Ronan Farrow

Separately, if you read this piece and you care about these safety stakes and you care about what those researchers are warning about, I do still believe even in this environment in the power of democracy to work.

I do think that politicians are looking at polling numbers that are increasingly coming out saying a majority of Americans see AI as having more risk and downside than upside currently.

I think if

We all kind of join arms and say this matters and accountability for Silicon Valley matters and oversight matters specifically for these safety issues.

And if politicians get a sense that people will vote on that basis, there is a chance that the legislative branch can still do its job.

Well, you're exactly right to highlight this backdrop of openly anti-democratic ideology in Silicon Valley.

I mean, Peter Thiel is openly espousing a set of ideals that trickle down from Curtis Yarvin, if anyone knows that name.

um that is really about the idea that democracy has failed and that what should replace it i mean in the case of what teal is expressing specifically is uh a like racially stratified uh situation where a monarch basically a ceo-like character um has much more absolute power

um so you know i i think i probably don't even need to comment on that further uh and and that thinking has gone into the water in silicon valley beyond that extreme example of teal um you know sam altman uh is not

I think, an extremist politically.

I think the thing we talked about earlier, the dynamic in which he is opportunistic in this respect, and he sees, as government officials told us in this story, an opening where the Trump administration can, one said, do his bidding, where the Biden administration could not.

And by the way, this is not to exonerate the Biden administration, which created a number of these problems and gaps in it.

oversight or the Democratic Party, which, as you, I think, alluded to earlier, is like at the forefront of big Silicon Valley money taking over and a failure to espouse any kind of protections of working class Americans.

But with respect to these oligarchs, when I reported on Elon Musk, what I found was he really has gotten so much money that

it's become so disproportionate that he doesn't view himself as someone who needs to participate in the social contract anymore.

You look at the Rockefellers, you look at the Carnegie's, you look at... There was a previous era of bad guys, you know, in the Gilded Age, and I don't exonerate them either, but they thought they had to, like, build stuff for people.

And I think we're really entering an era where...

the gulf the inequality has become so extreme where these institutions and individuals that i have been reporting on um they just they don't have the value of engaging or giving back anymore you look at mark zuckerberg's charitable contributions you know when it was convenient and in vogue he was contributing to charity it's all getting pulled back now um you look at the giving pledge

where Bill Gates and others were getting together and saying we're going to give up above a certain threshold of our net worth.

That is now ridiculed in many circles in Silicon Valley.