Ed Elson

It was the Wild West.

We were the insurgents.

And now we find them all migrating back into Washington.

And now they are becoming part of the establishment.

And so you could almost sense the cognitive dissonance in Bill where he knows, like, this isn't who we are.

This is not what this was supposed to be.

But suddenly in 2026, all of these players have become their own form of institutional bureaucracy.

They are their own form of the big dogs.

And we're all kind of sitting there like, well, what happened to the underdog?

What happened to all the excitement about that and the disruptors coming in?

And he said it himself.

The people in Silicon Valley don't want companies to get broken up.

They don't want to see that disruption because they don't want to be disrupted.

They are those companies now.

It's a very interesting dynamic of power.

I like it.

I like it.

I'm going to impress you.

I'm going to raise a big old bonus.

This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer.