Speaker 1: Kara, you know these men and their egos very, very well. How do you think this is going to end?

Speaker 2: Probably badly, and yet not. They recognize how inexpensive it is to buy their way into politics, and as politics started to encroach on them with regulation, of which there are none, they decided to employ their money and their means. And their first person really was Peter Thiel, who went out and spent very little money to get JD Vance into the Senate, $25 million, or something like that. Very inexpensive for these people. And so once they realized that, they're going to do it, and they had to figure out which of the presidential candidates would allow that to happen. Now, Democrats were tight with tech people for a long time, but it wasn't this. It wasn't this expectation, maybe get on a defense counsel, or this and that, or an invitation to the White House, but not this proximity. So it will end, I think, badly in some ways for Trump, because he cannot control them, and they cannot be controlled.

Speaker 1: I mean, Bill, you've worked in the White House before. What would your life be like if Elon Musk were sitting in the outer oval and just was doing whatever he wanted? If he had a corner in the oval where he could just focus head and body.

Speaker 3: I'm not cool enough to spend time in Silicon Valley like you are, but I imagine it's very much like a campaign feel, right? A rolling, freewheeling.

Speaker 2: I was going to say, no, it's free school, but OK.

Speaker 3: A lot of stand-up desks, right? Pizza at midnight in headquarters. White House is very different, right? It's very structured. For it to succeed, you need unity and discipline. Not everyone, actually few people from a campaign, can actually make the transition to a White House. This is a very structured, rigid environment. It's the most formal workplace, I think, that's ever existed. I could see why someone from a campaign or Silicon Valley would have a hard time with that transition. I think we're seeing that here.

Speaker 2: He wasn't in the room for that announcement, and they kept him out on purpose. The companies did not want him there, wandering around.

Speaker 1: And we know Elon would not have behaved himself. I mean, what do you make of this? As you called yourself a movement conservative, I mean, conservatives have always been friendly with business. But I wonder this idea of whole industries just kind of buying their way into the good graces

Speaker 4: of government. Well, I'm calling this particular one the plutocracy, because that's what this is. This is power and money and tech all wrapped into one. And I'm very concerned about the cronyism and the conflicts of interest, because the relationship between government and technology is so important right now. As we are in this sort of nascent period of AI evolution and everything that that's going to bring, good and bad, this could go very well for America and civilization, or it could go very badly. And I'm worried that these relationships and the money and the politics is going to pollute science, and vice versa, the other way around, that tech is going to pollute politics, if it isn't polluted enough already. But this is a very important time for tech.

Speaker 1: I mean, tech is like any other. I mean, I think we still talk about tech as if it's this little baby. Oh, it is not. No, it's actually the most powerful industry now, second maybe to oil and gas, in the whole world. First, the top 10 value companies are tech companies. They are not a little baby that needs to be coddled. And so this idea that you can't engage with them like you engage with any other industry, which is to say there's oversight, there is regulation, there are guardrails against them taking over the whole thing.

Speaker 5: The fact that he, co-president Musk, is in the Oval Office and in the West Wing and has that protection of the executive privilege of us not having the clarity of transparency that will happen. And that cronyism that she was speaking of is going to go to a level that we've never seen before. And I think when it falls apart, ultimately it's going to be where the money is.

Speaker 2: One of the things that's to be clear is, I think Steve Bannon is right. I can't believe those words are coming out of my mouth,

Speaker 6: but I think he is.

Speaker 2: They don't care about anything. They don't have values. They don't have conservative values. What I was joking the other day, if Mark Zuckerberg, if Kamala Harris had won, Mark Zuckerberg would be asking us to call him they, them. Just, I'm telling you, they just would. They have no values. Below, there's a lot of Democrats in tech, but the top ones have no libertarian light, would be what I might describe them as.

Speaker 3: I think we have to go easy on the outrage that we hear. Literally from the beginning of tech, they were with the Democrats. Clinton in 16 got 97% of donations from Silicon Valley. Biden got even more than Clinton got. So, I mean, to me, a part of me wonders, like what took so long? And like, think about it. These are outside establishment types. They're innovators. You know, they're bros who wear the annoying vest to work every day. Like, the qualities.

Speaker 2: The below people were, but the higher ones would play both sides all the time.