{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Keen On America","title":"Episode 2250: :John Markoff compares Steve Jobs with contemporary tech titans like Sam Altman and Elon Musk","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3266,"description":"Former New York Times reporter John Markoff has been writing about Silicon Valley for almost a half century. In December 1993 the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist wrote one of the earliest articles about the World Wide Web, referring to it as a \"map to the buried treasures of the Information Age.\" So where are we now in the history of tech, I asked Markoff. Is the AI boom just one more Silicon Valley cycle of irrational exuberance? And how do contemporary tech titans like Sam Altman and Elon Musk compare with Steve Jobs, who Markoff covered for many years.John Markoff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He has reported on Silicon Valley for more than four decades and wrote for The New York Times’ science and technology beat for 28 years, where he was widely regarded as the paper’s star technology reporter. He is the author of five books about the technology industry including his upcoming book Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (on sale in March 2022). For decades Markoff has chronicled how technology has shaped our society. In Whole Earth, he delivers the definitive biography of one the most influential visionaries to inspire the technological and cultural revolutions of the last six decades. While Stewart Brand is largely known as the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog that became a counterculture bible for a generation of young Americans during the 1960s, his life’s work is much larger. Brand became a key influence in the ‘70s environmental movement and the computing world of the ‘80s. Steve Jobs adopted Brand’s famous mantra “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” as his code to live by, and to this day Brand epitomizes what Markoff calls “that California state of mind.” Brand has always had “an eerie knack for showing up first at the onset of some social movement or technological inflection point,” Markoff writes, “and then moving on just when everyone else catches up.” Brand’s uncanny ahead-of-the-curve-ness is what makes John Markoff his ideal...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/bCpvkYgrorWYCv4ujOodZ7o-xqCKvQH-YHlEI5E7zpw/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS83NDM2/MGJjOTYyNjBkYzJi/ZDVhMTUwZDgwMWE3/ZDk3OS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}