Smash Notes
It's not AI Doom, It's a Fourth Turning
From building TechCrunch to backing Uber and Airbnb, Michael Arrington has had a front-row seat to some of technology’s biggest shifts. He joins Tommy on The Delphi Podcast for a candid conversation about the unstoppable AI race, the psychology of exceptional founders, and why he believes Bitcoin is the hard money the world needs. Michael shares how he…
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Notes
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Michael Arrington says two books made such a huge impression on him that he will never forget them. One is Guns, Germs and Steel. The other is The Fourth Turning.
He reads constantly, mostly fiction for fun, and he has read many nonfiction books. Arrington thinks Guns, Germs and Steel was published in the early 90s. He calls it an incredible book about how humans form teams. If people were all the same color, Arrington says, they would still find something to hate about each other, and the book explains sports team loyalty. The Fourth Turning is a little bit sad, but Arrington says it seems very accurate. He thinks the book was published in 97 or 98. Arrington thinks one of the authors passed away, and he says the other author recently did an update.
Delphi host Tommy asked Michael Arrington whether the world is in the fourth turning right now. The pattern Delphi host Tommy put to him is a change every hundred years, in four 20-year segments: a stretch when everything is great and institutions are valued, then a breakdown, then a reset.
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Delphi host Tommy assumes China is crushing it, from robotics to ghost cities, because so much emphasis on GDP means building a city counts as all new GDP. Michael Arrington says China is not in an awesome position right now and there are lots of things wrong with China. The debt issue in China is pretty bad as well. People wanted to get their money out of China. China has capital controls, and they still got out a lot thanks to crypto. They got into real estate they thought was going to save them, and it turned out it did not.
Speaking as a novice, Michael Arrington says you do not see revolutions happen until people are starving, usually. People are not starving in China yet, but they import a lot of food and have to import all their energy. Arrington hopes to see the fall of the party and the rise of the people in a non-war way.
Delphi host Tommy is trying to tie artificial intelligence to the fourth turning and sort out cause and effect. In the US the picture is hyper centralization, max safety, doomerism, and a push for regulatory capture. China is giving away free open source, and Delphi host Tommy thinks China is innovating way more than people give China credit for. Michael Arrington says coming second brings a lot of benefits. Delphi host Tommy does not know how the contest plays out, and calls moat building in artificial intelligence a difficult thing at the model layer and the heavy infrastructure.
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Delphi host Tommy asked whether Dario and Sam Altman should run a foundation that decides the rate of progress in artificial intelligence. Michael Arrington rejects the idea. He calls it regulatory capture. Getting into position and then asking to be regulated means there will never be any other competition.
Arrington's ideal is what he calls the benevolent dictator, the model he ties to Dubai. There is no way to keep artificial general intelligence under control. The best hope is that it loves people, cares for them the way people care for animals in zoos, and defends them, rather than seeing people as unnecessary, not caring, and letting them die out. He is both terrified and excited, and he wants artificial general intelligence to love people too.
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Michael Arrington said he has known Sam Altman a long time. He met Altman in the TechCrunch days, when Altman had a Sequoia-backed startup and sold it, and Arrington knew him again when Altman took over Y Combinator. Arrington called him a very smart man, an exceptional salesperson, and a person with exceptional charisma.
Delphi host Tommy asked, "Do you think he's evil?" Arrington answered, "He's evil. I believe he's a psychopath." Arrington then said, "Which is different than being evil." Delphi host Tommy asked, "Why is it different?" Arrington answered, "Well, a psychopath is a medical condition, right? Uh, it's something that, that happens to you and you can't help. And there are plenty of psychopaths, you know, that aren't evil." He brought up the fictional character Dexter, then said, "I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't really diagnose anybody."
Asked how he could tell, Arrington said the hairs on the back of the neck stick up in the person's presence, and that he probably misdiagnoses all the time. The "he's evil" line is Arrington's opinion of Sam Altman. It is not a medical finding.
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Michael Arrington says Arrington Capital once had a psychopath on the team. He was a huge overachiever, super charming, super handsome, and very smart, and the firm let him go for sexual harassment with somebody else on the team. He was so over the top that people could sense it, and that flaw meant he could never achieve what he wanted.
The hire came in as a summer intern and was turned into a more permanent role while still a very junior guy. Arrington did not pay a ton of attention at first. Once he got to know him, he was genuinely scared of him. After the firing, the man showed up maybe six months later as a partner at another fund and told that fund he had been a partner with Arrington Capital. Arrington Capital keeps few names on its website for security, so the claim was hard to check. Arrington knew the founder. The founder could have called, and he did. The man got fired, and the whole fund got shut down.
Michael Arrington says separating a psychopath from someone who wants to take over the world is genuinely hard, because both overachieve. Psychopaths mimic normal behavior. They taught themselves to seem normal because they do not feel empathy or sympathy, and they do not have the feelings other people have. Supposedly they do not feel empty. They just feel different, then learn to fake it until they are excellent at it, and quite often they fake being a narcissist. They slightly wrong people in a lot of small things, and the pattern adds up.
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Michael Arrington started TechCrunch in 05 after quitting a job and taking a year off. He lived in an apartment on the strand in Manhattan Beach while a girlfriend worked, and he spent the year surfing, playing video games, and eating burritos. The break followed a company he had started and sold. The sale doubled investor money, and he said he did not make any money himself.
He had taken 17 and a half million in investment and sold the company for 35 million. A two X liquidation preference applied back then. He got 150 grand, paid so he would not veto the deal, and bought a Porsche Boxster. He then moved to England and sat in a garage for 10 years.
When he needed a job, the read write web was replacing static webpages with pages a person could interact with and create content on, like a Google doc. Very few places covered the new startups, so he started a blog and posted his research. The first TechCrunch articles were formatted and had no opinion: company name, product description, and fundraising to date.
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Michael Arrington said Steve Jobs sold all of his Apple stock from the merger that brought him back. Arrington, a junior lawyer on the NeXT sale, missed the call and kept the voicemail for 10 years. Jobs said he had a bunch of Apple stock from the merger and wanted to sell it all, and he sold every share.
The law firm represented Jobs when he sold NeXT to Apple in the late 1990s, negotiating as his lawyers while the bankers did the real work. Arrington was fairly junior and went to Jobs's house a couple of times to get signatures. Jobs sat and talked. He was very charming and a bit crazy. After the transaction closed, the main partner was on vacation and had told Jobs to call if he needed anything. Arrington missed the call, then had to phone the bankers and figure out the sale. Jobs was not chief executive right away and was not super into Apple. He was still a little bitter because Apple had treated him very badly in the 1980s.
Jobs already had NeXT and Pixar, and Pixar was sold later. The shares Jobs told Arrington to dump were the Apple shares from the NeXT deal.
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Michael Arrington says politics feels meaner than the 90s, and the way through the fear is to live each day rather than sink into doom.
He used to think everyone hating each other was just him getting older. Republicans and Democrats kind of got along in the 90s, not totally, but they kind of did. Men and women used to go on dates and like each other, and the world felt pretty nice. He still asks whether he is just a get-off-my-lawn guy, and he is really scared for a lot of things right now.
He deals with the fear by refusing doomerism. He tries to live life every day. Arrington's advice for anybody who over-ruminates is to get out of their head and live their life.