Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…ion bill. They were ready to deal, but they didn’t want to do that because it is fundamentally for them about political control. And this is my steelman case for the action. This is a case, I believe. What Elon did at Twitter was not make Twitter more efficient. It’s not like a better product now. It’s a different product. What he did was he made it controllable. What he did at Twitter was he went into something where he thought the people disagreed with him, and he broke it until he had actual operational control of the thing, and they would do what he wanted them to do, and then he can move it in his direction. What they’re doing in the federal government, and this is what Chris Rufo wanted to do, it’s what Russ Vought wanted to do, is make the thing controllable. And what they want to do with that control, I don’t even think they fully know, but their view is that the federal government is like a… It is the capital city that they have conquered. And now, they need to turn it into something that they can actually use. And in order to do that, I mean, Russ Vought has said, “You need to traumatize the civil servants,” right? That was his word, traumatize the civil servants. When Elon Musk talked about USAID, he said, “It’s all worms. No apple. We’re going to feed it to the wood shipper.” This isn’t the language of, let’s see who’s really doing a good job here and who’s not. This is the language of conquering. This is the language of destruction, and they have not- This is the language of destruction and they have not articulated new better goals for it and nor are they starting with the parts of the government where I think you would start with. What do they want the education department to do? I’m a professional political journalist. I talk to people in the Trump administration. I can’t tell you what they want out of it, aside from the fact that they don’t like it and they think it’s like a hotbed of other people’s power. I can tell you what some conservatives have written about it, but the administration itself has not articulated goals. So what I think their view is right now is they’re breaking the thing and trying to make the people who would be oppositional either leave or go into hiding and then they’re going to figure out what they want to do with it. But right now they’re in the period where you have to sack and then later on you can build yourself your monuments and turn the civil service to your own ends. I don’t think it’s still… I just… That is what I think is going on. I think that’s, from a certain perspective, accurate and insightful description. If we just look at Twitter, you said that he didn’t make it more efficient, he made it more controllable. Let me just describe, just because I know the engineers inside Twitter well, which we could argue that the government is very different than a company. That’s an important argument there. With Twitter, the culture that’s there now, people are really excited to work there and to be productive there, engineers. Elon is really good at finding people that are there, extremely good at what they do and are there to give everything. And the resulting thing this machine that is created, all barriers removed, you create beautiful stuff. It’s not like move fast and break things. It’s very cynical perspective on it. No, everybody loves what they do, are good at it and are really rapidly figuring out all the multitude of problems that arise in that. It’s a different culture, a culture of productivity, and it’s not like some negative boys club or there’s all kinds of negative perspectives you can take on those things. No, it’s a positive culture of productivity. Controllable side, also really important to understand and that could be taken advantage of in a really negative way, especially in government. But you should say on some of the most successful software projects, there is a level of control required like open source projects, Linus Torvalds, that heads up the Linux kernel. There has to be what’s often called the benevolent dictator for life. There has to be a controllability to the machine of this extremely productive, efficient team to work together. Now, those are engineering projects and the problem with government is you get elected new benevolent dictators for life that come. They’re often not benevolent.…

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