Podcast

Jeff Schechtman 06/12/26 (whowhatwhy.org)

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.”

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.

That teenager was Matthew Stepka, and the world he helped build is the one we’re all now straining to make sense of.

This week on the WhoWhatWhy podcast, 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.

It’s a conversation about corporate reasons for being. Tech, nearly alone among industries, has always needed one — a reason its products are not merely lucrative but good for society. Stepka was inside the rooms where those stories were told without irony, and where they curdled into punchlines.

He’s candid about how the land of the nerds, where you felt you could solve any problem, drifted into something harsher.

But this is no eulogy to a more innocent age. It’s an argument that the innocence is recoverable — that AI might amplify our humanity rather than hollow it out. Stepka would rather be called hopeful than optimistic. The difference, it turns out, is the whole story.

As today’s headlines fill with the SpaceX IPO, here’s a longer view.

Link to audio: https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/before-the-trillions-there-was-once-joy-in-silicon-valley/?utm_source=WhoWhatWhy+Now&utm_campaign=21ae191c61-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2_1_2021_16_41_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6b3f79a618-21ae191c61-608491147

• Jeff Schechtman Jeff Schechtman’s career spans movies, radio stations, and podcasts. After spending twenty-five years in the motion picture industry as a producer and executive, he immersed himself in journalism, radio, and, more recently, the world of podcasts. To date, he has conducted over ten thousand interviews with authors, journalists, and thought leaders. Since March 2015, he has produced almost 500 podcasts for WhoWhatWhy.