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
It's hard.
It's burdensome.
And if we've now invented these machines,
And I see AI as sort of the successor just to the internet connected device, which also provides a way not to have to deal with the messiness of other human beings and how annoying they can be and how hard it is to get them to do what you want.
And instead, if you're online with them.
You just talk at them or you find the right people in your chat room and we all agree with each other and all the others are stupid and you feel like a kind of elect group, which is how maybe Clubhouse was when it got started a few years ago.
So AI is a huge advance, but I see it as sort of a continuation of this escape from the
being human, that I think the ubiquitous totalitarian thing in our pocket began 15 years ago.
The Claremont speech was very important.
Yeah.
It is ideological.
He's a thinker.
He's a reader.
He went from being a kind of Hitchens, atheist, Ayn Rand libertarian to coming under the influence of Peter Thiel and Donald Trump and his own political ambitions and ended up as a...
a pretty far-right MAGA populist, and that's how he became vice president.
It was a good career move.
But he also likes to think of himself as still having one foot in the tech camp.
He likes to think he kind of unites the populist and the techno-futurist because he worked in very briefly, very briefly in Silicon Valley.
But he has essentially placed his bet on
What they call national conservatism, which is at its heart fundamentally anti-democratic because it requires a degree of executive power and –
Showing 481–500 of 697 · page 25 of 35
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