And, you know, we haven't released the report yet, but a lot of them think there will be a bubble at some point. You know, it is like, but they're trying to get the timing

right, you know, if your job is to deploy capital and you wait out, you know, famously financial types realized that a lot of the money gets made in the last year or so of the bubble, you know, and like making the right plays when a lot of appreciation is happening.

And you have to, you have to get the timing right. And if you're in the business of deploying capital, people, people keep investing.

“And so I think, you know, the sense from talking to a lot of VCs”

was we think there's a bubble, but, you know, it's not going to blow up in the next 12 months, you know, it's like, they think, you know, it's still a little ways out. I would to respond to another piece of what you're saying, I really would separate SpaceX from open AI and anthropic.

We haven't seen, you know, open AI and anthropic have not filed their financials, but SpaceX, you know, is a, you know, take off in landing company that that is impressive, but like you're saying, does not have sort of insane multiples that is promising to, that it's going to build space data centers,

which literally people don't know if that's even like advantageous. It is literally an open question right now, whether space data centers are better than data centers on the ground. And then if they succeeded that to really achieve the valuation

that the company wants, they have to use that advantage to build all sorts of, you know, software and AI applications that they really haven't proven, they're able to build, you know,

XAI was not some huge success Elon basically had to start

over with the acquisition of manufacturers. So that's, it's own thing and it's sort of like, Elon distortion field and I am generally fairly pessimistic, certainly at its current valuation. Opening and anthropic, there are definitely still questions,

but we have seen sort of historically fast revenue growth. Like, you know, these are companies that rip to the top of the app store, just like if you compare them to past examples of hot, hot technology companies, you know, they have really grown and are producing real sort of money along the way.

It's not quite like, you know, some of the social apps where it's like, we'll get engagement and then we'll figure out profits and people are skeptical and then, you know, those Facebook and others did sort of figure out the profits. So I think there's more rationale behind open AI and anthropic,

you know, they're still major risks in terms of, you know, in Silicon Valley we're all in my world, you know, open source, whether it's Chinese models or in video, you know, striking these deals and buying companies to support American open source, you know, potentially, you know, commoditizes what open AI and

anthropic offer which then then could really hurt them. So there are amazingly valuable businesses that still face real risks, but investors are valuing them on sort of a fantastic revenue growth. Yeah, sort of magical future thinking.

“When the only thing we know is that we've been wrong about almost all of the”

estimates so far and you mentioned China and, you know, that we've seen Chinese models evolve that are different from US models and use different amount of energy and our open source and our, you know, and they're focusing in different kinds of areas, you know, not like I want to dominate the whole field, but there's a lot of effort

to focus on applied AI, which is a whole different mentality, and I notice frankly what I look at some of your reporting that a lot of the interesting action to me when I read it is apply to AI, people doing interesting things with a gentic AI or AI that will shop for people or AI that will make it accounting for a more profitable,

that kind of thing. And a lot of the attention is on these handful of very big companies that have to my mind more questions about them than some of the other. But I think part of where you're getting at in a defense for these companies

is that one amazing thing about AI today is it is capable about all these things.

Like if I were to say, you know, if like five years ago, I was like, oh, you could plan your, you know, travel to Japan mostly with AI. You could literally take a picture wherever you are in a place in the world in Kyoto and say, where should I go next and it would have good ideas for you. Like that would have been pretty amazing, but it just sort of got bundled in

with a bunch of other cool things it could do at once.

“And so what's going to happen over, I think, and what Silicon Valley believes”

is going to happen over the next decade is that all these amazing things that's already capable of are going to get branded and explained people and we're going to lead them to it. It's like, oh, when you're traveling, you take a picture. And the question is sort of, do open AI, make all the money off that,

open AI and anthropic, make all the money off that because they have the underlying technology or they're startups, you know, that figure out how to explain it for you. Like right now, Silicon Valley is very hot on these personal agents. Instinct is raising round after round. We reported on one for businesses called town.

And, you know, both these companies are basically, you know, you sort of chat with it,

whether it's like email or text. And they say, hey, like, you know, I bought you your plane ticket and, you know,

but, you know, it's this idea of like the personal assistant.

“And, you know, open AI and anthropic want to do that too.”

And so there's going to be this sort of business question of who's better positioned independent companies that use the technology that the models have unlocked or the people who built

the super powerful models in the first place.

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And we look forward to it developing and growing over time because the issue is so important. Yeah, you know, to me it's a little bit like, you know, there's some questions like, you know, is the AI revolution like the dot com revolution, which produce some of these big super dominant companies that at these platforms.

“Or is it more like the industrial revolution that changes everything?”

And there's AI everywhere. And it's probably not a great idea to say, I want to be the Google of the next phase of technological development because there may not be a Google. And one of the big issues that's associated with that is hinted at

and what I saw in one of your most recent. And I guess it is your most recent addition of newcomers. Where the lead story is, there's a leadership vacuum and silicon valley. And as a former magazine editor, I admire the understatement of that headline. Because you know, I knew talk a little bit about Tim Cook and his departure.

But one of the problems that is linked to everything we've just been talking about

is that somehow you have these guys who are involved with this amazing technology.

And you know, a lot of them were like Elon or Sam Alkman or, you know, they're their promoters who've been really good at selling it to the financial sector. But they've turned out to be really bad at selling it to the public. And all of a sudden we have this backlash because when people look at the broldarky and they say, well, there's Elon and there's the elephants and there's Zuckerberg and there's Bezos

and there's Andrewsson and David Sachs and whatever they go, Peter Teele scares the shit out of me. I don't really give lectures on the Antichrist, not necessarily the way to make it seem like this is a safe person to be close to power. Right. And especially in the U.S. because if you go to China or you go to the Middle East or you go to Europe, there's a little more comfort with adopting AI to be honest with you. Right. It's the U.S. is where it pulls the worst. Yeah. Right. Because these

guys are, they're scary as crap, but it's like, what, how did that happen? I mean, at least Tim Cook

“wasn't that scary. And I think that's what I think you talk about in your story. But it's,”

it's Tim Cook, you know, he, you know, gives, he panders to Trump, he's, Tim Apple, he's gives them the big gift and he's available and sort of does the smiling, but, you know, which I judge him for and, you know, he, you know, we sort of held back his legacy, but at least he, you know, defended an important American institution, you know, navigated sort of an important company and kept it, you know, performing very well. And the, you know, it has apples

always taken stance on stuff like privacy and so it's conflicted with the government where it really

aligns with his values. But I agree that the faces of the tech industry are not doing a great job. I don't necessarily, I mean, if you think about like anthropic CEO, Dario Amode, like, I mean, he is, you know, a technologist, his company is born out of being sort of scared of the technologies inventing to such a point that he doesn't trust Sam Altman and wants to spin off and start a different company. His failures are often, you know, warning people about his own tech

and then getting a little surprised when some lines saying, you know, it could, you know, ruin it, you know, take all our jobs is, you know, clipped for the rest of eternity and he was like, oh, I didn't know that why don't they read my essays that I write annually that, you know, give all my, you know, I have full some views on what this could do and instead they take, you know,

yeah, has, you know, is an amazing fundraiser. So I certainly agree with, you know, we're about to see

sort of movies, movie come out about him with what's starting to Andrew Garfield about the blip when he gets outstead, you know, at that time, I wrote a piece saying that the board wasn't crazy to to Altman. So I, I do think he, you know, he has a history of sort of not honest dealing

“and so does that, and it is he the best person to be steward and AI is, I think, a perfectly”

legitimate question to ask and one that motivates andthropic. And so definitely, you know, there's this been this vacuum. I mean, you didn't even touch on the Google founders, which, you know, it seems like Sergey has become somewhat megapilled. And yeah, so it's, it's definitely a dark, dark world in terms of Silicon Valley's like moral leadership, right? I agree with that. Yeah, no, it's moral leadership, it's interesting. Exactly. But, you know, I live in DC. And so, you know,

I watch this stuff. I've been involved in tech for a while in DC for a while. And, you know, four years ago, and things guys weren't around in DC. In fact, you go to Silicon Valley and they go, we don't need DC. We don't want to be spoiled by DC. Then something happened along the way. And they said, no, we really need to be here and they buy houses here. They moved here. They set up things here. All of a sudden, they want to play the game. But, you know, because

“everybody around them says you're a billionaire, you must be very smart. They believe that. And”

they then think they know how to play this game like nobody's ever played it. Except for one thing, they then all, almost to a man said, we're signing up for mega. We're going to be with Trump. We're going to get these deals, Trump likes transactions. We're going to kiss his ass. And, you know, in two months, it's very possible that house in the Senate are going to be controlled by Democrats. We're going to say, we're not doing this with these mega tech companies. Hey, Peter Till,

come in here. We're going to do a little bit of an investigation on your black budgets for the defense department. Hey, Elon, do you really think we should have our space program in the hands of somebody who's actually supporting Neon Nazis in Europe and May or may not be supporting Russia? And all of a sudden, this could come apart. And, you know, use the term mega pill. These guys

“go all got a little bit mega pill. And I think they painted themselves into a corner.”

Did do investors see this as a problem? I agree with you that it seems like the tech set is under valuing the idea that Democrats could hold real power. This year, I mean, I guess Democrats

have never been as sort of punitive. You know, it's sort of like in some ways by, I don't know,

being a little fair, maybe the, you know, companies and investors sort of underrate the amount that, you know, they've been cozy to one party and it could matter to the other. I am similarly sort of mystified about it. I'm sorry, pounders out there hiring Democrats right now thinking, yeah, we'll just play the game. Now we'll get some Democrats. It'll all be fine. And not thinking, we may have got way out of over our skis. I mean, you know, I do think

it'll be very good for anthropic, which literally successfully sued, you know, the Department of Defense over, you know, it's ability to restrict how they use its technology, you know, Dario has had Slack messages leak that say that they're not going to be sort of forced to submit to Trump. So I think he's been pretty principled and that is the hot company in Silicon Valley right now. So I don't think it's singular. I do think there are a lot of like, you know,

Normie pro capitalist Democrats that in Silicon Valley that still represent a large share of the actual like workforce and sort of your standard venture capitalists that are just sort of like in hiding right now that'll come out. I mean, you have people, you know, some of the most, like, the node coast was probably one of the ones that's been the most defending, you know, opposed to Trump, but he's, you know, not a perfect Democrat. So there hasn't been this,

this great proxy for the Democrats. I don't know. It's, it's a weird environment. I'm certainly, yeah, I mean, I, I started newcomers. I, for a lot of reasons, but I, I'd been at Bloomberg, and I didn't want to have to pretend that Trump was normal. Like I didn't like the view from nowhere reporting. I thought it was very bizarre. Literally my first piece when I launched was about

how Sequoia capital, you know, which is, you know, probably the most important venture firm in the

world was run by this guy Doug Leone, who was, was Maga Fox News watching. Meanwhile, the firm was like dependent on it's making money from China. And it was like a major, probably one of the top investors in China. And then ultimately Sequoia broke up and, you know,

these contradictions between sort of, you know, how their politics were veering in their actual

behavior that I wanted to be able to talk about. But it's not even clear that being for America versus being globalists is the right play. I mean, an interesting outlier, and all of this is Jensen Wong, who seems to think that there ought to be some trading with China. And I remember having a conversation with somebody at Nvidia about their latest chipset. And, you know, we were talking about how this and this is made in Taiwan. I said, but everything else and the chipset,

you know, everything else in the device is made in China. You know, all the bits and the

“connectors and all that other kind of stuff. And they're very into that market. And I think, you know,”

the China Kibash, or whatever, is I think it's cool. Like all the signs from investors or that

they're doing stuff in China. I don't know. You think for all of Trump's fighting with Canada, he fights with Europe, the one that seemed, you know, I'm a globalist. But the one that seemed most logical was to like fight with China and try to extract some advantage for us there. And it seems like the social pressure on companies and China has been superlacks. And I think everybody sees that they're going to be able to do stuff with China. I don't know. It doesn't seem like there's a lot

of paranoia there. No, it's true. And Trump wants the approval of Xi because he likes brand names. And Xi's the most powerful guy in the world. And also, it's it turns out, you know, we beat up a little bit. I mean, I got, let me beat up a little, I was a Democrat, I mean, in a Democratic administration, let's beat up on Biden because Biden came up with this

small yard high fence policy, which was just stupid. It wasn't, you know, it was just never

going to work. And people in the tech sector said, this is not going to slow them down. And every time we blocked them on a technology, they said, hey, here's, here's here's our version of the technology. And they seem to be getting better and better at that. And, you know, it's, you go to

“China. Have you been to China recently? I've never been to China. You should go to China, man. It's,”

it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's going to go right before the pandemic. I was literally, a group of friends to go together. That's right. You don't need a reason now. You could just get, if that China's loosened their ability, go in. But you have never been in a place that is more AI-friendly app-driven, forward-leaning than China. No, I mean, I'm not, you know, they're not a democracy. The government's authoritarian. It does all sorts of horrible things. But when it comes

to tech, there are a lot of places in China whether it's Shanghai or Shenzhen, or Tengian, or Chengdu, or wherever you go, that just feels like the future in a way that we don't. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I really have to tell you about our sub-stack. The DSR network of sub-stack is the absolute best way to follow deep state radio. The DSR daily, words matter, need to know,

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future to us. My biggest concern is a Democrat-aligned person is that the Democrats are going to come in and stop the people who are actually trying to build new and exciting things. There are financial questions about open-air and anthropic, but they're definitely building the transformational technology of the world today, and we are ahead of China thanks to them. Sure, some of Elon's views deeply troubled me, and I don't see why he sits on Twitter, arguing about what race,

like Jews are, and stuff like that. He is building a space company that, while I might be wildly overvalued, is seemingly deploying satellites much more effectively than the federal government. We don't necessarily need them for their politics. They're supposed to be good company builders, their politics. They succeed in business often because they're many dictators. They get to run their companies how they want. They get to act unilaterally. That makes them great leaders of companies,

companies can die, and others can succeed, and we have this survival of the fittest in companies.

sort of the strongest necessarily get to decide. I think we should cheerlead them, and not

“cheerlead them as company builders, and I think Democrats can't totally abandon the thing that's”

making America super successful in terms of building for the future, while maybe we don't listen to them for every political question. But it is a super big question right now for AI for Washington, right? Because if you're under 40, you hate AI, and that's not good because as of 2022, the majority of the electorate is under 40, right? And you've got in the progressive movement in democratic party, a bunch of people who, by the way, am very sympathetic to a lot of things, but you know,

somebody said to them, you know, defund the police was too far. So let's just ban AI. And it's like, what the fuck are you talking about? You know, that can't happen. And I saw you had in one of your things, and I don't know, I'm just quoting, but you're, you know, sort of saying something like Doomers may have a point, but that doesn't mean they get to regulate the future of AI. And that there, you know, we need to reach some equilibrium where we go from the Robert Baron sitting

together with Trump saying, "Well, carve up the world for ourselves to something, you know, a little bit, maybe more in European," where you say, "We have to protect safety, we have to protect privacy, we have to..." But a lot of the things I would like would require, you know, the left wing to take AI seriously. Instead of saying, "Oh, it's, it's not really important." You know, like one

“thing, this important to me is I want to be able to use Claude and Chachiviti as a lawyer, right?”

Like basically the government and big companies are going to have AI ready to help it, like file legal briefs. They can run it all through their lawyers and it's going to like make the

bureaucracy really powerful. But then when you and I use Chachiviti, it's like discoverable and it's

not subject to attorney-client privilege. So there are all these things that if you took AI seriously and said, "Oh, it could be a force to empower the regular person and we need to make sure that they have privacy rights." And like, you know, they get to protect their data and they get, yeah, they have confidentiality and privacy. You know, there are lots of things like that that, you know, somebody who cares about creating new regulations and thinking thoughtfully about what

our society should look like could work on without just saying, you know, it's not real, which is sort of like the plug-mine ears or, yeah, let's just like, you know, stop all data centers or whatever, which is- Well, that's this weird thing where people, you know, I don't know, every so often, you may think Silicon Valley or bunch of sheep, but so it's so it's the political press in Washington. So in 2024, oh, what we need to be is like, more Joe Rogan friendly. We need

“more Joe Rogan's Democrats need Joe Rogan's, that'll solve everything. Well, that was idiotic, right?”

But, you know, we're in the same thing now where you go, well, the one thing you can get Democrats and Republicans together on is banning data centers. They all hate data centers. So let's have no data centers. Now, firstly, you know, I wouldn't want a data center next door and I think we need to regulate them in a sensible way. We need to understand the environmental implications and I think they need to make up for the cost issues for average consumers and so on and so forth.

But to go from- We're in the middle of a big revolution to let's stop the revolution all together, is idiotic. And I just don't see where there is a sort of rational ground swell of a sort of sensible policy. I'm actually trying to work on that with some other people here, get people together and say, what would that look like? But I just think, you know, if towns want to extract more from tech companies for data centers, Godspeed. And if this debate is informing city councils that they can

like get a little bit more out of Amazon if Amazon wants to put your data center there? Fine, like good. But I feel like blanket statewide or God forbid, like federal bands. Yeah, I'm just like sticking our head in this and pretending this isn't like a hugely important trend. Like let places that want them have them and negotiate with tech companies to extract, like fair concessions out of them. That's the process. But just these statewide

ban attempts seem really, really stupid to me. And what how do the investors fail about the shifting political plan? I mean, yeah, I think a lot of them are just sort of, you know,

it's not their expertise. You know, I think a lot of them, it's not like the first thing

they're thinking about. They're watching like how quickly are the companies growing, you know, dot-to-dot. I'm sure if you're a SpaceX investor, which I'm not talking in them all the time, the political wins matter some because it is dependent in government contracts. You think of like a palent year, you know, you'd need it analysis. But I think if you're an investor and like open AI anthropic, it's not sort of top five things you're thinking about. And I do think investors

the best response I've seen, which I think Ben Smith made to me on my podcast was basically

sure Americans hate AI, but it's really low on their list of priorities. And so then if it's low on their list of priorities, and tech's going to spend, you know, endless amounts of money to whenever whoever's in office does tech just feel confident the Democrats will say, all right,

“let's let's not, you know, make this about tech and let's do this other priority instead. I think”

that's that's the hope, but obviously, you know, sort of opposition to to tech is getting like louder and louder and louder, and so at some point, you know, people do what they said they were going to do when they run for office. What, what? We've only got a couple of minutes here, and I have to tell you, I've really enjoyed the conversation. And frankly, it could go on for a couple of hours, so we'll have to invite you back, we'll have to invite you back. But, but, you know, as you're looking

at these things, what, you know, I mentioned this earlier, I was reading about some of these agentic applications and weather AI can shop for people and stuff, and, you know, my wife has gotten all into, what is it called? What's up? And they're, you know, streaming. What not? What not, right? Exactly, and they're doing all this streaming sales, and I'm watching sort of retail be changed by all these folks in their houses doing this kind of thing, and then I think, well, AI's going to change all that,

because AI can shop the market. AI can evaluate it with their options. AI's going to get rid of the price arbitrage that are driving a lot of this stuff right now. And so it seems to me, you know,

that's just one of a million areas where, I mean, I'm literally hosting a conference, we're calling

machine earning this sort of, you know, on the future of FinTech. So I certainly see it as exciting.

“I think with personal shopping, there's this question of like, people like doing the shopping,”

right? Like, so it's so much of the debate with AI is like, what a humans actually like, want to spend their time on, and what do they want to hand off? So maybe it's like, oh, it gives me, you know, 10 rugs I get to look at, instead of just like wandering from app to app, but I still want to be involved. But meanwhile, if I want a restaurant reservation, I don't want to deal with like the weird like sitting there watching to see if it's on res. It literally

still can values like breaking resy right now. I don't know if you're watching this on Twitter,

but like this app instinct has people just like, you know, trying to get it to bid on,

get restaurants as soon as they're available and hold them back and then let, you know, so all these things are going to get that we don't like, right? Where it's tedious trying to restaurant reservation, people are going to deploy technology to sort of undermine inefficient systems. And so there's going to be this whole sort of cat and mouse game of that evolving. But I think at the end of it, the idea is that people get to do more of what they want to do. That

when Silicon Valley is succeeding, it is giving you your time to do what you actually want to do.

“And I think where social media really hurt the tech industry is like, people sort of want to do it.”

They're like, oh, I like watching TikToks, but I'm constantly setting restrictions on, you know, how much time I'm using it because it's addictive. And so social media has created this real situation where we do want to use it and we don't. And we have all this regret and so then we really, I think have a negative view of technology. And I think for AI to succeed, it needs to give us our time back to do what we really, you know, want to do and let sort of a machine handle the stuff

that feels bureaucratic and a waste of time. That's just sometimes hard to monetize, right? It's like it is for time on. Well, you know, it is hard to monetize, but it is kind of what is the core of this. I can't tell you how many times it but out there giving a speech, talking about AI and talking about the dislocations that are going to come to labor markets and people will work a few or days and that some people think that people won't work at all and they'll be UBI or whatever.

And they go, oh, no, oh, no, that would be terrible. And then go, why would that be terrible? And they say, well, because I get my identity from my job. And it's like, do you still believe this crap that your employer has been selling you for the past couple of hundred years? You know, you know, where they are sort of sitting there, you know, it's like the Catholic church and the 10th century saying, "We're a card in the fields and get dysentery and you'll do well

and heaven." And, you know, employers say, "We're a card and be underpaid and make me rich." But it gives you meaning in your life. And this is going to force us to say, "Well, what does and..." But this is where Silicon Valley needs to figure out what it believes, right? There is it's excited about universal basic income, UBI. And I think there have been pieces that are sort of like, you can just be an artist and maybe that will, you know, fulfill you. But then

the Elon's of the world are not creating a tax code. They're like, "Oh, we're about to have, you know, sort of ubiquitous resources, let's create an enormous government grant so people can just be like artists." You know, so they say that you're going to be freed of this like

you know, building companies. Who was it? Who was it? Who was it? Who was it? Who was that a couple

“days ago, said it was something it was talking about charity and talking about, somebody got a lot.”

Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, was criticizing philanthropy, but yeah, Silicon Valley is

pretty sour in philanthropy, right now. Yeah, but it's like, okay, you know, the problem is how you

get the opera, you know, it doesn't exist otherwise. By wife, who I just mentioned, I was an opera singer for 25 years. So I mean, that is how you get the opera, but it's how you get

“everything. It's how you got the Renaissance, you know, and the question is, what is the shape of”

this society? And I was lament that there aren't as many philosophers in politics as there are

venture capitalists and technologists, but, you know, somehow we're going to stumble into the, we really could talk all day because I would argue, this is a great time to be a philosopher. One of the exciting things that's happening right now is opening an anthropic of hired

a bunch of philosophers, because they want to figure out, you know, there's this woman

Amanda asked gold anthropic who's charged with building like the personality of Claude. Obviously,

“they're only a few, you know, they're select jobs that are super powerful, but I think, you know,”

they're all these open philanthropy, you know, it doesn't ask if it's organization, whatever it's called these days, but, you know, there's all these efforts to get philosophers to work thinking about how they can. Yeah, well, we should talk about it. We should talk about it. We should talk about it. That we should have more of these conversations. Yeah. You're super interesting. People should go to newcomer on sub-stack. Um, I paid for it. I thought, thank you. You know, I thought, well,

this is worth it, and that is, and it definitely is on many different levels. Um, quite a part from the financial levels that you might benefit. Thank you. But just, it's just, it really gives me the vibe of what's happening next better than any place else I go. So, I, I congratulate you and when you've done, well, prove it by inviting you back. I hope you're doing well. And, everybody, we'll be back here every week talking about this like they happened for the past few

years. So, join us again next week. Until then, thanks, everybody.