The EA Panic Is Overblown | Noah Smith

Noah Smith (0:00)

I think the big tech is boring and like, you know, knowing what level you are at Google is boring. And then that era died in the pandemic. It died like in a month.

Like it was that, that era was murdered. And then you had this very short lived crypto era where like crypto people made all the money and the AI people were like, wait, I was supposed to invent the future. What is up with these financial scammers getting all the money?

SPEAKER_2 (0:23)

And we're back. We're live with Noah Smith, friend of the show and the author of the excellent No Opinion.

Welcome to MTS.

Noah Smith (0:30)

Howdy.

SPEAKER_2 (0:32)

Isn't this your first time on MTS?

Noah Smith (0:33)

This is my first time. Maybe not the last. Depends on how I do.

SPEAKER_2 (0:36)

What took so long?

Noah Smith (0:38)

That's crazy. I don't know. It's like, yeah, like you had other people, you had a long queue of people to talk to. Yeah. Now you've worked your way through the queue. You're down to the economists. You've worked your way through the AI people, the engineers, the, you know, now you're down to the econ people.

SPEAKER_2 (0:54)

So how long have you lived in SF for?

Noah Smith (0:56)

About a decade now.

SPEAKER_2 (0:58)

So what's your anthropological history of tech in SF? This is what we were talking about right before we went on camera.

Noah Smith (1:03)

Oh yeah. Well, so I went to college at Stanford, like, you know, much like in the early 2000s. Like, so basically I've been around for a quarter century now. And so I've seen distinct eras of SF tech. So, you know, I never didn't live in SF till like 2016, but I would go to SF all the time. You know, there'd be like silly parties or just tech people would hang out there. You know, Stanford kids would go up and hang out. And then at that time, like the SF tech people were the hippies. They went to raves, they did drugs, they went to Burning Man, which was like not just old rich white guys. You know, it's like, it was always white guys.

They were young, the young people, punks and artists. And so then-

SPEAKER_2 (1:47)

What year are we talking about right now?

Noah Smith (1:48)

The early 2000s, you know, like, let's say like 2000, from like, you know, com bust era through, you know, up until like when Facebook took off.

I think that, you know, Silicon Valley meant the peninsula. Silicon Valley meant, you know, guys in like with like, you know, collared shirts and like pocket protectors and stuff like that. Like in the movie, Office Space, if you ever seen that, it's an old movie.

SPEAKER_2 (2:11)

I have seen the social network.

Noah Smith (2:13)

Social network. And I do know Dilbert, yeah. Yes, it was basically like, that was the tech industry. That was, you know, you worked for like Oracle or, you know, Sun or something. And you were just like a little coder in a little hole, you know, like I'm writing code.

But then like, if you wanted to, you know, live in a, you know, live with roommates or, you know, like make some, start something out of your garage, wear a hoodie, go to raves, et cetera, you went to San Francisco where you could be a tech hippie. And they had, and hippies-

SPEAKER_2 (2:44)

I was born in the wrong era.

Noah Smith (2:45)

Yeah, it was pretty cool. I mean, if you like drugs.

SPEAKER_2 (2:49)

But I don't know anyone like this except kind of Sofia and also Deep Fates.

Noah Smith (2:53)

Deep Fates, yes. He is like, he is of that era. He's the last.

SPEAKER_2 (2:59)

He's the last of his generation.

Noah Smith (3:01)

The last techno hippie. Yeah, and he really retains the culture, like this sort of punk, like change the world through tech, empower regular people, sort of optimistic, but also kind of like pessimistic about human society in general, optimistic about tech. He lived in like communes and stuff. And so he is the last, but like Jack Dorsey, if you want to meet, if you- That's true, yeah. Yeah, Jack Dorsey was, he is the paragon of that era. And of course he became like an old weirdo because every like old hippie becomes a weirdo, even if you're a tech hippie. But then he was the paragon of that era. He wore the hoodie, not because his marketing people told him to, but because he liked hoodies.

And he would just like sit around, yeah that was the idea of Twitter, to give a voice to the voiceless, to see what some random person in Bangladesh had to say. And of course it was like death to the Jews, but we found out later that was, we found out later that no one had anything interesting to say and everyone was just an attention seeking troll. But we didn't know that in the early 2000s. We thought people had like all these like, there's all this like knowledge trapped in like the.