Palantir’s Politics, Elon’s Approach to DOGE, and AI’s Effects on Writing w/ Byrne Hobart

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today we're releasing a conversation I had with Byrne Hobart on Turpentine's show, The Riff. We discussed AI's impact on writing, Alex Karp's new book, Elon Musk's strategy in defunding USAID, and more. Please enjoy.

So you wrote a few pieces on, on AI this, this week. I want to first talk about—

Yeah, I've been doing a little bit of that recently. Yes.

Exactly. Let's first talk about its effect on the, on the written word and why you think it's overstated.

Yeah. So I was thinking about this a lot because I, I will sometimes encounter this idea that up until about 2023, you could assume that anything you wrote was written by a real human being and that kind of meant something. And now you can't really assume that. And I think that is technically true. Like, it is true that LLMs can put one word after another in a coherent way, and they should not be able to do that. But the kind of writing that they produce is still, you know, one, it's still kind of detectable. You still get the vibe. You'll still notice this in the occasional email or Twitter reply or whatever. And I don't think it's a huge deal, but also a lot of the writing, being able to produce 95th percentile writing is an incredible technical achievement, but The 95th percentile is not nearly adequate for competing in the market for quality writing. And to the extent that it actually becomes hard to distinguish, that's just a combination of one, technology advancing, and two, not everyone has great taste. And, you know, in a lot of domains, I don't have great taste either. And so I shouldn't be really surprised if AI is actually writing some of the stuff that I read for, I don't know, like If I'm reading the wiki for a complicated strategy game that I don't actually have time to play, but I want to play it, I would not really be able to tell if this part of the wiki is written by a human being or by an LLM that has, you know, has just hoovered up a bunch of information that other people have posted about the game and is reproducing it, but I don't really care. And I'm not really reading that in order to understand what any one person thinks or in order to have some sort of parasocial relationship with the writer. It is more just that I'm looking for information and a convenient way to display information for people is to format it in natural language. And now we have a cheaper tool to do that. I actually, in the piece I wrote about this, that I think one of the bigger social adjustments, a larger social adjustment we've had to make was actually the adjustment to the existence of blogging. Because it used to be that if you wanted to write something and have a lot of people read it, you wanted to write about current events, you actually had to follow some kind of path where You start out in a local newspaper and you're covering city council meetings and it's incredibly boring, but you do have some chance to just show that you're reasonably competent and that you can write down the things that happened and you can highlight the important things and, you know, you have an editor and so on. And then there was this path where people would go from that to reporting on higher profile stories or, you know, some, sometimes it's because they get promoted. Sometimes it's because they get lucky. In other cases, people would go on more of the commentator track, but it, It does seem like it was hard for a long time for someone to just directly break into the business of having opinions on things and writing about them. And meanwhile, this whole ecosystem that has sort of a status hierarchy has a standard path, etc. It also had a lot. It was also kind of defined by just the the technological limitations on publishing. So the the news that was read is something that happened. Once a day because the newspaper comes out once a day. And then for commentary, maybe it's once a week or biweekly or monthly or something because you're doing that in a high status magazine. But there was this established cadence for how fast the news happens. And that was already accelerating because TV news is, or at least can be, pretty real time. Radio news, of course, can be real time. But then what blogging did was it meant that writing, which is just the way that important people consume information and will be for the foreseeable future. Like, smart people are really not going to switch to pure TV, pure audio. They will consume those things, but a lot less than average. They are getting most of their ideas from the written word. And to the extent that it is, to the extent that people are audio and video consumers who are important people making important decisions, it is usually not consuming something that is meant for a mass audience. It's usually something where the production values are not great and there's not a lot of flashiness in design. It's mostly just a conversation. So something like, like I, I could buy the idea that smart, well-informed people were watching William F. Buckley on Firing Line and that they were TV watchers. But I would also buy the idea that the median, like the typical member of the Firing Line audience, that was the TV that they watched. It was just William F. Buckley and nobody else. So, So I think that that's, that's a general bet to make. But with blogging, you, people who were just generally talented, generally informed, or just really good at, really good at zippy turns of phrase, they could actually get famous purely online, being totally outside of the normal journalistic hierarchy. And blogging is a lot more real time than other media. So they were actually just inside, inside the loop, like they were reacting to stories faster than the mainstream media outlets that were producing those stories could actually respond. And. I, when I was going back and reading some of the history on this, I, I was struck by the fact that I always remembered that there was this phrase of someone in the traditional media had talked about pajama-clad bloggers. And it was, of course, a derogatory term. I was wondering how that came about. And the actual reason it came about was that the first big story that was broken, broken by the blogosphere was this minor scandal. I mean, it was a big scandal at the time, but in retrospect, a very minor scandal, which is that CBS did this report on George W. Bush's National Guard service where they said that he had skipped out on parts of it. And there's enough circumstantial evidence that you basically have to believe that George W. Bush was really patriotic for a slightly coked-up frat boy with a very wealthy family who didn't want to go to war in Vietnam. For people in that category, he had to be extremely patriotic to actually show up to everything, but also disorganized enough that sometimes the paperwork did not reflect that, et cetera, et cetera. So CBS had this report where the Blockbuster The blockbuster thing anchoring it was a memo. The memo was talking about covering for George W. Bush and admitting that he was not actually fulfilling his duty, et cetera. And someone, I think it was the Little Green Football blog, pointed out that this memo was actually not written on a typewriter in the 1970s. It was clearly composed of Microsoft Word, and then it was artificially aged to look like an older memo. So that was actually a pretty good story. Obviously a very, very in-the-media story. Like, it is not really a story about a thing that happened in the outside world. It's a story about how things were covered. It made Makes a big media organization look embarrassed, makes a smaller media organization look great. But that was actually what prompted the original quote about pajama-clad bloggers. The bloggers were not really an issue until they started actually directly competing with the media, not just breaking stories, but breaking stories about bad things that larger media companies had done. But what actually happened was media companies all adapted, that a blog is now just a standard thing that any large media outlet will have. You know, the cable stations have them and local TV stations have them and the newspapers have them, magazines have them. It just got totally incorporated into the existing media setup, but it was a really tough adjustment. And I'm sure if I had been a magazine editor in 2003, I would have thought that one, blogging is really stupid. Two, these bloggers are just not as competent as the people that I've hired. You know, you read a random blog, you compare it to a random Atlantic piece. There's a really clear skill gap. And, and three, that Even if they achieve parity in terms of the product at the time, monetizing your content, which is absolutely not how anyone in that, in that industry at the time would have said it, but you wanted to do that on the printed page. You wanted really glossy, high resolution ads. You knew that these ads were being delivered to a particular audience. You had the zip code and the address. So you actually knew roughly how wealthy they were. You had lots of reasons to prefer that versus the pennies that you get from display ads on a website. So I, there were lots of reasons for large legacy media companies to resist this. And then eventually they incorporated it. And now we just, we kind of expect that news happens all the time. And that to the extent that you are reading printed news, it is either that you're very, very old or you kind of like this sort of LARPy ritual of unfolding the giant Wall Street Journal at the, at the breakfast table. Although actually the Wall Street Journal is now smaller than it used to be. So you don't even get to do that. Or. You are reading something that is meant to come out in a lower cadence, and it is meant to be not the first word on what happened, but the last word on something that happened. So for something like a cover piece in The Atlantic, there will be cases where it needs to be published in March and it's pointless to publish it in April. But there are also cases, and the better the article is, the more likely it is that no, the month in which you publish it is the month in which that's the biggest story in that part of the world. And so you just wait until you get it right. And when you publish it, it is necessarily timely because you made it timely. So there's, there's been an adjustment. And I think that adjustment has actually helped a lot of media companies. It's helped them really tighten up what they're doing because they know at this point that they are not going to compete with Twitter to be the first place where you read the first little blip of information about some new breaking event. Like, it's very, very hard to beat that. In the cases where you can beat that, you pretty much, you have to spend a lot. You have to invest a lot in having the writers who have the access to get the story, et cetera. And there could be some cases. I'm sure there are cases where there's something time constrained where you know that if you publish that story on newyorktimes.com in 15 minutes, it's an it's a Times exclusive. If you wait 30 minutes, triple check some things instead of double checking them, et cetera. It's somebody else's exclusive instead. But in a lot of cases, they've they've kind of recognized that there are these different cadences in the media business and that it is just blurred across this timeline instead of occurring in these discrete chunks where if it happened in time for the story to get finished, in time for it to get typeset, in time for it to get on, get printed for that morning edition, then it's part of that day's news and otherwise it's the next day's news. So I think that was a big adjustment. I think the other big adjustment that people kind of sleep on is spell check and grammar check. That these are all ways that people can get their, the quality of their writing from whatever percentile it is naturally to Adequate, good enough, you know, good enough for corp— for intra-corporate communications, good enough for emailing someone who is part of just a different social stratum than you. And LLMs have both, they've, they've brought up the, the bottom end of that distribution because they are better than a word-by-word spellcheck tool at figuring out what you meant if you are, you know, in the 10th percentile of writing ability. And so it's really hard to know what you meant, but an LLM can usually puzzle it out. One of the first kind of heartwarming applications I saw for, I think it was GPT-3.5, was that someone built a tool where his friend who had a yard work business, but also was just not academically inclined at all, this friend could take emails that were just written in maybe like SMS jargon and convert them into a normal email that you would send the upper middle class customer of your yard work service. So tools like that, I think, are just a great force for egalitarianism, but they're also an annoying force in the sense that you can no longer instantly judge the quality, you know, instantly prejudge the quality of someone's thinking by scanning the first paragraph for typos. So you do actually have to read more stuff to judge people. It does mean that people who receive a lot of inbound emails from people of just a variety of writing and thinking skills can no longer assume that the correlation between those is strong enough that you can just treat, treat typos as evidence that you should ignore something. So I think that is, that is an adjustment where we'll continue to make it, but it's also an adjustment we have been able to make socially that the, The fact that we mostly send the written word, we mostly type the written word and then send it digitally rather than writing it out means that just the way someone writes is less of a class signal than it used to be. But I think we'll, we'll probably handle it just fine. And it's already the case that there's just a huge surplus of written content and that most of the content you could hypothetically see, you will never see because the people who are designing your, the algorithm for your newsfeed, are, and the people who are editing the whatever, they're editing whatever publications, RSS feed you subscribe to, et cetera. These people already know that most of their job is to exclude things. Most of their job is to reject things that are pointless, that they shouldn't write about, that their audience doesn't care about, et cetera. So a lot of that work is already getting done. And if it gets done, if it, if it gets a little bit harder, I think that is still survivable. And I think ultimately, if LLMs are actually producing writing that is on par with the writing that human beings were doing in some particular domain, then this is just another case where there was a job. You used to have to have people do it. Now you can automate it. Now those people are hopefully doing something else, but either way, we're very unlikely to go back. So that is, that is an adjustment maybe for people in the media business, but in particular, people who are in the media business and whose views are very predictable based on things they've already written or what's just, you know, what's, what's in what's in the corpus related to the publication that they wrote about. So like, it might be, and this is something I've actually done. I have tested one of my newish benchmarks for LLMs is just if I'm going to write about some story, I will give the LLM the story and ask it what I would write about it. And it will sometimes get the central idea right. Sometimes get it wrong. Often doesn't have the same examples I would use. It's worse. Usually there hasn't been a case where I looked at the results of that and I was like, okay, I actually need to find another job. But it has gotten better over time. And so I, I try to just mentally be prepared for the fact that either, either those improvements level off or at some point an LLM can do some of the things that I do and I need to adjust the way I think about what it is that I do.

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You've already spoken to some of this and also alluded to it, but I just also, I want to point readers to it and also give you any space to expand. But you wrote 3 sort of segments related to news. One is sort of real news remaining the least lucrative part of the news business. 2, the different kinds of subscription businesses, one that tells you you know, information nobody else knows and one that gives you the opportunity to fit in or believe the same thing as, as your, your colleagues or peers. And then 3, one on, on the Washington Post and how it's, it's sort of changing, you know, catering to kind of a certain customer set with their changes. Yeah.

Yeah. So I could take those backwards. Hopefully I'll remember which order you said them in, but yeah, the Washington Post one, I, it's possible that Bezos took over the Washington Post a decade ago as part of this long-running conspiracy to make it a large libertarian newspaper, but I think what's actually happened was he was looking at the existing media environment. He realized that you've got the New York Times, they are progressive. They will always be progressive. You've got the Wall Street Journal. They are, they are a conservative paper, but they're also a conservative paper that is trying to be, I think, cooperative with the leading conservative parties in the places where they operate. And so that means it's a paper that gets Trumpier. And so if there is some audience that is the combination of progressives who are in favor of growth, who think that we If we want to redistribute a lot more to the poor and solve a lot of their problems, that that's just a whole lot easier if there's more to redistribute. So, you know, let's let's go ahead and build more things and get cheaper energy so that we can raise the top marginal tax rate and you know provide more more healthcare to more people, etc. And you know, I think that's that's a very internally consistent view. We'll see if it can actually survive the Democratic Party apparatus, but. Early signs are actually kind of promising. And then on the Republican side, you have a lot of Republicans who are just pretty aghast at the idea of a president raising tariffs. They they view tariffs as a tax which they don't like, and as an unusually inefficient tax which they like even less. So there is this audience that is being underserved by large media outlets, and then there are plenty of smaller media outlets that do actually go after this audience. So if you want the more more political version of that, you read Reason Magazine, and if you want a more, more like center, centrist libertarian and pretty establishment friendly take, you would read The Economist. But there's also room for a daily paper that has a recognizable brand name that is going to go after that audience. And it's not a huge audience. It's not a huge constituency. It's very hard to get libertarian parties, like truly libertarian parties that do not have some kind of, are not part of some kind of coalition, often with a more socially conservative element. It's hard to get them elected except in places that are just utter basket cases. So Argentina, very special case, but Argentina is almost this demonstration of you, you may want a more libertarian head of state and head of government, but you probably don't want to live in the kind of place where that is actually the most popular option. You probably, you should probably be really, really happy that center-left and center-right are the main things on the menu and that extremists are like that, that major parties try to often try to sound a little bit less extreme. That, that's what they compete on is being more centrist. That is, you know, it's, it may be a bad thing prospectively, but it's a good place to be retrospectively. So, so that's, that's the theory of the Washington Post. And then yeah, we have the, the general theory of hard news, why it's a bad business, which I still stand by. It is just not, it's not a good business, but it's worth thinking about why it is that that kind of news is typically a loss leader for both the print turned text publications and for, for video publications. And there are some just really obvious causes for that. So if you want to report on celebrity news, you just have your journalists in places where there are lots of celebrities. They will see things, they will overhear things, et cetera. And if you want to report on international news, you need someone in every place where crazy things happen. You need someone who is motivated to go to places where these kinds of things happen. You need someone who is tolerant of the risk. Like, if they really want to report on a coup, they also are going to be the person who's on the ground, you know, snapping photos and writing up their notes during an actual coup. And so the, the odds of getting shot or, you know, otherwise experiencing some very unpleasant things are a lot higher for those people. So there's this high fixed cost to doing that. But I think the, the deeper reason, so I wrote about this a little bit, is that you can think of actual news. It falls into 2 categories economically. You've got news where it's valuable to you because you know something other people don't know it. You can act on it before they do. And you will either make money or achieve influence or otherwise reach some of your goals. And the natural way for this news to be priced is some combination of there's a very high subscription price because you're monetizing it very directly. You are trading on this information or your, your company is making different strategic decisions based on this new information you're getting. And that's one market. And then another one is that it's, it's a barter economy where people distribute this information by trading favors and This seems to be a lot of how news in DC works is that people will strategically leak things that they would like to appear in their, in the publication that they have a relationship with. And they're going to leak things in a way that makes those things look better or worse for, for one side. And it's just kind of a perk of the job. It's, you know, it's, it's a little bit better than stealing office supplies, a little bit worse financially than embezzling money, but it is, it is a way that you get to use your employer's resources to accomplish goals that are not quite your employer's stated goals. And it's just kind of tacitly understood that this is something people do, that it's a perk of the job. And the, one of the problems with that is that when that information leaks out, it often loses a lot of its value once it actually gets published. So the, there is like a quasi-news industry that consists of people who are gathering information about things that are happening and are not publishing it and are taking advantage of it in various ways. One of which is to get it published somewhere in the way that is maximally beneficial to them, maximally damaging to their enemies. Et cetera. So you can, you can also think of like, if that's one end of the spectrum, the other end of the spectrum is news that you read, not because you want a differentiated view, but because you want to make sure you do actually have an identical view to your peers. And this is one of the functions of an op-ed page or of political endorsements, or even of just the selection of what stories are front page news. So if, if the New York Times were taken over by, super right-wing people, but they all had the same, they had the same staff. So, you know, these people are just not going to publish radically right-wing things. You could, you could achieve a fairly right-wing aim by saying, okay, we're, we're not going to tell you what to write. We're not going to tell you how to cover things, but the main things that we think our audience really cares about are crime and immigration and, you know, NEPA, like terrible red tape snarls, et cetera. Like you could have the same set of writers who are still engaged in the same process. And still, just by making those issues more salient, even if the coverage of those issues is actually tilted in a different partisan direction, those are just issues where Republicans tend to win when those are the issues people talk about. And similarly, if you wanted the Wall Street Journal to be a tool of the progressives and didn't want to have wholesale turnover of the journalists, just tell them we're reporting a lot more on healthcare and we're reporting a lot more on economic inequality. And when we write about crypto and meme stocks, we are going to cover the individual investors who participated in these, and you don't have to tell them, hey, you, you need to cover the individual investors who lost a lot of money. Because if you tell, if you say we should do a story on what it's like to bet on sports game outcomes and what it's like to put a lot of your retirement savings into Pump.fun, et cetera, you're naturally going to find that almost everybody lost money on it. So just choosing, choosing which topics is salient is an implicitly partisan decision. So yeah, I think that, I think that covers it for the, the news stuff. But yeah, news, like it's, it's a fascinating, oh, there is one last piece. So the last piece on this is what is it that, what is it that your readers actually want to get from a news story? So if you are covering Trump and your audience is mostly Republicans and you have a headline about a thing Donald Trump did, what is it that you want your readers to get from that? Now, one view is that you want your readers to be very well calibrated. If Trump did something good, you want to make sure they know it. If Trump did something bad, you want to make sure they know that. The problem is they don't actually want that. They don't want to hear this nuanced view where they used to be 70% on Trump's side and now it's 65%. That's actually, you know, to, to their peers who are going to be also selected very much on political agreement, that looks like backsliding. It looks like, you know, next week you'll say you wish you voted for Harris and the week after that you'll be a revolutionary communist. What people actually want is to basically maintain their views. And so you don't actually have a lot of upside from Reporting on things in a nuanced and complicated way, you do have a lot of upside from, one, highlighting actually good things that your side did, and two, highlighting dumb things that the other side said about dumb things that your side did. So that does allow people to have this media environment where they say, okay, the, the president's a complicated man, but I notice all the coverage of him is unfair, which, yeah, if you only read Fox and The Blaze, you are definitely going to get that view. And you can, you can precisely invert that. And there are just a lot of people, what it, what ends up happening is there are a lot of people who are Pretty bewildered that their, their side is not the overwhelming favorite and they feel kind of under siege. But if they read the other side's equally partisan media, they'll, they'll be reading something from the perspective of someone who feels exactly as under siege, just from the opposite direction.

That sounds like some good, good thoughts on, on, on, on news and where it's, where it's going. I mean, I think it's interesting. I mean, let me segue because I want to make sure we cover 2. A few other related topics. One is on AI and search, and you wrote about that in a, in a couple different ways. You know, one is this idea of just how the kind of the second order effects of the paradigm changing from, hey, you Google Broen Hobart and, you know, get a dossier on him versus like, hey, I'm going to, you know, this conference or I want to talk to, you know, the best, you know, bloggers, you know, who should I talk to? Yeah.

So this is, this is a fun one because Search tends to assume that you, you know, roughly what you're looking for, or, and even if what you're looking for is something like best place to get, you know, best place to get affordable vegan lunch in Midtown, you still, you implicitly are assuming that someone has actually collected the data to answer that exact question. But there is this other kind of search, which is a little bit more open-ended and a little bit more narrowly scoped, which is a reverse search where You're trying to identify something based on some known characteristics. And one case of that is reverse image search, where you see a picture, you want to know what it's from. And if it is from a movie or a TV show, and it's a popular picture, you know, you've seen it 50 times, you just don't understand what the context is, you can usually find out. If it's a picture of a random person, it is very, very hard to get a tool that allows you to do that unless you're in law enforcement and subscribing to the right, the right face search products, because that is, that is a case where very, very few entities that have the technical sophistication to do that are willing to tolerate the risk and blowback of being able to deanonymize someone based on taking a photo of a stranger in a public place. And what I've been thinking about was that LLMs would actually be really good for a sort of qualitative reverse search where you're asking who is the best person to talk to on topic X. And the more I thought about that, the more I realized that a lot of, there, there are various sites that are implicitly building the infrastructure to do that. So LinkedIn, for example, you, you could imagine a world where LinkedIn on the hiring side has a chat-like interface and you tell it that you are a YC-funded startup and here's what you're building and here's how it's going and here's where we're located and here's what our team is like. Please tell me who the best seat, like who are the, the 10 best people I should talk to about being our new CTO. And that would be a really cool feature, but it would also have this weird privacy violating thing, which is basically that the person who gets the inbound request to talk to this, this YC company founder, what they know is that some mysterious black box machine just totally deanonymized them as the specific person who is good for this role. And that's not necessarily something they asked for and not something they opted into. But here they are. So it is kind of disconcerting. It's disconcerting in a lot of cases. So like you could imagine, I'm sure that given the right dataset, I, there, there could exist an LLM where I tell it, here's where I live. I'd like to know who on my, who on my block, who in my general neighborhood would I get along with best? I'd like to meet my neighbors. But it'd be really, really weird to have someone knock on your door someday and say, hey, An AI told me that we would actually be really good friends and I live just down the block. Let's chat. It is, it is kind of, kind of a weird world, but it is a world we are gradually, gradually approaching because there is just more and more data in the training corpus. So I do, of course, do the, the vanity, the vanity Googling equivalent in LLMs. It is another nice way to test out models and what, what they used to do, what the original ChatGPT did, which was kind of funny, was it basically inferred a really flattering background for me based on what I do now. And then just kind of made up a bunch of stuff. Like I think I had an MBA from Columbia and had co-founded a private equity firm and all kinds of cool stuff. It was great. But now it's actually realistic and accurate. And that's a little bit disappointing, but also, also impressive. So, so yeah, I thought, I thought that concept of LLM-based reverse people search is It's an interesting one. And it's probably one where what will actually happen is that a lot of the companies that have implicitly created a really good database for doing this kind of search, they are going to monetize it either by building their own AI tools or by licensing all of their data to somebody else. And I'm, I'm sure that things like travel review sites could do a really, really good job if you've got, so let's say there's Google on one end and they know a lot about your personal interests. And then there's TripAdvisor and it has all this data about what other people have said about different hotels. And Google can also look at its information on these people and figure out, okay, how much, how similar is this person to you and how well do their tastes predict your tastes? And it could actually give you a pretty nicely summarized list of places to go, things to see, hotels to stay in, et cetera. That would be pretty valuable, but there's, I think that it'll be interesting to see how much of that value gets captured by the companies that are building the model, how much gets captured by the companies that have been accidentally hoarding really valuable data around this, and then how much just doesn't get captured because the, the bid-ask spread is too wide for those 2.

Yeah, no, that's good, uh, good overview.

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I want to make sure we get to this other topic too. So let's segue to it is, you know, I'm not sure how much we've talked about USAID. You know, you did do, you know, a little segment on sort of, we're just commenting on sort of the piece in The Economist about sort of, sort of foreign aid's impact on economic growth or kind of this, you know, warped incentive that, that it creates. I want you to talk about that, but more just generally. You know, what's happened between Doge and USAID over the past, you know, month or so? Like, what, what are the impacts of it, if anything, in terms of sort of, you know, what the lack of aid now means or changes the things geopolitically?

Yeah, I, I think it's really hard to say because I think that I get the feeling that when Elon Musk started looking at USAID, his assumption was this is entirely graph. Like, this is taxpayer money that is going directly to things that Go against the interests of taxpayers. And there is a lot of that. Like, I, my guess is that the people who have been dreaming for years of working at USAID and who've scrimped and saved in order to live in Washington, D.C. in order to work there, I don't think a lot of them are registered Republicans. I don't think very many of them voted for Trump. And so, yeah, there's, they are definitely going to have that tilt where they will, they will look at something and see it as a neutral, like values neutral thing that is good for the world. And A Trump voter would look at that and say, "This is horrible," and I can't believe that it's my money being spent on this. But the the actual amounts of money that are spent on these things are usually pretty tiny, and a lot of the larger programs actually seem you know at least from a utilitarian perspective pretty good. Like PEPFAR has this incredible return on lives saved per dollar spent, and I think that it's so so maybe part of it part of this is just a story of premature optimization that you. Before you decide that, before you decide that all of USAID or that you're going to cut USAID's budget by some fraction and, you know, put the rest of, put the rest of its projects in some other government department, et cetera, it would be a good idea to do at least a couple SQL queries beforehand and just look at what are the largest projects, what do they actually do, and what kind of return do they get. I think that one, one possibility, which would be very Elon flavored, is that The goal is to achieve an X percent budget cut by doing a 2X percent budget cut and then rapidly restoring the things that actually turned out to be important. And it feels like he did that with, with Twitter, for example, that he cut a lot of services and, you know, he cut a lot of jobs and eliminated a lot of things. And then some parts of the app actually broke. And so he knew those parts were worth restoring. And then other things, I'm sure that they have some logs of. Here are the things that broke and nobody complained. And, you know, a few people tried to load this page. It didn't do anything. They never tried again. And therefore we know we should just eliminate the link to that page because no one was actually using it instead of maintaining a service that did not actually matter. So that's, it's just a lot higher stakes if it is something like giving people medication to prevent and mitigate the symptoms of AIDS versus giving people GIFs of funny animals and things. So yeah, maybe maybe you do want a slightly more judicious attitude there. But there's also the political consideration that if you are embarking on a project like this, you know Doge would be it would be a very different vibe if what happened was Trump gets elected and Doge is announced, and then six months later Doge actually has an impact. Six months later they deliver the list of all the projects they're cutting and why they're cutting them and the total savings. If they can actually just continuously cut things, if basically every day there is a new story about waste and about weird stuff that the government is funding and so on, and if every day people feel like they're getting a little bit richer, these people who really support cuts to USAID's budget, that does actually give it a lot more legitimacy. Whereas especially if you're working under Donald Trump, would he remember if Doge had launched and was just quietly doing its research and running its SQL queries and carefully analyzing every grant. Would he still remember that it existed after a couple of weeks? I'm not entirely sure. And if, if it doesn't, if it doesn't exist, you know, if it's, if it's not top of mind, maybe it doesn't exist. If, if that's the case, then maybe there's no political will to actually implement the things that, that Doge is trying to do. So I guess all that is to say that I can, I can sort of see how a lot of this stuff happened in a way that I think is reasonably charitable. To, or at least realistic about the people involved. And I think that you know maybe the realistic way to look at this is that the mistakes they're making are roughly the kinds of mistakes that you would expect them to make, and that probably a lot of those mistakes will be undone. I mean, PEPFAR is just it's it's a really interesting phenomenon. I I had a Twitter thread a while ago where I was arguing that George W. Bush was actually the most EA president in that he started a war over an existential risk, which is weapons of mass destruction, and then he did this. Very high quality to dollar ratio charitable thing. And, you know, you put those 2 together and he does seem like, he seems like a more effective altruism flavored leader than, than a lot of the ones that we've had before or since. I think a lot of that is kind of a historical accident. I, I'm actually really, I, I think with PEPFAR, I didn't hear about it at all at the time and only heard about it in retrospect. But it was a very big deal and was one of those things where it actually has a material effect on life expectancies globally, just because it's, it has such a large scope and it was going after some fairly low-hanging fruit in terms of, in terms of supplying healthcare to places that were probably not going to be able to buy it at the market price. So I, I can see, like, my, my, my guess is that some of these programs will come back. I think some of them are gone forever. I think it's entirely possible and kind of fun to think about that for some of the weird You know, very woke things happening in far-off places, that this is actually a cover story. And I think in that case, we'll probably just never know. You know, I think, but it's still, it's still fun to speculate about. And what it is a good reminder that there, there should just be a wide confidence interval on these things. This is probably, there are probably just not that many people who looked at these individual grants before, and certainly not that many people who thought that hard about what these grants were for. Yeah. So that's, I think that's about where we are. And the U.S. in terms of total dollars spent on foreign aid is very generous in terms of share of GDP spent on foreign aid is not, not that generous, but then you also have to factor in the U.S. military, which to the extent that the U.S. military does reduce the risk of global conflict and to the extent that that global conflict has some kind of power law distribution in terms of how much suffering it can cause, you could argue that the, the U.S. is by far the biggest foreign aid donor. It's just. The, the foreign aid is spent on aircraft carriers and it's delivered in absence of nuclear exchanges.

I want to use this Elon topic as a way to segue to new elites in, in, in general. And you briefly profiled Alex Karp's new book or sort of reflected on it. Why don't you share your, your, your thoughts on, on his thesis?

Yeah. So I thought the book was fun. I thought it was, you know, among other things. I, I have this persistent annoyance at the claim that tech bros need to study the humanities because I know a lot of tech bros. I'm friends with a lot of tech bros. They do spend more time on the humanities than humanities people spend writing code. So I think that if you, you know, if you genuinely believe that that is a big problem with the world, and you can also use Google and find out that people have been saying this for a really long time, it's obvious that the path of least resistance is learn to code, become the tech bro you wish to see in the world. And see what happens from there. But it also sometimes encapsulates a bunch of assumptions that, like, it's, it's often brought up in the context of specific things that big tech companies do. And the assumption is everyone who studied the humanities would know exactly what to do in this case. And we would all do exactly the same thing. Like, one of the ways it gets brought up is Neuralink doing tests on animals. But you don't take a medical ethics class to find out that It's never okay to test on animals. And you don't take a medical ethics class to find out it's always okay to do tests on animals. You you would take such a class to have a good way to frame the trade-offs involved, and a good way to think holistically about what you're doing and why, and have a lot of analogies at work. But I actually think that it is probably totally fine to kill dozens of monkeys in order to restore sight and restore the ability to walk to potentially many more people. I actually think that's a very reasonable deal. And that I would be, I would be happy to write an essay in a medical ethics class on exactly that. And I think I'd get an A+. So I think it's, it's sometimes an empty, weird criticism, but one place where you can apply it is to someone who actually has a PhD in philosophy and has written a long dissertation meditating on various issues and so on. Like he's, he clearly hasn't understudied it. Maybe he studied the wrong kind, but that's usually not Not the the criticism that we get. It's usually not well. The tech bros who do study the humanities are too close to the Frankfurt School, and they've gone in this weird direction from other Frankfurt School people. And so we need to we need to drag them back. No, it's it's usually much more reflexive and high level than that. And yeah, Carpe's part of Carpe's view is a very familiar one to me, which is that tech has gotten incredibly good at delivering delightful little trivialities to people. And if you want to Be entertained, or if you want a quick burrito and you you have some money, then big tech has made your life much materially better. But it isn't. Big tech is doing a bit less for things like protecting the country and reducing the risk of military conflict and providing cheap abundant energy and so on. Although they they do a little bit of the latter. And it's a weird book because some of it is this this deeper critique of contemporary progressive culture. And Carp is he identifies as a democratic socialist. He is. At least nominally speaking from a progressive tradition, he strikes me as kind of in the mold of a lot of other heterodox progressives where he, he shares the general underlying views. He thinks that pretty much it's almost like he's criticizing the discourse more than he's criticizing the fundamental beliefs. But if you have good underlying beliefs and a totally broken way of interacting with facts about the world and building coalitions, then it doesn't do you any good that you really meant well. And one of the things he points out is that there really There doesn't seem to be some coherent view of what American values are or what Western values are of what we're trying to preserve. But there is this implicit view that certain parts of the status quo do need to be preserved and can't really be questioned. And so I think he is actually asking people to make a lot of their viewpoints more concrete. So for example, if someone at Google says, if someone at Google is protesting Google doing business with the, the Department of Defense. It would be helpful for them to know exactly how far that goes and what the end goal is. Like, is the goal that America is a pacifist country? Is the goal that, yes, there's plenty of work being done for the DOD by tech companies, just not by this particular tech company? And if so, does that make Google more virtuous or does that make Google a free rider on the efforts of other people? I think there are interesting questions to ask there, but you usually can't ask them at a protest or during a walkout. And yeah, it would be, it would be nice for there to be a more long long-form, thoughtful discussion of this kind of thing. And then I think the other piece of that, which actually ties in pretty well, is that he does point out quite correctly that tech and the U.S. government used to be much more closely intertwined, that the semiconductor industry was very heavily subsidized by various Cold War defense projects and by the Apollo program, which was also a quasi-defense project. And that we have a lot less of that today, that we basically have fewer tech people in government, fewer government people who really understand tech. And it feels like when you set up those 2 critiques, you, you really have to thread the needle, right? Because you sort of want tech people to be more serious, more patriotic, patriotic in a kind of grown-up way, which is not just America's better than every other country, but here are specific things that I and everybody else should like, like that I like about America that everybody else should like, that we should have more of and we should try to preserve. So you You sort of want to reform these people and also give them more power. And it feels like if you do those in the wrong order, then things get really, really bad because he is, he is right that a lot of very smart, very ambitious people went into building apps because that's where the money was. And that's also where the impact was that if you, if you want to change the lives of, you know, if you want to change the lives of a couple dozen people, you can probably do that at USAID. If you want to change the lives even incrementally of a million people, You should probably be shipping new buttons at YouTube or adding a feature to WhatsApp or something like that. Like you actually do have a larger impact in any way that you'd want to actually quantify if you're working at one of these big platforms. So it is true. A lot of talented people have moved in that direction, but it's also true that talent, it's, it's a scalar, not a vector. So if that talent is applied based on the exact ideology that he's, or the exact of quasi-ideology or even absence of ideology, like discourse norms with no underlying thing that people are actually aiming for, that just seems like the government would be better at doing things it shouldn't really be doing in the first place. So we'll see. And Palantir is, you know, he's, he's talking his book in his book because Palantir is this large company that is obviously very closely tied with the US government, especially closely tied with the current administration. And they are, there, there is this public sector, private sector synthesis where Palantir is building the things that a higher state capacity government would build and then selling them to that government. And maybe it is actually easier to just implicitly carve out some government activities and privatize them in the form of companies like Palantir, because that way you can actually pay people in a way that is competitive with working at Google or working at Facebook. Instead of you, you have, you know, all these really big ambitions, you have very large budgets for everything except talent.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's fascinating. You know, 15 years ago, maybe a bit more, you know, sort of what seems to be in vogue, seemed to be in vogue in sort of Silicon Valley was sort of, you know, maybe like an atheist libertarianism or something. And, and now what seems to be in vogue is sort of, you know, so Trey Stephens, like nationalist Christianity, almost Palmer Luckey, et cetera. And so it's It's interesting, you know, you could trace that evolution as, hey, maybe this sort of atheist libertarianism presented this, you know, this, this emptiness by which sort of more extreme versions of leftism could, could take over. And, and this is a reaction to that. But you could also paint the story of, hey, you know, software ate the world and it didn't stop at, or it didn't stop at bits. And now it, now it's coming for everything else that requires sort of government, you know, and, you know, a libertarian agenda isn't going to to make sort of, you know, make it work there. And so, yeah, the different stories you could tell as to why that happened. And I guess the question I have is like, but no one can answer really is like, okay, how durable is this shift? And is there a bounce back at some point? And that's not going to look like what it looked like 15 years ago. And so it'd just be interesting to watch where it goes.

Yeah, I think it will be. I don't think that the same kind of Openly, openly patriotic and somewhat nationalist view. Like I don't think that's a majority, and I also don't think that the the more progressive consensus of a few years before that or the more libertarian consensus a few years before that—I don't think those were majorities either. I think some of it just comes down to who who is actually getting some kind of upside from having some sort of visible ideology, and I think this was one of the advantages that that Palantir and Enderal had. For in hiring specifically was that if the if Silicon Valley kind of presented as like 95% progressive and 5% other, and was actually maybe 65-35, that there were just a lot of kind of annoyed Republicans who were experiencing what we can now call nonstop microaggressions at the workplace. And you couldn't you didn't have to say we are Republicans Incorporated and we have DEI for the right wing, etc. You could just say you know we're we're defense contractor. The people who work there are okay with selling weapons that destroy things that are meant to kill human beings as effectively as possible, that we're going to kill, you know, we're selling these to the US government, which is going to use them for that exact purpose. And if you don't like that, you should do something else. And it's not as if no Democrat has ever voted in favor of a larger budget for the Pentagon. It is, it is the case that defense in the US has been a bipartisan interest. And the debate is basically by what margin should the US be the largest, by far the most expensive military in the world. And by what margin should the US be the world's global policeman? Like, should we do it all the time? Should we do it some of the time? Are there particular places or particular places that we should pacify, particular friends we should have, particular enemies, et cetera? Like, the debate has been about degree and not about whether or not to do it. So they were not a really right-wing company. When I talked to people there, it was what they said was just, it's a pretty apolitical company because it's politically diverse enough that if you say something really inflammatory about politics, you do actually annoy and offend your coworkers. Whereas you could be as inflammatory as you want if you are in a more, more of a discourse monoculture. The, you know, basically the, the people who are in the minority viewpoint are just accustomed to periodically having people say insulting things about them. And because those people do not assume that, you know, if you have a lot of assumptions, like you, you're in this fairly elite organization and you and all your coworkers are really, really smart and you and all your coworkers are really, really democratic. You, you kind of overextrapolate that correlation and assume that all Republicans are dumb because we don't have any dumb people here. And we also don't have any Republicans that we know of. And yeah, you, you would tend to say things that imply that worldview. And it is statistically true that if you look at voting patterns by education and education would be our best proxy for intelligence at that level, that yeah, they're among people with a bachelor's or with a master's or PhD, there is a progressive majority, but it's not nearly as overwhelming as the discourse majority has been within some of these organizations. So I, like, what I would hope for is that they just end up kind of apolitical. Like, if you look at different jobs, so I think the, the more right-skewed jobs are things like realtor and car salesman and contractor construction, et cetera, but they, they're kind of soft right-wing in the sense of, yeah, they'll probably have an unironic American flag. They may listen to country music, but I, there's, there's a lot less just constant relentless politicizing of, of everything. And in part, it's just, it's really hard to sell a car to someone who you just called an idiot or evil or a groomer or something. So it's, it's just a whole lot easier to talk about the local sports team or the weather instead. They tend to be just a little bit apolitical.

And just on that note, education polarization seems to be one of the bigger stories of our time in terms of polarization. And I wonder if sort of this shift in economics, sort of the rise of Andurils and Palantirs, and now it can make money to be right-wing, if maybe, and just with where the country's going, maybe that shift, maybe it'll go from like 95-5 or 90-10, whatever it is now, to like 60-40 or something. Maybe that polarization will dampen down.

Yeah. And I think it's reasonable that if you have large organizations that are mostly hiring people who graduated from elite schools, who want to live in big coastal cities, that they're going to be a majority progressive or at least plurality progressive. Like you should expect that to be the general tilt. And you should also expect the tilt to go in the other direction if they're hiring from, from other backgrounds, other demographics, but this is the group they hire from. It is what you should expect, but it's, I think it was probably something where it was very unifying for tech in during the George W. Bush years to be You know, this sort of rebel alliance, they're not part of this crazy Republican establishment that is doing really dumb things and did contribute pretty substantially to messing up the economy. You know, being, being not part of that was probably a very healthy thing. But, and this is something that actually, there's, there's a nice, a nice symmetry here where tech could have this sort of politically oppositional culture when tech was small, but now they are the establishment and you can't be the establishment and also have this culture of We're going to criticize things. We're going to destroy things, and we're going to point out all these flaws in the way things are done because the way things are done is the way that they do things. Like they are the establishment now. And similarly, I think a lot of Trumpist people have been very used to this idea that they are the powerless insurgents, and they are constantly pointing out the the dumb things that the government has done and pointing out that they could be done better. But once once you are not on the outside, once you are on the inside, you actually do need to execute this culture flip and. You do need to say things like, okay, we are probably not going to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. There are probably a lot of things that are like a lot of laws that are still going to be on the books. And now we're actually responsible for the outcomes within the constraints. There's a lot of stuff we just can't change. And so once, once you have people saying that, they get a lot more boring. They get a lot more nuanced, but you really want the people in charge to be feeling that way. You really don't want the system to be run by people who want to tear down the system unless the system is is utterly broken. And I think in that case, there's also the question of why did you want to be in charge of this thing that is completely broken? You could have done something else with your life. And, and maybe, maybe it is more of this revolutionary mindset, like maybe they're going to tear down one thing and build up something else. But I think it's a, it's a very hard ship to steer. And I think that doing that by increments is, you know, as, as annoying as it would be for someone who was incredibly jazzed on Election Day and even more excited on Inauguration Day. Like sometimes the, the big legacy you leave behind is that this was getting 1% worse every single year and we made it 5% better.

Yeah, that's, that's a kind of practical pragmatism that you embody. Perhaps it's a great note to, to, to end on. We're over time. Thanks for a great conversation as always. Until next time.

All right. Next time. Thanks.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg.

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