Episode
Before the Trillions, There Was Once Joy in Silicon Valley
- Podcast
- Talk Cocktail
- Published
- Jul 11, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2377
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/talk-cocktail-15520/episodes/before-the-trillions-there-was-once-joy-in-silicon-valley/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/talk-cocktail-15520/before-the-trillions-there-was-once-joy-in-silicon-valley.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
A veteran of three tech eras on how the innocence was lost — and whether AI actually might win it back, through what he calls “enlightened AI.” Recently, on WhoWhatWhy podcast , Matthew Stepka — early internet-café founder, McKinsey alum, nine-year Google veteran who shepherded many of the company’s mission projects including the first self-driving cars, and now an investor in what he calls “enlightened AI” — walks us back through the Valley’s reinventions and asks what each one cost. Before the trillion-dollar IPOs, before the data centers and the doom, before “Silicon Valley” became shorthand for unaccountable power and unimaginable wealth, there was a teenager with an Atari — a gift from his NASA-engineer father — certain he could build any world he could imagine. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe