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Not Dead Yet
Ben Thompson
01:15:57
Ben and Chris talk with tech analyst Ben Thompson about the future. Is AI heaven, or hell, or both? Does the future belong to China or the United States? What’s the deal with Silicon Valley and does American ingenuity require a little insanity?
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A
Foreign.
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Hi, I'm Ben Sasse.
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C
And I'm Chris Dyer.
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Walt.
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And this is not dead yet. We're all dying. But only some of us have been brought face to face with that reality.
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C
However long each of us have to do it, though, we all want to
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B
live a good life, one with meaning, love and joy. And our guests are here to help us do exactly that.
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C
All right, Ben Sass, why, why do you want to talk to Ben Thompson?
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B
Maybe a better question is why would we not want to talk to Ben Thompson? He's helped remake journalism accidentally. He's an expert on the USCCP long term fight for the shape of the global order. There's kind of nobody who knows technology development, both at a technical level, but also at a seven of the eight biggest corporations in the history of the world. They're all American, they're all today, they're all tech companies. He is the expert inside gossip guy on all seven of them. Oh, by the way, he just happens to operate a side business where he's an NBA analyst. He's a weird and fascinating dude who I subscribe to a lot of his stuff and in my last couple of jobs and when we were in D.C. we'd have Ben come in and tutor us on stuff. And I miss him.
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A
So.
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C
So this is a, this is a guy who you look to for insight on the tech sector? Broadly, yes.
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B
I mean, you'll do his bio here in a minute, but I mean, the guy could have been a financial analyst for all the biggest, most profitable companies in the history of the world and instead he decided to do journalism about that and he made that pretty dang successful too. So I, I find him a great technical analyst. Both cutting it apart from the inside out and giving you a 30,000 foot view.
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C
Okay. And he is. Lives in the United States now, but spent some time, as I understand it, living in Asia. Is that right?
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B
Yeah, I don't fully understand it. I think it was partly marriage or something, but I also think he liked having the time zones work for him. So he based out of Taipei for a bunch of years as the most important US Pacific time zone analyst of the most important sector tech. But he lived in Taipei. But I think, you know, when you hear the, the drum beats of war, maybe it makes sense to come back to Wisconsin and raise your kids.
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C
Okay. Things that may be germane for our listeners to know is that Ben Thompson is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. He holds double master's degrees, one in engineering management, one in business management. After graduate school, he Worked at a at a succession of high powered corporations in the tech sector, starting with Apple. Also WordPress shout out WordPress enthusiasts of yore and was at Microsoft when he began dabbling in the blogosphere and blog world. In 2015, he revolutionized the newsletter model of journalism with his newsletter strategy. I think is how it's pronounced and it is stratory.
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A
He wants to get heck in there hard.
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C
Oh, stratecheri. Okay, well, well, there you go. I'd say it's strategary, but it makes more sense if it's strategary and it is the paid product that foretold the coming of substack and has garnered tens of thousands and maybe more subscribers for a for profit or for pay subscription model for newsletters. So he's a guy who knows a lot about tech, he knows a lot about journalism. You, you like tech? I like journalism. Sounds like he's the perfect guest.
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B
Ring on. Ben. Ben Thompson, Welcome. Glad to see you, my friend.
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A
Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Quite the illustrious list of guests. I mean, you're scrounging around at this point, I guess, huh?
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B
Well, we can't decide whether we have you on here to cover the NBA playoffs, to cover the Trump xi meaning to discover the jobs apocalypse, the future of journalism. We got a few places to go. Let's start with bio and geography. You just moved home to Wisconsin a while ago. Tell, tell our listeners the story of your career and how it spanned all the time zones and why you're back as a badger.
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A
Yeah, it's definitely full circle, quite literally. I grew up in Wisconsin, went to University of Wisconsin and then realized that I really wanted to travel, see the world. I was actually, I thought what I wanted to do was I wanted to be a columnist for the New York Times. That, that, that is actually how this story starts. I had a job with a student newspaper. We're going to remake the student editorial. Instead of randomly posting once every few months, like the war in Iraq or something that no one cares about, like, we're going to write every single day and we're only going to talk about five things that are relevant to students with city government, student government and state government. And actually we did four days a week. One day was letters, the editor, and we did it every day for a year. And in reality, I ended up being the one writing almost all those editorials and which I loved. It was amazing. It was basically a preview of what I do now, which is just right every day. Some people would say about the same thing over and over and over again. So lots of full circle sort of in this story. Anyhow, I looked at the New York Times editorial page, at all the bios. Journalist, journalist, journalists. I don't want to be a journalist. And then I got to William Sapphire, Nixon speechwriter, potential criminal conspiracy. I'm like, that sounds way more interesting than being a journalist. I'm going to go into politics. And I lasted about three months and worked on a Senate campaign. And it was horrible. The reality of politics was a lot different than the sort of city and political science classes, to say the least. So I bailed on that pretty quickly. And I was working at the center for the deaf and hard of Hearing, typing on the little tell type machines, like helping them communicate. And you know, me being a political science major, wanted to work for the New York Times. Subscribe to the New York Times. Was reading it every day, sitting in my cubicle. And there was a story about a bombing in Saudi Arabia. And in that they interviewed a guy who taught English. And I'm like, I could teach English. This sounds interesting. Wasn't deterred by the bombing at all. Anyhow, turned out I was always interested in Asia. I have some of my ancestry is Japanese, so I really want to go to Japan. They have this program called the jet program. Turned out I was a day late. I investigated the. The deadline was the day before. Friend of mine from high school, his older brother had just gotten back from Taiwan. He's like, go to Taiwan. It's better than Japan. Anyway, I'll introduce you to some people. This is 2003. 2003. So I go to go to Taiwan, travel, teach English, see the world. Thought I'd go for a year. Six years later, I came back to business school with a wife and a kid in tow. My wife actually deserves a ton of credit. She's like, all you do is talk and read about tech. Why don't you work in tech? And this is actually, I think pertinent to the story that you'll appreciate.
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B
Ben.
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A
I mean, I grew up in small town Wisconsin. The idea of going to San Francisco to work in tech literally did not even occur to me. It just wasn't even the realm of possibilities. Even though I was super interested from like junior high on and as during the dot com bubble, I was obsessed with it. It never even occurred to me to work at it. And I think that idea of not even being aware of considering opportunities is an aspect of growing up in a small town and in the middle of the country that people on the coast. Just can't even fathom that sort of mindset. But. But she was right. I'm like, oh, how do I get a job in tech? Guess I get an MBA as the shortest, fastest route legitimately used job market. Came back, went to Kellogg in Chicago, you know, chance to be close to my parents who were in Wisconsin. Went to Microsoft, went to Apple, and then I got a job that started shore well at Microsoft with the idea of there's no jobs for people like me really in Taiwan anymore. I'd like to go back. I guess I need to come up with something I can do anywhere. And that's, that's how I started writing Shachery. And that was back in 2013. Started Shachekery, went fully independent 2014, and it's been my job ever since.
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C
As you think about the way that the subscription model works, right? So my hobby horse is about what happens next in journalism and what happens next for this. Talk about how you built your brand, talk about how you developed an audience, talk about the business of journalism, where it intersects where you live.
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A
Right? So when I was considering Chateau Cari, stripe started in 2011, and they just come out with a product called Stripe Billing, which basically managed subscriptions on your behalf. And so I, it was clear at that time I always felt bad. I'd missed the blog revolution of the 2000s. I'd started a few blogs, never kept up with them. I'm sort of the same age as like Ezra Klein and Matthew Iglesias, and I saw their success. I'm like, oh, that, that could have been me. I'm too late. But it was already clear by then ads were not going to be a sustainable model for blogs in the long run. And. But I'm like, well, this subscription thing I think is pretty compelling because ads depend on scale. If you're not going to have scale, then you need to maximize your average revenue per user. The best way to do that would be through a subscription. And so I started Trory with the goal of it being a subscription business from day one. And the, the clearest manifestation of this was I had lots of ideas, lots of takes, but I limited myself to posting twice a week. And the reason was I wanted, when I launched a subscription product, not to suddenly I'm dropping a pay wall and people like, what, what's going on here? I wanted to get customers who wish I was writing more and I was going to suddenly delight them. Oh, wow, I can now get more stuff from Ben for a relatively low price. This is great. And that's basically how it worked out. I was measuring sort of subscribers on days I or people visiting the website on days I didn't post. And I figured that was like sort of my metric that I'm watching. And I got to that level way faster than I realized. I at that point did not understand the power of social media even though I was very online. But Shachekery took off like a rocket like from the very beginning. And, and so I watched products. A year later it was, I missed all my initial goals. But then seven, eight months later I made my one year goal which is a thousand subscribers. I posted that, that I made my goal and the next day was the only step changes subscribers I got. In 24 hours I got 250 new subscribers, a 25% increase. What that was was people. I was right on my metric. But because I was the first person to do this model, people were scared to sign up, they'd lose their money. I go out of business. And once I like proved it, then a bunch of people signed up, said okay, I want to sign up all along and then off to the races.
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C
Does it, does it help matter that you had an audience that was both narrow cast in terms of people who were deeply, deeply interested in tech and also that you had an audience of people who were very comfortable being online and, and, and interacting in that way? I assume that's a big part of why you experienced such early success.
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A
No, I started, I had 300 followers on Twitter. Literally no one knew who I was. So this was a totally different era of social media where there was real currency in sharing links and, and like that were smart. And I did put a lot of thought up front into the strategy branding. So number one, name's hard to pronounce. I always make jokes about it, but it's very.
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C
Blew it in. I blew it in our open don't.
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Yeah, it's exactly. You know, I don't mind people mispronouncing it. It's fine. It's strategy. Strategy and tech. The site was orange. The site had a custom font which back then was pretty rare. And I used to do all these hand drawn drawings with all my articles.
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B
I miss those.
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A
I know they're a lot of work, but I did it every single article at the beginning because I want people to visit a link, say wow, that's a good article. And to me the most important article you post is the second article someone reads because if they show up and they're like, well that's another good article. And I've, I've been on this site before. I should start following this person because there's a consistency here. Consistency is super underrated and I think super important that that was sort of my mindset in terms of building up that audience. And I had a five year plan. When I started again, I had 300, I think 387 followers on Twitter. So like I was like, like this is going to take a while. The fact that I was able to do it within a year, that's the social media aspect I'm talking about. Just like the speed with which I got followers, people paying attention was, was pretty amazing.
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B
Two smalls there. We'll stay at journalism for a while, so Chris should keep leading. But one, what was your plan on when you would be able to quit the day job and not have this be moonlighting? And two, who did you think the audience was at the beginning? And when you're jumping from a thousand to thirteen hundred, were they who you thought they would be?
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A
Yeah, I think so. I mean, so my, my plan again, I thought it'd be four to five years but like it just took off way faster. I think when I got to like five, that 5,000 people that were visiting the site on days I didn't post, I'm like, if I can capture over a year, if I can capture 20% of those, that is like going to be my sustainable business. That, that, that I'm looking for. And so I think that was right. It was mostly people in tech for sure that, you know, that's still my biggest subscriber base is I think like 26% or 27% of my subscribers are in the Bay Area or something along those lines. So, you know, the people who were very on Twitter in 2013 was, was definitely the customer base. And I should say all this sounds beautiful. I get to look back 13 years and say what a brilliant strategist I was. And I do think there's something to. I've never managed Apple, but at least I've managed some sort of functioning business. It gives me some sort of credibility. But I, it was definitely a right place, right time. I was the first guy to do this. It was, there was a different stage of Twitter where sharing links had currency, you know, and there's definitely good fortune here. Like I get to sit in my pajamas and write about the big tech companies. Like it's. I feel pretty lucky that regard. But there's a bit where, hey, if you were the first to do it, you, you get some traction there to
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C
brush past crass commercial considerations.
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B
Everybody's running the numbers right now. Everybody's doing price times volume in their head. Like, dude, that guy's rich and he's in his pajamas. Go ahead, Chris.
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C
Well, I, I, I rich. Rich is relative, especially when you're covering tech.
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Keeps you extremely humble.
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Myself, you're do, you're doing great as a journalist, which is like the, to quote Jenna Goldberg, the best gas stat sushi in Alabama. That's right.
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That's right.
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C
But your price point. So there are other people who are providing insider knowledge kind of stuff and do those. And they charge a lot. They charge thousands of dollars a year for people to get these subscriptions. Yours, I think is like 150 bucks a year or something like that.
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I started at $10 a month, $100 a year. I'm now at 15, 150. And there's a, there's an intentionality to that. I mean, I think you can definitely make the case. Many people make the case to me that I'm leaving a lot of money on the table, but I think money has never been my, my focus or goal. I'm making vastly. I want to make $100,000 a year. I'm making much more than I ever expected. But there's, I've optimized for my life. Like I am fortunate to have a job where number one, I live in Taiwan for a long time. I'm back in the U.S. i'm back in the U.S. for family reasons in that I spend almost all my free time in something that's family related. Right now it's driving to a lot of travel, baseball, girding up for, for
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C
a long time, brother. Peace be upon you, brother.
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A
And, and the other thing is just total independence. Like Mark Zuckerberg pays the same price that the person listening to this podcast does. Yes. And I don't know if assuming he's a subscriber, the. And there's a bit where I don't care what people say or think, and if I make them mad, that's fine.
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C
Gosh, I love that.
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A
And that can both be a big company executive, but it can also be someone I've had people that have like emailed in who I thought have been extremely disrespectful, casting aspersions on my character. And I'll not only refund their subscription, I will go back and say, oh, you've been a subscriber seven years, fine, here's a $750 refund. Like, I get out of my life and Maybe that's a bit of an overreaction, but it is a capacity that I place tremendous value on and having sort of high volume, relatively low cost subs lets me do that. And also I don't need to make stock picks. If you want stock picks from me, I'm going to charge you a whole lot more than 15amonth, I'll tell you that.
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C
Well, you mentioned William Sapphire. I'll give you William F. Buckley, who used to write a mailbag feature in every week's National Review and the they put together a compendium of his correspondence and the title of it was cancel your own GD subscription. So I like, I like that, I like the energy and it sounds like what you've done here because I was going to ask you about audience capture. Yeah, the problem with the subscription base is that you get you, you become the property of a deep but narrow group of consumers. So it sounds like in your mind keeping.
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A
It's totally a concern. And it's a concern to the extent that I've probably left a lot of money on the table with the express purpose of avoiding that I did. And again, this is a good fortune I had of blowing up relatively quickly. It was a very small amount of time where I had a large enough audience that no one had any sort of real, real say over me. And I'm very grateful for that and I think it's a definite concern. And yeah, again there's many aspects of this where turned out well for me. Timing was good, I got lucky and I think being able to avoid that is one of them.
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C
All right, I've tortured you about the how. I think Ben Sass probably should now ask you about the what about what? What's in it.
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B
I'm sincere that we have six or seven topics we could each spend 45 minutes on and we're only doing, you know, 45ish total. So this one will be small but then I'll, I'll redirect to us with, to Chris's point about the why of tech. But real quick before we go there. When you were writing only twice a week, you still were had so much input from so many of the big seven or whatever the right number of tech companies was at that point. And you understood it technically, you understood it strategically, financially, you understood it culturally. You had to be really self disciplined to let those ideas germinate and not just write every day and then be aged by two or three days from now when you were ready to batch a poet post. How do you write now, when in the week do you write and to what degree do you have to self consciously say, this one isn't ready for prime time yet. I don't want to write it out because I'll have to edit it later.
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A
Yeah, there's an interesting. There's actually a few different angles to that. So one is I've experienced a couple of times where I will react to something immediately or I'll like tear up what I'm writing because something just happened and I feel like throw out a response. And I feel the percentage of times in which I vaguely regret doing that because I had a more considered take later is fairly high. So I actually feel there's a. There's a regularity to posting multiple days a week like I do on a set schedule. And there's also more of a breathing time than you might think. Like, I'm going to wait at least until tomorrow, and if it happens on a Thursday or Friday or Saturday, I'm going to wait until the next week. That's sort of number one, I think it's been, I've learned, it's helped me avoid mistakes. But number two, at the risk of sounding arrogant, like, at the end of the day, I will succeed to the extent my ideas are consistently novel and can stand to wait a couple days. And probably the permanent example of this was Amazon bought Whole foods, I think 2015, 2016. And I think it happened on a Wednesday night. And so I was done writing for the day, for the week. I think I had an interview or I didn't do it was back then, whatever I was Thursday been a Thursday, I was done writing for the week. And I immediately knew what my take on that was. I'm like, should I do an emergency sort of post, sort of the, you know, the next day? And I didn't. And I just waited through the weekend and everyone had their takes and I came out with my take on Monday, which I think was completely novel relative to what had been written over the weekend. And I think it was right. And it ended up being by far the biggest, most viral post that I'd ever written. Like, you know, a million views in like a number of hours. And there was certainly an affirmative aspect to that of, on one hand, I benefit a lot from regularity and consistency. I think that's underrated. Quantity does matter. But there's also a bit where on the flip side, like having faith in myself and the ability to generate sort of a novel take that is not just sort of consensus in the moment, driven ultimately that is what has let me do this for 12 years, 13 years. And by the way, I get stuff wrong but I try to come back and say why I got it wrong. What was my thinking process that went into it and hopefully gives me, that gives me credibility with my readers to have strong takes elsewhere.
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C
What did you say? Do you remember what you said about the Amazon Whole Foods deal?
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A
Well, just in general I think to understand Amazon is Amazon try builds out these businesses that are scalable and easily accessible. The core example is AWS where they have like they had what's called primitives. They, they have storage, they have compute, they have all these different pieces and they have this problem internally of trying to coordinate all these teams. And they're like, actually there should never again be a meeting between our technical team and our store team. The technical team, you go build these building blocks with APIs and the other folks can use them or not. They're fully secure. You assume everyone's a stranger. And if you do that, you can do the same thing for the whole Internet. You can make AWS so it's available to everyone. But the way they got the scale to do that is they knew they had AWS as a customer. AWS is like the first best customer to do that. And that's what they've done with logistics, they've done with their whole warehouse system is they provide the scale to get off the ground. But what they get off the ground is something that is meant to have an interface that anyone can interact with it, whether it be an internal customer or an external customer. And they've been trying to crack this grocery issue for ages. And I'm like, well, Whole Foods provides this first best customer to consume their fresh goods. You know, that's the hardest part of doing it. They have an outlet for that and they can sort of scale beyond that. The ironic thing is it didn't really work. But I definitely think that was the mindset of why they got Whole Foods. They needed a in place customer to consume to, to sort of start to make a grocery production line that was sort of scalable. How they ended up getting to where they're at now actually and had very little to do with Whole Foods in the end. But I do think I was sort of in touch with the way they were thinking about the problem.
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C
Really, really good.
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B
I'm a free market guy, but given how much of the Internet runs on us, I guess I'm in favor of making legislation that would ensure that AWS can't discriminate on the basis of viewpoint and so kind of like telephone companies not being able to deny service because of the views of the person talking on the phone. AWS in my mind is a like a almost governmental function if it could be subject to cancel campaigns. Am I thinking about that wrong?
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A
No, I think that's exactly right. I wrote about this previously I framework for regulating content on the Internet and this idea that there's like, there's different levels of the stack. There's the, the actual consumer facing bit, you move down into infrastructure like aws. Below that there's the actual like telecommunications lines, you know, networking all even down to components. And the, your approach to regulation should differ based on where in the stack they are. And as part of that, the lower down you are, the more absolute should be the commitment to pure neutrality as, as terms of what goes over it. I'm open to discussions and I think I've become somewhat more concerned about any sort of insertion based on what happened over the last sort of five to six years in terms of the top layer. But I'm receptive to discussions about what the top layer that is actually displaying the content, what responsibilities they have, anyone below that layer. It's not their job, it's not their responsibility. And if we need, if we need to codify that, I'm, I'm definitely open to that.
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B
Okay, so your wife in I think you said oh 3,04ish said hey, you're into tech all day, every day. Let's go to business school.
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A
It was 2008, so I was a little older going to school. I did business school in 2009 when I was 29.
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B
Then give us a, give us an 18 year history of Ben Thompson's historian understanding of tech. I, I often say to folks who are surprised that I don't talk about policy very much like I, I just think politics are way downstream from almost everything that matters. I think 100 years from now, when you look back on our moment, you're not going to talk about our politics. You're going to talk about the fact that we were living through a digital technological revolution that remade which is reshaping culture and community. And it feels like you can speak to almost every topic and you understood that tech was the, you know, queen of sciences. It was a meta field that was driving everything. Has your view how has Ben Thompson changed over 20 years about why tech is so central to what you wanted to study and write about?
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A
Yeah, well, I mean this is, this was the basis I mentioned that I had why I reached out out to you, because you, you brought this up in your interview with Ross at the New York Times. And I'm like, this was such a brilliant bit from Ben. And Ross just skipped right over it. We need to talk a bit more about this. But this idea that, you know, looking back at 100 years, the politics will be, you know, a footnote to the technological change, I completely agree with. And I thought the, you know, what you, what you said in that interview was actually completely right on. I'm going to quote you, if you don't mind. What's really happening in these super devices in our pockets, the largest tools any media individuals ever had access to in all of human history, allow our consciousness to leave the time and place where we actually live, the places where we break bread, the people who are living next door to us, the people that you can physically touch and hug, the small platoons of real community. And we allow our consciousness to go really far away. First off, an incredible paragraph off the cuff. I mean, that is some A plus podcasting.
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B
Morphine, Morphine, Morphine, morphin.
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A
It's beautifully put. And I think that's, that's spot on. There's. We used to live our lives with what was in front of us and what was in the distance would pierce through our day to day. Occasionally, like, oh, something is happening far away. There was some disaster or even a war. Like you, maybe you went to the movie theater and you saw a reel before a movie about what was happening, but that definitionally shows that the rest of your life, you knew it was going on, but you had no sort of ongoing relationship to it, to this shift where, yeah, it's tragic. People are living their lives and in D.C. and, or on the world stage, but primarily through D.C. and occasionally their kids or friends will get them to put down the phone for a couple seconds and pierce through this real, this, this pseudo reality to remind them that they're, they're actually in a time and place. And it definitely tinges my coverage of tech. It's not something I write or talk about a lot, but it is an aspect in the back of my mind which is to what extent am I documenting human ingenuity? Bankrupting the human condition, I think is a fair question to raise and I think something that I think a lot about personally and what I want to do is to what extent can I work to connect people, link, link people together? And that's been a big thing in my personal life. But I do think about that in terms of trajectory. Like people ask, am I worried about AI. And I personally am not in part because there was once a world where, oh, you could brag about the fact I subscribers in hundreds of countries around the world at the same time. Now there's increasing value to the fact that lots of people can read one thing and at least they know they read the same thing, as opposed to whatever their AI personally generated for them that was sort of unique to them. Tech has this incredible atomizing experience. Your feed, my feed are all different. Your AI, my AI is all different. And any sort of commonality is, I think, increasingly rare and valuable. But then sort of like the other thing I would say. And I'm going to recruit you to my movement, as I heard you're not dead yet.
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C
Amen.
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A
Which is. I call myself a reluctant accelerationist. So there's this. I think we're at the nadir. I think right now it's about as bad as it can get because the atomization is nearly total. The conduits of that atomization are with us 247 in our pockets, devouring our attention. And we're not gonna go backwards. And I think a lot of the people who level the critique you just leveled, it's married to this idea of rolling things back, which is impossible given that we should actually be pushing forward. The worst possible thing we could do is to recognize how bad things are and pass regulations now to stop progress. And all we've done is lock ourselves in the worst possible place. Yeah, and so that's why I fall. I mean, I uneasy bedfellows with some of the overt accelerationists. I mean, I'm from Wisconsin to sort of home of the progressive tradition. So maybe I could like try to reclaim the progressive label in this regard, given that a lot of progressives today seem to be the real conservatives. But that's neither here nor there. You could see that though, in a lot of tech discussions there. I believe things can be better. I think there's things like the group chat. I think the group chat is one of the greatest gifts technology has given humanity. It's an opening to this new world where actually you can have a real connection with real friends on an ongoing basis in a society, in a country that atomizes people. Where people live, they move away, they have work and they have family and they feel suffocated and more of that. And I think we can do it. All right.
- [31:55]
B
So when you're, when you joke about Wisconsin, I feel like we need to just bring Andreessen on here and both hug him, noogie him, and Punch him in the face. Because if the choice if the false binary is safetyism versus accelerationism I'm always going with optimism. But we got to be more clear eyed about the challenges and like the sub fight under this is the AI jobs apocalypse, right? I am ultimately on the side of the ATM created a ton of jobs even though initially 1968, 69 in London, 7071 in the US it shrunk the number of bank tellers or employees at a given bank branch from 29 to 12 and therefore it shrunk employment inside banks until you realized holy crap, if you could run a Bank branch with 12 employees instead of 30 we can have five times as many because they become economically viable. To have them in the subur you don't have to drive to bankers hours downtown city center, try to park Monday to Thursday 10 to 4 and have a terrible experience with the vast majority of people.
- [32:57]
A
Wow, you had a high. You had a high service bank branch. I see this wrong view on 10 to 3, but yes.
- [33:02]
B
So it is clearly the case that the unanticipated consequences on the benefit side are amorphous at the beginning and the particular disruptions that are going to lead to a job loss or a rebundling that's scary are particular and therefore knowable and the fear is concrete or all that stuff is true. But at the end of the day being a farmer was doing something really, really, really meaningful. Jeff Bezos gave a speech a couple days ago where he said we could have never anticipated that we would create all these new categories of jobs like dog therapist. And he thinks he's making he wasn't kidding. He thinks he's making an argument that should comfort the scared people that there'll be new categories of jobs that are meaningless. Like it isn't good enough to say you're going to lose a bunch of good jobs or understandable jobs, mixed jobs, but coherent, where you're doing some meaningful
- [33:56]
A
work in Rust belt and you're going
- [33:59]
B
to replace them with something that sounds like a complete Huxley like bullshit job of dog therapist. And so I'm on the optimist side. I'm on the acceleration aside, but reluctant accelerationist is a great way to say that. Do you think there is a let's call it lean right of center middle on this topic or do you have to be dumb enough to say oh no, there's no jobs apocalypse. There'll be lots of only fan jobs for people to sell foot photos. I edited myself well at foot photos.
- [34:30]
A
It was really close look I'm a professional, like take haver and podcaster, so I might be the wrong person to ask about inventing seemingly meaningless new jobs in the future. It's worked out pretty well for me what I. But I do think, actually I say that somewhat tongue in cheek, but not completely. There is something very tangible about I dug a hole in the ground and planted a seed and pulled some weeds and now I'm eating at the kitchen table. And like, it's one of the classic sort of Marxist critiques, which is some insightful takes on the world as it is and no idea of how it actually functions and where we should go in the future. But is it more meaningful to plant your own food and eat it than it is to work on an assembly line that, like, if you squint there's something to it, but then you fast forward. It's like, it was way more meaningful to work on an assembly line than to work in an office and typing an email job. And now we're fast forward to it's way more meaningful to type out an email job than it is to be a dog therapist. And. And I think there is an aspect of moving the goalposts that is implicit in. In that critique. What I do think is interesting is my bad habit, slash good quality. Depends on the topic or the time. Let's zoom out. Let's look at a bigger picture. What are other concerns people have? Concerns about immigration and the work workforce. Concerns about natalism. How many, like, are we having enough kids? Concerns about the time it takes, like, wait for kids to actually become adults. All these different bits and pieces, like people finding meaning in all sorts of ways. The questions around that. And maybe if you want to be an optimist or if you want to believe in God or fate or whatever it might be, it sure is interesting that AI is arriving at this moment in time with this. These sorts of challenges that we're facing. Like, we're worried about job loss and we're also worried about not having enough kids and we shouldn't have. We need to have lots of immigration because we need people in the work. Which is it? Like, could we, like, can we actually, like, what's the actual issue here? What are we actually worried about? And there's not an answer here. But there's a reason for more optimism than I think you might think.
- [36:57]
C
That's the stuff, brother. You're smelling what I'm smoking. That's quite right. On the question of AI, my hobby horse this week is the fact that America's schools are bad. They're quite bad. And the latest report from Stanford basically says that the decade of slide that crashed down in the pandemic, the bounce back may have been a dead cat bounce, that it came back, but then is plateaued at a substantially lower level on math and reading than it was a decade ago. And it occurs to me that the United States and China are currently engaged in this global conflict over whose AI models will run the world. Right, that's me as a layman who knows nothing about this stuff. I see this as a contest between US companies and Chinese backed companies for who. Who's going to, who's going to power the coming revolution. And then it occurred to me that if Americans can't run AI, it doesn't matter what AI runs the world. When we think about the, the workforce, the people of the United States, who we are and where we are right now, how much anxiety do you have about our ability to adapt and grow and be in the new space?
- [38:33]
A
I am one, optimistic and two, to the extent I'm pessimistic, it is about humanity broadly.
- [38:42]
C
Well, that's you've come to the right podcast.
- [38:45]
A
And what I mean by that is so number one, to our credit as Americans, I think we are quite self critical and to our sort of position in the world. Our problems are the world's talking points. And so take racism for example. Word don't need to like explain the history of us in that regard. As someone who has lived in very homogenous countries, I have a difficult idea with the proposition that we are the most racist country in the world. Quite the opposite. Someone you can come to America and be of a different ethnicity, raise the question different from what? Given sort of the sort of melting pot nature. And you may feel poorly treated and you're poorly treated to the extent that everyone is poorly treated or the opposite, Americans are quite friendly. I think the idea of American small talk is our superpower. To the extent innovation and creativity depends on small groups of teams coming together, we are a culture that creates massive amounts of surface area for the acquisition of those small teams in a way that does not happen anywhere else in the world, that's something to be positive about. But part of the American problem is given the vast disparities we can have. I live in Wisconsin. If you exclude like 16 blocks of Milwaukee, it's like the safest state in the country. And as it ranks, it's actually like considerably lower, which speaks from a negative perspective to segregation and things along those lines. And it speaks to a positive Aspect where how do you measure outcomes? If you look at the average, you're averaging everything. If you look at the average of say, Taiwanese, I'm from Taiwan. Taiwanese performance versus Taiwanese American performance, Taiwanese American performance is significantly higher. And I think that tends to hold sort of broadly. And again, this is. As someone who was in Taiwan, my daughter went to local Taiwanese school for the first four years. Then she went to Taipei American school. My son went to Taipei American school. Throughout their calendars are totally different. So once one went, the other one had to go as well. A very Taiwanese school in that 90 of the population is Taiwanese now. There's not that many expats really in Taiwan anymore. But American education, and we made the choice. She graduated from college or she graduated from high school last year is in college. That of course she was gonna go to college in the US but we were gonna bring my son over to go to high school in the US and despite the fact, very well regarded school, high scores, very high pressure, intensive atmosphere in terms of academics, that's the number one focus. And to me, that was not necessarily what I wanted. And you know, I always felt my daughter was more American than my son and he was like more Taiwanese. It was sort of like me and my wife would talk about it. And so there's a bit where he needs to come over. And it's funny, within like a month, my daughter calls me from college, she's like, dad, I'm not nearly as American as I thought I was. And meanwhile, my son, within a month, total transformation in like, his just small talk, his ability to communicate, making a ton of friends, going to sleepovers, all these sorts of things. And to me, someone who has witnessed the alternative up close, when I went there before, I worked in bushy bonds cram schools where kids are going to study English after school. It's their second cram school of the day, they're gonna go home, do the cram school homework, then do their math cram school homework, then do their school homework and come in like zombies to school the next day. That's not a future that I want for my kids. 1 and it's not a future I want for my country generally. Not just in terms of what gets lost in childhood, but what gets lost in terms of creativity, in terms of innovation, in terms of not feeling well. One of the things that type of American school there, everyone knew elite schools pick X number of students from this region, from that and the sense of competition between kids who should be having the time of their lives and being friends was tragic. And the idea that that should govern your life from day one in general. I had a problem with you layer on AI where all the things AI does is exactly what all these kids are optimizing to do. Yeah. And there is an AI, from my perspective, is a much greater threat to China and the overall Chinese mindset and the school system, because that is the direct competition. Can I memorize a bunch of facts? Can I put a bunch of spreadsheets together? Can I make a bunch of calculations? Can I follow directions? And I think giving directions, coming up with ideas, figuring out how to work with other people, doing travel, baseball and pitching and maybe getting shelled and feeling like crap and having to pulled together is. I think it's more important.
- [43:57]
C
I can't, I can't disagree, but talk more about who's going to win the war and more about which war. The U.S. china, the, the, the, the dominance, the, the AI dominance question. How does that. Should I be thinking about it as an arms race or not? And if, if so, who's going to win?
- [44:19]
A
So I think I disagree with Ben. I definitely, I think disagree with our mutual friend, fellow Wisconsinite, Mike Gallagher. Mike Gallagher, this is the question I put forward to the biggest hawks in terms of China and Taiwan. And I say this as someone who has been was harshly critical of the Obama administration's in particular treatment of China. I think the way they allowed to expand the South China Sea was a huge problem and enabled a lot of put us in a much worse position generally going forward. That's what destroyed our deterrence more than anything, but is what it is. If we were China, we being the United States, and we had one coastline and our economy was completely dependent on that coastline, and there was an unsinkable aircraft carrier that to our minds was controlled by a grayish political rival, by this point, we would have invaded Taiwan 15 times, 20 times, 25 times. If we failed, we would get it together and try again. Two years later we tried the Bay of Pigs and Cuba is way down in the corner and we have two coasts. And I think this point why hasn't China done it yet? Is a very pertinent factor that should go into trying to model the Chinese mind. And I think that the ability of Americans to model the Chinese mind, and I say this as someone who is definitely an American, but knows I'm an American to a far deeper extent than someone, I think, who hasn't lived abroad, who hasn't been somewhere, been married to a Taiwanese, someone in a Taiwanese family, has had the Conversation of why is everyone in the room discussing these matters? Oh, you're not. We didn't think you would care. You're not Taiwanese. Like the. The. There is a fundamental difference in view of the world between an individualistic culture and the sort of collectivist culture and the individual. What people don't understand, people go tell, oh, people care about your family. Number one, you care about your family. You don't care about anyone outside of it, like the. The it. And number two, individualism sounds selfish. It is the foundation of caring about people you don't know because it is a currency. You impute a currency to someone else, which is that they are an individual and that currency is what makes you value your community because it's a community of individuals. It's a currency that imputes value to your country because we are a country of individuals born under the same flag. And the big concern I have for Taiwan is I do question how many Taiwanese will die for Taiwan in a fight. I also question how many Chinese will die for Taiwan in a fight. And I don't think it's an accident. It's 2026. Nothing has happened. The way if you look at Chinese historically, they don't generally fight big wars. They just sort of amorphously like a blob, absorb their invaders. They become Chinese in the end. And the other big problem, the Chinese capacity for ambiguity and gray is effectively infinite. And there's so many ways this manifests in day to day life. And I think it manifests in geopolitics and on the exact opposite, the American drive for resolution and to make things black and white is the strongest in the world. And there is a bit where Taiwan's was so much safer when Americans thought it was Thailand. And if we. There is no resolution to Taiwan, there's no good resolution. There is no good resolution. But that doesn't mean there is no good end state. I think we could handle ambiguity, we being the world broadly, and it could stay generally okay and kind of weird for a long time if we can chill out. The DPP cannot derive its political legitimacy from being a thorn in China's side. And ideally Xi Jinping can die. I'm not going to deny that's an issue. So there's no one great.
- [48:44]
C
He didn't look great.
- [48:46]
A
All right.
- [48:46]
C
Ben says, I'm convinced that we need to chill out on China. I have been persuaded. Why? Why is that wrong?
- [48:55]
B
Well, first of all, lots of good meat there. I hear your critique largely of me and even more of Gallagher. It'd be a fun debate to have over beers. I mean, I care about Taiwan for both realist and idealist reasons. For idealist reasons, I hate tyrants and I love individual liberty and all that you were just saying there about theological anthropology and dignity of souls. For realist reasons, I love microchips. And our supply chain would be, you know, ugly, constrained. But let's maybe pull up.
- [49:26]
A
But here's the, here's the question though. Like, like we are. We have this total dependency on Taiwan. In that light, that's a reason for us defend, to defend Taiwan. In that light, is it a good idea to try to eliminate China's dependency on Taiwan? Suddenly they have nothing to lose. If Taiwan goes off the map, we're hurt and they're not. And I think there is an aspect of if we. I am a real politic guy as well. And how much does it make sense to, number one, make it so China is not dependent on Taiwan, which we've done by trying to ban them from buying chips from TSMC and whatever it might be. And number two, to be out there trumpeting our upcoming military superiority advantage thanks to AI, which by the way is dependent on Taiwan. And it seems China do we want to put them in a box where RAI is so much better than you. We're going to beat you in a war. Oh please don't lob 10 missiles at TSMC and it's all gone.
- [50:31]
B
Three great threads inside that it's hard for me to pass on the direct question you're asking and the fonops implications of saying the German said all the Thucydides trap stuff over the last 48 hours.
- [50:43]
A
World War I is a good repost to a lot of.
- [50:47]
B
I mean their demographic problems are big enough that the idea that they're a straight rising power is obviously not true. I would argue that some of the reason he hasn't invaded the last two and a half or three years is because he wants 98% certainty, not 94% certainty that he would win. And it's somewhere in that range.
- [51:03]
C
Right.
- [51:04]
B
And so our lack of will, but that's partly because of Taiwan's domestic home. Lack of will is all problematic as well. But let's pull back to Chris's point when he started this, which was instead of just the Taiwan flashpoint in this we're coming out of a summit of President Trump and Chairman Xi talking about the future of tech. Both of them are not long for their jobs, Xi longer than Trump, but neither of them are going to be there very long. We do not. They don't have a system where the beliefs of their people, maybe, maybe 90 million of one and a half billion people that are members of the party matter a teeny little bit, but really it's about 2400 voters. So they don't need the broad public. We haven't brought our public along to understand the nature of this threat. So neither side has any leadership for after the change. And we're facing a world that's going to be either more Western values led, free trade, open navigation to seaways, transparent contracts, rule of law, human rights, no genocide in Xinjiang. What do you see as the simplest shorthand to think about the fight between the US and the ccp, about technology? Seven or nine or ten years from now? What are the main things that we're going to differ about? About Chris's point about who leads the AI models?
- [52:26]
A
Well, I mean, I think we're, you know, we are leading the AI models because their models are distillations of our models. I think that critique is correct. So which, by the way, you can think about AI models as being distillations of the human mind, which speaks to where the models fall short in a similar way to where the Chinese models fall short on to our models. Weird holes, jaggedness, super smart at some things and terrible at others. So it does raise a general question to what extent are these tools and to what extent are they, you know, the, the brain of the future of society. And I do think there's a. There's not a good answer to that per se, other than this is. It's another reason for perhaps misplaced starry eyed optimism about the US relative position. I was very early to call for a TikTok ban in the US which as someone who's quite a bit of a free speech absolutist, was no small step. My view on that was I wasn't concerned about privacy. I was concerned about basically giving the Chinese government a direct into US hearts and minds. I saw way back when, you know, Daryl Morey tweeted free Hong Kong or whatever, they were queer to manipulate the algorithm at that point to suppress Houston Rockets basketball content. And like, you can look at this, it's very clear this is happening. Like now imagine this in lots of other places.
- [54:03]
B
Side point praise to the Philadelphia 76ers for rehiring a guy who tried to get canceled by the CCP sympathizer. Money horse in the league.
- [54:12]
A
That's right. Although they did just, they did just hire him, they did just fire him this week. So, but yeah, no, it's. He's doing fine. I texted the other day, he's all good. So. But the thing that gave me pause about even calling for that is there is an aspect of good luck to anyone trying to herd the cats that are the American population. And the, you know, there's a people in the, you know, in the political sphere, there's sort of the case. You know, there's an argument. There's been that graph online, right, about the overall distribution of, of thoughts, actually. You see this go the journalism space generally. You know, the New York Times has this sort of dominant position on the center left. And it's very hard to succeed if you're in the same ideological space because everyone just reads the New York Times. The right is like a bunch of substacks, right? It's like there's no cohesiveness. It's great for business because you could make your own sort of thing. You obviously have problems with audience captures. We've seen with some of the most odious sort of outputs from the, from the right over, over the last few months in particular. But it's, it's this sort of like this herding cat problem. I would say if you zoom out, all of America is, relatively speaking, on that diagram, on the herding cat side of things. And, you know, yes, the AI is compelling. The AI and the AI has a point of view. And it's kind of tragic. That point of view seems to be rooted in like the late 2010s, but that's just sort of like an accident of time or place. If there's a sort of population and a culture that is going to have an embedded skepticism and resistance to that, it's the one that comes up with crazy conspiracy theories that has all sorts of wacko political movements. And people don't appreciate the extent to which the worst aspects of society are reflections, are inversions of the best aspects of society. American independence, American freedom of thought is implicitly tied to American kooks, American conspiracy theories and all the things that we feel embarrassed about on the world stage. But when you look at a world of what are we going to do when the AI tells everyone what to do? I worry less about the AI and I place more hope in people who just refuse to be told what to do.
- [56:44]
C
Okay, we have to stop. But I want whatever I'm sure Ben has.
- [56:48]
B
I'm stomping my foot. I don't want to stop.
- [56:50]
C
I know you're right, but I feel confident that Ben says has a seven part. It'll be like in Back to School where the professor says, I have one question for you, Mr. Mellon. So I'm sure Ben has a 14 part question for you, but we got it. We got to put this horse in the barn. Go ahead, Ben's ass.
- [57:09]
B
Thanks for the love, brother style. I think I just heard Ben Thompson say, be ungovernable. There's an American credo for the age of AI and I like it. I think there's a lot of me, right messy, this worldly, yeah, New Hampshire flag kind of wisdom in it. Tell us in closing, something about the culture of Silicon Valley as rural Wisconsin or any other part of America needs to understand it. Disproportionate power to the worldview and ideas bouncing around in that place. And without you having to speak specifically to Ray Kurzweil or actual philosophical manifestations of it. There's a lot of genuine insanity out there where folks who are building the most interesting tools or the most powerful, cheap and accessible tools in the history of the world say stuff like, oh, I think we're pretty close to the moment where humans become indifferent to our own mortality. We'll just upload our consciousness to the Internet, like batshit crazy kind of stuff. And because they're really good at other stuff, we act like their worldview is something that everybody should kind of defer to. And there's some crazy ideas out there. And yet there are a lot of normal, well meaning, thoughtful, kind of prudential people. Tell us about the culture of Silicon Valley and how you see it evolving over the coming decade.
- [58:26]
A
Well, first off, I'm someone who hasn't lived in Silicon Valley except for my internship way back in the day and purposely so. I think it's important for my work that I not be there in many respects. But what I would say to you is actually the answer I just gave you. You painted this world of crazy people saying crazy things and tied it to power. And that power is downstream from crazy people inventing crazy things that fundamentally change the world. And there's just an aspect of Silicon Valley that you're not gonna get away from. That you're not gonna get away from the Mille people, you're not going to get away from the doomers. Like the entire model economic model of AI is fairly insane. The amount of like this idea that you're going to invest billions and billions of dollars to create a model that within a matter of weeks or months is no longer going to be on the cutting edge and therefore in some sort of economic sense, no Longer worth the premium. The speed of commoditization of these models, whether it be from other models or from China or wherever it might be, does not remotely justify the amount of investment that's going into them. Yet the investment continues all the same because people believe, they believe we're going to get to a model that improves itself. There's going to be takeoff, there's going to be the end of the world, as it were. And as you know, people motivated by beliefs about the end of the world, religious, secular religion, or theological religion, whatever it may be. It's a coordination function. It's how you get a lot of people in a world of individuals who you can't herd to go in the same direction. It's the same thing with a bubble. Are we in a bubble? Almost certainly of some sort of. But the benefit of bubbles is it's not just that you get all this investment in things like Carlo Perez's sort of theory. But Bernholbert put up, put together another book about bubbles a few years ago. I thought was made one really compelling point, which is it's a coordination function when a lot of things need to be invented at the same time. Right now we needed new algorithms, we need new processors, we need new ways of organizing data, we need, perhaps we need data centers in space. We need all this. And it needs to all happen together concurrently so that you create the right dependencies on things around it. And the beauty of Silicon Valley is you have all these people inventing all sorts of crazy stuff all at the same time in the same place. And it's like, how did that happen in San Francisco? Such a crazy, wacky place with weird ideas. How could it not happen in San Francisco? And there's an aspect of every time you're upset at anyone or anything. China, Silicon Valley. Mark Andreessen, remember, the thing you're upset about almost certainly has a major upside and one that you couldn't do without.
- [61:38]
B
Thank you. Enjoy travel baseball. There's a lot of wisdom there in travel baseball, but also in your ref.
- [61:44]
A
I mean, do you do. Is there any more to your comment? What's your take? You're the historian. I wanted to have you on my podcast. This is my podcast. One chance to talk about politics. Doesn't matter. I was a US Senator. I just want to talk about tech. Like, here's your chance. Talk about tech.
- [61:59]
B
Way too simplistic. But like, if you just think, looking at kids coming of age today, people have always screamed, what's the matter with kids today? Why can't they be like, we were perfect every way, get off my lawn. But there's something really, really, really different to insulating people from reality until they're 22, 23, 24 years old and think they're then going to be able to become workers. And we're going through more disruption than anybody's ever gone through before in terms of Bill Gates kind of stuff, about two years versus 20 years and the pace of change and intra versus intergenerational change. I think throughout most of human history, the four formative institutions for kids coming of age were family, religion, work, and something about violence, protection, preservation, war. Something about needing to maintain the boundaries of a community where there was somebody who wanted to take your life, your liberty and your stuff. There's family, religion, work and something about war. We have now added institutionalized, bureaucratic, indoor, sit still, Karen mother, may I? School for the majority of waking hours for most kids. And then we're layering over it these other tools of technology which are like more peer segregation on speed at the time that we're minimizing any connection to work or to war based reality. So family's still there, less powerful in a world of ubiquitous devices. Religion is still there, less powerful in an affluenza world of really rich people who don't live near the parish. But there's still family and religion are still there, work and war are diminished. And so school and tech are all water filling every spot of volume in the space of a kid's consciousness. And so I'm super optimistic about the tools, property. I'm really pessimistic about the ability for us to build the kinds of institutions we need to help people coming of age navigate this moment. So it's why I think policy is so far downstream from the habits of what we're going to need to be able to build for families to think intentionally about transmission. And weirdly, at a time when families are not thinking intentionally about transmission, they're also just stopping having babies and having sex. Well, that's fricking weird. So I like your term I'll stop because I know we're at time, but I like your term reluctant accelerationist or reluctant optimist. Because the narrow question is about tech. And in those places I'm optimistic. The broader question is about the cultural implications of tech. And there we have to do a massive Tocquevillian institutional rebuild at a scale that's never been done before. There's never been a civilization of lifelong learners and we got to build it right now.
- [64:33]
A
Well, I'M glad I could sort of paint an optimistic picture for you. And my theory is, look, you're, you're walking off this, this, this sod at the, at the bottom point afterwards everything got better, I promise.
- [64:45]
B
I, I think you're probably right. Like I do think the tools of, of how we lever these tools into thicker community. I keep telling Chris I'm going to stop and then I don't. Nomads and agrarians, not Nebraska super productive today, but 10,000 years ago agriculture. Until 150 years ago, nomads and agrarians had work and home close together and there was a thickness about the community. Industrialization is the two where we separate work and home. And so right now we're at the kind of worst point at the bottom end of industrialization no longer works. But we still start with an assumption which is you should just outsource childhood to big John Dewey. Like institutions. We're going to build something thicker.
- [65:24]
A
Do you want another sort of like thing that might blow your mind? If you zoom out and look at population growth trends, you could just as easily make the case that actually the entire aberration was the last few hundred years where it blew up. And actually there's. To what extent is there a return to nature happening up and down society and enabled by empowered by tech and AI in a world where we end up back to something that looked like something 500 years ago, except every single aspect of life is a gazillion times better.
- [66:03]
C
Really, really good.
- [66:04]
B
And let's close with baseball. I mean you just told us that you're a baseball family and baseball is the high church of failure.
- [66:11]
A
It's I, it's the best sport. It's the best, right?
- [66:14]
B
You teach your kids to fail in baseball so they can fail better. Football's still the best, but we'll give baseball 1B. It's the closest thing to war, which is what we're substituting in sports. But you fail well in baseball so that you can fail better in life. And we need to have more institutions that keep teach kids the virtues of GR getting back up and if you get, you get in the hall of Fame at only failing 70% of time right now. Technology left to its own devices, pulls us away from the wisdom of grit because we're just insta everything and insta consumers and we're going to need better habits. And I think we're going to get there. And by the way, what's weird going to happen in the demographic point you make? I mean most of the life expectancy change is really declining fertility, it's increasing public health longevity. It's mostly the people have lived longer, but now we just fell below 2.1 babies per mama. But to the extent that babies are a bet on the future, it's the optimists that are going to inherit the earth.
- [67:13]
A
Absolutely.
- [67:15]
C
Okay, now the Bens will have to go have the podcast on the other Ben's podcast. And we are really grateful, Ben Thompson, that you've made time for us and we appreciate all the insights you brought us.
- [67:27]
A
Thanks. Glad to be here.
- [67:28]
B
Thank you, Ben. Look forward to talking.
- [67:31]
C
Well, Professor, I was about to ask you what we learned today, but we don't have to because our guest wrapped you anyway. I am only going to say that I can't with you people in your TikTok band anymore. I. I cannot with you. I know we don't talk about policy. Oh my God, I cannot with you people in your TikTok band. The catastrophic failure of the TikTok ban. And everybody who was for the TikTok ban is like, yeah, we needed a TikTok ban. And it's just, I can't with you people anymore. I know. It was well intentioned.
- [68:04]
B
I will let you just have that standalone comment and I won't rebut the fact that you are indifferent to the brain rot killing our children by a foreign power. But go ahead. Here's all you need to know. At the TikTok in the US and the TikTok in China, you should look at what the algorithms drive the two populations to do.
- [68:23]
C
I know. And it's good now that the federal government is in charge, because surely they will do a better job.
- [68:28]
B
You're definitely right. We should also be totally indifferent to Cubans running a boat one mile off the shore with nukes. Who cares? We should be libertarian about it.
- [68:41]
C
All right, well, we'll have to. We're going to have to save up our policy debates for a very special Not Dead Yet After Dark, where we will just argue. We will. We will talk about policy and we will talk about politics.
- [68:55]
B
That's very good.
- [68:57]
C
The things that I loved from Ben Thompson. The second article that. The article that matters is the second article that your subscriber or potential subscriber reads. I think that's something that is very often missed in my business, which is it's not enough to. In Source Soul. It's not enough to. To. To lure somebody in. You have to have them. The second thing that they read or see, they have to go, yeah, this is something I'd like to be a part of really good is human ingenuity. Breaking the human condition is a question he asked and you guys rolled around in that a lot. But I thought that was was sort of a fundamental question. I know you were digging as was I. Reluctant accelerationist. And the Churchill line that came to mind when he was talking about that was of course the only way out is through. If you don't like where you are, don't stay there. I thought that was excellent.
- [70:01]
A
Very good.
- [70:02]
B
Another one on that. Just since you mocked me, assuming I'd have a 14 part closing question. I mean some of why I do nerd around excluded middle frames on questions is because usually if you're having a fight between two endpoints on a continuum and it doesn't feel quite right to you, it's because there are actually virtuous things to say at both ends of the continuum and it's not some violation of the law non contradiction. It's that there's a two by two matrices under there. And on one dimension one side is right and on the other dimension the other side is right. And we haven't acknowledged what the two dimensions are. And I think what we we stumbled toward over the course of our hour together is there is a tech proper question and that's going to be really interesting and probably as more importantly absolutely not stoppable. There is no way to regulate it safety it to death. But there's a different question which is the human behavioral and affections and institutions habits based responses to that and right now and why I think Ben's moderation on this is so useful, hence reluctant accelerationists is because we are going to end up changing habits based on these tools. The tools are going to be useful. Our habits are not well adapted to them now and we're going to come out of this trough for at least some subset of the population is and hopefully it can be a big subset.
- [71:25]
C
Yeah, and I'm reminded of the discussion, those very stupid discussions of a decade ago about globalism in which people were like well globalism this, globalism that. Somebody was going to invent the shipping container, my brothers. Somebody was going to figure out globalism was not invented, it was not arranged, it was something that was happening. Individuals, systems, entities adjusted better or worse to that. His idea, individualism is the foundation of caring about people who you don't know. I wanted to give him a amen hosanna. His understanding of us versus Chinese, Western versus Chinese culture was amazing. I love that the dude paints or
- [72:13]
B
his art is played out in five or six or seven mediums. And he doesn't want to acknowledge how philosophically thoughtful he is because I don't think he wants to drift from the hardest stuff of technical side of tech. But I'm with you. That was a really important philosophical insight. Little platoons ish. But it is theological anthropology. If you believe in souls then you treat people differently. Then it's just my tribe and my family and screw everybody on the outside.
- [72:42]
C
He said the worst aspects of society are reflections of the best aspects of society. And I think that's very useful here in a free society. And his point about when you see what you don't like in the tech sector, when you see what you don't, all the problems and all of the weirdness and all of the whatever that there is another side to that. And I thought that was good. And the one that I think I'll be thinking about the most that I heard from him was that the millenarian versus doomer that these are coordination functions, that the that predicting heaven on earth or the end of everything is a way to make your tribe right and that to get to motivate people to undertake a project. It's an extreme way of thinking and being and one that has obvious short term benefits because you can rally people to an otherwise preposterous cause if you can convince them that we will achieve a utopia or that if we don't act now, everything good that it has ever been in all of human history will be destroyed.
- [74:04]
B
Apocalypticism turns out to be not great for our mental health or for policy deliberation. For people who don't subscribe to StrideCheri do it. It's incredibly useful and I mean you do have to handle a subset of stuff that's about the earnings calls of Meta this and they overperformed on that and Apple shipped this many units of this. You may not care about that stuff, but there's a lot of what you just said right here, Chris, which is sort of heaven or hell. Yep, both.
- [74:35]
C
Yeah, exactly. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. Well, I'm. I'm a believer now. I. I had not followed his work the way that you had and I did not know him. But I found him to be thoughtful, insightful and impressive and I'm glad you let me get to know him.
- [74:51]
B
Thanks for this.
- [74:52]
C
Good to be with you. Peace. Okay, he's right. That's it for this week's episode. We hope you'll like review and subscribe and tell a friend. Feel free to email us with your thoughts, corrections, questions, or whatever's on your mind. Write us@sassandstirewaltmail.com and we've got some good stuff coming your way on that front. This podcast was produced by Scott Emergett with the help of our colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute. The music is from Drew Holcomb and the neighbors. Thanks for listening and keep living the good life. It.