Money Talks: The changing ideology of Silicon Valley
Money Talks from The Economist
The Economist
4.4 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 14 December 2022
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Startup founders in Silicon Valley are often motivated by an almost religious idealism: young tech workers, looking to move fast and break things, want to use technology to make the world a better place. But 2022 has brought about a reckoning: the business models of once-star firms, such as Uber and Meta, are under threat; the allure of the dishevelled whizz-kid has been undermined by the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried; and the expense of Palo Alto has pushed plucky startups out. The Bay Area has often been populated by liberals, but many of tech’s heroes, like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, have shifted to the right.
On this week’s podcast, hosts Mike Bird, Soumaya Keynes and Alice Fulwood ask whether Silicon Valley has lost its religion. Margaret O’Mara, professor of history at the University of Washington, reveals the Valley’s past. And Adrian Daub, the author of “What Tech Calls Thinking”, tells us that the secret of the successful founder is to bamboozle regulators while they make a bit more money.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Money talks from the economist is sponsored by Invest Puerto Rico. |
| 0:06.0 | More than just a Caribbean paradise, Puerto Rico is a business powerhouse. |
| 0:11.0 | This U.S. territory is a fast-growing hub for innovators. |
| 0:15.0 | Puerto Rico boasts numerous tax credits, business incentives, |
| 0:19.0 | and world-class talent that take your business to the next level. |
| 0:23.0 | Find out why at InvestPR.org. |
| 0:26.0 | Gamechangers, welcome home. |
| 0:30.0 | Welcome to our podcast where we explore the world of technology and innovation with leading industry experts. |
| 0:48.0 | Don't worry, this is money talks, not tech talks, but bear with me. |
| 0:53.0 | If you've been on social media recently, |
| 0:56.0 | you'll have seen the output of chat GPT, which uses artificial intelligence to generate text. |
| 1:02.0 | The company that created it, OpenAI, is run by Sam Oldman, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. |
| 1:09.0 | We asked the chatbot to come up with an introduction to this episode using an interview with Sam. |
| 1:14.0 | In today's episode, we interview Sam Oldman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. |
| 1:21.0 | Not quite right, this episode covers much more ground. |
| 1:24.0 | But as promised, here's Sam talking about the history of Silicon Valley as he remembers it. |
| 1:29.0 | It bombed out after the dot-com bust. |
| 1:32.0 | Out of the rubble, roughly starting in 2005, |
| 1:36.0 | you had things like AWS pretty soon, you got things like the iPhone. |
| 1:39.0 | And we had this Cambrian explosion of new technology, and it was incredibly exciting. |
| 1:45.0 | It was an amazing thing to be part of. |
| 1:47.0 | And we got a lot of stuff that we now take for granted. |
... |
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