25 min read
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The early internet was built on big hopes—access, openness, connection, and the belief that technology could make the world fairer. In this episode of The Radical Candor Podcast, Kim & Jason are in conversation with Steven Levy. His recent article, “I thought I knew Silicon Valley. I was wrong.”, becomes the lens through which they revisit tech’s early promise and its reality today.
Watch the episode:
Take an honest look at the optimism that shaped Silicon Valley’s early culture and how those ideals unravelled. Kim & Steven candidly share their unique perspective of how it feels to recognize the gap between what they believed and what actually happened as two people who had a front row seat.
If you’re looking for a thoughtful, grounded, and honest conversation about how tech’s story was written—and rewritten—in real time, and what today’s leaders can learn from examining both intention and impact, this episode offers clarity and perspective you can apply right now.
[00:00:04] Kim Scott: Hello everybody and welcome to the Radical Candor Podcast. I'm Kim Scott.
[00:00:08] Jason: And I'm Jason Rosoff. And today we're joined by Steven Levy. Steven has been covering Silicon Valley since the days when tech leaders saw themselves as rebels, challenging authority, not bending the knee to it as WIRED’s editor at large, he's chronicled the evolution from Idealistic Home Brew Computer Club to today's billionaire, CEO at Mar-a-Lago moment. His recent essays on AI Breaking Bad, the in Enshitification Trap and what went wrong in Silicon Valley, ask the questions. Leaders need to hear. How do you maintain your values under pressure? What's the cost of silence? And can an industry that seems to have lost its way, find its soul again?
[00:00:42] Kim Scott: Steven, welcome to Radical Candor.
[00:00:45] Steven Levy: Great seeing you.
[00:00:46] Kim Scott: Great to see you. What folks may not know about Steven is that he, was one of the early champions of my, writing career. I had written a novel about what it was like to work at Google and Steven read it and wrote A nice article about that unpublished novel. Nobody else published it, but uh,
[00:01:05] Steven Levy: Still not published?
[00:01:06] Kim Scott: Still not published, but you can buy it. it's called Virtual Love. But this is not an advertisement for virtual love. this is really, I feel this great sense of, Betrayal, and maybe first and foremost I betrayed myself, and when I read your article, it really, spoke to me, and expressed a lot of what I felt. So, first of all, thank you. thank you for writing the article. and maybe you want to explain to folks who haven't read it, what your article is about, and then we'll jump in.
[00:01:39] Steven Levy: Sure, yeah. The headline in the article was, I thought I knew Silicon Valley. I was wrong.
[00:01:44] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:01:45] Steven Levy: And the thing that first drew me to writing about technology was the exciting. irreverent transformational nature of it. I started my journals of career. A lot of what I did was like cover the rock music world. that was exciting to me because when I got into that music, it was changing the world. You know, that was the late sixties, very early seventies, and it, I thought I was riding something, a wave that was like changing the world. But when I actually started writing about it, it was like the mid seventies, and it wasn't that way anymore.
[00:02:27] Then in the early eighties, I did a story for Rolling Stone about computer hackers. I had never touched a computer before then. But talking to those people, it blew my mind. You know, like, like these were fascinating people. They, you know, were full of exciting ideas. They were doing something really important and they were gonna change everyone's life.
[00:02:46] Kim Scott: They were the new musicians.
[00:02:48] Steven Levy: exactly. one guy who was covering the tech world, who had also been in the other world, and he kept saying, we're on the Led Zeppelin plane, we're on the Led Zeppelin plane. these people, you know, they had counterculture roots they were doing with their engineering counterculture what music had done, but in a bigger way. You know, instead of talking to, you know, Jimmy Page, I talked to Steve Jobs,
[00:03:12] Kim Scott: Yeah,
[00:03:13] Steven Levy: I think that's cooler and, so. I wrote that through the personal computer revolution. the internet boom. And I always felt the people I was talking to had values that I shared, they were going to do good for the world, and they sold that idea to their employees and everyone was doing God's work.
[00:03:37] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:03:38] Steven Levy: And I think even before Trump took office, that began to change, as the companies got bigger, as it became the mass product in the world, right? so you don't want to hang it all on Trump.
[00:03:57] Kim Scott: No, no, no. It was getting worse before him.
[00:04:00] Steven Levy: Yeah, it was getting more transactional as, as someone said. and then Trump comes along. the first term, I think a lot of the big company’s sort of deferred to their employees. They didn't jump on the Trump train, wholeheartedly,
[00:04:17] Kim Scott: Well, and you had Sergey Brin going to the airport, like objecting to the Muslim ban.
[00:04:22] Steven Levy: Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, and Google wouldn't do the, the, the contract with the Department of Defense, the AI contract, Maven. They sat that one out, so to speak.
[00:04:36] And then Biden came along and we could talk about this, and they had a different view, of Biden. One thing researching this story that took me aback was, you know, I knew that Biden might not have been a favorite of the people in Silicon Valley, but everyone hated him in the tech world. I mean, not just the Libertarians, you know, it was the liberals who said he's out to get us. he wants to destroy technology. I didn't think that was the case. and even in areas where they were saying, yeah, we need regulation like AI. when they saw an opportunity for someone else to come in and say, I don't want to regulate you at all you're part of our, competition globally. You know, why hold you back? And they, they jumped for that, you know, and crypto, we could talk about that. Obviously, they despise the SEC,
[00:05:29] Kim Scott: yeah.
[00:05:30] Steven Levy: and, you know, just hate.
[00:05:32] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:05:33] Steven Levy: And threw hundreds of millions of dollars towards the Trump campaign and, you know, the crypto people helped him. So, now we have Trump. And he is a person who likes to be sucked up to and,
[00:05:47] Kim Scott: Yeah, have his ring kissed.
[00:05:48] Steven Levy: And to my surprise, t he CEOs of Silicon Valley, the big companies are elbowing each other to see who can get in front of them to suck up to 'em the most.
[00:05:59] Kim Scott: Ugh. I can't even think of the right word. Disappointing is not, it, it's like a punch in the gut to watch this.
[00:06:06] Steven Levy: Yeah. I think it's shameful.
[00:06:07] Kim Scott: yeah. So many friends of mine have said, you know, it's waking people up at three in the morning, like making us feel physically ill. And I think that's part of why your article struck such a nerve. It's like, how is this happening?
[00:06:22] Steven Levy: Yeah, exactly. what happened to Silicon Valley?
[00:06:26] Jason: I saw the quote, that you pasted in Kim. why don't you read that? 'Cause like it, it's prescient.
[00:06:30] Kim Scott: Yeah. this sums it up. This is from Zadie Smith; in an interview I think with Ezra Klein a while ago. she said, "When the internet came, I was like, hallelujah. Finally, we've got a medium which isn't made by the man or centralized. We're just going to be talking to each other, hanging out with each other, peer to peer. It's going to be amazing. That is not the internet we have. That is not what occurred." Like that sums it up pretty well.
[00:06:57] Steven Levy: Yeah. Yeah. That last part's kind of an understatement. Look, I was right there talking about how, there's no borders in cyberspace and you know, every person has speaks with equal weight. I think social media was part of that toppling that it seems weird that something which gives the power to anyone to you know, just type something and it goes around the world, hundreds of millions of people can read it. But what we didn't count on was those algorithms. and, the toxic content, gets favored over, boring content or sensible content. and it turns out behind the scenes that those places are pulling the levers to make sure horrible stuff.
[00:07:45] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:07:46] Steven Levy: gets circulated more.
[00:07:48] Jason: in the article that you talked about Mark Lemley firing Meta as a client. so, this is like, after we already know it's bad, not only is it not leveling the playing field, but it's actually like causing harm. so, they fire, Meta, because he sees not only what the platform is doing, but the head of the platform, Zuckerberg is out there, projecting this sort of toxic masculinity, neo-Nazi madness. Very few people publicly at least followed his lead. And you wrote, "everyone fears repercussions because this administration is vindictive.”
And I kind of wonder what that says about the moment that we find ourselves in, right? That we have this sort of like promise, this vision of like where technology could take us running hard up against the reality. And it's not just fantasy, right? Like I, I do think the administration has demonstrated itself to be vindictive. So, I'm kind of curious, like, how does that play into your feeling of dislocation from Silicon Valley and maybe what you observed, of the leaders that you profiled?
[00:08:47] Steven Levy: Yeah. Lemley, for listeners who might not know, he's an intellectual property lawyer. He teaches at Stanford. He's a leader in his field. He's worked for a lot of the big companies, doing IP law. He always thought it was, um, not a political thing to do it was part of the law. And he'd argue a case and he could see the value of the other side of the case. Then at a certain point he says, I'm doing this work for Meta. He said, how could I be working for a place which is being so harmful to the world?
[00:09:20] So he fired Meta as his client, and that was very unusual. That's why I wanted to talk to him. he said, well, yeah, I took a stand, but I have tenure here at Stanford and I am gonna have clients. for, my outside work no matter what. And I think though, that's something that a lot of the people I'm talking about have, a similar luxury even if they could say, Hey, I'm in charge of this corporation. I have responsibility to the shareholders. They don't have a response. They, they have a responsibility to themselves look in the mirror as well. So, I think of Tim Cook. As a person who I actually admire, I've known him for a long time. Tim Cook doesn't like Donald Trump.
[00:10:07] Kim Scott: I, think that's safe to say.
[00:10:09] Steven Levy: he's never said that publicly, but I think we, it's pretty clear that Tim is not a MAGA kind of guy.
[00:10:18] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:10:20] Steven Levy: How many years from retirement? not many. he's a billionaire. He has gone through a lot. His integrity has been intact. So here he is in a position where. Unless he's shows fealty to Trump, unless he bends the knee, Apple will have some consequences. They'll have tariffs. You know, Trump threatened that first, apple spent a million dollars to get Tim on the dais at the inauguration. Right. He did that. And then Tim doesn't go to something in the Middle East where, you know, Trump wants all the tech people there. And then he says, boy, Tim wasn't there, maybe I'm, I should give it a 25% tariff.
[00:11:02] Well, as a CEO, Tim has to think about that. But as a human being, Tim could say, you know what, I'm gonna retire, I don't need to do this. So not only does he not retire, and you could argue he's a steward of Apple, you know, he wants to keep that going. He shows up in the Oval Office. With this, it's kind of like a fatted calf with this object, with a gold base, a solid gold base, and then.
[00:11:31] Kim Scott: etched glass.
[00:11:33] Steven Levy: Little legend on it like you know Donald Trump the greatest, and how could you do that? Right? I said, the most shameful product in Apple's history. And he is sitting there in the oval office, he's unboxing the thing, right? Like it's a new Vision Pro or something, you know, lovingly pulling it out. I can't believe that, I mean,
[00:11:53] Kim Scott: Well, yeah, when I saw that, I was like, maybe I'm giving Tim too much credit, but I'm like, what has he been threatened with? That he's willing to do that. 'Cause it does seem so, like I do admire him. It's shocking.
[00:12:06] Steven Levy: he made a choice and, you know, uh, personally, I think one day he might second guess that choice.
[00:12:14] Kim Scott: to go back to your question of what is causing these, what's the point of being a billionaire. If you can't say what you believe, like, if you have less power, not more, which is what it seems like is happening to these people.
[00:12:27] Steven Levy: Well, the ones who say what they believe are Mark Andreessen, and what he believes.
[00:12:32] Kim Scott: Terrifying.
[00:12:32] Steven Levy: Is that, you know, if you want to regulate AI, you're kind of a murderer because if you don't regulate AI, we're gonna solve diseases much quicker. So just think of all the people who would be dying because we didn't let AI go as fast as possible to find these magical cures. Right? And he talks about this thing called the deal.
[00:12:57] The deal is you're a good person. You give money to charity, you make your billions of dollars, and people love you. People say how great you are, and he's not loved. We, we hurt his feelings.
[00:13:10] Kim Scott: He's so sad. Yeah. but he also says your sins are forgiven. that's the thing in his deal, he is like, I give some money away and all my, like, he's admitting that there's something wrong here, who, nobody made that deal, except that a lot of people have gotten away with it,
[00:13:25] Jason: and I think we have to confront the fact that the promises of tech billionaires have led to a series of catastrophes, like, the promise of the internet being this great equalizing force for communication. Then the promise of social media to bring us all together, to connect us. that's not what has happened. the internet has made it so that the cost of control has gone down,
[00:13:47] And then for social media, I don't think anybody can honestly argue that it's connecting us, it is very clearly dividing us. And so, for someone to try to make the argument that like, hey, just, just trust me, like if we don't regulate AI, everybody's gonna be cured of cancer in, in 10 years. It, it like. I mean it strains credulity is understated. It's the understatement of the, of the century.
[00:14:09] Steven Levy: I mean, some of the things they're saying about AI, this idea that we're gonna have such abundance. We're going to have as kind of a utopian society and people say, well, what about all the jobs that won't be there? And they say, well, we'll have universal basic income, we'll all be living like billionaires. I think Sam Altman said the best of person now. Will be, uh, no better off than the least well-off person after AI, I mean, what?!
[00:14:42] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:14:43] Steven Levy: what, what, what's that about? But even, dialing down the hyperbole, you see what's happening now. We're the richest country in the world, and we're denying food stamps to people. So why would they think that even if the bounty they promised from AI came through that they would distribute that equitably?
[00:15:01] Kim Scott: Yeah, there's every reason to believe they won't and yeah. I think Steven, like to go back to your question, what happened when I met you, when I very first met you, and this was probably 2005, something like that.my unofficial title was High Priestess of the Long Tail.
[00:15:20] Right. Do you remember the long tail? Because we all believed that all these little creators were gonna be able to survive the internet was gonna be this great source of decentralization and of course, exactly. It's the opposite. It's, you know, 10 people control the whole thing.
[00:15:36] And in fact, I think we're, we're moving quickly to a world where we're gonna have state-controlled media. whether it's state-controlled media or three people controlling the media, it comes down to it doesn't even matter whether it's the state or these three people. It's bad either way. Like why did we believe that? Because I did believe in the long tail back then I did believe it. Like, what was going on?
[00:15:57] Steven Levy: Well, I think there was a period where it looked like it was unfolding. But when the big companies became the marketplaces and they controlled it for their own means, the level playing field got tilted.
[00:16:14] I read recently, I think Facebook or Meta supplied this claim that like 7%. of the things you see on your feed in Facebook come from people you actually know. Less than 10%. This thing's made about connectivity. Right. You know, and it's, a broadcast medium of what they serve to you that they think you're gonna react to, whether you're happy about it or not.
[00:16:43] Kim Scott: Yeah. We're foie gras geese.
[00:16:45] Steven Levy: Zuckerberg would like that.
[00:16:56] Kim Scott: Talk a little bit about The Age of Extraction, because it seems very relevant to everything you wrote about
[00:17:01] Steven Levy: Right.
[00:17:01] Kim Scott: it was a good explanation of why these platforms got so much power.
[00:17:05] Steven Levy: Right. I see Tim's book, The Age of Extraction as a companion piece to, Corey Doctorow's book about Enshittification.
[00:17:15] So basically this theory is, and you could see it yourself in the apps, you use that these companies start out, they want to serve people. They want to do the best for their customer, whether it's connecting people on meta or whether it's, Amazon's always going to give you the best deal, make it easy to find what you want. Google is always gonna give you the search results you're looking for, that's going to be the top of the stack, and then they become kind of monopolies.
[00:17:46] Kim Scott: Yeah,
[00:17:47] Steven Levy: They lock you in and they realize they can make more money by not giving you the easiest, best search result, the
[00:17:54] place to go. They used to take pride. You know this Kim, and Google is saying, we're great because people, we want people to leave us right away.
[00:18:01] Kim Scott: yeah.
[00:18:01] Steven Levy: Not so much
[00:18:02] Kim Scott: anymore.
[00:18:03] Steven Levy: No, no. Now, they want to send you to someplace where there's a payoff, on the other end. put in a search result for a hotel and try to figure out which is the hotel's website, and Amazon. You look for something, I want to buy a coffee pot and they're not gonna show you the best, cheapest coffee pot you might have to scroll down, several pages, you know, to find that.
[00:18:24] Kim Scott: It's faster now to go to Google and search for the coffee pot you want.
[00:18:28] Steven Levy: Or ChatGPT, gimme research mode, right? And it'll kind of think for a while and give you the coffee pot that you used to get right away on Amazon. All these apps we use are worse than they were before, and they've been Enshittified to use Corey's term. Tim has a societal view, he's really good at, finding really interesting stories to illustrate this from history.
[00:18:50] Under the Biden administration. they got tough, they started suing these big companies. blocking these mergers. and that's what made the people hate Biden, you know, in Silicon Valley, you know. but you look at it, you know, Tim's argument is that we're actually helping competition by doing that. And just take one thing that happened under. The Biden administration, there's a company called Figma, you know that company? Great company, which came across with a, you know, this collaborative way to do design. they were, you know, whipping Adobe's ass and Adobe wants to buy them.
[00:19:27] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:19:28] Steven Levy: Okay? And Lina Khan, no, no, no, no, no, no. no. I'm gonna fight you. So, they didn't. Merge, right.
[00:19:39] And then two years later, Figma goes public Bang! Huge valuation, right? You know, so there's a case where, hey, you know what? Things are better off because that merger didn't happen.
[00:19:55] Jason: Yeah.
[00:19:55] Kim Scott: the creators are better off. everybody except Adobe is better off.
[00:19:59] Steven Levy: Right. Adobe has left this game now.
[00:20:02] Kim Scott: Yeah,
[00:20:03] Steven Levy: they can't be Enshittified.
[00:20:05] Kim Scott: Yes. Yeah. Maybe it's better for Adobe in the end. So let me ask you a question. if we go, if we go back to like your, your article and, another theme that you had in the article was about the CEO's values.
[00:20:19] When I very first met, Mark Zuckerberg, I was working at Google, and I was interested in social media. It's probably again, around the time I met you, 2005, he gave me his business card, which still said I'm the CEO, Biotch. and I just remember thinking, this is an evil,
[00:20:36] Steven Levy: Do you still have it?
[00:20:37] Kim Scott: No, I was so disgusted. I threw it away. I should have kept, I wish I had kept it. but the, you know, I would say his values are not mine, as articulated by his business card. but I was talking to a couple of friends we both were talking about the fact that we're angry at our former employers, we're disappointed by our former employers. and that I think there's a big difference though between the companies where the CEOs started out bad and the companies where maybe they got corrupted by money. Did we just drink the Kool-Aid? Does it matter what the CEO's values are?
[00:21:15] Steven Levy: well, yeah, especially, you know, in a company like Meta where the CEO is in such control of the company, he always has been. But I mean, I spent a lot of time with Mark Zuckerberg, when I was writing a book about Facebook was as it was called them, and I.
[00:21:34] Kim Scott: A great book, by the way.
[00:21:35] Steven Levy: Well, thank you. I felt that I was watching someone grappling to some degree with, some of the things that, that the company was doing. He was thinking a lot about free speech.
[00:21:49] He did this year long, journey. He wanted to go to all 50 states. And someone who was very close to him told me, no doubt nor mine he was running for president. Not like officially, but you know, setting it up, right.
[00:22:03] But I felt he had a genuine concern for immigrants. He funded a school in East Palo Alto. I didn't think that was entirely bullshit, but now,
[00:22:15] Kim Scott: He shut it down.
[00:22:17] Steven Levy: Now it's Like he shut the school down. He, you know, embraced someone who was, the exact opposite view of immigration. Um, he doesn't say, yeah, well I kind of like Donald Trump, but we disagree on this. He's not saying that. You don't hear him say that. And he's espousing this kind of masculinity stuff.
[00:22:37] I think what happened with him is, you know, he's always been very ambitious, and, very aggressive in doing what he wants to do. Trump gave him license to say, I don't care about these people who were trying to hector me about my values. and he even said, I'm done apologizing. I'm done. Even if he, if things happen in Meta where he should apologize for, that's not him anymore.
[00:23:08] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:23:09] Steven Levy: So, I think, he has changed.
[00:23:10] Kim Scott: You think he's gotten worse? he wasn't as bad as maybe I was being too harsh on the business card.
[00:23:16] Steven Levy: Well, I don't know. he was always sort of the least liked CEO in Silicon Valley.
[00:23:21] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:23:22] Steven Levy: When I, When I, people would tell me, not always on the record, you know, most off the record that, you know, I don't like this guy. so, maybe it's no surprise that he's, you know, behaving that way now. But then you take someone like Jeff Bezos, another guy who espoused great values, I'd spent a lot of time talking to him. I wouldn't have predicted that he would become this sort of mega socialite. What happened to him?
[00:23:48] Jason: I think one thing that's really difficult is to figure out, 'cause I think one of the things that makes it feel so dislocating is when the effect of people capitulating. Is that everybody's sort of, now everybody's afraid to speak up. 'Cause it's not just like the individual contributor at Meta isn't afraid of Donald Trump, but they are sort of afraid of putting a toe out of line in a company that seems to be very happy to support his latest policy. what advice might you have for someone who finds themselves in a situation where they're like working at a company where either they disagree vehemently with the position that the company is taking. Maybe they don't feel super empowered to find another role someplace else at the moment. but how can they find community or how can they find a minimum commiseration? is there a counterculture growing in Silicon Valley?
[00:24:37] Steven Levy: I talked to someone who's executive at Meta and they were saying, it used to be we would discuss all sorts of things Now it's more like it was, sort of before the revolution, right? We, you know, you leave your politics at home, you know, if you're not comfortable with it, you leave. I just did a big interview with the head of Palantir. that's a company where, well, they take pretty strong stances. You know, they unabashedly support ICE, they were supporting the Israeli military. And their communications person said just last week at a conference or a couple weeks ago and saying, well, you know, we don't fire people for having different views, but it is self-selecting; the people who can't take it, that they'll leave.
[00:25:23] I think if you're not in a position financially where you can do that, what you would try to do is try to express your values from your work, right? I mean, thing I'm building a good product. Now, of course, if the product you're building is a horrible product, which is going to.
[00:25:40] Kim Scott: doing evil things.
[00:25:41] Steven Levy: Make, you know, make kids commit suicide, then you really should, you know, figure out. What it takes to live with yourself, how tough it is to get another job. But a lot of us sometimes wind up, working for places that people don't share our values. but the work we do, we're proud of.
[00:26:02] Uh, take the Washington Post Run by the fellow we were talking about, Jeff Bezos. For the first few years, he let. The editorial side, do whatever they wanted. His editor, Marty Barron, wrote a book saying what a great guy he was. never bothered interfere. So then, the election in 2024, they were about to have endorsed Kamala Harris. He said, we're not doing endorsements. Then he says, I'm gonna change the editorial page. I want to make it about free markets, which is what the Wall Street Journal page, you know, wants to be right. And a lot of people canceled their subscription. I have friends who work there who do work they're proud of. They're still great stuff for the Washington Post. And they were thinking like, you know, please don't subscribe. we're still here, you know.
[00:26:46] Kim Scott: It's really hard to know right now what to do. I have, a bunch of friends who, I mean, people who work at Apple, there's plenty of people Who were shocked that Apple took the app outta the app store that allowed people to warn each other when ICE was coming to their neighborhood. and then Google did, Google took it down too, but it didn't get as much press. I don't know what the hell I would do if I were still working there, but I have some thoughts.
[00:27:12] Steven Levy: You know, a lot of people will go to startups now. OpenAI was started because Elon Musk and Sam Altman didn't want AI in the hands of powerful companies.
[00:27:24] Kim Scott: Yeah. And then they became powerful
[00:27:26] Steven Levy: It's not a good situation when your own values are in conflict with, the organization that you are contributing your labor to,
[00:27:39] Jason: I think two things occur to me. One is there was a period of time where the disruption that was happening in Silicon Valley was in the direction of disrupting the current power structure and redistributing that power to many people. it's very easy to satisfy the criteria that you were describing, Steven, which is like, I may not agree with everybody or exactly what we think about this particular issue, but I actually think we're moving the world in the right direction and so there's a lot I can be really proud of. But I think as that shifts, one of the things that Silicon Valley is not used to is having to exercise power in other domains.
One of the things that was surprising to me, was how much more sort of obvious and prevalent local politics was on the East coast as compared to what it was like when I first moved to Silicon Valley 15 years ago. I think there's a shift, like people are starting to recognize maybe there's other domains in which I need to exercise some of these beliefs and use my agency and my power, my labor in order to like help move the conversation forward. So, I'd be thinking about that too is like, maybe I can't express all of this through work, but maybe I can get involved in, volunteering for organizations or being part of the political process. And that's just not something I've think a lot of people in Silicon Valley have had to think about very deeply. but that does seem like an option as well. if you don't think you're like harming people, you could stay in a place for quite a while that you disagree with if it gave you the, the flexibility to actually, contribute in some other way to what you thought should happen in the world.
[00:29:04] Steven Levy: That's a good point. You know, and again, I the underline, if the work that you are doing, you feel is good for the world that mitigates a lot,
[00:29:13] Kim Scott: Yeah. Those journalists at the Washington Post should keep writing.
[00:29:16] Jason: I've seen people make the same argument about like the CDC and stuff like there, like there's a bunch of people who are writing, I think quite eloquently about like, please don't quit. Please don't resign. the problem is you either won't be backfilled, which will still shift the balance of power to people we disagree with more strongly than you. or you will be backfilled with people who are willing to tow the line.
[00:29:36] Kim Scott: Yeah. maybe a better way to ask the question is what should I do now? I started my career in Moscow in 1990, and I thought it was about, you know, the revolution and dismantling, totalitarian, uh, regime and all of this. this was 1990, it was the Soviet Union. And instead, what I was supporting at the time without really quite realizing what I was doing were these neoliberal policies that the Clinton administration was putting forward, and I didn't get it. Okay. I was 20. I can blame myself for not getting it.
[00:30:09] So then I go to the Federal Communications Commission in 1996 after business school and we're, you know, it's the 1996 Telecom Act. There's. Section 230, et cetera, et cetera. And again, I thought this was about the telecommunications revolution power to the people, but instead, like we deregulated tech forever. I thought I had these progressive values, and yet what we were doing was again, super neoliberal.
[00:30:38] And then I took a job at Google and read the letter that Larry and Sergey wrote before the company went public. And it was all about we're gonna reward and treat people well, we're gonna make the world a better place. you know, and then the rest is history. I feel like I made a series of big miscalculations where I thought I was supporting these sorts of progressive forces, and in fact, I was doing the opposite.
[00:31:02] How do I atone for these sins? What should Kim Scott do? I want advice. I mean, I wrote an article, I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, which I love doing, but it does not feel like a sufficient atonement.
[00:31:14] Steven Levy: Well, I mean, look, you're helping people go through situations like this. You're doing something, you know, I mean, you're still.
[00:31:24] Kim Scott: too little, too late, but.
[00:31:26] Steven Levy: you know, we do what we can. Right. you're not still working for Google,
[00:31:30] Kim Scott: no, I'm not. In fact, I don't even have any stock.
[00:31:32] Steven Levy: I don't think everyone works for Google is a criminal or a bad person, but,
[00:31:36] Kim Scott: No. In fact, I still love Google.
[00:31:38] Steven Levy: I think as Jason said, you'd be active otherwise, this is part of a larger picture of what's happening in the country and in the world where concentrated power is being used, against people. So, there's a political path to take. you say you feel; how did I miss that? Well, it wasn't all there back then, right?
[00:32:01] Kim Scott: It wasn't so clear.
[00:32:02] Steven Levy: yeah. and you know, when I was talking to those guys in 1999, you know, they, were a couple of goofballs in an office.
[00:32:13] Kim Scott: Yeah. it was fun.
[00:32:15] Steven Levy: There were no super yachts.
[00:32:17] Kim Scott: there was a real commitment to doing the right thing, being good people. And I believe that commitment is still there, but it is very, unsettling That those who used to be so vocal about it are being so silent now.
[00:32:29] Steven Levy: what happens to anyone if they're worth a hundred billion dollars?
[00:32:34] Kim Scott: It's not good, for sure.
[00:32:36] Steven Levy: You know, if my income had built up over the last. couple decades to a hundred billion dollars. God knows what a creep I'd be. You know?
[00:32:45] Kim Scott: Yeah, me too. I mean, money corrupts, power corrupts, and I'm certainly not gonna stand here and say I'm incorruptible. I think we need to change the system. and in fact, I think this is a good, summary. A good place to almost end, which is, I think, for example, at Google there was this, you know, we're gonna systematically strip power away from everyone at the company. Nobody is gonna have unilateral hiring, decision making power, firing, you know, was a system of checks and balances, and it applied to all of the usual sources of power that any leader at the company, including Larry, Sergey, and Eric had with one exception. It did not apply to money.
[00:33:27] Steven Levy: Huh.
[00:33:28] Kim Scott: I think that money corrupted Silicon Valley. That's what happened. Too much money in too few hands.
[00:33:33] Steven Levy: Yeah. Money and power too.
[00:33:35] Kim Scott: Yeah.
[00:33:36] Steven Levy: Yeah. And, how we get it back? I don't know. I don't see the, AI changing that equation.
[00:33:43] Kim Scott: And it's not gonna be a billionaire who's gonna come in and save us. it's gonna have to be collective action. I really do believe. So, I'm signing up to be some, I hope there's a leader I can follow. I'm looking for them.
[00:33:56] Steven, thank you so much, for joining us. for everyone listening, you can read Steven's Work Weekly On WIRED, and of course, check out his books@stevenlevy.com it's all linked in the show notes. You can also join the Radical Candor Community. To get real-time peer support, and solidarity, go to radical candor.com/community to sign up.
[00:34:19] Jason: and if you do want to find the show notes, head to radical candor.com/podcast. If you're a visual person, you'll be able to see a video version of this podcast on YouTube and Spotify. And last but not least, praise in public and criticize in private. If you like what you hear, please rate, review, and follow us on whatever platform you listen to your podcast. If you have feedback or questions for us, you can always email them to us at any time. podcast@radicalcandor.com. We'll see y'all soon.
[00:34:45] Kim Scott: Thank you so much, Steven. Keep speaking truth to power.
[00:34:48] Steven Levy: Thank you,
[00:34:49] Kim Scott: Take care.
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