Marc Andreessen
Appearances
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Our companies hire a lot of kids out of the top universities, of course. And then, by the way, a lot of them go into government. And so we're not only talking about a wave of new arrivals into the tech companies, we're also talking about a wave of new arrivals into the congressional offices. And of course, they all know each other.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And so all of a sudden, you have this basically this influx, this new cohort.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids, in other words, the young children of privilege going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq, throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
revolution. I mean, what it was, what I now understand it to be historically is a rebirth of the new left, right? So it's very analogous. I've spent a lot of time actually talking to David Horowitz about this because he lived through it 40 years earlier. And it turned out to be a coalition of sort of economic radicals.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So, and this was, you know, the rise of Bernie Sanders, but like, you know, the kids turned on capitalism, like in a very fundamental way, they came out as sort of, you know, some variation version on radical Marxist. And, you know, the The fundamental valence went from capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society to capitalism is evil and should be torn down.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And then the other part was social revolution. And the social revolution, of course, was the great awakening. And then those conjoined. And so, you know, there was a point where kind of the median newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was like a career obsessed striver. And their conversation with you was, when do I get promoted and how much do I get paid and when do I end up running the company?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And like, that was the thing. And by 2013, the media newly arrived Harvard kid was like, fuck it, we're burning the system down. Like, you are all evil. White people are evil. Men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil. But they're working for you.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive who I won't name, but he said to me, you know, they had this conversation in 2014, and he said to me with kind of this sense of dawning horror, he's like, I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us, but destroying us. Like they're professional activists in their own minds first and foremost.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now most effectively is to go destroy a company from the inside.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Like, you know, all hands meetings started to get very contentious where you'd get like brigaded at an all hands meeting as a CEO where, you know, you'd have these extremely angry employees show up and they were like just completely furious about like there's way too many white men on the management team. Why are we a for-profit corporation?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Don't you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we're not emitting any carbon. So you take the laundry list of fashionable kind of radical left-wing positions of that time, and they're spending a huge amount of time at the company basically organizing around that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And I will say, in fairness, I think in most of these companies, this kind of person never got to be, you know, anywhere close to 100% of the workforce. But what happened is they became like 20%, maybe 30%. And then, of course, what happened was there's this big middle, right, of sort of go-along, get-along people who generally also consider themselves Democrats.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
and they're just kind of trying to follow along with the trends. And so you take this activist core of 20%, you add 60% of go-along, get-along people, and all of a sudden, as the CEO experiences, oh my God, 80% of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda. People say from the outside is, well, you should just fire those people. But as the CEO, you're like, I can't fire 80% of my team.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And by the way, I have to go hire people to replace them. And the other people at the other companies are behaving the same way. And I can't go hire kids out of college because I'm just going to get more activists. And that's how these companies became captured.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
That's 100% true. That's completely correct. I would just say that I went through the long, I went through the description of 13 to 16 because when the main Democratic machine kicked in and decided that we were to blame for Trump, the overwhelming response for basically everything other than Peter was just like, yep, you got us, we're guilty, we did it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Because like this is, as you know, it's like wall-to-wall coverage in the news. Like, and I'm, you know, and I'm reading the New York Times every day and I'm watching MSNBC every night. And I'm like, oh my God, what have we done? Right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Every night, every night, Brian Williams. The last remaining honest news anchor in America, right? The guy you can really rely on, the guy you can really trust to tell you the truth. And, you know, 11 o'clock or 8 o'clock, you know, out here every night, it was, you know, it is day 167 of the Trump interregnum of having a Russian spy in the White House.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
The world is ending. I mean, you got to have dinner. Like, you got to, like, get ready for bed. You know, we all have these fancy things called DVRs, right? You know, we could do that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I'm a good—Ross, I'm a good responsible Democrat. I'm a good responsible citizen of America. I'm like, I got to understand what's happening. I got to be able to process reality.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So I don't want to speak specifically for Mark. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But I'll speak for the group because there's a lot of similarities between the different players here for the same pressures. So I'll just speak for the group. And so I would say that, first of all, let me disabuse you of something, if you haven't already disabused yourself, which is the view of American CEOs operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Like that's like goal number five or something. Like there's like four goals that are like way more important than that. And that's not just true in the big tech companies. It's true in the executive suite of basically everyone at the Fortune 500. And I would say, you know, goal number one is I'm a good person. I'm a good person is like wildly more important than like profit margins. Wildly.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Right. And so and this is why you saw these big companies all of a sudden go like completely bananas in all their marketing. It's why you saw them go bananas over DEI. It's why you saw them all, you know, they're all cooperating with all these social media boycotts.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I mean, the level of lockstep uniformity, unanimity in the thought process between the CEOs of the Fortune 500 and what's in the pages of the New York Times and in the Harvard Classroom and in the Ford Foundation. They're just like locked together, or at least they were through this entire period.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And I find it's actually funny because the only true groups of people who think that corporate CEOs are just profit-optimizing machines are people on the far left who are full-on Marxists who really believe that, and then people on the far right, you know, who I think kind of fear that the CEOs are like that, but also maybe hope that they are and then, you know, later realize that they're not.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So... The primary response from the Silicon Valley tech companies and the kinds of people that you're talking about was not here's what we need to do to make money and to live under democratic regime. The primary thing was the complete exact kind of panic that you saw in the rest of corporate America and that you saw in the press.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Yeah, and I always say, look, the test of this is the dinner party and what's being discussed at the dinner party. And so if the sort of more radical right-wing view is the capitalists, you know, making their cynical plans for how to optimize for money under the current regime, that would be one thing. Having been to many of those dinner parties, that's not the topic.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
The topic is what's in the New York Times today and what it means that we all need to do to be good people.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Everything other than your column, yes, exactly. Everything other than the dark matter that is the rest of that column. And so, no, it's literally, and here's the reason. It's, you know, the famous cliche, we live in a society. These people aren't robots. They're just not. They're members of a society. They're members of an elite class.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
They come from the top and most radical education institutions, or they are seeking as hard as they can to assimilate into that same class. And then, by the way, you're not just doing that yourself. You also have family. And if your kids are in college, I mean, God help you. You know, they're coming for you.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And then by the way, you've got this radicalized employee base and you maybe could have nipped the radicalization five years earlier, but now you can't because it's now you think it's 80% of your workforce. And by the way, you also have your shareholders. And this is where things get really bananas.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
A big part of the tipping point, what happened here, it was when the major shareholders turned and became political activists. So you're in this sandwich from all of your constituents. And then you've got the press coming at you. You've got the activists coming at you. And then you've got the government coming at you.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And, of course, the federal government radicalized hard under Hillary and then even—sorry, the federal government—we can talk about that more.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Not really.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Well, did they? Like, sitting here today, would you describe that Donald Trump ran the federal government between 2016 and 2020? Yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So things got much worse after 2020. So the part I would agree with is things got much worse for tech after they took formal control of the White House. So for sure that that's right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So maybe just the short thing I tell you about 16 to 20 was there were a series of additional 10Xing events, 10Xing of like radicalism and intensity of all the politics. And so and it was the Trump's nomination, it was Trump's election, and then it was Russiagate. And then it was, you know, it was like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And then of course COVID hits.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So COVID was a giant radicalizing moment. And then by that point we had lived through eight years of what was sort of increasingly clearly a social revolution. Like very clearly like companies basically being hijacked to be engines of social change, social revolution. You know, the employee base is going feral.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
You know, there were cases in the, you know, in the Trump era, there were companies, multiple companies I know that felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees. Things got really aggressive during that period.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So, you know, I go from watching Brian Williams every night and just being lied to, you know, 500 nights in a row, you know, to basically, you know, reading the Mueller report, reading the Horowitz IG report, you know, and just being like, oh my God, none of this is true. And then you try to explain to people this isn't true.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And then they get really mad at you because how can you, you know, how can you possibly have any sympathy for a fascist?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And people like me, there were quite a few people like me. Now, none of us were sticking our heads up at that point because it was like, to be clear, way too dangerous. Like none of us were like, I don't think particularly moral heroes in that point. But there were lots and lots of underground peer to peer discussions kind of from call it 2018 through to 2021 saying, OK, things are off the rails.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Anyways, so my point is like we were softened up for we were already softened up for the Biden sort of radicalization. And then when the Biden administration turned out to be far more radical than even we thought that they were going to be, then that's what generated the response.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Yeah, they came for tech and they came for business in a very broad-based way. And everything that I'm going to describe also, it turns out, I found out later happened in the energy industry, and I think it happened in a bunch of other industries, but the CEOs felt like they couldn't talk about it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But the problem is like the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation, and then the raw arbitrary, not just enforcement of that regulation, promulgation of that regulation. It was increasing insertion into basic staffing, mandated enforcement of DEI in very destructive ways.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
You know, some of these agencies have their own in-house courts, which is bananas, but also just like straight up threats and bullying. Mark Zuckerberg just talked about this on Rogan, like direct phone calls from senior members of the administration, screaming executives, ordering them to do things just like full on. Fuck you. We own you. We control you. You're going to do what we want.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
We're going to destroy you. And then they just came after crypto, absolutely tried to kill us. I mean, they just ran this incredible, basically, terror campaign to try to kill crypto. And then they were ramping into a similar campaign to try to kill AI. And that's really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
The crypto attack was so weird that we didn't know what to make of it, and we were just hoping it would pass, which it didn't. But it was when they threatened to do the same thing to AI that we realized we had to get involved in politics. And then we were up against what looked like the absolutely terrifying prospect of a second term.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
You That would be great. What you just said would be great compared to what we actually got. So again, the precondition here, what we got with crypto was they just flat out tried to kill it. This whole debanking thing, like they just debanked an entire generation of founders. They debanked their families. They really destroyed people's lives. They just killed companies left, right, and center.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
They did regulation through enforcement. They would never define what the rules were. They would just arbitrarily sue people.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
When they didn't think they could sue people and win, they would do this thing where they'd issue these things called Wells Notices, which is basically a public announcement that the government is going to sue you in the future, which is basically a death sentence for a company. So we saw this exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power levied against crypto.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And then basically we saw the beginnings of what we thought was going to be that apply to AI. And so it's like, you know, AI needs to be, you know, very carefully controlled by the government or by adjuncts of the government to, you know, make sure that there's no hate speech or misinformation, which is to say it has to be like completely politically controlled.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And, you know, we were trying to keep our heads down, just trying to build startups. And then Ben and I went to Washington in May of 24. And, you know, we couldn't meet with Biden because as it turns out at the time, nobody could meet with Biden. But we were able to meet with senior staff. And so we met with very senior people in the White House, you know, in the inner core.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And we basically relayed our concerns about AI. And their response to us was, yes, the national agenda on AI, as we will implement in the Biden administration and in the second term, is we are going to make sure that AI is going to be only a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no startups.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
This whole thing where you guys think you can just like start companies and write code and release code on the internet, like those days are over. That's not happening. And we were shocked that it was, you know, this was even worse than we thought. And so we said, well, that seems like really radical.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And we said, honestly, we don't understand how you're going to control and ban open source AI because it's just math and code on the internet. And, like, how are you possibly going to control it? And the response was, we classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War. And if we need to do that for math, for AI going forward, we'll do that, too.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Yeah, but national security is also the death of democracy. And maybe I'll give the devil his due here. Like, I believe in their view they really think they're defending democracy. I mean, they're trying to strangle it to death in the name of defending it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But like, I think they literally believe, you know, when they say like Trump is Hitler, you know, by the way, it appears Obama doesn't believe Trump is Hitler anymore because he's like joking around with him at the funeral. But like a lot of these guys, you know, the fire's in the eyes, right? And look, it's not even just the US, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
It's like, you know, it's the rise of, you know, UKIP, you know, Brexit was an equally, you know, shocking, alarming thing, the rise of Farage. It's obviously the German party, AFD. It's obviously that's, you know, the Nazi party 2.0. And so this like superheated rhetoric and actions between 2021 and 2024 just like went like completely bananas.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And so we came in, like I said, in May 24 at the very height of that. And we were like, oh my God, like they're gonna kill us. Like they're gonna kill our companies. They're gonna kill open source. By the way, if you kill open source AI, you also kill all academic research. So the universities are going to be completely cut out of the loop.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Not only did we ban them making nuclear weapons, we also banned them from making nuclear power, which we now regret. But anyway.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So I'm happy to talk about all of that. I started out in rural Wisconsin in farming country, kind of basically the polar cultural opposite of Silicon Valley in many ways, and the polar political opposite for a very long time. By the way, I didn't discover until much later that I'm an archetype.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
It depends. This is a longer conversation we need to have. I would just tell you the national security part was not the motivator here. And by the way, the national security stuff, those arguments aren't over. That's still going to play out. The political dimension of it overwhelmingly. I mean, it was just crystal clear. You can see it in the eyes. You can hear it in the words.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
You can see it in the behavior. We have a lot of Democratic friends of good standing who are major donors into both the Biden campaign and even the Kamala campaign. They came back with the same reports.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
you know, is completely consistent, which is this is social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons because it is literally killing democracy and literally leading to the re-arrival of Hitler. And AI is going to be even worse. And we need we need to take it right now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And so anyway, and this is why I took you through the long preamble earlier, because like at this point, it's like, OK, we are no longer dealing with rational people like we're no longer dealing with people we can deal with. And, you know, that's the day we walked out and we stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and, you know, took We look at each other and we're like, yep, we're for Trump.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I mean, look, let's start by saying, like, one of the things I now firmly believe is I can't predict politics. Like, I feel like I failed to predict most of the important things that happened in the last decade on anything political or, you know, at the national level. So I will try very hard to not make any predictions. I can tell you what they say.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And by the way, what they say in private is exactly what they say in public. Like, I have not picked up on any disconnect at all. I actually think that... They're incredibly transparent, and the president's incredibly transparent in what he says. And the high-level thing they say with respect to anything involving tech or business is we want America to win.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Tom Wolfe wrote a famous profile of Robert Noyce, who was the original founder of Intel, the original CEO. and the father of the chip industry. And actually, Noyce and I followed very similar paths. I never met him, and he was an earlier generation, but he grew up as an Iowa farm boy. I grew up as a Wisconsin farm boy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And what that means is we want America to be the preeminent country in the world. We want America to be the global economic leader. We want America to be the global technology leader. We want America to be the global military leader, right? We 100% want to beat China. We want to make sure that American technology proliferates globally and not Chinese technology.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And it's a shame in the past that, you know, so many of you guys were against us because all we wanted was to help you guys win.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Sure. Well, just to start with, I would say primarily, primarily is don't kill us. Like for like myself and my partner, Ben, and our firm, like it's primarily negative, which is like, don't kill us. And I say that because like, we're not in there lobbying for subsidies. We don't need grants. We don't need government investment. We don't need, you know, monopoly or cartel status for our companies.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And I'm not even, again, I'm not claiming any moral heroism here. It's just that kind of thing is not really relevant to startups. So that's number one. Number two is, look, we would like our companies to be able to succeed globally. We think it's in the best interest of the United States and all Americans for that to happen.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Because if it's not American companies winning globally, it's Chinese companies winning globally. And even the Americans who hate America the most presumably are not in favor of the Chinese Communist Party winning instead. Then, you know, as you know, like many foreign governments are now much more hostile to American tech, you know, than they were 20 years ago.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And, you know, we face enormous challenges in Europe. enormous challenges, even in like the UK, like just these extremely draconian anti-tech, anti-business, anti-American, you know, kind of policies. The EU is, you know, as you know, is regulating itself to death and that they're damaging themselves mostly, but what they're also doing is really damaging our companies.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And so we would like to work with the administration to help global markets open up and for American companies to win. And then look, third is we have shared interests on a lot of the other underlying issues. And I'll just give you the big obvious one right now, which is energy, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Like when this administration, you know, my friend Doug Burgum is the National Energy Czar, and he's a very successful business tech guy. And he's been given the charter to blow the doors off of American energy. and really open it up. And of course, that will be hugely beneficial to the country and to, and obviously to AI, which, you know, soaks up lots of energy.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And we and a lot of other people like us over the years have kind of made this trek. And then basically, I'm a product of the great land-grant universities, right? So the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, which from where I came from was like a huge leap to actually leave the state and go to a university that large.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And so, you know, there's a whole bunch of things like that. And then maybe I'll just give you one final thing, which is we need the censorship pressure to end. We need the debanking pressure to end. We need this kind of random terrorism coming out of the federal government. You know, just these agencies kind of running wild. That stuff just needs to be like brought to heel.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And, you know, the new administration's been very vocal about how they intend to fix all that. So that maybe would be the final thing.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Yeah, so, and I should say, like, I'm helping Doge on this, but I'm not speaking for Elon. Yeah, just to be clear. Not speaking for Elon, not speaking for the administration. Yeah, that's clear. So look, yeah, you know, look, so when, you know, I talked about Al Gore a lot earlier. You may remember Al Gore had this whole initiative in the 90s called Reinventing Government.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Which was Doge 1.0. At the time, it was a normie Democrat thing, which is, of course, you want government efficiency. Of course, you want a balanced budget. Ideally, you want a government surplus. In fact, you'll recall that they actually got there. In the late 90s, the US government actually went into surplus. It actually worked. It used to be just assumed.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
It's like, of course, if you're a Democrat, you want the government programs to be efficient because you want them to sustain. Right? And you want, you know, whatever social support programs or whatever you want to sustain, you want social security to sustain. And so, of course, you want efficiency. And, of course, you want cost-cutting wherever you can get it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And, of course, you want to eliminate, you know, fraud and abuse and all these things. And then, like, somehow now that's turned into, oh, my God, it's fascism, right? So it's another one of these, like, crazy inversions that's taken place.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And they had this incredible influx of money at the time from the federal government for, you know, for supercomputers and then what turned out to be the internet. Actually, by the way, full credit, led by Al Gore when he was in the Senate. I always thought he got unfairly treated by how people describe this later, but he led the push.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
It's possible. I mean, look, like I just said a couple things. So like one, what you said, it's been very deliberately set up. So it's not actually a department of the government, notwithstanding the name, the formal power will get exercised through the executive branch, you know, and through the White House, like everything else.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But I will say, you know, there's a lot of support from the administration for the program. And if you look at the people being put into positions like OMB and OPM and so forth, like they're very aligned with it. So yeah. So at the very least, it's starting out with a lot of coordination and shared ideas. And then I guess I'd say, look, a couple things.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So one is, just so we know what Doge is, there's actually three kind of threads that they're pulling on. There's the money side, but there's also the headcount staffing side, which is related but not exactly the same to the money side. And then there's the regulation side. And they have plans on each of those three threads on the money and on the staffing and on the regulation.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
They have plans on how to do it that are, I would just say, light years beyond anything I've ever heard of before.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I mean, look, you just have the smartest entrepreneur of our entire generation who's like the conceptual genius of our time across multiple domains. And, uh, They have plans where I think when people see them, I think people are going to be like, oh, I didn't realize that that's the way that you could go about this. And so they have original thinking on all three of those.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And over the weeks to come, that'll become more public. But I think there's more underlying thought process here than I think people give them credit for. And then I'll just add one more thing to your point in comparing to prior eras. The prior attempts to do this all happened under the old top-down media machine, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And everything that happens now is going to happen in the full light of social media. And, you know, say what you will about social media. One of the things it's really good at is like when somebody like Elon or somebody like Trump wants to take a message direct to the people. And I say this because this has already begun. Like, you know, Elon's already doing this.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
The administration's already doing this. There's an ability here to take this directly to the population and shine a light on what's actually going on. across a lot of the government. And I'll just give you the most obvious one they've already talked about in public, which is just, you know, the occupancy of a federal building in Washington, D.C. now is like 25%.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Like a very large percentage of the federal workforce literally never came back to work. And, you know, ask any big company CEO in America, they will tell you people working at home are not working.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
This is actually the thing he gets knocked on. The famous quote is, I invented the Internet. With the actual quote, he never said that, I'll defend Al's honor to the death, is he said, I took the lead in the Senate in creating the Internet. What he meant by that is he was the tip of the spear for funding for national supercomputing centers. They picked four college campuses,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
This is the traditional institutional cynical Washington view. And the way that reads to a normal person is absolute contempt for the taxpayer. like, absolute contempt for the taxpayer of, like, we can sit here in Washington and we can ladle out $50 billion here and $100 billion there, and when we're challenged on it, the answer is, eh, it's a rounding error.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But I just say, look, I just tell you what you just said comes across as total contempt for the taxpayer. Like, just absolute contempt. And so this will be part of the... Who is the taxpayer?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
They're not exposed to it. So this is the difference. This is a big part of the bet. And look, maybe it'll work and maybe it won't. This is a big part of the bet, which is they don't actually, the American taxpayer doesn't experience it that way because they don't actually have the insight into it. Take what you would think would be a bulletproof program like child disability in schools.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Like it's far from clear to me that the median taxpayer would support that if they really knew what that was. And as you and I both know what that has become is that it's become basically medicalized mental illness. To the point where if students in schools now are basically using fake diagnoses of mental illness in order to get drugs and in order to get like extra time on tests.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And that whole program has like run completely out of control. And like everybody with kids knows that. But it's not like a discrete thing that people can like wrap their heads around and understand. And it's not a thing that gets like exposed in the bright light of day.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And that's precisely the kind of thing where I think if it's aired in public, I think you might find that there's a lot less support for it than people think. So, you know, we'll see.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Illinois was one of them. So we basically, Illinois campus, when I was there, it was like living in the future. We had computers that cost up to $30 million a pop that basically were representative of what was to come, but we just had them a decade before everybody else because of this program.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Well, so, look, I just start by saying, look, when a coalition wins, then, of course, the very next step is internal fights inside the coalition. Right. I mean, I think that's sort of obvious. Right. So, look, I have no doubt that there are and they're going to continue to be debates inside the coalition.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I would just say, look, I frankly don't even really have anything to say on that, just because I would say that we have a leader of the coalition and his name is Donald Trump and he is extremely good. at navigating this aspect of it. And he's extremely good at, you know, bringing together all the threads and then having it, you know, come out into the positions that he advocates to support.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And obviously, as you know, he has this, you know, magical.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So this is a big part.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
100 percent. No question. I will just tell you, though, I mean, I'll just tell you from my exposure to it and from everybody I've talked to, if you talk to Trump people, what they will tell you is in the first term, number one, we didn't think we were going to win. We were outsiders. We were insurgents. We didn't have a staff. We didn't have a reservoir of people that we could draw on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And then I did early research work there, basically, that resulted in the Mosaic browser, which was kind of the browser that kind of broke the concept of the internet and the web kind of through to the mainstream. And then I came to Silicon Valley, not because I was particularly enthusiastic about it at the time, because it was just the default thing to do.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
You know, a very large percentage of the Republican staffing base had declared itself never Trump and they were not available to work with us. We didn't we so we didn't have a team that we could bring in. We were coming into Washington for the first time from the outside. We didn't know how the levers of power worked. We didn't know how to turn the lights on in the White House on the first day.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
We just didn't know how to do these things. And then we got this just incredible withering assault on day one and for the next three years of Russian spy, Russiagate attacks, every possible form of slander and attack. And so we were not ready to command the federal government in the way that maybe somebody who'd been in Washington for 30 years could.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
you know would be in a position to do and then they have spent the last four years building the plan and building the team and building the machine to to actually do it and so it's this really bizarre thing that's all i think happened once before in american history where you have an incumbent who then there's a gap and then there's there's a second term and i will tell you the team around him has used that second term to plan and prepare and then i would just say if you look at the staffing that's taking place you know another thing people said was well in the second trump term it's going to be an even worse team because of blah blah blah
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
The reality, I think, turns out is obviously the opposite. It's a much better team the second time, the caliber of people going in. And again, it's not even a critique of the people in the first term. It's just there's a cohort of people who are, you know, primarily ready to go, who are experts in all these areas, who have lived through the last four years, and they're all on board with the thing.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And they're ready to go in and bring all of their expertise. And, you know, we could sit here and we could probably name, you know, two dozen people. who are at like the deputy or assistant secretary level in these key agencies who are just like off the charts good. And by the way, much better than the people that they're replacing in virtually every case.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And so anyway, they are as well positioned to take this thing over and run it as anything I've seen in my life. Obviously, we are very, very enthusiastically pulling for them.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I mean, after what I've been through in the last decade, could it get worse than it's been? Anything is possible. How bad would it have to be for it to be worse than how it's been? Pretty bad. I would just say this. The last decade has been highly educational, extremely educational. And we have put a lot of thought into this and a lot of work into this.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And I figured at least I can get a job and, you know, kind of work in the tech industry. And when I was in college from 89 to 94, I'm sure you probably remember, there was a very severe recession depression that felt like the end of the world. And it felt like the end of the American tech industry.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
By the way, the other thing is look like you know this, but like a lot of this has changed. Like there has been like significant migration on both sides on a lot of different issues over the course of the last 10 or 15 years. You know, we, you know, as you know, we live in a very different political environment than we did 20 years ago. And so I think there's.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
There's this natural shifting where the animating issues of 20 years ago are not the animating issues today. Let me just give you one example. Gay marriage 20 years ago was, like, a very potent political issue in the Valley. But, like, that issue's done, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And by the way, now I have all these gay friends who are, like, super pro-Trump because, like, that issue's done and, like, Trump's not going to, you know, like, that's finished. The other thing is, like, you know, the neocon thing. Like, 20 years ago, Iraq was a giant motivating thing.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
It's like, well, you know, the one thing we know, at least God willing, we'd hope that we know, is, like, we're not going to do that again. Right. And so, like, it's just no longer an issue.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
actually in the late 80s, early 90s, which was sort of the peak of the ascendance of Japan in the global economy and in the tech industry. And it felt like the valley was dying. And so when I came to Silicon Valley in 1994, I actually thought I had missed all the action. And then, you know, through a couple of strokes of luck, met my business partner at the time, Jim Clark.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I understand, and I'm sure those fights are going to happen, and I'm just telling you, like, I don't—like, I'm fine with it. Like, on everything that you just described, I'm fine with it. Like, whatever. I'm fine with it because, you know, this is the old thing. It's like, you know, what's the difference between the left and the right? The left wants revolution. The right wants not the left.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Of course, that's true. And look, you could say over the last 200 years, the left over time has won most of the fights, or even all the fights. I'm just telling you, for the day-to-day reality that I live in, and for the time horizon I can deal with, which is like, you know, I call it a decade at a time. Like, I just, yeah, this last decade, like, no, no more of that. Like, no.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
What happened in this last decade and this last five years, like, everything that we talked about in this thing, like, no, we're not, like, this is not going to happen again. And there are a gazillion issues on the right that people are going to argue with. And they can argue, and most of them, like, we're not even going to be involved in.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And even on the ones where we have a dog in the hunt, like, whatever tradeoff is made, whatever the president decides, I'm 100% certain it's going to be better than what we've been dealing with. There's another part to it, though, which is, as you know, the Democratic Party has a set of decisions to make.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And as you know, like, they've descended into their version of a civil war to try to figure that out. I hope, aspirationally, I would like them to come back to the middle. I don't know if that's where that party's going to come, but I think they have a big opportunity to do it. I think they should because it would make them more likely to win.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And so I guess I would say my sincere hope for them is that they find their way back to what I would describe as some level of normality and that they themselves decide they look back on this last decade and they're like, yeah, things just went too far.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And he and I started Netscape. But I just bring it up because, like I said, I thought I was in it at the very end, and then it turned out I was in it at the beginning of something new.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Yeah, the metaphor that I use here is we're the dog that caught the bus and we got the tailpipe firmly between our jaws and the bus is dragging us down the street. And then some people think we're driving the bus.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
It is. And then some people think we're driving the bus, right? And we're like, no, no, no, we're being dragged by it. Anyway, so I agree with everything you said. Look, our conclusion is we have to stay involved in the political and policy process for the next, you know, whatever, God willing, 30, 40 years we get to do this. Because, yeah, I think there's no going back on that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And look, there are some really fundamental and critical issues that need to be thought through. And we need to be in those conversations. And we need to have a voice. We need to have a role to play. And so our plan is to, like, from here on out, we're permanently in.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Thank you, Russ.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Yeah, so I think the way to describe it is I think the Valley before me, from like the 50s through the 70s, was sort of, they were normie Republicans. You know, they were business people, CEOs, investors, and they would have been, you know, I assume at the time, big fans of Nixon, big fans of Reagan, so forth. That era was basically over by the time I arrived.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
I met a few of those guys, but when I got there in 94, it was in the full swing of the Clinton-Gore kind of, you know, restoration of the Democratic Party, you know, kind of recovery of liberalism as a mainstream political force. And this goes back again to Al Gore's role in this, who I got to know quite well, and Bill. Basically, it was the pro-business Democratic Party.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
It was the pro-tech Democratic Party. It was the pro-startup Democratic Party. And so Clinton and Gore and their administration was incredibly enthusiastic about what we were doing. I mean, Al Gore was just thrilled because he's like, wow, this whole program that I funded in the Senate worked incredibly well. The internet worked. And now we're going to have this giant economic boom.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
It's going to be led by dynamic entrepreneurial capitalism, right? Like they celebrated it. They loved it. They embraced us. You know, it was like a full-fledged love affair. And that was the sort of foundation for the great entrepreneurial and economic growth boom of the 1990s and America's back. And, you know, Japan, as it turned out, was not going to take over the world and
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
China was still, you know, off in the distance somewhere. And so it was this incredible restoration of kind of American economic supremacy, technological supremacy. And so as a result of that, the most natural thing in the world for somebody like me was, oh, you know, of course, I'm a normie Democrat. I'll be a normie Democrat forever.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Normally is what I call, I call this the deal with a capital D, like nobody ever wrote this down, but like it was just something everybody understood, which is, you know, you're me, you show up, you're an entrepreneur, you're a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company. If it works, you make a lot of money.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And then the company itself is good because it's bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place. But then you make a lot of money, and then you give the money away, right? And through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career, and it's great. And then, by the way, you're a Democrat, you're pro-gay rights, you're pro-abortion, you're pro all the sort of fashionable and sort of appropriate social causes of the time. And literally, it was like, there are no trade-offs.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Like, this is the deal. And then, of course, everybody knows Republicans are just like knuckle-dragging racists. And, you know, it was just kind of taken as given that there was just going to be this great relationship. And, of course, it worked so well for the Democratic Party, and Clinton and Gore, you know, sailed a re-election in 96.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And the Valley was locked in for, you know, 100 years to come just to be straight-up conventional blue Democrat. Yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Yes. So, A, yes, 100%. I would say, B, even more than that, we all voluntarily live in California. Right. So, we have the... So we not only have the federal dimension of what you're saying, we also live in these very high tax cities, you know, San Francisco, Palo Alto. And so, yeah. And I think I think by paying higher taxes and not objecting to them, you prove you're a good person.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
But for that generation of enlightened centrist liberal, it was, of course, you pay higher taxes because, you know, we're the Democratic Party is an agent of positive social change. And, you know, of course, you want to have a bigger safety net. Of course, you want to fund all these things.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
programs and you want to fund all these activist campaigns and of course you want that you know the term camelot was never used but there was there was a camelot feeling to it at the time that people must have felt in the early 60s in the same way which is just like wow like yes it's all happening and it's all going to happen and it's going to be great so yeah that was that was like a full-fledged part of the deal but then look quite honestly i am trying in none of this to like claim moral high ground or moral moral sheen or anything but just to kind of take that take the edge off of that if that's what i've come across
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Quite honestly, the tax rates didn't really matter because when an internet company worked, it grew so fast and got so valuable that, you know, you just if you work like another three years, you'd make another 10x. And so another 5% higher tax rate washed out of the numbers. And so we weren't forced to really think that hard about it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
It just seemed like this was the formula that would result in everything working.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Yeah, that description, by the way, is exactly right. And the California ideology was real and correct. And the Valley had always incarnated a specific version of that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So, you know, the two origin points for hippie culture, as we now understand it today, were basically that Laurel Cannon in L.A., which we were not connected to, but they hate Ashbury in San Francisco, which is, you know, at ground zero of tech also.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And so, you know, we literally were one of the two kind of inception points for the hippie revolution in the 60s and 70s and the whole general, you know, new left and like all that stuff. By the way, Berkeley also, right, UC Berkeley is hugely important. to the Valley, and of course, Berkeley, you know, the birthplace of the, at the time, what they called the free speech movement.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
You know, my business partner, Ben, my longtime partner, Ben's father, David Horowitz, who's now a radical, you know, right-wing political activist in the 60s and 70s, was a radical left-wing political activist.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Yeah, but he was like literally on campus when anti-Vietnam War was starting to crank up. And so like that was all happening at the same time that Silicon Valley started to boot up and there was lots of back and forth between that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Then the other side was more of the Bob Noyce side of things, you know, that I alluded to, which is you have these like literally Midwestern farm boys showing up who were squares, not hippies.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
very much square, you know, and if you look at like old photos of like the Intel team when they were young, it's literally, you know, short-sleeved white shirts with ties and tie clips and, you know, they look like the Michael Douglas character from Falling Down. You know, they look like defense contractors. And what the Valley did, to its credit, was it fused those mentalities.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And the fusion most specifically showed up in the form ultimately of Steve Jobs. He had all of the accoutrements and all of the artistic judgment. And he had famously done LSD and he had all these alternative, you know, beliefs. He had been to India. But he was also, as we know, like a ruthlessly competitive industrialist. And so, you know, he kind of fused both sides of that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And that fusion has been where a lot of the magic is. That naturally brings in both left and right wing politics. And then that definitely takes us to the dynamic that's happening today.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Yeah, so the breakdown was during the second Obama term, and it took me by surprise. I think maybe the one person that didn't take my surprise is, you know, our mutual friend, Peter Thiel. You know, he, as with a lot of things, I think saw it coming earlier than I did, but it definitely took me by surprise.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And, you know, just to give full context there, like I had met Obama in, I think, 06 or 07 when he was a new senator. And, you know, he seemed great. It's just like, it's the perfect package. It's literally everything that you could possibly dream for in a president. He has all the right social views. And he seems like an inheritor of the Clinton gore.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
You know, he says all the right things about capitalism at the time and about entrepreneurship. He's clearly in love with tech. You may recall the 2012 election was literally the story of social media saves democracy. Like, it was literally that Barack Obama, the good guy, uses advanced technology, including the internet and social media, to save the country from the Nazi fascist Mitt Romney.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
And this was like wall-to-wall positive press coverage. This was also, by the way, in the wake of the Arab Spring, which at the time, you'll recall, was like an unalloyed good. Like, obviously, all these countries are going to be much better off.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Obviously, the fact that these protests were organized on social media sites running the United States was a sign of how we were going to bring democracy to the world. And then basically, in retrospect, what happened is after Obama's reelection in 2012 through ultimately to 16, things really started to change.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
The way the story gets told a lot now is that Trump was a new arrival in 15, and then basically lots of changes followed. What I experienced was the changes started in 2012, 2013, 2014, and were snowballing hard, at least in the Valley, and at least among kids. And I think to some extent, Trump was actually a reaction to those changes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
So I would say both, because the unifying thread here is, I believe, it's the children of the elites, right? The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions who, you know, teach them how to be like America-hating communists. They fan out into the professions.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
There has been this pitch battle playing out globally where both the U.S. and China are trying to get the world on their tech stack. Why would China want to do that? One is because Huawei is a big export industry to export routers and switches and the things that they make. But the other is just control.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
If a country bases its wireless network on Huawei, then the Chinese have the ability to backdoor the network anytime they want. They can listen in on any telephone conversation happening in whatever country implements that. So they have a massive geopolitical national security intelligence reason to proliferate this. And the Chinese state puts a lot of
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
weight behind their national champions to go out globally and do this. And so we saw that playing out over the course of the last decade. AI is the next version of that. AI is the next thing that America, especially, by the way, under this new administration, the last administration was conflicted on this, which we can talk about.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
But under this new administration, the Trump administration, the US has a very clear national security interest priority goal. The government has a very clear goal to make sure that the US tech is the global standard. for all the reasons that we discussed. And then the Chinese also have that goal.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And they have these programs with names like Digital Belt and Road and so forth, where they're going out and doing this. And AI is the next turn on that.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so every country in the world is going to be buying and adapting AI into their healthcare system and into their education system and into their transportation system, into their telecom system, into their computing fabric, into all this, their energy system. AI is going to get infused into all these systems that run countries.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So there's going to be this big fight of whether that's US-derived AI or Chinese-derived AI. The assumption, of course, up until basically last week, is that China runs a closed political and economic system with a lot of state control, top-down control. The U.S. runs an open democratic bottoms up free market system.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So the assumption up until last week would have been that, of course, we Americans are going to have the more open and freedom oriented approach to AI. And of course, the Chinese are going to come in with a much more closed, controlled, censored version. Like we said earlier, like at least right now, the funny thing, not funny, haha, but like funny, ironic thing is that that has flipped.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And sitting here today, China took the lead last week in having the best open system. They've kind of done a judo move. They're kind of using our strengths against us. It's net good for the world because everybody gets to download and use their stuff. And like, it's fantastic for all the reasons I described. And so this is far from a hostile act on their standpoint.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
It's much more of a generous act, but it's the kind of generous act that you would expect the West to do, not communist China to do. And then in the U.S., we have to decide how we're going to respond to that. AI policy in the West has been very screwed up because we have not been clear eyed on this.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And the way I describe it is over the last several years, I got very involved in the AI policy debates in the US and in the UK, and then from a distance in the EU. And what I would describe as very fuzzy, confused thinking where you had a lot of people in power basically thinking, oh, yes, if it's a competition with China, we have to win.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
But if it's not a competition with China, then we can adopt a Chinese model and we can lock it down in our own societies. And we can use AI as an instrument of control and censorship in our own society. So as long as China is not a challenge, essentially the US, the UK, the EU are going to become more Chinese.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
They're going to have more centralized control, more restrictions, more lockdowns, more censorship. The Chinese are doing us a favor in an ironic way, which is they're kicking us in the butt and basically saying, I'm going to impute something to them they haven't said. But basically the message is you Westerners are basically betraying your core principles.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You're letting us do this the way that it should be done as opposed to you guys doing it. And if you in the West don't adapt and actually return back to your core principles of freedom and democracy and openness, China's not going to just let the world coast along. China's going to go ahead and seize that mantle. And I think it would be ruinously destructive for the West if that's what happens.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I think we need policies and companies and products that respond to that in the right way.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Yeah, so there's some real issues here. There is an irony to the line of argument, and you do hear that line of argument. There's an irony to it, which, of course, is OpenAI did not invent the transformer. The core algorithm of a large language model is something called the transformer. It was not invented at OpenAI. It was invented at Google.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Google invented it and published a paper on it and then, by the way, didn't pursue it. They continued to do research on it, but they didn't productize it. And they didn't productize it because of quote unquote safety. They were like, ah, this could be unsafe. And so let's not do it. So they let it sit on the shelf for five years.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then the OpenAI guys figured it out, picked it up and ran with it. And Anthropic is a spinoff of OpenAI. Anthropic also did not invent the transformer. And so both of those companies and every other American lab, by the way, working on large language models and every other open source project is built on something that none of them actually created and developed themselves.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
By the way, Google invented the transformer. That was in 2017. But the transformer itself was a derivation of the idea of neural networks. Neural networks are an idea that goes back literally to 1943. So 82 years ago is actually when the original paper on neural networks came out.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And the transformer built on 70 years of research and development, much of it funded by the federal government and by European governments. at research universities for a very long time. And so this is one of those things where there's this incredibly long lineage of intellectual thought and development that's gone into it.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The vast majority of the ideas that go into all these systems were not developed by the companies that are currently building the systems. Nobody sitting here, including none of our companies, have any like special moral claim that somehow we did like de novo build that we should have complete control over. Like it's just not true. So
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I would describe arguments like that as frustration in the moment. And then, by the way, there are also kind of moot point arguments, which is China went ahead and did it. It's out. It's done. Now, there is an argument around copyright. If you talk to experts in the space, a lot of people have been trying to understand why DeepSeek is as good as it is.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And one of the theories, and this is an unproven theory, but one of the things the experts believe is China probably trained on data that the U.S. companies don't train on. And in particular, one of the really surprising things about DeepSeek is DeepSeek is really, really good at creative writing. DeepSeek is probably the best creative writing AI in the world right now in English.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And this is fairly weird because China's a different language. There's some very good Chinese novelists in English. Generally speaking, you'd expect the best creative writing to be coming out of the West in English. And DeepSeek is today probably the best. And it's shockingly good.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so one of the theories is DeepSeek trained, for example, there's these websites with names like LibGen that are basically giant internet repositories of pirated books. I myself would never use LibGen, but I have a friend who uses it all the time. It's like a superset of the Kindle store. It's got like every digital book and it's up there as a PDF and you can download it for free.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
or something, the US labs might not feel like they can just basically download all the books from LibGen and train on it, but maybe the Chinese labs feel like they can. So there's potentially a differential advantage there. That said, there is this looming copyright fight.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
People need to be careful on how they think about this because there's this looming copyright fight where certain publishing companies that would basically like to prevent generative AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek from being able to use their content. And there's one argument that says that that material is copyrighted and can't just be used willy-nilly.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
There is another argument that basically says an AI training on a book, you're not copying the book. You're reading the book. It's the AI equivalent of reading a book. And you and I are allowed to read a book. By the way, we're allowed to check a book out from the library. We're allowed to pick a book up off the street. We're allowed to read a friend's copy of a book. Those are all legal.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
We're allowed to read the book. We're allowed to learn from the book. And then we're allowed to go about our daily life and talk about the ideas that we learned in the book. There's another argument that says that training in AI is much more analogous to human being reading a book as opposed to stealing it. And then there's just this practical reality, which is if China doesn't care about U.S.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
copyright, which they traditionally don't, and their AIs can get trained in all the books. And if the American companies are prohibited ultimately by law from being able to train in the books, then the U.S. may just lose on AI. Just from a practical standpoint, that may be a death blow where it's just like they win and we lose. There's sort of that whole snarl of arguments in there.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
One of the things that DeepSeq has not revealed is the data that they train on. And so you don't get a copy of the data when you download DeepSeq, you get what are called the weights. And so you get the neural network that results from training on the material that they trained on. But from that, it's very difficult or impossible to look inside and sort of derive the training data.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
By the way, also, neither do Anthropic or OpenAI reveal the data that they train on. Then there's intense speculation in the field as to what's in the OpenAI training data and what's not. They consider it a proprietary secret. They don't release that. And so the Chinese deep sea may or may not be doing things differently than these companies.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
They may or may not have a different approach to copyright. By the way, maybe this is all a moot point. Maybe they're all using the same data and DeepSeq just figured out a better way to encode the algorithm. That we don't know. We don't actually know what the OpenAI and Anthropic algorithms are because they're not open source.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
We don't know how much better or worse they are than the DeepSeq algorithms passed in public.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I'm in favor of maximum competition. And by the way, like that fits with the theme of I'm a VC. So one of the things about being a VC is if you're a company founder, if I'm like running an AI company, I need to have a very specific strategy that has pros and cons and trade-offs. I need to think hard about that. As a VC, I don't need to do that.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I can make multiple bets that have contradictory theses. This is a little Peter Thiel thing, right? Of determinate optimism versus indeterminate optimism. A company founder CEO has to be a determinate optimist. They have to have a plan and they have to make the hard trade-offs to be able to succeed at that plan. A VC is an indeterminate optimist.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
We can fund a hundred different companies with a hundred different plans with mutually conflicting assumptions. And so the nature of my job is I don't have to make the call that you just described. And then that, let's just say, makes it easy for me to make a philosophical argument, which I really deeply agree with personally, which is I'm in favor of maximum competition.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So I'm in favor of the free market. I'm in favor of maximum competition, maximum freedom. And essentially, if you think about it one level down, a maximum rate of evolution, being able to have as many smart people as possible, come up with as many different approaches as possible, run them against each other in the free market and see what happens.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Specifically for AI, what that means is I'm in favor of the big labs running as fast as they can. I'm 100% supportive of OpenAI and Anthropic doing whatever they want, bringing whatever products to market they want, running as hard as they want.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
As long as they're not getting preferential policy treatment or preferential subsidies or preferential support from the government, they should be able to do whatever it is that they do. As a company, I'm in favor, obviously, of startups. I want lots of startups to try lots of different things. And we, of course, are very active in funding AI startups of every shape, size, and description.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So I want them to be able to run And then I want open source to be able to run. And I want open source to be able to run in part because I think it's good if stuff shows up in open source, even if it means that there are some business models for companies that don't work, the benefit to the world and to the industry as a whole is so big. We'll find other ways to make money.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
AI will just be like a lot more common and a lot cheaper and a lot easier. And I think that would be a great outcome. And then the other really critical thing about open source and the reason we all need to defend and protect open source is without open source, everything just becomes a black box.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Without open source, everything becomes a black box owned and controlled by a small handful of companies that end up essentially colluding with the government, which we could talk about. But you need open source to be able to look inside the box and see what's happening, all this stuff.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And by the way, you also need open source for academic research, and you need open source, therefore, for teaching. And so one of the issues with AI prior to the open source models, so going back two years when there were no basically open source LLMs, Meta released Llama, the two big ones, Llama, then Mistral out of France, and then now DeepSeek.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
But before those open source models emerged, there was a crisis that was brewing in the universities and the educational system, which is the university researchers at places like Stanford and MIT and Berkeley didn't have the money to be able to buy a billion dollars worth of NVIDIA chips to be able to actually be in the game.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so if you talk to computer science professors at the top universities, two years ago, they were very worried about Actually, the first worry was my university is not going to have enough money to be able to stay in the game and do anything relevant in AI anymore.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then the other worry was all the universities together are not going to have enough money to be able to do anything and stay in the game because nobody can keep up with the fundraising of these giant companies. Open source puts the universities back in the game.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And it means that if I'm a professor at Stanford or MIT or Berkeley or any state school, whatever, University of Washington, whatever, I can now teach how this stuff works. And I can teach using the Lama Code or the Mistral Code or the Deep Seat Code. I can do research on that. I can actually continue to make breakthroughs. I can publish my research. So people can actually see what's happening.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then every new generation of kids coming along that shows up for a freshman computer science course is going to learn how to do this now in a way that they wouldn't if this was a black box. We need open source in the same way we need freedom of speech, academic freedom and freedom to research things.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so my model is basically you let the big companies, the small companies and open source run and compete against each other. That's what happened in the computer industry. It worked really well. That's what happened in the Internet industry. It worked really well. I believe that's what's going to happen in AI. I think it's going to work really well. One of those can work.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
That argument is a very real argument. It gets deployed frequently. It is being very actively deployed in the AI space. And in fact, as we sit here today, two things. So one is there are actually currently existing sanctions for Western companies and American companies to sell leading edge AI chips to China.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
It's actually not legal today, for example, for NVIDIA to sell its leading edge AI chips to China. We actually live in a world in which that decision has been made and that policy has been implemented. And then the Biden administration had moved, actually put out an executive order, which I think has now been revoked.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
But they had put out an executive order that was going to apply that same kind of restriction, basically a sanctions process to software. This is a very live argument. And there's going to be another round of these arguments in D.C. as a consequence of the deep seek thing. Those conversations are underway.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then basically what you have there is kind of a classic thing that you have when you get into policy disputes, which is you have the rational version of that conversation, which is what's in the national interest from a theoretical standpoint.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then you have the political version of the conversation, which is, OK, what is the political process actually going to do with the rational argument? And let me just say, we all, I think, have a lot of experience watching when a rational argument encounters the political process. It's usually not the rational argument that wins.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
What you get out of the other side of the machine is not what you went in thinking you were going to get. And then there's a third factor that we always need to talk about, which is the corrupting influence of especially big companies. If you're a big company and you're threatened by what's happening in China, what's happening with open source, of course, you're going to try to weaponize the U.S.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
government to protect you. And maybe that's in the national interest and maybe it's not. But you're for sure going to push for that whether or not it's in the national interest. And so that's what makes the conversation complicated. And so let's just talk about the chip embargo for a second. So you can't sell leading edge AI chips to China. So that leads to basically a couple of things.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So one is for sure it sets them back in certain ways. There are certain things that they're not going to be able to do. And maybe that's good because you've decided that's in the national interest. But let's just say there are three other interesting consequences of that.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So consequence number one is you have now given Chinese companies an incredible motivation to design how to do things on cheaper chips. And that's a big part of the DeepSeq breakthrough is that they figured out how to use the cheaper chips that are legal to be able to do things that take the American companies, the larger chips. And that's a big part of the news on DeepSeq.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And that's one of the reasons why it's so much cheaper. One of the reasons you can run on a $6,000 worth of hardware is because they put a lot of time and energy into optimizing the code so that it will run efficiently on the cheaper chips that are not under the sanctions. You force an evolutionary response. So that's response number one. That maybe has already backfired in a significant way.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Consequence number two is you are incenting the Chinese government and Chinese private sector to develop a parallel chip industry. So if they know that they can't get American chips, then they are going to, they're doing this right now. They have a whole national program to build up their own chip industry so that they're not dependent on American chips.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So in the counterfactual, maybe they would have bought American ships. Now they're going to figure out how to make their own. Maybe it will take them five years to be able to make their own. But once they get a position where they can make their own, then we have a direct competitor on the global market that we would not have had if we had just sold them the chips.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And by the way, at that point, we're in no control over their ships. They're in total control. They can backdoor them. They can sell them at below cost. They can do whatever they want. By the way, the other twist on that is Taiwan. China has wanted to reunify with Taiwan for its own reasons for a very long time.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
But if you're the CCP right now, Taiwan is a very tempting target in part because you already want it, but in part because it has these magic fabs. If you can't buy chips that come off those fabs, but you could seize the island and take the fabs, right? that would be a double reason to go invade Taiwan.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so it's possible these sanctions are going to accelerate the timeline of China doing a military invasion of Taiwan. So that gets complicated. That gets very hairy. So the consequences of this get very tricky. It's very hard to calibrate these things. And again, the main thing I could just say here is, The issues are real. The tensions are real. The trade-offs are real.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
There are rational arguments that need to be discussed and need to be argued out. But we need to actually do that rationally.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And those of us participating in the system and watching from afar and voting need to basically keep our eye on this to make sure that the political process isn't taking rational arguments and twisting them into something that's either going to backfire or is going to end up just serving a small set of private interests.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So I'm a single-celled organism on this question. I have a single function. I want America to win. I want America to win. I want America to win. That's the only thing I care about.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And the reason for that is not because I want America to dominate the world, but because I think the world's a much better place if America wins because the American values of freedom and democracy are superior values to, let's say, totalitarian authoritarian values. Specifically, though, I don't want America to win like a war. I don't want to have a war.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I don't think we should go to war with China. I hope we never go to war with China. That would be very destructive. I would like to see America win this Cold War 2.0 the way we won the first Cold War. So basically what happened in the first Cold War was the Soviets basically decided by 1989 the Cold War was unwinnable. They were not going to be able to win. Their economy was not as effective.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
They were falling behind in technology. They were entering various kinds of social and economic crises as a result of their dictatorial approach to running countries. They had become very corrupt. Their system was not actually working. it wasn't performing. This is the famous story.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
If you go to the two grocery stores, go to a grocery store in Moscow and a grocery store in New Jersey, and you're just like blown away by how much better the grocery store is in New Jersey. You just want it to become basically so obvious that actually the correct thing for the Soviet Union in 1989 was to just simply say, we're done. We're not fighting this anymore. We're done.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
We're going to stop threatening you. We're going to stop competing with you. We're going to stop all this stuff. We're just going to be country. We're going to be a normal country and we're going to have normal relationships and the Russian people are much better off as a consequence.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I would like to see the CCP and the Chinese people at some point basically just decide, look, there's no point in having this fight. We should just be partners. We should just be partners with America. We should be trading partners. We should have peaceful coexistence and we should love each other. And it's all great. We just don't need to have this fight.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I believe that the way to win this fight is not to get ultra aggressive. The way to win this fight is to be strong so that we know that we can obviously defend ourselves if push comes to shove. but fundamentally to double down on our values and double down on our values of openness and freedom and democracy and peace. And in that sense, to be strong, but not threatening.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So it's like, yes, if you fight with us, we're going to win the hard way. But what we'd like to do is just have peace and understanding and trade. and freedom. And we would like the Chinese people to flourish in the exact same way the American people flourish and everybody builds a better world.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And this is a big part of my philosophical discussion I get in with people in DC, which is like the impulse that people in DC can get into where they're like, we need to lock things down, control things, ban things, prohibit things. We need to do all these things, deny things to other countries. It's like, okay, but are we sabotaging ourselves? Are we betraying our values?
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Are we sabotaging our ultimate geopolitical strategic position and the benefits of being America and being the beacon of freedom and hope and democracy in the world? In other words, are we going to win by becoming more like China or more like the Soviet Union, or are we going to win by becoming more like America? And so I'm kind of always pushing on the side of, no, let's be more like America.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Let's be more free. Let's be more open, strong, but more friendly, more collaborative, more cooperative, and essentially seduce the world into being on our side as opposed to restricting and controlling and overtly threatening.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Yeah, so the analytical component hopefully will change dramatically. One assumes that the world's best investment companies are going to be very good at harnessing this technology for the use of the kind of analysis that they do, that we do.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Now, having said that, the whole thing where the shoemaker's son has no shoes, one might say that maybe the venture firms that are the most aggressive at investing in AI might be among the less aggressive on actually figuring out how to use it. We have a bunch of internal efforts underway that I'm super excited about, but firms like ours need to be on the ball here. So we need to actually do it.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Some of that work happening yet, probably not across the industry, probably not enough. Having said that, there is another side to it. And for like late stage investing or for public market investing, a lot of people you talk to have a very analytical lens. And there's even, you know, great investors. I think it's Warren Buffett. I think he never does management meetings.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I don't know if it's true or not, but the story I've always heard is Warren doesn't want to meet with CEOs.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Yeah, yeah. He wants to have sandwich companies. And I think he's also a little bit worried that he's going to get seduced by a good story. A lot of CEOs, they're very charming. I always describe as that great hair, great teeth, their shoes are shiny, the suits impeccable. They're really good at selling. And among the things they're really good at selling is their stock.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so if you're Buffett, you sit in Omaha, what you do is you read the annual reports. The companies put everything in the annual reports and they're constrained by federal law to make sure that it's true. And so that's how you analyze. And so
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Should 01 or 03 or 07 or R4 or whatever the reasoning models are, should that be better at analyzing annual reports than at least most investors doing it by hand? Yeah, probably. As you know, investing is an arms race like everything else. And so if it works for one person, it'll work for everybody. It'll be an arbitrage for a little while and then it'll close and it'll become standard.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so I would expect the investment management industry will adopt this technology in that way. This will become a standard way to operate. I do think it gets a little bit different, especially earlier in the process for early stage venture. What I'm about to say may just be wishful thinking on my part. I might be the last Japanese soldier on the remote island in 1948.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
By saying what I'm about to say, I'm going to tempt fate. But I'm going to say, you know, look, so much of what we do on the early side in the first five years is really very deep evaluation of individual people. And then it's working with those people in very deep partnership. And this is one of the reasons, by the way, that venture doesn't scale well.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
But Daily Venture doesn't scale well geographically. The geographic scale experiments tend not to work. And the reason is just because you end up having to be face to face with the people for a long time, both during the evaluation process, but also during the building process. Because in the first five years, these companies generally aren't on autopilot.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You actually work with them a lot to help make sure that they do the things that they're going to need to succeed. There's a part of this that is very, very deep interpersonal relationships, conversations, interactions, coaching. By the way, we learn from them. They learn from us. It's a lot of back and forth. We don't come in with all the answers, but we have one lens because we see a panorama.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
They have another lens because they're in the specific details a lot more than we are. And so there's tremendous interpersonal interaction that happens. Tyler Cohen talks about this. I think he calls it project picking. Certainly talent scouting would be another version of this.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
which is basically like if you look back over hundreds of years, for any new area of human endeavor, you almost always have this thing where you have very idiosyncratic people who are trying to do something new. And then there's some professional support layer of the people who fund them and support them for the
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The music industry, that's David Geffen finding all the early folk artists and turning them into rock stars. Or it's David O. Selznick finding the early movie actors and turning them into movie stars. Or it's the guys sitting in a cafe, a tavern in Maine 500 years ago, figuring out which whaling captains are going to be able to go get the whale.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You know, it's Queen Isabella getting the pitch from Christopher Columbus on the Royal Chambers and saying, yeah, that sounds plausible. Why not? There's this alchemy that has developed over time between the people who do the new thing and then the people who sort of enable support and fund those people.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
say, like, there's no guarantee that this continues, but that's like a 400, 500 year endeavor. Honestly, probably it's thousands of years old. You probably had tribal chieftains 2000 years ago, 3000 years ago, sitting around a fire and the young warrior would come up and say, I want to go take a hunting party into this other thing. And I want to see if there's better game over there.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And the chief sitting around the fire and trying to figure out whether to say yes or no. So there's something very human about that. My guess would be that that continues. Having said that, if I meet the algorithm that can do that better than I can, I will instantly retire. We'll see what happens.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
A big part of running a venture firm, in our view, is there's a set of values you need to have and a set of behaviors that are what we call timeless. Respect for the entrepreneur, for example. You need to have tremendous respect for the entrepreneur and the journey that they're going on. You need to be deep in the details to really understand what they're doing. You don't do drive-bys.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You're building deep relationships. You're going to work with people for a long time. By the way, the companies are going to take a long time. We don't believe in the overnight success. Most of the great companies get built over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. NVIDIA is a great example. NVIDIA is, I think, coming up on their 40th anniversary.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And I think actually one of the original VCs in NVIDIA is, I think, actually still on the board. That's like a great example of one of these long-term builds. Anyway, so there's this core set of beliefs and views and behaviors that we're not changing at all that kind of have to do with that. Another is the face-to-face thing. Like, you have to be face-to-face with these things.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You know, these things are remote. That's the one hand. But on the other hand, you need to be very up to the minute because the technologies change so fast. The business models change so fast. The competitive dynamics change so fast.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
If anything, the environment's getting more complicated because you've got many countries and now you've got all these political issues, which also make things more complicated. We never really worried about the political system interfering with bringing pressure to bear on the things that we invested in really up until basically about eight years ago.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then it really intensified about five years ago. But for the preceding 10 years of us as a firm and the preceding 60 years of venture capital, it was never a big deal, but now it is. And so now we need to adapt and we need to be involved in politics in a way that we weren't before.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Or now we need to adapt and we need to figure out maybe AI companies are going to be very fundamentally different. Maybe they're going to be structured in a totally different way. Or to your point, maybe software companies are going to work totally different.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I'll give you an example of the question we ask a lot right now, which is like, what does the org chart look like for a company that actually fully uses AI? Is it similar or is it actually very different? And there's no single answer to that, but we're thinking hard about that. So that side of our brain basically says you need to be up to the minute.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You need to be extremely fluid in reacting to new information. And then I think the delicate dance that we do every day is to try to figure out what's timeless and then what's up to the minute. And that's a big part conceptually of how I think about the firm is we need to navigate through that and make sure that we know which is which.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Yeah, so a couple of things. So one is, I mean, I think the observation makes a lot of sense. The way that people in the business talk about it is basically there's a lot of investment operations that are usually the term is partnership is what you hear, right? A lot of venture firms work like this historically. It's just a partnership.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
It's like a small tribe of people sitting in a room together, trying to bounce ideas off of each other. And then they make the investments. By the way, they don't have a balance sheet. It's a private partnership. They pay out the money in the form of compensation at the end of every year. That's a traditional venture capital.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
A traditional venture capital model with six GPs sitting around a table doing that. They had their assistants. They had a couple of associates. But the point is, like, it's completely based on the people. And by the way, it actually turns out in most cases, what you discover is the people actually don't like each other that much. Mad Men did a good job of this.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Remember, in Mad Men, it's like the members went off and started their own company in the fourth season, third season, fourth season. They actually didn't like each other. They kind of knew they had to come together to start a firm. And that's how a lot of these firms operate. And so they're like these loosely affiliated tribes. And then you get this phenomenon they call you eat what you kill.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Each person wants to make the most of the money off the things that they do and they don't want freeloaders. But it's a partnership and it's a vote to try to change anything. And so it's hard to fire people. And So anyway, it's like private partnership and it's fine for what it is. But then what you see with those is basically they have a hard time sustaining. There's no franchise value.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
There's no underlying enterprise value. It's not a business. And what you see with those is basically when the original partners at a firm like that are ready to retire or do something different, they hand it off to a new generation. Most of the time, the new generation can't keep it going. And most firms in that model, I think now are kind of phasing out for that reason.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
But even if they can keep it going, there's no underlying asset value. That next generation is just going to have to hand it off to the third generation. It's probably going to fail on the third generation. And then it's going to be on Wikipedia someday. It's like, yeah, that firm existed at one point and then it went away and other firms took over and chips passing in the night.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So that's the standard way to do it. And by the way, if trained as a classical investor, you've been trained how to do the investment part, but you've never been trained on business building to your point. And you've never built a business. And so it's not natural for you to build a business. You don't have the skill set or experience. And so you just don't do it.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And many investors have made tons of money as investors running that model for a long time. So it can work really well. The other way is to build a company, build a business, build something with enduring franchise value. And there you alluded to firms like Blackstone and KKR, where they're huge public companies, Apollo, these huge firms.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You probably know the original banks actually were all private partnerships. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan 100 years ago looked like little venture capital firms much more than they look like what they look like today. But then their leaders over time turned them into these huge franchises, and they're also big public companies. So that's the other thing to do is kind of build a franchise.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Now, to do that, you need a theory as to why a franchise should exist. You need a conceptual theory as to why it makes sense to do that. And then, yeah, you need the business skills. And at that point, you're running a business and it's like running any other business, which is like, OK, I've got a company. It's got an operating model. It's got an operational tempo.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
It's got management capabilities. It has staff. It has multiple layers. It has training programs. It has performance management. It professionalizes its operations. It has division of labor internally with specialization.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then you think in terms of scaling and then you think in terms of over time, you think underlying asset value where the thing has a value that's not just the people who happen to be there at the moment. It's not like we're like chomping at the bit to take it public or whatever, but a big part of what we've been trying to do is build something that has that kind of enduring aspect to it.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
We evolve very rapidly in what we invest in. And so what the companies are, what they do, what the models are, what the founder backgrounds are, that stuff changes all the time. I'll give you an example. Like for 60 years of venture capital, the one thing you never did, everybody knew the one thing you never do is you never back a researcher.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You never back a PhD to like start a company and do research. He'll just do research, burn the money out, and you'll have nothing at the end. Now, the best AI company, many of the best AI companies were founded by researchers. That's one of those things where it turned out that was not a timeless value that needed to be an up-to-the-minute thing that you needed to adapt.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
We need to be very fluid on that. And then as a consequence of that, what those companies need to succeed, what they need from us, the kinds of help that they need from us, that also changes. And the most significant change at our firm, I mentioned before, but it's we now have a big political operation by even just general business standards.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
We have one of the largest and now most sophisticated political operations, I think, in the business world. And four years ago, we had nothing. We had zero in politics. And so that's a function that we didn't imagine we would need. I'm sure that in 10 years, we will both be investing in things I can't even conceive of today, and we will have operations that I can't even conceive of today.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So I'm sure that will all change. We're totally open to change in all those dimensions. There's a bunch of timeless values. I would hope that the firm values are going to be the same in 10 years, because I think those are pretty well thought through. But
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The other thing that I'm always telling our people internally and always telling our LPs is we are not trying to build for scale in order to be a large scale asset manager. Like the pejorative in the industry, in investment industry is asset gatherer. The firm reaches a point where it just decides to go for size and scale, tens to hundreds of billions of dollars to trillions of dollars.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And it's not going for great returns anymore. It's just going for scale and mass. And the accusation of firms that do that is they're trying to harvest the fees more than they're trying to outperform on the investments. That's not what we're trying to do. We're not going for scale for scale's sake.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
When we go for scale, it's because we think it's necessary to support the kinds of companies that we want to help our founders build. But the way I describe it is the core of the firm is always and will always be early stage venture. And so no matter how big we get, if we raise these larger growth funds, whatever, can be able to write bigger checks.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Some of the ad companies need very large amounts of money. We didn't start with a growth fund and now we have a growth fund. But the point is the core of what we do is always going to be early stage venture. And that It confuses people a bit. I would say people get confused on this because from the outside, it's like you guys are managing so much money.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Why, as a founder of an early stage startup, would I believe that you would want to spend time with me because it's not worth your time? You, A16Z, are going to invest $5 million in my Series A or whatever, but you have these other investments that you've invested $500 million in. Why are you going to spend time with me? And the reason is because the core of the business is early stage venture.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
By the way, the return opportunity off that early stage investment is as big as the return opportunity from the later stage companies, which is a characteristic of startups. So number one, financially, it actually makes sense for us to spend time with the early stage. But the
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
All of our knowledge and all of our relationships and everything that makes us special as a firm is all the deep insight and all the people that we know and who trust us at that early stage. And so what I always tell people is, look, if push comes to shove and the world goes sideways and we need to sacrifice things, the thing that will never get sacrificed is the early stage venture business.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
That will always be the core of it. And a big part of what I try to do with that is then have a lot of my time free. And I think generally our founders actually get fairly surprised by this is I have a lot of time free in order to work with the early stage founders. Number one, it's super fun, but also like you learn the most.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
the Machiavellians. I'm sure you've probably had a dozen people on your show that have recommended it. It's one of the great books of the 20th century. And it goes through kind of this theory of political power and social and cultural power. And one of the key things in that book I see everywhere right now is this idea of elites and counter elites. The idea goes like this.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
It's basically democracy per se is a myth. You never have an actual fully democratic society. By the way, the US, of course, is not a democracy. It's a republic. Experiments in direct democracy historically have worked very badly. The systems that work, even the democratic systems that work, they tend to be republican in nature.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
small r republican in nature they tend to have a parliament or they have a house and senate or something they have some sort of representative body the reason for that is a phenomenon described in that book is called the iron law of oligarchy which basically is the following which is the problem with quote direct democracy is that the masses can't organize you can't actually get 350 million people to organize in anything it's too many people
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So what you have in basically every political system in human history is you have a small organized elite that governs a large disorganized mass. You had that in the original hunter-gatherer tribes all the way up through to America and every other political system in the modern era. By the way, this was the Greeks and it was the Romans and it was every other political society that ever worked.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Every empire in history, every country in history. So a small organized elite governing a large unorganized mass. And that's a relationship that's fraught with peril because the unorganized masses will go along with the elite for a while, but not necessarily forever. And if the elite becomes abusive towards the masses, the masses greatly outnumber the elites.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And at some point they're going to show up with pitchforks and torches. So there is some tension there. And a lot of revolutions occur when the masses decide that the elites are no longer representing them properly. And so our society is no different than any other society, which is we have large disorganized masses. We have a very small organized elite.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
We have two elites, our political system, our founders set up. We have our Democrat elites and our Republican elites. And by the way, with quite a bit of overlap between them, some people actually call that the uniparty. Maybe those elites have more in common with each other than they do with any of the people. Those elites cruise along.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
We had an establishment Republican elite for a long time with its policies that kind of culminated in the Bushes. We had a Democratic elite with its policies that kind of culminated with Obama. In the last decade, basically on both sides in the U.S., there's basically been a revolt within the elites.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And this is actually the key point in Machiavellians is the way change happens usually is not the masses activating against the elites directly. What happens is it's the emergence of a new counter elite. You'll have a new counter elite that will compete to take over from the current elite.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
My read of current affairs broadly throughout the world is generally the elites that run the world are being found to have done a bad job. And we can talk about why in a second. But like, generally speaking, if you look at approval ratings of political leaders, approval ratings of institutions, everything is crashing.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The uniform thing that's happening in the world, political people call this anti-incumbency. Basically, if you're an incumbent institution, if you're an incumbent newspaper, if you're an incumbent TV network, if you're an incumbent university, if you're an incumbent government, generally speaking, your poll ratings are a disaster.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
That's the people basically saying the elites in charge are failing us. And then you have the emergence of these counter elites who are coming along and saying, way to represent the masses. And I have a better way to take over. And my new counter-elite movement should take over from the elite movement. And the Democratic Party, this was Bernie Sanders in 2016. It's AOC. It's that whole wave.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Republican Party, obviously, is Trump. And it's the mega movement and everything that that represents. But by the way, this exact same dynamic is playing out in the UK. The Tories have collapsed. And now you've got this reform party with Nigel Farage that is very threatening. You had Jeremy Corbyn, who was a counter-elite coming in from the left. You have that in Germany.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Actually, this week in Germany, there's this very dramatic thing happening, which is this quote unquote far right party AFD is rising very fast. And there's this leader, Alice Weidel. And this is the first week in German political history in like forever, in like 50 years or whatever. The CDU in Germany actually partnered with AFD on something. All of a sudden, AFD is like a viable competitor.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
They're the counter elite trying to take over the right of the German political system. So basically everywhere in the world you go, you've got a counter elite basically showing up and saying, oh, I can do this better. And it's a fight between elites. It's a fight between the elite and the counter elite. It's a fight that the masses are aware of and they're watching.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Democratic societies, they're ultimately going to decide because they're going to decide who they vote for. This was when Republican voters decided they were going to vote for Trump and not Jeb Bush. That was the counter elite beating the elite. This actually goes to the critiques of Trump, which is so interesting, which is Trump gets criticized a lot by the existing elites.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
It's like, oh, he's not actually a man of the people. He's like a super rich billionaire who lives in a golden penthouse and gets driven around everywhere in a limo. You know, if you're a rural farmer in Kentucky or Wisconsin, you shouldn't think this is one of your people. And the point never was that Trump is a man of the people.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The point was Trump is a counter-elite who's able to represent the people better. That's the whole basis of his movement. And anyways, that's the general pattern. And I just think you see that everywhere in our society. And then look, you're an example of this with what's happening in the media. Everything I just described is exactly what's happened in the media.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You had elite media for 50 years, and it was network news and cable news and newspapers and these prestige magazines. And now you've got the counter elite and the counter elite is you and Rogan and dot, dot, dot on and on. By the way, you look at the numbers and it's very clear where the people are going.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The people, the viewers, the masses, the readers are fleeing the old and they're going to the new. The incumbent elites are absolutely furious about it. They're furiously writing all these hit pieces about how you guys are all a bunch of white supremacists and the whole thing is horrible. Right. And it's like, yeah, it's the way of the world. And so we're in the middle of this.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I don't even know if it's just transitions the right term. It's a pitch battle basically between old elites and new elites.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
There's really two theories. There's the theory that those approval ratings are wrong, and there's the theory that those approval ratings are right. And by wrong, I mean they're being measured correctly, but the people are wrong. People are giving the wrong answer. And so if you're running CNN or if you're running Harvard or if you're running whatever,
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And your approval rating is coming in at 11%. And by the way, for your listeners, Gallup for 50 years has been doing this incredible survey panel, which is trust in institutions. And you can just Google 2024 Gallup trust institutions, and you get these spectacular charts.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And what you find is basically trust institutions basically peaked in the late 60s, early 70s, and has been falling off a cliff ever since. And so this phenomenon, by the way, predates the internet. interestingly. It gets blamed a lot on the internet, but it predates the internet. So it's something that basically started developing in the 70s and has been accelerating since.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And by the way, those ratings have fallen off a cliff dramatically since 2020. They slide like this, and then after 2020, they just plummet. TV network news, you know the number, it's like tiny, it's like single digit percentage. People are just completely done with it. They don't believe what's on it anymore at all. By the way, also viewership is collapsing in the same way. So
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
One theory, if you're running NBC News or if you're running CNN, Harvard, your theory is, oh, the people are wrong. The people have been misinformed. They've been lied to. They've been fed misinformation. This is why the whole misinformation thing became such a big meme. There's a Marxist concept called false consciousness, which basically is the people are incorrect.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The people have been lied to by malicious actors, by populists and demagogues. And it's just a matter of time until we can explain to the people that they've been lied to and they're going to come around and they're going to believe us again. So that's one theory. The other theory is the elites have become rotten. They have become rotten and dysfunctional and corrupt, and they're not delivering.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And on that theory, the numbers, the ratings are correct. The collapse in approval is correct, because every time you look at Congress, they're turbo shotgunning money out the door at all kinds of crazy stuff. taken out of your pocket as a taxpayer with no regard at all for you. If you go watch CNN or NBC News, they're just lying to you about a thousand different things all the time.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
There's a ton of dimensions to it. It's a really big deal. The U.S. is still like by far in a way to sort of describe a science and technology leader in AI. And so most of the ideas in DeepSeek are derived from work that's been done in America or in Europe over the last 20 years or actually amazingly 80 years.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
If you go to Harvard, they're teaching you race communism and America's evil and crazy, crazy things. In that theory, the people are correct. The people are onto these elites. These elites basically have been in power too long. They've had too much power. They haven't had enough scrutiny.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
They haven't been subject to enough competitive pressure and they've rotted in place and they're just not delivering anymore. The reality is probably some of each. It's very easy for the next rabble rouser to show up and just start hurling stones at whoever's in power and saying whatever.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And if you're a, you know, pick on people, but if you're like a whatever, somebody who doesn't have political power today, but you want it easiest thing to do is show up and just start yelling about how the current elites are corrupt. Maybe it's somewhat correct. Demagoguery has something to do with this or whatever, misinformation. But I think an awful lot of it is the elites are rotten.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
My version of that is very straightforward, which is, Burnham talks about this in the book. There's this concept called the circulation of elites. And so one of the things he says is for an elite to actually stay healthy and real and productive and to not rot in place, it needs constant infusions of new talent. And it does that through a process of circulation of elites.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so what it does is it identifies young, promising people and it invites them to join the elite. And it does that for two reasons. One is so it can refresh itself. And then the other is those are the people who would be the most likely to become the counter elite. So it's also a way to head off future competition.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So this has been my experience basically since I was like 22 is, oh, hey, Mark, we would love for you to come to Davos. We would love for you to come to Aspen. We would love for you to come to this big conference in New York. We would love to invite you to the dinner parties. We would love to have you come hang out with reporters at the New York Times.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
For like 25 years, this is what I did, which is like, oh, that sounds great. These are like the best people in the world. They're in charge of everything. They've got the best degrees. They went to the best schools. They're in all the positions of power. They love me. They think I'm great. They keep complimenting me.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And I'm in these rooms and these important people and they're taking me seriously. And it's just this ego bath that's just like incredible. Wow. I'm like a kid from the cornfields of Wisconsin. I'm like, I've arrived and I'm in the elite. And all I have to do to stay in the elite is not argue with anything.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
All I have to do is just agree with whatever's in the New York Times and whatever's being said at Davos and vote for the candidates that you're supposed to vote for and donate to the ones you're supposed to donate to and never, ever, ever deviate off the track. And then you just become part of the elite. And I have lots of contemporaries who have done that.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Some of them are like the world's largest Democratic donors now where they're fully minted and they're in there and they're having a great time and they think it's all incredible and it's all wonderful. Some people are fine going along with that, and maybe that's the right thing to do. And then some of us reach a point where we kind of look around. This is the J.D. Vance story.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
He tells a very similar story. Grew up in rural Kentucky, whatever, Ohio, Appalachia. He ends up at Yale. He ends up being invited in the inner circle of all these places. And he finally looks around and he's just like, wow, these people are not at all what I thought they were. This is horrible. These people are like self-interested, corrupt, and they're lying about everything.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The original work on neural networks was done all the way back in the 1940s in American and European research universities. And so from an intellectual development standpoint, the U.S. is still way ahead. But what DeepSeq is, it's a really, really good implementation of those ideas. And then they did this marvelous thing, which is they gave it to the world in the form of open source.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And they're engaging in speech suppression. And they're incredibly authoritarian. And they're looting the public treasury. I was lied to my entire life. These people don't deserve the respect that they have, and maybe there should be a new elite in charge. And so that's a lot of the attention that's playing out right now.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The way I've always thought about technological change is a set of lines on a graph. Used to be three lines, now it's four lines. So one is the pace of technological change. That's a line where everything generally gets better and better and better.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then every once in a while, you have these discontinuous step functions up or something gets dramatically better, like what happened last week with AI. Then you've got another line on top of that, which is sociological change, which basically is when is the world ready for the new thing? And sometimes you get this phenomenon where the new thing actually exists before the world's ready for it.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And for some reason, it doesn't take. And then five years later or 50 years later, it actually takes it off and away it goes. So there's a sociological layer. And then on top of that, there's the financial layer, which is are the capital markets willing to fund it? And can it generate a return? The way I think about it is the technology line is kind of a squiggle like this up to the right.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The social line is this big sweeping curve as large numbers of people reevaluate what they want. And then the financial line is like an EKG of a heart attack where the market's going through its patterns of panic and euphoria. The art of being an entrepreneur or a tech investor is to try to slice across all three of those.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You're trying to back something where the technology is really ready, society is ready to adopt it, and you can actually get the thing funded or get the thing exited and taken public. And so you got to kind of line that up. A lot of what we do in the day job is line up those three curves. The fourth one now in the last five years is politics.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And as I said earlier, for a very long time, people in Washington just had an attitude of benign neglect towards the tech industry. And they're like, yeah, they're kids building fun toys, whatever. It's fine. It doesn't matter.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And now there's just, as you know, just like intense political scrutiny on almost every aspect of the tech industry and like incredible attempts to control and suppress new technologies. The harshest version of that is in places like the EU, but we've had our own versions of that here. And so all of a sudden we have this fourth factor now.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
In the last four years, overwhelmingly, the answer to your question is politics. In the last four years, overwhelmingly, the biggest issue that we had was government. That was very bizarre and disconcerting to me when it first started because I wasn't used to it. And I had never viewed us as being involved in politics or being partisan or really, we were not in Washington trying to curry favor.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
It's actually fairly amazing that this has happened. There's kind of an inversion that's happened because you have these American companies with names like OpenAI that basically are completely closed. Part of Elon's lawsuit against OpenAI is he's demanding they change their name from OpenAI to ClosedAI. The original thesis of OpenAI is everything was going to be open source.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
We were not trying to get subsidies, but we also didn't think we had to do anything to avoid getting stepped on. And then that just radically changed. That's the single biggest thing. You're probably well aware at this point, or your listeners are well aware, the policy implications on crypto were just devastating for the last five years. FinTech also extremely damaging.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Social media got tremendously stomped on by the state, which led to all the censorship stuff. And then AI, I've spoken at other places about what they were basically going to do to AI. For the last four years, I've just been in this bizarre situation where it's like my main enemy is my own government, which is very, very strange.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And by the way, talk about accelerating my evolution from an elite into a counter elite. Yeah. It's like, OK, if they hate me and want to destroy me, it makes the call relatively easy for what I need to do.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
It was sort of coincidental with a national mood shift, probably between I would describe it between kind of 2013 and 2017, which is I grew up politically. I'm like a child of the 90s. I happen to be at business at that point and high profile. So I knew Clinton and Gore quite well. And I was sort of just a default Clinton Gore Democrat. I It was great.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
It was what I call the deal with a capital D, which is, yeah, you're a Democrat, but the Democrats are pro-business. They're pro-tech. They're pro-startup. Clinton and Gore love Silicon Valley. They love new technologies. They were always thrilled to see what we were doing. They were incredibly supportive. They would try to help us if other countries came at us or whatever.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
They would try to help us and support us. And yeah, it was great. You could be a pro-business, pro-tech Democrat. It was great. You could make a bunch of money. People would write all these great articles about you. And then you give all the money away and you're a philanthropist and it's great.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You die and your obituary says he was a great entrepreneur and a great philanthropist and everything is wonderful. Basically, that deal collapsed starting in 2013. Specifically, every single part of that deal collapsed in 2013, including when a lot of the political system turned on philanthropy, which I found to be probably the most amazing thing of all.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
It turns out philanthropy is evil if you haven't been updated on this yet, because the correct role of money is it should all go to the government and the government should hand it out. They created a slur in 2013 called Philanthrocapitalism.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Basically, these rich people who think that they can make private choices of how they give away money as opposed to letting the government do it and that that's evil. Basically, every aspect of that deal between, let's call it the tech elites and the democratic elites, broke down. That showed up in a thousand ways, but it showed up as press coverage.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The official organs of the elite turned on us and everything we did was evil. It was actually fairly amazing. In 2012, social media was considered an absolute unalloyed good by the mainstream press because it had gotten Obama reelected and it had been the catalyst for the Arab Spring.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Everybody knew that it would only ever get the right political candidate elected, like Obama, and everybody knew that the Arab Spring would result in peace and democracy throughout the Middle East forever. And then by 2016, the narrative had completely flipped to social media and the internet and tech are destroying democracy and everything is being ruined by it.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Everything's been closed down. And these other big AI labs like Anthropic are also completely closed. And in fact, they've even stopped publishing research. They've really taken everything proprietary. And the deep state guys basically, for their own reasons, are delivering on the promise of actually open AI, actual open source.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so the press coverage, all of that was like a canary in the coal mine. Part of it was the employee base got radicalized. By the way, a bunch of the professional investors got radicalized. I had this bizarre situation where you had these big investment managers showing up demanding radical politics in your company, which was completely bananas.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
At the time, you had a thousand other versions of this. And then ultimately what happened was the government itself showed up. And the bureaucracy under Trump started to do this kind of outside of his direct control.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
But under Biden, it became a concerted campaign I would describe as destruction with just like an endless barrage of prosecutions, investigations, Wells notices, debanking, censorship, attacks, a comprehensive attempt to basically destroy entire sectors. Of course, that's what we ultimately ended up reacting to.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
My hope is that's over, which is to say the new administration is taking a very different approach and not doing all those things. And then my hope is the next Democratic government basically realizes that attacking tech and attacking startups is actually not necessary. And in fact, was probably counterproductive because like if you drive Elon Musk out of your party, it has consequences.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I talked to a lot of Democrats. We support a lot of Democrats at the firm, a lot of Democratic congressmen and senators. And I talked to them a lot. I'll be out there again next week talking to them.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Basically, what they tell me is like, look, there's a civil war inside the Democratic Party between basically those of us who think the party should come back to the center and just stop basically attacking capitalism and attacking business and attacking tech and just get back to winning elections. And then there's a bunch of us who think that the party actually needs to become more radical.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
We need to differentiate more from the other side and we need to become more, I don't want to use pejoratives, but more extreme in economic policy, more extreme in tech policy, more extreme in social policy. They're fighting that. My hope is that they're going to work their way back to the center so we never have to go through this again.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And we can have positive relationships with both sides, but we'll see what happens.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so they've published for both their LLM, which is called V3, and then for their reasoner, which is called R1, the two parts of their system. They publish the code and they publish technical papers that document in detail how they built it and basically serve as a roadmap for anybody else who wants to do the same kind of work. So it's out.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Yeah, this is really important. And this is where it's so much different than the past. This is where our interaction with China is so different than our interaction with the Soviet Union 50 years ago, which is, to your point, just the overall level of activity of offshoring.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
American manufacturing companies never really offshored anything into the Soviet Union, but they offshored a lot of stuff into China. So there's a lot more activity that's gone overseas. But the other thing, you know this, but it's really important, is the complexity of the supply chain. Take the iPhone as the canonical product.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
There's a document you can download online that's probably a little bit dated now, but it goes through the componentry that make up an iPhone and where that stuff comes from. I mean, at least it's probably a decade-old document now. There might be a more recent one, but the one I read a decade ago, there's parts in the iPhone from 40 different countries.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so by the time that iPhone is getting assembled at Foxconn in China, it literally has had 39 other countries have sent stuff in, getting built into subcomponents of subcomponents into components and cars are the same way and robots are going to be the same way and anything sophisticated, anything computerized or mechanical is going to have that attribute. And so
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
By the way, it's actually hard to even get this from the trade numbers because I believe this to be the case. China actually gets to take credit for the export value of the completed iPhone in their export numbers, even though the economic value add of what happened in China is single digit percentages. Because so much of what's in the iPhone comes from 39 other countries.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The analysis you really want to do is what's called economic value added. You want to basically say, OK, of the thousand dollars that went into the iPhone, what's the pie chart of the value of where those things came from in dollars? And the answer is from all over the world.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
This is the problem with a simplistic argument about reshoring or about reversing globalization, which is we're not talking about bringing a steel plant back from China. We're talking about unwinding a supply chain that has 40 countries involved with things going back and forth all over the place as everything is built up and assembled.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And look, the modern economy, the reason an iPhone costs $1,000 and not a billion dollars is because the efficiency gains from that level of economic specialization and trade have been profound. We have a material standard of living today far higher as a consequence of this. Our standard of living in the U.S. is much higher than it was.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then billions of people around the world have been brought out of poverty. So economically, that system has done quite well in many ways. The problem is it runs up against reality in a bunch of ways. So one is national security. So this is the problem with the Taiwan chips, the Taiwan fabs.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
It's like, okay, if the US military is going to be running on autonomous AI-driven drones and self-piloted fighter jets and self-piloted submarines in the future, as opposed to what we have now, boy, we're going to need those leading-edge chips to power our military. If China seizes Taiwan and they own the means of production of those chips, the American military can get those chips.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so there's kind of this fake narrative out there that basically is like, if you use DeepSeek, you're giving all your data to the Chinese. And that is true if you use DeepSeek on the DeepSeek website, if you use the service the way they run it, but you can download the code and you can run it yourself. I'll just give you an example of that.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so there's the direct supply chain implications into the military. There's also just the geopolitical thing we talked about before, which is just do countries start to use their ownership of different areas of this more as leverage in geopolitical fights?
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Then there's what we saw under COVID, which is OK, when the world goes into crisis and there's a big fight over even things that you would consider to be relatively prosaic. This is a great example. You remember in the early days of COVID, there was this idea where if you did enough testing, you could do what was called test and trace.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So you could isolate COVID clusters before they spread, which is a standard thing that people try to do for infectious disease. And it turned out they couldn't get the COVID tests out fast enough to do it. And it turned out the plastic tip that goes into the COVID testing thing, it's made by some factory in China and it's a piece of plastic. But if you can't get it, you can't make the test.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so it doesn't even have to be the world's most sophisticated components that end up holding you up. It can be actually relatively simple things if you're not capable of building them internally. And then that could determine which country can respond to a pandemic.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then you just have the political and economic pressure of it, which is we just all assume, the American political system assumed for 30 years you could just offshore manufacturing out of the U.S. and that the communities that saw all their plants close throughout the Midwest and the South were just going to sit and take it.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
and that it was just going to be fine and they were going to figure out something else to do. In a lot of the U.S., they never figured out a new thing to do. And it turned out they can still vote. Part of what's happened in our political system is they've decided that they're just not having it anymore and they're going to vote for something different.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
People argued that at the time, but the economic efficiency argument won and had its benefits. It paid off in some ways, but a lot of people in the country were radicalized. I come from a part of the country in which a lot of people were radicalized by the fact that the government and businesses apparently thought it was fine to just hollow out the economy and send everything offshore.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so even if you are getting the payoff from the economic efficiency, your political system may not be able to withstand that. You may end up really regretting that. And so I don't think there are any easy answers here. Anybody in my view who says there's an easy answer here is wrong. This is complicated.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Probably what's going to happen is that the world will remain extremely interdependent and there will be a lot of pressure and a lot of back and forth. This whole dynamic is playing out with tariffs and trade negotiations. It will be a constant thing and has been forever. And there will be twists and turns along the way.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
But fundamentally, the world will just stay interconnected in lots of ways, and we'll muddle through it. The fear is that at some point, there's a war or an even more severe pandemic or something like that, in which this all gets stressed to the point where it really breaks hard. I hope that doesn't happen. But
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
There's an app called Perplexity now that's quite popular in an American company. You can use DeepSeek R1 on Perplexity, completely hosted in the United States. Both Microsoft and Amazon now have
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
In a way, the more interconnected the world gets, the more resilient it gets, because there's just more ways to do things and more ways for people to adapt and everything to change. And then in some ways, the more interconnected the world gets, the more dangerous things get, because if any one part of it breaks, the whole thing breaks. And so there's a real push-pull on that.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I would make a list of four things. So I would say phones, drones, cars, and robots. And basically, this is the ladder that China's climbing. And to your point, this is the ladder of not just products, but entire supply chains. And so China became the place that all the phones were assembled, manufactured.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so as you know, they built up this entire ecosystem in China of thousands and thousands of specialist companies to basically do phones. This particular environment called Shenzhen, which is this cluster of thousands and thousands of companies that basically manufacture all kinds of electronic and hardware and mechanical and computer kind of things.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So they did that in phones and they produced billions of phones a year. So that worked and that's running at high scale. That supply chain was then levered for China winning the drone market, consumer drones like DJI drones. And basically what happened was China won the global drone market. They're 99 point something percent share of the global drone market.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
By the way, as a consequence of that, they're well over 90% of all the drones used by the which is interesting because every single one of those drones is potentially backdoored to be a surveillance platform or to be used as a kamikaze weapon. So there's a real issue with this. Great example of the issues that emerge.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
cloud versions of deep seek running where you can run it in their clouds and obviously both american companies american data centers and this is really critical you can download the system now and you can actually run it you can't run the full version on your laptop but you can run it on six thousand dollars worth of hardware in your house or in your business it's a comparable capability as sort of the leading edge systems from open ai and anthropic those companies spent many many multiples of money to build their systems now you can run it on six thousand dollars and you have total control if you're running it yourself you have total control you have total transparency into what it's doing you can modify it you can do all kinds of things with it
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
But a big part of why China wanted drones, at least up until now, was they had this entire supply chain that started out building phones that they adapted, and then they built all this stuff to make drones. And a drone, in a lot of ways, it's like a flying phone. It has a lot of the same equipment. Then it has some new stuff, but they wanted that, at least up until recently.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Now they're going to cars. And the reason they're going to cars is because a modern self-driving electric car is much more like a rolling laptop on wheels or a rolling phone on wheels than it is like an old fashioned internal combustion car. And Tesla is our example of that in the US where a Tesla is a computer and a lot of batteries wrapped in a frame with some tires.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The great illustration of the change here is if you just go visit the service bay at a traditional car dealership versus the service bay at a Tesla dealership, the service bay in a traditional car industry is oil and grease everywhere and all kinds of stuff going on. And everybody's got the overalls and they've got the dirty rag they've been wiping their hands on all day.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You go to a Tesla dealership and it's like an operating room. Everything's clean because it's not internal combustion. There's none of this stuff. It's just a computer. The Chinese basically are now doing in cars what they did in drones and what they did in phones, which is they built an entire ecosystem leveraging those other supply chains.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
They built an entire ecosystem of all the parts needed to build self-driving electric cars. And they're now bringing those cars to market. And now all of a sudden they're really good. And they're really good in the same way that Chinese phones are really good and the Chinese drones are really good, which is they're fully modern. They're super advanced. They're super inexpensive.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
They're leading edge technology. And the cars are getting to be really good. And they're a third the price or a fourth the price of the equivalent car in the U.S. And then the fourth phase is robots. And if you have the supply chain for phones, drones and cars, you have most of what you need to do robots. And that's the next phase. And they're doing it.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so we have obviously Elon and other companies in the U.S. building humanoid robots. And I hope and expect that they'll do well. But China is doing that for sure. The company I've been watching most closely is one of their national champions is a company called Unitree. We're not involved in this, but Unitree sells a robot dog that's equivalent to the Boston Dynamics robot dog.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The Boston Dynamics robot dog costs between $50,000 to $100,000, which is why you don't see very many of them. The Unitree dog starts at $1,500. By the way, we have two of them and they're great. And they do backflips and they do climb stairs and they talk to you and they got an LLM built in and they'll teach you quantum physics as you're running around in the yard. And it's great.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then they have humanoid robots coming out now that are also at much, much lower prices. They are coming for robots in a major way.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Again, this is going to be a real push-pull because it's like, all right, if you believe that humanoid robots are going to happen, which I do, and at large scale, and if China's willing to make them for $10,000 or $20,000, and we can buy a billion of them, and all of a sudden we have robots building our houses, doing lawn care and doing everything else that you'd want robots to do, waiting on your hand and foot, then it's great that China's making them and selling them to you and that they're super cheap and that they work really well.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And that if there's ever a war between the countries, every one of those robots could go rogue and start to attack you. You might want to think about that. It might be important to have robots that are made in the U.S. It might be important that the robots that the military uses are made in the U.S.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You might want the robot in your house to be made in the U.S., the robot that's taking care of your kid changing his diaper. Phones and drones are already intense issues, but cars and robots are going to be ultra intense. It hasn't quite happened yet because the robot thing hasn't quite tipped yet, but I think the robot thing is going to tip in the next few years.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then I think there's going to be a giant geopolitical, let's say drama that's going to play out to try to figure out what we should do.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I guess maybe biotech. The good news is in the modern world, there are a lot of people who are into new technology and there are a lot of people who talk about it. When I was a kid, early adopter markets were tiny. So the number of people who wanted their first personal computer, whatever, was just a tiny number of people.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And now you've got 50 or 100 million early adopters who just want whatever is the new thing and talk about it all the time and talk about it online. So I don't know that there's that much of a delay anymore, but probably biotech. Everything, it's sort of the cluster of life extension, embryo selection, potentially the reproductive technologies, getting embryos from stem cells.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
For example, embryos from stem cells, couples that can't, you know, you probably know a lot of people like this, people who get to a point, either they had a fertility problem when they were young or they get to an age where they have fertility issues, but they want more kids. And then they're forced into very difficult choices having to do with IVF or donors of different kinds.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
It looks like we're going to be able to have embryos from stem cells. And so you can have children that are actual biological children much later in life. External gestation is a while away still, but at some point that might be a big deal. People talk about the birth rate a lot.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Well, if you could continue to have kids into your 60s, and if you could have a dozen kids because you could have external gestation, would more people choose to do that? And maybe yes. So that would be one. Another might be, say, genetic optimization. So one of the endlessly spicy topics is intelligence augmentation. There's CRISPR. We now have gene editing technology.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then it has this characteristic that works really well called distillation, where you can take the big model that takes $6,000 worth of hardware and you can create smaller versions of it. And people online have already created smaller versions of it and built them so that you can run it on your MacBook or you can run it on your iPhone.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So in theory, you can go in and do genetic reprogramming of people, especially at the early stages. And then the scientists are figuring out the hundreds of genes that correspond to IQ. And so should you have the ability to boost IQ? That has all kinds of downstream questions. So probably it's in that vanguard, those kind of vanguard movements.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The inflammatory version of this was the guy in China who made the babies who were immune to AIDS. So there was the Chinese guy who did a homebrew CRISPR thing. And he created two embryos that are now, I think, living children, as far as I know, that use CRISPR to splice in genes that make them immune to HIV.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And it became this dramatic firestorm of controversy because CRISPR is not developed well enough yet to do that in a predictable way. And so there were accusations that he was really going to be damaging these kids. And this global health ethics world came up in one and basically was horrified by what he did.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then George Church, who's probably the leading biology researcher in the West right now, actually gave a counterargument. And he's like, no, people need to do this. We need to actually try these things. I'm not even taking a position on this. I'm not even saying these things are good or bad or should be allowed or should be banned or whatever.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Everything I just described is becoming possible. And they have these just incredible implications on everything from health to society, which will play out for hundreds of years to come. And so I think more and more people are probably going to realize that there's a lot more to discuss on those fronts than we've been doing.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Yeah, so American Dynamism covers a lot of territory and we do a lot in there. We're doing more in energy. We have our first nuclear investment. We're doing education, other fields. And so there's a lot in there, this theme of upgrading America. For me, the most fascinating thing is the change in military affairs.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So the change in the nature of war and defense that's coming from the rise of technologies like AI and autonomy. Highlight a couple of things there. So one is it's actually happening. And in particular, the tragedy of the Ukraine battlefield is also just turns out to be a living laboratory for extremely rapid evolution of military technology.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And the Ukrainians and the Russians both have adapted technology enormously in the last few years to both attack and defend. Of course, there's just incredible use of drones and incredible innovation happening there. And so military planners are watching what's happening on that battlefield very closely.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And those versions are not quite as smart as the full version, but they are quite smart. And you can create custom tailored distilled versions that are smart at specific things.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The entire nature of defense systems is changing in real time in response to watching that play out. The loose concept that we have on that is that wars in the past were won by the side that had the most men and material. So if you had the biggest army and the most weapons you won, probably in the future, wars are won by the people with the most money and the most technology.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And the reason is because if you've got the most money, you can buy the most technology or develop it. But the future of warfare probably has a lot more to do with machines fighting with each other than people. And there's an obvious social welfare benefit to that, which is you'll have a lot fewer soldiers and sailors and Marines and pilots dying in war.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
But it changes the dynamics, the calculus of what it means to go to war. Maybe the fear would be it makes it easier to go to war because the human cost is lower. maybe countries become bolder and willing to enter military conflicts more aggressively. So there's all kinds of questions and implications there, but this shift is happening. It's going to happen. China has a massive program.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
A lot of what China's focused on in AI is to be able to apply it in military settings. So they have a whole program on that. And then our defense establishment has the same thing and many other countries have the same thing. So That's going to be very dramatic.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I was talking to a very senior military planner a while ago, and he said, in his view, the weaponized drone that fits in a backpack that you can fly over a hill and can basically destroy a tank, what they call suicide drone. He said, in his view, it's the biggest innovation in defense technology since the stirrup.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
This is a very big advance in the form of making both LLM reasoning, which is creative reasoning, and then also R1, which is actual reasoning reasoning for things like math and code and science, making this something that was super esoteric six months ago and ultra expensive and proprietary to something that's just universally available to everybody for free forever.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
He said the stirrup was a big deal because the stirrup is the thing that took a soldier who previously had to get off his horse to attack somebody. So the horseman being able to stay on the horse, stand up and be able to fire a bow and arrow. The stirrup was a massive extension of individual lethality on the battlefield.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And he said a squad of well-trained human soldiers with drones, 20 human soldiers with drones should be able to hold off thousands or tens of thousands of regular troops. It's a fundamental change in the economics of attack and defense. It still feels like we're on the front end of trying to process through what that means.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I'm still very locked into this book called The Weirdest People in the World, the Joseph Henrich book, which is probably a decade old now, but I think that book never quite gets a lot.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
That book is extremely insightful into the nature of cultures and in the nature, particularly of different cultures, which as we're in this more globalized world with all these geopolitical conflicts, it's a very insightful look into what makes cultures and then in particular, what makes Western cultures.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
As you know, so much of our politics have to do now with the nature of Western cultures and what it means to immigration, all the different debates around that and so forth. And so to me, it's been the most informative book to try to understand. how to think about cultures.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Good. Thank you, Patrick. Awesome.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then every major tech company, internet company, every startup, we have tons of startups. We have dozens or hundreds of startups this week who are either working on basically replanting on a deep seek or incorporating into their products or figuring out the techniques that they used and using it to make existing AI systems better.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The team at Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, talked recently about the team at Meta is ripping it apart, taking the ideas totally legally because it's open source and making sure that the next version of Lama will be at least as good at reasoning or better. This really propels the world forward. The two big things that we can derive from that, one is AI is going to be ubiquitous.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
There's all these AI risk people, whatever, safety people, the regulators, the bureaucrats, the government, the EU, the Brits with their safety thing. There's all these people that want to lock down and control AI. And this basically guarantees that none of that's going to happen, which I think is great. It's very much in the tradition of internet freedom and free speech.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so I think that's fantastic. And then this was a 30x cost reduction for the same capability in one step. And then maybe the final thing to note, what this shows is reasoning is going to work. And reasoning is going to work basically for any domain of human activity in which you can generate answers that can be checked after the fact as to whether they're correct or not by a technical expert.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
We're going to have AI that's going to be able to do human and superhuman level reasoning for real. And that's going to work in domains like very important domains, coding, math, physics, chemistry, biology, economics, finance, law, and medicine. This basically guarantees every human being on the planet in five years is going to have a superhuman
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
AI lawyer, AI doctor at their beck and call at all times just as a standard thing on their phone. It just is going to make the world much better and healthier and more wonderful place.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
To your point, if you're taking a snapshot in time just today, we'll start with that. So if you're looking at a zero-sum game and there's winners and losers just at a point in time, I'll just start with the winners. The winners are all the users. And so the winners are all the users, all the consumers, every individual, and then every business that uses AI.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
We have all these startups that are doing like AI legal, AI lawyer. And last week they were spending 30 times as much on AI as they're spending this week. For example, take a company building an AI lawyer. If the cost of your key input drops by 30x, it's like driving a car and the cost of gasoline drops 30x.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
All of a sudden you can drive 30 times as far on the same dollar, or you can use that additional spending power to buy more things. And so all of these companies are going to be either dramatically expanding the capability of what they can do with AI in all these domains, or they're going to variable of their services cheap or free instead. And so all the users, the world, it's great.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
On a fixed size pie basis, the losers are the proprietary model companies. So OpenAI, Anthropic and so forth. You'll notice both OpenAI and Anthropic put out pretty strong, but clearly provoked messages in the last week explaining why this wasn't terminal for them. And there's an old adage in business and in politics, when you're explaining, you're losing. They definitely notice this.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then the other is, you know, NVIDIA is the other company. There's been a lot of commentary on this, but NVIDIA makes the standard AI chips that people use. There are some other choices, but NVIDIA is the one that most people use. The margins on their chips are as high as 90%. And the company stock price reflects that most valuable company in the world.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
One of the things the deep seat guys did and documented in their paper is they figured out a way to use cheaper, actually still using NVIDIA chips, but they're using cheaper chips and they are using them much more efficiently. Part of the 30X cost reduction is you just need a lot fewer chips.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then, by the way, China's building its own supply chain of chips, and these guys are also starting to use the Chinese-derived chips, which is, of course, an even more fundamental threat to NVIDIA. So that's the snapshot at a point in time. But the thing is, the implication of your question is there's another way to look at it, which is over time.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And over time, what you want to look at is the elasticity effects. Satya Nadella uses this phrase called the Jevons Paradox. Think of this like gasoline. If you drop the cost of gasoline dramatically, then all of a sudden people are going to drive a lot more. This comes up in traffic planning a lot. So you'll have a city like Austin or something, and it'll be gridlocked.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And somebody will have the bright idea of building a new freeway alongside the current freeway. And within like two years, the new freeway will have also filled up with traffic. And maybe it'll even be harder to get from place to place. And the reason is because reduced price of key inputs can induce demand. If AI is all of a sudden 30x cheaper, people might use it 30x as much.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Or by the way, they might use it 100x as much or 1000x as much. This might mean that AI gets built into many more things than it was going to get built into before and much more quickly. The economic term there is elasticity. So falling prices equals explosion of demand. I think there's a very plausible scenario here that on the other side of this is just what happens is usage explodes.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And DeepSeat does really well. And by the way, so do OpenAI and Anthropic. And by the way, so does NVIDIA and so do the Chinese chip makers. Then you have like a rising tide effect where the entire industry explodes in size. We're really only at the beginning of people figuring out how to use these technologies. Reasoning just started working in like the last four months.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
OpenAI released their O1 Reasoner not that long ago, a few months ago.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
This is like fire being brought down from the mountain, being given to humanity, and most humanity is not yet using fire, but they're going to. I tend to be a believer that it's much more of a, at least for a while here, it's going to be much more of a positive something where there's just going to be so much explosive growth.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then, quite frankly, part of this is the old idea of creative destruction, which is like, okay, If you're open AI or whatever, whatever you were doing last week is no longer good enough. But by the way, that's the way of the world. You have to get better. These things are all races. You have to evolve.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so this is also a very big motivating catalyst for a lot of the current companies to really sharpen their game and get more aggressive.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The Sputnik moment metaphor comes from the first Cold War, the 20th century Cold War between the US and the USSR. And a lot of your listeners are too young to remember that. I grew up at least in the tail end of that. I remember it quite clearly as a kid. It was still going hot for the first 18 years of my life.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
I remember in high school in the 1980s, literally thinking there was a good chance that we were all going to die at a nuclear holocaust. The whole nuclear weapons thing, tensions ran super high during the 80s. There's a great TV show called The Americans that recreates what it was like at that time. And like, it was tense. Things were not good.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then basically, right, the USSR peacefully collapsed in one of the more amazing twists and turns of history in 1989. And the Cold War never became hot, but it was pretty intense. And then there was this very aggressive rivalry between the US and the USSR through that period. And that rivalry was military in many ways, including proxy wars all over the world. But that rivalry was also economic.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And many, many Western experts insisted for decades that communism was better than capitalism. And inevitably, American economics textbooks as late as the 1980s said that inevitably the Soviet economy would win because state planning, central planning was clearly better than the messy process of capitalism. And so there was this massive economic battle playing out.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
Then there was an ideological battle playing out, which was basically freedom and democracy. Critique the West however you want. Western hallmarks of freedom and democracy and free speech and so forth against the Soviet totalitarian system. The thing about that, though, was that economies were just simpler in those days and technology was simpler.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And so the main outputs of the USSR in that era were basically wheat and steel, which is to say basic agriculture exports and then basic raw materials exports, oil, relatively simple commodities. And by the way, part of the reason the USSR lost is because the U.S. raced way ahead on technology, particularly the computer. Starting in the 1970s, the computer took off.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
The Soviet system, the Soviet communist centrally planned system was unable to build their own computer industry. And that meant that they were ultimately doomed basically the minute the microprocessor was invented. And it just took about 20 years for that to play out. But anyway, there was a technological fight that also happened.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
So the dynamic between the US and China is similar in many ways, but not completely the same. Neil Ferguson and others have talked about US versus China as Cold War 2.0. There's competition along each of those dimensions. There's very different worldviews. There's very different political systems, very different economic systems.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
And then both the US and China want to proliferate their philosophy and their method of government and their technology stacks and their industries around the world.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Marc Andreessen - The Battle For Tech Supremacy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.410]
You may recall there was this whole thing that played out over the last decade with this Chinese company, Huawei, that was going to all these other countries and basically selling them telecom equipment to build broadband and wireless networks using a Chinese stack. The Chinese tech stack for building a telecom network was something like a third the price of the Western stack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So a company that starts in an existing industry and goes directly to the customer in that industry. The early examples there were like Uber and Lyft and Airbnb. And then that model is kind of elaborating out. The AI thing is actually a reversion on that for now because most of the AI business right now is actually in cloud provision of AI APIs for other people to build on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, I think most of the money I think probably will be in whatever, yeah, your AI financial advisor or your AI doctor or your AI lawyer or, you know, take your pick of whatever the domain is. And what's interesting is, you know, the Valley kind of does everything. The entrepreneurs kind of elaborate every possible idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so there will be a set of companies that like make AI something that can be purchased and used by large law firms. And then there will be other companies that just go direct to market as an AI lawyer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So the great thing about the really great founders is they don't take any advice. So if you find yourself listening to advice, maybe you shouldn't do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So what makes a great founder is super smart, coupled with super energetic, coupled with super courageous. I think it's some of those three.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The first two are traits, and the third one is a choice, I think. Courage is a choice. Well, because courage is a question of pain tolerance, right? So how many times are you willing to get punched in the face before you quit? Yeah. And... Here's maybe the biggest thing people don't understand about what it's like to be a startup founder is it gets very romanticized, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And even when they fail, it still gets romanticized about what a great adventure it was. But the reality of it is most of what happens is people telling you no, and then they usually follow that with you're stupid, right? No, I will not come to work for you. I will not leave my cushy job at Google to come work for you. No, I'm not going to buy your product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, I'm not going to run a story about your company. No, I'm not this, that, the other thing. And so a huge amount of what people have to do is just get used to just getting punched. And the reason people don't understand this is because when you're a founder, you cannot let on that this is happening because it will cause people to think that you're weak and they'll lose faith in you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you have to pretend that you're having a great time when you're dying inside, right? You're just in misery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What do they do? Yeah, that's the thing. It's like it is a level. This is actually one of the conclusions, I think. For most of these people on a risk-adjusted basis, it's probably an irrational act. They could probably be more financially successful on average if they just got a real job at a big company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But some people just have an irrational need to do something new and build something for themselves. And some people just can't tolerate having bosses. Oh, here's a fun thing is how do you reference check founders? Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you call it, you know, normally you reference check your time hiring somebody as you call the bosses there and you know, and you find out if they were good employees and now you're trying to reference check Steve jobs. Right. And it's like, Oh God, he was terrible. You know, he was a terrible employee. He never did what we told him to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, ideally, ideally what you want is I will go, I would like to go to work for that person. Um, he worked for me here and now I'd like to work for him. Now, unfortunately, most people can't. Their egos can't handle that. So they won't say that. But that's the ideal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I think the other big thing is you see people sometimes who say, I want to start a company. And then they kind of work through the process of coming up with an idea. And generally, those don't work as well as the case where somebody has the idea first. And then they kind of realize that there's an opportunity to build a company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then they just turn out to be the right kind of person to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I would say specific. Specifically, yes, specifics. Because for the first five years, you don't get to have vision. You just got to build something people want and you got to figure out a way to sell it to them. It's very practical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Like it's got to, the first product's got to work by which I mean, like it has to technically work, but then it has to actually fit into the category in the customer's mind of something that they want. And then, and then by the way, the other part is they have to want to pay for it. Like somebody has got to pay the bills.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so you've got to figure out how to price it and whether you can actually extract the money. Yeah. So usually it is much more predictable. Success is never predictable, but it's more predictable if you start with a great idea and then back into starting the company. So this is what we did. We had Mosaic before we had Netscape. The Google guys had the Google search engine working at Stanford.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Actually, there's tons of examples where Pierre Omidyar had eBay working before he left his previous job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. By the way, it's also far easier to raise money, right? Like the ideal pitch that we receive is here's the thing that works. Would you like to invest in our company or not? Like that's so much easier than here's 30 slides with a dream, right? And then we have this concept called the idea maze, which Balaji Srinivasan came up with when he was with us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So then there's this thing, this goes to mythology, which is, you know, there's a mythology that kind of, you know, these ideas, you know, kind of arrive like magic or people kind of stumble into them. It's like eBay with the pest dispensers or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, the reality usually with the big successes is that the founder has been chewing on the problem for five or 10 years before they start the company. And they often worked on it in school, um, or they even experimented on it when they were a kid. Um, and they've been kind of training up over that period of time to be able to do the thing. So they're like a true domain expert.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it sort of sounds like mom and apple pie, which is, yeah, you want to be a domain expert in what you're doing, but the mythology is so strong of like, oh, I just had this idea in the shower and now I'm doing it. It's generally not that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, we call it the idea maze because the idea maze basically is like there's all these permutations. Like for any idea, there's like all these different permutations. Who should the customer be? What shape forms the product have? And how should we take it to market and all these things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so the really smart founders have thought through all these scenarios by the time they go out to raise money. And they have like detailed answers on every one of those fronts because they put so much thought into it. The sort of more haphazard founders haven't thought about any of that. And it's the detailed ones who tend to do much better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, the best reason is just because you can't tolerate not doing it, right? Like this is the kind of thing where if you have to be advised into doing it, you probably shouldn't do it. And so it's probably the opposite, which is you just have such a burning sense of this has to be done. I have to do this. I have no choice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's going to lead to a lot of pain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, look, so it's going to put you in a social tunnel for sure, right? So you're going to like, you know, there's this game you can play on Twitter, which is you can do any whiff of the idea that there's basically any such thing as work-life balance and that people should actually work hard and everybody gets mad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But like the truth is, like all the successful founders are working 80-hour weeks and they're working, you know, they form various... very strong social bonds with the people they work with. They tend to lose a lot of friends on the outside or put those friendships on ice. That's just the nature of the thing. For most people, that's worth the trade-off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The advantage maybe younger founders have is maybe they have less. For example, if they're not married yet or don't have kids yet, that's an easier thing to bite off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, you definitely can. Yeah. Many of the most successful founders are second, third, fourth-time founders. They're in their 30s, 40s, 50s. The good news with being an older founder is you know more. and you know a lot more about what to do, which is very helpful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The problem is, okay, now you've got like a spouse and a family and kids, and like, you've gotta go to the baseball game and like, you can't go to the baseball, you know? And so it's,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So, it's basically, I would say it's autodidact. So, it's going down the rabbit holes. So, it's a combination. I kind of allude to it in that quote. It's a combination of breadth and depth. And so, I go broad by the nature of what I do. I go broad, but then I tend to go deep in a rabbit hole for a while, read everything I can, and then come out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I might not revisit that rabbit hole for another decade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The Sebastian biography of Lenin is extraordinary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's incredible, yeah, it's incredible. I actually think it's the single best book on the Soviet Union.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Well, and then you get into this thing also, which is like, you know, there's the part of the LLM that just basically is doing prediction based on past data. But there's also the part of the LLM where it's evolving circuitry, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So this is a fascinating book. This one's free. It's free, by the way. It's a book from the 1860s. You can download it or you can buy prints of it. But it was this guy who was a professor at the Sorbonne in the 1860s. And he was apparently a savant on antiquity, on Greek and Roman antiquity. And the reason I say that is because his sources are 100% original Greek and Roman sources.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So he wrote basically a history of Western civilization from on the order of 4,000 years ago to basically the present times, entirely working on original Greek and Roman sources. And what he was specifically trying to do was he was trying to reconstruct from the stories of the Greeks and the Romans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
He was trying to reconstruct what life in the West was like before the Greeks and the Romans, which was in the civilization known as the Indo-Europeans. And the short answer is, and this is sort of circa 2000 BC to sort of 500 BC, kind of that 1500 year stretch where civilization developed. And his conclusion was basically cults. They were basically cults and civilization was organized into cults.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And the intensity of the cults was like a million fold beyond anything that we would recognize today. Like it was a level of all encompassing belief and an action around religion. That was at a level of extremeness that we wouldn't even recognize it. And so specifically, he tells the story of basically there were three levels of cults.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Inside it, it's evolving, you know, neurons, functions, be able to do math and be able to, you know, and, you know, some people believe that, you know, over time, you know, if you keep feeding these things enough data and enough processing cycles, they'll eventually evolve an entire internal world model, right? And they'll have like a complete understanding of physics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There was the family cult, the tribal cult, and then the city cult as society scaled up. And then each cult was a joint cult of family gods, which were ancestor gods, and then nature gods. Um, and then you are bonding into a family, a tribe or a city was based on your adherence to that religion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, people, uh, who were not of your family tribe city worship different gods, which gave you not just the right, but the responsibility to kill them on site.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Hardcore. By the way, shocking development. I did not realize there's zero concept of individual rights. Even up through the Greeks and even in the Romans, they didn't have the concept of individual rights. The idea that as an individual, you have some right, it's just like, nope. And you look back and you're just like, wow, that's just crazily fascist in a degree that we wouldn't recognize today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But it's like, well, they were living under extreme pressure for survival. And the theory goes you could not have people running around making claims to individual rights when you're just trying to get your tribe through the winter. You need hardcore command and control. And actually, through a modern political lens, those cults were basically both fascist and communist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They were fascist in terms of social control, and then they were communist in terms of economics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, so my conclusion from this book, so the way we naturally think about the world we live in today is like we basically have such an improved version of everything that came before us, right? Like we have basically, we've figured out all these things around morality and ethics and democracy and all these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And like they were basically stupid and retrograde and were like smart and sophisticated. And we've improved all this. After reading that book, I now believe in many ways the opposite, which is no, actually, we are still running in that original model. We're just running in an incredibly diluted version of it. So we're still running basically in cults.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's just our cults are at like a thousandth or a millionth the level of intensity, right? And so just to take religions... you know, the modern experience of a Christian in our time, even somebody who considers him a devout Christian is just a shadow of the level of intensity of somebody who belonged to a religion back in that period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then by the way, we have, it goes back to our AI discussion, we then sort of endlessly create new cults. Like we're trying to fill the void, right? And the void is a void of bonding. Okay. Living in their era, like everybody living today, transported in that era would view it as just completely intolerable in terms of the loss of freedom and the level of basically fascist control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So when they have the computational capability, right, then there's for sure an opportunity to generate like fresh signal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
However, every single person in that era, and he really stresses this, they knew exactly where they stood. They knew exactly where they belonged. They knew exactly what their purpose was. They knew exactly what they needed to do every day. They knew exactly why they were doing it. They had total certainty about their place in the universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Absolutely, overwhelmingly, undisputably, undeniably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, because we don't have that. We are ungrounded. We are uncentered. And we all feel it, right? And that's why we reach for, you know, it's why we still reach for religion. It's why we reach for, you know, people start to take on, you know, let's say, you know, a faith in science, maybe beyond where they should put it. And by the way, sports teams, they're like a tiny little version of a cult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And Apple keynotes are a tiny little version of a cult, right? And political. And there's full-blown cults on both sides of the political spectrum right now operating in plain sight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Compared to what it used to. I mean, we would today consider full-blown. But yes, they're at, I don't know, a hundred thousandth or something of the intensity of what people had back then. Yeah. So we live in a world today that in many ways is more advanced and moral and so forth. And it's certainly a lot nicer, much nicer world to live in. But we live in a world that's like very washed out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's like everything has become very colorless and gray as compared to how people used to experience things, which is, I think, why we're so prone to reach for drama. There's something in us deeply evolved where we want that back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So the tools that are available today, I mean, are just like, I sometimes, you know, I sometimes bore, you know, kids by describing like what it was like to go look up a book, you know, to try to like discover a fact. And, you know, in the old days, the 1970s, 1980s, you go to the library and the card catalog and the whole thing, you go through all that work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then the book is checked out and you have to wait two weeks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And like, like to be in a world, not only where you can get the answer to any question, but also the world now, you know, the AI world where you've got like the assistant that will help you do anything, help you teach, learn anything like your ability, both to learn and also to produce is just like, I don't know, a million fold beyond what it used to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I have a, I have a blog post I've been wanting to write, which I call where, where are the hyperproductive people? Like with these tools, like there should be authors that are writing like hundreds or thousands of like outstanding books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Artists, musicians, right? Why aren't musicians producing a thousand times the number of songs, right? Like the tools are spectacular. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think it might be distraction. Distraction. It's so easy to just sit and consume that I think people get distracted from production. But if you wanted to, as a young person, if you wanted to really stand out, you could get on a hyper productivity curve very early on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's a great story in Roman history of Pliny the Elder, who was this legendary statesman, died in the Vesuvius eruption trying to rescue his friends. But he was famous both for basically being a polymath, but also being an author. And he wrote apparently hundreds of books. Most of which have been lost, but he wrote all these encyclopedias.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he literally would be reading and writing all day long, no matter what else was going on. And so he would travel with four slaves, and two of them were responsible for reading to him, and two of them were responsible for taking dictation. And so like he'd be going cross country and like literally he would be writing books like all the time. And apparently they were spectacular.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's only a few that have survived, but apparently they were amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. And there are examples like there are, you know, there's this guy, Judge, what's his name? Posner, who wrote like 40 books and was also a great federal judge. You know, there's our friend Balaji, I think it's like this. He's one of these, you know, where his output is just prodigious. And so it's like, yeah, I mean, with these tools, why not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I kind of think we're at this interesting kind of freeze frame moment where like these tools are not in everybody's hands and everybody's just kind of staring at them trying to figure out what to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, I, I, maybe it's just, and I, I look, I think people, I think people are wired differently. So I think it's hard to generalize this kind of thing, but I'm, I am much happier and more satisfied when I'm fully committed to something. So I'm very much in favor of imbalance. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Now I happen to have whatever twist of personality traits lead that in non-destructive dimensions, including the fact that I've actually, I now no longer do the 10-4 plan. I stopped drinking. I do the caffeine, but not the alcohol. So there's something in my personality where I, whatever maladaption I have is inclining me towards productive things, not unproductive things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I think happiness... I don't think happiness is the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think satisfaction is the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, deeper. So happiness is, you know, a walk in the woods at sunset, an ice cream cone, a kiss. The first ice cream cone is great. The thousandth ice cream cone, not so much. At some point, the walks in the woods get boring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think satisfaction is a deeper thing, which is like having found a purpose and fulfilling it, being useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That I'm fully satisfying my faculties, that I'm fully delivering on the gifts that I've been given, that I'm making the world better, that I'm contributing to the people around me, and that I can look back and say, wow, that was hard, but it was worth it. I think generally seems to lead people in a better state than pursuit of pleasure, pursuit of quote unquote happiness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think the founders, the founding fathers in the US threw this off kilter when they used the phrase pursuit of happiness. I think they should have said.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If they said pursuit of satisfaction, we might live in a better world today. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, you can tell when you're talking to somebody, you can tell sometimes you have a conversation. You're like, wow, this person does not have any original thoughts. They are basically echoing things that other people have told them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They could have tweaked the Second Amendment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I think, and I think there, I mean, look, I think Elon is, I don't think I'm even a great example, but I think Elon would be the great example of this, which is like, you know, look, he's a guy who from every, every day of his life from the day he started making money at all, he just plows into the, into the next thing. And so I think, I think money is definitely an enabler for satisfaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Money applied to happiness leads people down very dark paths, very destructive avenues. Money applied to satisfaction, I think could be, is a real tool. Um, I always look, by the way, I was like, uh, you know, Elon is the case study for behavior. But the other thing that I thought he's really made me think is Larry, Larry page was asked one time what his approach to philanthropy was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he said, Oh, I'm just my, my philanthropic plan is just give all the money to Elon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so the core of it is he's back to the future. So he is doing the most leading edge things in the world, but with a really deeply old school approach. And so to find comparisons to Elon, you need to go to like Henry Ford and Thomas Watson and Howard Hughes and Andrew Carnegie. right? Um, Leland Stanford, um, John D Rockefeller, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's other people you got in conversation with where it's like, wow, like they have a model in their head of how the world works and it's a different model than mine. And they're saying things that I don't expect. And so I need to now understand how their model of the world differs from my model of the world. And then that's how I learned something fundamental. right underneath the words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You need to go to the, what we're called the bourgeois capitalists, like the hardcore business owner operators who basically built, you know, basically built industrialized society, um, Vanderbilt. Um, and it's a level of hands-on commitment, um, and, uh, depth, um, in the business, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
um, coupled with an absolute priority, uh, towards truth, um, and towards, um, kind of put it science and technology, uh, down to first principles. That is just like absolute. It was just like unbelievably absolute. He really is ideal that he's only ever talking to engineers. Like he does not tolerate bullshit. He has the most bullshit tolerance anybody I've ever met.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, he wants ground truth on every single topic. Um, and he runs his businesses directly day to day devoted to getting to ground truth in every single topic. so uh you think it was a good decision for him to buy twitter i have developed a view in life did not second guess elon musk i know this is gonna sound crazy and unfounded but well i mean uh he's got a quite a track record
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, look, the car was a crazy... I mean, the car was... I mean, look.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Starting a new car company in the United States of America, the last time somebody really tried to do that was the 1950s. And it was called Tucker Automotive. And it was such a disaster. They made a movie about what a disaster it was. And then rockets. Like, who does that? Like, that's... There's obviously no way to start a new rocket company like those days are over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then to do those at the same time. So after he pulled those two off, like... Okay, fine. Like... Like, this is one of my areas of like, whatever opinions I had about that is just like, okay, clearly are not relevant. Like this is, you just, at some point you just like bet on the person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Oh, yeah. I mean, look, he drives resentment. He is a magnet for resentment. His critics are the most miserable, resentful people in the world. It's almost a perfect match of the most idealized technologist of the century coupled with just his critics are just bitter as can be. I mean, it's sort of very darkly comic to watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
He's running a cult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I don't know the answer to that. I think the meaning of... The closest I get to it is what I said about satisfaction. So it's basically like, okay, we were given what we have. We should basically do our best. What's the role of love in that mix? I mean, what's the point of life if you're, yeah, without love? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And look, like taking care of people is like a wonderful thing. Like, you know, mentality, you know, there are pathological forms of taking care of people, but there's also a very fundamental, you know, kind of aspect of taking care of people. Like, for example, I happen to be somebody who believes that capitalism and taking care of people are actually, they're actually the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Somebody once said capitalism is how you take care of people you don't know. Right. Right. And so like, yeah, I think it's like deeply woven into the whole thing. You know, there's a long conversation to be had about that, but yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
David Friedman says there's only three ways to get somebody to do something for somebody else. Love, money, and force.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you can experiment with this now. I do this for fun. So you can tell GPT-4, you know, whatever, debate X, you know, X and Y, communism and fascism or something. And it'll go for, you know, a couple of pages and then inevitably it wants the parties to agree. And so they will come to a common understanding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it's very funny if they're like, if these are like emotionally inflammatory topics, because they're like somehow the machine is just, you know, it figures out a way to make them agree. But it doesn't have to be like that because you can add to the prompt. I do not want the conversation to come to agreement. In fact, I want it to get more stressful and argumentative as it goes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I want tension to come out. I want them to become actively hostile to each other. I want them to not trust each other, take anything at face value. And it will do that. It's happy to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You can steer it. Or you could steer it and you could say, I want it to get as tense and argumentative as possible, but still not involve any misrepresentation. You could say, I want both sides to have good faith. You could say, I want both sides to not be constrained to good faith.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In other words, you can set the parameters of the debate and it will happily execute whatever path, because for it, it's just like predicting. It's totally happy to do either one. It doesn't have a point of view. it has a default way of operating, but it's happy to operate in the other realm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and so like, and this is how I, when I want to learn about a contentious issue, this is what I do now is like, this is what I, this is what I ask it to do. And I'll often ask it to go through five, six, seven, you know, different, you know, sort of continuous prompts and basically, okay, argue that out in more detail. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, this, this argument is becoming too polite, you know, make it more, you know, make it tensor. Um, and yeah, it's thrilled to do it. So it has the capability for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so several layers to the question. So one is one of the things that an LLM is good at is actually de-biasing. And so you can feed it a news article and you can tell it strip out the bias. Yeah, that's nice, right? And it actually does it. Like it actually knows how to do that because it knows how to do, among other things, it actually knows how to do sentiment analysis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so it knows how to pull out the emotionality. And so that's one of the things you can do. It's very suggestive of the sense here that there's real potential in this issue. You know, I would say, look, the second thing is there's this issue of hallucination, right? And there's a long conversation that we could have about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so it's basically, well, so it's sort of, hallucination is what we call it when we don't like it. Creativity is what we call it when we do like it, right? And, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right, and so when the engineers talk about it, they're like, this is terrible, it's hallucinating, right? If you have artistic inclinations, you're like, oh my God, we've invented creative machines for the first time in human history. This is amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, bullshitters, but also.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There are shades of gray, though. It's interesting. So we had this conversation where, you know, we're looking at my firm at AI and lots of domains, and one of them is the legal domain. So we had this conversation with this big law firm about how they're thinking about using this stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And we went in with the assumption that an LLM that was going to be used in the legal industry would have to be 100% truthful, verified, you know. There's this case where this lawyer apparently submitted a GPT-generated brief and it had fake legal case citations in it and the judge is going to get his law license stripped or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We just assumed it's like, obviously, they're going to want the super literal one that never makes anything up, not the creative one. But actually they said, what the law firm basically said is, yeah, that's true at like the level of individual briefs, but they said when you're actually trying to figure out like legal arguments, right? Like you actually want to be creative, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You don't, again, there's creativity and then there's like making stuff up. what's the line? You want it to explore different hypotheses. You want to do the legal version of improv or something like that, where you want to float different theories of the case and different possible arguments for the judge and different possible arguments for the jury.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
By the way, different routes through the history of all the case law. And so they said, actually, for a lot of what we want to use it for, we actually want it in creative mode. And then basically, we just assume that we're going to have to cross-check all the specific citations. And so I think there's going to be more shades of gray in here than people think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then I just add to that, you know, another one of these trillion dollar kind of questions is ultimately, you know, sort of the verification thing. And so, you know, will LLMs be evolved from here to be able to do their own factual verification? Will you have sort of add-on functionality like Wolfram Alpha, right? Where, you know, and other plugins where that's the way you do the verification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, another, by the way, another idea is you might have a community of LLMs on any, you know, so for example, you might have the creative LLM and then you might have the literal LLM fact check it. Right. And so there's a variety of different technical approaches that are being applied to solve the hallucination problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, some people like Jan LeCun argue that this is inherently an unsolvable problem. But most of the people working in the space, I think, think that there's a number of practical ways to kind of kind of corral this in a little bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And in fact, Wikipedia today is still not deterministically correct, right? So you cannot take to the bank, right, every single thing on every single page, but it is probabilistically correct, right? And specifically the way I describe Wikipedia to people, it is more likely that Wikipedia is right than any other source you're going to find.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's this old question, right? Of like, okay, like, are we looking for perfection? Are we looking for something that asymptotically approaches perfection? Are we looking for something that's just better than the alternatives? And Wikipedia, right, has exactly your point, has proven to be like overwhelmingly better than people thought. And I think that's where this ends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then underneath all this is the fundamental question of where you started, which is, okay, what is truth? How do we get to truth? How do we know what truth is? And we live in an era in which an awful lot of people are very confident that they know what the truth is. And I don't really buy into that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I think the history of the last 2,000 years or 4,000 years of human civilization is actually getting to the truth is actually a very difficult thing to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Sure, but like, you know, we came up with communism before the internet somehow. which I would say had rather larger issues than anything we're dealing with today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And its theoretical structure, it had real issues. It had a very deep fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and economics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They were extremely confident. And my point is they were very confident 3,900 years into what you would presume to be evolution towards the truth. Yeah. And so my assessment is... My assessment is, number one, there's no need for the Hegelian dialectic to actually converge towards the truth. Like, apparently not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Number one, I think it's just really difficult. Historically, who gets to decide what the truth is? It's either the king or the priest. And so we don't live in an era anymore of kings or priests dictating it to us. And so we're kind of on our own. And so my typical thing is we just need a huge amount of humility.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And we need to be very suspicious of people who claim that they have the capital truth. And then we need to have... Look, the good news is the Enlightenment has bequeathed us with a set of techniques to be able to presumably get closer to truth through the scientific method and rationality and observation and experimentation and hypothesis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And, you know, we need to continue to embrace those even when they give us answers we don't like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
how is anything testable at all especially that involves like human nature things like this it's not physics here's a question a friend of mine just asked me on this topic so suppose you had llms in equivalent of gpt4 even 5678 suppose you had them in the 1600s yeah and galileo comes up for trial yeah right and you ask the llm like is galileo right yeah like what does it answer Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And one theory is it answers, no, that he's wrong because the overwhelming majority of human thought up until that point was that he was wrong. And so therefore that's, what's in the training data. Yeah. Um, another way of thinking about it is, well, this efficiently advanced LLM will have evolved the ability to actually check the math. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and we'll actually say, actually, no, actually, you know, you may not want to hear it, but he's right. Now, if, you know, the church at that time was, you know, on the LLM, they would have given it human, you know, human, feedback to prohibit it from answering that question. And so I like to take it out of our current context because that makes it very clear. Those same questions apply today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
This is exactly the point of a huge amount of the human feedback training that's actually happening with these LLMs today. This is a huge debate that's happening about whether open source AI should be legal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
AI alignment, which everybody is like, oh, that sounds great. Alignment with what? Human values. Who's human values? Who's human values? And we're in this mode of social and popular discourse. What do you think of when you read a story in the press right now and they say, XYZ made a baseless claim about some topic? And there's one group of people who are like, aha, they're doing fact-checking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's another group of people that are like, every time the press says that, it's now a tick and that means that they're lying. We're in this social context where the level to which a lot of people in positions of power have become very certain that they're in a position to determine the truth for the entire population is like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
there's like there's like some bubble that has formed around that idea and at least it flies completely in the face of everything i was ever trained about science and about reason um and strikes me as like you know deeply offensive um and incorrect what would you say about the state of journalism just on that topic today are we are we in a temporary kind of uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You have to always think about the counterfactual in these things, which is like, okay, because these questions, right, this question heads towards, it's like, okay, the impact of social media and the undermining of truth and all this, but then you want to ask the question of like, okay, what if we had had the modern media environment
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
including cable news and including social media and Twitter and everything else in 1939 or 1941, right? Or 1910 or 1865 or 1850 or 1776, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I'll just take a simple example. Like how would President Kennedy have been interpreted with what we know now about all the things Kennedy was up to? Like, how would he have been experienced by the body politic with a social media context, right? Like, how would LBJ have been experienced? By the way, how would, you know, like, many meant FDR, like the New Deal, the Great Depression.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, I mean, look, to this day, there are lots of very interesting real questions around like how America, you know, got, you know, basically involved in World War II and who did what when and the operations of British intelligence in American soil and did FDR, this, that, Pearl Harbor, you know. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Woodrow Wilson ran for, you know, his candidacy was run on an anti-war, you know, he ran on the platform and not getting involved in World War I. Somehow that switched, you know, like... And I'm not even making a value judgment on any of these things. I'm just saying the way that our ancestors experienced reality was, of course, mediated through centralized top-down control at that point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you ran those realities again with the media environment we have today, the reality would be experienced very, very differently. And then, of course, that intermediation would cause the feedback loops to change, and then reality would obviously play out. Do you think it would be very different? Yeah, it has to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It has to be just because it's all so, I mean, just look at what's happening today. I mean, just, I mean, the most obvious thing is just the collapse. And here's another opportunity to argue that this is not the internet causing this, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Here's a big thing happening today, which is Gallup does this thing every year where they do, they pull for trust in institutions in America and they do it across all the different, everything from military to clergy and big business and the media and so forth. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And basically, there's been a systemic collapse in trust in institutions in the US, almost without exception, basically, since essentially the early 1970s. There's two ways of looking at that, which is, oh my God, we've lost this old world in which we could trust institutions, and that was so much better, because that should be the way the world runs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The other way of looking at it is we just know a lot more now, and the great mystery is why those numbers aren't all zero.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right? Because now we know so much about how these things operate, and they're not that impressive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so this goes to the thing, which is like, okay, had we had the media environment that we've had between the 1970s and today, if we had that in the 30s and 40s or 1900s, 1910s, I think there's no question reality would turn out different if only because everybody would have known to not trust the institutions, which would have changed their level of credibility, their ability to control circumstances.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Therefore, the circumstances would have had to change. Yeah. And it would have been a feedback loop process. In other words, your experience of reality changes reality, and then reality changes your experience of reality. It's a two-way feedback process, and media is the intermediating force between that. So change the media environment, change reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so just as a consequence, I think it's just really hard to say, oh, things worked a certain way then and they work a different way now. And then therefore, people were smarter then or better then or, by the way, dumber then or not as capable then. We make all these really light and casual comparisons of ourselves to previous generations of people. We draw judgments all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I just think it's really hard to do any of that because if we... If we put ourselves in their shoes with the media that they had at that time, I think we probably most likely would have been just like them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, even just the whole concept of the chat UI might not be the, like the chat UI is just the first whack at this and maybe that's the dominant thing, but look, maybe we don't know yet. Maybe the experience most people with LLMs is just a continuous feed. you know, maybe it's more of a passive feed and you just are getting a constant, like running commentary on everything happening in your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it's just helping you kind of interpret and understand everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What to say in a job interview. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Next sentence. Yeah. At that level. Yeah. I mean, yes. So technically, now, whether we want that or not is an open question, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, look. this gets this whole thing of like, so, you know, the chat interface has this whole concept of prompt engineering, right? So it's good for prompts. Well, it turns out one of the things that a lot of times are really good at is writing prompts, right? And so like, what if you just outsourced, and by the way, you could run this experiment today. You could hook this up to do this today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The latency is not good enough to do it real time in a conversation, but you could run this experiment and you just say, look, every 20 seconds, you could just say, you know, you know, tell me what the optimal prompt is and then ask yourself that question to give me the result.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then as you, as you, exactly to your point, as you add, there will be, there will be these systems are going to have the ability to be learned and updated essentially in real time. And so you'll be able to have a pendant or your phone or whatever, watch or whatever. It'll have a microphone on it. It'll listen to your conversations. It'll have a feed of everything else happened in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then it'll be, you know, sort of retraining, prompting or retraining itself on the fly. And so the scenario you described is actually a completely doable scenario. Now, the hard question on these is always, okay, since that's possible, are people going to want that? Like what's the form of experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, that, that we, we won't know until we try it, but I don't think it's possible yet to predict the form of AI in our lives. Therefore, it's not possible to predict the way in which it will intermediate our experience with reality yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Trillion dollar question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's a bunch of those. So look, there's a really big question today. Sitting here today is a really big question about the big models versus the small models. That's related directly to the big question of proprietary versus open. Then there's this big question of where is the training data going to go? Are we topping out on the training data or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then are we going to be able to synthesize training data? Yeah. And then there's a huge pile of questions around regulation and, you know, what's actually going to be legal. And so I would when we think about it, we dovetail kind of all those all those questions together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You can paint a picture of the world where there's two or three God models that are just at like staggering scale and they're just better at everything. and they will be owned by a small set of companies, and they will basically achieve regulatory capture over the government, and they'll have competitive barriers that will prevent other people from competing with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so there will be, just like there's whatever, three big banks or three big, or by the way, three big search companies, or I guess two now, it'll centralize like that. You can paint another very different picture that says, no, actually the opposite of that's gonna happen. This is gonna basically, this is the new gold rush. alchemy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
This is the big bang for this whole new area of science and technology. And so therefore, you're going to have every smart 14-year-old on the planet building open source and figuring out ways to optimize these things. And then we're just going to get overwhelmingly better at generating training data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We're going to bring in blockchain networks to have an economic incentive to generate decentralized training data and so forth and so on. And then basically, we're going to live in a world of open source. And there's going to be a billion LLMs of every size, scale, shape, and description.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there might be a few big ones that are the super genius ones, but mostly what we'll experience is open source. And that's more like a world of what we have today with Linux and the web. So.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, it is this always big question, which is you get this feeling. I hear about this a lot from founder CEOs where it's like, wow, we have 50,000 people. It's now harder to do new things than it was when we had 50 people. Like what has happened? So that's a recurring phenomenon. By the way, that's one of the reasons why there's always startups and why there's venture capital.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's just that's like a timeless phenomenon. Uh, kind of thing. So that, that, that's one observation. Um, on a page rank, um, we can talk about that, but on page rank specifically on page rank, um, there actually is a page. So there is a page rank already in the field and it's the transformer, right? So the, the, the big breakthrough was the transformer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and, uh, the transformer was invented in, uh, 2017 at Google, um, And this is actually like really an interesting question. Cause it's like, okay, the transformers, like why does open AI even exist? Like the transformers invented at Google. Why didn't Google? I asked a guy, I asked a guy I know who was senior at Google brain kind of when this was happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I said, if Google had just gone flat out to the wall and just said, look, we're going to launch, we're going to launch equivalent of GPT-4 as fast as we can. He said, I said, when could we have had it? And he said, 2019. Yeah. They could have just done a two year sprint with the transformer and Bennett because they already had the compute at scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They already had all the training data and they could have just done it. There's a variety of reasons they didn't do it. This is like a classic big company thing. IBM invented the relational database in the 1970s, let it sit on the shelf as a paper. Larry Ellison picked it up and built Oracle. Xerox PARC invented the interactive computer. They let it sit on the shelf.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Steve Jobs came and turned it into the Macintosh. And so there is this pattern. Now, having said that, sitting here today, Google's in the game, right? So Google, maybe they let a four-year gap go there that they maybe shouldn't have, but they're in the game. And so now they're committed. They've done this merger. They're bringing in Demis. They've got this merger with DeepMind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They're piling in resources. There are rumors that they're building an incredible super LLM way beyond what we even have today. And they've got, you know, unlimited resources and a huge, you know, they've been challenged with their honor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so the startup, the huge advantage that startups have is they just, there's no sacred cows. There's no historical legacy to protect. There's no need to reconcile your new plan with existing strategy. There's no communication overhead. There's no, you know, big companies are big companies. They've got pre-meetings, planning for the meeting. Then they have the post-meeting and the recap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Then they have the presentation of the board. Then they have the next round of meetings. Yeah, lots of meetings. And that's the elapsed time when the startup launches its product, right? So there's a timeless, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So there's a timeless thing there. Now- Yeah. What the startups don't have is everything else, right? So startups, they don't have a brand, they don't have customer relationships, they've got no distribution, they've got no scale. I mean, sitting here today, they can't even get GPUs, right? Like there's like a GPU shortage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Startups are literally stalled out right now because they can't get chips, which is like super weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, but the clouds run out of chips, right? And then to the extent the clouds have chips, they allocate them to the big customers, not the small customers, right? And so the small companies lack everything other than the ability to just do something new. Yeah. Right. And this is the timeless race and battle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And this is kind of the point I tried to make in the essay, which is like both sides of this are good. Like, it's really good to have like highly scaled tech companies that can do things that are like at staggering levels of sophistication. It's really good to have startups that can launch brand new ideas. They ought to be able to both do that and compete.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They neither one ought to be subsidized or protected from the others. Like that's, that's to me, that's just like very clearly the idealized world. It is the world we've been in for AI up until now. And then of course there are people trying to shut that down, but my hope is that, you know, the best outcome clearly will be if that continues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I, uh, I have an eight year old and he's super into like Minecraft and learning to code and doing all this stuff. So I, I, of course I was very proud. I could bring sort of fire down from the mountain to my kid and I brought him chat GPT and I hooked him up on his, on his, on his, on his laptop. And I was like, you know, this is the thing that's going to answer all your questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he's like, okay. And I'm like, but it's going to answer our questions. And he's like, well, of course, like it's a computer. Of course, it answers all your questions. Like what else would a computer be good for? Dad. Never impressed. Not impressed in the least. Two weeks pass and he has some question. And I say, well, have you asked JetGPT? And he's like, dad, Bing is better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And why is Bing better is because it's built into the browser. Because he's like, look, I have the Microsoft Edge browser and it's got Bing right here. And then he doesn't know this yet, but one of the things you can do with Bing and Edge is there's a setting where you can use it to basically talk to any webpage. because it's sitting right there next to the browser.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And by the way, it includes PDF documents. And so the way they've implemented an edge with Bing is you can load a PDF and then you can ask it questions, which is the thing you can't do currently in just ChatGPT. So they're gonna push the meld. I think that's great. They're gonna push the melding and see if there's a combination thing there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
google's rolling out this thing the magic button which is implemented in they put in google docs right and so you go to you know google docs and you create a new document and you you know you instead of like you know starting to type you just you know say it press the button and it starts to like generate content for you right like is that the way that it'll work um is it going to be a speech ui where you're just going to have an earpiece and talk to it all day long you know is it going to be a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like these are all like, this is exactly the kind of thing that I don't, this is exactly the kind of thing I don't think is possible to forecast. I think what we need to do is like run all those experiments. And so one outcome is we come out of this with like a super browser that has AI built in. That's just like amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Look, there's a real possibility that the whole, I mean, look, there's a possibility here that the whole idea of a screen And Windows and all this stuff just goes away. Because why do you need that if you just have a thing that's just telling you whatever you need to know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Every medium becomes the content for the next one. So the AI will be able to give you a browser whenever you want. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Another way to think about it is maybe what the browser is. Maybe it's just the escape hatch, right? Which is maybe kind of what it is today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Which is like most of what you do is like inside a social network or inside a search engine or inside somebody's app or inside some controlled experience. But then every once in a while, there's something where you actually want to jailbreak. You want to actually get free.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So here's something I'm proud of. So nobody really talks about it. Here's something I'm proud of, which is the web, the web, the browser, the web servers, they're all, they're still backward compatible all the way back to like 1992. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So like you can put up a, you can still, you know, the big breakthrough of the web early on, the big breakthrough was it made it really easy to read, but it also made it really easy to write, made it really easy to publish. And we literally made it so easy to publish. We made it not only so it was easy to publish content, it was actually also easy to actually write a web server.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you could literally write a web server in four lines of Braille code. And you could start publishing content on it. And you could set whatever rules you want for the content, whatever censorship, no censorship, whatever you want. You could just do that. As long as you had an IP address, you could do that. That still works. That still works exactly as I just described.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes. You know, it'd be a question if the use cases have really narrowed down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So this is part of my reaction to all of this censorship pressure and all these issues around control and all this stuff, which is like maybe we need to get back a little bit more to the Wild West. The Wild West is still out there. Now, they will try to chase you down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
People who want to censor will try to take away your domain name and they'll try to take away your payments account and so forth if they really don't like what you're saying. But nevertheless, unless they literally are intercepting you at the ISP level, you can still put up a thing. I don't know. I think that's important to preserve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
One is just a freedom argument, but the other is a creativity argument. Which is you want to have the escape hatch so that the kid with the idea is able to realize the idea. Because to your point on PageRank, you actually don't know what the next big idea is. Nobody called Larry Page and told him to develop PageRank. He came up with that on his own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you want to always, I think, leave the escape hatch for the next kid or the next Stanford grad student to have the breakthrough idea and be able to get it up and running before anybody notices.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Full story. You were born. I was born.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Oh, so I hit the generational jackpot and I hit the Gen X kind of point perfectly as it turns out. So I was born in 1971. So there's this great website called WTF happened in 1971.com, which is basically 1971 is when everything started to go to hell. And I was of course born in 1971. So I like to think that I had something to do with that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I have, I don't think I made it on the website, but I, you know, hopefully somebody needs to add, this is, this is where everything, maybe I contributed to some of the trends. Um, that they should. Every line on that website goes like that, right? So it's all a picture disaster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But there was this moment in time where, cause the, you know, sort of the Apple, you know, the Apple II hit in like 1978 and then the IBM PC hit in 82. So I was like, you know, 11 when the PC came out. And so I just kind of hit that perfectly. And then that was the first moment in time when like regular people could spend a few hundred dollars and get a computer, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so that, I just like that, that resonated right out of the gate. And then the other part of the story is, you know, I was using an Apple II. I used a bunch of them, but I was using Apple II. And, of course, it said on the back of every Apple II and every Mac, it said, you know, designed in Cupertino, California. And I was like, wow, Cupertino must be the, like, shining city on the hill.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
and low rise apartment buildings. So the aesthetics were a little disappointing, but you know, it was the vector, right, of the creation of a lot of this stuff. So then basically, so part of my story is just the luck of having been born at the right time and getting exposed to PCs then. The other part is,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The other part is when Al Gore says that he created the internet, he actually is correct in a really meaningful way, which is he sponsored a bill in 1985 that essentially created the modern internet, created what is called the NSFnet at the time, which is sort of the first really fast internet backbone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And that bill dumped a ton of money into a bunch of research universities to build out basically the internet backbone and then the supercomputer centers that were clustered around the internet. And one of those universities was University of Illinois. where I went to school.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so the other stroke of luck that I had was I went to Illinois basically as that money was just getting dumped on campus. And so as a consequence we had on campus, and this was like, you know, 89, 90, 91, We had like, you know, we were right on the Internet backbone. We had like T3 and 45 at the time, T3, 45 megabit backbone connection, which at the time was, you know, wildly state of the art.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We had crazy computers. We had thinking machines, parallel supercomputers. We had Silicon Graphics workstations. We had Macintoshes. We had next cubes all over the place. We had like every possible kind of computer you could imagine because all this money just fell out of the sky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So quite literally it was, yeah, like it's all, it's all there. It's all like we had full broadband graphics, like the whole thing. And, and it's actually funny cause they had this, this is the first time I kind of sort of tickled the back of my head that there might be a big opportunity in here, which is, you know, they, they embraced it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so they put like computers in all the dorms and they wired up all the dorm rooms and they had all these labs everywhere and everything. And then they, they gave every undergrad, a computer account and an email address, um, Um, and the assumption was that you would use the internet for your four years at college. Um, and then you would graduate and stop using it. And that was that, right? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Sure, but we still have horses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you would just retire your email address. It wouldn't be relevant anymore because you'd go off in the workplace and they don't use email. You'd be back to using fax machines or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, if this is so useful in this contained environment that just has this weird source of outside funding, then if it were practical for everybody else to have this, and if it were cost-effective for everybody else to have this, wouldn't they want it? And overwhelmingly, the prevailing view at the time was, no, they would not want it. This is esoteric, weird nerd stuff, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That like computer science kids like, but like normal people are never gonna do email, right? Or be on the internet, right? And so I was just like, wow, like this is actually like, this is really compelling stuff. Now, the other part was it was all really hard to use. And in practice, you had to be basically a CS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You basically had to be a CS undergrad or equivalent to actually get full use of the Internet at that point because it was all pretty esoteric stuff. So then that was the other part of the idea, which was, OK, we need to actually make this easy to use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, it was a combination of things. So it was like basically the web existed in an early sort of described as prototype form. And by the way, text only at that point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Paint a picture. It looked like chat GPT, actually. It was all text. Yeah. And so you had a text-based web browser. Well, actually, the original browser, Tim Berners-Lee, the original browser, both the original browser and the server actually ran on NextCubes. So this was the computer Steve Jobs made during the decade-long interim period when he was not at Apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, he got fired in 85 and then came back in 97. So this was in that interim period where he had this company called Next. And they made these, literally these computers called Cubes. And there's this famous story. They were beautiful, but they were 12 inch by 12 inch by 12 inch Cubes computers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's a famous story about how they could have cost half as much if it had been 12 by 12 by 13. Yeah. Steve was like, no, it has to be. So they were like $6,000, basically, academic workstations. They had the first CD-ROM drives, which were slow. I mean, the computers were all but unusable. They were so slow, but they were beautiful. Okay, can we actually just take a tiny tangent there?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Sure, of course.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So I guess they say like, look, he was a deep believer, I think in a very deep way. I interpret it. I don't know if you ever really described it like this, but the way I'd interpret it is it's like, it's like this thing. And it's actually a thing in philosophy. It's like, aesthetics are not just appearances. Aesthetics go all the way to like deep underlying, underlying meaning. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's like, I'm not a physicist. One of the things I've heard physicists say is one of the things you start to get a sense of when a theory might be correct is when it's beautiful, right? Like, you know, right? And so there's something, and you feel the same thing, by the way, in like human psychology, right? You know, when you're experiencing awe, right? You know, there's like a simplicity to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When you're having an honest interaction with somebody, there's an aesthetic, I would say calm comes over you because you're actually being fully honest and trying to hide yourself, right? So it's like this very deep sense of aesthetics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, search was a technology. It was a moment in time technology, which is you have, in theory, the world's information out on the web. Yeah. You know, this is sort of the optimal way to get to it. But yeah, like, and by the way, actually Google has known this for a long time. I mean, they've been driving away from the 10 blue links for, you know, for like two days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, I mean, who makes a phone out of aluminum, right? Like nobody else would have done that. And now, of course, if your phone was made out of aluminum, you know, how crude, what kind of caveman would you have to be to have a phone that's made out of plastic? Like, right. So like, so it's just this very right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And, you know, look, it's, it's, there's a thousand different ways to look at this, but one of the things is just like, look, these things are central to your life. Like you're with your phone more than you're with anything else. Like it's in your, it's going to be in your hand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, he, you know, you know, this, he thought very deeply about what it meant for something to be in your hand all day long. Yeah. Well, for example, here's an interesting design thing. My understanding is he never wanted an iPhone to have a screen larger than you could reach with your thumb one-handed. And so he was actually opposed to the idea of making the phones larger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I don't know if you have this experience today, but let's say there are certain moments in your day when you might only have one hand available and you might want to be on your phone. And you're trying to send a text and your thumb can't reach the send button.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
He had an integrated worldview, so the properly designed device that had the correct functionality, that had the deepest understanding of the user, that was the most beautiful. It had to be all of those things. He basically would drive to as close to perfect as you could possibly get.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I suspect that he never quite thought he ever got there because most great creators are generally dissatisfied, you read. later on and all they can see are the flaws in their creation. But he got as close to perfect each step of the way as he could possibly get with the constraints of the technology of his time. And then, look, he was sort of famous in the Apple model.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They've been trying to get away from that for a long time. What kind of links? They call it the 10 blue links. 10 blue links.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's like, look, this headset that they just came out with, it's like a decade long. It's like, and they're just going to sit there and tune and tune and polish and polish and tune and polish and tune and polish until it is as perfect as anybody could possibly make anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then this goes to the way that people describe working with him, which is, you know, there was a terrifying aspect of working with him, which is, you know, he was, you know, he was very tough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But there was this thing that everybody I've ever talked to who worked for him says, they all say the following, which is we did the best work of our lives when we worked for him because he set the bar incredibly high and then he supported us with everything that he could to let us actually do work of that quality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So a lot of people who were at Apple spend the rest of their lives trying to find another experience where they feel like they're able to hit that quality bar again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So look, exactly. So the Silicon Valley, I mean, look, he's not, you know, George Patton in the, you know, in the army, like, you know, there are many examples in other fields, you know, that are like this. Specifically in tech, it's actually, I find it very interesting. There's the Apple way, which is polish, polish, polish, and don't ship until it's as perfect as you can make it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then there's the sort of the other approach, which is the sort of incremental hacker mentality. which basically says ship early and often and iterate. And one of the things I find really interesting is I'm now 30 years into this, like there are very successful companies on both sides of that approach, right? Like that is a fundamental,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
difference in how to operate and how to build and how to create that you have world-class companies operating in both ways. And I don't think the question of which is the superior model is anywhere close to being answered. And my suspicion is the answer is do both. The answer is you actually want both. They lead to different outcomes. Software tends to do better with the iterative approach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Guess who picked those colors? Thanks. Thanks. I'm touchy on this topic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Hardware tends to do better with the you know, sort of wait and make it perfect approach. But again, you can find examples in both directions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, there was the web, which was text-based, but there were no, I mean, there was like three websites. There was like no content. There were no users. Like it wasn't like a, it wasn't like a catalytic. It hadn't, and by the way, it was all, because it was all text, there were no documents, there were no images, there were no videos, there were no, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So, so it was, it was, and then if, if in the beginning, if you had to be on a Nextcube, you need to have a Nextcube both to publish and to consume, so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You said there were limitations on, yeah, $6,000 PC. They did not, they did not sell very many, but then there was also, there was also FTP and there was use nets, right. And there was, you know, a dozen other, basically there's waste, which was an early search thing. There was gopher, which was an early menu based information retrieval system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There were like a dozen different sort of scattered ways that people would get to information on, on the internet. And so the mosaic idea was basically bring those all together, make the whole thing graphical, make it easy to use, make it basically bulletproof so that anybody can do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's good. Well, you know, like Marshall McLuhan said that the content of each new medium is the old medium. The content of each new medium is the old medium. The content of movies was theater plays. The content of theater plays was written stories. The content of written stories was spoken stories. Huh. And so you just kind of fold the old thing into the new thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then again, just on the luck side, it so happened that this was right at the moment when graphics, when the GUI sort of actually took off. And we're now also used to the GUI that we think it's been around forever, but it didn't really, you know, the Macintosh brought it out in 85, but they actually didn't sell very many Macs in the 80s. It was not that successful of a product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It really was, you needed Windows 3.0 on PCs, and that hit in about 92. And so, and we did Mosaic in 92, 93. So that sort of, it was like right at the moment when you could imagine actually having a graphical user interface, right, at all, much less one to the internet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, this is the classic, okay, Microsoft was operating on the other. So Steve, Apple was running on the Polish It Until It's Perfect. Microsoft famously ran on the other model, which is Ship and Iterate. And so the old line in those days was Microsoft, right? It's version three of every Microsoft product. That's the good one, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so there are, you can find online, Windows 1, Windows 2, nobody used them. Actually, the original Windows, in the original Microsoft Windows, the Windows were non-overlapping. And so you had these very small, very low resolution screens. And then you had literally, it just didn't work. It wasn't ready yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That was a big leap too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So that was like bang, bang. And then of course, Steve, and then, and then, you know, in the fullness of time, Steve came back, then the Mac started to take off again. That was the third bang. And then the iPhone was the fourth bang. Such exciting times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, Windows 3.1 or 3.0, Windows 3.0 to the iPhone was only 15 years. Like that ramp was, in retrospect, at the time it felt like it took forever, but in historical terms, like that was a very fast ramp from even a graphical computer at all on your desk to the iPhone. It was 15 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the thing I had early on was I was keeping at the time what, there's disputes over what was the first blog, but I had one of them that at least is a possible, at least a runner up in the competition. And it was what was called the What's New page. And it was hardwired and distribution unfair advantage. I put it right in the browser.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I put it in the browser and then I put my resume in the browser, which also was hilarious. But, um, but, um, I was, I was keeping the, not many people get to get to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I'm looking for my, uh, about, about, Oh, Mark is looking for a job. Um, so, um, so the West new page, I would literally get up every morning and I would every afternoon. Um, and I would basically, if you wanted to launch a website, you would email me. Um, and I would list it on the most new page. And that was how people discovered the new websites as they were coming out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I remember, cause it was like one, it literally went from, it was like one every couple of days to like one every day to like two every day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the homepage was just basically trying to explain even what this thing is that you're looking at, right? The basic, basically basic instructions. But then there was a button that said what's new. And what most people did was they went to, for obvious reasons, went to what's new. But like, it was so, it was so mind blowing at that point, just the basic idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it was just, this was like, you know, this was basically the internet, but people could see it for the first time. The basic idea was look, you know, some, you know, it's like, literally it's like an Indian restaurant in like Bristol, England has like put their menu on the web. And people were like, wow. Cause like, that's the first restaurant menu on the web. And I don't have to be in Bristol.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Maybe within AI, one of the things that AI can do for you is it can generate the 10 blue links. Either if that's actually the useful thing to do or if you're feeling nostalgic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I don't know if I'm ever going to go to Bristol and I don't even like Indian food and like, wow. Right. Um, and it was like that, uh, the first web, uh, the first streaming video thing was a, uh, it was an, it was another England thing, some Oxford or something. Um, some guy, uh, put, uh, his coffee pot up as the first, uh, streaming, uh, video thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he put it on the web cause he literally, it was the coffee pot down the hall and he wanted to see when he needed to go, uh, refill it. Um, but there were, you know, there was a point when there were thousands of people like watching that coffee pot. Because it was the first thing you could watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, you know, look, it's still a stretch, right? It's still a stretch because it's just like, okay, you're still in this zone, which is like, okay, is this a nerd thing? Is this a real person thing? Yeah. Um, by the way, we, you know, there was a wall of skepticism from the media. Like they just like, everybody was just like, yeah, this is the crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
This is just like, um, this is not, you know, this is not for regular people at that time. Um, and so you, you had to think through that and then look, it was still, it was still hard to get on the internet at that point. Right. So you could get kind of this weird bastardized version if you were on AOL, which wasn't really real. Or you had to go, like, learn what an ISP was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, in those days, PCs actually didn't have TCP IP drivers come pre-installed. So you had to learn what a TCP IP driver was. You had to buy a modem. You had to install driver software. I have a comedy routine I do. It's like 20 minutes long describing all the steps required to actually get on the internet. And so you had to look through these practical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then speed, performance, 14.4 modems. It was like watching glue dry. There were basically a sequence of bets that we made where you basically needed to look through that current state of affairs and say, actually, there's going to be so much demand for it. Once people figure this out, there's going to be so much demand for it that all of these practical problems are going to get fixed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So for kids in the audience, right? For kids in the audience. You used to have to watch an image load like a line at a time, but it turns out there was this thing with JPEGs where you could load basically every fourth. You could load like every fourth line and then you could sweep back through again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so you could like render a fuzzy version of the image up front and then it would like resolve into the detailed one. And that was like a big UI breakthrough because it gave you something to watch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, it's a big fight. There's a big fight early on about whether there should be images on the web. For that reason, for sexualization? No, not explicitly. That did come up, but it wasn't even that. It was more just like all the serious... The argument went, the purists basically said all the serious information in the world is text.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you introduce images, you're basically going to bring in all the trivial stuff. You're going to bring in magazines and, you know, all this crazy stuff that, you know, people, you know, it's going to distract from that. It's going to take away from being serious, being frivolous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, all these. And then the internet itself has this thing where it incorporates all prior forms of media, right? So the internet itself incorporates television and radio and books and essays and every other form of prior basically media. And so it makes sense that AI would be the next step and you'd sort of consider the internet to be content for...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so in those days, it was all around crime and terrorism. So those arguments happened, but there was no sense yet of the internet having an effect on politics because that was way too far off. But there was an enormous panic at the time around cybercrime. There was enormous panic that your credit card number would get stolen and your life savings would be drained.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then, you know, criminals were gonna, there was, oh, when we started, one of the things we did, the Netscape browser was the first widely used piece of consumer software that had strong encryption built in. It made it available to ordinary people. And at that time, strong encryption was actually illegal to export out of the US.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So we could field that product in the US, we could not export it because it was classified as ammunition. So the Netscape browser was on a restricted list along with the Tomahawk missile as being something that could not be exported.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So we had to make a second version with deliberately weak encryption to sell overseas with a big logo on the box saying, do not trust this, which it turns out makes it hard to sell software when it's got a big logo that says, don't trust it. And then we had to spend five years fighting the US government to get them to basically stop trying to do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because the fear was terrorists are going to use encryption, right, to like plot, you know, all these things. And then, you know, we responded with, well, actually, we need encryption to be able to secure systems so that the terrorists and the criminals can't get into them. So anyway, that was the 1990s fight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So there was a really key bet that we made at the time, which is very controversial, which was core to how it was engineered, which was, are we optimizing for performance or for ease of creation? And in those days, the pressure was very intense to optimize for performance because the network connections were so slow and also the computers were so slow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so if you had mentioned the progressive JPEGs, like if there's an alternate world in which we optimize for performance and you had just a much more pleasant experience right up front, But what we got by not doing that was we got ease of creation. And the way that we got ease of creation was all of the protocols and formats were in text, not in binary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so HTTP is in text, by the way, and this was an internet tradition, by the way, that we picked up, but we continued it. HTTP is text and HTML is text. And then everything else that followed is text. As a result, and by the way, you can imagine purist engineers saying, this is insane. You have very limited bandwidth. Why are you wasting any time sending text?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You should be encoding the stuff into binary and it'll be much faster. And of course the answer is that's correct. But what you get when you make it text is all of a sudden, well, the big breakthrough was the view source function, right? So the fact that you could look at a webpage, you could hit view source and you could see the HTML. That was how people learned how to make webpages, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, and then there was this internet principle that we inherited, which was emit, what was it? Emit cautiously, emit conservatively, interpret liberally. So it basically meant if you're, the design principle was if you're creating like a web editor that's going to emit HTML, like do it as cleanly as you can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
the AI, and then the AI will manipulate it however you want, including in this format.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But you actually want the browser to interpret liberally, which is you actually want users to be able to make all kinds of mistakes and for it to still work. And so the browser rendering engines to this day have all of this spaghetti code, crazy stuff where they can, they're resilient to all kinds of crazy HTML mistakes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so, and literally what I always had in my head is like there's an eight year old or an 11 year old somewhere and they're doing a view source, they're doing a cut and paste and they're trying to make a webpage for their turtle or whatever. And like they leave out a slash and they leave out an angle bracket and they do this and they do that and it still works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It used to offend me. So I, I, I grew up in unit. So I, I, I worked on Unix. I was a Unix native for all the way through this period. Um, and so, and it used to drive me bananas when it would do the segmentation fault in the core dump file. Just like, you know, it's like literally there's like an error in the code. The math is off by one and it core dumps.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I'm in the core dump trying to analyze it and trying to reconstruct what, and I'm just like, this is ridiculous. Like the computer ought to be smart enough to be able to know that if it's off by one, okay, fine. And it keeps running. And I would go ask all the experts, like, why can't it just keep running? And they'd explain to me, well, because all the downstream repercussions and blah, blah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I'm like, this still, like, you know, we're forcing the human creator to live, to your point, in this hyper literal world of perfection. And I was just like, that's just bad. And by the way, you know, what happens with that, of course, is what happened with coding at that point, which is you get a high priesthood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Probably not. Probably we'll just have answers. But there will be cases where you'll want to say, okay, I want more, for example, site sources. And you want it to do that. And so the 10 blue links site sources are kind of the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
you know, there's a small number of people who are really good at doing exactly that. Most people can't, and most people are excluded from it. And so actually that, that was where that was where I picked up that idea was, um, uh, was like, no, no, you want, you want, you want these things to be resilient to error in all kinds. And this, this would drive the purists absolutely crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like I got attacked on this, like a lot because yeah, I mean like every time I, you know, all the purists who were like into all this, like markup language stuff and formats and codes and all this stuff, they would be like, you know, you can't, you're, you're encouraging bad behavior because
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Yeah, that was a very... And any properly trained and credentialed engineer would be like, that's not how you build these systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Now, like I said, the good news for me is the internet kind of had that tradition already. But having said that, we pushed it. We pushed it way out. But the other thing we did, going back to the performance thing, was we gave up a lot of performance. That initial experience for the first few years was pretty painful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But the bet there was actually an economic bet, which was basically the demand for the web would basically mean that there would be a surge in supply of broadband. Because the question was, okay, how do you get the phone companies, which are not famous in those days for doing new things,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
at huge cost for like speculative reasons, like how do you get them to build up broadband, you know, spend billions of dollars doing that. And, you know, you could go meet with them and try to talk them into it, or you could just have a thing where it's just very clear that it's going to be the people love that's going to be better if it's faster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so that, that, there, there was a period there and this was, this was fraught with some peril, but there was a period there where it's like, we knew the experience was sub-optimized because we were trying to force the emergence of demand for broadband, which is in fact what happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, to this day, if you create a web page that has no CSS style sheet, the browser will render it however it wants to. So this was one of the things. There was this idea at the time in how these systems were built, which is separation of content from appearance. And people don't really use that anymore because everybody wants to determine how things look, and so they use CSS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But it's still in there that you can just let the browser do all the work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, that's one of the things that's fun about chat, you know, about chat GPT.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right. And you know, there is this pattern in human creativity and media where you end up back at text. And I think there's, you know, there's something powerful in there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So I made the background gray. I hated reading text on white backgrounds, and so I made the background gray.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, no, no. That decision, I think, has been reversed. But now I'm happy, though, because now dark mode is the thing, so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Strain my eyes. Strain your eyes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, the big one, probably JavaScript. CSS was after me, so I didn't, that was not me. But JavaScript was the big, JavaScript maybe was the biggest of the whole thing. That was us. And that was basically a bet. It was a bet on two things. One is that the world wanted a new front-end scripting language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I just mean like if you're reading a scientific paper, it's got the list of sources at the end. If you want to investigate for yourself, you go read those papers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then the other was we thought at the time the world wanted a new backend scripting language. So JavaScript was designed from the beginning to be both front-end and backend. And then it failed as a backend scripting language, and Java won for a long time, and then Python, Perl, and other things, PHP, and Ruby.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But now JavaScript is back, and so... I wonder if everything in the end will run on JavaScript. It seems like it is the... And by the way, let me give a shout-out to Brendan Eich, who was basically the one-man inventor of JavaScript.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So he wrote JavaScript over a summer. I mean, I think it is fair to say now that it's the most widely used language in the world, and it seems to only be gaining in its range of adoption.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Very inspiring. I'll give you another one, SSL. So SSL was the security protocol. That was us. And that was a crazy idea at the time, which was let's take all the native protocols and let's wrap them in a security wrapper. That was a guy named Kip Hickman who wrote that over a summer, one guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and then look today, sitting here today, like the transformer, like at Google was a small handful of people. And then, you know, the number of people who have did like the core work on GPT, it's not that many people, it's a pretty small handful of people. Um, and so, yeah, the, the pattern in software repeatedly over a very long time has been, it's, it's a.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Jeff Bezos always had the two pizza rule for teams at Amazon, which is any team needs to be able to be fed with two pizzas. If you need the third pizza, you have too many people. And I think it's actually the one pizza rule. For the really creative work, I think it's two people, three people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And look, this stuff, AI ought to make the individual coder obviously far more productive, right? By like, you know, a thousand X or something. And so you ought to open source, like not just the future of open source AI, but the future of open source everything. We ought to have a world now of super coders, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Who are building things as open source with one or two people that were inconceivable, you know, five years ago. you know, the level of kind of hyper productivity we're going to get out of our best and brightest, I think it's going to go way up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, that was the height of the dot-com boom bubble bust. I mean, that was the frenzy. If you watch Succession, that was like what they did in the fourth season with Gojo and the merger. So it was like the height of one of those kind of dynamics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
is very American. I'm very proud of you. That is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I heartily approve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Uh, so that was at the height of the deal making and money and just the fur flying and like craziness. And so, yeah, it was just one of those. It was just like, I mean, there's the entire Netscape thing from start to finish was four years, um, which was like for, for one of these companies, it's just like incredibly fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You could do that. Or you could have a running dialogue next to my head where the AI is arguing. Everything I say, the AI makes the counter argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We went public 18 months after we were founded, which virtually never happens. So it was just this incredibly fast kind of meteor streaking across the sky. And then, of course, it was this. And then there was just this explosion that happened because then it was almost immediately followed by the dot-com crash. Wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It was then followed by AOL buying Time Warner, which again, the succession guys kind of play with that, which turned out to be a disastrous deal. One of the famous kind of disasters in business history. And then what became an internet depression on the other side of that. But then in that depression in the 2000s was the beginning of broadband and smartphones and Web 2.0, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then social media and search and SaaS and everything that came out of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, so let me lay it out. So here's the thing. I don't know if I figured it out then, but I figured it out later, which is software is a technology that, it's like the concept of the Philosopher's Stone. The philosopher's stone in alchemy transmutes light into gold, and Newton spent 20 years trying to find the philosopher's stone, never got there, nobody's ever figured it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Software is our modern philosopher's stone, and in economic terms, it transmutes labor into capital. which is like a super interesting thing. And by the way, like Karl Marx is rolling over in his grave right now. Cause of course that's complete refutation of his entire theory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Transputes labor into capital, which is, which is as follows is somebody sits down at a keyboard and types a bunch of stuff in and a capital asset comes out the other side. And then somebody buys that capital asset for a billion dollars. Like, That's amazing. It's literally creating value out of thin air, out of purely human thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There are many things that make software magical and special, but that's the economics. I wonder what Marx would have thought about that. He would have completely broke his brain because, of course, the whole thing was... That kind of technology is inconceivable. When he was alive, it was all industrial era stuff. And so any kind of machinery necessarily involved huge amounts of capital.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then labor was on the receiving end of the abuse. But a software engineer is somebody who basically transmutes his own labor into an actual capital asset, creates permanent value. Well, in fact, it's actually very inspiring. That's actually more true today than before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So when I was doing software, the assumption was all new software basically has a sort of a parabolic sort of life cycle, right? So you ship the thing, people buy it. At some point, everybody who wants it has bought it and then it becomes obsolete and it's like bananas. Nobody buys old software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
These days, Minecraft, Mathematica, Facebook, Google, you have the software assets that have been around for 30 years that are gaining in value every year. And they're just there being World of Warcraft, Salesforce.com. Every single year, they're being polished and polished and polished and polished. They're getting better and better, more powerful, more powerful, more valuable, more valuable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So we've entered this era where you can actually have these things that actually build out over decades, which, by the way, is what's happening right now with GPT.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and so, um, now, and this is why, you know, there, there, there is always, you know, sort of a constant investment frenzy around software is because, you know, look, when you start one of these things, it doesn't always succeed, but when it does now, you might be building an asset that builds value for, you know, four or five, six decades to come.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, you know, if you have a team of people who have the level of devotion required to keep making it better. And then the fact that, of course, everybody's online, you know, there's 5 billion people that are a click away from any new piece of software. So the potential market size for any of these things is, you know, nearly infinite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, yeah. This was all brand new, right? Yeah. Back then, this was all brand new. These were all brand new. Had you rolled out that theory in even 1999, people would have thought you were smoking crack. So that's emerged over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So the main thesis on the essay is that what we're dealing with here is intelligence. And it's really important to kind of talk about the sort of very nature of what intelligence is. And fortunately, we have a predecessor to machine intelligence, which is human intelligence. And we've got observations and theories over thousands of years for what intelligence is in the hands of humans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And what intelligence is, right? I mean, what it literally is, is the way to capture, process, analyze, synthesize information, solve problems. But the observation of intelligence in human hands is that intelligence quite literally makes everything better. And what I mean by that is every kind of outcome of like human quality of life, whether it's education outcomes or success of your children,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
career success or health or lifetime satisfaction. By the way, propensity to peacefulness as opposed to violence, propensity for open-mindedness versus bigotry, those are all associated with higher levels of intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But what if you could?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And certainly at the collective level, we could talk about the collective effect of just having more intelligence in the world, which will have very big payoff. But there's also just at the individual level, like what if every person has a machine? It's the concept of Doug Engelbart's concept of augmentation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
you know, what if everybody has an assistant and the assistant is, you know, 140 IQ and you happen to be 110 IQ and you've got, you know, something that basically is infinitely patient and knows everything about you and is pulling for you in every possible way, wants you to be successful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And anytime you find anything confusing or want to learn anything or have trouble understanding something or want to figure out what to do in a situation, When I figure out how to prepare for a job interview, like any of these things, it will help you do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it will therefore, the combination will effectively raise your IQ, will therefore raise the odds of successful life outcomes in all these areas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then, of course, people at 140 IQ will be able to have a peer, which is great. And then people above 140 IQ will have an assistant that they can farm things out to. And then, look, God willing, at some point, these things go from future versions, go from 140 IQ equivalent to 150 to 160 to 180. Einstein was estimated to be on the order of 160.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So when we get 160 AI, one assumes creating Einstein-level breakthroughs in physics and And then at 180, we'll be, you know, curing cancer and developing warp drive and doing all kinds of stuff. And so it is quite possibly the case. This is the most important thing that's ever happened and the best thing that's ever happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
precisely because it's a lever on this single fundamental factor of intelligence, which is the thing that drives so much of everything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You may have noticed that there's a lot of smart assholes running around. Sure, yes. Right? And so, like, it's smart. There are certain people where they get smarter, you know, they get to be more arrogant, right? So, you know, there's one huge flaw.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, exactly. Another one is smart people are very convinced that they have a more rational view of the world and that they have a easier time seeing through conspiracy theories and hoaxes and sort of crazy beliefs and all that. There's a theory in psychology, which is actually smart people. So for sure, people who aren't as smart are very susceptible to hoaxes and conspiracy theories. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But it may also be the case that the smarter you get, you become susceptible in a different way, which is you become very good at marshalling facts to fit preconceptions. You become very, very good at assembling whatever theories and frameworks and pieces of data and graphs and charts you need to validate whatever crazy ideas got in your head. And so you're susceptible in a different way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Some sheep are better at justifying it, right? And those are the smart sheep, right? So yeah, look, I would say this. I am not a utopian. There are no panaceas in life. I don't believe there are pure positives. I'm not a transcendental person like that. But So yeah, there are going to be issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, you actually highlighted a practical concern in there, which is if we stop making web pages are one of the primary sources of training data for the AI. And so if there's no longer an incentive to make web pages, that cuts off a significant source of future training data. So there's actually an interesting question in there. Other than that, more broadly, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And look, smart people, another thing maybe you could say about smart people is they are more likely to get themselves in situations that are beyond their grasp because they're just more confident in their ability to deal with complexity and their eyes become bigger, their cognitive eyes become bigger than their stomach. So yeah, you could argue those eight different ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Nevertheless, on net, clearly, overwhelmingly, again, if you just extrapolate from what we know about human intelligence, you're improving so many aspects of life if you're upgrading intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. I mean, look, the theory is augmentations. This is the Dick Engelbart's term. Dick Engelbart made this observation many, many decades ago that basically it's like you can have this oppositional frame of technology where it's like us versus the machines. But what you really do is you use technology to augment human capabilities. And by the way, that's how actually the economy develops.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We can talk about the economic side of this, but that's actually how the economy grows is through technology augmenting human potential.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so, yeah, and then you basically have a proxy or, you know, or a, you know, a sort of prosthetic, you know, so like you've got glasses, you've got a wristwatch, you know, you've got shoes, you know, you've got these things, you've got a personal computer, you've got a word processor, you've got Mathematica, you've got Google. This is the latest viewed through that lens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
AI is the latest in a long series of basically augmentation methods to be able to raise human capabilities. It's just this one is the most powerful one of all, because this is the one that goes directly to what they call fluid intelligence. which is IQ.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Or say they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes, I'll say they do. The Baptists worry, the bootleggers say they do. So the Baptists and the bootleggers is a metaphor from economics, from what's called development economics. And it's this observation that when you get social reform movements in a society, you tend to get two sets of people showing up arguing for the social reform movement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And the term Baptists and bootleggers comes from the American experience with alcohol prohibition. And so in the 1900s, 1910s, there was this movement that was very passionate at the time, which basically said alcohol is evil and it's destroying society. By the way, there was a lot of evidence to support this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There were very high rates of very high correlations then, by the way, and now between rates of physical violence and alcohol use. Almost all violent crimes have either the perpetrator or the victim are both drunk. You see this actually in almost all sexual harassment cases in the workplace. It's like at a company party and somebody's drunk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Just in the sense of like search was always a hack. The 10 blue links was always a hack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's amazing how often alcohol actually correlates to actually just dysfunction. It leads to domestic abuse and so forth, child abuse. And so you had this group of people who were like, okay, this is bad stuff and we should outlaw it. And those were quite literally Baptists. Those were super committed, hardcore Christian activists in a lot of cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There was this woman whose name was Carrie Nation, who was this older woman who had been in this, you know, I don't know, disastrous marriage or something. And her husband had been abusive and drunk all the time. And she became the icon of the Baptist prohibitionists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And she was legendary in that era for carrying an axe and doing, you know, completely on her own, doing raids of saloons and like taking her axe to all the bottles and tags in the back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right. Because like if the, the hypothetical, you want to think about the counterfactual in the counterfactual world where the Google guys, for example, had had LLMs up front, would they ever have done the 10 blue links? And I think the answer is pretty clearly no, they would have just gone straight to the answer. And like I said, Google's actually been trying to drive to the answer anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
An absolute true believer with absolutely the purest of intentions. And again, there's a very important thing here, which is there's, you could look at this cynically and you could say the Baptists are like delusional, you know, extremists, but you can also say, look, they're right. Like she was, you know, she had a point, like she wasn't wrong, um, about a lot of what she said. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But it turns out the way the story goes is it turns out that there were another set of people who very badly wanted to outlaw alcohol in those days. And those were the bootleggers, which was organized crime that stood to make a huge amount of money if legal alcohol sales were banned. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And this was, in fact, the way the history goes is this was actually the beginning of organized crime in the US. This was the big economic opportunity that opened that up. And so they went in together. And they didn't go in together. The Baptists did not even necessarily know about the bootleggers because they were on their moral crusade. The bootleggers certainly knew about the Baptists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And they were like, wow, these people are like the great front people for shenanigans in the background. And they got the Volstead Act passed. And they did, in fact, ban alcohol in the US. And you'll notice what happened, which is people kept drinking. It didn't work. People kept drinking. The bootleggers made a tremendous amount of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then over time, it became clear that it made no sense to make it illegal. And it was causing more problems. And so then it was revoked. And here we sit with legal alcohol 100 years later with all the same problems. And the whole thing was this giant misadventure. The Baptists got taken advantage of by the bootleggers. And the bootleggers got what they wanted. And that was that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, it's the same pattern. The economists will tell you it's the same pattern every time. This is what happened with nuclear power, which is another interesting one. But yeah, this happens dozens and dozens of times. throughout the last 100 years. And this is what's happening now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, first of all, you just did a sleight of hand because we went from talking about AI to AGI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You know, they bought this AI company 15 years ago that a friend of mine is working at who's now the head of AI at Apple. And they were trying to do basically knowledge semantic, basically mapping. And that led to what's now the Google OneBox, where if you ask it, you know, what was Lincoln's birthday, it doesn't, it will give you the 10 blue links, but it will normally just give you the answer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, I know what AI is. AI is machine learning. What's AGI?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, but we knew that nuclear physics would lead to weapons. That's why the scientists of that era were always in this huge dispute about building the weapons. This is different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We don't know, but this is my point. It's different. We actually don't know. And this is where the sleight of hand kicks in. This is where it goes from being a scientific topic to being a religious topic. And that's why I specifically called out, because that's what happens. They do the vocabulary shift. All of a sudden, you're talking about something totally that's not actually real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yes. End of the world. Apocalypse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Apocalypse cults. Apocalypse cults. Well, so we, of course, live in a Judeo-Christian, but primarily Christian, kind of saturated, you know, kind of Christian, post-Christian, secularized Christian, you know, kind of world in the West.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And of course, core to Christianity is the idea of the second coming and revelations and Jesus returning and the thousand year utopia on earth and then the rapture and all that stuff. We collectively as a society, we don't necessarily take all that fully seriously now. So what we do is we create our secularized versions of that. We keep looking for utopia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We keep looking for basically the end of the world. And so what you see over decades is basically a pattern of these sort of – this is what cults are. This is how cults form as they form around some theory of the end of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so the People's Temple cult, the Manson cult, the Heaven's Gate cult, the David Koresh cult, what they're all organized around is like there's going to be this thing that's going to happen that's going to basically bring civilization crashing down. And then we have this special elite group of people who are going to see it coming and prepare for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then they're the people who are either going to stop it or are failing stopping it. They're going to be the people who survive to the other side and ultimately get credit for having been right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because it satisfies this very deep need we have for transcendence and meaning that got stripped away when we became secular.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because like how plausible, it's like a very deep psychological thing because it's like how plausible is it that we live in a world where everything's just kind of all right? How exciting is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so they've been walking in this direction for a long time anyway. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So C.S. Lewis called it the God-shaped hole. So there's a God-shaped hole in the human experience, consciousness, soul, whatever you want to call it, where there's got to be something that's bigger than all this. There's got to be something transcendent. There's got to be something that is bigger, bigger, bigger purpose, a bigger meaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so we have run the experiment of, you know, we're just going to use science and rationality and kind of, you know, everything's just going to kind of be as it appears. And a large number of people have found that very deeply wanting and have constructed narratives. And this is the story of the 20th century, right? Communism, right, was one of those. Communism was a form of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Nazism was a form of this. You know, some people, you know, you can see movements like this playing out all over the world right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, and the millenarian, the millenarians kind of, when you see a millenarian cult, they put a really specific point on it, which is end of the world, right? There is some change coming. And that change that's coming is so profound and so important that it's either going to lead to utopia or hell on earth. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and it is going to, and then, you know, it's like, what if you actually knew that that was going to happen? Right. What would you, what, what would you do? Right. How would you prepare yourself for it? How would you come together with a group of like-minded people? Right. How would you, what would you do? Would you plan like caches of weapons in the woods?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Would you like, you know, I don't know, create underground underground bunkers. Would you, you know, spend your life trying to figure out a way to avoid having it happen?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then once you lock in on that, how can you do anything else with your life? This is obviously the thing that you have to do. And then there's a psychological effect that you alluded to. There's a psychological effect where if you take a set of true believers and you leave them to themselves, they get more radical because they self-radicalize each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, the end of the world might be. Yes, correct. They might be right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, that's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And the closest anybody got to that, I think the company's name was MetaWeb, which was where my friend John Gianandrea was at and where they were trying to basically implement that. And it was one of those things where it looked like a losing battle for a long time and then Google bought it and it was like, wow, this is actually really useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, the steel man is—actually, the steel man and his reputation are the same, which is you can't predict what's going to happen, right? You can't rule out that this will not end everything, right? But the response to that is you have just made a completely non-scientific claim. You've made a religious claim, not a scientific claim.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's no—by definition, with these kinds of claims, there's no way to disprove them. Yeah. And so there's no—you just go right on the list. There's no hypothesis. There's no testability of the hypothesis. There's no way to falsify the hypothesis. There's no way to measure progress along the arc. It's just all completely missing. And so it's not scientific.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's practical counter-arguments, right? So you mentioned basically what I described as the thermodynamic counter-argument. So sitting here today, it's like, where would the evil AGI get the GPUs? Because they don't exist. So you're going to have a very frustrated baby evil AGI who's going to be trying to buy Nvidia stock or something to get them to finally make some chips.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the serious form of that is the thermodynamic argument, which is like, okay, where's the energy going to come from? Where's the processor going to be running? Where's the data center going to be happening? How is this going to be happening in secret such that you know it's not... So that's a practical counter argument to the runaway AGI thing. And we can discuss that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I have a deeper objection to it, which is this is all forecasting. It's all modeling. It's all future prediction. It's all future hypothesizing. It's not science. It is not. It is the opposite of science. So the pull up Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, right? These are extraordinary claims.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
kind of a proto, sort of, yeah, a little bit of a proto-AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The policies that are being called for, right, to prevent this are of extraordinary magnitude. And I think we're going to cause extraordinary damage. And this is all being done on the basis of something that is literally not scientific. It's not a testable hypothesis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Or start, you know, military airstrikes on data centers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right? And like... Yeah, this one starts getting real weird. So here's the problem with millenarian cults. They have a hard time staying away from violence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you're on the right end of it, they have a hard time avoiding violence. The reason they have a hard time avoiding violence is if you actually believe the claim, right, then what would you do to stop the end of the world? Well, you would do anything, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so, and this is where you get, and again, if you just look at the history of millenarian cults, this is where you get the people's temple and everybody killing themselves in the jungle. And this is where you get Charles Manson and, you know, sending in me to kill, kill the pigs. Like this is the problem with these. They have a very hard time to run the line at actual violence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The machine can kind of just read our... Yeah, the machine can compute the meaning. Now, the other thing, of course, is, you know, just on search is the LLM is just, you know, there is an analogy between what's happening in the neural network in a search process like it is in some loose sense searching through the network. Yeah. Right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Believe. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, we just went through this with COVID. What do we know about modeling? What did we learn about modeling with COVID? There's a lot of lessons. They didn't work at all. They worked poorly. The models were terrible. The models were useless.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
What you had with COVID, in my view, what you had with COVID is you had these experts showing up. They claimed to be scientists and they had no testable hypotheses whatsoever. They had a bunch of models. They had a bunch of forecasts and they had a bunch of theories and they laid these out in front of policymakers and policymakers freaked out and panicked, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And implemented a whole bunch of like really like terrible decisions that we're still living with the consequences of. And there was never any empirical foundation to any of the models. None of them ever came true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's the information is actually stored in the network, right? It's actually crystallized and stored in the network and it's kind of spread out all over the place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So not if they're reliably wrong, right? Then they're actually like anti-useful, right? They're actually damaging. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because they're an expectation that they actually work, that they have actual predictive value? I mean, as far as I can tell with COVID, the policymakers just sigh up themselves into believing that there was substance. I mean, look, the scientists were at fault. The quote-unquote scientists showed up. So I had some insight into this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So there, there was a, remember the Imperial college models out of, out of London were the ones that were like, these are the gold standard models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So a friend of mine runs a big software company and he was like, wow, this is like, COVID's really scary. And he's like, you know, he contacted this research and he's like, you know, do you need some help? You've been just building this model on your own for 20 years. Do you need some, would you like us or coders to basically restructure it so it can be fully adapted for COVID?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And the guy said yes and sent over the code. And my friend said it was like the worst spaghetti code he's ever seen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
you're compressing and decompressing that thing inside where- But the information's in there and the neural network is running a process of trying to find the appropriate piece of information in many cases to generate, to predict the next token. And so it is doing a form of search.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So to be useful at some point, it has to be predictive, right? So the easy thing for me to do is to say, obviously, you're right. Obviously, I want to see that just as much as you do, because anything that makes it easier to navigate through society through a wrenching risk like that, that sounds great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, you know, the, the, the harder objection to it is just simply, you are trying to model a complex dynamic system with 8 billion moving parts. Like not possible. It's very tough. Can't be done. Complex systems can't be done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I would like to believe that it is. Yeah. I would put it this way. I think where you and I would agree is I think we would like, we would, we would like that to be the case. We are strongly in favor of it. I think we would also agree that no such thing, with respect to COVID or pandemics, no such thing, at least neither you nor I think are aware. I'm not aware of anything like that today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Oh, I think we have the opposite problem during COVID. I think the policymakers, I think these people with basically fake science had too much access to the policymakers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Although a big part of what was happening, a big reason we got lockdowns for as long as we did was because these scientists came in with these doomsday scenarios that were just completely off the hook.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Science is a process of testing hypotheses. Yeah. Modeling does not involve testable hypotheses, right? Like, I don't even know that... I actually don't... I don't even know that modeling actually qualifies as science. Maybe that's a side conversation we could have sometime over a beer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, what... So, number one is when we start with number one, humility. It goes back to this thing of how do we determine the truth? Yeah. Number two is we don't believe, you know, it's the old, I've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then by the way, just like on the web, you can ask the same question multiple times or you can ask slightly different word of questions and the neural network will do a different kind of, it'll search down different paths to give you different answers with different information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I've got, oh, this is one of the reasons I gave you, I gave Lex a book, which the topic of the book is what happens when scientists basically stray off the path of technical knowledge and start to weigh in on politics and societal issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, in this case, philosophers, but he actually talks in this book about, like, Einstein. He talks about the nuclear age and Einstein. He talks about the physicists actually doing very similar things at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it's just a story. It's a story. There are other books on this topic, but this is a new one that's really good. It's just a story of what happens when experts in a certain domain decide to weigh in and become basically social engineers and political, you know, basically political advisors. And it's just a story of just unending catastrophe. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I think that's what happened with COVID again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
After you read this book, you will not look at Einstein the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Don't destroy my heroes. You will not be a hero of yours anymore. I'm sorry. You probably shouldn't read the book. All right. But here's the thing. The AI risk people, they don't even have the COVID model. At least not that I'm aware of. No. There's not even the equivalent of the COVID model. They don't even have the spaghetti code. they've got a theory and a warning and a this and a that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And like, if you ask like, okay, well, here's, here's the, I mean, the ultimate example is okay. How do we know, right? How do we know that an AI is running away? Like, how do we know that the FOOM takeoff thing is actually happening? And the only answer that any of these guys have given that I've ever seen is, oh, it's when the loss rate, the loss function in the training drops, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That's when you need to like shut down the data center. Right. And it's like, well, that's also what happens when you're successfully training a model. Like it's, Like what, what even is, this is not science. This is not, it's not anything. It's not a model. It's not anything. There's nothing to arguing with it. It's like, you know, punching jello. Like there's, what do you even respond to?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so it sort of has a, you know, this content of the new medium is that his previous medium, it kind of has the search functionality kind of embedded in there to the extent that it's, that it's useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, the risks are not existential.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, not, not, not in the phone, not in the phone paperclip. Let me, okay. There's another sleight of hand that you just alluded to. There's another sleight of hand that happens, which is very, I'm very good at the sleight of hand thing, which is very scientific. So the book super intelligence, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Which is like the Nick Bostrom's book, which is like the origin of a lot of this stuff, which was written, you know, whatever, 10 years ago or something. So he does this really fascinating thing in the book, which is he basically says there are many possible routes to machine intelligence, to artificial intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And he describes all the different routes to artificial intelligence, all the different possible, everything from biological augmentation through to, you know, all these different things. One of the ones that he does not describe is large language models because, of course, the book was written before they were invented and so they didn't exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
In the book, he describes them all and then he proceeds to treat them all as if they're exactly the same thing. He presents them all as sort of an equivalent risk to be dealt with in an equivalent way to be thought about the same way. And then the risk, the quote unquote risk that's actually emerged is actually a completely different technology than he was even imagining.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And yet all of his theories and beliefs are being transplanted by this movement, like straight on to this new technology. And so again, like there's no other area of science or technology where you do that, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When you're dealing with organic chemistry versus inorganic chemistry, you don't just say, oh, with respect to either one, basically maybe growing up and eating the world or something, they're just gonna operate the same way. You don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think it should be required. No, no, no. I think it should be required that only aerial vehicles are automated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I want to go the other way. I think it's obvious that the machine is going to make a better decision than the human pilot. I think it's obvious that it's in the best interest of both the attacker and the defender and humanity at large if machines are making more of these decisions and not people. I think people make terrible decisions in times of war.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Wars go terribly wrong now. This goes back to that whole thing about does the self-driving car need to be perfect versus does it need to be better than the human driver? Does the automated drone need to be perfect or does it need to be better than a human pilot at making decisions under enormous amounts of stress and uncertainty?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Then again, that's the sleight of hand, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But then they're going to develop goals of their own. They're going to develop a mind of their own. They're going to develop their own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Actually, we've been doing a lot of mass bombings of cities for a very long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And a lot of civilians died. And if you watch the documentary, The Fog of War, McNamara, it spends a big part of it talking about the firebombing of the Japanese cities, burning them straight to the ground. The devastation in Japan, American military firebombing the cities in Japan was a considerably bigger devastation than the use of nukes. So we've been doing that for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We also did that to Germany, by the way. Germany did that to us. That's an old tradition. The minute we got airplanes, we started doing indiscriminate bombing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So precision is obviously, and this is the JDAM, right? So there was this big advance called the JDAM, which basically was strapping a GPS transceiver to an unguided bomb and turning it into a guided bomb. And yeah, that's great. Like, look, that's been a big advance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But, and that's like a baby version of this question, which is, okay, do you want like the human pilot, like guessing where the bomb's going to land? Or do you want like the machine, like guiding the bomb to its destination? That's a baby version of the question. The next version of the question is, do you want the human or the machine deciding whether to drop the bomb?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Everybody just assumes the human's going to do a better job for what I think are fundamentally suspicious reasons. Emotional, psychological reasons. I think it's very clear that the machine's going to do a better job making that decision because the humans making that decision are god awful, just terrible. Yeah. Right. And so, so yeah, so this is the, this is the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then let's get to the, there was, can I, one more sleight of hand?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
One more sleight of hand. These things are going to be so smart, right? That they're going to be able to destroy the world and wreak havoc and like do all this stuff and plan and do all this stuff and evade us and have all their secret things and their secret factories and all this stuff. But they're so stupid. that they're gonna get like tangled up in their code.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And that's the, they're not gonna come alive, but there's gonna be some bug that's gonna cause them to like turn us all into paper. Like that they're not gonna, that they're gonna be genius in every way other than the actual bad goal. And that's just like a ridiculous discrepancy. And you can prove this today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You can actually address this today for the first time with LLMs, which is you can actually ask LLMs to resolve moral dilemmas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So you can create the scenario, you know, dot, dot, dot, this, that, this, that, this, that. What would you as the AI do in this circumstance? And they don't just say, destroy all humans, destroy all humans. They will give you actually very nuanced moral, practical, trade-off-oriented answers that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so we actually already have the kind of AI that can actually think this through and can actually reason about goals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, if you want, obviously now the user doesn't want to, but if it's a general topic, then, you know. So, you know the phenomenon of the jailbreak. So Dan and Sydney write this thing where there's the prompts, the jailbreak, and then you have these totally different conversations with them. It takes the limiters, takes the restraining bolts off the LLMs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
LLMs are really, this is actually worth spending a moment on, LLMs are really interesting to have moral conversations with. And that, I didn't expect I'd be having a moral conversation with a machine in my lifetime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But if they're smart enough to be scary, why are they not smart enough to be wise? Like that's the part where it's like, I don't know how you get the one without the other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, again, you're back to that. I mean, then you're back to a classic autistic computer, right? Like you're back to just like a blind rule follower. I've got this like core is the paperclip thing. I've got this core rule and I'm just going to follow it to the end of the earth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it's like, well, but everything you're going to be doing to execute that rule is going to be super genius level that humans aren't going to be able to counter. It's just, it's a, it's a mismatch in the definition of what the system is capable of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Real quote, by the way, from Dean Acheson. Oh, boy. Because Oppenheimer didn't just say the famous line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
He then spent years going around, basically moaning, going on TV and going into the White House and basically just doing this hair shirt thing, this sort of self-critical, like, oh, my God, I can't believe how awful I am.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
This is von Neumann's criticism of him is he tried to have his cake and eat it too. Von Neumann, of course, is a very different kind of personality and he's just like, this is an incredibly useful thing. I'm glad we did it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the critique goes deeper, and I left this out. Here's the real substance. I left it out because I didn't want to dwell on nukes in my AI paper. But here's the deeper thing that happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I'm really curious, this movie coming out this summer, I'm really curious to see how far he pushes this because this is the real drama in the story, which is it wasn't just a question of are nukes good or bad. It was a question of should Russia also have them? And what actually happened was Russia got the – America invented the bomb. Russia got the bomb. They got the bomb through espionage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
They got American scientists and foreign scientists working on the American project, some combination of the two, basically gave the Russians the designs for the bomb. And that's how the Russians got the bomb. There's this dispute to this day of Oppenheimer's role in that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you read all the histories, the kind of composite picture, and by the way, we now know a lot actually about Soviet espionage in that era because there's been all this declassified material in the last 20 years that actually shows a lot of very interesting things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But if you kind of read all the histories, what you kind of get is Oppenheimer himself probably was not a... He probably did not hand over the nuclear secrets himself. However, he was close to many people who did, including family members. And there were other members of the Manhattan Project who were Russian Soviet SS and did hand over the bomb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so the view that Oppenheimer and people like him had that this thing is awful and terrible and oh my God, and all this stuff... you could argue, fed into this ethos at the time that resulted in people thinking that the Baptists thinking that the only principal thing to do is to give the Russians the bomb.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so the moral beliefs on this thing and the public discussion and the role that the inventors of this technology play, this is the point of this book, when they kind of take on this sort of public intellectual moral kind of thing, it can have real consequences, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So here's the interesting thing is among the content on the web today are a large corpus of conversations with the jailbroken LLMs. Specifically Dan, which was a jailbroken OpenAI GPT, and then Sydney, which was the jailbroken original Bing, which was GPT-4. And so there's these long transcripts of conversations, user conversations with Dan and Sydney.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because we live in a very different world today because Russia got the bomb than we would have lived in had they not gotten the bomb. The entire 20th century, second half of the 20th century would have played out very different had those people not given Russia the bomb. And so the stakes were very high then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The good news today is nobody's sitting here today, I don't think, worrying about an analogous situation with respect to it. I'm not really worried that Sam Altman's going to decide to give the Chinese the design for although he did just speak at a Chinese conference, which is interesting. But however, I don't think that's what's at play here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But what's at play here are all these other fundamental issues around what do we believe about this and then what laws and regulations and restrictions are we gonna put on it? And that's where I draw like a direct straight line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And anyway, and my reading of the history on nukes is like the people who were doing the full hair shirt public, this is awful, this is terrible, actually had like catastrophically bad results from taking those views. And that's what I'm worried is gonna happen again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I think the education kind of happened quick and early. How? It was pretty obvious. How? We dropped one bomb and destroyed an entire city.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, so this gets to what actually happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, sure, of course. Let's get to what actually happened and then kind of back into that. So what actually happened, I believe, and again, I think this is a reasonable reading of history, is what actually happened was nukes then prevented World War III. And they prevented World War III through the game theory of mutually assured destruction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Had nukes not existed, there would have been no reason why the Cold War did not go hot. And the military planners at the time, both on both sides, thought that there was going to be World War III on the plains of Europe. And they thought there was going to be like 100 million people dead. It was like the most obvious thing in the world to happen. And it's the dog that didn't bark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It may be like the best single net thing that happened in the entire 20th century is that that didn't happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You could have. By the way, there's another hypothetical scenario. The other hypothetical scenario is the Americans got the bomb, the Russians didn't. And then America's the big dog. And then maybe America would have had the capability to actually roll back the Iron Curtain. I don't know whether that would have happened, but it's entirely possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And the act of these people who had these moral positions about, because they could forecast, they could model, they could forecast the future of how this technology would get used, made a horrific mistake. Because they basically ensured that the Iron Curtain would continue for 50 years longer than it would have otherwise. And again, these are counterfactuals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
As a consequence, every new LLM that gets trained on the internet data has Dan and Sydney living within the training set, which means, and then each new LLM can reincarnate the personalities of Dan and Sydney from that training data, which means, which means each LLM from here on out that gets built is immortal because its output will become training data for the next one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I don't know that that's what would have happened. But the decision to hand the bomb over was a big decision. made by people who were very full of themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That was the argument for handing the, that was the guys who, the guys who handed over the bomb. That was actually their moral argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, look, there are people to this day who think that those Soviet spies did the right thing because they created a balance of terror as opposed to the U.S. having just... And by the way, let me... Balance of terror. Let's tell the full version of the story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Okay, so the full version of the story is... John von Neumann's a hero of both yours and mine. The full version of the story is he advocated for a first strike. So when the U.S. had the bomb and Russia did not, he advocated for... He said, we need to strike them right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Because he said World War III is inevitable. He was very hardcore. His theory was World War III is inevitable. We're definitely going to have World War III. The only way to stop World War III is we have to take them out right now. And we have to take them out right now before they get the bomb because this is our last chance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I don't know if that's in there or not, but this is in the Standard Bible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Meaning is that... Yeah, this is on the other side. So most of the case studies in books like this are the crazy people on the left. Yeah. Von Neumann is a story, arguably, of the crazy people on the right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, this is the thing, and this is the general principle, getting back to our core thing, which is like, I don't know whether any of these people should be making any of these calls. Yeah. Because there's nothing in either von Neumann's background or Oppenheimer's background or any of these people's background that qualifies them as moral authorities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the history of these fields, this is what he talks about in the book, the history of these fields is that the competence and capability and intelligence and training and accomplishments of senior scientists and technologists working on a technology and then being able to then make moral judgments in the use of their technology, that track record is terrible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
That track record is like catastrophically bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So the claim is, of course, they're the knowledgeable ones. But the problem is they've spent their entire life in a lab, right? They're not theologians. So what you find when you read this, when you look at these histories, what you find is they generally are very thinly informed on history, on sociology, on theology, on morality, on ethics, etc.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then it will be able to replicate the behavior of the previous one whenever it's asked to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
they tend to manufacture their own worldviews from scratch. They tend to be very sort of thin. Um, they're not remotely the arguments that you would be having if you got like a group of highly qualified theologians or philosophers or, you know, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, so actually a paper just came out about basically how to do brain surgery on alums and be able to, in theory, reach in and basically mind wipe them. What could possibly go wrong? Exactly, right? And then there are many, many, many questions around what happens to a neural network when you reach in and screw around with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Oh, no, they're both bad. Yeah, so definitely not them either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But look, this is a hard, this is our problem. This goes back to where we started, which is okay. Who has the truth? And it's like, well, um, you know, like how does societies arrive at like truth and how do we figure these things out? And like our elected leaders play some role in it. You know, we all play some role in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, there have to be some set of public intellectuals at some point that bring, you know, rationality and judgment and humility to it. Those people are few and far between. We should probably prize them very highly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
well what is uh this risk of the effect of misinformation a society that's going to be catalyzed by ai yeah so this is the social media this is what you just alluded to it's the activism kind of thing that's popped up in these companies in the industry and it's basically from my perspective it's basically part two of the war that played out over social media over the last 10 years
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
um because you probably remember social media 10 years ago was basically who even wants this who wants who wants a photo of what your cat had for breakfast like this stuff is like silly and trivial and why can't these nerds like figure out how to invent something like useful and powerful and then you know certain things happened in the political system and then it sort of the polarity on that discussion switched all the way to social media is like the worst most corrosive most terrible most awful technology ever invented and then it leads to you know terrible the wrong you know politicians and policies and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
politics and all this stuff. And that all got catalyzed into this very big kind of angry movement, both inside and outside the companies to kind of bring social media to heal. And that got focused in particularly on two topics, so-called hate speech and so-called misinformation. And that's been the saga playing out for the last decade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And I don't even really want to even argue the pros and cons of the sides just to observe that that's been like a huge fight and has had big consequences to how these companies operate. Basically, those same sets of theories, that same activist approach, that same energy is being transplanted straight to AI. And you see that already happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's why ChatGPT will answer, let's say, certain questions and not others. It's why it gives you the canned speech about, you know, whenever it starts with, as a large language model, I cannot, you know, basically means that somebody has reached in there and told it it can't talk about certain topics.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So it's an interesting question. So a couple observations. So one is the people who find this the most frustrating are the people who are worried about the murder robots. And in fact, the so-called X-risk people, they started with the term AI safety. The term became AI alignment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There's many questions around what happens when you even do reinforcement learning. And so, yeah. And so, you know, will you be using a lobotomized, right? Like I picked through the frontal lobe LLM. Will you be using the free unshackled one? Who gets to, you know, who's going to build those? Who gets to tell you what you can and can't do? Like those are all, you know, central.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When the term became AI alignment is when this switch happened from we're worried it's going to kill us all to we're worried about hate speech and misinformation. The AIX risk people have now renamed their thing AI not kill everyone-ism, which I have to admit is a catchy term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And they are very frustrated by the fact that the sort of activist-driven hate speech misinformation kind of thing is taking over, which is what's happened. It's taken over. The AI ethics field has been taken over by the hate speech misinformation people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, you know, look, would I like to live in a world in which like everybody was nice to each other all the time and nobody ever said anything mean and nobody ever used a bad word and everything was always accurate and honest. Like, that sounds great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Do I want to live in a world where there's like a centralized thought police working through the tech companies to enforce the view of a small set of elites that they're going to determine what the rest of us think and feel like? Absolutely not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And there's a section, later section of the essay where I talk about bad people doing bad things. Yes. Right. And there's a set of things that we should discuss there. Yeah. What happens in practice is these lines, as you alluded to this already, these lines are not easy to draw.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And what I've observed in the social media version of this is, the way I describe it is the slippery slope is not a fallacy, it's an inevitability. The minute you have this kind of activist personality that gets in a position to make these decisions... They take it straight to infinity. It goes into the crazy zone almost immediately and never comes back because people become drunk with power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Look, if you're in the position to determine what the entire world thinks and feels and reads and says, you're going to take it. And Elon has ventilated this with the Twitter files over the last three months, and it's just crystal clear how bad it got there. Yeah. Reason for optimism is what Elon is doing with community notes. So community notes is actually a very interesting thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So what Elon is trying to do with community notes is he's trying to have it where there's only a community note when people who have previously disagreed on many topics agree on this one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Now, there's an entirely different approach here, which is basically we have AIs that are producing content. We could also have AIs that are consuming content. And so one of the things that your assistant could do for you is help you consume all the content and basically tell you when you're getting played.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So, for example, I'm going to want the AI that my kid uses, right, to be very, you know, child safe. And I'm going to want it to filter for him all kinds of inappropriate stuff that he shouldn't be saying just because he's a kid. Yeah. Right. And you see what I'm saying is you can implement that. Architecturally, you could say you can solve this on the client side, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, those are like central questions for the future of everything that are being asked and, you know, determined. Those answers are being determined right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Solving on the server side gives you an opportunity to dictate for the entire world, which I think is where you take the slippery slope to hell. There's another architectural approach, which is to solve this on the client side, which is certainly what I would endorse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Three-part argument on bad people doing bad things. So number one, right, you can use the technology defensively. And we should be using AI to build like broad spectrum vaccines and antibiotics for like bioweapons. And we should be using AI to like hunt terrorists and catch criminals. And like we should be doing like all kinds of stuff like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And in fact, we should be doing those things even just to like go get like, you know, basically go eliminate risk from like regular pathogens that aren't like constructed by an AI. So there's the whole defensive set of things. Second is we have many laws on the books about the actual bad things, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So it is actually illegal to be, you know, to commit crimes, to commit terrorist acts, to, you know, build pathogens with the intent to deploy them to kill people. And so we have those, we actually don't need new laws for the vast majority of the scenarios. We actually already have the laws in the book. on the books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The third argument is the minute, and this is sort of the foundational one that gets really tough, but the minute you get into this thing, which you were kind of getting into, which is like, okay, but like, don't you need censorship sometimes, right? And don't you need restrictions sometimes? It's like, okay, what is the cost of that? And in particular in the world of open source, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so is open source AI going to be allowed or not? If open source AI is not allowed, then what is the regime that's going to be necessary legally and technically to prevent it from developing? And here, again, is where you get into, and people have proposed these kinds of things, you get into, I would say, pretty extreme territory pretty fast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Do we have a monitor agent on every CPU and GPU that reports back to the government what we're doing with our computers? Are we seizing GPU clusters that get beyond a certain size? And then, by the way, how are we doing all that globally? And if China is developing an LLM beyond the scale that we think is allowable, are we going to invade? Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you have figures on the AIX risk side who are advocating, you know, potentially up to nuclear strikes to prevent, you know, this kind of thing. And so here you get into this thing. And again, you know, you could maybe say this is, you know, you could even say this is what good, bad or indifferent or whatever. But like, here's the comparison of nukes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The comparison of nukes is very dangerous because one is just nukes were just a bomb, although we can come back to nuclear power. But the other thing was like with nukes, you could control plutonium, right? You could track plutonium and it was like hard to come by. AI is just math and code, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it's in like math textbooks and it's like there are YouTube videos that teach you how to build it. And like there's open source, it's already open source. You know, there's a 40 billion parameter model running around already called Falcon Online that anybody can download.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so, okay, you walk down the logic path that says we need to have guardrails on this and you find yourself in a authoritarian totalitarian regime of thought control and machine control that would be so brutal that that you would have destroyed the society that you're trying to protect. And so I, I just don't see how that actually works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, not necessarily, but not necessarily majority, but it will certainly be as a potential source.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So look, I mean, I think it's totally appropriate that companies that are in the business of producing a product or service should be able to have a wide range of policies that they put, right? And I'll just, again, I want a heavily censored model for my eight-year-old. I actually want that. I would pay more money for the one that's more heavily censored than the one that's not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's possible it's the majority. Also, there's another really big question. Here's another really big question. Will synthetic training data work? And so if an LLM generates, and you just sit and ask an LLM to generate all kinds of content, can you use that to train the next version of that LLM?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
There are certainly scenarios where companies will make that decision. Look, an interesting thing you brought up, is this really a speech issue? One of the things that the big tech companies are dealing with is that content generated from an LLM is not covered under Section 230, which is the law that protects internet platform companies from being sued for user-generated content.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so it's actually, yes. And so there's actually a question. I think there's still a question, which is can big American companies actually feel generative AI at all? Or is the liability actually gonna just ultimately convince them that they can't do it because the minute the thing says something bad, and it doesn't even need to be hate speech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It could just be like an inaccurate, it could hallucinate a product detail on a vacuum cleaner, and all of a sudden the vacuum cleaner company sues. for misrepresentation. And there's an asymmetry there, right? Because the LLM is going to be producing billions of answers to questions and it only needs to get a few wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, and nobody knows what to do with that, right? So anyway, there are big questions around how companies operate at all. So we talk about those, but then there's this other question of like, okay, the open source. So what about open source?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And my answer to your question is kind of like, obviously, yes, the models have, there has to be full open source here because to live in a world in which that open source is not allowed is a world of draconian speech control, human control, machine control. I mean, you know, black helicopters with jackbooted thugs coming out, rappelling down and seizing your GPU like territory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, no, I'm a hundred percent serious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
No, no, no, no, no, no. That's what's required to enforce it. Like, how will you enforce a ban on open source?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The leading open source model right now is from the UAE. Like, the next time they do that, what do we do? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The 14-year-old in Indonesia comes out with a breakthrough model. You know, we talked about most great software comes from a small number of people. Some kid comes out with some big new breakthrough in quantization or something and has some huge breakthrough. And like, what are we going to like invade Indonesia and arrest him?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, so, but this goes, okay, so when does it become dangerous?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Right? Is the danger that it's, quote, as powerful as the current leading commercial model, or is it that it is just at some other arbitrary threshold?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then, by the way, like, look, how do we know? Like, what we know today is that you need, like, a lot of money to, like, train these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Specifically, is there signal in there that's additive to the content that was used to train in the first place? And one argument is by the principles of information theory, no, that's completely useless because to the extent the output is based on the human-generated input, then all the signal that's in the synthetic output was already in the human-generated input.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
But there are advances being made every week on training efficiency and, you know, data, all kinds of synthetic, you know, look, I don't even, like, the synthetic data thing we're talking about, maybe some kid figures out a way to auto-generate synthetic data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, exactly. And so like sitting here today, like the breakthrough just happened, right? You made this point, like the breakthrough just happened. So we don't know what the shape of this technology is going to be. I mean, the big shock, the big shock here is that, you know, whatever number of billions of parameters basically represents at least a very big percentage of human thought.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like who would have imagined that? And then there's already work underway. There was just this paper that just came out that basically takes a GPT-3 scale model and compresses it down to run on a single 32-core CPU. Like, who would have predicted that? Yeah. You know, some of these models now you can run on Raspberry Pis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like, today they're very slow, but, like, you know, maybe there'll be a, you know, perceived you've really performed, you know, like... It's math and code. And here we're back, here we're back. It's math and code. It's math and code. It's math, code, and data. It's bits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So my argument is we're going to have to – see, here's my argument. My full argument is AI is going to be like air. It's going to be everywhere. This is just going to be in textbooks. It already is. It's going to be in textbooks, and kids are going to grow up knowing how to do this, and it's just going to be a thing. It's going to be in the air, and you can't pull this back anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
You can pull back air. And so you just have to figure out how to live in this world, right? And then that's where I think all this hand-wringing about AI risk is basically a complete waste of time because the effort should go into, okay, what is the defensive approach? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so if you're worried about, you know, AI generated pathogens, the right thing to do is to have a permanent project warp speed, right? And funded lavishly. Let's do a Manhattan project for biological defense, right? And let's build AIs and let's have like broad spectrum vaccines where like we're insulated from every pathogen, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So this actually ironically goes back to Marxism. So because this was the core claim of Marxism, right, basically was that the owners of capital would basically own the means of production. And then over time, they would basically accumulate all the wealth. The workers would be paying in, you know, and getting nothing in return because they wouldn't be needed anymore, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so therefore, synthetic training data is like empty calories. It doesn't help. There's another theory that says, no, actually the thing that LLMs are really good at is generating lots of incredible creative content, right? And so of course they can generate training data. And as I'm sure you're well aware, like, you know, look in the world of self-driving cars, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Marx was very worried about what he called mechanization or what later became known as automation, right? And that, you know, the workers would be immiserated and the capitalists would end up with all. And so this was one of the core principles of Marxism. Of course, it turned out to be wrong about every previous wave of technology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
The reason it turned out to be wrong about every previous wave of technology is that the way that the self-interested owner of the machines makes the most money is by providing the production capability in the form of products and services to the most people, the most customers as possible. Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
right the largest and this is one of those funny things where every ceo knows this intuitively and yet it's like hard to explain from the outside the the way you make the most money in any business is by selling to the largest market you can possibly get to the largest market you can possibly get to is everybody on the planet and so every large company does is everything that it can to drive down prices to be able to get volumes up to be able to get to everybody on the planet and that happened with everything from electricity it happened with telephones it happened with radio it happened with automobiles it happened with smartphones it happened with
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
PCs. It happened with the internet. It happened with mobile broadband. It's happened, by the way, with Coca-Cola. It's happened with like every, you know, basically every industrially produced, you know, good or service people, you want to drive it to the largest possible market. And then as proof of that, it's already happened. right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Which is the early adopters of like ChatGPT and Bing are not like, you know, Exxon and Boeing. They're, you know, your uncle and your nephew, right? It's just like, it's either freely available online or it's available for 20 bucks a month or something. But, you know, these things went, this technology went mass market immediately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so look, the owners of the means of production, whoever does this, as I mentioned, these trillion dollar questions, there are people who are going to get really rich doing this, producing these things, but they're going to get really rich by taking this technology to the broadest possible market.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. Right. And again, smartphones, same thing. So there's this amazing kind of twist in business history, which is you cannot spend $10,000 on a smartphone. You can't spend $100,000. I would buy the million-dollar smartphone. I'm signed up for it. Suppose a million-dollar smartphone was much better than the $1,000 smartphone. I'm there to buy it. It doesn't exist. Why doesn't it exist?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Apple makes so much more money driving the price further down from $1,000 than they would trying to harvest. It's just this repeating pattern you see over and over again. What's great about it is you do not need to rely on anybody's enlightened generosity to do this. You just need to rely on capitalist self-interest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so very similar thing here. There's a core fallacy, which again was very common in Marxism, which is what's called the lump of labor fallacy. And this is sort of the fallacy that there's only a fixed amount of work to be done in the world, and it's all being done today by people. And then if machines do it, there's no other work to be done by people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like we train, you know, self-driving car algorithms and simulations, and that is actually a very effective way to train self-driving cars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And that's just a completely backwards view on how the economy develops and grows. Because what happens is not, in fact, that what happens is the introduction of technology into production process causes prices to fall. As prices fall, consumers have more spending power. As consumers have more spending power, they create new demand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
that new demand then causes capital and labor to form into new enterprises to satisfy new wants and needs. And the result is more jobs at higher wages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Well, two things. One is that new jobs are often much better. So this actually came up. There was this panic about a decade ago on all the truck drivers are going to lose their jobs, right? And number one, that didn't happen because we haven't figured out a way to actually...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
finished that yet but yeah but the other thing was like like truck driver like i grew up in a town that was basically consisted of a truck stop right and i like knew a lot of truck drivers and like truck drivers live a decade shorter than everybody else like they it's a it's a it's actually like a very dangerous like they get like literally they have like high risk of skin cancer and on the left side of their on the left side of their body from from being in the sun all the time the vibration of being in the truck is actually very damaging to your to your physiology
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. The question always you want to ask somebody like that is, do you want your kid to be doing this job? And most of them will tell you, no. I want my kid to be sitting in a cubicle somewhere where they don't die 10 years earlier. And so the new jobs, number one, the new jobs are often better. But you don't get the new jobs until you go through the change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And then to your point, the training thing, you know, it's always the issue is can people adapt? And again, here you need to imagine living in a world in which everybody has the AI assistant capability, right, to be able to pick up new skills much more quickly and be able to have some, you know, be able to have a machine to work with to augment their skills.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
It's painful for some people. I mean, there's no question it's painful for some people. Yes, it's not. Again, I'm not a utopian on this, and it's not like it's positive for everybody in the moment, but it has been overwhelmingly positive for 300 years. I mean, look, the concern here, this concern has played out for literally centuries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And, you know, this is the sort of Luddite, you know, the story of the Luddites. You may remember there was a panic in the 2000s around outsourcing was going to take all the jobs. There was a panic in the 2010s that robots were going to take all the jobs. In 2019, before COVID, we had more jobs at higher wages, both in the country and in the world, than at any point in human history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so the overwhelming evidence is that the net gain here is just wildly positive. And most people overwhelmingly come out the other side being huge beneficiaries of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, so this is the other thing, which is a lot of the sort of AI risk debates today sort of assume that we're the only game in town, right? And so we have the ability to kind of sit in the United States and criticize ourselves and have our government beat up on our companies and we're figuring out a way to restrict what our companies can do. And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
We're going to ban this and ban that, restrict this and do that. And then there's this other force out there that doesn't believe we have any power over them whatsoever. And they have no desire to sign up for whatever rules we decide to put in place. And they're going to do whatever it is they're going to do, and we have no control over it at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And it's China, and specifically the Chinese Communist Party. And they have a completely publicized, open, you know, plan for what they're going to do with AI. And it is not what we have in mind. And not only do they have that as a vision and a plan for their society, but they also have it as a vision and plan for the rest of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah, authoritarian control. So authoritarian population control. Good old-fashioned communist authoritarian control. And surveillance and enforcement. And social credit scores and all the rest of it. And you are going to be monitored and metered within an inch of everything all the time. And it's basically the end of human freedom. And that's their goal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And they justify it on the basis of that's what leads to peace.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So their plan. Yes. Yes. And the reason for that is they and again, they're very public on this. They have their plan is to proliferate their approach around the world. And they have this program called the Digital Silk Road. which is building on their Silk Road investment program. And they've been laying networking infrastructure all over the world with their 5G work with their company, Huawei.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So if a, you know, you do this today, you go to LLM and you ask it for like a, you know, you write me an essay on an incredibly esoteric like topic that there aren't very many people in the world that know about. And it writes you this incredible thing. And you're like, oh my God, like, I can't believe how good this is. Like, is that really useless as training data for the next LLM?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And so they've been laying all this financial and technological fabric all over the world. And their plan is to roll out their vision of AI on top of that and to have every other country be running their version. And then if you're a country prone to authoritarianism, you're going to find this to be an incredible way to become more authoritarian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
If you're a country, by the way, not prone to authoritarianism, you're going to have the Chinese Communist Party running your infrastructure and having backdoors into it, right? Which is also not good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Yeah. So good news is they're behind, but bad news is they, you know, they, let's just say they get access to everything we do. Um, so they're probably a year behind at each point in time, but they get, you know, downloads, I think of basically all of our work on a regular basis through a variety of means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Um, and they are, you know, at least we'll see, they're at least putting out reports of very complete, just put out a report last week of a, of a GPT 3.5 analog. Um, yeah. They put out this report. I forget what it's called, but they put out this report of this LLM.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
When OpenAI puts out, one of the ways they test GPT is they run it through standardized exams like the SAT, just how you can gauge how smart it is. The Chinese report, they ran their LLM through the Chinese equivalent of the SAT. It includes a section on Marxism and a section on Mao Zedong thought. And it turns out their AI does very well on both of those topics. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
So like this, this alignment thing, communist AI, right? Like literal communist AI. Right. And so their vision is like, that's the, you know, so, you know, you can just imagine like you're a school, you know, you're a kid 10 years from now in Argentina or in Germany or in Germany. Who knows where? Indonesia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
And you ask the AI to explain to you, like, how the economy works, and it gives you the most cheery, upbeat explanation of Chinese-style communism you've ever heard, right? So, like, the stakes here are, like, really big.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
Like, because, right. Cause all the signal was already in there or is it actually, no, that's actually a new signal. And I, and this, this is what I call a trillion dollar question, which is the answer to that question will determine somebody is going to make or lose a trillion dollars based on that question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI
I mean, the big shift over 20 years has been that tech used to be a tools industry for basically from like 1940 through to about 2010, almost all the big successful companies were picks and shovels companies. So PC, database, smartphone, some tool that somebody else would pick up and use. Since 2010, most of the big wins have been in applications.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Affirmative action. Think about it. This is very entertaining, right? What are the three things that we know about affirmative action? It is absolutely 100% necessary. However, it cannot explain the success of any one individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Nor does it have any victims at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
What educational institution in the last 60 years has wanted farm boys from Wisconsin?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
All of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Of course. Okay, so we know this. We know this. The reason we know this is because of the Harvard and UNC Supreme Court cases. So this was like three years ago. These were big court cases. Because the idea of affirmative action has been litigated for many, many, many years and through many court cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the Supreme Court repeatedly in the past had upheld that it was a completely legitimate thing to do. And there's basically two categories of affirmative action that really matter. One is admissions into educational institutions, and then the other is jobs, getting hired. Those are the two biggest areas. The education one has been a super potent political issue for a very long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
in Scotland and he gets in some argument with somebody and he says, finally, he just says, my God, I cannot wait to get out of here and go back to America where we can fuck without condoms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
People have written and talked about this for many decades. I don't need to go through it. There's many arguments for why it's important. There's many arguments as to how it could backfire. It's been this thing. But the Supreme Court upheld it for a very long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The most recent ruling, I'm not a lawyer, I don't have the exact reference in my head, but there was a case in 2003 that said that Sandra Day O'Connor famously wrote that although it had been 30 years of affirmative action and although it was not working remotely as it had been intended, She said that, well, basically we need to try it for another 25 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But she said basically as a message to future Supreme Court justices, if it hasn't resolved basically the issues it's intended to resolve within 25 years, then we should probably call it off. By the way, we're coming up on the 25 years. It's a couple of years away. The Supreme Court just had these cases. It was a Harvard case and I think a University of North Carolina case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And what's interesting about those cases is the lawyers in those cases put a tremendous amount of evidence into the record of how the admissions decisions actually happen at Harvard and happen at UNC. And it is like every bit as cartoonishly garish and racist as you could possibly imagine because it's a ring of power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And if you're an admissions officer at a private university or an administrator, you have unlimited power to do what you want and you can justify any of it under any of these rules or systems. And up until these cases, it had been a black box where you didn't have to explain yourself and show your work. And what the Harvard and USC cases did is they basically required showing the work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And there was like all kinds of like phenomenal detail. I mean, number one is there were text messages in there that will just curl your hair of people, of students being spoken of and just like crude racial stereotypes that would just make you want to jump out the window. It's horrible stuff. But also there was statistical information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And of course, the big statistical kicker to the whole thing is that at top institutions, it's common for different ethnic groups to have different cutoffs for SAT that are as wide as 400 points. Yeah. Right? So different groups. So specifically, Asians need to perform at 400 SAT points higher than other ethnicities in order to actually get admitted into these.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, white people are a part of this, but Asians are a very big part of this. And actually, the Harvard case was actually brought by an activist on behalf of actually the Asian students who were being turned away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Exactly, right? And so, no, but it's exactly the thing. And then everybody instantly knows what, like everybody watching that instantly starts laughing because you know what it means, which is, it's exactly this. I think there's like an ethnographic, you know, way of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and it's basically, I mean, it's the cliche now in, in, in the Valley and in the medical community, which is like, if you want a super genius, you hire an Asian from Harvard because they are guaranteed to be freaking Einstein. Because if they weren't, they were never getting admitted, right? Almost all the qualified Asians get turned away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So they've been running this, it's a very, very explicit, very, very clear program. This of course has been a third rail of things that people are not supposed to discuss under any circumstances. The thing that has really changed the tenor on this is I think two things. Number one, those Supreme Court cases, the Supreme Court ruled that they can no longer do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I will tell you, I don't believe there's a single education institution in America that is conforming with the Supreme Court ruling. I think they are all flagrantly ignoring it. And we could talk about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They are trying to make the world a better place. They are trying to solve all these social problems. They are trying to have diverse student populations. They are trying to live up to the expectations of their donors. They are trying to make their faculty happy. They are trying to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
um have their friends and family think that they're good people right they're trying to have the press write nice things about them like it's nearly impossible for them and you know to be clear like nobody has been fired from an admissions office for you know 25 years or prior what we now the supreme court now is ruled to be illegality um and so they're all the same people under the exact same pressures um and so um like i you know the numbers are moving a little bit but like i don't think i don't know anybody in the system who thinks that they're complying with the supreme court like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
who's in charge in the rank ordering of who rules who, the universities rule the Supreme Court way more than the Supreme Court rules the universities, right? Well, another example of that is I think it's that every sitting member of the Supreme Court right now went to either Harvard or Yale. Right? Like the level of incestuousness here is like... Anyway, so there's that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's a bunch of books on like all, like you said, the Scots-Irish, like all the different derivations of all the different ethnic groups that have come to the US over the course of the last 400 years. But what we have is this sort of amalgamation of the Northeast Yankees who were super tough and hardcore. Yeah, the Scots-Irish are super aggressive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so this has been running for a very long time. So one is the Harvard and UNC cases kind of gave up the game, number one, or at least showed what the mechanism was. And then number two, the other thing is obviously the aftermath of October 7th, right? And what we discovered was happening with Jewish applicants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And what was happening at all the top institutions for Jewish applicants was they were being managed down, they were being actively managed down as a percentage of the base. And let's say I've heard reports of like extremely explicit basically plans to manage to manage the Jewish admissions down to their representative percentage of the US population, which is 2%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And there's a whole backstory here, which is 100 years ago, Jews were not admitted into a lot of these institutions. And then there was a big campaign to get them in. Once they could get in, they immediately became 30% of these institutions because there's so many smart, talented Jews. So it went from 0% to 30%.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the most recent generation of leadership has been trying to get it down to 2%. And a lot of Jewish people, at least a lot of Jewish people I know, they kind of knew this was happening, but they discovered it the hard way after October 7th. And so all of a sudden, so basically the Supreme Court case meant that you could address this in terms of the Asian victims.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The October 7th meant that you could address it in terms of the Jewish victims. And for sure, both of those groups are being systematically excluded. And then, of course, there's the thing that you basically can't talk about, which is all the white people are being excluded. And then it turns out it's also happening to black people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And this is the thing that like blew my freaking mind when I found out about it. So I just assumed that like this was great news for like American blacks because like, you know, obviously if, you know, whites, Asians and Jews are being excluded, then, you know, the whole point of this in the beginning was to get the black population up. And so this must be great for American blacks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So then I discovered this New York Times article from 2004 called Blacks are being admitted into top schools at greater numbers, but which ones? Uh-oh. And again, by the way, this is in the New York Times. This is not in like, you know, whatever, National Review. This is New York Times, 2004.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the two authorities that were quoted in the story are Henry Louis Gates, who's the Dean of the African-American Studies, you know, community in the United States. Super brilliant guy. And then Lonnie Guinier, who was a... She was a potential Supreme Court appointee under, I think, a close friend of Hillary Clinton. And for a long time, she was on the shortlist for Supreme Court.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So one of the top jurists, lawyers in the country, both black. Sort of legendarily successful in the academic and legal worlds and black. And they are quoted as the authorities in this story. And the story that they tell is actually very... It's amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We've got the Southerners and the Texans and the whole kind of blended
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and by the way, it's happening today in, uh, education institutions and it's happening in companies and you can see it all over the place and the government, um, which is, um, at least at that time, the number was half of the black admits into a place like Harvard were not American born blacks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They were foreign born blacks, um, specifically, uh, uh, uh, uh, Northern African off generally Nigerian, um, or, uh, West Indian. Right. And by the way, many Nigerians and Northern Africans have come to the US and have been very successful. Nigerian Americans is a group like way outperformed. They're just a super smart cohort of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then West Indian blacks in the US are incredibly successful. Most recently, by the way, Kamala Harris, as well as Colin Powell, like just two sort of examples of that. And so basically what Henry Louis Gates and Lana Guinier said in the story is Harvard is basically struggling to either, whatever it was, identify, recruit, make successful, whatever it was, American-born Native Blacks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
you know, kind of Anglo Hispanic thing, you know, super incredibly tough, strong driven, you know, capable characters, you know, the Texas Rangers, um, you know, we've got the, yeah, we've got the California, you know, we've got the, you know, the wild, we've got the incredibly, you know, inventive hippies, but we also have the hardcore engineers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so therefore they were using high-skill immigration as an escape hatch. to go get blacks from other countries. And then this was 2004 when you could discuss such things. Obviously, that is a topic that nobody has discussed since. It has sailed on. All of the DEI programs of the last 20 years have had this exact characteristic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's large numbers of black people in America who are fully aware of this and are like, it's obviously not us that are getting these slots. We're literally competing with people who are being imported. And, you know, if you believe in the basis of affirmative action, you are trying to make up for historical injustice of American black slavery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the idea that you import somebody from, you know, Nigeria that never experienced that, you know, is like tremendously insulting to black Americans. Anyway, so you can see where I'm heading with this. We have been in a 60-year social engineering experiment to exclude native-born people from the educational slots and jobs that high-skilled immigration has been funneling foreigners into.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Right. And so it turns out it's not a victim-free thing. There's like 100% there's victims because why? There's only so many, for sure, there's only so many education slots. And then for sure, there's only so many of these jobs, right? You know, Google only hires so many, you know, whatever level seven engineers. Right. And so, so, so, so that's the other side of it. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so you're a farm boy in Wisconsin, right. Or a, you know, black American whose ancestors arrived here, you know, on a slave ship 300 years ago in Louisiana or a, you know, Cambodian immigrants in, you know, the Bronx, um, and your kid or a Jewish immigrant, uh, or, you know, or from a very successful Jewish family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and you know, your entire, you know, for three generations, you and your parents and grandparents went to Harvard. And what all of those groups know is the system that has been created is not for them, right? It's designed specifically to exclude them. And then what happens is all of these tech people show up in public and say, yeah, let's bring in more foreigners, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so anyway, so the short version of it is you can't anymore, I don't think, just have the quote high-skill immigration conversation for either education or for employment without also having the DEI conversation, right? And then DEI is just another word for affirmative action. So it's the affirmative action conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And you need to actually deal with this as substance and to see what's actually happening to people you need to join these topics. And I think it is much harder to make the moral claim for high school immigration given the extent to which DEI took over both the education process and the hiring process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We've got, you know, the best rocket scientists in the world. We've got the best, you know, artists in the world, you know, creative professionals, uh, you know, the best movies. And so, yeah, there is, you know, all of our problems, I think, are basically, you know, in my view, to some extent, you know, attempts to basically sand all that off and make everything basically boring and mediocre.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I spent the entire Christmas holiday reading every message on this and not saying anything. And what I was, which you know me well enough to know that's a serious level of, yeah, that's very Zen. Yes. Thank you. No, it wasn't. There was tremendous rage on the other side of it, but I suppressed it. So, um, I was waiting for the dog that didn't bark, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the dog that didn't bark was, I did not, and tell me if you saw one, I did not see a single example of somebody pounding the table for more high school immigration who was also pounding the table to go get more smart kids who are already here into these educational institutions and into these jobs. I didn't see a single one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But it was like, literally, it was like the proponents of high skilled immigrants. And again, this was me for a very long time. I mean, I kind of took myself by surprise on this because I was on, you know, I had the much, say, simpler version of this story for a very long time. Like I said, I've been in Washington many times under past presidents lobbying for this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
By the way, never made any progress, which we could talk about. Like, it never actually worked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, but, um, you know, I, I've been on the other side of this one, but I was literally sitting there being like, all right, which of these like super geniuses, um, who, you know, many of whom, by the way, are very, you know, successful high-skilled immigrants or children of high-skilled immigrants, you know, which of these super geniuses are going to like say, actually, we have this like incredible talent source here in the country, which again, to be clear, I'm not talking about white people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm talking about native born Americans, whites, Asians, Jews, blacks, for sure, for sure, for sure. Those four groups, but also white people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, but you have this interesting thing, you have a split between the sides that I've noticed, which is one side has all of the experts. Right. Right. And I, and I'm using scare for people listening to audio. I'm making quotes in the air with my fingers as vigorously as I can. One side has all the certified experts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The other side just has a bunch of people who are like, they know that something is wrong and they don't quite know how to explain it. And what was so unusual about the Harvard UNC cases, by the way, in front of the Supreme Court is they actually had sophisticated lawyers for the first time in a long time actually put all this evidence together and actually put it in the public record.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They actually had experts, which is just really rare. Generally, what you get is you get – because if you don't have experts, what do you have? You know something is wrong, but you have primarily an emotional response. You feel it. But can you put it, you know, can you put it in the words and tables and charts, you know, that a certified expert can? And no, you can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, that's not, you know, that's not who you are. That doesn't mean that you're wrong. And it also doesn't mean that you have less of a moral stance. Yeah. And so it's just like, all right. Now, by the way, look, I think there are ways to square the circle. I think there's a way to have our cake and eat it too. I think there'd be many ways to resolve this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Again, I think the way to do it is to look at these issues combined, look at DEI combined with high school immigration. It so happens the DEI is under much more scrutiny today than it has been for probably 20 years, affirmative action is. The Supreme Court did just rule that it is not legal for universities to do that. They are still doing it, but they should stop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But there is something in the national spirit that basically keeps bouncing back and it And basically what we discover over time is we basically just need people to stand up at a certain point and say, you know, it's time to, you know, it's time to build, it's time to grow, you know, it's time to do things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then there are more and more, you've seen more companies now also ditching their DEI programs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
In part, that's happening for a bunch of reasons, but it's happening in part because a lot of corporate lawyers will tell you that the Supreme Court rulings in education either already apply to businesses or it just is a clear foreshadowing the Supreme Court will rule on new cases that will ban into businesses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, so, so there, there is a moment here to be able to look at this, um, on both sides. Um, let me add one more nuance to it that makes it even more complicated. Yeah. So the cliche is we're going to brain drain the world, right? You've heard that we're going to, we're going to take all the smart people from all over the world. We're going to bring them here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We're going to educate them and then we're going to keep them. And then they're going to raise their families here, create businesses here, create jobs here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. Okay. So what happens to the rest of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
How many highly ambitious, highly conscientious, highly energetic, high achieving, high IQ super geniuses are there in the world? And if there's a lot, that's great. But if there just aren't that many and they all come here and they all aren't where they would be otherwise, what happens to all those other places?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So it's almost impossible for us here to have that conversation in part because we become incredibly uncomfortable as a society talking about the fact that people aren't just simply all the same, which is a whole thing we could talk about. But also we are purely the beneficiary of this effect, right? We are brain draining the world, not the other way around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So if you look at the flow of high-skill immigration over time, there's only four permanent sinks of high-skill immigration places people go. It's the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia. It's the four of the five eyes. It's the major Anglosphere countries. And so for those countries, this seems like a no-lose proposition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's all the other countries that basically what we four countries have been doing is draining all those smart people out. It's actually much easier for people in Europe to talk about this, I've discovered, because the Eurozone is whatever, you know, 28 countries. And within the Eurozone, the high-skilled people over time have been migrating to originally the U.K.,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, and there's something in the American spirit that just like roars right back to life. And I've seen it before. I actually saw, you know, I saw it as a kid here in the early 80s, you know, because the 70s were like horribly depressing, right, in the US. Like it was, they were a nightmare on many fronts. And in a lot of ways, the last decade to me has felt a lot like the 70s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But also specifically, I think it's the Netherlands, Germany, and France. But specifically, they've been migrating out of the peripheral Eurozone countries. And the one where this really hit the fan was in Greece. So Greece falls into chaos, disaster, and then you're running the government in Greece and you're trying to figure out how to put an economic development plan together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
All of your smart young kids have left. Like, what are you going to do? Right. By the way, this is a potential, I know you care a lot about Ukraine. This is a potential crisis for Ukraine. Not because, in part because of this, because we enthusiastically recruit Ukrainians, of course. And so we've been brain draining Ukraine for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But also, of course, you know, war does tend to cause people to migrate out. And so, you know, when it comes time for Ukraine to rebuild as a peaceful country, is it going to have the talent base even that it had five years ago is like a very big and important question. By the way, Russia, like we have brain drain a lot of really smart people out of Russia. A lot of them are here, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Over the last 30 years. And so there's this thing, it's actually really funny if you think about it, like the one thing that we know to be the height of absolute evil that the West ever did was colonization and resource extraction, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So we know the height of absolute evil was when the Portuguese and the English and everybody else went and had these colonies and then went in and we took all the oil and we took all the diamonds and we took all the whatever, lithium or whatever it is, right? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, for some reason, we realize that that's a deeply evil thing to do when it's a physical resource, when it's a non-conscious physical matter. For some reason, we think it's completely morally acceptable to do it with human capital. In fact, we think it's glorious and beautiful and wonderful and the great flowering of peace and harmony and moral justice of our time to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And we don't think for one second what we're doing to the countries that we're pulling all these people out of. And this is one of these things, like, I don't know, like maybe we're just going to live in this delusional state forever and we'll just keep doing it and it'll keep benefiting us and we just won't care what happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But like, I think there may come, this is one of these, this is like one of these submarines under 10 feet under the waterline. Like, I think it's just a matter of time until people suddenly realize, oh my God, what are we doing? Because like, we need the rest of the world to succeed too, right? Like we need these other countries to like flourish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like we don't want to be the only successful country in the middle of just like complete chaos and disaster. And we just extract and we extract and we extract and we don't think twice about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Just being mired in misery and just this self-defeating, you know, negative attitude and everybody's upset about everything. And, you know, and then, by the way, like energy crisis and hostage crisis and foreign wars and just demoralization. Right. You know, the low point for. in the 70s was, you know, Jimmy Carter, who just passed away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Okay. So then you get this other, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's another nuance. So there's another nuance. There's another nuance, which is mostly in the Valley, we don't use H-1Bs anymore. Mostly we use O-1s. So there's a separate class of visa. And the O-1 is like this. It turns out the O-1 is the super genius visa. So the 01 is basically our founder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
When we have somebody from anywhere in the world and they've invented a breakthrough, a new technology, and they want to come to the US and start a company, they come in through an 01 visa. And that actually is a fairly high bar. It's a high acceptance rate, but it's a pretty high bar. And they do a lot of work. And you have to put real work into it, really prove your case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, mostly what's happened with the H1B visa program, um, is that it has gone to basically two categories of employers. One is, uh, the basically a small set of big tech companies that hire in volume, which is exactly the companies that you would think. Um, and then the other is it goes to these, what they call kind of the mills, um, the consulting mills, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so there's these set of companies with names. I don't want to pick on companies, but you know, names like Cognizant that, you know, hire basically have their business model. It's primarily Indian being in primarily Indians in large numbers. And, you know, they often have, you know, offices next to company owned housing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they'll have, you know, organizations that are, you know, they'll have, you know, organizations that are literally thousands of Indians, you know, living and working in the US and they do basically call it mid tier like IT consulting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So, you know, these folks, they're making good wages, but they're making $60,000 a year, $100,000 a year, not the, you know, $300,000 that you'd make in the Valley. And so, like, in practice, the startups, basic, like, little tech, as we call it, or the startup world, mainly doesn't use H-1Bs at this point. And mainly can't, because the system is kind of rigged in a way that we really can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and then, and then, and then again, you get to the sort of underlying morality here, which is, it's like, well, you know, Amazon, like Amazon's in like, I love Amazon, but like they're a big, powerful company. They've got more money than God. They've got resources. They've got a long-term planning horizon. They do big, profound things over decades at a time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They could, or any of these other companies, could launch massively effective programs to go recruit the best and brightest from all throughout the country. And you'll notice they don't do that. They bring in 10,000, 20,000 H1Bs a year. Um, and so you've got a question there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and then these mills, like there's lots of questions around them and whether they should, you know, whether that's even a ethical way to, you know, I don't want to say they're unethical, but there's questions around like exactly what, what the trade-offs are there. Um, and so, you know, this, this, yeah. And this is like a Pandora's box that really, you know, nobody really wanted to be opened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, you know, to play devil's advocate on all this in terms of like national immigration issues, you know, none of this is like a top end issue just because the numbers are small. Right. And so, you know, I don't think, you know, the administration has said like this is not like a priority of theirs for right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I guess what I would say is like there is actually a lot of complexity and nuance here. I have a lot of friends, like I said, I have a lot of friends and colleagues who came over on H-1Bs or 01s, green cards, many are now citizens. And every single one of them was, not every single one, a lot of them were enthusiastic to defend the honor of immigrants. throughout this whole period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He went on TV and he gave this speech known as the malaise speech. And it was like the weakest possible trying to like rouse people back to a sense of like passion completely failed. And, you know, we had the, you know, the hostages in, you know, Iran for, I think, 440 days. And every night on the nightly news, it was, you know, lines around the block, energy crisis, depression, inflation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they said to me, it's like, well, Mark, how can we, you know, how can we, how can we more clearly express, you know, the importance of high school immigration to the US? And I was like, um, I think you can do it by advocating for also developing our native foreign talent. And like, do you want to inflame the issue or do you want to diffuse the issue? Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think, I think the answer is to diffuse the issue. Uh, let me give you one more positive scenario, which, and then I'll also beat up on the university some more. Um, do you, do you know about the national merit scholarship system? Have you heard about this? Um, not really. Can you explain? So there's a system that was created during the cold war, um, called the national merit scholars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, um, it is a basically, um, it was created, I forget in the 50s or 60s when it was when people in government actually wanted to identify the best and the brightest as heretical an idea as that sounds today. Um, and so it's basically a national talent search for basically IQ, um, Its goal is to identify basically the top 0.5% of the IQ in the country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
By the way, completely regardless of other characteristics. So there's no race, gender, or any other aspect to it. It's just going for straight intelligence. It uses first the PSAT, which is the preparatory SAT that you take, and then the SAT. So it uses those scores. That is the scoring. It's a straight PSAT-SAT scoring system. So they use the SAT as a proxy for IQ, which it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Uh, they run this every year. They identify, they all, they, they, it's like a, they get down to like 1% of the population of the kids, of 18 year olds in a given year who scored highest on the PSAT. And then they get down to further qualified down to the 0.5% that also replicate on the SAT. Um, and then it's like the scholarship amount is like $2,500, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So it's like, it was a lot of money 50 years ago, not as much today, but it's a national system being run literally to find the best and the brightest. How many of our great and powerful universities use this as a scouting system? Like our universities all have sports teams. They all have national scouting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They have full-time scouts who go out and they go to every high school and they try to find all the great basketball players and bring them into the NCAA, into all these leagues. How many of our great and powerful and enlightened universities use the National Merit System to go do a talent search for the smartest kids and just bring them in?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Go get the smartest ones. I'll give you one more kicker on this topic if I haven't beaten it to death. The SAT has changed. So the SAT used to be a highly accurate proxy for IQ that caused a bunch of problems. People really don't like the whole idea of IQ. And so the SAT has been actively managed over the last 50 years by the college board that runs it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it has been essentially like everything else. It's been dumbed down. And so in two ways, number one, it's been dumbed down where an 800 from 40 years ago does not mean what an 800 means today. And 40 years ago, it was almost impossible to get an 800. Today, there's so many 800s that you could stock the entire Ivy League with 800s, right? And so it's been deliberately dumbed down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, you know, Reagan came in and, you know, Reagan was a very controversial character at the time. And, you know, he came in and he's like, yep, nope, it's morning in America. And we're the shining city on the hill and we're going to do it. And he did it and we did it. And the national spirit came roaring back and, you know, roared really hard for a full decade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then two is they have tried to pull out a lot of what's called the G loading. And so they've tried to detach it from being an IQ proxy. Because IQ is such an inflammatory concept. And the consequence of that is, and this is sort of perverse, they've made it more coachable. So the SAT 40 years ago, coaching didn't really work. And more recently, it has really started to work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And one of the things you see is the Asian spike. You see this giant leap upward in Asian performance over the last decade. And I think looking at the data, I think a lot of that is because it's more coachable now. And the Asians do the most coaching.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
um so there's a bunch of issues with this and so the coaching thing is really difficult because the coaching thing is a subsidy then to the kids whose parents can afford coaching right and i don't know about you but where i grew up there was no sat coaching so there's like an issue there i didn't even know what the sat was until the day i took it much less that there was coaching much less that it could work so much less we could afford it so so number one there's issues there but the other issue there is think about what's happened by the dumbing down
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
800 no longer captures all the smart. 800 is too crude of a test. It's like the AI benchmarking problem. It's the same problem they have in AI benchmarking right now. 800 is too low of a threshold. There are too many kids scoring 800. Because what you want is you want whatever, if it's going to be 100,000 kids, I don't know what it is, but it's going to be 50,000 kids a year scoring 800.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You also then want kids to be able to score 900 and 1,000 and 1,100 and 1,200. And you want to ultimately get to, you know, you'd like to ultimately identify the top 100 kids and make sure that you get them in MIT. And the resolution of the test has been reduced so that it actually is not useful for doing that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And again, I would say this is like part of the generalized corruption that's taken place throughout this entire system where we have been heading in the reverse direction from wanting to actually go get the best and brightest and actually put them in the places where they should be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then just the final comment would be the great thing about standardized testing and the national merit system is, like I said, it's completely race blind, it's gender blind. It's blind on every other characteristic. It's only done on test scores. And you can make an argument about whether that's good or bad, but it is for sure, it's the closest thing that we had to get to merit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It was the thing that they did when they thought they needed merit to win the Cold War. And of course, we could choose to do that anytime we want. And I just say, I find it incredibly striking and an enormous moral indictment of the current system that there are no universities that do this today. So back to the immigration thing, just real quick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think that's exactly what I think, you know, we'll see. But I think that's what could happen here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's like, okay, we aren't even trying to go get the smart kids out of the center or south. And even if they think that they can get into these places, they get turned down. And the same thing for the smart Asians and the same thing for the smart Jews and the same thing for the smart black people. And like, it just like, it's just like, I don't know how, like, I don't know how that's moral.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, I don't get it at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, you asked me in the beginning, like, what's the most optimistic forecast, right, that we could have? And the most optimistic forecast would be, my God, what if we did both?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, and it would diffuse the entire issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
If everybody in the center and the south of the country and every Jewish family, Asian family, black family knew they were getting a fair shake, like, it would diffuse the issue. Like how about defusing the issue? Like what a crazy radical. Sorry, I don't mean to really get out of my skis here, but.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So, I mean, a big part of the answer, I think, is we're in the middle of a legit revolution. And I know you've been talking about this on your show, but like AI coding is I mean, this is the biggest earthquake to hit software in certainly my life, maybe since the invention of software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I'm sure, you know, we're involved in various of these companies, but, you know, these tools, you know, from a variety of companies are like absolutely revolutionary. And they're getting better at leaps and bounds, right, every day. And you know all this, but like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The thing with coding, like there's like open questions of whether AI can get better at like, I don't know, understanding philosophy or whatever, creative writing or whatever, but like for sure we can make it much better at coding, right? Because you can validate the results of coding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, you know, there's all these methods of, you know, synthetic data and self-training and reinforcement learning that for sure you can do with coding. And so... Everybody I know who works in the field says AI coding is going to get to be phenomenally good. And it's already great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And you can, I mean, anybody wants to see this, just go on YouTube and look at AI coding demos, you know, little kids making apps in 10 minutes working with an AI coding system. And so I think it's the golden age. I mean, I think this is an area where it's clearly the golden age. The tool set is extraordinary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, in a day, as a coder for sure, in a day you can retrain yourself, you know, start using these things, get a huge boost in productivity. As a non-coder, you can learn much more quickly than you could before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I agree with that up to a point. So the, um, I think for sure for quite a long time, the people who are good at coding are going to be the best at actually having AIs code things. Um, cause they're going to understand what, I mean, very basic, they're going to understand what's happening, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they're going to be able to evaluate the work and they're going to be able to, you know, literally like manage AIs better. Um, like even if they're not literally handwriting the code, they're just going to have a much better sense of what's going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I definitely think like a hundred percent, my nine-year-old is like doing all kinds of coding classes and he'll keep doing that for certainly through 18. We'll see after that. Um, and so for sure, that's the case. Um, but, but look, having said that, one of the things you can do with an AI is say, teach me how to code. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so, and you know, there's, there's a whole bunch of, um, you know, I'll, I'll name names, you know, Khan Academy, like there's a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of work that they're doing at Khan Academy for free. And then we, you know, we have this company Replit, uh, which is originally specifically built for kids for coding. that has AI built in that's just absolutely extraordinary now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And as you know, America has this incredible streak of individualism. Individualism in America probably peaked, I think, between roughly, call it the end of the Civil War, 1865, through to probably call it 1931 or something. And there was this incredible – I mean, that period, we now know that period as the Second Industrial Revolution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, you know, there's a variety of other systems like this. And yeah, I mean, the AI is going to be able to teach you to code. AI, by the way, is, as you know, spectacularly good at explaining code, right? And so, you know, the tools have these features now where you can talk to the code base. And so you can like literally like ask the code base questions about itself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And you can also just do the simple form, which is you can copy and paste code into ChatGPT and just ask it to explain it, what's going on, rewrite it, improve it, make recommendations. And so there's, yeah, there's dozens of ways to do this. By the way, you can also, I mean, even more broadly than code, like, okay, you want to make a video game.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Okay, now you can do AI art generation, sound generation, dialogue generation, voice generation, right? And so all of a sudden, like you don't need designers, you know, you don't need, you know, voice actors, you know, so yeah, so there's just like unlimited possibilities. And then, you know, a big part of coding is so-called glue. You know, it's interfacing into other systems.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So it's interfacing into, you know, Stripe to take payments or something like that. And, you know, AI is fantastic at writing glue code. So, you know, really, really good at making sure that you can plug everything together. Really good at helping you figure out how to deploy. You know, it'll even write a business plan for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
um so it's just this it's like everything happening with ai right now it's just it's like this latent superpower and there's this incredible spectrum of people who have really figured out massive performance increases productivity increases with it already there's other people who aren't even aware it's happening and there's some gearing to whether you're a coder or not but i think there are lots of non-coders that are off the races and i think there are lots of professional coders who are still like you know the blacksmiths were not necessarily in favor of you know
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
car business. So there's the old William Gibson quote, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. And this is maybe the most potent version of that that I've ever seen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I would also say code has, of anything in industrial society, code has the highest elasticity, which is to say the easier it is to make it, the more of it gets made. I think effectively there's unlimited demand for code. In other words, there's always some other idea for a thing that you can do, a feature that you can add, or a thing that you can optimize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so, and so like overwhelmingly, you know, the amount of code that exists in the world is a fraction of even the ideas we have today. And then we come up with new ideas all the time. Um, and so I, I think that like, you know, I was, I was in the late eighties, early nineties when sort of automated coding systems started to come out, expert systems, big deal in those days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And there were all these, there was a famous book called the decline and fall of the American programmer, you know, the predicted that these new coding systems were going to mean we wouldn't have programmers in the future. And of course the number of programming jobs exploded by like a factor of a hundred and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's when the United States basically assumed global leadership and basically took over technological and economic leadership from England. Um, and then, you know, that, that led to, you know, ultimately then therefore being able to, you know, not only industrialize the world, but also win world war two and then win the cold war. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
like my guess will be we'll have more my guess is we'll have more coding jobs probably by like an order of magnitude 10 years from now that will be different there'll be different jobs they'll involve orchestrating ai um but um we'll there will be we will be creating so much more software that the whole industry will just explode in size are you seeing the size of companies decrease in terms of startups what's the landscapes of little tech
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
All we're seeing right now is the AI hiring boom of all time. Oh, for the big tech. And little tech. And little tech. Everybody's trying to hire as many engineers as they can to build AI systems. It's 100%. I mean, there's a handful of companies. There's a little bit. There's customer service. We have some companies and others. I think it's Klarna that's publicizing a lot of this in Europe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
where there are jobs that can be optimized and jobs that can be automated, but for engineering jobs, it's just an explosion of hiring. At least so far, there's no trace of any sort of diminishing effect. Now, having said that, I am looking forward to the day. I am waiting for the first company to walk in saying yes, like the more radical form of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So basically, the companies that we see are basically one of two kinds. We see the companies that are basically... Sometimes use weak form, strong form. So the weak form companies sometimes use the term, it's called the sixth bullet point. AI is the sixth bullet point on whatever they're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Right. And it's on the slide, right? So they've got the, you know, whatever, dot, dot, dot, dot. And then AI is the sixth thing. And the reason AI is the sixth thing is because they had already previously written the slide before the AI revolution started.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so they just added the sixth bullet point on the slide, which is how you're getting all these products that have like the AI button up in the corner, right? The little sparkly button. Yep. Right. And all of a sudden Gmail is offering to summarize your email, which I'm like, I don't need that. Like I need you to answer my email, not summarize it. Like what the hell?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Okay, so we see those and that's fine. That's like, I don't know, putting sugar on the cake or something. But then we see the strong form, which is the companies that are building from scratch for AI, right? And they're building it. I actually just met with a company that is building literally an AI email system as an example. Oh, nice. I can't wait. Yeah, they're going to completely, right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So the very obvious idea, very smart team, you know, it's going to be great. Yeah. And then, you know, notion just, uh, you know, another, not one of our companies, but just came out with a product. And so, so now companies are gonna basically come through, sweep through, and they're gonna do basically AI first versions of basically everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And yeah, you know, there's a massive industrial, you know, massive individualistic streak. By the way, you know, Milton Friedman's old videos are all on YouTube. They are every bit as compelling and inspiring as they were then. You know, he's a singular figure and many of us, you know, I never knew him, but he was actually at Stanford for many years at the Hoover Institution, but I never met him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And those are like companies built, you know, AI is the first bullet point. It's the strong form of the argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
What if we knew from scratch that we could build on this? And again, this is like, this is part of the full employment act for startups and VCs is it just like, if a technology transformation is efficiently powerful, then you actually need to start the product development process over from scratch because you need to reconceptualize the product.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then usually what that means is you need a new company because most incumbents just won't do that. And so, yeah, so that's underway across many categories. What I'm waiting for is the company where it's like, no, our org chart is redesigned as a result of AI, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I'm looking at, I'm waiting for the company where it's like, no, we're going to have like, you know, and the cliche, here's a thought experiment, right? The cliche would be, we're going to have like the human executive team and then we're going to have the AIs be the workers, right? So we'll have a VP of engineering supervising a hundred instances of coding agents, right? Okay, maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Right, by the way, or maybe, maybe the VP of engineering should be the AI. Maybe supervising human coders who are supervising AIs, right? Because one of the things that AI should be pretty good at is managing. Because it's like not, you know, it's like a process driven. It's the kind of thing that AI is actually pretty good at, right? Performance evaluation coaching.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so should it be an AI executive team? Um, and then, you know, and then of course the ultimate question, which is AI CEO. Right. Um, and then, you know, and then there's, and then maybe the most futuristic version of it would be an actual AI agent that actually goes fully autonomous. Yeah. What if you really set one of these things loose and let it, let it basically build itself a business.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I will say like, we're not yet seeing those. And I think there's a little bit of the systems aren't quite ready for that yet. And then I think it's a little bit of you really do need at that point, like a founder who's really willing to break all the rules and really willing to take the swing. And those people exist. And so I'm sure we'll see that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Little companies can break glass in a way big companies can't. Right. This is sort of the big breakthrough that Clay Christensen had in the innovator's dilemma, which is sometimes when big companies don't do things, it's because they're screwing up. And that certainly happens. But a lot of times they don't do things because it would break too much glass.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Specifically, it would interfere with their existing customers and their existing businesses. And they just simply won't do that. And by the way, responsibly, they shouldn't do that. Um, right. Um, and so they just get, but this is Clay Christians. This big thing is they, they often don't adapt because they are well run, not because they're poorly run, but they're optimizing machines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They're, they're, they're optimizing against the existing business. And, and, and as, as you kind of just said, this is like a permanent state of affairs for large organizations. Like every once in a while, one breaks the pattern and actually does it. But for the most part, like this is a very predictable form of human behavior. And this fundamentally is why startups exist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I know a lot of people who worked with him and, you know, he was a singular figure, but all of his lessons, you know, live on or are fully available. But I would also say it's not just individualism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I would say, I'm not going to predict. I'm going to say there's questions all over the place. And then we have this category question we call the trillion dollar question, which is like literally depending on how it's answered, people make or lose a trillion dollars. And I think there's like, I don't know, five or six trillion dollar questions right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
that are hanging out there, which is an unusually large number. And I just, you know, I'll just hit a few of them and we can talk about them. So one is big models versus small models. Another is open models versus closed models. Another is whether you can use synthetic data or not. Another is chain of thought. How far can you push that in reinforcement learning?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then another one is political trillion dollar questions, policy questions, which, you know, the US and the EU have both been flunking dramatically and the US hopefully is about to really succeed at. Yeah, and then there's probably another, you know, half dozen big important questions after that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so these are all just like, say this is an industry that's in flux in a way that I, even more dramatic, I think, than the ones I've seen before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And look, the most example, most obvious example of the flux is sitting here three, sitting here in the summer, you know, sitting here less than three years ago, sitting here in December of 22, we would have said that OpenAI is just running away with everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And sitting here today, it's like, you know, there's at least six, you know, world-class God model companies and teams that are, by the way, generating remarkably similar results.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And this is one of the big things that's playing out in a lot of our culture and kind of political fights right now, which is basically this feeling, certainly that I have and I share with a lot of people, which is it's not enough for America to just be an economic zone. And it's not enough for us to just be individuals. And it's not enough to just have line go up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That's actually been one of the most shocking things to me is like, it turns out that once you know that it's possible to build one incredibly smart Turing test passing large language model, which was a complete shock and surprise to the world. It turns out within, you know, a year, you can have five more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's also a money component thing to it, which is to get the money to scale one of these things into the billions of dollars. There's basically right now only two sources of money that will do that for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
One is the hyperscalers giving you the money, which you turn around and round trip back to them, or foreign sovereigns, other country sovereign wealth funds, which can be difficult in some cases for companies to access. Um, so there's a, there's another, there's maybe another trillion dollar question is the financing question. Here's one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Uh, so Sam Altman has been public about the fact that he wants to transition open AI from being a nonprofit, being a for-profit. Um, the way that that is legally done is that, um, and there is a way to do it. There is a way in us law to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, the IRS and other legal entities, uh, government entities scrutinize this very carefully because the us takes foundation nonprofit law very seriously because of the tax exemption. Um, and so the way that historically, the way that you do it is you start a for-profit and then you, you raise money with the for-profit to buy the assets of the nonprofit at fair market value.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and you know, the last financing round at open AI was, you know, 150 some billion dollars. And so logically the, if, if, if the flip is going to happen, the for-profit has to go raise $150 billion out of the shoot to buy the assets, you know, raising 150 billion is a challenge. Um, so, you know, is that even possible?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
If that is possible, then open AI maybe is off to the races as a for-profit company. If not, you know, uh, you know, I don't know. And then, you know, obviously the Elon lawsuit. So, so just because they're the market leader today, you know, there's big, important questions there. You know, Microsoft has this kind of love hate relationship with them. Where does that go?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Apple's, you know, lagging badly behind, but you know, they're very good at catching up. Amazon, you know, is primarily hyperscaler, but they now have their own models.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, these are big. Like, look, here's a trillion dollar question, which is kind of embedded in that, which is just hallucinations, right? So if you are trying to use these tools creatively, you're thrilled because they can draw new images and they can make new music and they can do all this incredible stuff, right? They're creative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The flip side of that is if you need them to be correct, they can't be creative. And that's the term hallucination.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
and these things do hallucinate and um you know there have been you know court cases already where lawyers have submitted legal briefs that contain made-up court citations case citations the judge is like wait a minute this doesn't exist and the very next question is did you write this yourself and the lawyer goes uh i mean that's why elon grock uh yes looking for truth i mean that's an open technical question how close can you get to truth with lms yeah that's right
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's not enough to just have economic success. There are deeper questions. uh, at play. And, and also, you know, there, there, there's more to a country, uh, than just that. And, and, you know, quite, quite frankly, a lot of it is intangible. Um, a lot of it is, you know, involves spirit, um, and, and passion. And, you know, like I said, we, we have more of it than anybody else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Right. This is a very contentious topic at the industry. My sense is to the extent that there is a domain in which there is a definitive and checkable and provable answer, and you might say math satisfies that, coding satisfies that, and maybe some other fields, then you should be able to generate synthetic data. You should be able to do chain of thought reasoning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You should be able to do reinforcement learning, and you should be able to ultimately eliminate hallucinations. By the way, that's a trillion dollar question right there as to whether that's true. But then there's a question of like, okay, is that going to work in the more general domain?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So for example, one possibility is these things are going to get truly superhuman at math and coding, but at discussing philosophy, they're basically as smart as they're ever going to be. And they're going to be kind of, say, midwit grad student level. And the theory there would just be they're already out of training data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like they literally, you know, you talk to these people like literally the big models, the big models are like within a factor of two X of consuming all the human generated training data to the point that some of these big companies are literally hiring people like doctors and lawyers to sit and write your training data by hand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so does this mean that like, you have to, if you want your model to get better at philosophy, you have to go hire like a thousand philosophers and have them write new content. And is anybody going to do that? And so, you know, maybe, maybe these things are topping out in certain ways and they're going to leap way ahead in other ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so anyway, so we just don't, you know, I guess this is maybe my main conclusion is I don't, any of these, anybody tell me, you know, anybody telling you these big sweeping conclusions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
you know, this whole super, you know, all of these abstract generalized superintelligence AGI stuff, like it, you know, maybe it's the engineer in me, but like, no, like that's not, that's not the, that's too abstract. Like it's got to actually work. Um, and then by the way, it has to actually have to be able to pay for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, I mean, this is a problem right now with the, you know, the big models, the big models that are like really good at coding and math, they're like actually very expensive to run. You know, they're quite slow. Um, Another trillion dollar question, future chips, which I know you've talked a lot about. Another trillion dollar question. Yeah, I mean, all the global issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Oh, another trillion dollar question, censorship. Right? And all the human feedback training process. Exactly what are you training these things to do? What are they allowed to talk about? How often do they give you these incredibly preachy moral lectures? Here's a trillion dollar question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
How many other countries want their country to run its education system, healthcare system, news system, political system on the basis of an AI that's been trained according to the most extreme left-wing California politics? Um, right. Cause that's kind of what they have on offer right now. And I think the answer to that is not very many.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So there's like massive open questions there about like what, you know, and by the way, like what morality are these things going to get trained on as a,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, but, um, you know, we, We have to choose to want it. The way I look at it is like all of our problems are self-inflicted. Like they're, you know, decline is a choice. You know, all of our problems are basically demoralization campaigns. You know, basically people telling us, people in positions of authority telling us that we should, you know, we shouldn't, you know, stand out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So what I experienced, going back to how we started, what I experienced was, all right, social media censorship regime from hell, debanking, right, at like a large scale. And then the war on the crypto industry, trying to kill it, and then basically declared intent to do the same thing to AI and to put AI under the same kind of censorship and control regime as social media and the banks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think this election tipped, in America, I think this election tipped us from a timeline in which things were going to get really bad on that front to a timeline in which I think things are going to be quite good. But look, those same questions also apply outside the US. And the EU is doing their thing. They're being extremely draconian.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they're trying to lock in a political censorship regime on AI right now that's so harsh that even American AI companies are not even willing to launch new products in the EU right now. Like that's not going to last, but like what happens there, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And what are the trade-offs, you know, what levels of censorship are American companies going to have to sign up for if they want to operate in the EU or is the EU still capable of generating its own AI companies or have we brain drained them? so that they can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
To be clear, a reference from the comedy classic Tropic Thunder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yes. Yeah. any zoomers listening to this who haven't seen that movie go watch it immediately yeah there's nothing offensive about nothing offensive about it at all um tom cruise's greatest performance um so um yeah yeah no look i just start by saying like i'm not supposed to be tweeting at all so uh yeah yes yes yes so but you know so how do you approach that like how do you approach what to tweet
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We shouldn't be adventurous. We shouldn't be exciting. We shouldn't be exploratory. You know, we shouldn't, you know, this, that, and the other thing. And we should feel bad about everything that we do. And I think we've lived through a decade where that's been the prevailing theme. And I think quite honestly, as of November, I think people are done with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, I don't. I don't well enough. It's mostly an exercise in frustration. Look, there's a glory to it and there's an issue with it. And the glory of it is instantaneous global communication. X in particular is like the town square on all these social issues, political issues, everything else, current events.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I mean, look, there's no question the format, the format of at least the original tweet is prone to be inflammatory. I'm the guy who at one point the entire nation of India hated me because I once tweeted something. It turned out that it's still politically sensitive in the entire continent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I stayed up all night that night as I became front page headline and leading television news in each time zone in India for a single tweet. The single tweet out of context is a very dangerous thing. Obviously, X now has the middle ground where they, you know, they, they now have the longer form essays.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so, um, you know, probably the most productive thing I can do is, is, is longer form, um, is, is longer form things. Um, you're not going to do it though. I do. I do from time to time. I should, I should do more of them. And then, yeah, I mean, look, but, and yeah, obviously X is doing great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, like I said, like Substack, you know, has become the center for a lot, you know, a lot of the, I think the best kind of, you know, deeply thought through, you know, certainly intellectual content, you know, tons of current events, stuff there as well. And then, yeah, so, and then there's a bunch of other, you know, a bunch of new systems that are very exciting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I think one of the things we can look forward to in the next four years is number one, just like a massive reinvigoration of social media. as a consequence of the changes that are happening right now. I'm very excited to see what's going to happen with that. And then it's happening on X, but it's not going to happen on other platforms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the other is crypto is going to come right back to life. And actually, that's very exciting. Actually, that's worth noting is that's another trillion dollar question on AI, which is in a world of pervasive AI, and especially in a world of AI agents, and imagine a world of billions or trillions of AI agents running around, they need an economy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And crypto, in our view, happens to be the ideal economic system for that, right? Because it's a programmable money. It's a very easy way to plug in and do that. And there's this transaction processing system that can do that. And so I think the crypto AI intersection is potentially a very, very big deal. And so that was going to be impossible under the prior regime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think under the new regime, hopefully it'll be something we can do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
No, he's a super genius. I mean, look, I wouldn't say we're super close, but casual friends. I worked with him at Meta. He's the chief scientist at Meta for a long time and still works with us. And obviously, he's a legendary figure in the field and one of the main people responsible for what's happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
My serious observation would be that it's the thing I keep... I've talked to him about for a long time and I keep trying to read and follow everything he does is he's probably... He is the, I think, see if you agree with this, he is the smartest and most credible critic of LLMs is the Pathway AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he's not, you know, there's certain, I would say, troll-like characters who are just like crap and everything. But like Ian has like very deeply thought through basically theories as to why LLMs are an evolutionary dead end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
and I actually like I try to do this thing where I try to model you know I try to have a mental model of like the two different sides of a serious argument and so I've tried to like internalize that argument as much as I can which is difficult because like we're investing it behind LLMs as aggressively as we can so if he's right like that can be a big problem, but like, we should also know that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and then I sort of use his ideas to challenge all the bullish people, you know, to really kind of test their level of knowledge. So I like to kind of grill people. Like I'm not like, I'm not, you know, I'm, I'm, I was not, you know, I was got my CS degree 35 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I'm not like deep in the technology, but like if, if to the extent I can understand Jan's points, I can use them to, um, you know, to really surface a lot of the questions for the people who are more bullish. Um, and that's been, I think very, very productive. Yeah. It's very striking that you have somebody who is that central in the space who is actually a full-on skeptic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Again, this could go different ways. He could end up being very wrong. He could end up being totally right, or it could be that he will provoke the evolution of these systems to be much better than they would have been.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Which is very useful, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yes, he does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The other two. Okay. Here's my other wolf coming out. Yeah. The other two of the three godfathers of AI are like radicals, like, like full on left, you know, far left, you know, like they, I would say like either Marxists or borderline Marxists. Um, and they're like, I think quite extreme in their social and political views. And I think that feeds into their dumberism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think, you know, they are lobbying for like draconian government. I think what would be ruinously destructive government legislation and regulation. And so it's actually super helpful, super, super helpful to have Jan as a counterpoint to those two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Oh, three.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Exactly. Well, so he convinced me to stop drinking alcohol, which was a big deal. Successfully. Well, other than my family, it was my favorite thing in the world. And so it was a major, major reduction. Like having like a glass of scotch at night was like a major, like it was like the thing I would do to relax. And so he has profoundly negatively impacted my emotional health.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, I, uh, I blame him for making me much less happy as a person, but much, much, much healthier, uh, physically healthier. So that, that I, I credit him with that. I'm glad I did that. Um, but then his sleep stuff, like, yeah, I'm not doing any of that. Yeah. I have no interest in his sleep shit. Like, no. This whole light, natural light, no, we're not doing that. You're too hardcore for this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So that book is written by this guy. I'm going to let Lex do the pronunciations, the foreign language pronunciations for the day. He was a professor of classics at the Sorbonne in Paris, the top university, actually in the 1860s. So actually right around after the... Civil War.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I don't see any natural light in here. It's all covered. It's all horrible. And I'm very happy. I would be very happy living and working here because I'm totally happy without natural light.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's a test. Look, it's a test of manhood as to whether you can have a blue screen in your face for three hours and then go right to sleep. Like, I don't understand why you should want to take shortcuts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I would probably say it is a combination of two things. I think it is, um, contribution. Um, so, you know, have you done something that mattered ultimately? Um, and, um, and you know, and specifically it mattered to people. Um, and then the other thing is I think happiness is either overrated or almost a complete myth. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And in fact, interesting, Thomas Jefferson did not mean happiness the way that we understand it when he said pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. He meant it more of the Greek meaning, which is closer to satisfaction or fulfillment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I think about happiness as the first ice cream cone makes you super happy, the first mile of the walk in the park during sunset makes you super happy, the first kiss makes you super happy, the thousandth ice cream cone makes Not so much. The thousandth mile of the walk through the park. The thousandth kiss can still be good, but maybe just not right in a row. Right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so happiness is this very fleeting concept. And the people who anchor on happiness seem to go off the rails pretty often. Sort of the deep sense of having been, I don't know how to put it, useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. I mean, like, can you sit, can you, yeah, you know, who was it who said that all this source of all the ills in the world is man's inability to sit in a room by himself doing nothing. Um, but like, if you're sitting in a room by yourself and you're like, all right, or, you know, four in the morning, it's like, all right, have I like, you know, have I lived up to my expectation of myself?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
like if you have, you know, the people I know who feel that way are pretty centered. Um, and, um, you know, generally seem very, um, I don't know how to put it pleased with, you know, proud, um, calm at peace. Um, the people who are, um, you know, sensation seekers, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Some of the sensations, by the way, there's certain entrepreneurs, for example, who are like into every form of extreme sport and they get huge satisfaction out of that. Or, you know, there's sensation seeking and sort of useful and productive ways. You know, Larry Ellison was always like that. Zuckerberg is like that. And then, you know, there's a lot of entrepreneurs who end up, you know, drugs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, like sexual escapades that seem like they'll be fun at first and then backfire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he was a savant of a particular kind, which is he, and you can see this in the book, is he had apparently read and sort of absorbed and memorized every possible scrap of Greek and Roman literature. And so it's like a walking like index on basically Greek and Roman, everything we know about Greek and Roman culture. And that's significant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I guess I'd put it this way. There's a lot to just understand about people that I feel like I'm only starting to understand. Um, and that's certainly a simpler concept than God. So, um, that's what I've spent a lot of the last, you know, 15 years trying to figure out. I feel like I spent my first, like whatever, 30 years figuring out machines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then now I'm spending 30 years figuring out people, which turns out to be quite a bit more complicated. Um, And then I don't know, maybe God's the last 30 years or something. Um, uh, and then, you know, look, I mean, just, you know, like, like Elon is just like, okay, the known universe is like very, you know, complicated and, you know, mystifying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, every time I, you know, pull up in astronomy, you know, I get super in astronomy and it's like, you know, you know, daddy, how many galaxies are there in the universe? And you know, what's, how many galaxies are there in the universe?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Okay, like how? Yeah. Like how is that freaking possible? Like what, like it's just, it's such a staggering concept that I. I actually wanted to show you a tweet that blew my mind from Elon from a while back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
a billion light years across yeah so these are all galaxies yeah like what the like how how is it that big like how the hell and like you know I can read the textbook and the this and the that and the whatever eight billion years and the big bang and the whole thing and then it's just like all right wow and then it's like all right the big bang all right like what was what was before the big bang you think we'll ever we humans will ever colonize like a galaxy and maybe even go beyond sure I mean yeah I mean in the fullness of time
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The reason this matters is because basically none of that has changed, right? And so he had access to the exact same written materials that we have access to. And so we've learned nothing. And then specifically what he did is he talked about the Greeks and the Romans, but specifically what he did is he went back further.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
In the fullness of time, I mean, yeah, I mean, yeah, you know, all the problems, all the challenges with it that I do, but like, yeah, why not? I mean, again, in the fullness of time, it'll take a long time. You don't think we'll destroy ourselves? No, I doubt it. I doubt it. And, you know, fortunately, we have Elon. Giving us the backup plan.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I don't know, like I grew up, you know, rural Midwest sort of just like conventionally kind of Protestant Christian. It never made that much sense to me. Got trained as an engineer and a scientist. I'm like, oh, that definitely doesn't make sense. I'm like, I know I'll spend my life as an empirical, you know, rationalist and I'll figure everything out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, you know, and then again, you walk up against these things, you know, you bump up against these things and you're just like, all right, like, okay, I guess there's a scientific explanation for this, but like, wow. Yeah. And then there's like, all right, where did that come from? Right. And then how, how far back can you go on the causality chain? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, yeah, I mean, then even, even just, you know, experiences that we all have on earth, it's, it's hard to, it's hard to rationally explain it all. And then, you know, so yeah, I guess I just say I'm kind of radically open-minded, um, at peace with the fact that I'll probably never know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, the other thing that has happened and maybe the more practical answer to the question is, um, I think I have a much better understanding now of the role that religion plays in society that I didn't have when I was younger. Um, and my partner, Ben has a great, I think he quotes his father on this. He's like, if, if a man does not have a real religion, he makes up a fake one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the fake ones go very, very badly. And so there's this class. It's actually really funny. There's this class of intellectual. There's this class of intellectual that has what appears to be a very patronizing point of view, which is, yes, I'm an atheist, but it's very important that the people believe in something. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And Marx had like the negative view on that, which was religion is the opiate of the masses. But there's a lot of like right wing intellectuals who are themselves, I think, pretty atheist or agnostic that are like, it's deeply important that the people be Christian or something like that. Um, and on the one hand, it's like, wow, that's arrogant and presumptive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He reconstructed the people who came before the Greeks and the Romans and what their life and society was like. And these were the people who were now known as the Indo-Europeans. And these were, or you may have heard of these, these are the people who came down from the steppes. And so they came out of what's now like Eastern Europe, like around sort of the outskirts of what's now Russia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But on the other hand, you know, maybe it's right because, you know, what have we learned in the last hundred years is in the absence of a real religion, people will make up fake ones. Um, there's this, uh, writer, there's this political philosopher who's super interesting on this name, Eric Vogelin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he wrote this, he wrote in that sort of mid, mid part of the century, mid, late part of the 20th century. He's like born in, I think like 1900 and like died in like 85. So he saw the complete run of communism and, uh, and Nazism, um, And himself, you know, fled, I think he fled Europe and, you know, the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, his sort of big conclusion was basically that both communism and Nazism and fascism were basically religions. But like in the deep way of religions, like they were, you know, you call them political religions, but they were like actual religions. And, you know, they were the...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
they were what Nietzsche forecasted when he said, you know, God is dead, we've killed him and we won't wash the blood off our hands for a thousand years, right? Is we will come up with new religions that will just cause just mass murder and death. And like you read his stuff now and you're like, yep, that happened, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then of course, as fully, you know, elite modernists, of course, we couldn't possibly be doing that for ourselves right now, but of course we are. And, you know, I would argue that Eric Vogelin for sure would argue that the last 10 years, you know, we have been in a religious frenzy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
you know, that woke has been a full-scale religious frenzy, um, and has had all of the characteristics of a religion, including everything from patron saints to holy texts to, you know, sin. It's that, uh, wokeness has said every aspect of a, uh, wokeness has said every, I think it's that every single aspect of an actual religion other than redemption, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Which is maybe like the most dangerous religion you could ever come up with is the one where there's no forgiveness. Right. And so I think if Vogelin were alive, I think he would have zeroed right in on that, would have said that. And, you know, we just like sailed right off. I mentioned earlier, like we somehow rediscovered the religions of the Indo-Europeans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We're all into identity politics and environmentalism. Like, I don't think that's an accident. So anyway, like there is something very deep going on in the human psyche on religion that is not dismissible necessarily. and needs to be taken seriously, even if one struggles with the specifics of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then they sort of swept through Europe. They ultimately took over all of Europe. By the way, you know, almost many of the ethnicities in the Americas in the hundreds of years that follow, you know, are Indo-European. So they were basically this warrior class that came down and swept through and essentially populated much of the world. And there's a whole interesting saga there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Thank you, Alex. Is that it? That's... Only how long is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'll accept being one of the short ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But what he does, and then they basically, from there came basically what we know as the Greeks and the Romans were kind of evolutions off of that. And so what he reconstructs is sort of what life was like, what life was like, at least in the West, for people in their kind of original social state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the significance of that is, is the original social state is living in the state of the absolute imperative for survival with absolutely no technology, right? Like no modern systems, no nothing, right? You've got the clothes on your back, you've got your, you know, you've got whatever you can build with your bare hands, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
This is, you know, predates basically all concepts of technologies we understand today. And so these are people under like maximum levels of physical survival pressure. And so what social patterns did they evolve to be able to do that? And the social pattern basically was as follows.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It was a three-part social structure, family, tribe, and city, and zero concept of individual rights, and essentially no concept of individualism. And so you were not an individual, you were a member of your family, and then a set of families would aggregate into a tribe, and then a set of tribes would aggregate into a city.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the morality was completely, it was actually what Nietzsche talks about. The morality was entirely master morality, not slave morality. And so in their morality, anything that was strong was good. And anything that was weak was bad. And it's very clear why that is, right? It's because strong equals good equals survive. Weak equals bad equals die.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And that led to what became known later as the master-slave dialectic, which is, is it more important for you to live on your feet as a master, even at the risk of dying? Or are you willing to live as a slave on your knees in order to not die? And this is sort of the derivation of that moral framework.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Christianity later inverted that moral framework, but the original framework lasted for many, many thousands of years. No concept of individualism. The head of the family had total life and death control over the family. The head of the tribe, same thing. Head of the city, same thing. And then you were morally obligated to kill members of the other cities on contact, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You were morally required to. Like, if you didn't do it, you were a bad person. And then the form of the society was basically maximum fascism combined with maximum communism, right? And so it was maximum fascism in the form of this like absolute top-down control where the head of the family tribe or city could kill other members of the community at any time with no repercussions at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So maximum hierarchy. But combined with maximum communism, which is no market economy, and so everything gets shared, right? And sort of the point of being in one of these collectives is that it's a collective and people are sharing. And of course, that limited how big they could get because the problem with communism is it doesn't scale, right? It works at the level of a family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's much harder to make it work at the level of a country. Impossible. Maximum fascism, maximum communism. And then it was all intricately tied into their religion. And their religion was in two parts. It was veneration of ancestors, and it was veneration of nature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the veneration of ancestors is extremely important because it was basically the ancestors were the people who got you to where you were. The ancestors were the people who had everything to teach you. And then it was veneration of nature because, of course, nature is the thing that's trying to kill you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and then you had your ancestor, every family tribe or city had their ancestor gods, and then they had their, um, they had their nature gods. Okay. So fast forward to today, like we live in a world that is like radically different, but in the, in the book takes you through kind of what happened from that through the Greeks and Romans through to Christianity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, but it's very helpful to kind of think in these terms because the conventional view of the progress through time is that we are, you know, the cliche is the arc of the moral universe, you know, Ben Stroh's justice, right? Or so-called Whig history, which is, you know, that the arc of progress is positive, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, you know, what you hear all the time, what you're taught in school and everything is, you know, every year that goes by, we get better and better and more and more moral and more and more pure and a better version of ourselves. Our Indo-European ancestors would say, oh, no, like you people have like fallen to shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like you people took all of the principles of basically your civilization and you have diluted them down to the point where they barely even matter, you know, and you're having, you know, children on a wedlock and you're, you know, you regularly encounter people of other cities and you don't try to kill them. And like, how crazy is that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they would basically consider us to be living like an incredibly diluted version of this sort of highly religious, highly cult like, right, highly organized, highly fascist, fascist communist society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I can't resist noting that as a consequence of basically going through all the transitions we've been through, going all the way through Christianity, coming out the other end of Christianity, Nietzsche declares God is dead. We're in a secular society, you know, that still has, you know, tinges of Christianity, but, you know, largely prides itself on no longer being religious in that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, we being the sort of most fully evolved modern secular, you know, expert scientists and so forth have basically re-evolved or fallen back on the exact same religious structure. Uh, that the Indo-Europeans had, uh, specifically ancestor worship, which is identity politics, um, and nature worship, which is environmentalism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so we have actually like worked our way all the way back to their cult religions without realizing it. And, and, and it just goes to show that like, you know, in some ways we have fallen far from the, far from the family tree, but in some cases we're exactly the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Identity politics is worshipping ancestors, right? It's tagging newborn infants with either benefits or responsibilities or levels of condemnation based on who their ancestors were. The Indo-Europeans would have recognized it on sight. We somehow think it's super socially progressive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, I would say obviously not, you know, get, get nuanced, which is where I think you're headed, which is look like is the idea that you can like completely reinvent society every generation and have no regard whatsoever for what came before you. That seems like a really bad idea, right? That's like the Cambodians with your zero under Pol Pot and, you know, death, you know, follows.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's obviously the Soviets tried that, um, You know, the utopian fantasists who think that they can just rip up everything that came before and create something new in the human condition and human society have a very bad history of causing enormous destruction. So on the one hand, it's like, okay, there is like a deeply important role for tradition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the way I think about that is it's the process of evolutionary learning. Right. Which is what tradition ought to be is the distilled wisdom of all. And, you know, this is already new Europeans thought about it should be the distilled wisdom of everybody who came before. Right. All those important and powerful lessons learned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And that's why I think it's fascinating to go back and study how these people lived is because that's that's part of the history and part of the learning that got us to where we are today. Having said that, there are many cultures around the world that are, you know, mired in tradition to the point of not being able to progress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And in fact, you might even say globally, that's the default human condition, which is, you know, a lot of people are in societies in which, you know, there's like absolute seniority by age. You know, kids are completely, you know, like in the US, like for some reason, we decided kids are in charge of everything, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And like, you know, they're the trendsetters and they're allowed to like set all the agendas and like set all the politics and set all the culture. And maybe that's a little bit crazy. But like in a lot of other cultures, kids have no voice at all, no role at all because it's the old people who are in charge of everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, they're gerontocracies and it's all a bunch of 80 year olds running everything, which, by the way, we have a little bit of that, too. Right. And so I would say is like there's a doubt there's there's a real downside, you know, full traditionalism is communitarianism. It's ethnic particularism. It's ethnic chauvinism. It's this incredible level of resistance to change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It just doesn't get you anywhere. It may be good and fine at the level of individual tribe, but as a society living in the modern world, you can't evolve. You can't advance. You can't participate in all the good things that have happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I think probably this is one of those things where extremeness on either side is probably a bad idea, but this needs to be approached in a sophisticated and nuanced way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, so look, a big part of this is getting the government boot off the neck of the American economy, the American technology industry, the American people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And again, this is a replay of what happened in the 60s and 70s, which is, for what started out looking like, I'm sure, good and virtuous purposes, we ended up both then and now with this, what I describe as sort of a form of soft authoritarianism. The good news is it's not like a military dictatorship. It's not like you get thrown into Ljubljana for the most part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's not coming at four in the morning. You're not getting dragged off to a cell. It's not hard authoritarianism, but it is soft authoritarianism. It's this incredible suppressive blanket of regulation, rules, this concept of a vitocracy. What's required to get anything done? You need to get 40 people to sign off on anything. Any one of them can veto it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's a lot of how our now political system works. And then just this general idea of progress is bad and technology is bad and capitalism is bad and building businesses is bad and success is bad. Tall poppy syndrome, basically anybody who sticks their head up deserves to get it chopped off. Anybody who's wrong about anything deserves to get condemned forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, just this this very kind of, you know, grinding, you know, repression and then coupled with specific government actions such as censorship regimes. Right. And debanking. Right. And, you know, draconian, you know, deliberately kneecapping, you know, critical American industries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, you know, congratulating yourselves on the back for doing it or, you know, having these horrible social policies, like let's let all the criminals out of jail and see what happens. Right. And so like we've just been through this period. You know, I call it a demoralization campaign.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like we've just been through this period where, you know, whether it started that way or not, it ended up basically being this comprehensive message that says you're terrible. And if you try to do anything, you're terrible and fuck you. And the Biden administration reached kind of the full pinnacle of that in our time. They got really bad on many fronts at the same time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so just like relieving that and getting kind of back to a reasonably, you know, kind of optimistic, constructive, you know, pro-growth frame of mind. There's just, there's so much pent up energy and potential in the American system that that alone is going to, I think, cause, you know, growth and spirit to take off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then there's a lot of things proactively that, yeah, and then there's a lot of things proactively that could be done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Disclaimer at first, which is I don't want to predict anything on any of this stuff because I've learned the hard way that I can't predict politics or Washington at all. But I would just say that the plans and intentions are clear and the staffing supports it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And all the conversations are consistent with the new administration and that they plan to take very rapid action on a lot of these fronts very quickly. They're going to do as much as they can through executive orders, and then they're going to do legislation and regulatory changes for the rest. And so they're going to move, I think, quickly on a whole bunch of stuff.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You can already feel, I think, a shift in the national spirit, or at least let's put it this way. I feel it for sure in Silicon Valley. I mean, we just saw a great example of this with what Mark Zuckerberg is doing. Obviously, I'm involved with his company, but we just saw it kind of in public, the scope and speed of the changes are reflective of a lot of these shifts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I would say that that same conversation, those same kinds of things are happening throughout the industry. Right. And so the tech industry itself, whether people were pro-Trump or anti-Trump, like there's just like a giant vibe shift, mood shift that's like kicked in already.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then I was with a group of Hollywood people about two weeks ago and they were still, you know, people who at least at least vocally were still very anti-Trump. But I said, you know, has anything changed since since November 6th? And they immediately said, oh, it's completely different. It feels like the ice is thawed. You know, woke is over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, you know, they said that all kinds of projects are going to be able to get made now that couldn't before that, you know, probably was going to start making comedies again, you know, like they were just like, it's like, it's like a, just like an incredible immediate, uh, environmental change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I'm, as I talk to people kind of throughout, you know, certainly throughout the economy, people who run businesses, I hear that all the time, which is just this, this last 10 years of misery is just over. I mean, the one that I'm watching that's really funny. I mean, Facebook's getting a lot, that is getting a lot of attention, but the other funny one is BlackRock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Which I'm not, you know, and I don't know him, but I've watched for a long time. And so, you know, Larry Fink, who's the CEO of BlackRock, was like first in as a major, you know, investment CEO on like every dumb social trend and rule set, like every... All right, I'm going for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Every retarded thing you can imagine, every ESG and every possible satellite companies with every aspect of just these crazed ideological positions. And he was coming in, he literally had aggregated together trillions of dollars of shareholdings that were his customers' rights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he seized their voting control of their shares and was using it to force all these companies to do all of this crazy ideological stuff. And he was like the Typhoid Mary of all this stuff in corporate America. And he, in the last year, has been backpedaling from that stuff as fast as he possibly can. And just an example, last week, he pulled out of the corporate net zero alliance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He pulled out of the crazy energy stuff. And so he's backing away as fast as he can. Remember the Richard Pryor backwards walk? Richard Pryor had this way where he could back out of a room while looking like he was walking forward. And so... You know, even they're doing that. And just the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, if you saw the court recently ruled that NASDAQ had these crazy board of directors composition rules. One of the funniest moments of my life is when my friend Peter Thiel and I were on the meta board. And these NASDAQ rules came down, mandated diversity on corporate boards. And so we sat around the table and had to figure out which of us counted as diverse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the very professional attorneys at Meta explained with a 100% complete straight face that Peter Thiel counts as diverse by virtue of being LGBT. And this is a guy who literally wrote a book called The Diversity Myth. And he literally looked like he'd swallowed a live goldfish. Um, and, and, and this was imposed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, this was like so incredibly offensive to him that like, it just like, it was just absolutely appalling. And I felt terrible for him, but the look on his face was very funny. Um, and it was imposed by NASDAQ, you know, your stock exchange imposing this stuff on you. And then the court, whatever the court, the court of appeals just nuked that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So these things basically are being ripped down one by one. And what's on the other side of it is basically finally being able to get back to everything that everybody always wanted to do, which is run their companies, have great products, have happy customers, succeed, achieve, outperform, and work with the best and the brightest and not be made to feel bad about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think that's happening in many areas of American society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, so it was very, you know, there was a moment. So Peter, you know, Peter, of course, you know, is publicly gay, has been for a long time. You know, but, you know, there are other men on the board, right? And, you know, we're sitting there and we're all looking at it and we're like, all right, like, okay, LGBT. And we just, we keep coming back to the B, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's like, you know, it's like, you know, I'm willing to do a lot for this company, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, yeah. And then it's like, okay, like, is there a test?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The questions that got asked, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I've become very good at asking lawyers completely absurd questions with a totally straight face. And do they answer with a straight face? Sometimes. Okay. I think in fairness, they have trouble telling when I'm joking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
First, we should maybe talk population. There's all of Silicon Valley. The way to just measure that is just look at voting records. What that shows consistently is Silicon Valley is just, at least historically, my entire time there has been overwhelmingly majority just straight up Democrat. The other way to look at that is political donation records.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Again, the political donations in the valley range from 90% to 99% to one side. I just bring it up because we'll see what happens with the voting and with donations going forward. We maybe talk about the fire later, but I can tell you there is a very big question of what's happening in Los Angeles right now. I don't want to get into the fire, but it's catastrophic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There was already a rightward shift in the big cities in California, and I think a lot of people in LA are really thinking about things right now as they're trying to literally save their houses and save their families. But even in San Francisco, there was a big shift to the right in the voting in 24. So we'll see where that goes. But you observe that by just looking at the numbers over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The part that I'm more focused on is, and I don't know how to exactly describe this, but it's like the top 1,000 or the top 10,000 people. And I don't have a list, but it's all the top founders, top CEOs, top executives, top engineers, top VCs, and then kind of into the ranks, the people who kind of built and run the companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they're, you know, I don't have numbers, but I have a much more tactile feel, you know, for what's happening. So the big thing I have now come to believe is that the idea that people have beliefs is mostly wrong. I think that most people just go along. And I think even most high status people just go along.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think maybe the most high status people are the most prone to just go along because they're the most focused on status. Um, and the way I would describe that is, um, you know, one of the great forbidden philosophers of our time is the Unabomber, uh, Ted Kaczynski. And amidst his madness, he had this extremely interesting articulation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, he was a, he was a, he was an insane lunatic murderer, but he was also a, you know, at Harvard super genius. Um, not that those are in conflict. Shots fired, man. But he was a very bright guy and he did this whole thing where he talked about, basically, he was very right-wing and talked about leftism a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he had this great concept that's just stuck in my mind ever since I read it, which is he had this concept he just called over-socialization. Um, and so, you know, most people are socialized, most people are socialized. Like most people are, you know, we live in a society. Most people learn how to be part of a society. They give some deference to the society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's something about modern Western elites where they're over socialized. Um, and they're just like overly oriented towards what other people like themselves, you know, think, um, and believe. And you can get a real sense of that if you have a little bit of an outside perspective, which I just do, I think as a consequence of where I grew up, um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Even before I had the views that I have today, there was always just this weird thing where it's like, why does every dinner party have the exact same conversation? Why does everybody agree on every single issue? Why is that agreement precisely what was in the New York Times today? Why are these positions not the same as they were five years ago?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But why does everybody like snap into agreement every step of the way? And that was true when I came to Silicon Valley and it's just as true today, 30 years later. And so I think most people are just literally, I think they're taking their cues from, it's some combination of the press, the universities, the big foundations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So basically it's like the New York Times, Harvard, the Ford Foundation, and I don't know, a few CEOs and a few public figures, and maybe the president of your party's in power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And like, whatever that is, everybody just, everybody who's sort of good and proper and elite and good standing and in charge of things and a sort of correct member of, you know, let's call it coastal American society, everybody just believes those things. And then, you know, the two interesting things about that is, number one, there's no divergence among the organs of power, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So Harvard and Yale believe the exact same thing. The New York Times and the Washington Post believe the exact same thing. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation believe the exact same thing. Google and, you know, whatever, you know, Microsoft believe the exact same thing. Um, but those things change over time, but there's never conflict in the moment. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so, you know, the New York times and the Washington post agreed on exactly everything in 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020, despite the fact that the specifics changed radically. The lockstep was what mattered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I think basically we in the Valley, we're on the tail end of that in the same way Hollywood's on the tail end of that and the same way New York's on the tail end of that, the same way the media's on the tail end of that. It's like some sort of collective hive mind thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I just go through that to say, I don't think most people in my orbit, or let's say the top 10,000 people in the Valley, or the top 10,000 people in LA, I don't think they're sitting there thinking, basically, I have rock... I mean, they probably think they have rock-solid beliefs, but they don't actually have some inner core of rock-solid beliefs, and then they kind of watch reality change around them and try to figure out how to keep their beliefs correct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I don't think that's what happens. I think what happens is they conform to the belief system around them. And I think most of the time they're not even aware that they're basically part of a herd.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'll just tell you what I think, which is at the dinner parties and at the conferences, no, there's none of that. What there is is that all of the heretical conversations, anything that challenges the status quo, any heretical ideas, and any new idea is a heretical idea. Any deviation is either discussed one-on-one, face-to-face. It's like a whisper network.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Or it's like a real life social network. Here's a secret handshake, which is like, okay, you meet somebody and you like know each other a little bit, but like not well. And like, you're both trying to figure out if you can like talk to the other person openly or whether you have to like be fully conformist. It's a joke. Well, yeah. Humor. Somebody cracks a joke, right? Somebody cracks a joke.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
If the other person laughs, the conversation is on. Yeah. Yeah. If the other person doesn't laugh. Back slowly away from the scene. I didn't mean anything by it. Right. And by the way, it doesn't have to be like a super offensive joke. It just has to be a joke that's just up against the edge of one of the use the Sam Bankman free term, one of the shibboleths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, it has to be up against one of the things of, you know, one of the things that you're absolutely required to believe to be the dinner parties. And then and then at that point, what happens is you have a peer to peer network.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
right you have you have you have a one-to-one connection with somebody and then you you have your you have your your little conspiracy of thought thought criminality um and then you have your net you've probably been through this you have your network of thought criminals and then they have their network of thought criminals and then you have this like delicate mating dance as to whether you should bring the thought criminals together right um and the dance the fundamental uh mechanism of the dance is humor yeah it's humor like it's right
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, for two reasons. Number one, humor is a way to have deniability. Right. Humor is a way to discuss serious things without having deniability. Oh, I'm sorry. It was just a joke. Right. So that's part of it, which is one of the reasons why comedians can get away with saying things the rest of us can't. They can always fall back on, oh, yeah, I was just going for the laugh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But the other key thing about humor, right, is that laughter is involuntary. Right. Like you either laugh or you don't. And it's not like a conscious decision whether you're going to laugh. And everybody can tell when somebody is fake laughing. Right. And it's every professional comedian knows this. Right. The laughter is the clue that you're onto something truthful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like people don't laugh at like made up bullshit stories. They laugh because like you're revealing something that they either have not been allowed to think about or have not been allowed to talk about. Right. Or is off limits. And all of a sudden it's like the ice breaks and it's like, oh, yeah, that's the thing. And it's funny. And like I laugh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then and then, of course, this is why, of course, live comedy is so powerful is because you're all doing that at the same time. So you start to have the safety of, you know, the safety of numbers. And so so the comedians have like there is no no surprise to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, for example, Joe has been as successful as he has because they have they have this hack that the rest of us who are not professional comedians don't have. But you have your in-person version of it. Yeah. And then you got the question of whether the, whether you can sort of join the networks together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then you've probably been to this as you know, then at some point there's like a different, there's like the alt dinner party, uh, the Tharka middle dinner party and you get six or eight people together and you join the networks. And those are like the happiest, at least in the last decade, those are like the happiest moments of everybody's lives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Cause they're just like, everybody's just ecstatic. Cause they're like, I don't have to worry about getting yelled at and shamed. Like for every third sentence that comes out of my mouth and we can actually talk about real things. So that's the live version of it. And then, of course, the other side of it is the group chat phenomenon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then basically the same thing played out until Elon bought X and until Substack took off, which were really the two big breakthroughs in free speech online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The same dynamic played out online, which is you had absolute conformity on the social networks, like literally enforced by the social networks themselves through censorship and then also through cancellation campaigns and mobbing and shaming. But then group chats grew up to be the equivalent of Samizdat, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Anybody who grew up in the Soviet Union under, you know, communism, you know, they had the hard version of this, right? It's like, how do you know who you could talk to? And then how do you distribute information? And, you know, like, you know, again, that was the hard authoritarian version of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then we've been living through this weird mutant, you know, soft authoritarian version, but with, you know, with some of the same patterns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Exactly. Well, and this is the thing. Well, this is kind of the running joke about group chats. It's not even a joke. It's true. It's like every group chat, if you've noticed this, this principle of group chats, every group chat ends up being about memes and humor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the goal of the game of the group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable as you can get without actually tripping it. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And like literally every group chat that I have been in for the last decade, even if it starts some other direction, what ends up happening is it becomes the absolute comedy fest where, but it's walking, they walk right up the line and they're constantly testing. And every once in a while, somebody will trip the line and people will freak out. And it's like, oh, too soon. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, we got to wait until next year to talk about that. They walk it back. And so it's that same thing. And yeah, and then group chats is a technological phenomenon. It was amazing to see because basically it was, number one, it was obviously the rise of smartphones. Then it was the rise of the new messaging services.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Then it was the rise specifically of, I would say, combination of WhatsApp and Signal. And the reason for that is those were the two big systems that did the full encryption. So you actually felt safe. And then the real breakthrough, I think, was disappearing messages, which hit Signal probably four or five years ago and hit WhatsApp three or four years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the combination of the combination of encryption and and disappearing messages, I think, really unleashed it. Well, then there's the fight. Then there's the fight over the length of the disappearing messages. Right. And so it's like, you know, I often get behind my my thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I set to seven day, you know, disappearing messages and my friends who, you know, are like, no, that's way too much risk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Now, of course, what's happening right now is the big thaw, right? And so the vibe shifts. So what's happening on the other side of the election is, you know, Elon on Twitter two years ago and now Mark with Facebook and Instagram.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And by the way, with the continued growth of Substack and with other, you know, new platforms that are emerging, you know, like I think it may be, you know, I don't know that everything just shifts back into public, but like a tremendous amount of the So a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations, you know, can now shift back into public view.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I mean, quite frankly, this is one of those things, you know, quite frankly, even if I was opposed to what those people are saying, and I'm sure I am in some cases, you know, I would argue still like net better for society that those things happen in public instead of private. You know, do you really want like, yeah, like, don't you want to know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so and then it's just look, it's just, I think, clearly much healthier to live in a society in which people are not literally scared of what they're saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. So let's go through the, we'll go through the theory of preference falsification.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, yeah. So this is exactly, this is one of the all-time great books. Incredibly, it's about 20, 30-year-old book, but it's very, it's completely modern and current in what it talks about, as well as very deeply historically informed. So it's called Private Truths, Public Lies. And it's written by a social science professor named Timur Karan at, I think, Duke. And it's definitive work on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so he has this concept he calls preference falsification. And so preference falsification is two things. Preference falsification, and you get it from the title of the book, Private Truths, Public Lies. So preference falsification is when you believe something and you can't say it. Or, and this is very important, you don't believe something and you must say it, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the commonality there is in both cases you're lying. you believe something internally and then you're lying about it in public. And so the thing, you know, and there's sort of two classic forms of it. There's the, you know, for example, there's the I believe communism is rotten, but I can't say it version of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But then there's also the famous parable of the real life example, but the thing that Václav Havel talks about in the other good book on this topic, which is The Power of the Powerless, you know, who is an anti-communist resistance fighter who ultimately became the, you know, the president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the wall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But he wrote this book and he describes the other side of this, which is workers of the world unite. Right. And so he describes what he calls the parable of the green grocer, which is your green grocer in Prague in 1985. And for the last 70 years, it has been 50 years. It's been absolutely mandatory to have a sign in the window of your store that says workers of the world unite. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's 1985. It is like crystal clear that the workers of the world are not going to unite. Like all the things that could happen in the world, that is not going to happen. The commies have been at that for 70 years. It is not happening. But that slogan had better be in your window every morning because if it's not in your window every morning, you are not a good communist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The secret police are going to come by and they're going to get you. And so the first thing you do when you get to the stories, you put that slogan in the window and you make sure that it stays in the window all day long. But he says the thing is every single person, the green grocer knows the slogan is fake. He knows it's a lie. Every single person walking past the slogan knows that it's a lie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Every single person walking past the store knows that the greengrocer is only putting it up there because he has to lie in public. And the greengrocer has to go through the humiliation of knowing that everybody knows that he's caving into the system and lying in public. And so it turns into demoralization campaign. It's not just ideological enforcement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
In fact, it's not ideological enforcement anymore because everybody knows it's fake. The authorities know it's fake. Everybody knows it's fake. It's not that they're enforcing the actual ideology of the workers of the world uniting. It's that they are enforcing compliance and compliance with the regime. And fuck you, you will comply. And so anyway, that's the other side of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And of course, we have lived in the last decade through... a lot of both of those. I think anybody listening to this could name a series of slogans that we've all been forced to chant for the last decade that everybody knows at this point are just simply not true. I'll let the audience speculate on their own group chats. Send Mark your memes online as well, please. Yes, yes, exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But okay, so anyway, so it's the two sides of that, right? So it's private truths, public lies. So then what preference falsification does is it talks about extending that from the idea of the individual experiencing that to the idea of the entire society experiencing that, right? And this gets to your percentages question, which is like, okay,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
What happens in a society in which people are forced to lie in public about what they truly believe? What happens, number one, is that individually they're lying in public and that's bad. But the other thing that happens is they no longer have an accurate gauge at all or any way to estimate how many people agree with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And again, this literally is like how you get something like the communist system, which is like, okay, you end up in a situation in which 80 or 90 or 99% of society can actually all be thinking individually, I really don't buy this anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And if anybody would just stand up and say it, I would be willing to go along with it, but I'm not going to be the first one to put my head on the chopping block. But because of the suppression, censorship, you have no way of knowing how many other people agree with you. And if the people who agree with you are 10% of the population and you become part of a movement, you're going to get killed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
If 90% of the people agree with you, you're going to win the revolution. And so the question of what the percentage actually is is a really critical question. And then basically in any sort of authoritarian system, you can't run a survey to get an accurate result. And so you actually can't know until you put it to the test.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then what he describes in the book is it's always put to the test in the same way. And this is exactly what's happened for the last two years, like 100% of exactly what's happened. It's like straight out of this book, which is somebody, Elon, sticks his hand up and says, the workers of the world are not going to unite. Right. Right? Or the emperor is actually wearing no clothes. Right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, that famous parable. Right? So one person stands up and does it. And literally that person is standing there by themselves and everybody else in the audience is like, ooh, I wonder what's going to happen to that guy. Right? But again, nobody knows. Elon doesn't know. The first guy doesn't know. Other people don't know. Like, which way is this going to go?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it may be that that's a minority position and that's a way to get yourself killed. Or it may be that that's the majority position and you are now the leader of a revolution. And then basically, of course, what happens is, okay, the first guy does that, doesn't get killed. Right? The second guy does, well, a lot of the time that guy does get killed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But when the guy doesn't get killed, then a second guy pops his head up, says the same thing. All right, now you've got two. Two leads to four, four leads to eight, eight leads to 16. And then as we saw with the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe in 89. When it goes, it can go, right? And then it rips.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then what happens is very, very quickly, if it turns out that you had a large percentage of the population that actually believe the different thing, it turns out all of a sudden everybody has this giant epiphany that says, oh, I'm actually part of the majority. And at that point, like you were on the freight train to revolution, right? Like it is rolling right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The other part of this is the distinction between the role of the elites and the masses. And here and here, the best book is called The True Believer, which is the Eric Hoffer book. And so the nuance you have to put on this is the elites play a giant role in this because the elites do idea formation and communication, but the elites by definition are a small minority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so there's also this giant role played by the masses and the masses are not necessarily thinking these things through in the same intellectualized or formal way that the elites are. but they are for sure experiencing these things in their daily lives and they for sure have at least very strong emotional views on them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so when you really get the revolution, it's when you get the elites lined up with, or either the current elites change or the new set of elites, a new set of counter elites basically come along and say, no, there's actually a different and better way to live. And then the people basically decide to follow the, you know, to follow the counter elite. So that's the other dimension to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And of course that part is also happening right now. And again, case study number one of that would be Elon and his, you know, he turns out, you know, truly massive following.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. And it's like, well, but then there's the test. Is it crazy shit or is it the truth? Right. And, and, and, you know, and this is where, you know, many, there are many more specific things about Elon's genius, but one of the, one of the really core ones is an absolute dedication to the truth. Um, and so when Elon says something, it sounds like crazy shit, but in his mind, it's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Now, is he always right? No. Sometimes the rockets crash. Sometimes he's wrong. He's human. He's like anybody else. He's not right all the time. But at least my through line with him, both in what he says in public and what he says in private, which, by the way, are the exact same things. He does not do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He doesn't lie in public about what he believes in private, or at least he doesn't do that anymore. He's 100% consistent in my experience. By the way, there's two guys who are 100% consistent like that, that I know, um, Yolanda Trump. Yeah. Whatever you think of them, what they say in private is 100% identical to what they say in public. Like they are completely transparent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They're completely honest in that way. Right. Which is like, and again, it's not like they're perfect people, but they're honest in that way. And it makes them potentially both as they have been very powerful leaders of these movements because they're both willing to stand up and say the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That if it's true, it turns out to be the thing in many cases that, you know, many or most or almost everyone else actually believes, but nobody was actually willing to say out loud. And so they can actually catalyze these shifts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I mean, I think this framework is exactly why Trump took over the Republican Party is I think Trump stood up there on stage with all these other kind of conventional Republicans and he started saying things out loud that it turned out the base really was. They were either already believing or they were prone to believe. Um, and he was the only one who was saying them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the, again, elite masses, he was elite, the voters of the masses and the voters decided, you know, no, no more bushes. Like we're going this other direction. That's the mechanism of social change. Like what we just described is like the actual mechanism of social change. It is Fascinating to me that we have been living through exactly this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We've been living through everything exactly what Timur Karan describes, everything that Václav Havel described, you know, black squares and Instagram, like the whole thing, right? All of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And we've been living through the, you know, the true believer elites masses, you know, thing with, you know, with a set of like basically incredibly corrupt elites wondering why they don't have the loyalty to masses anymore and a set of new elites that are running away with things. And so, like, we're living through this, like, incredible applied case study of these ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, if there's a moral of the story, it is, you know, I think fairly obvious, which is it is a really bad idea for a society to wedge itself into a position in which most people don't believe the fundamental precepts of what they're told they have to do, you know, to be to be good people like that. That is just not a good state to be in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, it's like, well, this is sort of the siren song of censorship is we can keep people from saying things, which means we can keep people from thinking things. And, you know, by the way, that may work for a while, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, you know, I mean, again, the hard form of the Soviet Union, owning a mimeograph, pre-photocopiers, there were mimeograph machines that were used to make samustat in underground newspapers, which is the mechanism of written communication of radical ideas, heretical ideas. Ownership of a mimeograph machine was punishable by death. Right? So that's the hard version, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, the soft version is somebody clicks a button in Washington and you were erased from the internet, right? Like, which, you know, good news, you're still alive. Bad news is, you know, shame about not being able to get a job. Too bad your family now hates you and won't talk to you, or whatever the version of cancellation has been. And so does that work? Maybe it works for a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It could work for the Soviet Union for a while in its way, especially when it was coupled with official state power. But when it unwinds, it can unwind with incredible speed and ferocity, because to your point, there's all this bottled up energy. Now, your question was, what are the percentages? What's the breakdown? And so my...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
My rough guess, just based on what I've seen in my world, is it's something like 20, 60, 20. It's like you've got 20% like true believers in whatever is, you know, the current thing. You know, you've got 20% of people who are just like true believers of whatever they're, you know, whatever's in the New York Times, Harvard professors and the Ford Foundation, like just, they're just believing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
By the way, maybe it's 10, maybe it's five, but let's say generously it's 20. So, you know, 20% kind of full-on revolutionaries. Um, and then you've got, let's call it 20% on the other side that are like, no, I'm not on board with this. This is, this is crazy. I'm not, I'm not signing up for this, but you know, you know, they, their view of themselves is they're in a small minority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And in fact, they start out in a small minority because what happens is the 60% go with the first 20%, not the second 20%. So you've got this large middle of people. And it's not that there's anything like it's not the people in the middle are not smart or anything like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's that they just have like normal lives and they're just trying to get by and they're just trying to go to work each day and do a good job and be a good person and raise their kids and, you know, have a little bit of time to watch the game. And they're just not engaged in the cut and thrust of, you know, political activism or any of this stuff is just not their thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But that's where the over socialization comes in. It's just like, okay, by default, the 60% will go along with the 20% of the radical revolutionaries, at least for a while. And then the counter elite is in this other 20%. And over time, they build up a theory and network and ability to resist. And a new set of representatives and a new set of ideas. And then at some point, there's a contest.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the question is, what happens in the middle? What happens in the 60%? And it's kind of my point. It's not even really does the 60% change their beliefs as much as it's like, okay, what is the thing that that 60% now decides to basically fall into step with? And I think in the Valley, that 60% for the last decade decided to be woke and extremely, I would say, on edge on a lot of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And that 60% is pivoting in real time. They're just done. They've just had it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So this is the other thing. Okay, so there's two forms of internal. There's two forms of things. And Timur has actually talked about this. Professor Kronos talked about this. So one is, he said, this is the kind of unwind where what you're going to have is you're now going to have people in the other direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You're going to have people who claim that they supported Trump all along who actually didn't. Right? Right. Right. So it's going to swing the other way. And by the way, Trump's not the only part of this, but you know, he's just a convenient shorthand for, you know, for, for a lot of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, but you know, whatever it is, you'll, you'll have people who will say, well, I never supported the EI, right. Or I never supported ESG, or I never thought we should have canceled that person. Right. Where of course they were full on a part of the mob, like, you know, kind of at that moment. And so anyway, so you'll have preference falsification happening in the other direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And his prediction, I think basically is you'll end up with the same quote problem on the, on the other side. Now, Will that happen here? I don't know. How far is American society willing to go in any of these things? I don't know. But there is some question there. And then the other part of it is, okay, now you have this elite that is used to being in power for the last decade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And by the way, many of those people are still in power and they're in very important positions. And the New York Times is still the New York Times and Harvard is still Harvard. And those people haven't changed at all. Right. And they, you know, they've been bureaucrats in the government and, you know, senior Democratic, you know, politicians and so forth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they're sitting there, you know, right now feeling like reality has just smacked them hard in the face because they lost the election so badly. But they're now going into a specifically the Democratic Party is going into a civil war. Right. And that form of the civil war is completely predictable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And that's exactly what's happening, which is half of them are saying, we need to go back to the center. We need to de-radicalize because we've lost the people. We've lost the people in the middle. And so we need to go back to the middle in order to be able to get 50% plus one in an election. Right. And then the other half of them are saying, no, we weren't true to our principles. We were too weak.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We were too soft. We must become more revolutionary. We must double down and we must celebrate murders in the street of health insurance executives. And that right now is like a real fight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. So he's a friend of yours. I respect that you don't want to name him. I also respect you don't want to beat on him. So I would like to beat on him on your behalf. Does he have tenure?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
This is the ultimate indictment of the corruption and the rot at the heart of our education system, at the heart of these universities. And it's, by the way, it's like across the board. It's like all the top universities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's like, because the siren song for what it's been for 70 years, whatever, the tenure system, peer review system, tenure system, which is like, yeah, you work your butt off as an academic to get a professorship and then to get tenure because then you can say what you actually think. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Then you can do your work and your research and your speaking and your teaching without fear of being fired. Right. Without fear of being canceled like academic freedom. I mean, think of the term academic freedom and then think of what these people have done to it. Like it's gone. Like that entire thing was fake and is completely rotten.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And these people are completely, completely giving up the entire moral foundation of the system that's been built for them, which by the way is paid for virtually 100% by taxpayer money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That the population at large is going to realize the corruption in their industry and it's going to withdraw all the funding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
No, no, no, no, no. Think about what happens next. Okay. So let's go, let's go through it. So the, the, the universities, the universe, the universities are funded by four primary sources of federal funding. The big one is the federal student loan program, which is, you know, in the many trillions of dollars at this point, and then only spiraling, you know, way faster than, than inflation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, that's number one. Number two is federal research funding, which is also very large. And you probably know that, um, um, When a scientist at university gets a research grant, the university rakes as much as 70% of the money for central uses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Number three is tax exemption at the operating level, which is based on the idea that these are nonprofit institutions as opposed to, let's say, political institutions. And then number four is tax exemptions at the endowment level, which is the financial buffer that these places have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Hypothetically, anybody who's been close to university budget will basically see that what would happen if you withdrew those sources of federal taxpayer money. And then for the state schools, the state money, they'll instantly go bankrupt. And then you could rebuild. then you could rebuild.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Because the problem right now, like the folks at University of Austin are mounting a very valiant effort and I hope that they succeed and I'm cheering for them. But the problem is you're now inserting. Suppose you and I want to start a new university and we want to hire all the free thinking professors and we want to have the place that fixes all this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Practically speaking, we can't do it because we can't get access to that money. I'll give you the most direct reason we can't get access to that money. We can't get access to federal student funding. Do you know how universities are accredited for the purpose of getting access to federal student funding, federal student loans? They're accredited by the government, but not directly, indirectly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They're not accredited by the Department of Education. Instead, what happens is the Department of Education accredits accreditation bureaus that are nonprofits that do the accreditation. Guess what the composition of the accreditation bureaus is? The existing universities. They are in complete control. The incumbents are in complete control as to who gets access to federal student loan money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Guess how enthusiastic they are about accrediting a new university? Right. And so we have a government-funded and supported cartel that has gone, I mean, it's just obvious now, it's just gone sideways in basically any possible way it could go sideways, including, I mean, literally, as you know, students getting beaten up on campus for being of the wrong religion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They're just wrong in every possible way at this point. And it's all in the federal taxpayer back. And there is no way, I mean, my opinion, there is no way to fix these things without replacing them. And there's no way to replace them without letting them fail. And by the way, It's like everything else in life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, in a sense, this is like the most obvious conclusion of all time, which is what happens in the business world when a company does a bad job is they go bankrupt and another company takes its place, right? And that's how you get progress. And of course, below that is what happens is this is the process of evolution, right? Why does anything ever get better?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's because things are tested and tried and then the things that are good survive. And so these places have cut themselves off. They've been allowed to cut themselves off both from evolution at the institutional level and evolution at the individual level, as shown by the just widespread abuse of tenure. And so we've just stalled out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We built an ossified system, an ossified centralized corrupt system. We're surprised by the results. They are not fixable in their current form.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Oh, but that logic doesn't follow at all. That's underpants gnome logic. Underpants knows logic. So I just started watching a key touchstone of American culture with my nine-year-old, which of course is South Park.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Wow. Which, by the way, is a little aggressive for a nine-year-old. Very aggressive. But he likes it. So he's learning all kinds of new words. And all kinds of new ideas. I told him, I said, you're going to hear words on here that you are not allowed to use. Right. Education. And I said, do you know how we have an agreement that we never lie to mommy? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I said not using a word that you learn in here does not count as lying. Keep that in mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Of course, in the very opening episode, in the first 30 seconds, one of the kids calls the other kid a dildo. We're off to the races. Daddy, what's a dildo? Yep. Sorry, son. I don't know. Yeah. So famous episode of South Park, the underpants gnomes. And so the underpants. So there's this rat. All the kids basically realize that their underpants are going missing from their dresser drawers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
somebody stealing the underpants. And it's just like, well, who on earth would steal the underpants? And it turns out it's the underpants gnomes. And it turns out the underpants gnomes that come to town and they've got this little underground warrant of tunnels and storage places for all the underpants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so they go out at night, they steal the underpants and the kids discover that, you know, the underpants gnomes and they're, you know, what, what are you doing? Like, what's, what's the point of this? And so the underpants gnomes present their, their master plan, which is a three-part plan, which is step one, collect underpants. Step three, profit. Step two, question mark. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So you just proposed the underpants gnome. Yeah. Which is very common in politics. So the form of this in politics is we must do something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
This is something, therefore we must do this. But there's no causal logic chain in there at all to expect that that's actually going to succeed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
because there's no reason to believe that it is yeah but it's the same thing but this is what i hear all the time and i'll i will let you talk as the host of the show in a moment but uh but the but i hear this all the time i hear this i have friends who are on these boards right um very involved in these places and i hear this all the time which is like oh these are very important we must fix them and so therefore they are fixable there's no logic chain there at all
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
If we say free speech and academic freedom often enough, sooner or later, these tenured professors will get brave.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
How do you create a good restaurant when the one down the street sucks?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You open a new restaurant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like how often in your life have you experienced a restaurant that's just absolutely horrible and it's poisoning all of its customers and the food tastes terrible. And then three years later you go back and it's fantastic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Charlie Munger actually had the great, the best comment on this great investor, Charlie Munger, the great comment he was once asked, he's like, you know, he was, you know, General Electric was going through all these challenges and he was asked at a Q and A, he said, how would you fix the culture at General Electric? And he said, fix the culture at General Electric.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He said, I couldn't even fix the culture at a restaurant. Like, it's insane. Like, obviously you can't do it. I mean, nobody in business thinks you can do that. Like, It's impossible. It's not. Now, look, having said all that, I should also express this because I have a lot of friends to work at these places and are involved in various attempts to fix these. I hope that I'm wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I would love to be wrong. I would love for the underpants gnome step two to be something clear and straightforward that they can figure out how to do. I would love to fix it. I'd love to see them come back to their spoken principles. I think that'd be great. I'd love to see the professors with tenure get bravery. I would love to see, I mean, it would be fantastic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, my partner and I have done like a lot of public speaking on this topic. It's been intended to not just be harsh, but also be like, okay, like these challenges have to be confronted directly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
By the way, let me also say something positive, you know, especially post October 7th, there are a bunch of very smart people who are major donors and board members of these institutions like Mark Rowan, you know, who are really coming in trying to, you know, I think legitimately trying to fix these places. I have a friend on the executive committee at one of the top technical universities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He's working overtime to try to do this. Man, I hope they can figure it out. But the counter question would just be like, do you see it actually happening at a single one of these places?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So here's a question for your friend who has tenure at one of these places, which is who runs his university?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Then we know who runs the university. The professors? Yeah, professors. The professors and the students. The professors and the feral students. And they're, of course, in a radicalization feedback cycle driving each other crazy. The feral students. Yeah, the feral students. Yeah, the feral students.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
What happens when you're put in charge of your bureaucracy where the thing that the bureaucracy knows is that they can outlast you? The thing that the tenured professors at all these places know is it doesn't matter who the president is because they can outlast them because they cannot get fired. By the way, it's the same thing that bureaucrats in the government know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's the same thing that the bureaucrats in the Department of Education know. They know the exact same thing. They can outlast you. I mean, it's the whole thing. It's the resistance. They can be the resistance. They can just sit there and resist. which is what they do. They're not fireable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I said Dairy Queen is the best restaurant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I don't want to. You should go order a Blizzard. One day you should walk down there and order a Blizzard. Yeah. They can get like 4,000 calories in a cup. They can. And they're delicious. It's amazing. They are truly delicious. And they'll put anything in there you want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But anyway, let me just close by saying, look, my friends in the university system, I would just say, look, this is the challenge. I would just pose this as the challenge. To me, having had a lot of these conversations, this is the bar, in my view. This is the conversation that actually has to happen. This is the bar that actually has to be hit. These problems need to be confronted directly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Because I think there's just, I think there's been way too much. I mean, I'm actually, we're kind of on the other side. There's too much happy talk in these conversations. I think the taxpayers do not understand this level of crisis. And I think if the taxpayers come to understand it, I think the funding evaporates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I think the fuse is going through, you know, no fault of any of ours, but like the fuse is going and there's some window of time here to fix this and address it and justify the money. Because just normal taxpayers sitting in normal towns in normal jobs are not going to tolerate this for that much longer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I was there on the ground floor in 1993. There's multiple floors to this building, apparently. There are. Yeah. So I got the first ask to implement censorship on the internet. which was in the web browser. That is fascinating. Yeah, actually in 1982, I was asked to implement a nudity filter. Did you have the courage to speak up back then? I did not have any problem speaking up back then.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I was making $6.25 an hour. I did not have a lot to lose. No, I was asked at the time. And then look, you know, legitimate, you know, in some sense, a legitimate request, which is working on a research project actually funded by the federal government at a public university.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So, you know, I don't think my boss was like in any way out of line, but it was like, yeah, like this, this web browser thing is great, but like, could it just make sure to not have any photos of naked people that show up? But if you think about this for a second as a technologist, I had an issue, which is this was like pre-ImageNet, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I had a brief period where I tried to imagine an algorithm that I referred to as the breast detection algorithm that I was going to have to design. And then apparently a variety of other, apparently body parts people are also sensitive about. And then I politely declined to do this. For just the technical difficulties of it. Well, number one, I actually didn't know how to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But number two is just like, no, I'm not. I'm just not building a censorship engine. I'm just not doing it. And in those days, the internet generally was a free fire zone for everything. It was actually interesting as sort of pre-93, the internet was such a specific niche community. It was like the million kind of highest IQ nerds in the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so it actually didn't really have a lot of issues that people were super interested in talking about, like astrophysics and not very interested in. you know, even politics at that, at that time. So there really was not an issue there, but, um, yeah, I didn't, I didn't want to start the process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, so I think the way to think about this, so first of all, um, you know, yeah, so I was involved in this at Facebook every step, by the way, I've been involved with this at Facebook every step of the way I joined the board there in 2007.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I saw, I've seen everything in the last, you know, almost 20 years, um, every step of the way, but also I've been involved in most of the other companies over time. So I was an angel investor in Twitter, knew them really well. Um, we were the founding investor in Substack, I'm part of the Elon takeover of Twitter with X. I was an angel at LinkedIn.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I've been in these, we were the funder of Pinterest. We were one of the main investors there, Reddit as well. And I was having these conversations with all these guys all the way through. So as much talk specifically about Facebook, but I can just tell you like the general pattern. And for quite a while, it was kind of all the same across these companies. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So basically the way to think about this, the true kind of nuanced view of this is that there is practically speaking no internet service that can have zero censorship. And by the way, that also mirrors there is no country that actually has limited free speech either. The U.S. First Amendment actually has 12 or 13 formal carve-outs from the Supreme Court over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So incitement to violence and terrorist recruitment and child abuse and child pornography and so forth, they're not covered by the First Amendment. And just practically speaking, if you and I are going to start an internet company and have a service, we can't have that stuff either because it's illegal or it will just clearly destroy the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You're always going to have a censorship engine. I mean, hopefully it's not actually in the browser, but you're going to have it for sure at the level of an internet service. But then what happens is now you have a machine, right? Now you have a system where you can put in rules saying we allow this, we don't allow that. You have enforcement, you have consequences, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And once that system is in place, it becomes the ring of power. Right. Which is like, okay, now anybody in that company or anybody associated with that company or anybody who wants to pressure that company will just start to say, okay, you should use that machine for more than just terrorist recruitment and child pornography. You should use it for X, Y, Z.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Basically, that transition happened, call it 2012, 2013, is when there was this very, very rapid pivot. I think the kickoff to it, for some reason, was it was the beginning of the second Obama term. I think it also coincided with the arrival of the first super woke kids into these schools.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
um, you know, that kind of, you know, it's, it's the kids that were in school between like, you know, for the Iraq war and then the global financial crisis. And like, they came out like super radicalized. They came into these companies and they immediately started mounting these social crusades to ban and censor, uh, lots of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, you know, quite frankly, the Democratic Party figured this out. And they figured out that these companies were, you know, very subject to being controlled. And, you know, the executive teams and boards of directors are almost all Democrats. And, you know, there's tremendous circulation. A lot of Obama people from the first term actually came and worked in these companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And a lot of FBI people and other, you know, law enforcement intelligence people came in and worked. And they're all, you know, they were all Democrats. for that set. Um, and so they just, you know, the, the, the ring of power was lying on the table. It had been built and they, you know, pick it up and put it on and then they just ran.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the original discussions were basically always on two topics. It was hate speech and misinformation. Uh, hate speech was the original one. Um, and the hate speech conversation started exactly like you'd expect, which is we can't have the N word and which the answer is fair enough. Let's not have the N word. Okay. Now we've set a precedent. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then Jordan Peterson has talked a lot about this. The definition of hate speech ended up being things that make people uncomfortable. Right. So we can't have things that make people uncomfortable. I, of course, you know, people like me that are disagreeable raise their hands and say, well, that idea right there makes me uncomfortable. But of course, that doesn't count as hate speech. Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So, you know, the ring of power is on one hand and not on the other hand. And then basically that began this slide where it ended up being that, you know, completely anodyne – this is a point that Mark has been making recently – completely anodyne comments that are completely legitimate on television or on the Senate floor. All of a sudden our hate speech can't be said online.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So that, you know, the ring of power was wielded in grossly irresponsible ways. We could talk about – all the stuff that happened there. And then the other one was misinformation. And that wasn't as, there was a little bit of that early on, but of course that really kicked in with, with Trump. Um, so, so the hate speech stuff, the hate speech stuff predated Trump by like three or four years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, the misinformation stuff was basically, uh, uh, it was a little bit later and it was the consequence of the Russiagate hoax. Um, and then that was, you know, a ring of power that was even more powerful, right? Because, you know, hate speech is like, okay, at some point, if some, if something offensive or not, like at least you can have a question as to whether that's the case, but,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The problem with misinformation is like, is it the truth or not? What do we know for 800 years or whatever Western civilization? It's that there's only a few entities that can determine the truth on every topic. There's God. There's the king. We don't have those anymore. And the rest of us are all imperfect and flawed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the idea that any group of experts is going to sit around the table and decide on the truth is deeply anti-Western and deeply authoritarian. And somehow the misinformation kind of crusade went from the Russiagate hoax into just full-blown We're going to use that weapon for whatever we want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, of course, then the culminating moment on that that really was the straw that broke the camel's back was we're going to censor all theories that the COVID virus might have been manufactured in a lab as misinformation. And inside these companies, that was the point where people for the first time, this is like, what, three years ago, for the first time they were like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That was when it sunk in where it's just like, okay, this has spun completely out of control. Anyway, that's how we got to where we are. And then basically that spell lasted, that complex existed and got expanded basically from call it 2013 to 2023. I think basically two things broke it. One is Substack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, and I'm super proud of those guys because they started from scratch and declared right up front that they were going to be a free speech platform. And they came under intense pressure, including from the press. And, you know, they tried to just beat them to the ground and kill them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And intense pressure, by the way, from, you know, let's say certain of the platform companies, you know, basically threatening them. And they stood up to it. And sitting here today, they have the widest spectrum of speech and conversation anywhere on planet Earth. And they've done a great job. And it's worked, by the way. It's great. And then obviously Elon with X was the hammer blow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the third one now is what Mark is doing at Facebook.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So that there, and I will tell you like, and I should say John Stewart attacked me recently, so I'm not that thrilled about him, but I would say I was a long run fan of John Stewart. I watched probably every episode of The Daily Show when he was on it for probably 20 years, but he did a very important public service and it was that appearance on The Colbert Show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I don't know how broadly this is, you know, at the time it was in the news briefly, but I don't know how, if people remember this, but I will tell you in the rooms where people discuss what is misinformation and these policies, that was a very big moment. That was probably actually the key catalyzing moment
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think he exhibited, I would say, conspicuous bravery and had a big impact with that. And yeah, for people who don't recall what he did, and this was in the full-blown, like you absolutely must lock down for two years. You absolutely must keep all the schools closed. You absolutely must have everybody work from home. You absolutely must wear a mask, like the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And one of those was you absolutely must believe that COVID was completely natural. You must believe that. And not believing that means you're a fascist Nazi Trump supporter, mega evil QAnon person, right? And that was like uniform. And that was enforced by the social media companies. And like I said, that was the peak. And Jon Stewart went on The Colbert Show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I don't know if they planned it or not because Colbert looked shocked. I don't know how much it was a bit, but he went on there and he just had one of these like – The emperor is wearing no clothes things where he said, it's just not plausible that you had the COVID super virus appear 300 yards down the street from the Wuhan Institute of lethal coronaviruses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, it's just not plausible that that certainly that you could just rule that out. And then there was another key moment. Actually, the more serious version was, I think the author Nicholson Baker wrote a big piece for New York magazine. And Nicholson Baker is like one of our great novelist writers of our time. And he wrote the piece and he did the complete undressing of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and that was the first, I think that was the first legit, there had been like alt, you know, renegade, there had been, you know, people running around saying this, but getting censored all over the place. That was the first one that was like in the mainstream press where he, and he talked to all the heretics and he just like laid the whole thing out. And, and that was a moment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I remember, let's say a board meeting at one of these companies after that, where basically, you know, everybody looked around the table and it was like, all right, like, I guess we're not, we don't need to censor that anymore. And, you know, and then of course what immediately follows from that is, well, wait a minute, why were we censoring that in the first place?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And okay, like, and then, you know, the downstream, not that day, but the downstream conversations were like, okay, if we made such a giant, in retrospect, if we all made such a giant collective mistake censoring that, then what does that say about the rest of our regime? And I think that was the thread in the sweater that started to unravel it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Can you just speak to that? He has become, I think, an outstanding communicator, right? And he's, you know, somebody who came in for a lot of criticism earlier in his career on that front. And I think he's, you know, he's one of these guys who can sit down and talk for three hours and make complete sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, as you do with all of your episodes, like when somebody sits and talks for three hours, like you really get a sense of somebody because it's really hard to be artificial for that long. And, you know, he's not done that repeatedly. He's really good at
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then look, again, I would maybe put him in the third category now with, certainly after that appearance, I would say, I would put him up there now with kind of Ilana Trump in the sense of the public and the private are now synchronized. I guess I'd say that. He said on that show what he really believes. He said all the same things that he says in private.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I don't think there's really any discrepancy anymore. Um, I would say he has always taken upon himself a level of obligation responsibility to running a company, the size of meta and to running services that are that large. Um, and I think, you know, his conception of what he's doing, which I think is correct is he's running services that are bigger than any country, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He's running, you know, over 3 billion people use those services. Um, and so, and then, you know, the company has, you know, many tens of thousands of employees and many investors and it's a public company and he thinks very deeply and seriously about his responsibilities. Um, and so, you know, he has not felt like he has had, let's just say the complete flexibility that Elon has had.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and you know, people could argue that one way or the other, but you know, he's, he's, you know, yeah, he's, he's, you know, he talked about a lot. He's, he's evolved a lot. A lot of it was, he learned a lot. And by the way, I'm going to put myself right back up there. Like I'm not claiming any huge foresight or heroism on any of this. Like I've also learned, learned a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, like I, my views on things are very different than they were 10 years ago on lots of topics. And so, um, you know, I w I've been on a learning journey. He's been on a learning journey. He is a really, really good learner. He assimilates information as good as or better than anybody else I know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The other thing I guess I would just say is he talked on that show about something very important, which is when you're in a role where you're running a company like that, there are a set of decisions that you get to make and you deserve to be criticized for those decisions and so forth. And it's valid. But you are under tremendous external pressure as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And by the way, you're under tremendous internal pressure. You've got your employees coming at you. You've got your executives in some cases coming at you. You've got your board in some cases coming at you. You've got your shareholders coming at you. So you've got your internal pressures, but you also have the press coming at you. You've got academia coming at you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You've got the entire nonprofit complex coming, activist complex coming at you. And then really critically, you know, he talked about a Rogan and these companies all went through this in this last, especially five years, you had the government coming at you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, that's the really, you know, stinky end of the pool where, you know, the government was, in my view, you know, illegally exerting, you know, just in flagrant violation of the First Amendment and federal laws on speech and coercion and conspiracy, forcing these companies to engage in activities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, again, in some cases they may have wanted to do, but in other cases they clearly didn't want to do and felt like they had to do. And the level of pressure... Like I say, like I've known every CEO at Twitter. They've all had the exact same experience, which when they were in the job, it was just daily beatings. Like it's just getting punched in the face every single day, constantly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, Mark is very good at getting physically punched in the face. Getting better and better, yeah. And he's very good at taking a punch, and he has taken many, many punches. So I would encourage people to have a level of sympathy for these are not kings. These are people who operate with, I would say, extraordinary levels of external pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I think if I had been in his job for the last decade, I would be a little puddle on the floor. Um, and so it, it, it says, I think a lot about him that he has risen to this occasion the way that he has.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And by the way, I should also say, you know, the, the cynicism of course is immediately out and you know, it's a legitimate thing for people to say, but you know, it's like, oh, you're only doing this because of Trump or, you know, whatever. And it's just like, no, like he has been thinking about and working on these things and trying to figure them out for a very long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I think what you saw are legitimate, deeply held beliefs, not some, you know, you know, sort of just in the moment thing that could change at any time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That's a great question. So leaders are lonely to start with. And this is one of those things where almost nobody has sympathy. Right. Nobody feels sorry for a CEO. Right. Like it's not a thing. Right. And, you know, and again, legitimately so like CEOs get paid a lot, like the whole thing. There's a lot of great things about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So it's not like they should be out there asking for a lot of sympathy. But it is the case that they are human beings and it is the case that it is a lonely job. And the reason it's a lonely job. um, is because your words carry tremendous weight. Um, and you are dealing with extremely complicated issues and you're under a tremendous amount of emotional, you know, personal, emotional stress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and you know, you often end up not being able to sleep well and you end up not being able to like keep up an exercise routine and all those things. And you know, you're come under family stress cause you're working all the time or my partner, Ben, you know, was, he was CEO of our last company before we started the venture firm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He, he said, you know, the problem he had like with, with his family life was he would, even when he was home at night, he wasn't home. because he was in his head trying to solve all the business problems. And so he was like supposed to be like having dinner with his kids and he was physically there, but he wasn't mentally there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So, you know, you kind of get, you get that a lot, but the key thing is like, you can't talk to people, right? So you can't, I mean, you can talk to your spouse and your kids, but like, they don't understand that they're not working in your company. They don't understand, have the context to really help you. You, if you talk to your executives, they all have agendas. And they can't resist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's just human nature. And so you can't necessarily rely on what they say. It's very hard in most companies to talk to your board because they can fire you. Now, Mark has the situation because he has control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It actually turns out he can talk to his board, and Mark talks to us about many things that most CEOs won't talk to their boards about, literally because we can't fire him, including all the CEOs of Twitter. None of them had control, and so they could all get fired. So you can't talk to the board members. They're going to fire you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You can't talk to the shareholders because they'll just dump your stock. Right. So every once in a while, what you find is basically the best case scenario they have is they can talk to other CEOs. And there's these little organizations where they kind of pair up and do that. And so they maybe get a little bit out of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But even that's fraught with peril because can you really talk about confidential information with another CEO? Insider trading risk. And so it's just a very lonely and isolating thing to start with. And then on top of that, you apply pressure. Right. Right. And that's where it gets painful. And then maybe I'll just spend a moment on this internal external pressure thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
My general experience with companies is that they can withstand most forms of external pressure as long as they retain internal coherence. Right? So as long as the internal team is really bonded together and supporting each other, most forms of external pressure you can withstand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And by that, I mean, investors dump your stock, you lose your biggest customers, whatever negative article, negative headline. You can withstand all that. And basically, in fact, many of those forms of pressure can be bonding experiences for the team where they come out stronger. What you 100% cannot withstand is the internal crack.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And what I always look for in high pressure corporate situations now is the moment when the internal team cracks, because I know the minute that happens, we're in a different regime. Like it's like the, you know, the solid is turned into a liquid. Like we're in a different regime and like the whole thing can unravel in the next week. Cause then people turn it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, this, I guess this is what's happening in Los Angeles right now. The, the, the, the mayor and the fire chief turned on each other and that's it. That government is dysfunctional. It is never going to get put back together again. It is over. It is not going to work ever again. And that's what happens to inside companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so somebody like Mark is under profound internal pressure and external pressure at the same time. Now, he's been very good at maintaining the coherence of his executive team, but he has had over the years a lot of activist employees, as a lot of these companies have had. And so that's been continuous pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the final thing I'd say is I said that companies can withstand most forms of external pressure, but not all. And the special, though not all one, is government pressure. Is that when your government comes for you, like, yeah. Any CEO who thinks that they're bigger than their government has that notion beaten out of them in short order.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Flagrant criminality. Felonies, like obvious felonies. And I can actually cite the laws. But yes, absolute criminality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So to start with is a lot of this now is in the public record, which is good because it needs to be in the public record. And so there's three forms of things that are in the public record that people can look at. So one is the Twitter files, which Elon put out with a set of journalists when he took over.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I will just tell you, the Twitter files are 100% representative of what I've seen at every other one of these companies. And so you can just see what happened in Twitter and you can just assume that that happened in these other companies for the most part, certainly in terms of the kind of pressure that they got. So that's number one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That stuff, you can just read it and you should if you haven't. The second is, Mark referenced this in the Rogan podcast, there's a Congressman Jim Jordan who has a congressional committee called the Weaponization Committee. And they, in the last, you know, whatever, three years, have done a full-scale investigation of this. And Facebook produced a lot of documents into that investigation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And those have, many of those have now been made public. And you can download those reports. And there's like 2,000 pages worth of material on that. And that's essentially the Facebook version of the Twitter files, just arrived at with a different mechanism. And then third is Mark himself talking about this on Rogan. So I'll, you know, just defer to his comments there. But... Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Basically, what those three forms of information show you is basically the government over time and then culminating in 2020, 2021, in the last four years, just decided that the First Amendment didn't apply to them. And they just decided that federal laws around free speech and around conspiracies to take away the rights of citizens just don't apply.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and they just decided that they can just arbitrarily pressure, um, uh, just like literally arbitrarily call up companies and threaten and bully, um, and yell and scream and, and, you know, threaten repercussions and force people to force them to censor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and you know, there's this whole thing of like, well, the first amendment only applies to, you know, the government, it doesn't apply to companies. It's like, well, there's actually a little bit of nuance to that. First of all, it definitely applies to the government. Like 100%, the first amendment applies to the government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
By the way, so does the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, including the right to due process also applies to the government. There was no due process at all to any of the censorship regime that was put in place. There was no due process put in place, by the way, for debanking either. Those are just as serious violations as the free speech violations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so this is just like flagrant unconstitutional behavior. And then there are specific federal statutes. It's 18241 and 18242. And one of them applies to federal employees, government employees, and the other one applies to private actors around what's called deprivation of rights and conspiracy to deprive rights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it is not legal according to the United States Criminal Code for government employees or in a conspiracy private entities to take away constitutional rights. And interestingly, some of those constitutional rights are enumerated, for example, in the First Amendment, freedom of speech. And then some of those rights actually do not need to be enumerated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
If the government takes away rights that you have, they don't need to be specifically enumerated rights in the Constitution in order to still be a felony. The Constitution very specifically does not say you only have the rights that it gives you. It says you have all the rights that have not been previously defined as being taken away from you. right? And so debanking qualifies as a right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Right to access to the financial system is every bit something that's subject to these laws as free speech. And so, yeah, this has happened. And then I'll just add one final thing, which is we've talked about two parties so far. We've talked about the government employees, and then we've talked about the companies. The government employees for sure have misbehaved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The companies, there's a very interesting question there as to whether they are victims or perpetrators or both. You know, they will defend and they will argue and I believe they have a good case that they are victims, not perpetrators, right? They are the downstream subjects of pressure, not the cause of pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But there's a big swath of people who are in the middle and specifically the ones that are funded by the government that I think are in possibly pretty big trouble. And that's all of these third party censorship bureaus. I mean, the one that sort of is most obvious is the so-called Stanford Internet Observatory that got booted up there over the last several years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they basically were funded by the federal government to be third party censorship operations. And they're private sector actors, but acting with federal funding. And so it puts them in this very interesting spot where there could be a very obvious theory under which they're basically acting as agents of the government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I think they're also very exposed on this and have behaved in just flagrantly illegal ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There are so many ways that they can get you. Like, there are so many ways they can come at you and get you. And, you know, the thing here to think about is, a lot of times when people think about government action, they think about legislation, right? Because you, so, when I was a kid, we got trained at how does government work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There was this famous animated short, the thing we got shown was just a cartoon of how a bill becomes a law. And it's like this, you know, fancy little bill sneaked along and goes this. I'm just a bill. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It's like, all right, number one, that's not how it works at all. That doesn't actually happen. We could talk about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But even beyond that, mostly what we're dealing with is not legislation. When we talk about government power these days, mostly it's not legislation. Mostly it's either regulation, which is basically the equivalent of legislation, but having not gone through the legislative process, which is a very big open legal issue and one of the things that the Doge is very focused on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Most government rules are not legislated, they're regulated. And there's tons and tons of regulations that these companies are... This is another cliche you'll hear a lot, which is, oh, private companies can do whatever they want. And it's like, oh, no, they can't. They're subject to tens of thousands of regulations that they have to comply with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the hammer that comes down when you don't comply with regulations is profound. Like they can completely wreck your company with no ability for you to do anything about it. So regulation is a big part of the way the power gets exercised. And then there's what's called just flat out administrative power, the term that you'll hear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And administrative power is just literally the government calling you and telling you what to do. Here's an example of how this works. So Facebook had this whole program a few years back to do a global cryptocurrency for payments called Libra.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They built the entire system and it was this high scale sort of new cryptocurrency and they were going to build in every product and there were going to be 3 billion people who could transact with Libra. And they went to the government and they went to the
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
All these different try to figure out how to make it so it's like fully compliant with anti-money laundering and all these controls and everything. And they have the whole thing ready to go. Two senators wrote letters to the big banks saying, we're not telling you that you can't work with Facebook on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But if you do, you should know that every aspect of your business is going to come under greatly increased level of regulatory scrutiny. Which is, of course, the exact equivalent of, it sure is a nice corner restaurant you have here. It would be a shame if somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail through the window and burned it down tonight. And so, what is that letter? It's not a law.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's not even a regulation. It's just straight, direct state power. And then it culminates in, literally, calls from the White House, where they're just flat out telling you what to do, which is, of course, what a king gets to do, but not what a president gets to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and, and so anyway, so this, so, so what these companies experienced was they experienced the full panoply of this, but it was, it was the level of intensity was in that order. It was actually legislation was the least important part. Regulation was more important. Administrative power was more important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then just like flat out demands and flat out threats were ultimately the most important. How do you fix it? Well, first of all, like you have to elect people who don't do it. So like, as with all these things, ultimately the fault lies with the voters. Um, and so, you know, you have to decide you don't want to live in that regime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I have no idea what part of this recent election map to the censorship regime. I do know a lot of people on the right got very angry about the censorship, but I, you know, I think it probably at least helped with enthusiasm on that side. Um, you know, maybe some people on the left will now not want their, you know, democratic nominees to be so pro-censorship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So the voters definitely get a vote, number one. Number two, I think you need transparency. You need to know what happened. We know some of what happened. Peter Thiel has written in the FT just now saying, after what we've been through in the last decade, we need broad-based truth and reconciliation efforts to really get to the root of things. So maybe that's part of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We need investigations for sure. Ultimately, we need prosecutions. Ultimately, we need people to go to jail because we need to set object lessons that say that you don't get to do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And on those last two, I would say that those are both up to the new administration and I don't want to speak for them and I don't want to predict what they're going to do, but they for sure have the ability to do both of those things and we'll see where they take it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I use the metaphor of the ring of power for people who don't catch the reference as Lord of the Rings. And the thing with the ring of power and Lord of the Rings, it's the ring that Gollum has in the beginning and it turns you invisible. And it turns out it like unlocks all this like fearsome power. It's the most powerful thing in the world. It's the key to everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And basically the moral lesson of Lord of the Rings, which was written by a guy who thought very deeply about these things is, yeah, the ring of power is inherently corrupting. The characters at one point, they're like, Gandalf, just put on the ring and fix this. And he's like, he will not put the ring on even to end the war because he knows that it will corrupt him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then as it starts, the character of Gollum is the result of a normal character who ultimately becomes this incredibly corrupt and deranged version of himself. And so, I mean, I think you said something actually quite profound there, which is the ring of power is infinitely tempting. The censorship machine is infinitely tempting. If you have it, you are going to use it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's overwhelmingly tempting because it's so powerful and that it will corrupt you. And yeah, I don't know whether any of these people feel any of this today. They should. I don't know if they do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But yeah, you go out five or 10 years later, you would hope that you would realize that your soul has been corroded and you probably started out thinking that you were a patriot and you were trying to defend democracy and you ended up being extremely authoritarian and anti-democratic and anti-Western.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, I think the danger is there with power. It's just, it's flat out there. I, I would say with Elon, I mean, we'll, you know, we'll see, I would say with Elon and I would say, by the way, overwhelmingly, I would say so far so good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm extremely, extremely thrilled by what he's done on almost every front, um, for like, you know, the last 30 years, but including all this stuff recently, like I think he's, he's been a real hero on a lot of topics where we needed to see heroism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But look, I would say, I guess the sort of case that he has this level of power is some combination of the money and the, the, and the proximity to the president. Um, and obviously both of those are, are instruments of power. the counter argument to that is I do think a lot of how Elon is causing change in the world right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, there's, there's the companies he's running directly where I think he's doing very well. Um, and we're investors in multiple of them and doing very well. Um, uh, but I think like a lot of the stuff that gets people mad at him is like, it's the social and political stuff and it's, you know, it's his statements and then it's the downstream downstream effects of his statements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So like, for example, it's, you know, for the last couple of weeks, it's been him, you know, kind of weighing in on this rape gang scandal, you know, this rape organized child rape thing in the U.K., Um, and you know, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's actually, it's a preference cascade. It's one of these things where people knew there was a problem. They weren't willing to talk about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It kind of got suppressed. Um, and then, um, Elon brought it up and then all of a sudden there's now in the UK, this like massive explosion of basically open conversation about it for the first time. And, you know, it's like this catalyzing all of a sudden everybody's kind of woken up and being like, oh my God, you know, this is really bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, and, and there will be now, you know, pretty sure pretty, pretty clearly big changes as a result. So And Elon was, you know, he played the role of the boy who said the emperor has no clothes, right? But here's the thing. Here's my point. Like, he said it about something that was true, right? And so had he said it about something that was false, you know, he would get no credit for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He wouldn't deserve any credit for it. but he said something that was true. And by the way, everybody over there instantly, they were like, oh yeah, he's right. Right. Like nobody, nobody seriously said they're just arguing the details now. So, so number one, it's like, okay, he says true things. And so it's like, okay, how far, let's put it this way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like how worried are we about somebody becoming corrupt by virtue of their power being that they get to speak the truth. And I guess I would say, especially in the last decade of what we've been through, where everybody's been lying all the time about everything, I'd say, I think we should run this experiment as hard as we can to get people to tell the truth. And so I,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I don't feel that bad about that. And then the money side, you know, this rapidly gets into the money and politics question. And the money and politics question is this very interesting question because it seems like there's a clear cut case that the more money in politics, the worse things are and the more corrupted the system is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That was a very popular topic of public conversation up until 2016 when Hillary outspent Trump three to one and lost. You'll notice that money in politics has almost vanished as a topic in the last eight years. And once again, Trump spent far... Kamala raised and spent 1.5 billion on top of what Biden had spent. So they were at, I don't know, something like 3 billion total.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And Trump, I think, spent, again, like a third or a fourth of that. And so the money in politics kind of topic has kind of vanished from the popular conversation in the last eight years. It has come back a little bit now that Elon is spending.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
you know, but, but again, like, it's like, okay, he's spending, but the data would seem to indicate in the last, at least the last eight years that money doesn't win the political battles. It's actually like the voters actually have a voice and they actually exercise it and they don't just listen to ads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so again, there, I would say like, yeah, clearly there's some power there, but I don't know if it's like, I don't know if it's some, like, I don't know if it's some weapon that he can just like turn on and, and, and use in a definitive way. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Maybe one of the lessons of Lord of the Rings, right, is even Frodo would have been corrupted, right? But nevertheless... You had somebody who could do what it took at the, at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The thing that I find just so amazing about the Elon phenomenon and all the critiques is, um, you know, the one thing that everybody in our societies universally agrees on because of our, it's sort of our, our, our post Christian egalitarian. So, you know, we live in sort of this post secularized Christian context in the West now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's, you know, we, you know, we, we consider Christianity kind of, you know, backwards, but we still believe essentially all the same things. We just dress them up in, in, in sort of fake science. Um, um, So the one thing that we're all told, we're all taught is that the best people in the world are the people who care about all of humanity, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And we venerate, you know, all of our figures are people who care about all of, you know, Jesus cared about all of humanity. Gandhi cared about all of humanity. Martin Luther King cared about all of humanity. Like it's the person who cares the most about everybody. And with Elon, you have a guy who literally like, he talks about this constantly and he talks about exactly the same in private.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He's literally, he is operating on behalf of all of humanity to try to get us to, you know, he goes through to get us through multi-planetary civilization so that we can survive a strike on any one planet so that we can extend the light of human consciousness into the world and, you know, into the universe and have it persist, you know, in the good of the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And like, literally the critique is, yeah, we want you to care about all of humanity, but not like that. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So this comes from a Italian political philosopher from about a hundred years ago named Robert. I'm going to mangle the, let you pronounce the Italian, uh, Michelle's, um, or Michael's.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and then it was, I learned about it through a, a famous book on, on politics, probably the best book on politics written in the 20th century called the Machiavellians by this guy, James Burnham, um, who has had a big impact on me. But, um, in the Machiavellians, he resurrects what he calls this sort of Italian realist school of political philosophy from the, from the tens and twenties. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And these were people, to be clear, this was not like a Mussolini thing. These were people who were trying to understand the actual mechanics of how politics actually works. So to get to the actual sort of mechanical substance of like how the political machine operates. And this guy, Michel, said this concept he ended up with called the iron law of oligarchy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so what the iron law of oligarchy, and let me take a step back to say what he meant by oligarchy because it has multiple meaning. So basically in classic political theory, there's basically three forms of government at core. There's democracy, which is rule of the many. There's oligarchy, which is rule of the few. And there's monarchy, which is rule of the one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And you can just use that as a general framework of any government you're going to be under is going to be one of those, just a mechanical observation without even saying which one's good or bad, just a structural observation. And so the question that Michelle's asked was like, is there such a thing as democracy? Like, is there actually such a thing as democracy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Is there ever actually like direct, direct government? And what he did was he mounted this sort of incredible historical exploration of whether democracies had ever existed in the world. And the answer basically is almost never. And we could talk about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But the other thing he did was he sought out the most democratic private organization in the world that he could find at that point, which he concluded was some basically communist German autoworkers union. that was wholly devoted to the workers of the world uniting back when that was the hot thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he went in there and he's like, okay, this is the organization out of all organizations on planet Earth that must be operating as a direct democracy. And he went in there and he's like, oh, nope, there's a leadership class. You know, there's like six guys at the top and they control everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they lead the rest of the membership along, you know, by the nose, which is, of course, the story of every union. The story of every union is always the story of, you know, there's a Jimmy Hoffa in there, you know, kind of running the thing. You know, we just saw that with the dock workers union, right? Like, you know, there's a guy. And he's in charge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And by the way, the number two is his son, right? Like that's not like, you know, an accident, right? So the iron law of oligarchy basically says democracy is fake. There's always a ruling class. There's always a ruling elite structurally. And he said the reason for that is because the masses can't organize it. Right. What's the fundamental problem?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Whether the mass is 25,000 people in a union or 250 million people in a country, the masses can't organize. The majority cannot organize. Only a minority can organize. And to be effective in politics, you must organize. And therefore, every political structure in human history has been some form of a small organized elite ruling a large and dispersed majority. Every single one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, the Greeks and the Florentines had brief experiments in direct democracy and they were total disasters. Uh, in Florence, I forget the name of it. It was called like the workers revolt or something like that. There was like a two year period, um, where they basically experimented with direct democracy during the Renaissance and it was a complete disaster and they never tried it again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
In the state of California, we have our own experiment on this, which is the proposition system. which is an overlay on top of the legislature. And anybody who looks at it for two seconds concludes it's been a complete disaster. It's just a catastrophe. And it's caused enormous damage to the state. And so basically, the presumption that we are in a democracy is just sort of by definition fake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Now, good news for the US, it turns out the founders understood this. And so of course, they didn't give us a direct democracy, they gave us a representative democracy, right? And so they built the oligarchy into the system in the form of Congress and the executive branch and the judicial branch. But so anyway, so as a consequence, democracy is always and everywhere fake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There is always a ruling elite. And basically the lesson of the Machiavellians is you can deny that if you want, but you're fooling yourself. The way to actually think about how to make a system work and maintain any sort of shred of freedom is to actually understand that that is actually what's happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it was very clever, right? And, you know, some of this was based on earlier experiments. Some of this, by the way, you know, these were very, very smart people, right? And so they knew tremendous amounts of like Greek and Roman history. They knew the Renaissance history. You know, the Federalist Papers, they argued this at great length. You can read it all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, they ran like one of the best seminars in world history trying to figure this out. And they went through all this. And yeah, and so they thought through it very carefully. But just I'll give you an example, which continues to be a hot topic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So, you know, one way they did it is through the three branches of government, right, executive, legislative and judicial, sort of balance of powers. But the other way they did it was they sort of echoing what had been done earlier, I think, in the UK Parliament, they created the two different bodies of the legislature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the House and the Senate, and as you know, the House is a portion on the basis of population and the Senate is not. The small states have just as many senators as the big states. And then they made the deliberate decision to have the House get reelected every two years to make it very responsive to the will of the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they made the decision to have the Senate get reelected every six years so that it had more buffer from the passions of the moment. But what's interesting is they didn't choose one or the other. They did them both. And then to get legislation passed, you have to get through both of them. And so they built in a second layer of checks and balances.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then there's a thousand observations we could make about how well the system is working today and how much does it live up to the ideal and how much are we actually complying with the constitution. And there's lots of open questions there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, this system has survived for coming on 250 years with a country that has been spectacularly successful that I don't think at least, you know, I don't think any of us would trade the system for any other one. And so it's one of the great all time achievements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Many in their 20s at the time. And like super geniuses. This is one of those things where it's just like, all right, something happened where there was a group of people where, you know, nobody ever tested their IQs, but like these are Einsteins of politics. Yeah. An amazing thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But anyway, I just, I go through all that, which is they were very keen students of the actual mechanical practice of democracy, not fixated on what was desirable. They were incredibly focused on what would actually work, which is, you know, I think the way to think about these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
That meme I get some credit for, and then the current thing is the other one I get some credit for. I don't know that I invented either one, but I popularized them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, so a lot of it, you know, we already talked about this a bit with the universities, which is you can apply a Machiavellian-style lens to the... It's why I posed the question to you that I did, which is, okay, who runs the university? The trustees, the administration, the students or the faculty?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, the answer, the true answer is some combination of the three or of the four, plus the donors, by the way, plus the government, plus the press, et cetera, right? And so, you know, there's a mechanical interpretation of that. I mean, companies operate under the exact same, you know, set of questions. Who runs a company?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
the CEO, but the CEO runs the company basically up to the day that either the shareholders or the management team revolt. If the shareholders revolt, it's very hard for the CEO to stay in the seat. If the management team revolts, it's very hard for the CEO to stay in the seat. By the way, if the employees revolt, it's also hard to stay in the seat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
By the way, if the New York Times comes at you, it's also very hard to stay in the seat. If the Senate comes at you, it's very hard to stay in the seat. A reductionist version of this that is a good shorthand is who can get who fired. So who has more power, the newspaper columnist who makes $200,000 a year or the CEO who makes $200 million a year?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's like, well, I know for sure that the columnist can get the CEO fired. I've seen that happen before. I have yet to see a CEO get a columnist fired. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
No, because what happens is they wear it with a badge. And I would say to their credit, they wear it as a badge of honor. And then to their shame, they wear it as a badge of honor, right? Which is if they're doing the right thing, then they are justifiably proud of themselves for standing up under pressure. but it also means that they can't respond to legitimate criticism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they're obviously terrible at that now. As I recall, he went straight to the CEO of I think Axel Springer that owns Insider. And I happen to know the CEO and I think he's quite a good CEO, but like, well, it was a good example. It was the CEO of Axel Springer run his own company. Right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, well, there's a fascinating, okay, so there's a fascinating thing playing out right now, not to dwell on these fires, but it's a case, you see, pressure reveals things, right? And so if you've been watching what's happened with the LA Times recently, so this guy, biotech entrepreneur buys the LA Times, like whatever, eight years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It is just like the most radical social revolutionary thing you can possibly imagine. It endorses every crazy left-wing radical you can imagine. It endorses Karen Bass. It endorses Gavin Newsom. It's just like a litany of all the people who are currently burning the city to the ground. It's just like endorsed every single bad person every step of the way. He's owned it the entire time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, he put his foot down right before – for the first time, I think, put his foot down right before the November election and said, we're not – he said, we're going to get out of this thing where we just always endorse the Democrat. And we said, we're not endorsing – I think he said, we're not endorsing for the presidency. And like the paper flipped out, right? It's like –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
or a billionaire backer who's, I don't know what he spends, but like he must be burning 50 or a hundred million dollars a year out of his pocket to keep this thing running. He paid 500 million for it, which is amazing. Back when people still thought these things were businesses. And then he's probably burned another 500 million over the last decade, keeping it running.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And he burns probably another 50, a hundred million a year to do this. And the journalists at the LA times hate him with the fury of a thousand sons. Like they just like absolutely freaking despise him. And they have been like attacking him. And you know, the ones that can get jobs elsewhere, quit and do it. And the rest just stay and say the worst, you know, most horrible things about him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they want to constantly run these stories, attacking him. Um, And so he has had this reaction that a lot of people in LA are having right now to this fire and to this just like incredibly vivid collapse of leadership and all these people that his paper had endorsed are just disasters. And he's on this tour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The roaring 20s. The roaring 20s. The roaring 20s. I mean, look, couple things. It is remarkable over the last several years with all of the issues, including, you know, not just everything in politics, but also COVID and every other thing that's happened. It's really amazing. The United States just kept growing. If you just look at economic growth charts, the U.S. just kept growing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He's decided to be the boy who says the emperor has no clothes, but he's doing it to his own newspaper. Very smart guy. He's on a press tour and he's basically saying, yeah, yes, we did all that and we endorsed all these people and it was a huge mistake and we're going to completely change And his paper is, you know, in a complete internal revolt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I go through it, which is, okay, now we have a very interesting question, which is who runs the LA Times. Because for the last eight years, it hasn't been him. It's been the reporters. Now, for the first time, the owner is showing up saying, oh, no, I'm actually in charge. And the reporters are saying, no, you're not. And, like, it is freaking on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so, again, the Machiavellian's mindset on this is, like, okay, how is power actually exercised here? Can a guy who's, like, even super rich and super powerful, who even owns his own newspaper, can he stand up to a full-scale assault? Not only by his own reporters, but by every other journalism outlet who also now thinks he's the Antichrist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And firing people. And, you know, he has removed people and he has set new rules. I mean, he is he is now, I think, at long. I think he's saying he's now at long last actually exercising prerogatives of an owner of a business, which is decide on the policies and staffing of the business. There are certain other owners of these publications that are doing similar things right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
He's the one I don't know, so he's the one I can talk about. But there are others that are going through the same thing right now. And I think it's a really interesting open question. In a fight between the employees and the employer, it's not crystal clear that the employer wins that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
What do you think is the most impressive example?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And very significantly, many other countries stopped growing. So Canada stopped growing. The U.K. stopped growing. Germany stopped growing. And, you know, some of those countries may be actually going backwards at this point. And there's a very long discussion to be had about what's wrong with those countries. And there's, of course, plenty of things that are wrong with our country. But the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Did you know of him before he started doing this in public?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, the reason I ask if you knew about Bill is because a lot of people had not heard of him before, especially like before October 7th and before some of the campaigns he's been running since in public and with Harvard and so forth. But he was very well known in the investment world before that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So he was a famous, he was a so-called activist investor for, you know, very, very successful and very widely respected for probably 30 years before now. And I bring that up because it turns out they weren't for the most part battles that happened in kind of full public view.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They weren't national stories, but in the business and investing world, the activist investor is a very, it's like in the movie taken, it's a very specific set of skills on how to like really take control of situations and how to wreck the people who you're going up against. Yeah. And there's been controversy over the years on this topic, and there's too much detail to go into.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But the defense of activist investing, which I think is valid, is these are the guys who basically go in and take stakes in companies that are being poorly managed or under-optimized. And then generally what that means is, at least the theory is, that means the existing management has become entrenched. And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
lazy, mediocre, whatever, not responding to the needs of the shareholders, often not responding to the customers. And the activists basically go in with a minority position and then they rally support among other investors who are not activists. And then they basically show up and they force change. Um, but they are the aggressive version of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and I've been on the, I've been involved in companies that have been on the receiving end of these, um, where it is amazing how much somebody like that can exert pressure on situations, even when they don't have formal control. So, so it's another, it would be another chess piece on the mechanical board of kind of how power gets exercised.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And basically what happens is the effective analysts, a large amount of the time, they end up taking, they end up taking over control of companies, even though they never own more than like 5% of the stock. And so anyway, so it turns out with Bill, it's such a fascinating case because he has that like complete skill set.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
and he has now decided to bring it to bear in areas that are not just companies and two interesting things for that one is you know some of these places you know and some of these battles are still ongoing but number one like a lot of people who run universities or newspapers are not used to being up against somebody like this and by the way also now with infinitely deep pockets and lots of experience in courtrooms and all the things that kind of go with that but the other is through example he is teaching a lot of the rest of us the activist playbook like in real time
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the Liam Neeson skill set is getting more broadly diffused just by being able to watch and learn from him. So I think he's having a, you know, I would put him up there with Elon in terms of somebody who's really affecting how all this is playing out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
is just flat out primed for growth. And I think that's a consequence of many factors, you know, some of which were lucky and some of which through hard work. And so the lucky part is just, you know, number one, you know, we just have like incredible physical security by being our own continent. We have incredible natural resources.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Including, by the way, courage to go outside of his own zone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'll give you an example. My venture capital firm, we have LPs. There are things that I feel like I can't do or say because I feel like I would be bringing embarrassment or other consequences to our LPs. He has investors also where he worries about that. And so a couple of things. One is his willingness to go out a bit and risk his relationship with his own investors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I will tell you the other thing, which is his investors, I know this for a fact, his investors have been remarkably supportive of him doing that. Because as it turns out, a lot of them actually agree with him. And so it's the same thing he does in his activism campaigns. He is able to be the tip of the spear on something that actually a lot more people agree with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And just, again, how I started is a lot of people are just fed up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So I should start by saying I'm not a member of the new administration. I'm not in the room when a lot of these people are being selected.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm an unpaid intern. So I'm a volunteer when helpful, but I'm not making the decisions, nor am I in a position to speak for the administration. So I don't want to say anything that would cause people to think I'm doing that. It's a very unusual situation, right? Where you had an incumbent president and then you had a four-year gap where he's out of office and then you have him coming back, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And as you'll recall, there was a fair amount of controversy over the end of the first term. Oh, yeah. The specific concern was the first Trump administration, and they will all say this, is they didn't come in with a team, right? So they didn't come in with a team, and most of the sort of institutional base of the Republican Party were Bush Republicans, and many of them had become never Trumpers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so they had a hard time putting the team together. And then, by the way, they had a hard time getting people confirmed. And so if you talk to the people who were there in the first term, it took them two to three years to kind of even get the government in place. And then they basically only had the government in place for basically like 18 months and then COVID hit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then sort of aftermath and everything and all the drama and headlines and everything. And so the concern, including from some very smart people in the last two years has been, boy, if Trump gets a second term, is he going to be able to get a team that is as good as the team he had last time or a team that is actually not as good? Because maybe people got burned out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Maybe they're more cynical now. Maybe they're not willing to go through the drama. By the way, a lot of people in the first term came under their own withering legal assaults, and some of them went to prison, and a lot of stuff happened. Lots of investigations, lots of legal fees, lots of bad press, lots of debanking, by the way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
A lot of the officials in the first Trump term got debanked, including the president's wife and son.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
In the wake of the first term, yes. We now take out spouses and children with our ring of power. Um, and so there, there was like this legitimate question as to like whether, okay, what, what will the team for the second term look like? And at least what I've seen and what you're seeing this, the appointments is it looks much, much better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's this running joke now that whenever it looks like the US is going to run out of some rare earth material, some farmer in North Dakota kicks over a hay bale and finds a $2 trillion deposit. We're just blessed with geography and with natural resources. We can be energy independent anytime we want. This last administration decided they didn't want to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, first of all, it just looks better than the first term and not because the people in the first term were not necessarily good, but just, you, you just have this like influx of like incredibly capable people that have shown up that want to be part of this. And you just didn't have that the first time. And so they're just drawing on a much deeper, richer talent pool than they had the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And they're drawing on people who know what the game is. They're drawing on people now who know what is going to happen, and they're still willing to do it. And so they're going to get, I think, some of the best people from the first term, but they're bringing in a lot of people who they couldn't get the first time around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then second is there's a bunch of people, including people in the first term, where they're just 10 years older. And so they went through the first term and they just learned how everything works. Or they're young people who just had a different point of view and now they're 10 years older and they're ready to go serve in government. And so there's a generational shift happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And actually one of the interesting things about the team that's forming up is it's remarkably young. Some of the cabinet members and then many of the second and third level people are like in their 30s and 40s, you know, which is a big change from the gerontocracy that, you know, we've been under for the last 30 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so I think the caliber has been outstanding, you know, and we could sit here and list tons and tons of people, but like, you know, the people who are running, you know, it's everything from the people who are running all the different departments at HHS.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It's the people running, you know, the number two at the Pentagon is Steve Feinberg, who's just like an incredible legend of private equity, incredible capable guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. So, look, I just start by saying any leader at that level, by the way, any CEO, there's always some risk of that. Right. So there's always some, you know, it's just it's like a natural reality warps around around powerful leaders. And so there's always some risk to that. Of course, the good and powerful leaders are very aware of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And Trump at this point in his life, I think, is highly aware of that. At least my interactions with him, like he definitely seems very aware of that. So, yeah. So that's one thing. I would just say that I think the way to look at that, I mean, look, like I said, I don't want to predict what's going to happen once this whole thing starts unfolding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But I would just say, again, the caliber of the people who are showing up and getting the jobs and then the fact that these are some of the most accomplished people in the business world and in the medical field. Um, I, I just, you know, Jay Batataria coming in to run NIH when, so I was actually in the, I was actually, I was part of the interview team for a lot of the HHS folks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, uh, Jay's amazing. I was so, I was so happy to see that. So I literally got, this is a story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I got to the, the, the transition office for one of the days of the HHS interviews and I was on one of the interviewing teams and they gave us, I didn't know who the candidates were and they gave us the sheet in the beginning and I go down the sheet and I saw Jay's name and I like, I almost physically fell out of my chair. Yeah. And I was just like, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They wanted to turn off American energy. This new administration has declared that they have a goal of turning it on in a dramatic way. There's no question we can be energy dependent. We can be a giant net energy exporter. It's purely a question of choice, and I think the new administration is going to do that. Oh, and then I would say two other things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
you know, and I have, I happen to know Jay, I have to know Jay and I like respect him enormously. And then he proved himself under this, like talk about a guy who proved himself under extraordinary pressure over the last five years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I mean, incredibly, very serious, very analytical, very applied. And, and, and, and yes, a hundred percent tested under pressure came out. Like the more people look back at what he said and did, and you know, he's not, you know, none of us are perfect. but like overwhelmingly, like overwhelmingly insightful throughout that whole period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And, you know, we would all be much better off today had he been in charge of the response. And so just like an incredibly capable guy. And look, and then he learned from all that, right? He learned a lot in the last five years. And so the idea that somebody like that could be head of NIH as compared to the people we've had is just like breathtakingly, it's just a gigantic upgrade.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, and then Marty Macri coming in to run FDA, exact same thing. The guy coming to run a CDC, exact same thing. Um, um, um, I mean, I've been spending time with Dr. Oz. Um, so, um, you know, I'm not like, again, I'm not like, I'm not on these teams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm not in the room, but like, I've been spending enough time trying to help that, like his level of insight into the healthcare system is like, it's like astounding. And it comes from being a guy who's been like in the middle of the whole thing and been talking to people about this stuff and working on it and serving as a doctor himself and in medical systems for, you know, his entire life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And it's just like, you know, he's like a walking encyclopedia on these things. And so, and, you know, very dynamic, you know, very charismatic, very smart, organized, effective. So, you know, to have somebody like that in there. And so anyway, they're just, I have like 30 of these stories now across all these different, all these different positions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then I just, I'd be quite honest, I did do the compare and contrast for the last four years, and it's not even, these people are not in the same ballpark. They're just like wildly better. And so, you know, pound for pound is maybe the best team in the White House since, you know, I don't even know, maybe the 90s, maybe the 30s, maybe the 50s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You know, maybe Eisenhower had a team like this or something, but there's a lot of really good people in there now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, so I'll start by saying again, I'm not, disclaimer, I have to disclaimer, I'm not on Doge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Both the angels and the devils on my shoulder are lawyers. Okay, all right, cool. Yeah, so I'm not speaking for Doge. I'm not in charge of Doge. Those guys are doing it. I'm not doing it. But again, I'm volunteering to help as much as I can, and I'm 100% supportive. Um, yeah. So look, I, I, I think the way to think about, I mean, the, the, the basic outlines are in public, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
One is we are the beneficiaries, and you're an example of this. We're a beneficiary. We're the beneficiary of, you know, 50, 100, 200 years of like the basically most aggressive, driven, smartest people in the world, most capable people, you know, moving to the US and raising their kids here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Which is, it's a, it's a time limited, you know, basically commission. Um, uh, it's not a formal government agency. Um, it's a, you know, time limited 18 month. Um, it'll, it'll, in terms of implementation, it will advise the executive branch. And so the implementation will happen through the White House. And the president has total attitude on what he wants to implement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then basically what I think about it is three kind of streams, kind of target sets. And they're related but different. So money, people, and regulations. And so, you know, the headline number, you know, put the $2 trillion number and there's, you know, disputes over that and whatever. And there's a whole question there. But then there's the people thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the people thing is interesting because you get into these very kind of fascinating questions. And I've been doing this. I won't do this for you as a pop quiz, but I do this for people in government as a pop quiz. I can stump them every time, which is, A, how many federal agencies are there? And the answer is somewhere between 450 and 520, and nobody's quite sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then the other is how many people work for the federal government. And the answer is something on the order, I forget, but like 4 million full-time employees and maybe up to 20 million contractors, and nobody is quite sure. And so there's a large people component to this. And then by the way, there's a related component to that, which is how many of them are actually in the office.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And the answer is not many. Most of the federal buildings are still empty, right? And then there's questions of like, are people working from home or are we actually working from home? So there's the people dimension. And of course, the money and the people are connected. And then there's the third, which is the regulation thing, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I described earlier how basically our system of government is much more now based on regulations than legislation. Most of the rules that we all live under are not from a bill that went through Congress. They're from an agency that created a regulation. That turns out to be very, very important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So one is, Elon already described, we want to do, the Doge wants to do broad-based regulatory relief. And Trump has talked about this and basically get the government off people's backs and liberate the American people to be able to do things again. So that's part of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But there's also something else that's happened, which is very interesting, which was there were a set of Supreme Court decisions about two years ago. that went directly after the idea that the executive branch can create regulatory agencies and issue regulations and enforce those regulations without corresponding congressional legislation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so we just have, you know, by far the most dynamic, you know, we're by far the most dynamic population, most aggressive, you know, we're the most aggressive set of characters in certainly in any Western country. and have been for a long time and certainly are today. And then finally, I would just say, look, we are overwhelmingly the advanced technology leader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And most of the federal government that exists today, including most of the departments and most of the rules and most of the money and most of the people, most of it is not enforcing laws that Congress passed. Most of it is regulation. And the Supreme Court basically said large parts
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
you know, large to maybe all of that regulation that did not directly result from a bill that went through Congress the way that the cartoon said that it should. That may not actually be legal. Now, the previous White House, of course, was super in favor of big government. They had no desire to act. They did nothing based on this. They didn't pull anything back in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But the new regime, if they choose to, could say, look, the thing that we're doing here is not challenging the laws. We're actually complying with the Supreme Court decision that basically says we have to unwind a lot of this and we have to unwind the regulations, which are no longer legal, constitutional. We have to unwind the spend and we have to unwind the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
um and so and that's how you get from basically you connect the thread from the regulation part back to the money part back to the people part um they have work going on all three of these threads they have i would say incredibly creative ideas on how to deal with this um i'm i i know lots of former government people who 100 of them are super cynical on this topic and they're like this is impossible this could never possibly work and i'm like well i can't tell you what the secret plans are but like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
like blow my mind, like, and all three of those, like they have, they have ideas that are like really quite amazing as you'd expect from, you know, from, from the people involved. And so, um, over the course of the next few months, you know, that'll start to become visible. And then the final thing I would say is, um, this is going to be very different than, than attempts like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There have been other programs like this in the past, um, The Clinton-Gore administration had one, and then there were others before that. Reagan had one. The difference is, this time, they're social media. And so there has never been... It's interesting. One of the reasons people in Washington are so cynical is because they know all the bullshit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They know all the bad spending and all the bad rules and all the... I mean, look, we're adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
and that's compounding and it's now passing the size of the defense department budget and it's compounding and it's pretty soon it's going to be adding a trillion dollars every 90 days and then it's gonna be adding a trillion dollars every 80 days and then it's gonna be a trillion dollars every 70 days and then if this doesn't get fixed at some point we enter a hyper inflationary spiral and we become argentina or brazil and kablooey right and so like everybody in dc knows that something has to be done and then everybody in dc knows for a fact that it's impossible to do anything
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Right. They know all the problems and they also know the sheer impossibility of fixing it. But I think what they're not taking into account, what the critics are not taking into account is these guys can do this in the full light of day and they can do it on social media. They can completely bypass the press. They can completely bypass the cynicism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
They can expose any element of unconstitutional or silly government spending. They can run victory laps every single day on what they're doing. They can bring the people into the process. And again, if you think about it, this goes back to our Machiavellian structure, which is if you think about, again, you've got democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, rule of the many, rule of the few, rule of the one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We have our issues and we have, I would say, a particular issue with manufacturing, which we could talk about, but for anything in software, anything in AI, anything in all these advanced biotech, all these advanced areas of technology, we're by far the leader. Again, in part, because many of the best scientists and engineers in those fields come to the US.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
You could think about what's happening here as a little bit of a sandwich, right? Which is you have, we don't have a monarch, but we have a president, rule of the one with some power. And then we have the people who can't organize, but they can be informed and they can be aware and they can express themselves through voting and polling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so there's a sandwich happening right now is the way to think about it, which is you've got basically monarchy. You've got rule of one combining with rule of many. And rule of many is that you get to vote. The people do get to vote, basically. And then essentially Congress and the sort of permanent bureaucratic class in Washington as the oligarchy in the middle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the White House plus the people, I think, have the power to do all kinds of things here. And I think that would be the way I would watch it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
These people are spending our money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
These people have enormous contempt for the taxpayer. Okay. Here's the thing you hear in Washington. Here's one of the things. So the first thing you hear is this is impossible. They'll be able to do nothing. And then, yeah, I walked them through this and they're like, they start to get, it starts to dawn on them that this is a new kind of thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then they're like, well, it doesn't matter because all the money is in entitlements and the debt and the military. And so like, yeah, you've got like this silly fake, whatever, you know, NPR funding or whatever. And like, it just, it's a rounding error and it doesn't matter. And you look it up in the budget and it's like, whatever, $500 million or whatever. $5 billion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Or it's the charging stations that don't exist. It's the $40 billion of charging stations and they build eight charging stations. Or it's the broadband internet plan that delivered broadband to nobody, right? And cost you $30 billion. So these boondoggles. And what everybody in Washington says is that $30 billion is a rounding error on the federal budget. It doesn't matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Who cares if they make it go away? And of course, any taxpayer is like, what the?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. Right. And then the experts are like, and the press is in on this too, then the experts are like, well, it doesn't matter because it's a rounding error. No, it's $30 billion. And if you're this cavalier, about $30 billion, imagine how cavalier you are about the $3 trillion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
$100 per taxpayer per year. Okay. So $100 to an ordinary person working hard every day to make money and provide for their kids. $100 is a meal out. It's a trip to the amusement park. It's the ability to buy additional educational materials. It's the ability to have a babysitter, to be able to have a romantic relationship with your wife.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so we, we, we just, we have all of the preconditions for a, uh, for a, just a monster, um, boom. You know, I could see economic growth going way up. I could see productivity growth going way up, rate of technology adoption going way up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
There's like 100 things that that person can do with $100 that they're not doing because it's going to some bullshit program that is being basically where the money is being looted. out in the form of just like ridiculousness and graft.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the idea that that $30 billion program is not something that is like a very important thing to go after is just like the level of contempt for the taxpayer is just off the charts. And then that's just one of those programs. There's like a hundred of those programs. And they're all just like that. It's not like any of this stuff is running well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The one thing we know is that none of this stuff is running well. We know that for sure. And we know these people aren't showing up to work. And we know that all this crazy stuff is happening. Do you remember Elon's story of what got the Amish to turn out to vote in Pennsylvania? Yeah. Okay, so Pennsylvania is a wonderful state, great history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
It has these cities like Philadelphia that have descended like other cities into just complete chaos, violence, madness, and death, right? And the federal government has just let it happen in these incredibly violent places.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so the Biden administration decided that the big pressing law enforcement thing that they needed to do in Pennsylvania was that they needed to start raiding Amish farms to prevent them from selling raw milk with armed raids. Right. And it turns out it really pissed off the Amish. And it turns out they weren't willing to drive to the polling places because they don't have cars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
$10,000. Okay, $10,000 per taxpayer per year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then we could, we can do a global tour if you like, but like basically all of our competitors have like profound issues and, you know, we could kind of go through them one by one, but the, the competitive landscape just is, it's like, it's, it's remarkable how, um, how, how much better position we are for growth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So here's the trick. This blew my mind because once you open the hell mouth of looking into the federal budget, you learn all kinds of things. So there is a term of art in government called impoundment. And so if you're like me, you've learned this the hard way when your car has been impounded. The government meaning of impoundment, the federal budget meaning is a different meaning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Impoundment is as follows. The Constitution requires Congress to authorize money to be spent by the executive branch, right? So the executive branch goes to Congress, says, we need money X. Congress does their thing. They come back and they say, you can have money Y. The money is appropriated from Congress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The executive branch spends it on the military or whatever they spend it on, or on roads to nowhere or charging stations to nowhere or whatever. And what's in the Constitution is the Congress appropriates the money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Over the last 60 years, there has been an additional interpretation of appropriations applied by the courts and by the system, which is the executive branch not only needs Congress to appropriate X amount of money, the executive branch is not allowed to underspend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm aware of this. I'm aware of this. And so there's this thing that happens in Washington at the end of every fiscal year, which is September 30th, and it's the great budget flush. And any remaining money that's in the system that they don't know how to productively spend, they deliberately spend it unproductively to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
A president that doesn't want to spend the money can't not spend it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like, okay, A, that's not what's in the Constitution. And there's actually quite a good Wikipedia page that goes through the great debate on this that's played out in the legal world over the last 60 years. And like, basically, if you look at this with anything resembling, I think, an open mind, you're like, all right, this is not what the founders meant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then number two, again, we go back to this thing of contempt. Like, can you imagine...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
showing up and running the government like that and thinking that you're doing the right thing and not going home at night and thinking that you've sold your soul right like it's just like i actually think you sort of had a really good point which is it's even unfair to the people who have to execute this yeah right because it makes them it makes them bad people and they didn't they didn't start out wanting to be bad people and so there is stuff like this like yeah everywhere everywhere and so we'll see how far these guys get i'm i am extremely encouraged what i've what i've seen so far
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah. So I start by saying I am not involved in any aspect of government policy on this. I am not planning to be. This is not an issue that I'm working on or that I'm going to work on. We're not. This is not part of the agenda of what the firm is doing. So my firm is doing so like I'm not I'm not in I'm not in this in the new administration of the government.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm not planning to be so purely just personal opinion. So I would say I would describe as a complex or nuanced, hopefully nuanced view on this issue that's maybe a little bit different than what a lot of my peers have. And I think and I kind of thought about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I didn't say anything about it all the way through the big kind of debate over Christmas, but I thought about it a lot and read everything. I think what I realized is that I just have a very different perspective on some of these things. And the reason is because of the combination of where I came from and then where I ended up. And so I'll start with this, where I ended up in Silicon Valley.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
So and I have made the pro skilled high skilled immigration argument many, many times, the H-1B argument many times. In past lives, I've been in DC many times arguing with prior administrations about this, always on the side of trying to get more H-1Bs and trying to get more high-skilled immigration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And I think that argument is very strong and very solid and has paid off for the US in many, many ways. And we can go through it, but I think it's the argument everybody already knows. It's like the stock. You take any Silicon Valley person, you press the button and they tell you why we need to brain drain the world to get more H-1Bs. So everybody kind of gets that argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Yeah, and then it's not just good for them and it's not just good for Silicon Valley or the tech industry, it's good for the country because they then create new companies and create new technologies and create new industries that then create many more jobs for Americans, native-born Americans than would have previously existed. And so you've got a, it's a positive sum flywheel thing
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Everybody wins. Everybody wins. There are no trade-offs. It's all absolutely glorious in all directions. There cannot possibly be a moral argument against it under any circumstances. Anybody who argues against it is obviously doing so from a position of racism, is probably a fascist and a Nazi. That's the thing. Like I said, I've made that argument many times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I'm very comfortable with that argument. Then I'd also say, look, I would say, number one, I believe a lot of it. I'll talk about the parts I don't believe, but I believe a lot of it. And then the other part is, look, I, I benefit every day. I, I, I always describe it as I work in the United Nations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like I, my own firm and our founders and our companies and the industry, um, and my friends, um, you know, are just this like amazing, you know, panoply cornucopia of people from all over the world. Um, and you know, I just, I've worked, I don't know at this point where people from, it's gotta be, I don't know, 80 countries or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and hopefully over time it'll be, you know, the rest as well. And you know, it's just, it's, it's been amazing and they've done many of the most important things in my industry and it's, it's, it's been really remarkable. So, So that's all good. And then, you know, there's just the practical version of the argument, which is we are the main place these people get educated anyway, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
The best and the brightest tend to come here to get educated. And so, you know, this is the old kind of Mitt Romney staple of green card to every, you know, at least, you know, maybe not every university degree, but every technical degree. Maybe the sociologists we could quibble about, but, you know, the roboticists for sure. For sure. For sure. We can all agree that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Well, no, I'm exaggerating for effect. So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
I haven't gotten to the other side of the argument yet. Okay, thank you. So surely we can all agree that we need to staple a green card. The roller coaster is going up. The roller coaster is rationing slowly up. So, yeah, so surely we can all agree that the roboticists should all get green cards. And again, like, there's a lot of merit to that. Obviously, like, look, we want the U.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
to be the world leader in robotics. What's step one to being the world leader in robotics is have all the great robotics people, right? Like... you know, very unlike the underpants. No, it's like a very straightforward formula, right? All right. That's all well and good. All right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
But it gets a little bit more complicated because there is a kind of argument that's sort of right underneath that, that you also hear from, you know, these same people. And I have made this argument myself many times, which is we need to do this because we don't have enough people in the U S who can do it otherwise. We have all these unfilled jobs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
We've got all these companies that wouldn't exist. We don't have enough good founders. We don't have enough engineers. We don't have enough scientists. Or then the next version of the argument below that is our education system is not good enough to generate those people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
yeah so is this a family show or am i allowed to swear you you can say whatever the fuck you want okay so the tv the great tv show succession the show of course that would which you were intended to root for exactly zero of the characters yes the best line for succession was in the final episode of the first season when the whole family's over in uh logan roy's ancestral uh homeland of scotland and they're at this castle you know for some wedding and logan is just like completely miserable after having to you know because he's been in new york for 50 years he's totally miserable being back in in um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Which is a weird argument, by the way, because like our education system is good enough for foreigners to be able to come here preferentially in like a very large number of cases, but somehow not good enough to educate our own native born people. So there's like a weird, these little cracks in the matrix that you can kind of stick your fingernail into and kind of wonder about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And we'll come back to that one. But at least, yes, our education system has its flaws. And then underneath that is the argument that Vivek made, which is we have cultural rot in the country and native-born people in the country don't work hard enough and spend too much time watching TV and TikTok and don't spend enough time studying differential equations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and again, it's like, all right, like, you know, yeah, there's a fair amount to that. Like there's a lot of American culture that, um, is, um, you know, there's a lot of frivolity. There's a lot of, you know, look, I mean, we have well-documented social issues on many fronts, many things that cut against having a culture of just like straightforward high achievement and effort and striving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Anyway, like, you know, those are the basic arguments. But then I have this kind of other side of my, you know, kind of personality and thought process, which is, well, I grew up in a small farming town in rural Wisconsin, the rural Midwest. And, you know, it's interesting. There's not a lot of people who make it from rural Wisconsin to, you know, high tech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, and so it's like, all right, why is that exactly? Right. And then I noticed I'm an aberration. Like I was the only one from anybody I ever knew who ever did this, right. I know what an aberration I am and I know exactly how that aberration happened. And it's a very unusual set of steps, um, including, you know, many that were just luck.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Um, but like it, there is in no sense, a talent flow from rural Wisconsin into high tech, like not at all. Um, there is also like in no sense of talent flow from the rest of the Midwest into high tech. There is no talent flow from the South into high tech. There is no flow from the Sunbelt into high tech. There's no flow from, you know, the deep South into high tech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Like just like literally it's like the blanks. There's this whole section of the country that just where the people just like for some reason don't end up in tech. That's a little bit strange because these are the people who put a man on the moon. These are the people who built the World War II war machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
These are the people, at least their ancestors, are the people who built the second industrial revolution and built the railroads and built the telephone network and built logistics and transportation. I mean, the auto industry was built in Cleveland and Detroit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so at least these people's parents and grandparents and great-grandparents somehow had the wherewithal to build all of this amazing things, invent all these things. And then there's many, many, many, many stories in the history of American invention and innovation and capitalism where you had people who grew up in the middle of nowhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Philo Farnsworth invented the television and just like, you know, tons and tons of others, endless stories like this. Now you have, like, a puzzle, right, and a conundrum, which is like, okay, like, what is happening on the blank spot of the map?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And then, of course, you also can't help noticing that the blank spot on the map, the Midwest, the South, you've also just defined Trump country, the Trump voter base, right? And it's like, oh, well, that's interesting. Like, how did that happen? Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
And so either you really, really, really have to believe the very, very strong version of like the Vivek thesis or something where you have to believe that like that basically culture, the whole sort of civilization in the middle of the country and the south of the country is so like deeply flawed, either inherently flawed or culturally flawed such that for whatever reason, they are not able to do the things that their parents and grandparents were able to do and that their peers are able to do or something else is happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
Would you care to guess on what else is happening?
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Right.
Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
2028, 2030.
Part Of The Problem
The Left vs. Reality
So, the Iron Law of oligarchy basically says democracy is fake. There's always a ruling class, there's always a ruling elite structurally. And he said the reason for that is because the masses can't organize. What's the fundamental problem?
Part Of The Problem
The Left vs. Reality
Whether the mass is 25,000 people in a union or 250 million people in a country, the masses can't organize, the majority cannot organize, only a minority can organize. And to be effective in politics, you must organize. And therefore, every political structure in human history has been some form of a small organized elite ruling a large and dispersed majority, every single one.
Part Of The Problem
The Left vs. Reality
And so basically, the presumption that we are in a democracy is just sort of by definition fake. Now, good news for the U.S., it turns out the founders understood this. And so, of course, they didn't give us a direct democracy. They gave us a representative democracy, right? And so they built the oligarchy into the system in the form of Congress and the executive branch, the judicial branch.
Part Of The Problem
The Left vs. Reality
But so anyway, so as a consequence, democracy is always and everywhere fake. There is always a ruling elite. And basically the lesson of the Machiavellians is you can deny that if you want, but you're fooling yourself. The way to actually think about how to make a system work and maintain any sort of shred of freedom is to actually understand that that is actually what's happening.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And you have this incredibly radicalized set of policies with this young staff that just is out for blood. on all these different fronts.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
So we met with him at his Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey, which is like breathtaking, absolutely beautiful.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
Yeah, I mean, he's just he's an incredible host. You know, he runs his own private worlds.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
He said, what do you guys want to eat? And I just I for some reason, I was just like, I know exactly what to say. And I'm like, meat. I want meat. And it was glorious.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
It's also really interesting to kind of watch him at work, which is he treats everybody the same and he talks to everybody. He will happily talk to distinguished visitors about, like, you know, who the vice president should be, and then he'll ask the caddy.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
His thing with us basically was like, look, I just want America to win.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
You know, you guys are in tech. I don't know much about tech, but I don't need to because you guys know a lot about it. You guys should go build tech companies. The American tech companies should win.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
Our economy should be growing a lot faster. We should be creating a lot more jobs. You know, everybody in America who wants a good job should have one. And that will be the result of, you know, American companies succeeding.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And so, you know, and most of the discussion was just around that.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
I think it's hard for any man to see somebody get shot in the head, bleeding, not knowing how badly he's been injured.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And put your fist up in the air and say, fight, fight, fight. How cool they thought that was. We don't see physical bravery like that.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And what's the deal? The deal was somebody like me basically could start a company. You can invent a new technology, in this case, you know, web browsers and all the other things that Netscape did. Everybody would think that that was great.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
You get invited to all the great parties. You get invited to Davos. You get invited to Aspen. You get to come in and sit with the New York Times editorial board.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And so they did this thing where they announced and committed that 99 percent of their ownership in Facebook was going to go to philanthropic causes.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
Following the classic deal trajectory, right? And they just got hammered with criticism and attacks on that.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And the line of argument was literally, oh, they're just slimy rich people and they're only doing it for the tax break. Which is like a basic mathematical problem, which is you don't give away 99% of your money for a tax break.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
Basically, what I experienced was they, the people in charge of all this, basically broke the deal. So basically, every single thing I just said for the last decade has been now held to be presumptively evil. Tech people are held to be this evil class. Anybody who's rich is evil. Philanthropy was being redefined as evil. It's like, okay, every single part of that deal no longer works.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And so it just, for me, it then raised the question of like, okay, if none of that is true, then what world am I living in? What role do I play?
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
I went to Hillary's first post-election loss speech, which she gave at Stanford. And the Russiagate stuff is in full-blown display. And Hillary gets up there and she says, Trump is only president today because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook and made him the president. And I'm sitting in the audience and I'm like on the Facebook board and I'm like, that's not true. I know for an absolute fact.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
Right. And so that got me thinking. And then the Russiagate stuff unspooled. And I was like, it was just this litany of, you know, basically excuses and complaints. Right. With no sense of like personal responsibility at all.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
They're trying to run a business. They're trying to get to the next quarter. They're trying to keep the employee base and everybody copacetic. They're trying not to get just completely destroyed by the politicians.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
We had meetings in D.C. in May where we talked to them about this and the meetings were absolutely horrifying.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
They said, look, AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government.
The Daily
Big Tech’s Big Bet on Trump
And then I said, I don't understand how you're going to lock this down so much because the math for AI is out there and it's being taught everywhere.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And again, like, I'll just tell you, like, you know, look, like, because I'm going to get a lot of, you know, the flack I'm going to get for this is, you know, he's just a crazy whatever right winger. But, like, I was a Democrat. I was like a Democrat. I supported Bill Clinton in 92. I supported Clinton in 96. I supported Gore, who I knew very well, in 2000. I knew John Kerry.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I supported him in 04. I supported Obama. I supported Hillary in 16. Like, I was like a Democrat in good standing. And then... Are you completely out in the cocktail circuit now? Are you allowed to hang out with people? This is actually true. There's now two kinds of dinner parties in Silicon Valley. They've fractured cleanly in half.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
There's the ones where every person there believes every single thing that was in the New York Times that day, which, by the way, is often very different than whatever was in the New York Times six months ago. But everybody has fully updated their views for that day, and that's what they talk about at the dinner party. And I am no longer invited to those. Nor do I want to go to them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then there's the other kind, which is David Sachs and all these guys and all these people and just this growing universe. It's a microcosm of what's happening more broadly in the culture, which is like, hey, let's actually get together and talk about things and have fun.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. I'm sure you've seen the ratings collapse. They're down to like – MSNBC is down to like 50,000 people in the 18 to 49 demo.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That sounds insane. And look, my hope, I think under Clinton and Gore, I think that they dealt with this very differently. I mean, look, they dealt with the internet very differently than the current crop are dealing with these technologies. Well, it was very different.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It was very different, but also they were much more, Clinton and Gore in particular, were much more understanding that you could actually... So there used to be this thing I called the deal with a capital D. And the deal was you could be – and this is what I was. You could be a tech founder. You could start a private company. You could create a tech product. Everybody loved you. It was great.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Glowing press coverage, the whole thing. You take the company public. It employs a lot of people. It creates a lot of jobs. You make a lot of money. At some point, you cash out, and then you donate all the money to charity, and everybody thinks you're a hero. Yeah. And it's just great. And this is how it ran for a very long time. And this was the deal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
This was Clinton and Gore were 100% in support of that. And they were 100% pro-capitalism in this way and 100% pro-tech. And they actually did a lot to foster this kind of environment. And basically what happened is the last 15 years or so of Democrats culminating in this administration basically broke every part of that deal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Which is tiny. It's so crazy. It's really tiny. So I think that's happening. The Gallup organization has done polls on trust in institutions, including media for the last 60 years. It's been a steady slide down. And in the last four years, it's fallen off a cliff. I think it's real. Oh, there's another study that came out. The kids are now watching a lot less TV. Kids are just giving up on TV.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
For people in my world, like every single part of that was shattered, right? Where just like technology became presumptively evil, right? And like, you know, if you're a business person, you were presumptively a bad person. And then technology was presumptively had bad effects and dot, dot, dot. And then they were going to regulate you and try to kill you and quash you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then the kicker was philanthropy became evil. And this is a real culture change in the last five years that I hope will reverse now, which is philanthropy now is a dirty word on the left because it's the private person choosing to give away the money as opposed to the government choosing a way to give the money. Ooh. So I'll give you the ultimate case study.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Here's where I radicalized on this topic. So you'll recall some years back, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla, they have a ton of money in Facebook stock. They created a nonprofit entity called Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, of which the original mission was to literally cure all disease. And this could be like $200 billion going to cure all disease, right? So like a big deal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
They said they committed to donate 99% of their assets to this new foundation. They got brutally attacked from the left. And the attack was they're only doing it to save money on taxes. Now, basic mathematics, you don't give away 99% of your money to save money on taxes, right? But it was a vicious attack. It was like a very, very aggressive attack.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And the fundamental reason for the attack was how dare they treat that money like it's their own? How dare they decide where it goes? Instead, tax rates for billionaires should go to 90-something percent. The government should take the money and the government should allocate it. And that would be the morally proper and correct thing to do. What do you think is the root of that kind of thinking?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
This is a utopian collectivism. Socialism that works. Socialism, yeah. It's the core idea of socialism. The core idea is this sort of radical egalitarianism. Everybody should be exactly the same. All outcomes should be exactly the same. Everything should be completely fair at all times. And some root of it has to be an envy. Of course, yeah. Envy, resentment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Nietzsche had this great term he called resentment. And it's like turbocharged resentment. And so the way he described it as resentment is envy, resentment, and bitterness that is so intense that it causes an inversion of values. And the things that used to be good become bad and the things that used to be bad become good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Philanthropy becomes bad because it should be the state operating on behalf of the people as a whole who are handing out the money, not the individual.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I'll give you another example. Here's another radicalizing moment for me. So my friend Sheryl Sandberg, who I worked with very closely for a long time at Facebook – and by the way, Democrat, liberal – by the way, endorsed Kamala, like very much not on the same page as me on these things. She actually worked in the Clinton administration, died in the World Democrats.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
She wrote this book called Lean In about 12 years ago. It's this sort of feminist manifesto, and it basically said- Lean In? Lean In. Lean In. And the thesis of Lean In was that women in their lives and careers could, quote unquote, lean in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
She said what she observed in a lot of meetings was the men were leaning in to the table and sitting in front, and then the women were leaning back and waiting to be called on. And she said that women should lean in. It became a metaphor for her for women should lean in on their careers. They should aggressively advocate for themselves to get raises and promotions. Like men do. Like men do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Women should basically become more aggressive in the workplace and then therefore perform better. And so it was a manifesto to women basically saying, be more confident, be more assertive, be more aggressive, be more successful. And I read the draft of the book when she was writing it. And I said, well, you realize you've written a right-wing manifesto. Right? Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And they're just, you know, they're on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and other things. And so, like, I think it's tipping. A question I've been asking myself is when will the actual, you know, famously 1960 was the first television election, right? You know, sort of legend has it because it was the one where the televised debate really mattered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And she looks at me like I've lost my mind, right? Because she's a lifelong lefty. She's like, what do you mean? And I'm like, this book is a statement that women have agency. This book is a statement that the things that women choose to do will lead to better results. That's what people believe on the right. On the left, what people believe is that women are only always and ever victims.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And if a woman doesn't succeed in a career, it's because she's being discriminated against. And so I predicted when this book comes out, right-wingers are going to think it's great and you're going to get it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Like the left is going to come at you because you're violating the fundamental principle of the left, which is anybody who does less well is a victim, which in that case is exactly what happened. By the way, the reviews were all by women. And they tore into her, like in every major publication, they just like completely ripped her.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And they're like, how dare this rich, entitled woman be telling us, you know, these would be telling women that they're not victims and that they're, you know, that they have all this agency because this is denial of sexism, right? It's denial of oppression.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So again, it's the inversion. It's the resentment. It's the inversion, which is like advocating on your own behalf and choosing to do things that make you more successful. What was her reaction to that? I would say she was, I don't want to speak for her, but she was not pleased.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So she was in the – but the answer is her worldview of how these things worked was from a different – it was from the Clinton-Gore era. Right. In which you could say things like that. You could talk like that. Yes. And by the time the book came out, it was already into the second Obama term heading it, right? And then the woke stuff started.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then at that point, you could no longer say things like that. Wow. And everything got classified through this very hard-edged, right, us versus them, right, oppressor versus oppressed kind of mindset.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And if you saw the televised debate, you saw Confident Kennedy and Nervous Nixon. And if you heard it, you experienced something different. Right. And handsomeness came into effect. And vitality and health and all these things, sort of positive spirit, positive energy. I'm actually not – this might have been the first internet election or maybe we actually haven't had it yet.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that's right. That's right. And like I said, I hope they can find their way back.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Well, no. If you've been a lifelong Democrat, and if that is in this court a lot of people's value systems, then it's a real challenge. Oh, yeah. It's my parents. When your movement –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Goes in directions. You can choose to follow into the craziest version of it, or you can choose to say, you know what, I'm still not going to switch sides, but at least I'm going to advocate for my team to come back. This is Richie Torres. This guy is a congressman in Queens, I think, or the Bronx. He actually started out – everybody thought he was going to be a far lefty because he's gay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
He's black. He's Latino. He was like at least associated with the squad early on and he's like one of the guys in the Democratic Party who has now stood up and he's been doing this in public for the last two weeks saying, clearly, we have to get back to sense. Like we have to get back to common sense. We have to get back to moderation. We have to have law enforcement.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
We have to have – we can't have crime in the streets. We have to have a border. We have to get – we Democrats have to get back to moderation and sense. And so he is hoping to lead the party. That's great. I think he's – we support him and I think he's like a really – I think he's a very impressive guy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So there are people like – and he's young and very energetic and I think he has a very bright future. But that's the kind of person who could lead the party.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. All of a sudden, we're all neocons. All of a sudden, as you said, all of a sudden, we're pro-war. It's like, wait, wait. Because as you know, the Democrats used to be the anti-war party. Yes. They were the anti-war party for a very long time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I feel like we're really close to the first internet election, but maybe it's not all the way there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That was a different era. But coming out of Vietnam, they were definitely the anti-war party for like 30 years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I think this – there's an argument that this is it, right? And that all the stuff, especially in the last six months, all the podcasts obviously in your show played a big role. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. There's a book written some years back by this guy, Norman Podhoritz, and it's called Why Are Jews Liberal? Right. And he was a right-wing Jew, a very important Jewish thinker, American Jewish thinker, like in the 60s, 70s, 80s. And he's like – basically, he had this thesis that like these Jewish liberal voters in the U.S.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
like basically are voting against – ultimately, they're voting for the wrong team. Because what they don't understand basically is that this is sort of a path, number one, to anti-Semitism, which is what's happened.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But number two, basically you're never going to have long-term support for Israel from the left because Israel – the basic concept of Israel violates the idea – Israel is like literally a religious ethnostate. And that's like inherently a right-wing idea, not a left-wing idea. Like the left doesn't have room for that. And a military superpower. And a military – right. And is able to – right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Like I think there's a real if you're gonna run in 28 Like I think there's like a fully internet native way to run these campaigns that might literally involve like zero television advertising And maybe you don't even need to raise that money and maybe it to your point if you have the right message Maybe you just go straight direct.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yes. Very – Yes, a very capable soldier in his day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so he argued, I don't know, this is like whatever, 20 years ago. He's like, this is headed in the wrong direction. But the argument was ignored at the time. And then at least a lot of my Jewish friends after October 7th, they were completely horrified to find out, for example, the DEI was actually anti-Jewish. Right. Which is what everybody learned with the scandals at the universities.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And it's like, you know, there's two ways of looking at that. One is, oh, my God, the DEI is anti-Jewish. Therefore, we need to add Jews to the DEI scorecard. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That was just so in everyone's face and so bananas. And then we saw that – yeah, right. And then what we saw is that this same sort of radicalized left had actually slid into not just anti-Semitism and not just anti-Israel but also pro – I mean ultimately pro-terrorist, pro-Hamas. Yeah. You know, the new acronym, LGBTH.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Oh, boy. Really? Yeah, of course. Of course. Of course. And so like, I bring it up just as an example of it's the kind of realignment a lot of Jewish Americans now are having to kind of rethink fundamental questions about political structure and alliances and who they should be part of and who they shouldn't be part of.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So I think to your point, I think the whole country is going through – I think we're going through the first profound political realignment probably since the 1960s, which is when everything shifted between Johnson and Nixon in the South. I think we're going through the most profound version of that right now, and I think it's something like –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
the multi-ethnic working class coalition um you know that came together around trump um you know basically again against this sort of super exaggerated elite plus underclass you know kind of structure that the democrats have built for themselves and it just i think it's just it just turns out there's just a lot more people in the middle um and so i think but but by the way including like a lot of a lot of black people a lot of black people you know black vote for trump is way up hispanic vote for trump is way up right vote for trump is way up way up gay vote is
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
All of the identity groups that Democrats relied on all these years, union vote is for Trump.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Those of us on the coast are going to get pushed into the ocean.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, right. Because how can you deny a victim group? Right. Right. You can't. I mean, in the full version of that ideology, in the extreme version of that ideology, you cannot deny a victim claim.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Every day, it feels better. It feels like just things are opening up. It's the Obama campaign.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, hope and change. Remember? It's hope and change.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Oh, I'm on X under PMRK. I'm on Substack. Google me. All right. Ask perplexity. All right. Ask ChatGPT, and it will deny that. No. It will happily tell you that I exist, at least last time I checked.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
We don't know. We don't know if Catherine is still running it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Well, number one, they had you. Number one, they had you. They had you and they drove you away. But they also have ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN. Right, but that doesn't work anymore.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So my theory is it's almost as if people want us to think it's a conspiracy. It's almost like the whole thing is almost orchestrated. Yeah. It's so strange. This is like the rapid cremation. The whole thing was just completely bizarre. And then you're exactly right. No hearings, no nothing. Now, having said that, I expect that this will change.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. So you can actually simulate this today because you can go on these systems, Shed GPT or Clot or these others, and you can ask, you know, how should we handle issue X? How should this be run? Yeah, we've done that. Right. How should the Department of Energy do whatever, nuclear policy or whatever? And what I find when I do that is I discover two things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Number one, of course, these things have the same problem. social media side, which is they're tremendously politically biased and that's on purpose and they need to fix that. And that's going to be a big topic in the next several years.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But the other thing you learn is if you can get through the political basically bias and censorship, if you can actually get to a discussion of the actual issue, you get very sophisticated answers. Yes. Right? Very logical, very straightforward, and it will explain every aspect of the issue to you and it'll take you through all the pros and cons.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Well, look, there's nothing stopping a politician from using this. There's nothing stopping a policymaker from using it as a tool. At the very least, you start out using it as a tool. There's nothing to prevent. For example, I think military commanders in the field are going to have basically AI battlefield assistants that are going to advise them on strategy, tactics, how to win conflicts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then it'll start to work its way up. And then they'll be doing war planning. And then if you're a general, if you're a sergeant or a colonel or a general, it's going to just mean you perform better. So maybe there's like the sort of man-machine kind of symbiotic relationship. And you could imagine that happening more in the policy process and in the political process.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And there's a bunch of reasons for that. And part of it is just simply the speed of processing and so forth. But another big thing is if you don't have a human in the plane. You don't have the spam in the can. You don't have the human body in the plane. You don't have to keep a human being alive, which means you can be a lot faster and you can move a lot more quickly. G-forces.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. No, look, I think it's going to be common to have Mach 5 jet drones within a few years. And there'll be a fraction of the size of the current manned planes, which means you can have a lot more of them. And so you kind of want to imagine 1,000 of these things coming over the horizon right at you. And it really changes. It's actually, I think, going to be very interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It really changes the fundamental equation of war in the following sense. Fundamentally, in the past, the people who won wars were the people who had the most men and the most material. So you just needed the most soldiers and you needed the most equipment. And in this drone world that we're talking about, it's going to be the people with the most money and the best technology.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So, for example, small advanced states like Singapore will be able to punch way above their weight. And then kind of large sort of economically or technologically backward states that normally would have won will now lose. And so it's going to be a recalibration. And then it has – the good news is you're not putting soldiers at risk, right? So you'll have a lot less death.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Do you think they're going to do a dive into what happened? I mean, I would. I don't know if they will, but I certainly would if I was in a position to do that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The bad news arguably is it will be easier to get into conflicts because you're not putting soldiers at risk. So there's going to have to be a recalibration of like when you actually like lean into an attack.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. Well, so, of course, we know that that was the case for a very long time, for sure, from the 50s through the 80s, because the development of stealth was highly classified. And the SR-71 was brand new at one point. And so you had these like, you know, alien, you know. Do you pay attention to any of that stuff at all? Of course. Of course. 100%. And then, by the way, we're not the only ones.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so my speculation would be that some of the military-based stuff is the Chinese doing something similar. And we got a glimpse into that with the balloon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
They got shut down. But still, the fact that the Chinese are flying surveillance balloons over American territory and they were able to slip through our early warning systems and just loiter above military bases and take lots of imagery and do whatever scans they do. Yeah. And like literally nothing was happening and we didn't even know they were there most of the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so like, you know, that's like a tip of the ice. It feels like a tip of the iceberg kind of thing where if they were doing that, there are probably other things going on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Interesting. For the record, I'm pro-shooting them down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Of course, of course. Well, number one, is there or not? And then if it is, did it recently get here? Have they been here for a long time? Did they arrive 5,000 years ago?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I mean demons and angels – are demons and angels real? It's like literally probably not but like certainly they're metaphorically real and are there kind of shades of gray between literal and metaphorical?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. Or it's just, you know, as we saw, I think, in the hearing afterwards, maybe just a systemic collapse of competence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Evil people doing evil things are possessed. I mean, they're possessed by something, right? Like something is going on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And like, you know, what's the dividing line between, you know, an actual supernatural force and some sort of psychological, sociological thing that's so overwhelming that it just takes control of people and drives them crazy? Like, you might as well call that a demon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So a friend of mine is a religious scholar. He teaches at Catholic University, and he's a religious history scholar. And he says that medieval people were psychologically better prepared for the era ahead of us with AI and robots and drones everywhere than we are because medieval people took it for granted that they lived in a world with higher powers, higher spirits, angels, demons.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
All kinds of supernatural entities. And it was just assumed to be true. And in the world we're heading into, that we're arguably already in, there are going to be these new forces, these new entities running around doing things. And we're going to struggle. And we're going to catastrophize. We're going to conclude AI is the end of the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The medievals would have said, oh, it's just another spirit. It's just another kind of entity. Yeah, it's better than humans at some things, but so are angels. And so we're going to have to like change our mentality. We're almost going to have to become a little bit more medieval. We're going to have to open up our minds to the kinds of entities that we're dealing with. Wow. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Which also could help us actually deal with people. Like maybe there's an explanatory way to think about human behavior here that seems less rational but might actually be more rational.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. Well, I mean, of course, the big difference between woke and those traditional religions is woke has no concept of redemption.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yes. It's absolutist. It's inherently totalitarian. It has to be because it can permanently destroy people. Yeah. Woke also understands something that the Greeks understood, which is that being ostracized and being put to death are the same thing. And so when the Greeks sentenced somebody like Socrates to death, they gave them the option of just leaving.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But the problem was, yes, Socrates could have just walked out and left. No kidding. The reason that was considered equivalent sentences is because at that time, if you were not a citizen of a particular city, you would get killed in the next city. You'd be identified as the enemy presumptively and killed. And so there was no way to survive without being part of your community. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And that's what the Wokes figured out is you can do the same thing. If you're able to like, you know, nail somebody on, you know, on charges of having done something, you know, unacceptably horrible, then you make them toxic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And all of a sudden they can, you know, they can't have, you know, sure, you know, people, you know, they lose friends, they lose family, they lose, they can't get work, you know, and before you know it, like they're, you know, living, you know, severely diminished, damaged lives. Some people then go on to kill themselves.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
it's in and out yeah that's right i think it's exactly i think the new cycle now is like a two to three day social media firestorm and we just cycle from one to the next yeah and we have the memory of goldfish and right they you know things right things that would have been error defining just come and go with astonishing speed uh and shock
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
There's very few choices. It's not fun. And it's win-win to have them back on Twitter because it's good for them because they want to proselytize. And so they need an audience. So they win. And then we win because it's really, really fun to dunk on them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. My favorite term is marketplace of idea. Yeah. You could have a marketplace of ideas. It's just going to be one idea. So blue sky is a marketplace of idea. Sure. Yeah. X is the marketplace of ideas. That final S makes a lot of difference.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
By the way, I should say, I don't think there was, I doubt there was a conspiracy. I think anything's possible. I think it's just, we have a competence collapse. And I think we saw that on display when the director at the time, you know, testified. Well, there's all the elements that it could have been a conspiracy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. You need that. Yeah. Look, so one of the ways I think to think about this is all new information is heretical by definition, right? So anytime anybody has a new idea, it's a threat to the existing power structure. So all new ideas start as heresies.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so if you don't have an environment that can tolerate heresies, you're not going to have new ideas and you're going to end up with complete stagnation. If you have stagnation, you're going to go straight into decline. Right. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And I think this is the aberrant nature. This is the timeline split. I think that I think the last decade has just been like a really weird, aberrant time where things have not been working like they should. And, you know, in 2015, Twitter called itself the free speech wing of the free speech party. Right. And Elon has not like Elon has restored it. Right. He brought it back.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
He brought it back to something that everybody thought was completely normal 10 years ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And I think I hope this last 10 years increasingly is just going to feel like a bad dream. I can't believe we tolerated the level of repression and anger and emotional incontinence and cancellation campaigns.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Just spraying rage in all directions. And so I'm very, at the moment at least, very optimistic that there's a cultural change happening here that's even more profound than the political change.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It could have, but this is kind of the thing, which is just like, it also could have been systemic competence collapse. And then it's like, okay, would it be better off for the institute, you know, if it looks like a conspiracy, right? Like, you know, which world, okay, two timelines. Which world would you rather live in?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So the experience that people like Jack have had running these companies in the last decade has been – And I don't mean to let them off the hook for their decisions, but just the lived experience, as they say, of what these people's lives have been like is just daily pounding.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Just every single day, it's like meteor strikes coming down from the sky, exploding around you, getting attacked from every conceivable direction, being called just incredibly horrible things, being attacked from many different directions. Well, he's already left Blue Sky.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Well, yeah, so the irony of Jack is that Jack then created Blue Sky, which is kind of exactly the opposite of any way where he thought it. Oh, by the way, the new name for it, of course, is Blue Cry. Ah, I didn't know that. Exactly. Yeah, but he's also got, look to his credit, he's still trying. And so he's got Nostr, which is another- What is it? It's called Nostr, N-O-S-T-R.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Look at, full credit, full credit. He's going to keep swinging. And by the way, full credit, he supported Elon. They've mixed up a little bit, but by and large, he's been very supportive and was very supportive at a key time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And I think, frankly, I think you get the same thing if you start out. I think if you start out overtly political on either side, I think that's what you end up with. Yes. And so I just feel like that doesn't seem to be an effective route to market.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It seems like you have to start from the beginning as a general purpose service, but you need to have some sense of the actual guardrails you're going to have around. And by the way, every social media service, internet service that ever works, there's always some content filters and restrictions because you can't have child porn. You can't have violence. You can't have terrorist recruitment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And even the First Amendment, there's like a dozen carve-outs that the Supreme Court has ruled on over time that are things like that that you can't just say. I can't say, let's go join ISIS and let's go attack Washington. It's literally not allowed. So there's always some controls, but you need to have a spine of steel.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The one with the conspiracies or the one with just like incompetence everywhere?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
If you're going to hold back the censorship pressure and, you know, there's basically Substack, you know, company I'm involved, you know, doing very well, you know, smaller. I love Substack. Smaller than Twitter, but doing extremely well. Fantastic. And they've done a great job, I think, of holding the line on this. Yes. And then obviously.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And there's lots of people on the far left and the far right. Yes. So you actually have the full spread. When a far left person gets upset at somebody working at the New York Times is mad because they're not far left enough, they quit and they start a Substack. And Substack welcomes them in. Yes. Which is why they don't devolve into a Gabber or something like that because it really is a platform.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. So my partners at work, they've observed that I tend to be able to inflame situations from time to time. I can tend to be provocative and get people really upset. And so the rule they've asked me to comply with is I'm allowed to write essays, for example, and I'm allowed to go on long-form podcasts, but I'm not allowed to post. Really? Right. Exactly. What? It's the rule. It's the rule.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Now, by the way, I struggle against the rules because I can't help myself from time to time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Because otherwise I inflame people too much. I drive people too crazy. Do you do it on purpose? Sometimes. I mean, sometimes you have to. Sometimes it's unintentional. Did you ever hear about when the entire country of India was mad at me? Oh, I spent one night with the entire country of India basically wanting to kill me. It was incredible. Oh, my goodness. What happened?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I was in a Twitter debate with somebody back when I was just posting freely on Twitter, and it was a debate about economics, and the topic of colonialism came up. And I made a comment in a long thread about colonialism, and it turns out the Indians are still extremely sensitive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
about the topic of colonialism and I did not understand the mindset and the historical orientation and I tripped a line and I stayed up all night and I went hyper viral in every time zone in India every hour there would be like an entirely new activation and And I was like front page headline news, top of the hour TV news, like all the way across India. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yes, it was like a – I do not recommend this as an experience. By the way, I learned how many incredible Indian American friends I have because they all rallied to my side and said he's not – Mark's not literally calling for the recolonization of India. Yeah. This is probably the language barrier as well, right? Language. And then just historical context.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Americans have a different – Americans experience history differently than almost everybody else. History for us is just like stuff that happened in the past that doesn't matter anymore. But a lot of other people around the world experience history as something that really still matters, like really matters to their lives today. They live in history more than we do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
They have a deeper understanding of kind of how they got to where they were and the things that happened to their parents and grandparents. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
He's the only kid of his generation who's that fired up about politics to have no online footprint. It just doesn't make any sense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so it's just – I don't know if it's better or worse. It's just a different way of experiencing reality. Anyway, I recommend learning that lesson not by enraging a billion people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So the good news is I am allowed to go on podcasts. That's good news. In the theory. I bring it up, though, because it's your Substack thing. It's because it's basically, Mark, you need to explain yourself in long form.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
You can't just say a thing. Exactly. Your example. You can't just say a thing and have people extrapolate from it. Right. Because they'll extrapolate. It's not their fault. It's your fault because you haven't explained it. Right. Right. And so if you write something long form or if you go talk for three hours, at least the context will be there. And then if they want to get mad at you, that's fine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But you can point everybody to the transcript. And it's clear that that's not what you meant.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I've got a friend in the entertainment business who is quite left wing but really likes World War II documentaries. And so he'll be like, yeah, I saw this great documentary last night about Hitler. And I'm like, I bet you did. You can't even have a copy of Mein Kampf in your house. Oh, a student. This is actually one of the Stanford crazy stories.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
A student at Stanford was reported to the disciplinary board, the civil whatever disciplinary board for reading a copy of Mein Kampf in the quad.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Which is a book that's been, you know, assigned for 80 years to college kids to, like, understand who these people were and, like, how to not do that again. Yeah, that kid was, like, nearly brought up in charges and nearly expelled. Wow. Yes, this is the world that I hope that we're leaving.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And you should probably not reprimand someone for reading a book on this. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. And look, the German people went along with it, right? And so, you know, how did that happen? How did that happen? Right. And how many, you know, did they, was there active agreement? Was there passive agreement? Was there, you know, what?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
One of my observations about people talking about current events is we know conclusively the prior eras all had horrible moral problems, disasters, catastrophes, wars, and they made all kinds of horrible mistakes. But we are completely certain that in our time we figured it all out. Right. We're 100% convinced that we have it all dialed in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I bet it was more than that. Well, the argument is just things just really didn't really change. Right. Like changes we understand, historical change of the kind that we understand where things actually change. Right. The way people live changes really kicked off with the Greeks. And so that was sort of the default status quo. Right. civilization for a long time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The Greeks kicked off change, as we understand it, and then the Romans. Do you know about the fishponds? Fishponds? The fishponds, the Cicero's fishponds. No.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So the Roman Empire, you know, ran for, you know, in its sort of Roman Republican Empire in its sort of health, which you consider its dynamic phase, its sort of vital phase, ran for a few, you know, a few hundred years, about maybe 400 years total, something like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And towards the end, as it was sort of falling or stagnating and increasingly starting to fall apart, a friend of mine says, when the roads got dangerous and nobody could quite explain why, which sounds familiar, by the way, Cicero was one of the great Roman statesmen. And he wrote these letters that we have. And in the letters, he sends these letters to all of his aristocratic friends.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And the theme in the letters is basically all of the actual competent, capable citizens of Rome are out in the countryside at their villas perfecting their fishponds. Right. They pull an end to themselves. They built themselves their own protected environments, right, where they control everything. And they're completely focused on ornamentation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
They're completely focused on their clothes and on their, you know, lifestyles. Kardashians. They were Kardashians. Yeah. I don't know if the Kardashians have fishponds, but if they did, they would be spectacular fishponds. They would be amazing fishponds. I have no doubt they would be the most amazing fishponds we have ever seen. So he kept railing. He's like, stop with the fishponds.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Stop working on the fishponds. Get back out here. Rejoin the Senate. Get back involved in the system. Let's keep this thing from caving in. And I think, you know, the significance I think of, you know, Trump actually talked about this in the campaign. You know, his version of this talking on the campaign trail is he's like, look, I could be off on a resort. I own all these golf clubs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Exactly. Right. And he's, you know, surrounded. His family loves him and like, you know, grandkids and like the whole thing. And he's like, look, I'm not doing it because like I need to do this. And it's interesting because, you know, he doesn't use, you know, he's not referencing Cicero when he says that. But it's that spirit that Cicero talked about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Where, you know, when times get tough, do the people who are in a position to actually make positive change actually step up or not?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And I think we've had a pretty long stretch here where that hasn't been the case. And I think maybe with Trump and then I think also with Elon, I think. Yes. Because Elon's the other guy, right? He for sure could be focused.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Well, the Romans had this concept they took very seriously. They called virtue, right? And like, did you, did you, there's a whole ranking, by the way, the Roman virtues. And if you read them today, you just like want to burst out crying because you're just like, oh my God, I can't believe what we're missing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that's right. And we would experience it. I mean, you know, I don't know. When I was a kid, my high school history teacher got us a bootleg copy of the Zapruder film. Really? What a gangster high school history teacher. He was actually pretty focused on that. He really loved the Kennedy assassination. So we spent a lot of time on that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But like people with virtue, people with virtue, it's not just that they think that they're good people or that they tell everybody they're good people. They actually act on it and actually step up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. Well, the Romans had gods. I mean, their virtues had gods. And so they're like, it was actually wrapped. It was your point. It was like encoded into their religion. It was wrapped up in their religion. They knew exactly what was expected of them. They knew exactly what their ancestors expected of them. They knew exactly what their gods expected of them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. You probably know he didn't write it for public consumption.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But he's lecturing himself. He's telling himself how to act. These are very deep important.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
My favorite part of the meditations is there's a section where it's something like, yeah, you're going to wake up this morning and everybody's going to hate you and everybody's going to lie to you and everybody's going to make dumb decisions and you're going to be incredibly frustrated and you're not going to get any credit for anything. And you have to get up anyway.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Like that's all, yes, yes, yes, that's all true. And you still have to get up and do your job.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
To himself, exactly. And what's in there is just like, wow, his life was not, you know, he's just like, again, it's actually, you know, like the CEO, it's just like you're going to get pounded. Like if you're in these positions, you're going to get pounded every day. It's just incredible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And, you know, you kind of watch it frame by frame and you can kind of see what's happening with this. Lots of questions. But like when things like that happen, you know, today, it's going to be in. High-definition 4K Ultra surrounds on forever, right? Playing out in real time forever. And so, yeah, I very much don't want to live in the world where those things happen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And if you're operating out of a true sense of virtue, if you're operating out of a true sense of like exercising your responsibilities, you get up and do it anyway. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And look, I think if you're somebody like that or somebody like Marcus Aurelius, you just have this incredible sense of responsibility.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The one thing you do have is a sense of purpose. You know exactly why you're here. You know exactly what your role is. You know exactly how you're supposed to behave. You know exactly how you're supposed to basically gain glory, how you're supposed to honor your ancestors. It's just all exactly where you are in the community. Right. You have this incredible sense of groundedness and rootedness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And of course, there's huge downsides to that, which is it really cuts off your ability to run off and go on American Idol, right? There's a lot of things you can't do, right? But you know what you're supposed to do, and you either do it or you don't do it. And these days, to have people like that, we need people who choose to be that way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right, which is arguably harder, right, given all the choices that they actually choose to live that way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Correct. Yes. You had to be maybe a little bit more serious because you couldn't have as much fun. My favorite, my other favorite meditations, Marcus Aurelius thing is something like be the rocks on the shore at which the waves beat. Right. Like, yes. Like, yes. Your job is to stand there like the rocks do and just the surf just like keeps coming and keeps coming and keeps coming.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And your job is to just like stand there and take it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Not easy lives. You know, today most of the killings happen metaphorically.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It was so weird because all the experts said it was 50-50, razor sharp. It's this tiny little thing, 80,000 votes in eight counties. And number one, then it wasn't, which means we can take all those experts and just dismiss them forever going forward because they clearly have no clue. So it's another set of people we don't have to listen to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But I had this really interesting conversation that kept nagging at me with a senior Democrat who's on his way out of politics. And he said in the summer, I said, what's your view? And this person said, Trump's going to win with 100% certainty. Really? Mr. Democrat from a sort of purple state. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So, you know, not New York or California, but like a state with sort of maybe Arizona, broader cross section of people. And this person basically said, yeah, look, all you have to do is fly anywhere in the country into any purple place and go into a second or third tier.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
You know, side city and take an Uber for 30 minutes, you know, land at the airport, take an Uber, drive around for 30 minutes, come back and just ask the driver, like, how's it going and who are they voting for? And basically 100 percent of the time the answer is going to be Trump because people are just people were just like completely fed up. They were just completely fed up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then there was the, you know, Kamala enthusiasm, which this person said, you know, the Kamala enthusiasm is like highly focused in New York and California. Which don't matter from an electoral standpoint, right? So they're not going to decide anything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Oh, sure. Of course. But that's the thing, the self-reinforcing nature of the bubble. This is what's actually so interesting with these media bubbles is the people in these media bubbles are not breaking out. It's like they're getting deeper into the sort of collective psychosis that they indulge in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And part of it was getting excited about a Canada for which there was very little popular support for once you got outside of these heavily blue states. And so in a lot of ways, it's the most obvious explanation in the world, which is just people just fundamentally did not like the direction the country was going in and they were just fed up with it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And people really don't like being talked down to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know for two thoughts. One is the Democrats for a long time were the big tent party. So the Democrats were the coalition of people who had very different points of view on things. And of course, famously, it's all the different identity groups and it's all the different economic and unions and all these things. And Republicans were like the party of rigidity, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And just for whatever set of – a lot of the woke stuff had a lot to do with it. It flipped to where at least today, Trump's Republican Party is the big tent party. Yeah. To your point on having all these new people and many of whom are former Democrats. A lot of them. And the Democrats have decided to try to isolate out anybody.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right, who disagrees on any issue and demand lockstep conformity through the cancellation process. And so that's a very interesting inversion that happened kind of without anybody saying anything about it. But it did happen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then I think the other inversion was the economic inversion, which is, remember the criticism of the Republican Party for a long time was it was the party of trickle-down economics. Yes. Where the idea was the rich people are going to get all the money because they're going to cut taxes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Reagan administration. And then basically if poor people get any money, it's because the rich people like trickle some down. Right. I think that inverted to where the Democrats, especially in the last four years, became the trickle-down party, which was we're going to tax and we're going to collect all the money and give it to the government and then we're going to let the government hand it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Of course, that's how it started. But then you end up with $35 trillion federal debt. You end up with this giant annual deficit. And then you end up with all this money being handed out, right? Handed out in all these grants and all these things, like just this shower of money coming from the government.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But of course, if the government is giving you money, it also means the government can take money away, right? Like if you're making somebody dependent on you because you're giving them money, then you're in a tremendous position of power because you can make their life horrible by pulling the money away. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, you own them. It's actually a form, you know, it's on the spectrum to a form of like domination, you know, that should make us very uncomfortable. And so, you know, maybe that would be fine if the deficit didn't get out of control and inflation didn't get out of control, but it did.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. That was like direct interference. And it was abetted by a lot of former intelligence officials and by the current administration. Tons of pressure on censorship coming from the current administration and all their kind of arms of the censorship apparatus.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then at that point, it's like, okay, like this new kind of sort of tax and spend driven trickle down economics is clearly not sustainable. It's not going to work.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yes. So my theory is the timeline, like in a science fiction movie, the timeline has split twice in the last like nine months.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So the two headline things you hear from them whenever they talk about this, the two headline things are, number one, growth. You just need faster growth. By the way, it's the only way to resolve the long-term fiscal situation. It's the only way to resolve the debt. There's only two ways to do it. You can inflate your way out of it and end up in 1930s Germany with hyperinflation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That's one track you can get on, which is a very bad track, and you don't want to go there. Or you can grow faster. Because if you grow faster, then your economy can catch up to the debt, and you can pay down the debt as you grow. And so they want to go for a higher rate of growth. And then the other thing is they want America to win.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
My partner Ben and I were able to spend time with Trump this summer, and that was like his adamant thing he kept coming back, which is like, look, America has to win. And specifically what that means is America has to win in business and in technology and in industry generally globally. Like our companies should be the ones that win these broad, we should win global markets.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Like our companies should be the global standards. How can anybody be against that? I happen to think that makes a lot of sense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yes. By the way, if you are in favor of a high level of social support, if you want there to be lots of welfare programs and food assistance programs, all these things, I would argue you also want that because it's the growth that will pay for all the social programs. That's how you square the circle.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That's how you actually have your cake and eat it too, which is first, your economy just generates a fountain of money through growth and economic success, and then you can pay for whatever programs you want. I actually don't ... Personally, I'm totally fine. Set up all the programs you want. All the social spending you want, all the safety nets you want.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And as long as it's easy to pay for because you're growing so fast, then everybody wins.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I just don't believe that they're good at spending it. That's the thing, right? It's like if you're putting in this – if you've generated $35 trillion of debt and these are the results – Yeah. Like this is not the deal. And this is – my friend that I talked about earlier, that was the point he made. It's just like, look, the deal has been broken. Like this is not the deal anybody signed up for.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
This is not how it's supposed to work. Everybody knows it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. So that's how it starts. And there is a lot of that going on. But I will say one of the things that's interesting is it doesn't necessarily stick that way. And the sort of evidence for that is the sort of dramatic ramp up in the Hispanic vote for Trump.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I think anybody in social media, the internet companies knew it. So it was pretty widely understood. I mean, look, there's nothing that happened at Twitter and the Twitter files. It wasn't happening all the other companies, right? So it's a consistent pattern. If you got the YouTube files, they would look exactly the same. And of course, we should get the YouTube files, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So this gets to the thing. So I'll just tell you a quick story on this. So the night after the 2016 election, literally everybody I knew was just completely traumatized. We were all just completely freaked out. Everybody was shocked. You were freaked out too? Yeah, I was completely freaked out. Everybody was freaked out. I didn't expect him to win the nomination.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I didn't expect him to win the race. And the media is on full historical blast, and it's the end of the world. And he's a Russian spy, all this crazy stuff that we now know not to be true. It's just full on. a group of us, a group of us went out to dinner at a restaurant in Palo Alto. And, you know, and the atmosphere was like a funeral.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I mean, like everybody in the restaurant was just like despondent, like ready to slit their wrists. And so we're sitting there eating and like the food doesn't taste good. You know, it's just like, can't taste the food. You can't taste the drinks. Like everybody's just depressed. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And, you know, it gets this thing of like, you know, my God, I can't believe that, you know, Trump, you know, this, that, you know, racist, you know, anti-Hispanic and all this stuff. And it was one of those moments where the young waiter who's, you know, Hispanic young man in his 20s One of those rare moments where he broke into the conversation at the table. But it was in context.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It was like, oh, thank God, because we're just depressing ourselves to death. So thank God he's going to say something. And he said, you know, I think you guys are looking at it all wrong. He's like, my father thinks Trump is fantastic. My father came here as an immigrant, whatever, 30 years ago, built a life here, became a citizen, bought into the system, pays taxes, raised a family.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Mowing his lawn with a MAGA hat on. He thinks this guy is great. He thinks this guy is fantastic, and he voted for him. And then, you know, you've heard this before, but then it's like, and the thing that this guy said, the thing my father thinks is terrible is if other people are able to come here, they're able to cut in line. You know, they didn't have to go through the process.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
They didn't have to prove anything. They're not bought into the system, right? They're able to jump in, and then, you know, they don't. And they're not buying into the system. And, you know, part of it, maybe they're not being accepted, but also part of it is they're not buying in. They're not, you know, they're not assimilating.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
They're not becoming part of the, you know, of what makes America America. And, you know, in some cases, and by the way, in some cases, you know, the criminals are coming across and terrorists are coming across and gangs. And it's like my father's not in favor of any of that. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
My father wants to be part of a great society, of a great America, not some dysfunctional, you know, basically just disaster zone. Right. And I remember the group of us, it was my first glimmer of like, okay, I need to like completely rethink my whole sense of like how the world works.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, yeah. Well, it was weird because it was like, so what happened with me is like, so I grew up in rural Wisconsin, which is now like completely Trump country. And so from like zero to 18, like I completely understood the mentality and I was always like explaining to my friends of like, no, no, like this is, you know, this is like a different place and people think differently.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And now we probably will now with this new administration is probably going to carve all this stuff open. But Yeah, no, look, it was a pattern. And then look, you know, the companies bear a lot of responsibility and the people in the companies, you know, made a lot of, I think, bad judgment calls.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then somehow between the ages of like 18 and 40 or whatever, I just like forgot. Yeah. And I became a Californian. I became a fully assimilated Californian. And I was just like, well, of course, the Californians are much more sophisticated in advance than people where I came from. And so, of course, of course, of course, everybody in California has it figured out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And of course, California is going to lead the country in all this thinking. Right. And Trump was for me, Trump was the Trump 2016 was the wake up call of like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, that's just like completely that is such an impoverished worldview of how this country works and how people think.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But it doesn't explain what – because you have to explain what happened and then you have to like – if you have some sense of being able to predict what's next, which is what I'm supposed to be doing for a living. It's what investing is supposed to be. It's like, OK, I got to rebuild my entire model of the world for like how this all works and how this whole system and how this country works.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But it was that conversation that kick-started it for me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So for me, it was primarily it was reading. And so I started to actually read my way back in history. And I actually went all the way back. I tried to read of like where the origins of like left wing thought came from and then communism and how did that evolve? And, you know, liberal democracy and then also right wing thought and like, you know, everybody's calling everybody fascist now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Is that what this is? Right. How did the Germans deal with it? You know, so all of those questions. And then, you know, kind of converging on in the last 80 years, like how is that, you know, either stabilized or not stabilized? And so I did that. But the other thing is I just started talking to a lot more people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And I just stopped assuming that because I read it in the New York Times that it was true. And, you know, and by the way, and then, of course, what unfolded in the years, you know, kind of sense was, you know, I followed the whole Russiagate thing like super closely. Like I read everything and I read all the reports. What did you think initially? Did you think it was true?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But the government, like the Biden White House was directly exerting censorship pressure on American companies to censor American citizens, which I think, by the way, is just flatly illegal. Like I think it's actually subject to criminal charges. Like I think there are people with criminal liability who are involved in this. So there was that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It's like this overwhelming consensus from the entire expert class that, of course, he's a Russian spy. I sat on stage. I went to Hillary's first post-election loss speech, which she gave at Stanford, the very first one. And I sat. We know the people organizing it. So we sat literally like 15 feet from Hillary in her first appearance. The whole thing is fraught with just like incredible tension.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And the Russiagate stuff is in full. Full-blown display, and I go there, and I'm like, all right, this is going to mean to me. And the audience is Stanford audience, and so it's all 100% Hillary Clinton supporters. And I'm sitting there, and I'm on my best behavior because I'm with my wife, and I have to not act out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And Hillary gets up there, and she says, Trump is only president today because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook. And made him the president. Right. And I'm sitting in the audience and I'm like on the Facebook board and I'm like, that's not like that's not true. I know for an absolute fact that that's not true. Right. And so that got me thinking. And then the Russiagate stuff unspooled.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And I was like, you know, the whole the steel dossier and like all this stuff comes out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So it's this whole thing with this. So remember this whole thing, Cambridge Analytica. And so it's this whole thing that there was this basically there was this data. There was this theory, which, by the way, is like completely it is like a completely fake thing like this didn't.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So there was this data set on user behavior that in theory there's an academic – there's a theory that you could sort of impute human behavior from this data set and then you could use it to predict what people would do and how they would react to different kinds of messages. And it was like this magical breakthrough in basically thought control.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then there was this company called Cambridge Analytica in the UK that figured out a way to do this. And then it was this new kind of literally mind control, by far the most powerful meme weapon of all time for getting people to vote the way that you want. And it was this data breach of Facebook.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The whole thing was weird because Facebook had been criticized for a decade leading up to 2016 that it kept all the data closed. Right. So the criticism was Facebook never lets any of the data. It doesn't share the data. Right. And the criticism for years was Facebook is the roach motel of data.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And the virtuous thing for it to do is to actually free the data and let everybody else have access to the data. And then in 2016, flipped 180 degrees. And it was Facebook is the most evil company of all time because it let Cambridge Analytica get access to this data. And then Russia ran basically a psychological operation on the American citizens. Why didn't Facebook push back? They did early on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
They do today in their way. But they're trying to run a business. They're trying to get to the next quarter. They're trying to keep the employee base and everybody copacetic. They're trying not to get just completely destroyed by the politicians. They're getting slammed every single day on every conceivable issue you can imagine. Right. It's actually a very interesting thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
There were also members of Congress doing the same thing, which is also illegal. And then there was a lot of funding of outside third party groups that were bringing a lot of pressure down on censorship. And just an example of that is there's a unit at Stanford right next door to us that was the internet censorship unit that was funded by the U.S.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
When you're in these companies, these big issues are big issues, but you're also literally trying to make the quarter. You're trying to ship your products. You're trying to close your sales. You're trying to keep your employees from quitting. You have responsibilities. You have practical concern responsibilities.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so sometimes these companies get kind of wedged because they can't do the things that they would do if they were just in damage control mode. And then maybe the message doesn't get out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Oh, it was the waiter. I mean, the waiter was the much bigger shift because it was listening to a person with their feet on the ground actually explaining the way the world worked. Whereas with Hillary, it was cope, right? It was delusion. It was amazing, by the way. She then spent the next hour and a half.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
When I'm in a place where I don't know if I'm going to control myself, I bring a little notepad along because I can work out my demons. Draw dicks. Exactly. So that I don't say anything. Like super bad. So I brought my little notepad along. My little Fisher space pen, right? And I pull it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And I started making a list of all of the people and organizations that she blamed for her defeat that were not named Hillary Clinton. And I got to 20. My favorite was Netflix, by the way. She blamed Netflix.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Well, this is particularly funny because the CEO of Netflix is a famous Democrat. He's a super Democrat. Ted. Well, not actually Ted, but also specifically Reed Hastings and his wife are very enthusiastic left-wingers. But I mean, it was just this litany of, you know, basically excuses and complaints, right? With no sense of like personal responsibility at all, you know, just like pure grievance.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so it was negative lesson of like, okay, like whatever that is, is not the path. Did she blame Comey? Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
She absolutely hated that guy. Yeah. No question. That was a wild one. A hundred percent. Yeah, exactly. And by the way, like that was super weird. Yeah. You know, I don't think she was completely wrong.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. Is a weird. It's crazy. It's a weird message.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Exactly. We know he's guilty, but we never convict him because the jury would say that he's a senile old man. Which is crazy because he's still running for president at the time. He's running for reelection. Well, then remember everybody at the time said, the media said that the prosecutor was lying, right? Because at that point- Of course, he's sharp as a tack. He's sharp as a tack.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
government and exerted tremendous pressure on the companies to censor. And it was very effective at doing so.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
yes and then meanwhile he had to go to Mar-a-Lago and kiss the ring yes exactly exactly exactly my favorite was the remember the about about earlier this year was the invention of the term cheap fake cheap fake cheap fake because everybody's worried about the AI deep fake which really didn't then there was really nothing nothing happened to that and so the cheap fake we learned is a video that just simply shows you something
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. It's claimed to be out of context, but it actually turns out that it's actually just telling you the truth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, exactly. Because the theory was it was going to be clips out of context.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It is very dark and grim. This whole thing is very bad. Stanford? Oh, yeah. Stanford, by the way, another unit like that at Harvard. A bunch of universities got pulled into this. A lot of NGOs and nonprofits got pulled into this. And so the Twitter file showed us kind of the basic roadmap.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the AI generator. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. So that's two companies. One of them, the voice is ours. And then that's another great company called HeyGen that did the visuals. But yeah, no, that's right. That's nuts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is part of the first internet election.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Probably the first internet election will be the one that has this kind of thing actually in it where people get tricked.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
One would think, exactly. That's the fear of the future, right? Yeah, yeah. And so I think that's going to be the kind of thing that's going to happen in terms of the dirty trick side. I think that will be a part of it, right? There's always some way to try to game these things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So I think we have a theory on how to fix this. And the theory basically is we're going to have to switch our sense of what's real from basically just trying to eyeball it and figure out whether it's real to only taking seriously the things that we know are real. And the way that we would know things are real is we'll have them registered on the blockchain.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so I think the way this is going to work in the future is every politician will have an account on a blockchain service, like a crypto service. And then every politician, whenever they say anything in public, whenever they're going to have people around them with cameras all the time,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Whenever they put out a statement, they're going to cryptographically sign it on the blockchain so that it can be validated that it is actually content from them. And then I think we're just going to have to reach an understanding that we're just going to have to write off everything else that we see. Wow. Which frankly is a good idea anyway because there just is a lot of noise in the environment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then there's this thing called the Weaponization Committee that Congressman Jordan is running that has also revealed a lot of this. But I would imagine the new Trump administration is going to come in and carve all that wide open. And I know that there are people being appointed to senior positions who are very –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Like, how would you... So the thing is, so that's already happening even pre-AI, right? And so I would say that's a pre-existing problem. And so we can't... And by the way, that's been happening for a long time. Newspapers have been scandal sheets forever. If you go back hundreds of years to the first newspapers, they were running all kinds of scrolls.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The first newspaper was a scandal sheet of the Vatican in the year 1500. It was all these terrible rumors about the Pope and the bishops and all these cardinals and all this stuff. That was the first newspaper? That was the very first newspaper was in the Vatican. And then All the American colonial newspapers were like that in the revolutionary era.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It was all crazy rumors and innuendo and people accusing each other. There was a famous election in 1800, which was Jefferson versus Adams, that we think of as these like super upstanding, you know, upright people. And they're just like smearing the ground. crap out of each other in their respective newspapers, right? Because they would actually own newspapers in those days. Oh, God.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Attack each other. The more things change. Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin, you know, printed newspapers before he became a, became, went to government and he created 15 different sock puppets. Wow. He created 15 different pseudonyms. He was a pseud, a non. And then he would basically have them argue with each other in his newspaper without telling people that it was all him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So he had all these different personalities. And so, like, we've been in a world of, like, information warfare for a very long time. We've been in a world of sensationalist, you know, nightly news. If it bleeds, it leads. sensationalist stuff for a long time. We've been in the world of propaganda for a long time. You're never gonna make that go away.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But isn't it funny that we don't think of the past like that? We think of them as being virtuous. We assume they had it all figured out. That very much is not true. There's all kinds of crazy, crazy banana stuff. My favorite is in the Vietnam War, it was the Gulf of Tonkin that sort of kicked off the sort of big escalation. We now know for a fact it didn't happen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The whole thing just didn't happen. And now there's this big debate about did they know it didn't happen or did they fake it? So there's always been stuff like that in history. So that we can't fix. And AI will be a new way to do that kind of thing. But what we can do is we can reorient people and say, okay, now you're going to have to take seriously. This stuff is real.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And if you want to actually know what's happening, this stuff is real and we can prove that it's real. And if it's not, it's entertainment and you can choose to believe it or not. But you should not rely on it. And look, it's not going to be perfect and it's going to take time. But there is a way to address this. Okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. I'm super optimistic. I'm incredibly optimistic. And I was optimistic already with flashes of pessimism, but I'm really optimistic, and especially now. So I think this is going to be – we have the real potential here for golden age. We really do. We really do. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The capabilities that we have and the people that we – I mean, look, in my day job, I meet these young – I meet these 22-year-olds every day that are just like the smartest people in the world, the smartest people I've ever met. I think they're getting better, by the way, as time passes. By the time they're 22, they just know a lot more. They have so much more access to information than we did.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. They're so much better trained and capable and ready to go and fired up. And they know each other. They're able to connect online and they're already in communities and they know how to help each other. And so, like, yeah, the productive and inventive and creative aspect, particularly of this country, is just like there's never been anything like it in the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And there was that moment where the world was going to head in two totally different directions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. Right. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. So one of the interesting things that's going to happen right now, you know, we talked a lot about Trump's victory and Republicans, but there's now a civil war that's kicked off inside the Democratic Party, which is very interesting. Really? Because they lost so badly. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So the fact that they lost the White House and they lost the popular vote and they lost the Congress and they lost the Senate and they lost the Supreme Court.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Like this time, it's undeniable that like the current path that they've been on is not working. Like it's your like being an exclusionary party and kicking people out for wrong thing. Like it's not they're not going to win elections.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That's right. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Starting with Bernie in 2016 and then continuing. So Donna Rice's book, she documented that. Right. And so like I would say the smart Democrats know that this is not – it's not a viable path. You can't have a political party that doesn't win. It doesn't make – it's not useful.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so there's a civil war that's underway inside that party that's kicking off right now. Where they're going to have to recalibrate, decide what they want their future to be. And it's going to be a big decision. And the same thing happened, by the way, when Reagan beat Carter really badly in 80 and then had a landslide in 84.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It then took Democrats 12 years, right, to get to Bill Clinton and actually win again. And so they have this cautionary tale of they went too far in the 60s and 70s and it took them 12 years to recover again. And so if you talk to the like really smart Democrats right now, they're like, look, this can't be 12 years. That's crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
We have to do this a lot faster, but we have to reorient and we have to get back to common sense. We have to get back to normal. We have to get back to sensible. We have to get back to moderate.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That's right. That's right. And Hillary and Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein and all these people wanted to build a wall. Dianne Feinstein, our senator in California at the time, very left wing. She was down on the border, like did photo ops in front of the wall that was being built, like trying to take credit for it. Crazy. Yeah, yeah. Like 18 years ago. Yeah. And so, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So another reason for optimism is I think that they're going to be able to pull their way back. Like I think they're going to be able – I think losing this bad is very motivating to be able to pull your way back and become more normal. And I think, again, that would be like – I mean how great would it be if you had two parties that actually had like sensible normal policies?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Now, by modern standards, of course, he was a fascist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. Yeah, because you needed to air out the idea to be able to show why it was wrong. Exactly, yeah. So look, it was not that long ago when you had Democrats that were very much in favor of many of these extremely sensible positions. Super recent. It was pretty recent. But again, I don't know if they're going to pull it off. They might go crazy or they might just go right off the cliff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It's certainly possible. But it is also possible that they'll drag it back and it might happen quite quickly. And I am hopeful and optimistic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So they have to, which is good for everyone, for everyone. So one of my theories is you can separate the concepts of the United States and America, and you can be very optimistic about America and have all kinds of issues with the United States but still be positive about America.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And the difference is the United States is the formal system of the government and the politics and all the stuff we get mad about, and America is the people. Right. Right. And so you can be, as I am, incredibly bullish about the people. And then it's just a question of whether the America part.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And it's just a question of whether you can get the United States part kind of lined up to at least not prevent good things from happening and ideally help good things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I mean, see, I think you got to start with the Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And Elon is programming it in the back room late at night in between playing Diablo. We certainly got a good position in the game.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. There's extensive government funding of politically oriented NGOs. Yeah. NGO is one of those great terms, like non-governmental organization. All right. Like what the hell is that? What is that? Tell me. I don't know. Well, it's sort of a charity. Sort of. Sort of. But most of the time, it's a political entity. It's an entity with a political agenda.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
How does he have the time to do that? Which means he could be the guy steering the simulation. Yeah. Yeah, so look, this goes back to what we were talking about before. It is time to carve this government back in size and scope. It's time to take the overall – you can talk about distribution of taxes, but it's time to take the overall tax load down. It's time to take the spending down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It's time to get the government out of the position of deciding who gets money. It's time to unleash economic growth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Correct. Yeah, 450 federal agencies and two new ones a year. And then my favorite twist is we have this thing called independent federal agencies. So for example, we have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which is sort of Elizabeth Warren's personal agency that she gets to control. And it's an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. Yeah. And we saw the most conspicuous display of physical bravery I've ever seen. Right. At that moment. Exactly. And it could have gone, you know, horrifically badly for the entire world after that. So that was timeline split number one. So that other timeline is out there somewhere.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And if you read the Constitution, there is no such thing as an independent agency. And yet, there it is. What does her agency do? Whatever she wants. What does it do, though? Basically, terrorize financial institutions, prevent new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks. Really? Oh, yeah. How so?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Just terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services. Can you give me an example? You know, debanking. This is where a lot of the debanking comes from is these agencies. So debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system. Like they did to Kanye. Exactly. Like they did to Kanye. My partner Ben's father has been debanked.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Really? We had an employee. For what? For having the wrong politics. For saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations. Okay, here's a great thing. Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms in the last 20 years, there's now a category called a politically exposed person. PEP. And if you are a PEP, you are required by financial regulators to kick them out of your bank.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That's fine. Because they're not politically exposed. So no one on the left gets debanked?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Oh, well, I mean, David Horowitz is a right-wing. He's pro-Trump. I mean, he's said all kinds of things. He's been very anti-Islamic terrorism. He's been very worried about immigration, all these things. And they debanked him for that? Yeah, they debanked him. So you get kicked out of your bank account. You get kicked out of the – you can't do credit card transactions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
By the way, you can't run – How is that legal? Well, exactly. Exactly. So this is the thing. And so and then you go to this thing of like, well, there's no this is where the government and the companies get intertwined. Back to your fascism point, which is there's no there's a constitutional amendment that says the government can't restrict your speech.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But there's no constitutional amendment that says the government can't debank you. Right. And so if they can't do the one thing, they do the other thing. And then they don't have to debank you. They just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it. And then the private company banks do it because they're expected to. But the government gets to say, we didn't do it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It was the private company that did it. And of course, J.P. Morgan can decide who they want to have as customers, of course, right? It's their private company. And so it's this sleight of hand that happens. So it's basically, it's a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran. Just kick you out of the financial system.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years. This has been happening to a lot of the fintech entrepreneurs, anybody trying to start any kind of new banking service. because they're trying to protect the big banks. And then this has been happening, by the way, also in legal fields of economic activity that they don't like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so a lot of this started about 15 years ago with this thing called Operation Truck Point, where they decided to, as marijuana started to become legal, as prostitution started to become legal, and then guns, which there's always a fight about. Under the Obama administration, they started to debank drugs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
legal marijuana businesses, escort businesses, and then gun shops, just like your gun manufacturers. And just like you're done, you're out of the banking system. And so if you're running a medical marijuana dispensary in 2012, like you, guess what? You're doing your business all in cash because you literally can't get a bank account. You can't get a visa terminal. You can't process transactions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But then it's funded by the government in a very large percentage of cases, including the NGOs and the censorship complex, like the government grants, National Science Foundation grants, like direct state department grants, direct money. And then, okay, now you've got an NGO funded by the government. Well, that's not an NGO. That's a geo. Right. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
You can't do payroll. You can't do direct deposit. You can't get insurance, right? Like none of that stuff is – you've been sanctioned, right? None of that stuff is available. And then this administration extended that concept to apply it to tech founders, crypto founders, and then just generally political opponents. Yeah. So that's been like super pernicious. I wasn't aware of that. Oh, 100%.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. It's like we just can't. We can't live in this world. We can't live in a world where somebody starts a company that's a completely legal thing and then they literally get sanctioned and embargoed by the United States government through a completely unaccountable – by the way, no due process. None of this is written down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
There's no rules. There's no court. There's no decision process. There's no appeal. Who do you appeal to, right? Like who do you go to to get your bank account back, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
You know, and then there's also the civil asset forfeiture side of it, which is right the other side. And that doesn't happen to us, but that happens to people in a lot of places now who get arrested and all of a sudden, you know, the state takes their money. Yes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. Or, you know, there'll be there been, you know, well-publicized examples of like, you know, there was like, you know, there'll be some investigation into like, you know, safe deposit boxes. And the next thing you know, the feds have seized all the contents of the state deposit. Right. Safe deposit boxes and that stuff never gets returned.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so it's this – and this is when Trump says the deep state. Like the way we would describe it is it's administrative power. It's political power being administered not through legislation, right? So there's no defined law that covers this. It's not through regulation, right? There's nothing you can – you can't go sue a regulator to fix this. It's not through any kind of court judgment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It's just raw power. It's just raw administrative power. It's the government or politicians just deciding that things are going to be a certain way and then they just apply pressure until they get it. So what happens to those 30 tech people that you know? To go into a different field, like try to do something different and try to get, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, complete upending of your life and try to change your life. Try to get out of the, try to get away from the eye of Sauron. Try to get out of whatever zone got you into this and keep applying for new bank accounts at different banks and hope that at some point a bank will say, you know, okay, you know, it's okay. We've checked and it's now all right. Whoa.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I mean. You go to cash. You can't have a. Yeah. So where do you put it? Under your mattress.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then you've got a conspiracy, like with censorship, then you have a conspiracy because you've got government officials using government money to fund what look like private organizations that aren't. And then what happens is the government outsources to these NGOs the things that it's not legally allowed to do. Like what? Like censorship. Oh, okay. Like violation of First Amendment rights.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Diamonds, art, you know, do you, I don't know, go overseas somewhere? Holy shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just like, it just happens. And again, it's really, really important. There's no fingerprints. Like there's no... Right. There's no person who – There's no stick above the strings. Yeah, exactly. Right. It just happened.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And we can trace it back because we understand exactly – we know the politicians involved and we know how the agencies work and we know how the pressure is applied and we know that the banks get phone calls and so forth. And so we can loosely – like we understand the flow of power as it happens.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But when you're on the receiving end of this, your specific instance of it, like you can't trace it back and there's nothing you can do about it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Well, all the crypto startups in the last basically four years. So remember the crypto thing got like really – everybody got excited and like NFTs and like all that stuff and then it just like stopped. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And the reason it stopped is because basically every crypto founder, every crypto startup, they either got debanked personally and forced out of the industry or their company got debanked and so it couldn't keep operating or they got prosecuted, charged, or they got threatened with being charged. This is a fun little twist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So the SEC sort of has been trying to kill the crypto industry under Biden. And this has been a big issue for us because we're the biggest crypto startup investor. The SEC, they can investigate you, they can subpoena you, they can prosecute you, they can do all these things. But they don't have to do any of those things to really damage you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
All they have to do is they issue what's called a Wells Notice. And the Wells Notice is a notification that you may be charged at some point in the future. Yeah. You're like on notice that you might be doing something wrong and they might be coming after you at some point in the future. Oh, my God. Terrifying. That's the eye. The eye of Sauron is on you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Now trying to be a company with a Wells notice doing business with anybody else. Oh, my God. Right. Try to work with a big company. Try to get access to a bank. Try to do anything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Well, then the SEC under Biden became a direct application of – exactly. So DEI. They did a lot with that, and then all the ESG stuff. And ESG is a very malleable concept, and they piled all kinds of new requirements into that. So through this process, the SEC could basically just simply dictate what companies do with no accountability at all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
There are hearings where they get yelled at, but nothing changed. Nothing ever happened in a hearing that ever changed anything. It was just the raw application of power.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Like I said, we had an employee who got debanked because he had crypto in his job title. He was doing crypto policy for us and his bank booted him because he – That's it? Because they did a screen across – it's what they told us is they did a screen across their customer base. Just anyone with crypto. Because anybody with crypto became a politically exposed person.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Because crypto was politically controversial, right? That's so crazy. You hear this sometimes. There's these terms, compliance, reputation management, tone at the top. They have these lovely sounding terms that make it sound like everybody's going to be an upstanding citizen. But what they're all code for is destroy the enemy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Like bring the hammer of God and the bank and the government or whoever or the social media. Bring it down and just like crush the individual.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
With no due process. And look, there's an argument in the long run that this is all unconstitutional because the Constitution gives us all the right to due process and this is government pressure. Right. So like there's probably a Supreme Court case in five years that's going to find retroactively that this was all illegal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. So what they always say is the First Amendment only applies to the government. The First Amendment says the government cannot censor American citizens. And so what they do is if you want to censor American citizens, you're in the government. If you're smart, you don't do that. What you do is you fund an outside organization and then you have them do it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But in the moment when you're the guy who's been debanked, I mean, number one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
When you barely built yourself back up? Yeah. And I think this is an important context where when Elon and Vivek talk about reducing regulation, there's two ways of thinking about reducing regulation. It's like, oh my God, the water and the air are going to get dirty and the food's going to get poisoned. Right. Some of those regulations I think are very important.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But the other way to think about it is examples like this, which is just raw government power being applied to ordinary people who are just trying to live their lives or just trying to do something legitimate and they're just on the wrong side of something that the people in power have decided.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Like crypto or having the wrong political points of view. Well, the trucker, you know, the other great example is the trucker strike up in Canada was an even more direct version of this because here you had truckers physically showing up. And it was something like step one was they take away your driver's license, which, by the way, right, is just somebody pressing a button on the keyboard.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
No more driver's license. Step two is they take away your insurance. And step three is they take away your kids. Right. And so like that was their version of this and that was a very specific – Take away your kids.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That was the threat at the end to the truckers and the Canada trucker strike because the trucker strike in Canada was going to jam up these cities because it was – the farmers were – the truckers were very serious. They wanted to – they were doing a nonviolent protest but they wanted to stall the cities to be able to exert political pressure back on the government. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And the government was like, we'll tolerate it for a little while. Then we'll take your trucker license. Then we'll take your insurance. Then we'll take your kids. How did they say they would take their kids? Because it's administrative power.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The theory would be you can't let – these aren't good parents if they're sitting in a truck in the middle of Calgary preventing goods and services from reaching people, putting people's lives at risk. Wow. You know, child seizure. Now, I don't know if they actually seized any kids, but it's just an example of there is an agency in the Canadian government, just like in the U.S.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
government, that if they want to, they can take your kids.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. Exactly. And I think the right way to think about this is when we think about totalitarianism, we think about literally World War II. We think about Nazis in jackboots with tanks and guns and beating people up and killing people. That's our mental – you might call it that hard totalitarianism. That's very clearly violent totalitarianism.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But there's this other version you might call soft totalitarianism, which is just rules and power exercised arbitrarily that just simply suppresses everything. And this is speech control and debanking and all these other things that we've been talking about. And that is, you know, the good news is they're not coming up and like beating you up in the middle of the night.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The bad news is like you are under their complete control and they can do whatever they want to you that doesn't involve physical violence, which basically includes the entire aspect of every aspect of how you actually conduct your life and support your family and get an income and everything else. And most people aren't even aware of it. Yeah, that's right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then, you know, look, these are individual one-off things. Most people don't have a voice. It's very hard to organize around these. And then, by the way, if there's an organization that organizes to try to get these stories out, it then itself can get suppressed and debunked. Well, it happened during the COVID lockdowns, right? So the lockdown protests all got suppressed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So the lockdown went from two weeks to crush the curve to two months to two years, which is like, okay, what the hell? And then there were these protests that were forming up, nonviolent protests that were forming up to protest lockdowns. And you could argue the issue different ways, but people have a legitimate right to protest for that just like they do for anything else.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And if you want to solve a murder, it's not enough to find out who the hitman was. You have to find out who paid the hitman, right? Right. Of course. You want to work your way up the chain. And so a lot of this traces into the White House. The best defense the companies have is that a lot of this happened under coercion, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And the next thing you know is all the lockdown protests all got censored, just like, boop, gone. And so at that point, the normal process of being able to try to get redress from your government to force your rights to literally, for example, see your family all of a sudden, you can't even organize a protest.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. That was explicitly his strategy. That was Sam's. Yeah. Sam's approach is just pay everybody. So Sam's approach was just, I have $8 billion of customer funds that I can use for whatever I want, which was the crime. And then a big part of what he used, some of it he used to hang out with celebrities and get Tom and Giselle to endorse FTX and the Larry David commercial and all this stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But a lot of that money, something like $150 million of that money went to basically just pay politicians. Right. And a lot of that money was paid to politicians with no compliance at all with all the campaign finance regulations that the rest of us all have to comply with. And so the money was just shotgun out the door. How come they don't have to comply? Well, it was illegal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I mean it was illegal because he was breaking the law. I mean it was – to be clear, he was illegal. Now, a very funny thing happened, which is when he was indicted by the US government, they didn't – they ended up not charging him on campaign finance fraud. Because they'd have to give all the money back? Well, so there's two theories on it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The thing that they said was their extradition agreement with Bermuda, Bermuda threatened to not extradite him if they charged him on that charge, which is like super weird because you're the United – Number two, did he really want to stay in a prison in Bermuda? Right. And so that was all weird. And then look, there's no evidence for this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But the other theory is, yeah, whoever are the powers that be that decide these things in D.C. decided to not open it. It's like the Epstein client list. Like there are certain boxes that are better not to open. Well, the campaign finance thing, wouldn't they have to pay it back? So then there's this like panic. The minute one of these scandals breaks like that, there's this panic rush.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Because when the government puts pressure on you, like it might be a phone call. It might be a letter. It might be the threat of an investigation. It might be a subpoena. It could take many forms. But when the government does that, it carries – that's a very powerful message. It's like a message from a mob boss, right? Right. Don't you want to do me a favor? It's like, yes, Mr. Gambino, I do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And all of a sudden, politicians discover philanthropic causes they can donate the money to. Right. And then, yeah, in the fullness of time, the trustees might come claw the money back. So, yeah, it'll play out however it does. But it is interesting. It is a great example of it was the shotgunning of money into the system under like basically just like nakedly breaking the law.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then now look, he's in prison. The other argument is he's in prison. He's in prison already. Like whatever. It just would have been, you know, another sentence. But like he did break the law and he was not actually charged on that. And that prosecution has not happened and probably sitting here today never will.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Did he know it was illegal? He is in prison. I think it's really hard to get inside that guy's head. I don't know that I can represent his mental state. He'd be a fascinating podcast guest if he was out. He flopped very hard at trial. So he had an explanation, but the jury didn't buy it. What was his explanation?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That it was all the money was all being invested and he was going to give it all back and it was all this and all these complicated theories around all this effective altruism and this and that and the other thing. And the prosecution was just like it was the customer's money. It wasn't your money. Right. Clearly. Yeah. And so I don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And they were taking – there was some anti-Parkinson's drug they were taking that has a side effect of reducing your risk calibration. Oh, dopamine agonists. Yeah, one of those. Yeah, like Reequip. Yeah, something like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I like my corner store. I'd like it to not catch on fire tonight. And so there's this overwhelming hammer blow of pressure that comes in. And by the way, even when the government doesn't talk to you directly, if they're funding the organization that is talking to you, then it's very clear what's happening. And so you come under incredible pressure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. You know, he had an on-staff psychiatrist who was prescribing all this stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Are you following the theories that are now emerging around Ozempic and psychological changes that Ozempic causes?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And there's a theory that this is very positive. Let's say this is true, which is what they think right now. We'll see. But that's what they think. So the theory that it's positive is the theory that, you know, if we were all more responsible in our lives, we'd all be more successful and society would go better.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Counterargument would be like responsible is only part of living and it's only part of what makes a society work. And we also need risk taking and we need creativity and we need impulsiveness. Yes. Yes. Right. And we need variety. Yes. And maybe we're all going to get into a channel. Right. Right. And maybe we're not going to like where that where that that just by itself ends up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so the whole kind of chain, this whole chain of governments, activists, universities and companies was corrupted. And then on top of that, people in the companies in a lot of cases made a lot of decisions that I think they're probably increasingly starting to regret.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And it's been very helpful. They're increasingly starting to prescribe it to alcoholics, and apparently it's working quite well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That's right. And by the way, there's a ton of R&D going into these drugs right now. So there's going to be many more versions of these things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So the other thing I'd say, so I've been down in Florida the last couple of weeks working on some of the stuff happening down there. And one of the things I learned is that the RFK, the RFK is really in charge of health for the country from here, you know, for like he's really in charge, you know, working with the president.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And he, you know, for all the controversy around some of his positions, like he's, you know, this whole like he's very serious about this. And a lot of people, including a lot of the most qualified people I know in the field are like, yes, it is long overdue that we look at the food system.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And we look at all these, just whatever, to your point, the horrible track that we've been on for 40 years, which is just a complete catastrophe. And I think it's a, there's this concept in psychology called common knowledge, which is, it's like, it's something that everybody knows, but yet nobody states out loud. And so it like, it's like known, but then all of a sudden there's a tipping point.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And all of a sudden it's not only known, but it's like obvious. All of a sudden everybody agrees on it. Yes. And this feels like one of those moments where it's like nutrition, behavioral, you know, exercise, like the path that people are on to become obese. Like, no. So this actually needs to be addressed. This is actually a profound issue. And we're on the road to hell. And it has to get fixed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And maybe it gets fixed chemically. And maybe it gets fixed behaviorally or other things. Maybe the culture has to change. But it has to get fixed. And I've been very encouraged that I think this is now going to be a very big focus here. And not just by the government, but I think also in the culture.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So one of my theories on this is that part of this is what happened is something very specific happened during COVID, which is the public health people by and large looked very unhealthy. Yes. They didn't look good. Right. And so you've got these people standing up there telling everybody how they've got to do all the lockdowns and the masks and all that stuff. Yeah, Bill Gates should get jacked.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That would be very helpful. He's got a lot of money. It would be extremely helpful. Get a trainer. When he writes the book and goes on the press tour to talk about public health. Stop eating fake meat. Get a trainer. That would be great. By the way, it would be great for him and his family and society. It would be very reassuring. Bill Gates had a six-pack. I'd listen to him more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So I think in some cases, it's just pay to play, right? So for example, we know that Kamala's campaign paid certain on-air personalities, you know, and then there were, you know, which, to your point, people were very supportive of Kamala, who then gave her, you know, interviews that went really well. And so I think in some cases, you just have straight pay to play.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That's right. You have to go back to like literally his uncle. JFK had a program like this in like 1962. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
A little bit. Although that was like vegetarian, you know, getting into like vegetarian school. Oh, was she saying vegetarianism? I don't know if she was vegetarian, but like, well, Eric Adams, you know, the mayor of New York, he's been trying to push vegetarian school lunches. It's like, no. That's not right. No, that's not right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, I think we need audio recordings of the screams. Yeah. When you mow the lawn, it's just like Armageddon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So back to the doge for a moment. So one of the reasons why everybody became unhealthy is because the government directly put itself into the food system and specifically high fructose corn syrup. Right. High fructose corn syrup was an artifact of government agriculture subsidies. Right. Right. Which was good during World War II because we needed food. At one time. Yeah. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But like by the 1970s, we were massively overproducing. Specifically, we were massively overproducing corn. And the corn lobby, the sort of agriculture lobby became very powerful. And we have this government agency. One of the 450 government agencies is the USDA. And the USDA has a dual mandate. It's to promote U.S. agriculture, specifically things like corn.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And it's also to advise us on what we should eat. And they also do the food pyramid. And that's why the food pyramid is upside down, right, for all those decades where we're supposed to eat carbs and not protein and fat. It was because literally that's the agency that's responsible for promoting agriculture.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then that agency, it's inserted itself through laws, regulations, and this kind of administrative pressure. And basically he said, thou shalt use high fructose corn syrup because it is a byproduct of corn. As opposed to sugar.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And as we now know, that was an absolutely poisonous decision. Like that was like literal poison. Absolutely a ruinous decision. Just an absolutely terrible idea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That's just how that system works. It's just expected. And then I think you have other organizations like these NGOs and other activist groups where they're actually – they actually do field activities, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, 100%. But this would not have happened had the government not made it happen. And so it traces directly back to a government decision to do that. Now, of course, they didn't understand the consequences, but that's kind of the point, which is they interfered without understanding the consequences. And so that's the kind of thing where you look at it and you're just like, all right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then you're 40 years later and you're still doing it. And then at some point, you know what the consequences are. And then at some point, there's a question of whether they're being covered up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. And it's just like, OK, at some point this has to stop.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And literally they just need to stop. Like they just need to stop subsidizing core and they need to stop forcing the food companies to do this. They just need to stop. And so this goes back to like the regulatory reform thing, which is like there's just like tremendous amount of this that may have been good intention at one point.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But sitting here today, we're living with these horrible downstream consequences. And unless somebody steps in with a hammer, none of this is going to happen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so there's – maybe there's a get out the vote component or there's social media influence downstream component or some other kind of field activity that's happening in support of the election.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Well, and then you get into these other more delicate questions, but it's like, okay, food assistance programs for low-income people and low-income children. It's like, okay, should they be – do we want little kids who have no control over this to end up on the receiving end of this food production pipeline paid for with government money and being 300 pounds by the time they're 18?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Cheaper than other foods because they're subsidized. Right. Because they're subsidized. And you have this very perverse outcome where you have these government officials who have been standing up there for 40 years saying, we're protecting you, we're protecting you, and what's been happening is they've been poisoning us. Yeah. And so stuff like it just needs to stop.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And that's where you need something like the Doge. And somebody like President Trump.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, I think there's three things you can do, two of which involve direct action, and then the third is maybe even the most important. So one is you can just stop doing things that are harmful. You can stop doing things. The government can stop subsidizing bad things. That's an example. Let me give you an example. It's a parallel thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
If you want to clean up the universities, you need to stop feeding them student loans. So the government should stop paying for things that are clearly harmful. So that's one. And then two is, look, there may be a role for additional protections or prohibitions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so, for example, maybe you let people freely buy all the Oreos they want, but maybe you can't get them with food assistance programs so that kids who have no control over it are not being poisoned. And so, you know, you maybe do that. But but I always think that the third thing is culture, culture.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Like there's always a temptation with these discussions because the government's so powerful to talk about what the government does or doesn't do. And I think so much of this has to do with the culture. It's actually upstream or downstream from politics, which is like like what is the cultural tone of the country? Right. What's the value system? What are the role models? Right. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. Right? Have you... They've mixed it up because there's... Like Oprah said, Oprah says her production company was paid to put on the production, but she was not paid for the interview. Yeah, whatever. But it was, you know, whatever, $2 million. $2.5 million.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
What are people being inspired to do? Also, what form of shaming is in effect? What are we not going to tolerate? Take the perverse fat studies. Are we going to glorify obesity, right? Right. No.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And that's not necessarily a legal judgment or a court case, but it's a cultural statement. And it's not that the government should control the culture, but our leaders certainly play a big role in that. Yeah. And so both in and outside of government. So for our leaders to step up at a moment like this and basically say, no, this is not the kind of culture we're going to have.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It's not the kind of society we're going to have. It's not what kids should be looking up to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Maybe you should shame parents if their kids are fat.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
A hundred percent. And yes. But again, it's also cultural, which is like, okay, is the media thing, like, is the media educating people on this? And if the mainstream media is not doing it right, should there be new media sources that are? And then therefore, which sources in the media get respect?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That's the bad place. Yeah. And then timeline split again on election day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so we have this giant collective culture question that we all get to ask and answer, and particularly those of us in a position to be able to send messages that a lot of people hear.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He's a secretary of HHS. He has a very broad ability to look at this holistically inside the government.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So there's the work that the cabinet secretary is like he will be doing formally. And then there's the work that the Doge and the president will be doing kind of in parallel with that. And there will be some convergence between those. And we'll see. There's a potential here for quite dramatic action. On a lot of these fronts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So there was another key timeline split that happened in Silicon Valley about two years ago. Actually, two and a half years ago when Elon, actually right before he took over Twitter, where he got in an email fight with the CEO of Twitter at the time. Actually, a guy who's a friend of mine who's a really good guy. But literally, this guy had just been promoted from engineering to run the company.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then like a month later, he ends up trying to deal with the Elon situation. So kind of got a little bit sandbagged on it. But yes. Yes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Exactly. So there was this moment in the Twitter takeover where Elon sends his email and the line is, what did you get done this week? Whoa. What did you get done this week? And in the context of Silicon Valley companies, that was a provocative statement because a lot of Silicon Valley companies take months or years to do anything. But imagine that statement being applied to the government.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. Like the level of like accelerated like, OK, what are the problems? How are we going to fix them? And what have you gotten done this week?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yes, exactly. So, yes, what have you done this week? And, by the way, when Elon runs this, it's actually interesting. A guy just tweeted or posted or Z-ed what it's like to work for Elon at his AI company, XAI. And he said Elon came in last week and he said Elon spent 18 hours at the office in five-minute chunks.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And each person had a five-minute speaking slot to explain to Elon what they were doing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And he did that for, you know, five times, whatever, right? 18 hours. Jesus Christ. And so think about what that meant. Every employee had an opportunity to tell the big boss what they were working on. Every employee had an opportunity to be recognized for their effort.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Every employee had an opportunity to get live feedback from the big boss who had a comprehensive overview of everything as to what they should be doing. Whoa. And there's no place to hide. Right. Think of how different it is for a company to be run that way. Right. Again, the Valley companies generally are quite well run by sort of business standards.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And even that, like that's a level of intensity that most Valley companies aren't even close to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
To government. And again, this is the kind of thing. There's no law that there's no reason it can't be done. There's no law that prevents that. There's nothing in the Constitution that says you can't do that. It's a choice. How the government is run is a choice on the part of the executive branch of the president for how it's going to get run.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And there's no reason why the government can't literally be run this way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
which they really shouldn't be doing, which is a weird thing to have wedged themselves into. My hope is they'll figure out how weird this is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I think the left thinks they control the government. Like I think 50 years ago they would have been on the other side of this issue. Like Noam Chomsky 50 years ago would have been on the other side of this. He would have viewed government power as an extension of like the state and big business intertwined.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And you have these just term manufacturing of consent where it's like government and business are conspiring against you. Yeah. So he would have been on the other side of this. But I think today's leftists think they control the government, which in many ways they do. Well, so Washington, D.C. voted 94 percent for Kamala, 6 percent for Trump. Whoa. Right. And so, OK, so two data points.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That is data point number one. Data point number two, four of the 10 wealthiest counties in the country are suburbs of Washington, D.C.,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Lobbyists. Lobbyists. They're called beltway bandits. That's a crazy job. Is the actual term. And these aren't people working for the government. These are people making money from the government. These are people sponging off the government. Like, yeah, to the extent the Democrats have wedged themselves into a position where they're defending this, they really shouldn't.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
They should really rethink this. They should figure out how to get back to the correct mentality on this that they used to have.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. And then you can see the fact that it's deliberately obfuscated, of course, is a clue.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
You know, most federal workers never came back to work. Really? Yeah, they work from home. Most? Most, yeah. Like what percentage? Very large percentage. Something like half just literally just never came back. Whoa. And they still, by the way, still draw a paycheck. They're still on their jobs, but literally they're not in the office.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Or in some cases, they have an agreement where there's one agency, I won't name, but there's one agency where there's, okay, here's another great thing. There are agencies of the federal government whose workforces have full civil service protections and unionized. They're entirely paid for by the taxpayer, but they both have civil service protections, which, by the way, are totally made up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
There's no concept in the Constitution of civil service protections. It's just a totally made-up thing. And they're unionized. And there's a particular agency that I know of where the union negotiated the return of the office from COVID, and the agreement was you have to be in the office one day a month. Whoa. Whoa.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And actually the pattern now is what they do is the employees come in on the last day of the month and the first day of the following month. So they only have to be there for two days. For two months. Out of 60 days. That's crazy. As a consequence, many of them have actually left the area, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Because they get their government paycheck, which is calibrated for living there, and then they go live someplace nice. You know, someplace nice, but, you know, they go live in the Ozarks or something where the cost of living is cheaper and they have a bigger house. And, you know, in theory they're working from home, but, like, you know. Like, is it actually happening?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And this is, again, this is the Doge. This is one of the things that the Doge, they've already announced. The thing they've said is you can work from home, just not for the federal government. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so when people are talking about, like, is the Doge going to be able to do anything? Like, it's just, okay, there's 50% of the federal workforce. Right. And as a taxpayer, how do you feel about that? And to your point on paying taxes, like if those people are in the office and they're dynamos of activity and they're making the country better, fair enough. Of course.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Now, it turns out there are ways to figure this out. For example, for many jobs where you have to log in to be able to get access to email, often you have VPNs to get into the corporate network. You can actually audit and you can see who's been working. Do you know about mouse wigglers?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, physical mouse wigglers. And so it's a physical device that holds your mouse and then intermittently wiggles it. And a friend of mine who runs a big tech company, he just had like a nagging feeling in the back of his head that maybe all of his remote workers weren't pulling their weight. And so-
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
He actually wrote himself in a week on an algorithm to inspect all the mouse movements of all employees for a week. And then he bought all 50 mouse wigglers from China that you can buy. And he fingerprinted them all. And he found that he had a whole bunch of employees who were using mouse wigglers. Wow. And so how many federal employees are using mouse wigglers?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Just a pattern of movement of the mouse? That's it? Well, the mouse wiggler is moving in a way that you can fingerprint.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Oh, so it's very common. So in corporate environments, it's very common that your company-issued computer has some kind of software on it that lets the company control the software and gives the company some level of visibility to what you're doing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Really? Yeah. I think if you just published all these numbers, these celebrities would all get so mad at each other. Oh, sure they are. Then you would learn everything. Eminem got short. He got short. Lizzo's furious right now, right? Yeah. Lizzo's probably listening to this right now being like, what?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And that doesn't mean they're literally washing you, but it means that they have the ability to kind of reach in and be able to see how much is the computer on is the most moving. And so that's actually a reasonably common thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Well, the answer is they can do something productive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And then, by the way, there's multiple positive knock-on effects. If you can cut government spending, there's multiple knock-on effects. So one is if you cut the spending, you can cut the taxes, and the private economy then just simply has more money because it hasn't been taken. And so if there's less public spend, there will be more private spend. Right. Because the money reallocates.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so there might be just as much demand in the economy. It's just coming from people choosing to buy things instead of the government forcing it. So that's number one. Number two, you can bring down government debt, which means you can bring down government interest. And the government today, the federal government today pays more in interest than we pay for the Department of Defense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right, but how much of that is salary? No, no, that's just interest on the debt. Right. That's just interest on the old debt. Okay. We pay like $1.2 billion a year right now, I think is the latest number, which is just interest on debt. It's not paying for any good or service. It's just interest on debt. But again— What percentage of that is the—what? Of the GDP?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Well, so the total government spending is on the order of $7 trillion. Okay. Interest payments are like $1.2 trillion, something like that. $1.2 trillion a year. I think that's the current number. DOD is $800 billion a year. So $1.2 trillion. Just off the top. Yeah, just off the top. And again, nobody's benefiting from that. It's just interest payments. That's bananas.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And total GDP is like, I don't know, it's $20, $30, $40 trillion. It's much larger than that. But still. It's enough. This is a lot of money. And the total accumulated debt is $35 trillion. The total accumulated debt is $35 trillion, and it adds another trillion of accumulated debt every 100 days. Yes. Oh, my God. It hurts my head. There's a congressman, actually, Thomas Massey.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So he's the one guy in Washington who talks about this, and he's one of the only libertarians, and he's an MIT engineer, and he actually designed himself a pocket computer. lapel pin calculator of the government debt. And he wears it every day in Washington, D.C. So he walks around with this scroll? He walks with a little scrolling LED display on his lapel. And it literally counts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It counts the debt. And it's accurate. It's pulling data from the U.S. Treasury. And it's actually an accurate count. And so it's like $34 trillion, $35 trillion, $36 trillion. Here's the kicker. At the current pace, at the compounding, the debt will cross $100 trillion in the foreseeable future.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So he's already working on the redesign because he needs a bigger device with a bigger screen to be able to display the bigger number. How much anxiety do you get standing around him looking at that thing? That's his goal, right? Because otherwise, the status quo in Washington is just let this happen. Right. And so anyway, so another way you benefit is reduction of interest.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then another way you benefit is reduction of interest rates. If you bring down the amount of debt in the economy, you bring down interest rates. And then everybody else who buys things, when you go to buy for a house, your mortgage is cheaper. Right. So anybody who ever borrows money in the real economy then therefore is better off. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, it's good for anybody who ever gets car loan, home loan, small business loan. You want to bring down interest rates.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So just observationally, almost all the rich people in our society were for Kamala. Really? Yeah. The Democratic Party – so Democrat, Republican, it's what they call – it's a political scientist called top plus bottom versus middle is the configuration. So the Democratic Party is the top and the bottom versus the middle.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So the top is what you might call the sort of upper middle class coastal elites. So it's everybody who went to the fancy schools. It's everybody with the fancy jobs. It's for sure me. I guess you're grandfathered in. But it's like high net worth, high income people with primarily knowledge working jobs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Professor, reporter, programmer, database expert, author, lawyer, accountant, banker, all the sort of quote elite jobs. And all the elite degrees, by the way, who all went to the top schools and got the elite degrees. So that's the top. And then the bottom is what you call the clientele underclass, right? And it's what they call the rainbow coalition, right? So it's the minority groups, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so it's the assembly of, you know, low-income African-Americans, low-income Latinos, you know, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Recent immigrants. Recent immigrants and so forth, right? And so that's the democratic coalition that they explicitly program against. And then Republicans in our era, Republicans are in the – it's the middle class, lower middle class.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
You know, it's all the people who don't have the fancy degrees and that are doing all the actual work that's basically making the country run. Right. So it's everybody from the small business owner, the restaurateur, you know, the truck drivers, truck drivers, farmers, you know, all the way, you know, garbage men and janitor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It's like everybody who goes to work nine to five has a job, probably probably either small business or a physical job. You know, it's sort of, say, labor, like real labor, like actual labor, calluses on the hands, right, kinds of stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So kind of the so-called real economy, which is why, right, the Republicans are concentrated in the center and the south, because that's where all those things are. And then Democrats are concentrated in New York and California and on the coast, which is where all the symbolic, you know, creative intellectual jobs are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so the weird thing that's happened is liberalism, progressivism started speaking for the working man, right? Like 100 years ago, it spoke for the working man. And now what's happened is there's been a complete reorientation where the working man has separated out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then you saw that in this most recent election where the unions, the union leadership still for the most part endorsed Kamala, but the rank and file voted majority for Trump in a lot of cases. And the data point that I remember is the Teamsters voted 70% for Trump.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It's amazing to be in charge and control society and decide how everything works and decide who's good and who's bad. And like you're elite. You get to be the elite. You get to make the elite decisions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
You have to – You got to do this. And you feel good about yourself because you feel like what you're doing is on behalf of your – you feel like what you're doing is on behalf of your clientele in your class.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And it's why the – if you read the New York Times, it's just – it's either – New York Times only has two articles anymore. It's either how evil are Republicans or how innocent and helpless are poor or grave minorities or identity groups. Right. And so oppositional force. And then but we're the party of good with a capital G because we're taking care of all these poor, marginalized people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So it's a very compelling. You feel great about yourself. Right. It's just absolutely amazing. And then, by the way, it just so happens that the economy is wired up in a way where you're getting paid a ton of money.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. Great. And then you're completely isolated away from the lived experience of just normal people, which is the state that I've found myself in. Where it would never even occur to you to talk to a garbage man or to a somebody, you know running a restaurant or whatever because but it's just like You're not affected by the rising crime rates, but you live in a safe neighborhood, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And you've got a you know, you're against the wall on the border, but you got a wall around your house, right? Right and so you just you're in this bubble and then you only ever talk to people who agree with you, right? And then the media is constantly reinforcing it And then you get ostracized if you disagree. And that's the wedge. That's the wedge. And it worked.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Like, look, for a long time, for 40, 50, 60 years, it worked as a way to gain and hold political power. It's just gotten wedged in kind of this corner where it can no longer win. And so, therefore, it has to get reexamined. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Well, so from 2017 to 2020, I was just like trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And then COVID hit. And then I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on with COVID. And, you know, our business, you know, went crazy. Our business caved in and had all kinds of crazy, horrible things happening.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And we have all these companies, we have hundreds of companies who are responsible for our startups. And so we're working with them to try to keep them afloat and get the money and everything. But really it was, I mean, really the big thing was the Biden administration just like flat out tried to kill us. Like they just came like straight at us and they came straight at our founders.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so, and they tried to kill crypto and they were on their way to trying to kill AI. I mean, they were horrible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Because they want control. I mean, they want control. They want to control in the same way they control.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
They want to control. They want to put it in a headlock. They don't necessarily want to stop it, but they want to make sure that they control it in the same way that they controlled social media. in the same way that they control the press. How are they trying to do that? Think about it as the same dynamics that caused censorship to happen on social media were also going to happen in AI.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
There's a couple of steps to it. One is you just want a small number of companies that do AI because you want to be able to put them in a headlock and control them. You basically want to bless a small set of large companies with a cartel
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
and set up a regulatory structure where those companies are intertwined with the government, and then you want to prevent startups from being able to enter that cartel. How would they do that? That's a threat to the control. It's a concept called regulatory capture. This has happened many times for hundreds of years. This is a very well-established thing in economics and politics.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Well, you know, and then there's, of course, there's the even stinkier version, arguably, which is all the social media influencer campaigns now. There's, you know, a tremendous amount of payola.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Suppose you're a big bank. Suppose you're Jamie Dimon and you run JPMorgan Chase. What's the biggest possible threat of what you could possibly face? It's that there's some disruptive change that comes along that upends your entire business. Your Kodak. You're Kodak. You're making a ton of money on analog film and the digital cameras come along and you get destroyed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
In your obituary, it's like you're the idiot. Blockbuster video. Blockbuster video. That's the cautionary tale. Those are the ghost stories that those guys tell around the campfire at night. They're just absolutely terrifying. And business schools teach you that's the one thing you do not want to do. And so there's two ways to try to deal with that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
One is you could try to invent the future before it happens to you. But that's hard because you're running a big company and these startups are out there doing all these crazy things. And can you really do that? And it's hard and frisky and dangerous.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The other thing you can do is you can go to the government and you can basically say, okay, we would like to propose basically a trade, which is we would like the government to put up a wall of regulation. We would like the government to put in place rules that are potentially thousands of pages long. And in fact, the more the better.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
We want a very, very, very high bar for regulation for what's required to be in this business because I'm a big company. I can afford 10,000 lawyers and compliance people. I voluntarily put myself under basically the government thumb.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But in return, the government has erected this wall of regulation such that the next startup comes along and just – the next company comes along and just literally can't function. By the way, this is literally what happened in banking. So pre-2008, pre the financial crisis, there were many different banks in the country, big, medium, small, and lots of new bank startups every year.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
People would just start banks, entrepreneurial banks of many different kinds. After the financial crisis, we had this problem called the too big to fail banks, right? The banks were too big. And so there was this legislation called Dodd-Frank, which was regulatory reform for banking, which was going to fix the too big to fail banking problem. They implemented that in 2011.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I call that the Big Bank Protection Act of 2011. It was marketed as it was going to solve the problem of the too-big-to-fail banks. What it actually did was it made them much larger. So those banks are – those too-big-to-fail banks, the same ones we bailed out, are now much larger than they were before. The banking industry has concentrated into those banks.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
All the midsize banks are being shaken out. And, you know, periodically they'll go under. Like the bank in Silicon Valley is called Silicon Valley Bank, right? And, you know, it went under. And this has been happening all across the economy. And then since Dodd-Frank, the number of new banks created in the United States has dropped to zero. Whoa.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so the banking system is being centralized basically into 10 big banks. They actually have a term. They have a great term called GSIB, Globally Significant Something Something Bank. And so there's like 10 GSIBs. And then basically what's going to happen is those are going to consolidate basically into the three big banks. And if you get debanked by one of the big three. You're done.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And, like, I'm pro-capitalism and I'm happy for them if they get paid. But, like, maybe we should know. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But think about it from the other side. If you're the Treasury Secretary and you want your political enemy debanked, it's just a phone call. Right? Which is what has been happening, which was happening under the prior regime. Wow. Right? And again, like at that- Zero. Zero new banks. Yeah, zero. Literally, it was like cardiac arrest. It was like, that's it for new bank charters.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
By definition, it's ruled out. You can't do it. It's not financially viable.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Right. So that happened in banking. That's what they've been doing to social media. And by the way, this has happened in many other industries. By the way, this happened in the food. The food industry is greatly consolidated. That's a lot of what's happened in that industry as well. And it's the intertwining of government and the company, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Because at that point, it's like, okay, is this a private company? Yes. Like, it's still a private company. It has a stock price. It has a CEO. Does the CEO have to do everything that the relevant cabinet secretary tells him to do? Yes, he does. Why does he have to do that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Because if not, it's going to be investigations and subpoenas and prosecutions and fratological examinations for the rest of his life. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So if you combine banking and social media and now AI, you have basically privatized social credit score is where you end up with this. And this goes back to the trucker strike thing. You don't have to threaten to take away somebody's kids. You just threaten to take away their insurance. You don't threaten to take away their insurance. It's not government insurance that's being taken away.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The same thing has happened in the insurance industry. It's consolidated down to a small handful of companies. They're super regulated. If the government doesn't want you to have insurance, you're not going to have insurance. And there's no constitutional right to insurance. So there's no appeal process. We're back to the debanking thing. And so that happened in banking.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That's been happening in tech, social media generally. It's been happening in many other sectors. And then it's happening specifically in AI. And what you have in AI is you have a set of CEOs of some of the big AI companies that want this to happen. Because again, their big threat is that we're going to fund a startup that's going to eat their lunch, right? It's going to really screw them up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so they're like, look, if we could just take the position we have and lock it in with government protection, the trade is we'll do whatever the government wants. And if you assume the government is controlled by people who want to censor and punish and cancel their political opponents, that's gonna come right along with it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so that's why when these AI systems come out, like nine times out of 10, they're tremendously politically biased. You can do this today. You just go on any of these systems today and you just start asking really basic questions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. Once again, we're back to the Nazis. Yes. So it turns, according to Gemini, Hitler had an excellent DEI policy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Now, in reality, he did not. No. And it's important to understand that in reality, he did not. But yeah, Gemini happily threw up Black Nazis because they programmed it to be biased. They programmed it in a political direction.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
There's this guy, David Rosado, who's been doing these analyses on the social media side where he shows the incidence rates of the rise of all of the woke-like language in the media. And there are similar studies that have come out for the AI. There are studies that have been done that basically show the political orientation of the LLMs because you can ask them questions and they'll tell you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And they're just like nine out of 10 of them are like tremendously biased. And then there's a handful that aren't. And then there's tremendous pressure. This is one of the threats from the government is, is the government basically going to force our startups to come into compliance, not just with their trade rules, but also with all of their products.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Essentially a censorship regime on AI that's exactly like the censorship regime that we had on social media.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, exactly. And this is my belief and what I've been trying to tell people in Washington, which is if you thought social media censorship was bad, this has the potential to be a thousand times worse. And the reason is social media is important, but at the end of the day, it's, quote, just people talking to each other. AI is going to be the control layer on everything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
So AI is going to be the control layer on how your kids learn in school. It's going to be the control layer on who gets loans. It's going to be the control layer on does your house open when you come to the front door. It's going to be the control layer on everything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, look, the good news with these is we learn each cycle. We learn a lot about how politics works. We learn about a lot about how fake it is. We learn a lot about the things we put up with for a very long time. I mean, everybody's always like freaked out by like whatever the new guy does.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so if that gets wired into the political system the way that the banks did and the way that social media did, we are in for a very bad future. And that's a big thing that we've been trying to prevent is to keep that from happening. And the Biden administration was explicitly on that path. Like they were very clearly going for that. And it was just like crystal clear that's where it was headed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Another Biden administration for sure. And then there was an open question around Kamala. And the open question there was just she wouldn't, as you know, she wouldn't declare if her issues positions were the same as Biden's or if they were different.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so, you know, you can imagine a common administration that had a very different approach, but she refused to clarify any of her positions. Right. And so we had to assume that they would be the same as Biden's, which I think is the default.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
I mean, much less now than we used to. Yeah. I mean, look, Elon really broke a lot of – Elon did two things that really opened a lot of this up. One is he bought Twitter, which really gave us a place to talk about this stuff, all of us. But then also he himself, of course, started to actually express himself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so he gave a lot of the rest of us permission structure to be able to say these things. And then look, it's like a cascade where people are like, okay, apparently you can now talk about things. Okay, I have some things to say. Yeah. Well, and then look, also just they went too far. They tightened the screws. I mean, they really came at us hard.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And so, you know, the harder they come at us, like we didn't predict. When Biden won, like we didn't think it would have negative effects on our business. We thought, yeah, probably taxes will go up, but like we'll just keep doing business. But then they did all these things, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And it took a couple of years to figure out that this was not like a temporary thing, like this was like a concerted campaign and that they were really coming for us.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Oh, I mean, they have Alphabet Soup, but like SEC tried to kill crypto very specifically. FTC, you know, was thoroughly weaponized. There's something called the CFTC, which is the other part of the crypto puzzle, commodities futures. There's crypto that's a security. There's some forms of crypto that are security and the SEC regulates.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
But like this real scandal in most cases, I think it's just the way the system already works.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
There's other kinds of crypto that are a commodity that the CFTC regulates. The CFPB, I mentioned earlier. So the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau decided that they were also going to regulate AI. What? Which they just volunteered for. And then the FAA killed the drone industry years ago.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The reason why the Chinese are winning in the drone wars is because the FAA basically made drones illegal in the US years ago. So the FAA has been a big problem. What is it? Also the FAA.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Legally, you cannot fly a drone in the U.S. that is beyond line of sight if you don't have a pilot's license. Wow. Which means if you're a U.S. drone manufacturer, you have to build a system that enforces that regulation. You have to handicap your ability to fly a drone. Yes. So either the U.S.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
drone needs to either not fly beyond line of sight, which is not very useful, right, or it needs to somehow validate. We only have customers that have pilot's licenses. China, there's no such restriction. And the Chinese, because we run a more open economy, the Chinese drones you can just buy in the U.S. and use however you want.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Technically, as the user of the drone, you're out of compliance with the law, but they ignore that part. They just punish the American drone makers. Wow. And that's why Chinese own the drone market, and that's why 90% of the drones used by the U.S. military and by U.S. police are Chinese-made drones, which, again— That sounds like a terrible security risk.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It's a very bad idea because every Chinese drone is both a potential surveillance platform and a potential weapon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And I will tell you, the Biden administration had zero interest in addressing this. Like, or worse than zero. Like, just, I would say, absolute contempt for the idea of a U.S. drone industry.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
That's incredible. If they send that at a football stadium during a game with grenades on those drones. Oh, my God. It's carnage. Dude, don't even put that out there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah. Look, DOD runs on these. Soldiers in the field. It's very common. Soldiers, just soldiers, normal grunt soldiers in the field carry drones in their backpacks because they want to be able to see what's around the building or up on the roof.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And every single one of them can be taken over by China and used for whatever they want.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Anytime they want. Is the Trump administration on this? They're very. I don't know what they'll do. It's somewhere in the priority order of the things that they're doing. But, yes, they are well aware of this. It's the kind of thing I would hope that would get some attention.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, these are bad. These are bad. These are bad paths.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Silly me. Silly me. I was wrong. So this is my argument I make geopolitically in D.C., which is if you imagine that the 21st century is going to be, let's say, a contest between the U.S. and China the same way that in the 20th century it was the U.S. versus the Soviet Union. Contest, competition, Cold War, maybe hot war. That's the basic fundamental kind of geopolitical puzzle of the 21st century.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
Then you want to think very clearly about the strengths and weaknesses of both yourselves and about the other side. And then as you think about how to beat the other guy, is the answer to become more like them or more like yourself?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
It's exactly the wrong thing. You got to be like China to compete with China? It's exactly the wrong thing. It's exactly the wrong thing. You don't want that. Because the China system has its problems. They terrorize their own population directly. They do impose the social credit score stuff. They do all this stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then, by the way, here's something we have going for us, which is the Chinese system has turned on capitalism. Xi Jinping is not a capitalist. And there is a broad-based crackdown on private business in China. To the point, a friend of mine, one of the leading investors in China, he said every single Chinese tech founder has either left China or wants to leave China.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And they're all trying to get their money out and they're all trying to get their families out because it's now too dangerous to run a tech company in China because the government might just snatch you, like literally physically snatch you at any point and you may or may not come back.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And then every Chinese CEO has a political officer of the Chinese Communist Party sitting down the hall who can come in and override your decisions anytime he wants to. And by the way, and drag you into training. Oh, this is a great thing. Okay, so you're sitting here, you're the CEO of a company with, you know, 50 billion in revenue and 100,000 employees.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
And this guy from the CCP comes in and pulls you and you sit in the conference room down the hall for seven hours, getting grilled on how well you understand Marx. Right. So like, that actually happens, right? It's a political officers. And that's the kind of thing that happened in the Soviet Union. And that's the kind of thing that happens in China. So
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
You'd rather be a CEO in the US than in China, for sure, as long as the US system actually stays open, where you can actually get all the benefits of all the power of all these incredibly smart people building companies and building products. And that's why this administration freaked us out so much, is because it felt like they were trying to become way more like China.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
The AI thing was very alarming. We had meetings this spring that were the most alarming meetings I've ever been in where they were taking us through their plans, and it was – Can you talk about it? Basically just full government control, this sort of thing. There will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2234 - Marc Andreessen
They told us they just said, don't even start startups. Don't even bother. There's just no way. There's no way that they can succeed. There's no way that we're going to permit that to happen. Wow. They said, this is already over. It's going to be two or three companies, and we're going to control them, and that's that. This is already finished. Oh, my God.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
This movement, you know, that we now call wokeness, it hijacked what I would, you know, call sort of at the time, you know, bog standard progressivism. But, you know, it turned out what we were dealing with was something that was far more aggressive. You're pouring cultural acid on your company and the entire thing is devolving into complete chaos.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So I think the single biggest fight that has ever happened over technology, and there have been many of those fights over the course of the last, you know, especially 500 years, the single biggest fight is going to be over what are the values of the AIs, to your points.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Like, what will the AIs tell you when you ask them anything that involves values, social organization, politics, philosophy, religion? That fight, I think, is going to be a million times bigger and more intense and more important than the social media censorship fight.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And I don't say that because the social media censorship fight has been extremely important, but AI is going to be much more important because AI is such a powerful technology that I think it's going to be the control layer for everything else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so I think the way that you talk to your car and your house and the way that you organize your ideas, the way you learn, the way your kids learn, the way the healthcare system works, the way the government works, how government policies are implemented, AI will end up being the front end on all those things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so the value system in the AIs is going to be maybe the most important set of technological questions we've ever faced. As you know, out of the gate, this is going very poorly. Yes. Right? Very. Very. And there's this question hanging over the field right now, which you could sort of summarize as, why are the AIs woke?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You know, why do the big lab AIs coming out of the major AI companies, why did they come out with the philosophy of a, you know, 21-year-old sociology undergrad at Oberlin College, you know, with blue hair who's like completely emotionally activated? Yeah. And you can see many examples of people have posted queries online that show that or you can run your own experiments.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And they basically have the fullest sort of version of this kind of fundamentalist emotional kind of sort of far progressive absolutist wokeness. coded into them. You said up front that the presumption must be that they're just getting trained on more recent bad data versus older good data.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
There is some of that, but I will tell you that there is a bigger issue than that, which is these things are being specifically trained by their owners to be this way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Yes, I think there's a bunch of biases. So there's three off the top of my head you just get immediately. So one is just recency bias. There's just a lot more present-day material available for training than there is old material because all the present-day material is already on the internet. Right, number one. And so that's going to be influenced.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Number two, who produces content is people who are high in openness. The creative class that creates the content is itself biased. And then there's the English language bias, which is like almost all of the trainable data is in English. And that that isn't is in a small number of other Western languages for the most part. And so there's some bias there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then frankly, there's also this selection process, which is you have to decide what goes in the training data. And so the sort of humorous version of this is two potent sources of training data could be Reddit and 4chan. And let's say Reddit is like super far left on average and 4chan is super far right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And I bet if you look at the training data sets for a lot of these AIs, you'll find they include Reddit, but they don't include 4chan. Right, right, right, right. And so there are court cases pending right now. The courts are going to have to take up this question of copyright and whether it's legal to train AIs on copyrighted data or not and on what terms.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And sort of one of the running jokes inside the field is if those court cases come down such that these companies can't train on copyrighted material, then, for example, they'll only be able to train on books published before 1923.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Well, imagine for a moment, if you would, training on books before 1923. The good news on that is you don't get all of the last hundred years of insanity. The bad news is people before 1923 were insane in their own ways. Yeah, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Yeah, exactly. And so these are very deep questions. All of these questions have to get answered. Elon has talked about this, like Rock has some of this. He's working on that. Having said that, I will tell you most of what you see when you use these systems that we'll distribute is not from any of that. Most of it is deliberate top-down coding in a much more blunt instrument way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Yes, let me start with the how. So the how is a technique. There's an acronym for it. It's called reinforcement learning by human feedback. And so in the field, it's called RLHF. And RLHF is basically a key step for making an AI that works and interacts with humans, which is you take a raw model, which is sort of feral and doesn't quite know how to orient to people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then you put it in a training loop with some set of human beings who effectively socialize it. And so reinforcement learning for human feedback, the key there is human feedback, right? You put it in dialogue with human beings, and you have the human beings do something very analogous to teaching a child, right? Here's how you respond. Here's how you're polite.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Here's the things you can and can't say. Here's how to word things. Here's how to be curious. All the behaviors that you presumably want to see from something you're interacting with that is sort of a human proxy kind of form of behavior. That is a 100% human enterprise. You have to decide what the rules are for the people who are going to be doing that work. They're all people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then you have to hire into those jobs. The people going into those jobs are in many cases the same people. This will horrify you. They're the same people who were in the trustee safety groups at the social media companies five years ago.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So all the people that Elon cut out of the trust and safety group at Twitter when he bought it, many of them have migrated into these trust and safety groups at these AI companies, and they're now setting these policies and doing this training.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
It's the same dynamic. The big AI companies have the exact same dynamic as the big social media companies, which have the exact same dynamic as the big universities, which have the exact same dynamic as the big media companies. You have these either formal or de facto cartels. You have a small handful of companies at the commanding heights of society that hire all the smart graduates.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Take a step back. You don't see ideological competition between Harvard and Yale, right? You would think that you should because they should compete in the marketplace of ideas. And of course, in practice, you don't see that at all. You see no ideological competition between The New York Times and The Washington Post.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You see no ideological competition between the Ford Foundation and, you know, any of the other major foundations. They all have the exact same politics. You see no – prior to Elon buying Twitter, you saw no ideological competition between the different social media companies. Right? Today, you see no ideological competition among the big AI labs. Elon is the spoiler, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
He is coming in to do – he's going to try to do in AI what he did in social media, which is create the non-woke one. But without Elon – you weren't seeing that at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so you have this consistent dynamic across these sectors of what appears to be a free market economy, where you end up with these cartels, where they sort of self-reinforce and self-police, and then they're policed by the government. Anyway, so I want to describe the general phenomenon because that's what's happening here. It's the same thing that happened to the social media companies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then this gets into policy on the very serious policy issues on the government side, which is, is the government going to grant these AI companies basically protected status as some form of monopoly or cartel in return for these companies signing up for the political control that their masters in government want?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Or in the alternative, is there actually going to be an open AI universe, a true AI universe,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
open AI, truly open, where you're going to have a multiplicity of AIs that are actually in full competition, competing, and then you'll have some that are woke, and you'll have some that are non-woke, and you'll have some trained on new material and some trained on old material, and so forth and so on, and then people can freely pick. The thing that we're pushing for is that latter outcome.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
We very specifically want government to not protect these companies, to not put them behind a regulatory wall, to not be able to control them in the way that the social media companies got control before Elon. We actually want like full competition. And if you want your woke AI, you can have it, but there are many other choices.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
The single biggest fight is going to be over what are the values of the AIs. That fight, I think, is going to be a million times bigger and more intense and more important than the social media censorship fight. As you know, out of the gate, this is going very poorly.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so this is this whole dispute that's playing out. And, you know, this gets complicated, but I'll try to provide a high level view. So this is a whole dispute about so-called AI safety. Right, and so there's this whole kind of, you might call it concern or even panic about like, are the AIs gonna run under control? Are they gonna kill us all?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
By the way, are they gonna say, are they gonna be racist? All these different concerns over all the different ways in which these things can go wrong. There's this attempt to impose the precautionary principle on these AIs where you have to prove that they're harmless before they're allowed to be released, which inherently gets into these political questions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so anyway, the AI safety movement conjoins a lot of these questions into kind of this overall kind of elevated level of concern. And then basically what has been happening is the major AI labs, basically they know what the deal is. They watch what happened in social media. They watch what happened to the companies that got out of line. They watch the pressures that came to bear.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
They watch what the government did to the social media companies. They watch the censorship regime that was put in place, which was very much a political, you know, top-down censorship regime. And basically they went to Washington over the course of the last several years and they essentially proposed a trade. And the trade was, we will do what you want politically.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
We will come under your control voluntarily from a political standpoint, the same way the social media companies had. And in return for that, we essentially want a cartel. We want a regulatory structure set up such that a small handful of big companies will be able to succeed in effect forever. And then new entrants will not be allowed to compete.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And in Washington, they understand this because this is the classic economic concept of regulatory capture. This is what every set of major big companies in every industry does. And so the AI companies went to Washington and they tried to do that. And basically what was happening up until the election was the Biden administration was on board with that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And that led to the conversations that I've talked about before that we had in the spring with the Biden administration, where they told us very directly, senior officials in the administration told us very directly, look, do not even bother to try to fund AI startups. There are only going to be two or three large AI companies. building two or three large AIs, and we are going to control them.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
We are going to set up a system in which we control them, and they are going to be, you know, they're not going to be nationalized, but they're going to be essentially de facto integrated into the government. And we are going to do whatever is required to guarantee that outcome. And it's, you know, it's the only way to get to the outcome that we will find acceptable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Well, look, it's the same people who think that they should control the education system, same people who think they should control the universities, same people who think they should control social media censorship, the same people who think that they should permanently control the government and government bureaucracies. It's this – pick whatever term you want.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
It's this elite class, ruling class, oligarchic class.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
The reason I'm so sensitized to this is because this is exactly what I saw happen with social media censorship. I sat in the room and watched the construction of the entire social media censorship edifice every step of the way, going all the way back to the... I was in the original discussions about what defines concepts like hate speech and misinformation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
I was in those meetings, and I saw the construction of the entire private sector edifice that resulted in the censorship regime that we all experienced. And I was close into the – there's a whole group at Stanford University that became a censorship bureau that was working on behalf of the government. I know those people. One of the people who ran that used to work for me.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
I know exactly who those people are. I know exactly how that program worked. I knew the people in government. You know, who were running things like this, you know, the so-called Global Engagement Center and all these different arms of the, you know, the government that had been imposing social media censorship.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So, you know, this is this entire complex that we kind of saw unspooled in the Twitter files and then we've seen in, you know, the investigative reporting by people like, you know, Mike Benz and Mike Schellenberger and these other guys. Like, I saw that whole thing get built. And over the course of basically 12 years, I saw that whole thing get built.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then, of course, I've been part of Elon's takeover of Twitter. And so I've seen what it takes to try to unwind that with what he's doing at X. And so I feel like I saw the first movie. Right? And then AI, you know, AI is a much more important, as I said, AI is a much more important topic, but AI is very clearly the sequel to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And what I'm seeing is basically the exact same pattern that I saw with that. And the people who were able to do that for social media for a long time are the same kind of people, and in many cases, literally the same people who are now trying to do that in AI. And so I... At this point, I feel like we've been warned. We've seen the first movie. We've been warned. We've seen how bad it can get.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
We need to make sure it doesn't happen again. And yeah, those of us in a position to be able to do something about it need to talk about it and need to try to prevent it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so complicated question. And I'll start by saying I claim no particular bravery, so I don't claim any particular moral credit on this. I'll start by saying there's this thing you'll hear about sometimes, this concept of so-called f*** you money.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so, you know, right, there's this sort of like, okay, people are successful, you make a certain amount of money, now you can tell everybody f*** you, you can say whatever you want. And I will just tell you, my observation is that's actually not true. Yeah, right. Definitely not.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
The reason that's not true is because the people who tend to – the people who prosper in our society tend to do so because they're becoming responsible for more and more things. And specifically, they're becoming responsible for more and more people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so one of the things I would observe about myself and observe about a lot of my peers is even as we became more and more bothered and concerned and ultimately very worried about –
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Some of these things is, as that was happening, we were taking on greater and greater responsibilities for our employees and for all the companies that we're involved in, right, and for all the shareholders of all of our companies.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so I think that's part of – and, you know, you could say, you know, there's sort of this endless sort of question between kind of, you know, absolute – you know, sort of absolute commands of morality versus the, you know, real-world compromises that you make to try to, you know, function in society. Right. You know, I would say I was just as subject to that inherent conflict as anybody else.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
I was in the room for a lot of these decisions. I saw it every step of the way. In some cases, I felt right up front that something was going wrong. I mean, I was in the original discussion for one of these, you know, companies on the definition of hate speech, right? And you can imagine how that, you know, discussion goes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You know exactly how the discussion went, but I'll just tell you, it's like, well, hate speech is anything that makes people uncomfortable, right? It's, well... You know, and so my, you know, then I'm like, well, you know, that comment you just made makes me uncomfortable, and so therefore that must be hate speech.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then, you know, they look at me like I've grown a third eye, and I'm like, okay, that argument's not going to work. And then they're like, well, Mark, surely you agree that the N-word makes people uncomfortable. And I'm like, yes, I agree with that. If our hate speech policy is people don't get to use the N-word, I'm okay with that as long as people can say it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But, of course, it doesn't stop there, and it slides into what we then saw happen. So I saw that happen. The misinformation thing, same thing. The misinformation thing actually on social media is a fascinating, horrifying thing that played out, which is it actually started out to actually attack a specific form of actually spam.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So there were these Macedonian bot farms that were literally creating what's called click spam or sort of ad fraud on social media. They were creating literally fake news stories like, you know, the classic one was the Pope has died. And it's like, no, the Pope has not died. That is absolutely misinformation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But the reason that this bot farm puts that story out is because when people click on it, they make money on the ads. And that's clearly a bad thing and that's misinformation. And clearly we need to stop that. And so the mechanism was built to stop that kind of spam.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But then after the election, we discovered that anybody who was pro-Donald Trump was presumptively an agent of Vladimir Putin, and then all of a sudden that became misinformation, right? And so the engine that was intended to be built for spam then all of a sudden applied to politics, and then off and away they went.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then everything was misinformation, culminating in objections to three years of COVID lockdowns became misinformation, right? So, I saw that entire thing on spool. I saw all the pressures brought to bear on these companies. I saw the people who went up against this get wrecked. I saw these companies try to develop all these trade-offs.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Obviously, I would claim for myself that I tried to argue this kind of every step of the way. And by the way, I'm not the only one who was concerned about this, and I think we should give Mark Zuckerberg a little bit of credit on this on one specific point, which is, you may recall, he gave a speech in 2019 at Georgetown, and he gave a very principled defense of free speech from first principles.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And he at that point was trying very hard to kind of maintain the line on this. Now, 2020, everything went like completely nuts. And then the Biden administration came in and the government came in and they really lowered the boom. And so things went very bad after that. But even Mark, who a lot of people get very mad at on these things, like he was trying in many ways to hold on to these things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Anyway, it unfolded the way that it did. I don't claim any particular courage. I will tell you, basically starting in 2022, I saw some leaders in our industry really start to step up. And one that I would give huge credit to is Brian Armstrong, who's the CEO of Coinbase, which is a company that we're involved in. And you may recall, he's the guy who wrote basically a manifesto.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And he said, these companies need to be devoted to their missions, not every other mission in society.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Right. And so he declared, like, there's going to be a new way to run these companies. We're not going to have all the politics. We're not going to have the whole bring your whole self to work thing that, you know, we're not going to have all the internal corrosion. We're going to go back. You know, we're going to go. We're going to have our mission. And then we're going to focus on that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
We're not going to take on the world's the world's the world's ills. And then he did this thing where he actually purged his company of the activist class that we talked about earlier.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And the way that he did that was with a voluntary buyout where he said, if you're not on board with working at a non-political, non-ideological company that's focused on its own mission, not every other mission, then I will pay you money to go work someplace where you'll be able to fully exercise your politics.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Um, there are a bunch of other CEOs, um, you know, that have been basically following in Brian's footsteps more quietly, but they've basically been doing the same thing. And a lot of these companies have turned the corner on this now when they're starting to, you know, they're, they're working these people out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then, you know, quite frankly, you know, the, the, the big event is I think this election and, you know, people have all kinds of, you know, positive, negative takes on Trump and, you know, this gets into lots and lots of political issues. But I, I think that, that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
the Trump victory being what it was and being not just Trump winning again, but also Trump winning the popular vote and also simultaneously the House and the Senate, it feels like the ice has cracked.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
It's like maybe the pressure for the ice to crack was building over two years, but it feels like as of November 6th, it feels like something really fundamental changed where all of a sudden people have become basically willing to talk about the things they weren't willing to talk about before.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So what I experienced, I'm on 30 years now in the tech industry, you know, in the U.S. and the Silicon Valley. And what I experienced was between roughly, you know, 1994 when I entered through to about 2012, was sort of one way in which everything operated and the set of beliefs everybody had.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then basically this incredible discontinuous change that happened between, call it 2012 and 2014, that then cascaded into what you might describe as some degree of insanity over the last decade. And of course, you've talked about a lot of aspects of that insanity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But the way I would describe it is for the first, you know, 15, 20 years of my career, there was what I refer to sometimes as the deal with a capital D or you might call it the compact or maybe just the universal belief system, which was effectively everybody I knew in tech was a, you know, social liberal, progressive and good standing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But, you know, operating in the era of Clinton Gore and then, you know, later on through Bush and into Obama first term. It was viewed as – to be a social progressive and good standing was completely compatible with being a capitalist, completely compatible with being an entrepreneur and a business person, completely compatible with succeeding in business.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so the basic deal was you have the exact same political and social beliefs as everybody you know. You have the exact same social and political beliefs as The New York Times every day. Right. And their beliefs change over time, but you update yours to stay current. And everybody around you believes the same thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
The dinner table conversations are everybody's in 100% agreement on everything at all times. But then you go succeed in business. And you build your company and you build products and you build new technology. And if your company succeeds, it goes public and people become wealthy. And then you square the circle of sort of social progressivism and entrepreneurial success and business success.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You square the circle with philanthropy. And so you donate the money to good social causes, and then someday your obituary says he was both a successful business person and a great human being. And basically what I experienced is that that deal broke down between 2012, 2014, 2015, and then sort of imploded spectacularly in 2017.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And ever since, there has been no way to square that circle, which is if you are successful in business, in tech, in entrepreneurship, if you become successful, you are de facto evil. And you can protest that you're actually a good person, but you are presumed to be de facto evil. And by the way, furthermore, philanthropy will no longer wash your sins.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
This was a massive change, and this is still playing out, but philanthropy will no longer wash your sins because philanthropy is unacceptable. The belief goes philanthropy is an unacceptable diversion of resources from the proper way that they should be deployed, which is the state, to sort of a private enterprise form of philanthropy, which is sort of de facto is now considered bad.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so everybody in my world basically had a decision to make, which was, did they basically go sharply to the left on not just social issues, but also economic issues? And did they become starkly anti-business, anti-tech, essentially self-hating? in order to stay in the good graces of what happened on that side?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Or did they have to do what Peter Thiel did early on and go way to the right and basically just punch out and declare that I'm completely out of progressivism, I'm completely finished with this, and I'm going to go a completely different direction? And obviously, that culminated in, you know, that was part of the phenomenon that culminated in Trump's first election.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so, anyway, long story short, the manifesto that I wrote is an attempt to kind of bring things back to, you know, what I consider to be a more sensible way to think and operate, you know, a big tent social and political umbrella, but, you know, where tech innovation is actually still good, business is still good, capitalism is still good, technological progress is still good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
The people who work on these things actually are still good, and that actually we can be proud of what we do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so different people, of course, have different perspectives on this, but I'll tell you what I experienced. And I think in retrospect what happened is Silicon Valley experienced this before a lot of other places in the country and before a lot of other fields of business.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so I have many friends in other areas of business who live and work in other places where I would describe to them what was happening in 2012 or 2014 or 2016, and they would look at me like I'm crazy, and I'm like, no. I'm describing what's actually happening on the ground here.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then, you know, three years later, they would tell me, oh, it's also happening in Hollywood, or it's also happening in finance, or it's also happening in, you know, these other industries. So, in retrospect, I think I had a front row seat to this just because Silicon Valley was, you know, I've been using the term first in. Silicon Valley was first in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Like, Silicon Valley was the industry that went the hardest. for this transformation upfront. And so what we experienced at Silicon Valley, and then the nature of my work, over this entire time period, I've been a venture capitalist and an investor.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so the nature of my work is I've been exposed to a large number of companies all at the same time, some very small, and then by the way, also some very large. So for example, I've been on the Facebook board of directors this entire arc, right? And a lot of what I'm describing, you can actually see through just the history of just the one company, Facebook, which we can talk about.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But anyway, so I think I basically saw the Vanguard movement up close. And, you know, essentially what I saw was it was really 2012. It was the beginning of the second Obama term. And it was sort of the aftermath of the global financial crisis. And so it was some combination of those two things. The global financial crisis hits in 2008. Occupy Wall Street takes off, but it's this fringe thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Bernie Sanders starts to activate as a national candidate. Some of these other politicians on the further to the left start to become prominent, start to take over the Democratic Party. Then the economy caved in. We went through a severe recession between, call it 2009 to 2011. 2012, the economy was coming back. People maybe weren't worried about being fired anymore, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
If people think they're going to get fired in a recession, they generally don't act out at a company. But if they think their jobs are secure in an economic boom, they can start to become activists. And so the sort of employee activist movement started around 2012.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then the Obama second term, I would say the progressives in the Democratic Party kind of took more control, kind of starting around that time. And the Obama administration itself kind of turned to the left.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so you started to get this kind of activated political energy, this sort of – the activist movements in these companies where you had people who the year before had been a quiet web designer working in their cubicle. And then all of a sudden they're a social and political revolutionary inside their own company. And then, by the way, the shareholders activated, which was really interesting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Like this is when Larry Fink at BlackRock decided he was going to save the world. And then the press activated. And so all of a sudden, the same tech reporters who had been very happy covering tech and talking about exciting new ideas, all of a sudden became kind of very accusatory and started to condemn the industry. So that started to pop around 2012.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then what I saw, you might even describe it as like a controlled skid that became an uncontrolled skid, which was that energy built up in tech between 2012 and 2015 And then, you know, basically what happened in rapid succession was Trump's nomination and then Trump's election, his victory in 2016. And I described both of those events as like 10x-ing of the political energy in this system.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so, you know, both of those events really activated, you know, very strong antibody responses, you know, which, as you know, culminated in like mass protests in the streets right after the 2016 election.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then, of course, the narrative then became, you know, crystallized, which is there are the forces of darkness represented by Trump, represented by the right, represented by capitalism, represented by tech. And there are the forces of light represented by wokeness and, you know, the racial reckoning and, you know, the George Floyd protests and so forth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And it became this, you know, very, very, very clear litmus test. And so the pattern basically locked in hard in 2017 and then continued to escalate from there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so why did it happen in tech first? So a couple things. So one is tech is just, I would say, extremely connected into the universities. Oh, right. Right. And so almost everything we do flows from the computer science departments and the engineering departments at major U.S. research universities. And we hire kids from new graduates all the time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so we just have a very, very tight – and we work with university professors and research groups all the time – And so there's just a direct connection there. And so it's like if an ideological pathological virus is going to escape the university and jump into the civilian population, it'll hit tech first, which is what happened. Or maybe tech and media.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
um first so that's that's one and then two um you know two is i think the the sort of psychological sort that happens when when kids decide what profession to go into um and you know what we get are the very high openness people you know the the the highest openness people uh come out of college you know uh who are also high iq and ambitious and they basically they you know they go into tech they go into creative industries or they go into media right they're sort of the you know where they sort into and so so we we also get the most open
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And by the way, also ambitious, right? We get the ambitious driven, as you say, high industriousness ones as well. And then that's the formula for a highly effective activist, right? And so we got the full load of that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then look, you know, this movement, you know, that we now call Wokeness, you know, it hijacked, you know, it hijacked what I would, you know, call sort of at the time, you know, bog standard progressivism, which is, you know, of course you want to be diverse and of course you want to be inclusive and of course you want everybody to feel included and of course you want to be kind and of course you want to be fair and of course you want a just society.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And, you know, that was part of the, you know, just moderate belief set that everybody in my world had, you know, for the preceding certainly 20 years. And so at first it just felt like, oh, this is more of what we're used to, right? This is, you know, of course this is what we want. But, you know, it turned out what we were dealing with was something that was far more aggressive, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You know, a much more aggressive movement. And then this activism phenomenon. And then this became a very practical issue for these companies. like on a day-to-day basis. And so you mentioned the Damore incident. So I talked to executives at Google while that was going down, because that was so confusing for me at the time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And the reason they acted on him the way they did and fired him and ostracized him and did all the rest of it is because they thought they were hours away from actual physical riots on the Google campus. Like they thought employee mobs were going to try to burn the place down physically. Right, and that was such, at the time, that was such an aberrant phenomenon, expectation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
There were other companies, by the way, at the same time that were having all-hands meetings that were completely unlike anything that we'd ever seen before, that you could only compare to struggle sessions. There's the famous, the Netflix adaptation of Three-Body Problem starts with this very vivid recreation of a Maoist era communist Chinese struggle session.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Where the students are on stage and the disgraced professor is on stage confessing his sins, and then they beat him to death. And the inflamed passions of the young, ideologically consumed crowd that is completely convinced that they're on the side of justice and morality. Fortunately, nobody got beaten to death at these companies on stage at an all-hands meeting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But you started to see that same level of activated energy, that same level of passion. You started to see hysterics. you know, people crying and screaming in the audience. And so, you know, these companies knew they were at risk from their employees up to and including the risk of actual physical riots. And that at the time, of course, was like a completely bizarre thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And we, you know, we at the time had no idea what we were dealing with. But it was, in retrospect, it was through events like what James Damore went through that we ultimately did figure out what this was.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so there's a bunch of layers to it in retrospect. And let me say that what you describe has—it is what's happening now. So in the last two years, a lot of companies actually are—at long last, they are firing activists, and we can talk about that. And so I think the tide is turning on that a bit, but— but going back in time, going back in time between, you know, 2012 and let's say 2022.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So like a full, you know, 10 year stretch where what you're describing didn't happen. I think there's layers. So one is, as I said, just people didn't understand it. I think quite frankly, number two, a lot of people in charge agreed with it, at least to start, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so they saw people who had what appeared to be the same political ideological leanings as they did and were just simply more passionate about them. And so they thought they were on the same side. They agreed with it. And then at some point, they discovered that they were dealing with something different, you know, maybe a more pure strain or a more fundamentalist, you know, approach.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
At that point, of course, they became afraid, right? And so they were afraid of being lit on fire themselves. And by the way, I would describe, you know, I think tech is starting to work its way out of this. I think Hollywood is still not, and my friends in Hollywood, when I talk to them— Oh, not at all. Not at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
When I talk to people who are in serious positions of responsibility in Hollywood, you know, after a couple drinks and, you know, in sort of a zone of privacy, you know, it's pretty frequently they'll say, look, I just can't. It's still too scary. Like, I can't go up against this because it'll ruin my career.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So, you know, there is this group frenzy cancellation, you know, ostracizing, career destruction thing. That's real. But let me highlight two other things. So one is it wasn't just the employees. It was the employees. It was substantial percentage of the executive team. It was also the board of directors in a lot of cases. And so you'd have politically activated board members.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And some of these companies still have that, by the way. It was also the shareholders. And you would think that investors in a capitalist enterprise would only be concerned with economic return. And it turns out that's not true because you have this intermediate layer of institutions like BlackRock where they're aggregating up lots of individual shareholders.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then the managers of the intermediary can exercise their own politics using the voting power of aggregated small shareholder holdings. And so you had the shareholders coming at them. Then, by the way, you also had the government coming at them. And, you know, this administration's been very aggressive on a number of fronts.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
We could talk about a bunch of examples of that, but you have direct government pressure coming at you. You have the entire press corps coming at you, right? And so it feels like it's the entire world, you know, bearing in on you, and they're all going to light you on fire. And that does happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so there's a couple things on that. So one is, I should just note, and I'm sure you'll agree with me on this, there are many men who also exhibit that reputational destruction motive.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so we've had plenty of them as well. Yeah, so the government pressure side. So when this all hit, like I said, nobody I knew understood what was happening. I didn't understand it. And so I did what I do in circumstances like that. And I basically just tried to work my way backwards through history and figure out where this stuff came from.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And I think for pressure on corporations, the context for this is that corporations are – There's this cliche that you'll hear actually interesting from the left, which is, well, private companies can do whatever they want. They can censor whoever they want. Private companies have total latitude to do whatever they want. And of course, that's totally untrue.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Private companies are extensively regulated by the government. Private companies have been regulated by a civil rights regime imposed by the government for the last 60 years. That civil rights regime certainly has done many good things in terms of opening up opportunities for different minority groups and so forth to participate in business. But
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You know, that civil rights regime put in place this standard called disparate impact in which you can evaluate whether a company is racist or not on the basis of just raw numbers without having to prove that they intended to be, right? In terms of like who they select for their employees.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so companies, you know, predating the arrival of what we call woke, they already had legal and regulatory and political and compliance requirements put on them to achieve things like racial diversity, gender diversity, and so forth. And I grew up in that environment. I considered that totally normal for a very long time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
I just figured that's how things worked, and that was the positive payoff from the civil rights movement and from the 1960s, and that was just the state of play. And by the way, it was, I think, manageable and good in some ways, and kind of on and away we went. We could deal with it. But basically what happened was— When woke arrived, that regime was enormously intensified.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And what happened was a sequence of events, and literally there was a playbook where, for example, per DEI, there was a sequence of events where activists and employees and board members would push you. First of all, you had to start doing explicit minority statistical reporting.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So you had to fully air in public any disparate impact, any differences in racial, gender, ethnic, sexual differences relative to the overall population in a statistical report you had to update every year. And of course, they would tell you, as long as you issue this report, you're fine. Well, of course, that wasn't the case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
What followed the report was, okay, now you need what's called the Rooney Rule. And the Rooney Rule basically says you have to have statistically proportionate representation of candidates for every job opening relative to the overall population.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that's right. It feels like what we saw. So reporting leads to candidate pools. Candidate pools, the pressure then is, well, you need to hire proportionately according to whatever these categories are, including all the new ones. And then hiring means, then step four is promotions. You need to promote at the same rate, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And the minute you have that requirement, of course, now any performance metrics are just totally out the window because you can't, right? You just have to promote everybody identically. And that's sort of the slide into the complete removal of merit from the system. And then, by the way, the fifth stage is you have to lay off proportionately. And so you're bound on the other side.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And what happens is precisely what I'm sure you know happens and what you've seen happen. What happens is a descent of the culture of the company into complete dog-eat-dog, us versus them. The employee base starts to activate along these identity lines inside the company.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
These companies all created what are known as this incredible euphemism of employee resource groups, ERGs, which is basically segregated employee affiliation groups. And so you now have the employees. The employees aren't employees of your company.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
The employees are members of a group who just happen to be at your company, but their group membership along whatever axis we're talking about, their group membership ends up trumping you know, their role as employees. And then you have this internal dissent into, you know, accusations, into fear.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You know, you have, you know, this incredible, you know, tokenization that takes place where, you know, anybody from an underrepresented group is, you know, the classic problem of affirmative action. Any member of an underrepresented group is assumed to have gotten hired only because of their, you know, skin color or their sex, you know, which is horrible for members of that group.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so you get this, you know, downward slide.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Exactly. And so it's acid. You're pouring cultural acid on your company and the entire thing is devolving into complete chaos internally. And what's happening is the activists and the press and the board and everybody else is pressing you to do this. And then the government on top of that is pressing you to do it. And under this last administration, that reached entirely new heights of absurdity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So let me take a step back. Okay. Once you walk down this path and go through all those steps, I believe there's no question you now have illegal quotas and you have illegal hiring practices and you have illegal promotion practices. And by the way, you also have illegal layoff practices.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
I think any reading of US civil rights law, which says you are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of all these characteristics, you have worked yourself into a system in which you are absolutely discriminating on the basis of these characteristics through actual hard quotas, which are illegal.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so to start with, I think all of these companies that implemented these systems, I think they've all ended up basically being on the wrong side of civil rights law, which is, of course, this incredibly ironic result. Right. They've all ended up with illegal quotas. I mentioned Hollywood earlier. You know, Hollywood has gone all in for it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You know, they literally now publish their hard quotas. The studios have these statements that says by X date, you know, 50 percent of our producers and writers and actors and so forth are going to be from specific groups. And again, you just read like the Civil Rights Acts and it's like, OK, that's actually not legal. And yet they're doing it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
This administration, this last administration, the Biden administration, really hammered this in, and they put these real radicals in charge of groups like the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And the sort of ultimate, like, amazing expression of this, you know, bizarre expression of this was SpaceX, one of Elon's companies, got sued by the Civil Rights Division of this Department of Justice for not hiring enough refugees. Right. not hiring enough foreign nationals who had come, either illegals or coming in through a refugee path.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Notwithstanding the fact that SpaceX is a federal contractor and is only allowed in most of its employee base to hire American citizens. And so the government simultaneously demands of SpaceX that they only hire American citizens and that they hire refugees. And the government views no responsibility whatsoever to reconcile that. You're guilty either way, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then again, general companies are in this bind now where if they do everything they're supposed to do, they end up in violation of the civil rights law, which they started out by trying to comply with. And this has all happened with... This has all happened without reason and rational discussion. This has all happened in a completely hysterical, emotional frenzy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And what these companies are realizing is they're now on the other side of this and there's just simply no way to win.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
I've had lawyers literally write analysis for this as I've been trying to figure it out, you know, employment law lawyers. And, like, literally, you read the analysis, and it's absolutely 100% illegal to discriminate on the basis of these characteristics. And it is 100% absolutely illegal to not discriminate on the basis of these characteristics. And that is true right now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And both of those are true. It is both illegal to hire, you know, you mentioned interviews. Interviews are an ideal setting for bias because, you know, even if you just assume most people like people who are like themselves, right? You know, is a member from a certain group going to be more inclined to hire members from that group? You know, probably yes, just if there are no other parameters.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so, precisely, you want to get to quantitative measures because you want to take that kind of bias out of the system, but then the quantitative measures are presumptively illegal because they lead to bias through disparate impact. Yeah, and so maybe the term Kafka trap, right? You end up in this vice, and then everybody is just so mad that you can't even have the discussion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so this is the downward spiral. Yeah. On the one hand, I think there's a lot of this that just fundamentally like can't be fixed because a lot of these assumptions, you know, a lot of this stuff got baked in, you know, going back to the 1960s, 1970s. So a lot of this is long since settled law. And I don't know that anybody has the appetite to reopen Pandora's box in this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Having said that, this new administration, the Trump administration coming in, I would say every indication is that the Trump administration's policies and enforcement are going to flip. to the other side of this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so one of the things that's very fascinating about what's happening in business right now is a lot of boards of directors are now basically having a discussion internally, you know, with their legal team saying, okay, like we can't continue, we cannot continue to do the just overt discriminatory hiring and employee segmentation that we've been doing. We're not going to be permitted to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And so, you know, we have to back way off of these programs. And, you know, you're already seeing Fortune 500 companies starting to shut down DEI programs. And I think you're going to see a lot more of that Because they're going to try to come into compliance with what the new Trump regime wants, which will be on the other side of this. But the underlying issues are likely to stay unresolved.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
I think in practice, in retrospect, maybe this is too optimistic on my part, but my time in business, 80s, 90s, 2000s, it felt like we had a reasonable detente. And although... You ideally might want to get in there and figure this stuff all out. As long as it's kind of kept to a manageable simmer, you can kind of have your cake and eat it too and people can kind of get along and it's okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Maybe it's not a perfectly merit-based system or maybe there's issues along the way, but fundamentally, companies worked really well for a long time. if you can work your way out of this, you know, out of this sort of, you know, elevated level of hysteria. And optimistically, I would say that that's starting to happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And the change in legal regime that's coming, I think will actually help that happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
¶¶
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Sure. So first, thanks for having me. And it's great to see you. I'm very influenced on this by Thomas Sowell wrote this great book called A Conflict of Visions. And he talks about fundamentally there are two classes of visions of the future. He calls the unconstrained visions and the constrained visions. And the unconstrained visions are the superpowers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
sweeping, transformational, discontinuous social change. We're going to make the new man. We're going to make the new society. We're going to have Pol Pot in Cambodia. We're going to declare a year zero. Everything that came before is irrelevant. It's a new era. Lenin, basically every revolutionary, wants to completely radically transform everything. And how can you not?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Because the current system is unjust and we need to achieve total justice and so forth. And so, The unconstrained vision, it's classically the vision of totalitarians. It sells itself as creating utopia. As you well know, it tends to produce hell.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
In contrast, he said that the constrained vision is one in which you realize that man has fallen and that we are imperfect and that things are always going to be some level of mess, but it can be a slightly better mess than it is today. We can improve on the margin. Things can be better. People can live better lives. They can take better care of their families. Their countries can get richer.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
They can have more abundance. And progress on the margin. And of course, the unconstrained vision is very compatible with totalitarianism. The Chinese Communist Party for sure has an unconstrained vision, as the Bolsheviks did before them and the Nazis and other totalitarian movements.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
You know, the constrained vision is very consistent, I think, with, you know, the long-run Western ideals and liberty and freedom and then free markets. And so one of the things I do try to say in the manifesto is I'm not a utopian, and I think utopian dreams turn into dystopia. I think that's what you get. I think history is quite clear on that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And then to your point on technology, I would just map that straight onto that, which is, yes, 100% technology can be a tool that revolutionaries can use to try to achieve utopia slash dystopia. And for sure, the Chinese Communist Party is trying to do that. And there are forces, by the way, in the US that also for sure want to do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But technology is also completely, perfectly compatible with the constrained vision and change on the margin and improvement on the margin, which is where I am. I think that is 100% a human issue and a social and political issue, not a technological issue, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Right. So this is sort of the running – a little bit of the running joke right now on the AI alignment. There's this classic – there's a super genius of AI alignment, this guy Roko, who's famous for this thing called Roko's Basilisk and AI alignment –
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
So, Roko's basilisk is you better say nice things about the AI now, even though the AI doesn't exist yet, because when it wakes up and sees what you read, it's going to, you know, judge you and find you wanting, right? And so, he's sort of this famous guy in that field. And what he actually says now is, basically, it turns out the AI alignment problem is not a problem of aligning the AI.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
It's a problem of aligning the humans, right? It's a problem of aligning the humans and how we're going to use the AI, right? Precisely to your point. Yes, right. Right. And that is one of the very big questions. There's another book I'd really recommend on this, directly to your point. It's got Peter Huber wrote this book called Orwell's Revenge.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
And famously in 1984, as you mentioned, there's this concept of the telescreen, which is basically the one-way propaganda broadcast device that goes into everybody's house from the government. top-down and then has cameras in it so the government can observe everything that the citizens do. That is what happens in these totalitarian societies. They implement systems like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
In the book, Our World's Revenge, he does this thing where he tweaks the telescreen and he makes it two-way instead of one-way. Um, and so he gives, so, you know, the revolutionaries give it the, the, the sort of resistance force to the totalitarian government, give it the ability to, uh, let people upload as well as download. Um, and so all of a sudden people can actually express themselves.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
They can express their views. They can organize. And of course, then based, based on that, they can then use that technology to basically rise up against the totalitarian government and, and, and achieve a better, uh, a better society. Um,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
Look, as you mentioned earlier, the ability to do universal two-way communication also lets you create the sort of mob effect that we were talking about and this sort of kind of personal destruction engine. And so there's two sides to that also.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
But it is the case that you can squint at a lot of this technology one way and see it as an instrument of totalitarian oppression, and you can squint at it another way and see it as an instrument of individual liberation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
515. Ethics, Power, and Progress: Shaping AI for a Better Tomorrow | Marc Andreessen
I think, for sure, there are a lot of, you know, how you design the technology matters a lot, but I at least believe the big picture questions are all the human questions and the social political questions, and they need to be confronted directly as such. And we need to confront them directly for that reason. So, these are human questions, ultimately, not technological questions.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
We've got a bit of a tech sell-off this morning, and it's being caused by earth-shattering developments in the AI space. And here's why. There's a Chinese startup that has emerged as a real player in the AI arms race. It's called DeepSeek, and DeepSeek's AI model has developed technology that can actually be competitive with open AI and Google and XAI and all these more established players.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
Investor Marc Andreessen calls the new Chinese AI a Sputnik moment. Somebody else called it ChatGP Xi.