#recode decode

Anand Giridharadas:

“We often have these folk memories that are not our own memories, but are just kind of passed down. 

There’s a folk memory in tech of being a rebel, of being a hacker, of being a tinkerer on the outside.

And I think if you’re like 30 and working in tech, that just was never the actual story of your life.

I think the problem is they’ve clung to that folk memory even as they won.

So the analogy I use is, you see on the news these war-torn countries where you have a rebel army that is advancing on the capitol.

And you’ve got these rebel commanders in their berets sitting in the back of pickup trucks. They’ve got one gun, holding another gun.

Sometimes the rebels win. Sometimes the rebels actually make it to the palace. They become the new king, they become the president.

The old guy’s taken off in a helicopter to some exile country.

And it’s always a bad sign if the rebel, when they ascend to the palace, keeps their beret on.

Castro, Mugabe, Saddam, they all kept the beret. And what does it mean when you keep the beret? You haven’t accepted who you are.

You now actually are power. You’re not the rebel. You’re the establishment now and you haven’t processed your arrival. (…)

I think, when I was listening to [your interview with Mark Zuckerberg], my observation was... And I had the same feeling watching that Elon Musk spliff one.

I love to live in a world where there are all kinds of different people.

But I think we have to, just watching these guys, we have to acknowledge that they tend to be a very particular kind of person. Particular kind of man.

And they’re often these kind of boy-men who are not particularly developed in a lot of ways. They’re not cultivated.

That’s fine to have such people who kind of are not able to relate to other human beings and not able to connect to their emotions.

It’s great to have them in the world.

But to have so many of them essentially, now, in charge of what have become, basically, the locomotives of human history now, these various platforms, is really, really problematic.”

—

Source: Recode Decode: 'Winners Take All' author Anand Giridharadas

Kara Swisher Interviews Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Recode Decode | Full Interview

Kara Swisher interviews Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Recode Decode | Full interview - 7/15/19

“Ask a layman about artificial intelligence and they might point to sci-fi villains such as HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey or the Terminator. But the co-founders of the AI Now Institute, Meredith Whittaker and Kate Crawford, want to change the conversation. Instead of talking about far-flung super-intelligent AI, they argued on the latest episode of Recode Decode, we should be talking about the ways AI is affecting people right now, in everything from education to policing to hiring. Rather than killer robots, you should be concerned about what happens to your résumé when it hits a program like the one Amazon tried to build.”

“‘They took two years to design, essentially, an AI automatic résumé scanner,’ Crawford said. ‘And they found that it was so biased against any female applicant that if you even had the word ‘woman’ on your résumé that it went to the bottom of the pile.’ That’s a classic example of what Crawford calls ‘dirty data.’ Even though people think of algorithms as being fair and free of human bias, ... biased humans are the ones who create the data sets and the code that decides how that data should be evaluated; that doesn’t mean AI is useless, but ... we need to be interrogating how it is being made and deployed in the real world.”

Vox, April 8, 2019: “How will AI change your life? AI Now Institute founders Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker explain.,” by Eric Johnson

Vox’s Recode Decode, May 23, 2019: “Former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter on surveillance, AI ethics, and how to regulate tech,” with Kara Swisher (1:19:00, audio)

AI Now Institute, April 2019: “Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race, and Power in AI,” by Sarah Myers West, Meredith Whittaker, and Kate Crawford (33 pages, PDF)

Kara Swisher:

“The president didn’t talk about it like it was serious. How did you look at that?

You and others in California were early to this [coronavirus shutdown]. How do you look at the impact of that?

I mean, it’s obvious in the numbers that California is doing a lot better.”

Mayor of San Francisco, London Breed: 

“It probably has a lot to do with our history.

On the West Coast and in particular in San Francisco, you probably remember the AIDS crisis that hit really hard.

The public health professionals here lead the way, the charge.

The federal government was absent, and didn’t want to support our efforts in any way.

We were almost left alone to manage this public health crisis in the city.

And we emerged really as a model for addressing HIV/AIDS.

The gains that we’ve made, and how far we’ve come — even last year we had less than 200 new patients diagnosed with HIV, which is absolutely incredible.

So I think we knew that we had to do what we had to do for ourselves, that we’d probably need to focus on making sure that we’re coming together here in California, and taking care of one another.

We weren’t certain that we were going to be able to count on the federal government, because we’ve been there before.”

MBTI: examples of Elon Musk’s INTP-ness

Source: Full Q&A: Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Recode Decode

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Elon Musk:

“Well, I tweet interesting things pretty much as they come to me, and probably with not much of a filter. I find it entertaining.

I think, ‘Oh, other people might find this entertaining.’ Sometimes they do. It’s pretty random.

What people are most interested in, like some little tweet about ‘I love anime.’ That was it. 

But it was lowercase ‘i’, black heart, ‘anime,’ and people loved that. That was like one of my most popular tweets.”

—

Kara Swisher:

“What about things that are just critical of you that you don’t like? Do you think you’re particularly sensitive?”

Elon Musk:

“No. Of course not. Count how many negative articles there are and how many I respond to. One percent, maybe.

But the common rebuttal of journalists is, ‘Oh. My article’s fine. He’s just thin-skinned.’ No, your article is false and you don’t want to admit it.”

Kara Swisher:

“Do you take criticism to heart correctly?”

Elon Musk:

“Yes. How do you think rockets get to orbit? Not easily. 

Physics is very demanding. If you get it wrong, the rocket will blow up. Cars are very demanding. If you get it wrong, a car won’t work.

Truth in engineering and science is extremely important. I have a strong interest in the truth. Much more than journalists do.”

—

Elon Musk:

“Well I can’t talk about the details, but it’s gonna be like a really futuristic like cyberpunk, ‘Blade Runner’ pickup truck.

It’s gonna be awesome, it’s gonna be amazing. This will be heart-stopping. It stops my heart. It’s like, oh, it’s great. 

You know, I actually don’t know if a lot of people will buy this pickup truck or not, but I don’t care.

I mean I do care, eventually, you know. Like sure, I care. We wanna get gasoline, diesel pickup trucks off the road. (…)

But like I said, it could be just like, okay, I weirdly like it and other people don’t. That’s possible. 

But we’re gonna make it anyway, and then we will just have a niche audience, I don’t know.”

—

Elon Musk:

“And we actually launched a Tesla — my Tesla Roadster to Mars orbit.

And although ... Like a lot of people thought this was like some ego thing or whatever, but ...

And you know, we had a lot of, you know, like playing David Bowie. 

And where, like, ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ stuff in there, we’ve got the Asimov Foundation series etched in glass. Like there’s a lot of like little things.”

—

Elon Musk:

“The vehicle that we’re designing right now, which is sort of code-named BFR, I’m thinking of changing the official name to Heart of Gold.”

Kara Swisher:

“Okay. As in Neil Young?”

Elon Musk:

“Well, I do like that song, but it’s more like the spaceship in ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’

And it’s powered by infinite improbability. I still think it’s the great ... This is like a very great power source.”

Kara Swisher:

“What was BFR? What did BFR stand [for]?”

Elon Musk:

“BFR is, to some degree, a Rorschach test on acronyms. But officially, it is the Big Falcon Rocket.”

Kara Swisher: 

“Okay, Big Fucking Rocket.”

—

Kara Swisher:

“When you had been looking to go private with Tesla, you had talked to the Saudis, how do you feel about them now?”

Elon Musk:

“Yeah, well I mean, it’s important to appreciate that the Saudis have been approaching me for two years about going private. It wasn’t like spur-of-the-moment.”

Kara Swisher:

“But I’m talking about in the wake of Khashoggi’s murder.”

Elon Musk: 

MBTI & Podcast episodes

NT Content (Tim Ferriss: ENTJ, Kara Swisher: ENTJ)

Recode Decode: Tim Ferriss: You’re not Isaac Newton! Give yourself a break for being unproductive right now.

“Bestselling author, investor, and podcaster Tim Ferriss talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about his advice for people coping with the coronavirus quarantine, which includes giving yourself slack for being unproductive, afraid, and fatigued;

the crucial difference between fast decisions and rushed ones;

and why the pandemic crisis is a "natural culling of the herd" for businesses in a "bloated capitalist system" that have no resilience.”

—

NF Content (Brené Brown: ENFJ)

Unlocking Us with Brené Brown: Dr. Vivek Murthy and Brené on loneliness and connection

“Have you ever struggled with feeling lonely - even when you’re surrounded by people you love? I have. It’s painful and confusing.