George Packer
speaker
697 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 6 May
George Packer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I mean, he's a very fluent speaker, and he had all the lines down.
He's got different lines now.
They're all about our common humanity.
But back then, it was all about the machines and how the machines could solve these problems.
So, yeah, it was the Democrats as well as the Republicans, maybe even more because the Democrats were so close to Silicon Valley and
A lot of your colleagues at the Obama White House ended up going to Silicon Valley.
What is it about Silicon Valley?
Well, I grew up there, but it was not called that.
I'm old enough to precede Silicon Valley.
Once it came, you just felt a combination of utopianism, that kind of countercultural thing.
beloved community they were creating that was really part of the origins of it.
Certainly the zeitgeist that was around Apple.
The incredible success of
money that it's produced.
And these are engineers.
They're impatient with human flaws and messiness.
They want an elegant solution to every problem, including the problem of how to govern ourselves.
And this is something actually, when I was writing about Silicon Valley, that Ben Horowitz, partner of Marc Andreessen, said to me,
He said there's a kind of similarity of Marxists and libertarians because what they both have is a perfect system that explains everything in which if you do it right, everything will work for the best.
And so, of course, in that divide, they're libertarians.
Showing 441–460 of 697 · page 23 of 35
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