Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I am Rich Ziade.

Paul: And this is The Aboard Podcast. It’s the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software, and maybe more generally about the world of software, all in, like, what’s going on over in the—

Rich: Sure.

Paul: —software world. Today, Rich, I woke up this morning and I saw a skeet, I think they’re called, on Bluesky.

Rich: Skeet?

Paul: Eh, it’s rough over there. But anyway, Katie Drummond, who’s the editor of WIRED, was like, “We went all in on politics this issue.” And Steven Levy, truly great tech journalist, like, kind of—

Rich: Legend.

Paul: Just has covered the industry for, I guess, 40-plus years now.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: Real Silicon Valley anchor, just went, “What is with all the fascism? Like, what, what are you guys doing?”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so it’s a really good article, and it’s a good subject.

Rich: What’s the title of it?

Paul: “Tech Went All In. Now What?”

Rich: Let’s unpack that.

Paul: [laughing] I like that. We’re on a podcast. That’s what you do on a podcast.

Rich: Let’s unpack it!

Paul: You know what? First we have to unpack that theme song. So why don’t we do that?

[intro music]

Paul: You know, last night I got home, because my piano teacher was playing a recital.

Rich: Way to come out like a ball of fire, Paul. [laughter] Tell me about your piano teacher.

Paul: He’s great. He did a good job. And I mean, he’s really—I mean, he’s incredibly good, and he’s a very smooth trio.

Rich: Ooh!

Paul: On Tuesday—

Rich: Jazz?

Paul: Oh, yeah.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: Yeah. Like, real avant garde, little Argentinian. On Tuesday, I’m gonna go in and I’m gonna play “Air on the G String” by Bach really, really slowly, like a, like a nine year old.

Rich: All right.

Paul: I don’t know how he gets through the day, but I was thinking about it. He’s been teaching probably for, like, 25 years.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: He’s taught 30,000 lessons. Like, if you just do the math, like, 1,500—

Rich: I mean, he’s making a living teaching.

Paul: No, a pretty good one.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, he’s really, like, he’s pretty booked. I was lucky to get in.

Rich: And on top of that, he gets to do what he loves. He gets to go out and play shows.

Paul: 30,000 lessons. So when you’re in there, you’re just like, “Okay, I am only 1/30000th, like, today, no matter how bad I suck.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s really not that big a deal.

Rich: It’s not.

Paul: So anyway, so that was nice. And I came home and my friend Pete was, like, literally on our porch.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: With his dog.

Rich: It’s called trespassing. But go on.

Paul: It’s fine. He has permission. And he sat down, and he was immediately like, “Man, you know, the podcast doesn’t have enough banter. It’s missing—”

Rich: Banter?

Paul: “Too much marketing. Too much marketing.” So I want to start marketing our product right now, and I want to just shout out to Pete, and tell him that, just turn this off in the shower, and just relax, because we’re going to talk about Aboard for one minute, and then we will talk about the gradual overtaking of the tech industry by pseudo-fascist forces.

Rich: Whoa.

Paul: Yeah. So marketing first, though, right?

Rich: All right, let’s market.

Paul: Richard, what is Aboard?

Rich: Aboard is a software-generation platform. You get to talk to a prompt. It asks you a bunch of really, really smart questions. Less technical, more substantive, more sort of, “What’s the product you need?” And then it generates software.

Paul: It’s that most mysterious thing. It’s the product manager who can code.

Rich: It’s different. It’s not vibe coding. It’s a tool that ships good, credible, first cuts of software for companies, businesses, organizations, nonprofits, anyone you like. We’ve got a really aggressive roadmap. But you can go play with what… You can get a taste. You can get a sampling. Remember we used to get free samples of shampoo, little squeezy packets? They look like ketchup packets?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But they’re shampoo.

Paul: But delicious.

Rich: Don’t eat it.

Paul: No, gonna eat it. I’m gonna eat those ketchup, that shampoo packet.

Rich: Fair. Fair. You can go try Aboard at aboard.com today. Subscribe and we’ll keep in touch on updates. We’re gonna be pretty aggressive about it.

Paul: Is it a product or a service?

Rich: It’s both.

Paul: [laughing] It’s a shampoo and a dessert topping!

Rich: [laughing] It’s both.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: We still want to talk to you about what needs to get done. We got to integrate. Software is messy inside of companies, and so part of it is talking to you.

Paul: What we’re doing is we’re riding the wave of what AI makes possible. We’re a little ahead of the curve, but instead of pretending that humans don’t have to come back into the mix?

Rich: We put them in the mix.

Paul: We make sure that there are humans nearby if they need to be in the mix to get you your software.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: Our goal is to get you your thing. That’s what we’re about. That’s who we are.

Rich: Let Pete back in. Come on back in.

Paul: Come on back in, Pete. That’s all the marketing. Here we go. Unclog your ears. Okay, Rich. I’m going to summarize this article in a minute. You ready?

Rich: One minute?

Paul: Yeah, yeah. Okay, marketing is done. Time for the substance.

Rich: Go!

Paul: Steven Levy has been reporting on, and really a deep analyst and thinker about the tech industry, especially the growth of the Silicon Valley tech industry, for decades and decades.

Rich: He is a legend in tech journalism.

Paul: Extremely influential to me. I read the first book by him in college.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: He has rightly identified the culture as very capitalist, very like, let’s make a lot of money.

Rich: Free markets, libertarian…

Paul: But let’s move culture forward, let’s move people forward, let’s empower humans. That’s the tech industry.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And over the last couple of years, he’s watched, especially, like, adjacent to Donald Trump—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: —as the industry has taken, throwing out the word “fascist” is actually fuzzy with these people, but a hard Trumpist turn away from issues around diversity, or personal empowerment, and so on, and into a hard capitalist, don’t regulate us, we know what’s best for you kind of ultra conservative move?

Rich: Yeah, the progressivism streak that usually existed and sort of was part of the narrative at Silicon Valley has really receded.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And it’s much more of an anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-whatever.

Paul: To be clear, and I think he underplays this a little bit in the article, respectfully. Like, that libertarian, anti-regulation vibe has been there from the absolute beginning. Like, many of the people—

Rich: Absolutely.

Paul: Your Peter Thiels and your Curtis Yarvins and all these—

Rich: No, yeah—

Paul: These are Valley staples. So they weren’t the mainstream.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: But now you’ve got Elon Musk, but even put him aside, you’ve got Tim Cook bending the knee, and you’ve got Jensen Huang bending the knee, and you’ve got sort of this, Mark Zuckerberg saying, “I don’t really care anymore and everybody needs to man up, and I’m going to do MMA.” And so you just have this sort of weird, hyper-masculine Trumpist thing happening to the big, soft, fuzzy industry at the very highest level, while everybody else kind of remains a centrist Democrat.

Rich: Mmm hmm. Yeah.

Paul: And he’s just like, “Whoa.” And his rough thesis is that the drama of 2020, when these people just kind of got yelled at, they became sort of, they stood in for capitalism, their employees sort of turned on them.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They were told that they just weren’t doing enough around culture, radicalized them a little bit.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then, you know, and they’re kind of in the wilderness. And Trump was like, “Let’s do a deal.” And he makes you feel good if you’re on his side.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: He makes you feel good. And that then, they kind of went all in.

Rich: Yeah, that’s right. And so he’s looking at, “What happened to my Silicon Valley that I saw as this place that, yes, created enormous wealth and value, but also was progressive and had the right values, the right, in sentiment, behind it?”

Paul: I mean, the idea was that you would, you would, most of that value would go out to the users of the product. You would just take your part.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But that they would do their work and they would do—and you were, you were the enabler of so much.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: To me, I think that there’s two things missing here and I kind of want to throw it back to you because I know you have a lot of thoughts. One is that hard libertarian streak has been there from the beginning. And—

Rich: Two things missing from his article?

Paul: Yeah. So that’s one. And then I, two. I actually think that the culture around crypto set this turn up. Like—

Rich: Sure.

Paul: And there’s a reason that Trump and crypto are strongly aligned, right? So I think you just had like two hyper-libertarian—you have this long term, Peter Thiel-style hyper-libertarian, we should run the world, capitalism is the greatest good.

Rich: Anti-government, anti-regulation.

Paul: That’s right. And like, “Shut up about DEI, Western culture’s the best,” and so on. So very validating if you’re a white guy who’s getting yelled at.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And then I think on the other side, you had this culture around crypto where it’s like, we should make our own markets, we should have our own stock market.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: We know best. And I think you get those two and then you get Trump going like, “Let’s do a deal.” And I think they just went, “To hell with it. I guess that’s the way it’s going. And you know what? This is more fun. I’m going to buy another yacht.”

Rich: Yeah. I don’t think it’s material, I don’t think it’s materialistic, the motivation. Materialism is done, for the wealthy—

Paul: It objectively can’t be. They can’t have anything new.

Rich: They can have the yacht, the second yacht or whatever, right?

Paul: Unless the goal is to be the richest person in the world?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: There is nothing left for them to achieve.

Rich: Correct. Paul, I want to bake you a cake.

Paul: What kind of cake?

Rich: It’s a gold-foiled stuffed gold cake.

Paul: You know, I’ve been cutting back lately, but I had a layer cake at a diner the other day and I was like, “Is it fresh?”

Rich: Never asked that question.

Paul: No, I did, because the guy, he was an honest fellow.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: He was like, “It’s very fresh.” Man. Just a trip to paradise.

Rich: Well, you cut open this bundt cake?

Paul: Mmm hmm?

Rich: And gold oozes out of the center.

Paul: That sounds incredibly harmful. [laughter]

Rich: And it’s terrible, too!

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rich: But here we are. Here are the ingredients to bake this cake, Paul.

Paul: So you have a thesis as to how we got here?

Rich: I think it’s a collection of things.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: The first, let’s get the basics out of the way, which is these companies have become big enough to defend their turf as dominant players. Like, they are—we can argue whether they are actually monopolies, in an antitrust sense, but they’re huge and they’re scared of being broken up.

Paul: Can I make an observation about that, too?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I have a little thing I say a lot which is, like, ethics don’t scale. But the reality is when you get to that size, you are such a nation state that anything that people think you are doing is the most evil thing you could possibly do, you’re also doing the other thing.

Rich: It’s  massive.

Paul: No, so you’re like, “Oh, you guys are just exploiting everybody by owning too much of the advertising market.” “Well, we’re also incentivizing a commons where people are creating content—”

Rich: “There’s a marketplace…”

Paul: “And twelve billion people are using us every day to do these five things.”

Rich: Correct.

Paul: So you can tell yourself a story.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you have a set of myths and understanding as a nation state company?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That may not be in alignment with the myths that people have anywhere else.

Rich: Correct.

Paul: But it’s very self-fulfilling. So it doesn’t feel like a monopoly to you.

Rich: Correct. And just a quick highlight on this: Adobe made a move to acquire Figma a few years ago.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And the government, and this is under the Biden administration, stopped it as anti-competitive.

Paul: And they were also like this product makes no sense. There’s too much interface. You guys have to—if they could just have stripped Figma down, I bet they could have gotten it through.

Rich: You look at Silicon Valley and the idea of an acquisition not happening?

Paul: Oh, yeah.

Rich: That hit, that hurts, that really hurts.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: From VCs to investors, to the founders, it, like, struck at them personally. So there is—

Paul: They should have spun off Figma.

Rich: Oooh.

Paul: [laughing] Okay, keep going.

Rich: So, you know, companies like Google, which were under scrutiny during the Biden administration, like there’s just a lot going on. And so these companies had reached scale and size where they were dominant, and so they were starting to get nervous. So that’s ingredient one for this delicious bundt cake.

Paul: Okay, what is ingredient one?

Rich: You are reaching scale where the fear of getting broken up as a monopoly.

Paul: You’re monopolish.

Rich: You’re monopolish.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I mean, it’s real and they’re dominant, so they want to defend the status quo.

Paul: Okay, number two.

Rich: Number two is on a more individual, personal level. As we closed out 2020, and it was—the pandemic hits.

Paul: You and I were running a company at that time.

Rich: You and I were running a company at the time. Social issues were, like, at fever pitch. The platforms were amplifying only the loudest, most sort of extreme positions.

Paul: Everybody’s home.

Rich: And people like Mark Andreessen, who, to be clear, looks like a villain. Like, if he told me to draw a villain, he would look like that.

Paul: He’s sort of the most LLM, like, Midjourney-created human.

Rich: Yeah. And it had gotten to a point where these people who were either investors or founders or executives were really, really in a position where they were in a constant state of judgment, of vilification. And I’m not trying to defend, because I think some of these people are not great. But it became, it got to a point where you couldn’t make a joke in a hallway. Like, it really had gotten to that point. And we experienced that on an obviously much, much smaller scale.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And for these people who were like, “You know what? No matter what good deed I do, even if I talk about a donation to a foundation, I have been pegged as this successful white male billionaire.” And a lot of the ills of the world, there was a dotted line drawn to them. And maybe some are legit. I’m not saying that. That’s not the point. The point was they woke up one day and they were like, “Enough.”

Paul: “I’m going to get a bigger yacht.”

Rich: “Enough.”

Paul: “I’m done.”

Rich: “I’ve just had enough.” No, no, no. They’re not going to get a bigger yacht. They’re going to take the mic back. They’re like, “I got to be able to joke. I got to be able to compliment someone’s shoes. I got to be able to, like, not feel like I have to never open my mouth ever again. I have made a thousand millionaires, a few billionaires, and I can’t talk.” Like, it got to that point. And I’m trying to get inside the psychology of what was going on here. I’m not trying to sympathize. Right?

Paul: That’s okay. I mean, like, if people feel that this is you saying Marc Andreessen should be president, then they should listen to a different podcast.

Rich: I’m not saying that.

Paul: We’re just like, just go with us for a minute, friends.

Rich: Can I be a psychologist for a split second, too?

Paul: I would love to see you be a psychologist.

Rich: These are nerds.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: These are nerds. And when you tell, like, nerds who succeeded are still nerds, and they’re still actually pretty insecure. Like, Zuckerberg is still freaking awkward today.

Paul: Well, you got to think about it, Zuckerberg, it’s just, like, so much money so soon. And actually, go back to your psychologist point. Who’s going to help him process that? Nobody. There’s nobody who has his experience. So basically, the only message he has is whatever you want to be, whether it’s a new version of Julius Caesar, or the world’s greatest philanthropist, go do it, because it’s up to you.

Rich: It’s corny. It lands real corny.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: He was, like, “Masculinity needs to come back.” I’m like, is the Rock on the podcast or is that Zuckerberg? It’s just corny.

Paul: Remember when he was smoking meat? Remember that? It’s just rough.

Rich: It’s rough, right? And again, this is an ingredient. This is not the reason. It’s not like, oh, they’re getting their revenge. It is a component. I do think that it framed a lot of the psychology around it.

Paul: Here’s the thing. When you decide that you can’t win.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You’re just like, “Well, then I’ll just play a different game.”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Right?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And so there was a point where they just couldn’t satisfy anybody. And when I talk about anybody, anybody is looking at them and going, and making jokes about guillotines all day long.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And they went—and they see that because they’re online. And they went, “All right, well, there’s no place for me here.”

Rich: I think it landed as anti-libertarian. It was anti-free expression, free to open discourse. Like, it landed as like, how did we end up here? This is like, not—where’s the freedom, free flow of discussion and ideas?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And so that’s number two. Number three, and this is just. I hate to say it, it’s basic Business 101.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: A CEO, if you zoom into the job description of Tim Cook, it’s that he’s got to keep the company stable, growing, improve margins, get more profits. And so when he goes to the Oval Office—

Paul: Well, and ultimately, the market will reward everybody, and that’s what they want.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: It’s just like the whole thing is built on the number going up. And if something starts to threaten the number, like, Trump saying, “Hey, I’m gonna do 25% tariffs on iPhones,” he’s gotta go.

Rich: He’s gotta get on a plane and go. Now, mind you—

Paul: Now that is the actual job. But it might not be morally where he sits.

Rich: Well, it gets worse than that. It actually doesn’t work with a very transactional person. But you do what you got to do. And like, was he sobbing quietly in the bathroom in the West Wing? Maybe.

Paul: It is a rough one to see that you might have hundreds of millions of dollars and yet you still end up just kind of crawling.

Rich: There’s a board.

Paul: I don’t love it, man.

Rich: There’s stockholders. His job, his job. He is not a politician. And I think that’s where, like, the lens through all of this starts to—

Paul: And why can’t anyone ever just stand up and say—I mean, this is why I don’t have real power. Because ultimately I do think there’s a moment where I personally, and a lot of my past would point to this, just go, “Eh, fuck it.” [laughing]

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like just, you know, “It’s up to you guys.” But the reality is then the next person to come in—here’s what Tim Cook is thinking. [Tim Cook voice] “I really, would really, really prefer not to do this. I would really like to do that.”

Rich: Yeah. That’s an interesting Tim Cook imitation.

Paul: “Yeah, I would love to never do this right now, but—”

Rich: Yeah, okay.

Paul: “But—but! I have to, because the person who would come after me would just have to do the same thing.”

Rich: The Nvidia dude who, like, I was like, “Aw, cool nerd with like, motorcycle jacket!”

Paul: No, no. Crawling like a worm on the ground.

Rich: Yeah. I mean, all of them. And look, here’s the thing. They have a job and a responsibility and they have a fiduciary duty.

Paul: And they are right. If they peace out, the market will punish them for peacing out. And then the next person to show up will just have to crawl. So they’re like, “I guess I have to go. I’ll get the broken glass in my kneecaps.”

Rich: Ingredient three, unfortunately, has no space for moral judgment. It is the job of an executive. It just does. It really does.

Paul: Well, this is how they’re getting us, right? Because they’re—basically, Trump knows that.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: He knows that better than anybody.

Rich: Of course.

Paul: And he’s like, “I can make you dance like a puppet because your shareholders will punish you.” Now, he assumes it’s just greed, but also they know that if they aren’t the one, somebody else, et cetera, et cetera.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s just, this is a big game that has horrible real-world consequences.

Rich: And keep in mind, and Levy points this out in the article, Trump’s a deal guy. He’s not a politician. He’s not someone that is carrying sort of civic values and bringing them forward. He’s a deal guy. He’s very familiar to the business side of things. Right?

Paul: In a kind of mobbed up way.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, totally.

Paul: Like, he’s not, like, an ethical deal guy.

Rich: Oh, look, it’s not—like, reneging on a deal?

Paul: Not a problem.

Rich: Not a problem. Right? And they’re all seeing that now. Right? Like, there’s other issues that are coming up around immigration and H-1Bs and all this. It’s a lot of headaches around this. But you’re doing the best you can with what you got, right? And when you put on the CEO hat, that’s your job.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: That’s your job.

Paul: Okay, so what was that? That was three.

Rich: That was three. To recap: Monopoly. These companies are huge. They’re protecting status quo. They want to be left alone. They want the SEC and any regulatory oversight to stay away.

Paul: Two, their feelings got real hurt.

Rich: Enough is—he says it. I think he literally says their feelings got hurt. Enough is enough.

Paul: And so, “Enough is enough. I’m out of here. You guys can—”

Rich: Peace out.

Paul: “Go have your DEI. I’m gonna go learn more about jiu-jitsu.”

Rich: Correct.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Number three is CEOs gonna CEO. [laughing]

Paul: The function of the corporation is to grow.

Rich: The function of the corporation—

Paul: And to return value to its shareholders. And that’s the real job. So I gotta do it, even if it means kissing Trump’s yellow toenails.

Rich: Yeah. I’m gonna toss the fourth one to you.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: In the Silicon Valley family is this weird skater dude called crypto.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: The framing of crypto, the money at stake with crypto, the arguments that were made about alternative markets and alternative control, and control away from government seeped into the rest of Silicon Valley. And I don’t know if we’re here without the crypto narrative.

Paul: There’s no way we’d be here. So, I mean, crypto to me was really, really attractive to Silicon Valley because people think that the function of VC is to create really amazing products. But that’s one of the functions. The real most, the thing that excites, like, Andreessen Horowitz, right? They went all in on crypto, as far as you can go.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Is creating a market.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You have buyers and sellers, and you sit in the middle. And in fact, they even created their own stock market out there. I haven’t even checked in on in a while. But they were going to make their own, like, their own New York Stock Exchange. But it was the Silicon Valley—

Rich: That’s not Coinbase. I don’t know.

Paul: No, no, no, no. Like, a classic market, too.

Rich: Oh, like a Nasdaq.

Paul: Yeah, because they’re just like, it’s annoying—there is this element where Silicon Valley hates New York City because we have all the money. We have tall buildings.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: I would argue that many—

Rich: Better restaurants.

Paul: And we’re just better looking, frankly. Not necessarily in this room.

Rich: Woo!

Paul: No, I’m sorry. I’m like, I know a California 10 is supposed to be a California 10, but the New York 10 is, like, also runs a large not-for-profit. Like, it’s just—

Rich: It’s also the world.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Shows up in New York City.

Paul: Are the coolest, most diverse, best place on Earth. And everybody keeps trying to ruin it. And everybody says it’s over. And I’m on year 30, and I’m like, “I’m sorry, friends, I’m really sorry.” [laughter] Like, I like it out there. Or I used to.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: But mmm! So just, we drive them bananas.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They want to own and control the market.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And the East Coast in general. You got D.C. regulating you. And New York City, just like, Goldman saying, “Oh, we’ll take you public, but mmm, I need a little extra.”

Rich: Little something.

Paul: “Little something for me.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so it’s like, “Why can’t I keep all that value?” And then blockchain comes along. It’s decentralized. It’s got this strong libertarian vibe. And it spins up a trillion dollars. Just spins it up.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Just out of cryptography. Nothing could feel better.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It finally is the justification for all of your hard work—

Rich: It’s everything. It’s everything. It’s the end of banks.

Paul: Yeah, that’s right.

Rich: It’s the end of fiat currency. It’s the end of government control around foreign exchange.

Paul: You’ve sat in a room talking about your thesis for 25 years, making sure only to fund young white Stanford dudes. And finally somebody noticed and said, “You’re great. Let’s give you a whole economy.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That’s just been waiting!

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so it shows up and it creates this ideology of total affirmation around this set of ideas?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it creates a transactionalism. And if you go read Peter Thiel’s Zero to One book, it’s like one of the chilliest books. It’s like reading horror fiction. Because it’s supposed to be how to scale up a startup, but it actually just kind of, occasionally he’ll just drop these lines that’ll be like, “Well, and if you look at this quadrant, China descends into cannibalism.” [laughter] And then he just sort of goes on to the next thing. And that’s just how he sees the world.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: He doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: All those dark enlightenment people don’t. So they had the whole package, the whole thing.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: And then Biden shows up and starts regulating it.

Rich: Aggressively.

Paul: No one’s excited about crypto and nobody—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so—

Rich: By the way, it’s worth pointing out, and Levy smartly includes it, is the Bankman-Fried meltdown?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Like, that made everyone pause and sit up straight, like, “Oh, wow, it’s a bunch of fraudsters.” And so it, it colored a lot of the posture. It sort of set the posture in that administration. And so it was essential—

Paul: Well, he was a huge Democrat donor, right? So they got, they got embarrassed.

Rich: Even in its worst days, many, many billions were in the crypto markets. And the Biden administration was essentially saying, “This is all nonsense.”

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: Wind it all down.

Paul: That’s right. “What did you do? You guys made like 5,000 Enrons.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “Don’t do it.”

Rich: And so that was existential.

Paul: But actually contrast these two things. So you have one cultural thing happening where everybody is like, “You are what’s wrong with the world.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “You have too much money, you have too much power, you represent bad things, and you’re not moving fast enough to change the culture that you’re in.” Now, granted, a lot of things that people wanted were actually government and sort of regulatory level?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But they attacked the companies because the companies could actually react. Then at the same time, you have this other emerging ideology which where if you just believe we can spend up money out of nowhere and create, literally go to an island and create the society we want.

Rich: But it wasn’t an idea. It was already worth billions.

Paul: Yes, that’s right.

Rich: And so it was about to get deleted. Right? Or the threat of it was going to get deleted. And so hundreds of millions was poured into the Trump campaign. There’s a lesser of two evils vibe to all of it. Like, I talk to friends who are, tilt right of center and whatnot. And they’re anti-regulation, they’re free market and whatnot. And I don’t think, I think they signed up saying, “Well, look, it’s not great, but it’s better than the other option.”

Paul: Well, and also, like, the Biden administration was really, really bad at communicating. And so the Trump, the, the sort of, all the bananas people in exile were just able to kind of pour poison into the human ear.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: For, like, four straight years.

Rich: Oh yeah.

Paul: And then Biden, Biden would be like, “Well, you know, but we’re going to bring down the price of a Snickers bar.”

Rich: Yeah. So let’s recap, Paul. Monopoly. Enough is enough. CEO gotta be CEO.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Crypto shows up. Existential threat. We mix it up.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Put a little allspice in there and some saffron.

Paul: Uh huh. Uh huh.

Rich: That’s weird to add that in.

Paul: Paprika?

Rich: Paprika.

Paul: In a bundt cake.

Rich: Comes out of the oven and it tastes bad. And it tastes bad to a lot of the people who cooked the cake right now. [laughing]

Paul: You know, it doesn’t taste bad to one person. [laughter] One person is like just sitting there with his spoon, just eating it.

Rich: You know, so much of what made American innovation and Silicon Valley what it is, which is this incredible explosion of value creation, right? Designed in California, built in China.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But we keep all the money and you got all the, like, laborers making the phones. Right? The premise for that getting created is entirely under threat.

Paul: It really is. All of the—

Rich: Entirely.

Paul: They were worried that regulation would ruin the innovation engine. But what’s going to ruin it is corruption.

Rich: Beyond corruption. Even policies—you got to keep in mind, you’re dealing with a transactional person who’s thinking about the base, and the base wants no immigrants coming in. Whether you can, you’re a line cook or whether you’re a PhD in neuroscience.

Paul: I gotta say, you cannot imagine a tech industry without a liberal immigration policy. Especially around, like, H-1Bs and stuff. Like, it doesn’t exist.

Rich: You can run down the list and what you see, and he quotes Bradley Tusk, who’s, like, just this hard-nosed operative who helps Uber and FanDuel, like, just this is, like, a very serious guy. And he’s like, “Everything that made us what we are is under threat today.” And so the cake not only doesn’t taste good, but it’s sitting real weird in the belly right now. Right? And so that is what we are contending with today. And so I—look, we can make the moral case, but I am actually a free-market capitalist guy. I think that you should have ethics and morals. So a lot of stuff upsets me these days. But I want to see this system work. Because I’ve benefited from it.

Paul: I want to really, I don’t really ever want to know anybody else’s political beliefs under a well-regulated, clean-market society with good incentives and punishments. Right? Like, that’s where I would like to get to but boy, we’re nowhere near there right now.

Rich: Well, I think I—

Paul: You can literally go to the White House with a golden loaf, and they will not put 25% tariffs on your product.

Rich: And the truth is that is not grounded in a value system that creates value and creates growth.

Paul: And it’s incredibly anti-value.

Rich: It’s transactional.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: It’s transactional. And I think when you reduce it to the transactional, you lose your way. And I think that’s what we’re in the middle of right now.

Paul: We are currently losing our way.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: What do you think now? What’s going to happen?

Rich: Levy talks about this as well. He’s like, “How do we get out of this? Or maybe we don’t.” [laughing] That’s kind of how he ends it.

Paul: I am noticing the “maybe we don’t” is getting more common out there, yeah.

Rich: Look, if you’re a realist, eventually, these are all warning signs today. But when it starts to actually break things, I’m not gonna assume that they’re gonna wake up on the right side of the bed, morally or ethically.

Paul: I think the market will tank. And that’s the only way.

Rich: I think there are certain things that are gonna break.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: There are certain things that are gonna be under pressure, and then I think it snaps. I’m not talking about, like, Andreessen waking up one day. I’m talking about jobs being lost in a district where it leans one way and going the other way because of these outcomes.

Paul: I think the only way you get Americans, unfortunately, we have a lot of narratives about civic virtue. I buy into a lot of them. But unfortunately, the only way you seem to really get Americans to pay attention is when they go to their Betterment account or their, like, the ADP retirement—

Rich: Applebee’s Friday nights are over for the family for a while.

Paul: You know, actually, what’s interesting? Hamburger Helper sales are up.

Rich: Do not go there.

Paul: No, it’s a tell.

Rich: Are you putting that in the cake, too?

Paul: Yes. No, literally, that’s what people are doing because they’re, like, “Meat’s more expensive.”

Rich: It’s a lot. It’s very expensive.

Paul: And so especially—

Rich: You ever have Hamburger Helper?

Paul: I have. Yeah, sure.

Rich: It’s delicious.

Paul: It is. I mean, you just add, you’re adding carbs—

Rich: Pasta and ground beef.

Paul: And salt.

Rich: You just get some cream.

Paul: America knows that when things are bad, you just gotta get more salt.

Rich: This was a very thoughtful, intellectual discussion that ends with Hamburger Helper.

Paul: Well, didn’t, it was the logo, that little hand?

Rich: It was a hand…

Paul: [laughing] Yeah.

Rich: What the hand do?

Paul: I think it actually is in a relationship with the…

Rich: Spatula? [laughing]

Paul: No, it’s the guy from the little muffins. Who’s the little muffin guy?

Rich: The Pillsbury Doughboy?

Paul: Yeah, that guy in the hand. Like that’s, nobody talks about it.

Rich: All right, we’re going to run this through an AI video generator and see what it comes up with.

Paul: Oh, no, we’re not. No. No.

Rich: I hope—I’m an optimist, Paul.

Paul: I know you are.

Rich: I think better days are ahead, and I find that we do tend to reset ourselves. I love this country.

Paul: I know you do.

Rich: I was not born here. It gave me every opportunity. And I’m going to have faith in its ability to ride through it and get to a better place.

Paul: I don’t talk about it a lot because I have a lot of very progressive friends. And the default has always been to hate America and, you know, read Howard Zinn and hit yourself in the head with it. But I do love America. My father served in Korea. My brother was in the military.

Rich: I love this country.

Paul: I’ve advised vets orgs. Okay, I know it’s tricky and complicated, but…

Rich: Gets tested every so often.

Paul: Yeah, but this is—the problem is it’s just a huge piece of shit. Like, it’s just like if it wasn’t—

Rich: You said you loved it a minute ago.

Paul: No, not America.

Rich: Oh.

Paul: The test.

Rich: Oh, the test sucks.

Paul: We just got—

Rich: The test sucks!

Paul: They just gave a guy $50 grand in a Cava bag, and he’s the guy who builds the jails for the kids. Like…

Rich: It’s very bad.

Paul: It ain’t good right now.

Rich: It’s very bad.

Paul: But I’m gonna, I’m gonna, here’s what I will say.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: These self-corrective systems still exist.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: They are weakened, but they do still exist. Hopefully—

Rich: Look at you wading into politics on our AI podcast.

Paul: I don’t think there’s any—that’s all. At this point, an AI podcast is a politics podcast, whether we want it to be or not.

Rich: We didn’t talk about AI in the context of all this, which is beyond this podcast, but it is worth talking about at some point.

Paul: Well, it is one of the giant bubble things fueling a lot of this.

Rich: It’s one of the nuggets of gold that people are gonna fight over. Right?

Paul: That’s right. And what they’re—

Rich: Trying to control.

Paul: They’re also just trying not to slow it down. They want to keep going real bad.

Rich: He mentions that.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Right? There’s an anti-reg streak through all of it.

Paul: All of it. Because it’s, “Mom, get out of my room.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Yeah. So here we are. And I’m glad you’re optimistic. It is nice to have an optimistic business partner.

Rich: Oh, thanks.

Paul: And you do—

Rich: Sounds like you’re not. [laughing]

Paul: Well, you’ve noticed, it’s a good balance because every now and then you’re, like, “Okay, you kind of did say this six months ago. And we are now.”

Rich: Man. I’m Lebanese. I’ve seen some things.

Paul: You really have. All right, here’s what I actually believe. I have a lot of faith in our ability to pull this out and to figure it out. I do think there’s a lot of smarts here and there’s a lot of capability. I’m really worried about us, I just hope to God we can do it without violence. We just tend to go to violence as a society, and most societies do.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Everybody assumes that, like, the Republicans have the most guns. I don’t think it looks like that. I get nervous about that. And I’m raising my kids.

Rich: It’s messy. People are hot and it’s messy, and I hope, I hope, take care of each other, talk to each other.

Paul: Yeah, that’s true.

Rich: That’s the advice.

Paul: Just respect your neighbor and off we go. But all right, let’s go. Let’s return to our liberal bubble of New York goodness with our soon-to-be socialist mayor. [laughing] And we’ll have a good time.

Rich: Have a wonderful week, everyone.

Paul: Yeah!

Rich: On this very special edition of The Aboard Podcast.

Paul: Go read the article. Go, the whole WIRED issue is about politics.

Rich: It’s great.

Paul: It rules. Okay, bye.

Rich: Have a good week.

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