Silicon Valley

“Like I've been in too, too many of these like settings where we get like top, top people from Silicon Valley and we're sitting down to discuss how can we fix democracy? And, you know, make sure that social media does not ruin the democratic scene. And every on…”

“I think a lot of the kind of some of this kind of cult of disruption stuff that we see in, in, in Silicon Valley, probably best epitomized by like Uber or something, I think kind of has its roots in right wing activist politics, the right wing activist politic…”

“But it's kind of a weird way of looking at an industry that literally started as an extension of the U.S. Military. And like, you know, there's nothing, there is, there are countercultural things about Silicon Valley. But to see the tech industry as just this …”

“This idea that founders, that the class of the founder is this kind of special person who has a privileged access to kind of like what the company is supposed to do and who's right. Who's just knows what's best. That came from Peter Thiel. I mean, that, that c…”

“That ethos, Thielism, if you want to call it that, is Basically the main ethos of Facebook, of, you know, of most of the bigger companies in Silicon Valley. This idea that the rules yeah, just aren't that important and maybe it's best to cast them aside from t…”

“I think the biggest challenge that they were facing at that point of time was safety because the if you remember Microsoft Tay, That was the nightmares of Microsoft days still haven't left the valley, I feel, or at least hadn't left the valley back then. So sa…”

“Effective accelerationism was more or less a meme until last week. Like it wasn't really even like a thing. It was sort of just like a way to make older Silicon Valley guys look cringe or more cringe.”

“Effective accelerationism and to an extent effective altruism are really just sort of a rebranding of a lot of the same philosophies that have existed in Silicon Valley for a long time where people really want to feel good about themselves. Like they're, you k…”

“This is actually one of the reasons why Silicon Valley tends to create so many of the technology companies that dominate the globe, because if you take an overly kind of classic DCF analysis, business school prof analysis, et cetera, which many, much of the wo…”

“So when you put all of that together, he really used his ability to both post his public profile and his past political experience to bring it together to be, in my opinion, one of the most powerful people we've ever seen in Washington, who is a representative…”

“What you can do in the Valley, what you can do in business, you can't always do in the political realm. The political realm the government has functions that businesses don't have. Has many, many, many more veto groups, and many, many more constituencies that …”

“I see more cutting edge technology in the government often than I see in Silicon Valley and having been to Silicon Valley a lot as well.”

“I mean, look at all the things that came out of the government, integrated circuits, the internet, GPS you know, it goes on and on and on. Those came from government programs. All of Silicon Valley is built on top of it, right?”

“The sort of Trump administration looks, you know, from a distance like a sort of form of kind of Institutionalized sort of gangster capitalism where, you know, favors are done to favor, you know, favored companies and individuals and others are, you know, knee…”

“And I realized that actually what they were talking about when they were talking about friends, it's not friends at all. Cause you're not really having to adapt yourself. The entity, the AI entity is entirely adapting itself to you. So my fear, but it's a slig…”

“Like, of course, humans everywhere want to have an idea ideology and something to believe in, but I do think in Silicon Valley, it's like heightened. And so this idea that you might be driven by an ideology or a belief is socially rewarded here in a way that t…”

“And you've seen, like, companies like Anthropic come out of houses like these.”

“I mean, every successful cult has at its center, like, a significant amount of wisdom, because otherwise the teachings would never, like, get off the ground. And, you know, a lot of the, like, successful companies, even if they might lean heavily on, like, myt…”

“For the broader picture of Silicon Valley, these houses are much more influential than I think we read about.”

“And so much of the Silicon Valley conversation strikes me as a way to address fun thought experiments about the future and absolutely ignore what's going on in our world today.”

“So all of those things add up to actually just meaning that, that the diffusion of these types of technologies will take many, many years as they go through the rest of the world.”