On Steve Jobs, Drugs, AI, Risk and the Enduring Magic of Silicon Valley

The more sort of ironic thing that I like to bring up is I delivered newspapers to the future homes of both Steve Jobs and Larry Page. The irony is that those are the guys I would argue did more than any two people on the face of the earth to change the way news is delivered. So I was their paperboy. The microprocessor was going to change the world. And I looked at it and I thought, well, that'd be a good thing to focus on. And it turned out it was a great thing to focus on. It kept me busy for an entire career. The most hypocritical part of Elon, various hypocrisies is his notion in setting up Neuralink that somehow by binding humans more tightly, coupling them more tightly to the machine, that was going to allow us to control the machines. Did he not watch Star Trek? Did he not ever see the Borg? Does he not know what resistance is futile, you will be assimilated? I think the most important thing in developing this technology, you can be able to take the glasses off.

We're going to talk to John Markoff, the famous legend of covering the tech industry for a number of places, but, but most, most prominently at The New York Times for many years. John and I worked together at The New York Times for about 3 years. More to the point, though, he was the figure that I aspired aspired to be like. He's, he's always written about the technology industry with heart and soul and a deep interest in the actual tech itself and was for sure my role model. So this is, this one is, is an extra special treat for me. We're going to talk a little Silicon Valley history, a little Elon, a little AI, where the world is heading, and, and get John's just amazing perspective on, on this place and, and what it all means. And so I am sure you're going to enjoy the show. And as ever, please subscribe, leave a couple reviews. It apparently helps us out quite a bit. And thank you for listening. John Markoff, hello.

Hey, Ashlee Vance, long time no chat.

I know, too long. How are you?

Uh, above ground and taking solid food. I'm good.

I, I, uh, I'm really looking forward to this. I think I'm going to be a little indulgent. We've known each other for a long time, but there's a whole bunch of questions about your career and thoughts on, on Silicon Valley that I don't think I ever had a proper chat with you about. I hope, I hope that sounds okay.

It sounds fine, with the caveat you have to realize that, uh, I feel like I'm Rip Van Winkle in many ways. So, well, let's see what I can remember.

Do you, do you happen to remember the first time we ever met?

I suspect you, you don't, but I think it was, was it at CNET or something like that? It was somewhere, Soma, kind of.

It was the, yeah, the, at a coffee shop. But, you know, I, I was, well, I was 22 years old and I had just started my first job actually at IDG., and I was this cub reporter and I was reading everything I could and trying to figure out who I might want to try to be like one day. And, and you were the, were the standard to which I aspired. And I remember I dropped you an email and I thought, there's no way this guy's gonna write me back and meet up for a coffee. And you did. Did you, you, you had coffee with this young Idiot. And it always—

Forgot my coffee, but—

That always stood out to me that you were kind enough to do that. I've tried to— You set a good impression. I've tried to do that, you know, as much as I can, as I've gotten. Yeah.

Yeah. You're always on a journey.

I've been fascinated by your life and career and all the wonderful things you've written and explored. And I was digging around the internet. I mean, there's some information about this and some stuff I know, but there's not as much as I thought. I mean, can you set the stage for people a little bit about growing up in Silicon Valley and—

Sure. You know, I grew up in Palo Alto before there was a Silicon Valley. You know, Silicon Valley was named in 1971 by Don Hofler. So I grew up, I literally played in the Hewlett family household when I was in elementary school. They lived, the Hewlett family lived about 6 blocks away from my house. The more sort of ironic thing that I like to bring up is I delivered newspapers to the future homes of both Steve Jobs and Larry Page, which, you know, the irony is that those are the guys I would argue did more than any 2 people on the face of the earth to change the way news is delivered. So I was their paperboy. I was their pre-paperboy. And, you know, I left in '67 to go to the Northwest where I was for a decade in college and graduate school. And then I came back in '77 and this thing called Silicon Valley had emerged. And I got sort of sucked into, I had come back to because I'd given up on my idea of being an academic and wanted to try to become a reporter.

I saw you were studying sociology.

I was studying anti-war organizing under the COVID of sociology. Okay. Yeah. No, I was interested in social science stuff. And I had gone to school, a little college called Whitman College, middle of nowhere, Walla Walla, Washington. Town's so nice they named it twice. And then I went to graduate school at the University of Oregon. And when I got there, you know, I had a very intellectual kind of college career and I discovered that I was in a vocational training program in a graduate school and I really didn't wanna teach. So it took me about 4 years to unwind that. I had actually applied to Columbia. And I was sort of torn. I had this notion somehow at some point that studying sociology would be more relevant. And that was, I was disabused of that, but I had a fellowship. And so I hung around in Eugene. Eugene was a great place to live. I still think fondly of that. And for about 4 years, and I decided, you know, maybe I should really try to become a reporter, a newspaper reporter. That's what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Like when you were delivering papers, that's what you wanted to be when you grew up or you came to that?

I came a little bit later. So, you know, I edited my junior high school newspaper and then I really wasn't involved in journalism in high school. I was into racing bicycles. That's what I was, it was way too early for being a bike racer, but that's what I was, that's all I cared about. It was Palo Alto, you know, that there are these wonderful hills behind Stanford. I spent all my time there. That's what I did. And, but I, you know, in college, I, well, I had grown up on I.F. Stone. He was an independent investigative reporter. And I read a lot about Veblen. I ran my college newspaper. I read a lot about Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, the muckrakers, the progressive era. And that was sort of, that was as close as I was at that point to thinking about what I wanted to do when I grew up.

Were you at all, when you were going to, the Hewlett family house and seeing some of the early semiconductor stuff, was that— was the tech part of that on your radar at all? Were you interested in that?

So I was always kind of interested in science. I had this notion I'd become an astronomer when I went to college, and I was disabused of that after a year of calculus. I realized I wasn't going to be an astronomer. I mean, I passed the course, but it was— I was clearly not excelling, and I sort of got And the, you know, the Vietnam War was on and that was, that became sort of dominant in my consciousness. And so actually when I ended up coming back to what was then had become Silicon Valley, I was, I spent my first 5 or 6 years really reporting on the relationship between the technology companies that were in the Valley and the Pentagon. I was interested in the military uses of technology when I first started reporting. I think an article I wrote for something called the Pacific News Service was the first time that the phrase Star Wars was used to describe the SDI program, the Reagan era, you know, AB, both, you know, the anti-weapons stuff that they were doing.

Yeah, the space lasers. Yes, I know. I know maybe too much about Star Wars at this point. I got, got deep on that. So did you coin Star Wars or somebody else?

Well, a headline writer did. Yeah. It was the first one. And I, you know, there was a syndicate, so I'm not sure which paper it was, but one of the people who wrote that, the word Star Wars was not in the story, but it was in the headline. So, wow.

All right. I did not know that, that piece. That's fantastic. Um, and, and when you come back in, in '77, I don't know how, so this is the semiconductor industry's booming, the PC hasn't quite hit, is a few years away. You know, what is the, what's the energy?

Actually, the PC thing was clearly happening when I came back. I'd run across a couple of things before I came back. Ked Nelson's dual book I'd read. I'd read Stewart Brand's piece in the Rolling Stone. So I had this sense that, computers were coming personal. That was on my radar. I went to early homebrew meetings. I wasn't at the first meetings. I mean, I think it started in '75, but I was going to meetings as early as '78 or '79, just as a journalist trying to meet people. And so that was a very neat scene. Although I have to say the thing that sort of set me on my path was stumbling across a book by British computer scientist and psychologist whose name was Christopher Evans. And he wrote this book called The Micro Millennium. And the argument that he made in this book was that the microprocessor was gonna change the world. And I looked at it and I thought, well, that'd be a good thing to focus on. And it turned out it was a great thing to focus on. It kept me busy for an entire career, you know?

Yeah, that was, Well, well played on his part and on your part. What was, for people who don't know what the Homebrew Computer Club was, could you describe it a little and what it was like?

Yeah, so, you know, this sort of was one of the serendipitous things that indirectly came out of, to a large extent, out of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. I mean, Stewart was there circa '66, '67. The Whole Earth Truck Store had opened up in Menlo Park, California. And there was also a computer center based on a minicomputer called the People's Computer Center, started by Bob, what's his, Bob Albrecht, who was really into the using computers for education for kids. And there in between those two groups, there was an annual, an annual, there was a monthly potluck for people who were interested in computers. And for some reason, the PCC potluck was ending. I can't remember why it was ending. And that led these two guys, one an itinerant draft resistor whose name I'm blanking on at the moment, and the other Gordon French, who was an engineer, to basically send out a call. They did it by putting pieces of paper on like telephone poles and things like that at that point. For people to meet, people who are interested in building their own computers to meet. And so I think it was April '75, but you know, the Altair existed by that time. Microsoft with Micro/Soft existed at that time. So the stuff was bubbling. The microprocessor, you know, was clearly, you know, it made it possible for people to think about having their own computers. That was a big deal.

If I remember right, I mean, even Wozniak and Jobs present at the Homebrew Computer Conference.

They did. That was, I mean, to me, that's one of those, you know, cultural moments that really defined Silicon Valley, a generation of Silicon Valley. I mean, Wozniak simply wanted to build that computer to share with his friends. I mean, it was the complete open source, you know, sort of value thing. He didn't, Microsoft, I mean, Wozniak didn't want to start a company. I mean, he went to HP and offered it to them, right? But Jobs had the sense to realize there might be a market there. And it was putting those two things together, I think, that defined sort of the, it still defines the canonical Silicon Valley startup.

And you, even back then, '77, '78, '79, are you running in, it sounds like you were, I mean, are you running into Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and chatting with them?

Oh, Bill Gates wasn't in the Valley. Remember Gates was, he was on his way to Bellevue before Redmond. I think he didn't get to Redmond until '80. I mean, I just—

He was in New Mexico, right?

He was in New Mexico. Yeah, he left Harvard. He was in New Mexico. Um, uh, he, you know, he just, um, he just wrote the first volume of his trilogy biography. So there's two chapters in there which deal with Harvard and Albuquerque. He sent that famous letter to Homebrew accusing them of being thieves. There's this wonderful moment when the Altair was touring the country and they stopped at Ricky's Hide House. To demo it for a weekend. And while it was there, somebody borrowed, borrowed the paper tape and took it to a homebrew meeting. And they used, a friend of Wozniak had access to a high-speed paper tape copier. So they used that to make 70 copies and they gave them out at the homebrew meeting. And the deal was you could get a copy if you made a copy and gave it to somebody else. That was the, so that was the nature of, that was the cultural values of the hobbyist. And then Gates wrote this angry letter saying, you know, you're ripping me off. And what I didn't know that I learned from Bill's autobiography is that he wrote a second letter. I mean, his letter really pissed off Altair as it turned out, because, you know, Altair just wanted software to be out there. They didn't care if Bill was making money. And so he had to write a second letter, but it wasn't really contrite, but I didn't know about the second letter until recently.

Yeah, I haven't read the book yet, but I saw an interview he did with with Patrick Collison at the Computer History Museum. It sounds like there's a few gems in there that we didn't know about Bill. I didn't realize his, you know, it was always famous that Steve Jobs did acid and had this awakening and gave Bill grief for not being of like mind. And then it turns out Bill was dropping acid.

Yeah, he dropped a bit, but he was never, he never really liked the experience. Bill wanted to be in control of himself. His emotions, I think.

So yeah, you obviously, you've written an entire wonderful book about this, but this overlap between the '60s counterculture and, and the technology industry, um, you know, I, I guess maybe that begins earlier, but are you still feeling that in the late '70s, early '80s? What's the vibe as this is starting?

Yeah, so very much so. I mean, um, You know, the counterculture was still around at that point. The anti-war movement was tailing off. I mean, that's actually what led me to look for a day job was I realized that the anti-war movement was over and I hadn't gotten the memo. So at a certain point, like '79, '80, I decided I'd better get a real job.

Yeah.

So, you know, it was still, I mean, How do you— I'm actually thinking a lot about that because I've been trying to write something coming up with yet another explanation for why Silicon Valley happened. And, you know, I think there, depending on how you count, there are at least 5 to 7 different theories on why Silicon Valley happened in the '60s on the Mid-Peninsula. And I want to add another one, which is more software-oriented. I mean, I think most of the logic around the emergence of Silicon Valley is what I call the semiconductor narrative. But, you know, there were these three laboratories around Stanford, you know, Engelbart's laboratory and McCarthy's laboratories opened both in the same year, 1963. And, you know, the really striking thing about those two labs is one guy set out to replace the human. McCarthy thought it would take about a decade to build a thinking machine in '63. And Engelbart rejected that the year before he coined the term intelligence augmentation, or IA. And so you had this dichotomy between AI, which McCarthy had coined that term, artificial intelligence. And that dichotomy has been at the heart of computing ever since. And now, of course, you know, it's sharply at the heart of what's going on at the moment now that you can actually do AI. So.

Which, yeah. And I'm saving that for a little bit later. Your thoughts on that. But, and if I could ask, is this a new book or this is just a piece?

Well, you know, I, I, I thought about it as a book. I think probably I'm just gonna write it as a, as a long essay and get it outta my system and get on with things. I don't think, I mean, the publishing industry has changed so much. There's not a big appetite for history. And I kind of, I mean, I've been writing, you know, they say, what's that journalism saying? If you have a good story, write it often. And I've kind of been writing that a lot, although I do think that there's something missing. And you know, after I finished Dormouse, which was this basically effort to explain why the personal computer industry happened right around Stanford, at Stanford in the mid-'60s. I did that completely as a journalist. I mean, it was empirical. I didn't have a theory, a time to explain it. And then about 2 years afterwards, I ran into this work by these people at the Santa Fe Institute. You know, these are complexity theorists, mostly physicists, Stuart Kauffman and some other people focusing on this idea. They began to dabble in the social sciences and their argument was that creativity happens on the edge of chaos. And I looked at, you know, the Mid-Peninsula in the '60s and those three laboratories. Xerox PARC was the third laboratory, which started in 1970. And I thought, this exactly is an example of this theory. And I still think that there's something significant there that adds to the explanation for why this unique culture emerged on the Mid-Peninsula in the '60s. And it speaks to the question of whether you can, you know, when I was at InfoWorld, which was this weekly, the first weekly of personal computing, it had already started. This is 1981 where the delegations would come from all over the world to try to figure out what the magic was so they could take it back and create a Silicon Mountain or a Silicon Beach or a Silicon Desert. And it wasn't that simple. You know, it turned out you couldn't just export the culture easily. And I think, I mean, there are a couple of reasons why I think the Valley is a unique place. And one of them, you know, the original spark I think was related to that unique situation on the peninsula in the mid-1960s. Yeah, it wasn't all hardware, it wasn't all chips. It was when my— there were some big ideas were floating around that drove the culture.

And yeah, I'm always amused by how many attempts I've seen to recreate Silicon Valley, and it really does seem to be this, this very strange brew of, uh, of different factors. I, I always go back even to the Gold Rush and then to the very early electronics in the early 1900s you've just got people out here who are doing things a little bit differently than even the existing burgeoning East Coast electronics companies. How, you know, it's simplistic in some ways to argue like, oh, you go to 1849 and this vibe, for lack of a better word, is still carrying over just this acceptance of a boom and bust cycle, this belief that This is just how we live out here. We chase the next big thing constantly and are always trying to hit the, hit the payday. And, and, and people have this risk tolerance that seems nowhere else in the world. I haven't found anywhere that really just accepts risk. You know, you know this stuff way better than I do. I mean, is there any possibility this can actually be traced back that far? Or maybe it's even just California and it being this new place to do things.

I've seen the gold rush argument a lot and the, you know, the cultural values in the area. I'm sure that's part of the larger construct. It's hard to, you know, it's hard to connect the dots. You can make a statement like that in general. Like for example, one of the big differences between Route 128 and Silicon Valley that people like Anna Saxenian identify is that, you know, it became the case in Silicon Valley that failure was a badge of honor, not a badge of failure. And that was a, there's a big cultural difference. You could fail and you could start again and failure wasn't shame. So where did that come from? Clearly it was part of the water here, but you know, I never seen a good analysis explaining why that was true. I mean, you can, lots of things about the loser culture and I think are true, but to actually connect the dots is really challenging. The 49ers and that risk-taking thing, I think that's true, but I have trouble sort of once again connecting the dots directly to what was happening. And so I'm looking a little— I'm trying to look more closely. You know, the notion of— I mean, those laboratories were right in the midst of just the very— I mean, you can't— you have no idea how different the area in the Mid-Peninsula was in the 1960s. I mean, you know, there were Buildings on the Stanford campus where the windows were boarded up for 4 or 5 years, 'cause every time they, you know, every time they put new glass in, the windows were broken again. It was much more, you know, there was lots of street violence. There were lots of protests going on every day. There was lots of psychedelics around. People were trying to do all kinds of things to expand consciousness from drugs to religion to cults. It just, you know, It's Silicon Valley. The wealthy Silicon Valley of today was not what was happening on the Mid-Peninsula in the 1960s.

I love reading stories about all this stuff. I wish I was a huge Ken Kesey and Merry Prankster fan, and I will confess to being a deadhead, and I would have loved— it's like all my passions feel like they were combined in this era.

That's the amazing thing about Stewart Brand, who created the Whole Earth Catalog. You know, I came away from the biography I wrote about Stewart with a very different understanding of the Whole Earth Catalog than I think is sort of popular one. You know, it was very pro-technology. Stewart was pro-technology. But the most striking thing that I found was in this lost journal that he had that he didn't give to the Stanford Library that I hadn't seen the first time I read it. He saw something in the summer of 1966 that caused him to move to Menlo Park. And it's— there's a cryptic sentence that I've gone over with him a number of times that he has no idea why he wrote it, but he came to Menlo Park to, quote, "let his technology happen." So what did Stewart Brand see so much earlier than everybody else? He saw something and he was very early to that. And so I came away with a different, you know, when Trump was elected in 2017, you know, the zeitgeist in the Valley overnight went from Silicon Valley can do no wrong to Silicon Valley can do no right. And two books came out, one by Franklin Foer, "World Without Mind," the other by Jonathan Taplan, "Move Fast to Break Things." And I picked those two books up. I was, you know, I'd become Stewart Brand's biographer. And they both began with biographical sketches of Stewart Brand. I thought, what the hell's this about? You know? And, you know, I think Taplan got it right. Taplan was looking, he had this notion of a culture of digital utopians and he traced that back to Brand. I mean, that would, completely freak Stewart out because Stewart thinks of himself as a pragmatist, not as a utopian. But whichever the case, I came to think, I mean, and you know, Fred Turner and I had different takes on that. Fred Turner wrote this book, "From Counterculture to Cyberculture." I don't think of Stewart as being the guy who created that culture. I think Stewart was the first guy to understand that that culture was there and he was the first messenger, which is a different thing. And I think of the Whole Earth Catalog is the first statement to the world that something was going on on the Mid-Peninsula. And he announced it to a broader world. It became a bestseller. You know, there were 3 million copies of the whole catalog. And it was taking that message of what was going on in Silicon Valley, that technology can change the world, to, you know, an entire generation.

Well, I'm gonna fast forward unintentionally just 'cause you brought us here to, you know, that 2017 moment is fascinating to me. And it's something that I've, I've just been experiencing so much in my career. Yeah. Because I, I come, I tend to come at my stories, I think, similar to you on some stuff with this kind of genuine interest in the technology. You and I have always leaned more towards the science and the engineering and, and, and what makes all this stuff tick. But, you know, it got hard. It's, it, to be totally honest, it's like harder for me it got harder to do some of those stories because it was like, even if I was just covering something that I thought was so geeky and nerdy and almost esoteric, it was like, oh, well, you know, why is this bad? What's the evil behind this thing? I was like, I was like, I understand that. Of course. Yes, I get that these companies are huge and powerful and Facebook and Google, whoever are doing strange things. But I was like, some of this is just, is just kind of fascinating. And I don't know, there's not much tolerance for, for looking at things that way now, to some degree. But I was curious, like, what you make— I don't know if you're— I was curious of what you make of where we've ended up with the culture. I just wrote a story a couple weeks ago. I went to— yeah, I've been going to these communal houses for years, but I went to this hacker house of a bunch of 20-year-olds, and it was like an AI house. I mean, they had this GPU clusters all over the floor, They were using computers in ways— I use all the AI tools, but they were using them in ways that I was unfamiliar with. I mean, it was like they were, they were turned on and tuned in and this, this, it was like, uh, they were like AI natives is kind of how I put it in the story. And then in the background of all this, I don't think it's nearly as pronounced as the '60s, but you do still have this among the AI crowd, you've got this hallucinogenic lots of people doing mushrooms and acid and DMT, and then you've got these weird sort of polykule sex cults and all this. I don't, you know, it's like this weird version of it where it's the people who are living in this are hardcore, and this is a very broad stroke, but are hardcore math nerds and, and sort of like AI cultists. And then they still have some of these remnants of things that I associate, you know, with a previous era of the Valley. And I've been trying to wrap my head around this. I don't know if, I honestly don't know what to make of it. I don't know if you've run across any of this.

I admire that you're staying in touch. I mean, like I said at the very start, I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I disappeared into the archives at Stanford Library in 2017 and I barely came out and blinked my eyes. So I, you know, the fact that you're sort of still trying to stay in direct contact with the people who are sort of boots on the ground and doing this, I think really good. And like cultures that you're finding, you know, there was that kind of experimentation. Let's talk about psychedelics. And there is still, I think, a general belief in Silicon Valley amongst working engineers that somehow you can take a psychedelic and you can become more creative. Well, I'm sorry. I want to see the evidence. You know, I wrote about this in Dormouse. And, you know, the very first effort at this was an organization mostly of engineers in the 1960s called the International Foundation for Advanced Study. I think it was Advanced— I may have the name wrong, but it was in Menlo Park. And they took 300 to 500 mostly engineers through this intense LSD experience and tried to do, you know, research that showed that it made people more creative. And they, if you look at their research studies, it's like the stuff you see on late night TV. You know, you have brighter teeth, your smile's brighter, all of that. You know, my— I was never trying to make that point about LSD. I was trying to make a point about adjacency as opposed to this causal, this causal relationship. My best example of that is that Engelbart invented the mouse before he took mescaline. You know, the causal chain runs the wrong direction. And all he did after taking, taking an intense dose of psychedelics was he invented this thing he called a tinkle-toil that The Toilet Trained Young Boys. Great name.

So, okay, so you, you're the— as far as, as the counterculture and people who are inclined to do those things informing technology, it's more of just a mindset than, than the actual hallucinogens opening people up to, um, to new way of thinking.

Yeah, it was, it was adjacency. It's about a culture that it created rather than And I think, I mean, I, you know, I haven't, you show me the evidence. I've read, you know, How to Change Your Mind and stuff like that. And I still maintain that, you know, creativity is a mystery and it's not something you can get in a pill.

Well, I've been working on an AI book and I do have one anecdote that I'll save it for the book, but it involves, DMT and a transformer breakthrough. So we'll see how— see what you make of it.

That's classic.

Yeah.

So, you know, the famous example, the most famous example of this is Kelly— who's the guy who did the original recombinant DNA stuff? I mean, you know, he describes in his, in his biography, his autobiography, how he— I'm blanking on the name of the technique, but basically, you know, this is long long before the current wave of DNA stuff, but—

Not shotgun sequencing or?

No, no, this is, oh God, it's, you know, I'm a computer guy. I'm not a biology guy. Kelly, I'm blanking right now, but he, you know, he describes how he came up with a technique on a long drive up to his cabin in Mendocino on what he described as an LSD fugue state. And I tried to, you know, the equivalent for me that I tried to look at carefully was the invention of BitBlit at Xerox PARC, which is a graphical technique for controlling stuff on the screen and basically made the graphical user interface possible. And the guys who did that said, yeah, we sometimes we'd smoke some dope to get in the mood to program, but they never put the, you know, connecting the dots is harder. So yeah, there may be specific examples. I'm not disputing that.

You mentioned—

But your mileage may vary.

Don't do drugs, kids. You mentioned a few government labs and then places like PARC. You know, when I was starting out in my career, I mean, we used to have these great days where you'd go to Sun Microsystems R&D lab and Intel's and you'd go to IBM Almaden and you'd just get this window into where it felt like computing was going for the next 10, 20 years. Clearly some of those things exist in various forms, but it feels different to me now. Do you feel the same way? Do you feel like the Valley has lost this, this labby? I don't know. It feels very different to me than it used to.

Yeah, that's, that's a really good, good question. Do I feel like it's, it's entirely different? I mean, you know, the Valley lived off of DARPA for decades and decades. So, you know, Google X, when they first started out, was an effort to— well, actually, I've gotten different views from the two co-founders of X. You know, Sebastian Thrun clearly told me that they were trying to build a Xerox PARC at Google. And I just interviewed Astro and he said, well, we were using PARC as an example of what not to do. So they both could be true, actually. You know, it But, and yeah, it's a really great question now because a lot of this funding is going to go away, right? The people who have significant government grants must just be freaking out everywhere. We'll see what difference it makes. It's not clear to me. You know, the big difference was the original DARPA funding was blue sky funding. And that was the theory of laboratories like Watson and AT&T Bell Labs and Almaden and, you know, you know, that there was open-ended research to be done. And as opposed to research, you know, I mean, Jobs famously killed Apple's Advanced Technology Group because he didn't, you know, he didn't see the value. And he had constraints, budget constraints at that point. So, you know, where do the next big ideas come from? It's an interesting question. I don't have a good answer.

Yeah, I'm curious about it. It feels like, it feels like hard tech type startups can access so much more capital now, and that, that maybe it's just these little individual labs. I guess the, the feeling, and I don't know if it's just nostalgia, um, you know, Google X is the closest thing for sure to, to what I was describing and used to experience. It's just that I remember every couple, you know, you'd go to HP, and they would be doing crazy photonics and quantum research. And clearly, yes, you're at Microsoft, other companies doing some of this. It just used to be the thing that, that all the major tech companies of a decent size would show off and have this, this part of their company that really was academics just noodling on things. And I don't think I've received an invite to something like that in like a decade. So it must be— must be a little different.

There are venture capital incubators now. I mean, they picked up a little bit of that. I mean, maybe more of it's moved back to the university, which of course now is at all— is a huge risk even more. You know, they're going to take away the overhead. It's not clear that those models will continue to work. You know, that we're entering unknown territory right now.

So, so, yeah, I mean, I've seen you. You don't seem like a big Elon fan.

Well, that was one of the questions I wanted to ask. Can you square the Elon you wrote about with the Elon of today?

Oh, uh, in some ways, yes. Some ways, no. This might be— this might take a lot of time. Um, you know, I think, um, it's been this, this progression in a lot of ways that's been, been sort of fascinating. I mean, even the Elon that I was running into in 2012, I would say, was, um, still this shyer. Um, there's like a— there was a vein of, of insecurity in that, in that Tesla and SpaceX, when I first met him, were like just barely starting to be successful. And, and I think he was wealthy, but nothing like today. The, the people who had made it were, were Larry and Sergey and Zuck and, and, and Bezos. And, and I think Elon felt, you know, he, he was kind of pulled back a little bit. And so you would see glimpses obviously of how he went about running his business inside the business. But, um, outward facing, definitely not. If people go back to like his Twitter feed back in the day, I mean, he was, he was quite mild and, and not, uh, not controversial. Um, so, and then clearly like on the, on a human personal level, socially left and, and, and is and his technology was clearly left-leaning. So yeah, no, I would not—

I would—

would I have pictured that Elon and Donald Trump would be like running the White House together? Definitely not. And then, you know, I think there's been this progression of— it's hardwired into him to always chase the— to always be risking everything, chasing something bigger. And that went from— it went from business to kind of celebrity and then into politics, which I actually thought politics would be forever kind of too gross and messy for him to want to deal with. But, you know, clearly it's been this, this upward— I don't know what's next after this. Like, after you're running the United States, what do you, what do you do after?

Let's take it to Mars and see if we can test that question. If he wants, that he wants to die on Mars, but just not on impact. I'm willing to let him test that. But, you know, in a way, I knew I know way too much about his activities at Burning Man, not because I was ever a Burner, but because I had friends in his camp.

Yeah.

And the last time I actually saw Elon in person was this bizarre event. You know, he underwrote an AI is going to eat the world documentary. Right. And I was a talking head in that documentary where they put me out of context and had me saying things I didn't mean to say. But I went down there with Jerry Kaplan, who's a friend of mine. And because Elon had underwrote that, this was at one of those giant theaters, 2,000 people in the audience, and during COVID and he got up and spoke at the beginning, and it was a word salad where he made no sense, and they literally had to get a hook and drag him off the stage. I mean, it was one of the most bizarre things I'd seen, very different than the Elon I'd been in. I mean, I was never a big Elon reporter. You know, I spent some time at the SpaceX factory. I spent some time at the Tesla factory. I agree with you. I saw those, factories and the way they were organized. And, um, that was impressive. Um, but I couldn't, I couldn't connect the dots between the guy I saw on that stage and, you know, it was not Steve Jobs. Let's put it that way.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you, I mean, okay, this could be controversial. I suspect you might not agree, but I, you know, when he took over Twitter, um, I remember many of my media friends freaking out in the first 2 weeks after he did the layoffs. Was like, Twitter's broken, he's destroyed it. And, and clearly, like, the version of Twitter that— of X that is, is around now is, is, um, content-wise quite different. And, but infrastructure-wise, what strikes me is like mostly working despite having 20% of the people there to run the company. Do you— is there any shred of you that thinks, you know, you barge in, rewire the government, and, and yes, it's It looks horrific and brutal in the short term, but it comes out.

No, I think that, I mean, you know, this is a real, you know, first of all, let's get the facts straight. The size of the government has not grown since Eisenhower in terms of workforce. You know, that's a half a century and the number of people in the country has more than doubled. So this whole notion that there's this bloated bureaucracy is completely ridiculous. So, you know, put that to rest. You know, the other thing is the kind of workforce is— it's a pimple. You know, it's 4% of the budget. If he cuts 20% of it, no one will notice. This is not about doing that. Let's be real. This is about creating a bureaucracy that's loyal to Donald Trump. And Elon's enabling that. Whatever he says, the reality is he's getting rid of, you know, traditional independent federal workers, public servants, which I thought was a good thing. And I'm a believer in good government. I don't think government should run like businesses. You know, they should run in the interest of the people of the United States. And I think that, you know, I think we had a pretty good government. I think it's being torn apart and we'll see what we get. You know, if we get bird flu and it spreads to humans, let's see how they do, you know, this time around with a disease that has a 50% mortality rate.

I hear what you're saying. Tons of that. I think all my SpaceX reporting has made me so, um, I don't know if horrified is the right word, but you know, when every time I deal with Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, any of this stuff, I mean, it's like sometimes I think people have okay intentions and it's sort of the system that sends it awry, but man, it, it like, there is on the, on the government bloat and bureaucracy part, you know, that some of that stuff is horrifying.

Yeah, but you, you, that's not what Elon's cutting. That's not what's being cut. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I, you know, I saw this stuff that the new defense secretary has sort of pushed for 8% cuts, but the first thing that the Senate is doing is trying to increase the Defense Department budget. So there's some real contradictory stuff going on. I mean, you know, Yes. You know, Trump has made this noise that you can cut the defense budget in half. I haven't seen that in the budget. You know, I haven't seen them do anything to touch the defense budget. You know, are they going to cut— are they going to cut Boeing out of the space world so Elon has no competitors? I think that's— that would be interesting if that happened. I think that's certainly Boeing saying that's a possibility inside, that that's the stuff that's been reported.

I saw you write an opinion piece on— I think it just came out, right?

That was yesterday in the LA Times.

Yesterday in the LA Times. And I don't remember you writing opinion pieces before this.

I have written them. You know, the Times had this weekend review section, which were, you know, reported op-eds. So I would do them occasionally, but they were very reported. And I consider this to be reported too. You know, I'm kind of dismayed with this meme that Silicon Valley has backed Trump. And we wrote that piece because we actually looked at how the people in Silicon Valley voted. And the very simple fact, you know, if you say the leaders of Silicon Valley have turned because you have 10 voices that you can point to, doesn't reflect reality. I was simply wanting to call to people's attention that if you looked at the wealthiest communities in Silicon Valley, if you look at the Woodside and the Portola Valleys and the Palo Altos and the Menlo Parks and Los Altos Hills, they voted by over 75% for Kamala Harris. So, so what are you saying about the leadership of Silicon Valley? That's all I wanted to say is that the, you know, the notion that because you have 5 voices, 3 of whom left Silicon Valley and live in Austin or Malibu or Miami, what are you saying about Silicon Valley? The fact is the rank and file and much of the leadership of, of, of Silicon Valley is liberal to centrist. That hasn't changed. That's all I was saying.

So, I mean, what do you think happened that figures— the people coming to mind immediately are like Bill Ackman, Marc Andreessen. You know, this isn't, this isn't necessarily just sort of Elon and, and the PayPal crew, um, sort of changing a bit and going from this libertarian, um, way of thinking to this, this more, you know, Trumpian way of thinking. I mean, it feels broader than that, at least among some very, um, high-profile figures. I, I still don't know how to wrap my head around this.

I, I don't think I, I do completely either, but let me— there's always been a libertarian a thread in Silicon Valley. I don't think it's been the dominant value structure of Silicon Valley ever. Um, but you know, it's been there. There used to be sort of the classic Reagan Democrats. People like TJ Rogers come to mind. A lot of the semiconductor guys were Republicans. Um, and the shift to, you know, the, the Democratic shift, the broad Democratic shift in Silicon Valley has been relatively recent over the last two decades.

Yeah, because Bob Noyce, Hewlett and Packard, they were all Republicans, right?

Yeah, but They were Nixon Republicans, right? Remember Nixon created the EPA. Nixon believed in a basic income. I mean, they're not Republicans like the Republicans in Congress today. And, but you know, Jonathan Taplin in his book, Move Fast and Break Things, talks about this demarcation between the digital utopians of Brand's era and the digital libertarians that emerged in Stanford right before the dot-com era. There were, you know, the Peter Thiel people. And I think that that probably that shift or that emergence of that digital libertarian, you know, thread, you know, to me, Andreessen seems like an opportunist, opportunist. You know, he saw the way the wind was blowing. He had— he was— he had a huge commitment in Andreessen Horowitz to cryptocurrency. He's buttering his bread and I think it's unseemly. You know, what was it that Groucho Marx said? These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others. The last time Andreesen, I saw him in public was at the HAI 5th anniversary where Fei-Fei Li interviewed him and his rant was entirely about his dissatisfaction with this thing called the precautionary principle, which he thought was limiting innovation. Which I think is just a crock. Um, you know, there's been this interesting ongoing debate in the AI community since 2009 where trying to mimic the biotechnologists— they met at Asilomar to try to weigh the, um, the, the potential danger of artificial intelligence to the, to the species. Um, you know, the, the biologists, to their credit, when they were worried about their technology having deleterious effects, they actually stopped doing research for a while. They actually stopped. And that was entertained within the AI community until there was money on the table. And as soon as there was a little money on the table, ethics went completely out the window. We've seen this play out. I mean, this is probably the heart of your book, I would imagine.

It's— I was going to ask you about all this. I mean, it's pretty interesting. You, as far as I can tell, I mean, you sort of have These are broad strokes again, but you've got, you've got Demis from DeepMind, you've got Dario at Anthropic, Sam Altman, Elon, Zuck maybe to a lesser degree. I mean, you get, you get figures who are obviously brilliant, brilliant people, but you know, each one of them, you get the sense that they, they kind of feel like, well, I am, I'm the best person to kind of lead this forward. And if, if If I could shepherd this exactly the way I pictured in my head, we'll be okay. And, and, but then you end up with, you know, 5 competing versions of that simultaneously. And, and yeah, I mean, I think, I think you're exactly right. Once, once whatever you wanna call it, maybe ChatGPT came out, the, it just became such a race that, that I don't see, there's too much money involved. There's too much competition. Especially now that we see interesting things coming out of China. I don't see, I don't see anybody slowing down, um, at all. And, and so this— so I was curious about this. So this is like a point of concern for you?

Well, absolutely, but not in the way— I'm not an AGI believer.

Okay.

I, you know, I, if anything, I worship at the church of Gary Marcus, who's a notorious AI critic. And when Gary believes that these things are thinking machines, I'll believe they're thinking machines. I mean, he's, you know, he's, he's, he has a better technical grasp of these things. Although, you know, I, the, I use these things all the time. I, I, I more of, I'm more worried about the sociological and economic consequences than this notion that these things might develop agency. So let's put the AGI thing aside and let's, let's talk about whether they're going to change the, the job structure in some meaningful way. And I think the significant thing that's happened here is that computers have mastered human language. Yeah. And that's changed the nature of interface. You know, one of the things that I used to track in following Moore's Law, which I was accused of writing about way too often, but it was a good metric, which every turn of the crank computing would reach more of the human population. And the last turn of the crank was the smartphone. And that meant that about half of the human population is connected. And now it seems that, you know, generative AI is the final, you know, the final frontier. Now computing is ubiquitous amongst humanity. And the thing I worry about more, I mean, this is where I think the, you know, the most hypocritical part of Elon's various hypocrisies is his notion in setting up Neuralink that somehow by binding humans more tightly, coupling them more tightly to the machine, that was gonna allow them to control, allow us to control them, the machines. Did he not watch Star Trek? Did he not ever see the Borg? Does he not know what resistance is futile, you will be assimilated? I think the most important thing in developing this technology, that you can be able to take the glasses off, right? That there be a bright line between what is human and what is machine. 'Cause I think that we're moving up against that boundary.

Well, and I find, obviously Elon is always, he's been afraid of AI, but then funding multiple AI projects at the same time, although he's not like unique in that. I mean, it's kind of the craziest thing I found reporting this book. And it's not like this is some novel insight, it's just sitting out there. But you know, I'm just in room after room with people who are, it's really the people who are working on this stuff who might be the most most concerned about where it's heading, some of them, and then are just uniquely compelled to keep advancing it as fast as they can. I, I feel like I'm always sitting with like Bilbo Baggins with the, the ring in his pocket, and it's like he wants to, he wants to touch the ring and, and feel it every now and then, but wants to be able to take it off, and he knows he can't wear it all the time or something really bad happens, but yet is compelled to live his entire life around, around this object and And having covered technology for a long time, I've definitely never felt anything like this where it's just this, it strikes me as such a bizarre job to go in day after day and just sit at your desk and be in this existential conundrum. That's another thing, I still don't even know how to wrap my head around this fully.

Let's look at the, you know, I was, I had, in 2012, when I was reporting in the robotics world extensively, I, for a while, I was sort of really bought into that notion that we were in imminent danger of obsoleting lots of human workers. And I had this dinner with Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, where I was making this argument that automation was gonna come to China and was gonna lead to social disruption 'cause they're gonna throw an entire portion of the workforce out. Out of work. And he stopped me and he said, you don't get it. If automation comes to China, robots come to China, it'll be just in time. I said, what do you mean? And, you know, he walked me through what was going on with the demography of China and the aging of the workforce. And I literally changed the way I thought about it. And I stopped asking when there will be a self-driving car. And by the way, I'm on record as saying if an Uber at that point picked me up in 2025 and drove me to dinner from San Francisco to Palo Alto, I was buying dinner. That's still not happening. I haven't lost that bet yet and I don't think I'm gonna, I'm gonna lose. But anyway, that's, so the question I began asking the roboticist I was talking about is when would there be a robot that could safely give an aging human a shower? Much harder problem. I've basically seen zero progress toward that, meaningful progress since I started asking that question a decade ago. And you know, the, now this technology is moving out into the robotics world and there's all kinds of, you know, There's a wave of robotic startups again. We've seen this. I still don't think it's much nearer, and I don't think it's near enough because we have the same problem with aging and, you know, having a population that is, you know, you need caregivers and you don't, you're not gonna have enough caregivers, particularly since we're deporting them all. But that's another question. What I'm most interested in about this first wave of generative AI in terms of its impact on the economy is call centers and tech support. Most of that's going to happen, if it happens, outside of the country because, you know, that labor force is largely in places like India and the Philippines, I think. I just haven't been running into that many, you know, I haven't run into that many really intelligent robots online yet. I don't know, are you, have you seen that?

A little bit. I just, I would fully I would suspect that that stuff gets dialed in. I mean, I'm always trying to recalibrate myself, right? And that, that like things change so quick and then sometimes your brain leaps to like, oh, is this the final form of this thing? I mean, I think you're 100% right. I think what we did is we mathematically solved language and, and, you know, so I, I, I suspect things like you're talking about will get, will get very, very, very good, very quickly. The question in my head is, is how far does this stretch out to, you know, the new reasoning models that we've seen? There's no question. I mean, I'm just getting emails from scientists. There's people who work on complex problems that swear that this is now changing how they go about their work and is this phenomenal thing that I— it's just, it's like,— does that become broadly applicable or not? You know, is it, is it, is it chatbots and Nobel Prize winners and nothing in between or, or, or what? I guess I, I don't know. I, and I'm, I was wondering if you've, like, if this resonates with any other era that you've seen where we— Silicon Valley always has this habit, right? The next big thing is, is this overnight sensation and, and the world is gonna change. I mean, we're famous, we're cliché for for, for talking about saving the world, changing the world, all that. I, I don't know that I've been where I will use this technology and be impressed one day and then really underwhelmed the next day. And then I'll be sitting in a room with somebody who I consider very rational, extremely intelligent, kind of quite down to earth, and they will just tell me straight to my face that in 18 months the entire world will be upside down and whatever I'm doing right now is pointless. You know, it's a strange experience. I mean, Have you— have there been any other eras where it was like quite this dramatic that we were on the precipice of— because I was even thinking back to the rise of the consumer internet. I mean, the prevailing thing that I remembered then was just that the world's information was at your fingertips and this would be a revolution, but it didn't feel like— it just felt like opportunity. It didn't feel like— like they would turn everything.

I'm still in the Sappho, Paul Sappho camp. It wasn't Sappho who first said this, but I heard it first from him is, you know, in the short term we always overestimate technologies, in the long run we always underestimate them. But since we're so much in the midst of this right now, I don't trust any of my emotions. I mean, first of all, when you're sitting in a room with those guys, if they've got any skin in the game, how much of this are they in an ideological framework that shapes their view of the, you know, remember 90% of these companies fail. Yeah, that's the constant, you know. And so a lot of these people who are shoveling smoke about, you know, accelerationist ideas are not gonna be around. I still find, you know, in my day-to-day use of language models that any area where I know a lot about, I routinely see 15 to 30% of the stuff I see from these things being wrong. And yeah, so that, you know, remember Reagan said trust but verify? I think that the way you have to deal with these systems is don't trust, but verify anyway. Yeah. You know, you can't believe anything you get from a chatbot. So where are we?

I did, I asked one of the most advanced reasoning models to do some research on you. And it did, the first thing it said was that you grew up in New York. And then I was like, I don't think that is true. Um, and, and so I did, did have to check that. Um, I want to be mindful of your time. I, I, I, can I, I just want to do rapid fire on a couple things if that's okay.

Sure.

Um, I, I, I can't help but wonder your take on, on Intel and what has happened, the, the sort of situation we've emerged, we've ended up in where Nvidia is so much larger than Intel, that Intel is this, this fading, um, you know, might be sold for parts, like 20 years ago, this would've been unfathomable to me. When I see people write about it, I think sometimes they're, they're, they're not really appreciating even what like Intel not just meant to Silicon Valley back in the '70s, '80s, '90s, but, but just culturally as this icon of like everything this place stood for. I, I get, I get, I get a little emotional about all this stuff and, and, Detroit moment, isn't it? Yeah, that one strikes me as particularly sad. I was curious if you think about this at all.

I do. And I, you know, I grew up with people at Intel, and people are retired now and no longer working there, but were instrumental in some of the important technological advances. Just briefly, I just— in great sadness, because, you know, I grew up with Intel, and it was one of these icons of Silicon Valley. And I, I think if I had to look at one thing briefly about where the failure was is, you know, they, they pioneered with the U.S. government, um, EUV, extreme EUV, and then they didn't invest in it, right? TSMC invested in it. Um, they didn't buy the steppers that they needed to buy. They made this bet on immersion lithography. I think that was the branch point where they failed. I'm, you know, I haven't been reporting this and been close to it, but I believe that that was— it was a, a business decision not to sort of pursue a technological branch point that they needed to take. And, um, if that's true, uh, it's a question of the leadership of the company at that point. And, you know, I have my theories, but, uh, I don't— I wasn't reporting it, so I'm not certain.

Would you ever have guessed that Nvidia would be— what is it, it's probably like 20 times, 100 times bigger than Intel? I don't even know what it is at the moment.

Jensen's a sharp guy. Uh, no, I never— I never Well, you know, they made the right bet. It's a very, and now, you know, now everything's, DeepSeq's thrown everything up in the air. You know, there's this rich debate about whether, I mean, I just love the fact that the DeepSeq announcement was like, what, a day or two days after the announcement of this half trillion dollar investment in big data centers and what have you. And oh, by the way, maybe there's a different way to do this. I mean, that seemed inevitable to me that they would find shortcuts that wouldn't be and also, you know, this stuff is consuming so many resources that it seems like we have to think about alternative ways to get.

To you, do you think at all, again, I get a little nostalgic of the Linux desktop, BeOS, Transmeta Crusoe chip, new laptops coming out, all these different form factors. You know, there used to be real competition to make make computers of different shapes and sizes and software. And it feels like obviously the Apple world is dominant. And then, and then we just, it's Apple versus PC. And yes, we have smartphones as a new form. I get slightly excited by the idea that somebody takes AI and, and really rethinks computing and maybe we end up with, with, um, something new. Have you, have you batted that around in your head at all? Do you? Yeah.

I mean, I, I'm enough of a, um, of a Werner Vinge fan, um, to believe there will be this juncture to, um, you know, augmented reality glasses at some point, you know, uh, that, that there is a new metaphor. I mean, I was, when Magic Leap came along, I love the notion of being able to sort of change the notion of a computing desktop. I mean, I, I saw this as a, as a, you know, as a journalist and what kind of What tools would you like to have? Well, the notion of just being able to go like this and have a super high-definition display hanging in the air and you could have another one over here. I thought that was a super cool vision. I don't know if it's the next vision, but it seems like it's possible. And you know, that's a decade out now. I mean, you need to do a lot of technology innovation to make that. I mean, I, you know, Meta Ray-Bans are not the answer to that question. Although I know people in the Valley who believe that the path, you know, that, that will kill this billion-dollar display industry and change the form factor. And, you know, you know what, what's interesting to me in terms of Apple's intelligence stuff at this point is in 1987, um, uh, uh, John Sculley, you know, Steve had left. John Sculley had to come up with these, you know, a new vision. And he went to Alan Kay's group and they came up with this idea of knowledge navigators. And I don't know, people don't even remember Knowledge Navigator right now, but it had a huge impact on Silicon Valley. For one thing, everybody came out with their own vision videos. They became really a fad after that. But it really was a, you know, we're half a step away from Knowledge Navigator right now. And it's not clear to me that that's not the path that we're gonna go down in terms of the future of computing. So yeah, you know, it just, I just, you know that what we can't predict is pace. And then always, I mean, I, one of the, my favorite things to say about Silicon Valley has been the visionaries are always wrong. And we always get surprised. And, you know, transformers were the best example of that ever. I mean, even the guys who invented transformers didn't expect them to have the impact that they did. Nobody saw that coming. I mean, you know, except in general terms. So that, that, you know, the, the previous, The era for me like that in Silicon Valley was mobile computing, 'cause I was spending a lot of time in Europe in 2005 and 2006, and it seemed like innovation had all moved to Europe. Symbian, Nokia, mobile apps, they were all happening there first. And then the iPhone shows up and everything gets reset to Silicon Valley.

It was unbelievable. I remember, yeah, I used to go to Mobile World Congress and you're like, God, these Europeans are living in a futuristic world that we just seem to not want any part of. And man, overnight the US—

When was the last time you were in China?

It was probably 2017 or '18. I remember going to Shenzhen and being quite blown away. I don't know if that's where you're going, but I went to the headquarters of DJI and then to a pretty cutting-edge factory and just saw a bunch of 25-year-olds, you know, building machines in the hallways and the energy was was just insane. And, um, going way back to the first part of what we were talking about, I think I've only ever had this experience 3 times, which is that acceptance of failure, that which I still think Silicon Valley has more than anywhere else. But, but the risk tolerance I've only ever really found in 3 places, which is here, China, and Israel, are the only places where I've, I've like felt that vibe when I go to Europe, Australia, South America, you know, you can just tell that if you mess this thing up, you're looked down upon. It's just too risky to do that. But I don't know if that's where you were going. Yeah, yeah, of course.

And then, you know, Xi shut all that down, shut most of it down. Most of the startups are gone. But I had that, I was there at the end of 2016 on the third ring. And it was like Silicon Valley on steroids.

Yeah.

And the thing was, you know, Peter Thiel likes to rant about China stealing from the United States. And yes, that's true. But what they really were stealing at that point was our culture. They were borrowing Silicon Valley ideology, not Silicon Valley technology. That was the frightening thing to me about what I saw.

It was, yeah, it reminded me of just like everything I had ever read about the true, true glory days of the, the Valley. Um, so, okay, last question then, just in— not to— I, I don't know if this will end us on a positive note or a negative note, but, um, I mean, just given your, you know— so how do you feel about Silicon Valley in this particular moment? Um, as innovative as ever, or has it got too much going on now politically, and it's a cultural masses. I don't know. Are you, are you bull or bear on this place moving forward?

You know, there was a period where I read about this like everybody else about Silicon Valley dead. This was what was it right before Transformers, right? There were people who were going to Austin. Yeah. Guess what? They're all back. Yeah. I mean, I've seen that 3 times now, you know, the boom and bust cycle. But I'm very aware that Detroit lasted for a half century and then And it went away. And there's nothing to my mind that says the Valley has to stay, you know, the innovative center of information technology for the world. I keep looking for, you know, the next platform-like technology advance that comes from somewhere other than Silicon Valley. I haven't seen that yet. So I don't see, I mean, we're in the, it's so hard to get outside this particular investment bubble to understand what's going on. That's what I like about what you do is you try to look beyond the, you know, the 3 things that the mainstream world covers about technology, 'cause the interesting technologies always come from out of left field and surprise us. And there still seems to be a critical mass of people here that you don't find anywhere else in the world. Let me just say one other thing. I think the thing we didn't mention about the particular chemistry of Silicon Valley is its remarkable diversity. You know, how it was the magnet for the best and the brightest. And if you go around the different communities in Silicon Valley, there are different ethnic populations all around here that is a unique thing to any place in the world. And that may be actually what separates Silicon Valley and makes it an innovation hub more than anything else.

Yeah, absolutely. I always picture it like you tipped the earth and all the best and brightest people from all over tumbled into this place.

Yeah.

Um, it's fascinating. Um, well, John, this is, this was a dream come true for me. I've always wanted to ask you a bunch of these questions. Um, and, and I'll put, I would urge everyone to read all your wonderful books, um, which I will put in the show notes. Um, are there like, is there like one or two favorite stories you did over the years that I should? That's hard. I know that's hard. You probably wrote like, like 30,000.

You know, if people wanna, there's my entanglement with Kevin Mitnick. Yeah. May he rest in peace. That was, that demarked an era. I wrote the first article about the World Wide Web. That was a case of getting it all right and all wrong. I had, I wrote, I think it was a map to buried treasures in the information age. And when I was thinking treasure, I was thinking information, not money. Turned out it was money. It really was buried treasure. Measure. I didn't understand that. You know, there were a couple more, but yeah, you had to— the thing that, you know, it was a 7 by 24 life, and that's sort of what I'm looking back on now. You could only do this by living in that sea of technologists that you're still spending time with. And that's where you capture the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley best. So I'm jealous of what doing.

Yeah. Uh, well, uh, that's very kind of you. And, um, the, you were always just a awesome role model and mentor. And I'm, I'm, even though I didn't stay at the New York Times that long, but I was, I was so thrilled to have a chance to work with you when I did. And, um, and thanks for making time for me, man. I appreciate it.

Yeah. Good luck on your, your new, uh, your new chapter.

Thank you.

Yeah. Take care.

Today's episode was hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. Our guest was the great John Markoff. Core Memory is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and our wonderful editor is John Sortland.