Marc Andreessen：Trump、权力、科技、AI、移民与美国的未来｜Lex Fridman Podcast #458

We're adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days right now, and it's now passing the size of the Defense Department budget. It's compounding, and pretty soon it's going to be adding a trillion dollars every 90 days, then a trillion dollars every 80 days, and then a trillion dollars every 70 days. If this doesn't get fixed, at some point we enter a hyperinflationary spiral and become Argentina or Brazil. The following is a conversation with Marc Andreessen, his second time on the podcast. Marc is a visionary tech leader and investor who fundamentally shaped the development of the internet and the tech industry in general over the past 30 years. He's the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and is one of the most influential voices in the tech world, including at the intersection of technology and politics. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Marc Andreessen.

All right, let's start with optimism. If you were to imagine the best possible 1–2 years—2025 and 2026—for tech, for big tech and small tech, what would it be? What would it look like? Lay out your vision for the best possible trajectory for America.

The Roaring '20s. A couple of things: It is remarkable that over the last several years, with all of the issues—including not just everything in politics, but also COVID and every other thing that's happened—the United States just kept growing. If you look at economic growth charts, the US just kept growing, and very significantly, while many other countries stopped growing.

Canada stopped growing, the UK has stopped growing, and Germany has stopped growing. Some of those countries may actually be growing backward at this point. There's a very long discussion to be had about what's wrong with those countries. Of course, there are plenty of things that are wrong with our country, but the US is flat-out primed for growth.

I think that's a consequence of many factors, some of which are luck and some of which are the result of hard work. The lucky part is, number one, we have incredible physical security by being our own continent. We have incredible natural resources. 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.

Energy is another one. We can be energy-independent anytime we want. This last administration decided it didn't want to be; it wanted to turn off American energy. This new administration has declared that it has a goal of turning it on in a dramatic way. There's no question we can be energy-independent and a giant net energy exporter. It's purely a question of choice, and I think the new administration is going to do that.

I would say there are 2 other things. One is that we're beneficiaries—and you're an example of this—of 50, 100, or 200 years of the most aggressive, driven, smartest, and most capable people in the world moving to the US and raising their kids here. We just have, by far, the most dynamic and aggressive population. We're the most aggressive set of characters, certainly in any Western country, and have been for a long time.

Finally, we're overwhelmingly the advanced-technology leader. We have our issues, and we have a particular issue with manufacturing, which we could talk about. But in software, AI, advanced biotech, and all these advanced areas of technology, we're by far the leader. Again, that's partly because many of the best scientists and engineers in those fields come to the US.

We have all the preconditions for a monster boom. I could see economic growth going way up, productivity growth going way up, and the rate of technology adoption going way up. We can do a global tour, if you like, but basically all of our competitors have profound issues. We could go through them one by one, but the competitive landscape is remarkable in terms of how much better positioned we are for growth.

What about the humans themselves? Almost a philosophical question. I travel across the world, and there's something about the American spirit—the entrepreneurial spirit—that's uniquely intense in America. I don't know what that is. I've talked to Saagar, who claims it might be the Scots-Irish blood that runs through the history of America. What is it? You, at the heart of Silicon Valley—is there something in the water? Why is there this entrepreneurial spirit?

Is this a family show, or am I allowed to swear?

You could say whatever the fuck you want.

Okay. The great TV show Succession, in which you were intended to root for exactly 0 of the characters—

Yes.

The best line from Succession was in the final episode of the first season, when the whole family is over in Logan Roy's ancestral homeland of Scotland. They're at this castle for some wedding, and Logan is completely miserable having to be there because he's been in New York for 50 years. He's totally miserable being back in Scotland.

He gets into an argument with somebody and finally says, "My God, I cannot wait to get out of here and go back to America, where we can fuck without condoms." (Both laugh.)

Was that a metaphor, or—

Exactly. Everybody watching that instantly starts laughing because you know what it means. It's exactly this.

I think there's an ethnographic way to look at it. There are a bunch of books on, as you said, the Scots-Irish and all the different derivations of all the different ethnic groups that have come to the US over the course of the last 400 years. What we have is this amalgamation of the Northeast Yankees, who are super tough and hardcore; the Scots-Irish, who are super aggressive; the Southerners and the Texans; and the whole blended Anglo-Hispanic thing.

These are incredibly tough, strong, driven, capable characters. We have the Texas Rangers. We have California. We have the wild. We have incredibly inventive hippies, but we also have hardcore engineers. We have the best rocket scientists in the world, the best artists in the world, the best creative professionals, and the best movies.

All of our problems, I think, are basically, to some extent, attempts to sand all that off and make everything boring and mediocre. But there is something in the national spirit that keeps bouncing back. What we discover over time is that we need people to stand up at a certain point and say, "It's time to build. It's time to grow. It's time to do things."

There's something in the American spirit that just roars right back to life. I've seen it before. I saw it as a kid here in the early '80s, because the '70s were horribly depressing in the US. They were a nightmare on many fronts.

In a lot of ways, the last decade has felt a lot like the '70s to me: being mired in misery, with this self-defeating, negative attitude, and everybody upset about everything. There was the energy crisis, the hostage crisis, foreign wars, and demoralization.

The low point in the '70s was Jimmy Carter, who just passed away. He went on TV and gave this speech known as the Malaise Speech. It was the weakest possible attempt to rouse people back to a sense of passion, and he completely failed.

We had the hostages in Iran for, I think, 440 days. Every night on the nightly news, it was lines around the block, the energy crisis, depression, and inflation. Then Reagan came in. Reagan was a very controversial character at the time, but he came in and said, "Nope, it's morning in America, and we're the shining city on the hill. We're going to do it."

He did it, and we did it. The national spirit came roaring back and roared really hard for a full decade. I think that's exactly what could happen here. We'll see, but I think that's what could happen.

I just did a super-long podcast on Milton Friedman with Jennifer Burns, who's an incredible professor at Stanford. Milton Friedman was part of the Reagan Revolution, so there are a bunch of components to that, one of which is economic.

Yes.

One of which—maybe you can put a word on it, without being romantic—is freedom: individual freedom, economic freedom, political freedom, and, in general, individualism.

That's right.

Yeah, and as you know, America has this incredible streak of individualism. Individualism in America probably peaked, I think, from roughly 1865, the end of the Civil War, through to probably 1931 or something. There was this incredible rush. We now know that period as the Second Industrial Revolution.

It’s when the United States basically assumed global leadership and took over technological and economic leadership from England. That ultimately led to being able to not only industrialize the world, but also win World War II and then win the Cold War. It was a massive individualistic streak.

Milton Friedman’s old videos are all on YouTube. They are every bit as compelling and inspiring as they were then. He is a singular figure.

Many of us, including me, never knew him, but he was at Stanford for many years, at the Hoover Institution. I know a lot of people who worked with him, and he was a singular figure. All of his lessons live on and are fully available.

But I would also say it’s not just individualism. This is one of the big things playing out in a lot of our culture and political fights right now. There’s a feeling that I certainly have and share with a lot of people: it’s not enough for America to just be an economic zone. It’s not enough for us to just be individuals, and it’s not enough to just have the line go up or to have economic success.

There are deeper questions at play, and there’s more to a country than just that. Quite frankly, a lot of it is intangible. A lot of it involves spirit and passion. Like I said, we have more of it than anybody else, but we have to choose to want it.

The way I look at it is that all of our problems are self-inflicted. Decline is a choice. All of our problems are basically demoralization campaigns—people in positions of authority telling us that we shouldn’t stand out, we shouldn’t be adventurous, we shouldn’t be exciting, we shouldn’t be exploratory, and we shouldn’t be this, that, and the other thing. We should feel bad about everything that we do.

I think we’ve lived through a decade where that’s been the prevailing theme. Quite honestly, as of November, I think people are done with it.

If we could go on a tangent of a tangent, since we’re talking about individualism, and that’s not all that it takes, you’ve mentioned in the past the book “The Ancient City.”

#458

Yes.

It was written by the 19th-century French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges—if I could only pronounce the name, I don’t know.

#458

That was amazing.

All right. Anyway, you said this is an important book to understand who we are and where we come from.

#458

So what that book does is actually quite striking. It’s written by this guy, who was a classicist. 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, in the 1860s, right around the time of the U.S. Civil War.

He was a savant of a particular kind. He had apparently read, absorbed, and memorized every possible scrap of Greek and Roman literature. He’s like a walking index of basically everything we know about Greek and Roman culture, and that’s significant.

The reason this matters is that basically none of that has changed. He had access to the exact same written materials that we have access to, and we’ve learned nothing.

Specifically, he talked about the Greeks and the Romans, but he also went back further. He reconstructed the people who came before the Greeks and the Romans, and what their life and society were like. These were the people who are now known as the Indo-Europeans. You may have heard of them as the people who came down from the steppes.

They came out of what is now Eastern Europe, around the outskirts of what is now Russia, and then they swept through Europe. They ultimately took over all of Europe. In the hundreds of years that followed, many of the ethnicities in the Americas were Indo-European.

They were basically this warrior class that came down and swept through and essentially populated much of the world. There’s a whole interesting saga there. From there came basically what we know as the Greeks and the Romans, which were kind of evolutions of that.

What he reconstructs is a sort of picture of what life was like, at least in the West, for people in their original social state. The significance of that is that the original social state was living in a state of the absolute imperative for survival, with absolutely no technology—no modern systems, nothing. You’ve got the clothes on your back, whatever you can build with your bare hands.

This predates basically all concepts of technology as we understand them today. These are people under maximum levels of physical survival pressure. What social patterns did they evolve in order to be able to do that?

The social pattern was basically as follows: a 3-part social structure—family, tribe, and city—and zero concept of individual rights and essentially no concept of individualism. You were not an individual; you were a member of your family. A set of families would aggregate into a tribe, and then a set of tribes would aggregate into a city.

The morality was entirely what Nietzsche talks about: master morality, not slave morality. In their morality, anything that was strong was good, and anything that was weak was bad. It’s very clear why that is: strong equals good equals survive; weak equals bad equals die.

That led to what later became known as the master-slave dialectic. 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 not to die? This is the derivation of that moral framework.

Christianity later inverted that moral framework, but the original framework lasted for many thousands of years. There was no concept of individualism. The head of the family had total life-and-death control over the family; the head of the tribe had the same thing, and so did the head of the city.

You were morally obligated to kill members of the other cities on contact. You were morally required to. If you didn’t do it, you were a bad person.

The form of the society was basically maximum fascism combined with maximum communism. It was maximum fascism in the form of 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.

It was maximum hierarchy, but combined with maximum communism: no market economy, so everything gets shared. The point of being in one of these collectives is that it’s collective, and people share. Of course, that limited how large they could get, because the problem with communism is that it doesn’t scale.

It works at the level of a family. It’s much harder to make it work at the level of a country—impossible. Maximum fascism, maximum communism.

It was all intricately tied into their religion. Their religion was in 2 parts: veneration of ancestors and veneration of nature.

The veneration of ancestors is extremely important because the ancestors were the people who got you to where you were. The ancestors were the people who had everything to teach you. Then there was veneration of nature, because, of course, nature is the thing that’s trying to kill you.

Every family, tribe, or city had its ancestor gods, and then it had its nature gods.

Fast-forward to today: we live in a world that is radically different. The book takes you through what happened from that point through the Greeks and Romans to Christianity. It’s very helpful to think in these terms because the conventional view of progress through time is that we are—the cliché is—the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.

Or there’s so-called Whig history, which is that the arc of progress is positive. What you hear all the time, what you’re taught in school, is that every year that goes by, we get better and better, more and more moral, more and more pure, and a better version of ourselves.

Our Indo-European ancestors would say, “Oh, no. You people have fallen to shit. You took all of the principles of your civilization, and you diluted them down to the point where they barely even matter.”

You’re having children out of wedlock, and you regularly encounter people from other cities and don’t try to kill them. How crazy is that? They would basically consider us to be living an incredibly diluted version of this highly religious, highly cult-like, highly organized, highly fascist, communist society.

I can't resist noting that, as a consequence of going through all the transitions we've been through—going all the way through Christianity and coming out the other end of Christianity—Nietzsche declares, “God is dead.” We're in a secular society that still has tinges of Christianity, but largely prides itself on no longer being religious in that way. We, being the sort of most fully evolved, modern, secular expert scientists and so forth, have basically re-evolved, or fallen back on, the exact same religious structure that the Indo-Europeans had: specifically, ancestor worship, which is identity politics, and nature worship, which is environmentalism.

So we have actually worked our way all the way back to their cult religions without realizing it. It just goes to show that, in some ways, we have fallen far from the family tree, but in some cases, we're exactly the same.

You kind of described this progressive idea of wokeism and so on as worshiping ancestors.

#458

Identity politics is worshiping 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've recognized it on sight. We somehow think it's super socially progressive.

Yeah. And it is not. I mean, I would say obviously not. Get nuanced, which is where I think you're headed. Is the idea that you can 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 Year Zero under Pol Pot, and death follows. Obviously, the Soviets tried that. 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.

On the one hand, there's a deeply important role for tradition. The way I think about that is as a process of evolutionary learning, right? Tradition ought to be the distilled wisdom of all. This is what Indo-Europeans thought about: It should be the distilled wisdom of everybody who came before you—all those important and powerful lessons learned. That's why I think it's fascinating to go back and study how these people lived, because 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 mired in tradition to the point of not being able to progress. In fact, you might even say globally that's the default human condition, which is that a lot of people are in societies in which there's absolute seniority by age. In the US, for some reason, we decided kids are in charge of everything, right? They're the trendsetters, and they're allowed to set all the agendas, set all the politics, and set all the culture. Maybe that's a little bit crazy.

But in a lot of other cultures, kids have no voice at all and no role at all, because it's the old people who are in charge of everything. 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?

What I would say is that there's a real downside to full traditionalism. It's communitarianism, ethnic particularism, ethnic chauvinism, and an incredible level of resistance to change. It just doesn't get you anywhere. It may be good and fine at the level of an individual tribe, but as a society living in the modern world, you can't evolve, you can't advance, and you can't participate in all the good things that have happened. I think it's probably one of those things where extremists on either side are probably a bad idea, but this needs to be approached in a sophisticated and nuanced way.

So, the beautiful picture you painted of the roaring ’20s: How can the Trump administration play a part in making that future happen?

#458

Yeah, so look, a big part of this is getting the government boot off the neck of the American economy, the American technology industry, and the American people. Again, this is a replay of what happened in the ’60s and ’70s, which is that, for what started out, I'm sure, as good and virtuous purposes, we ended up both then and now with what I describe as a form of soft authoritarianism.

The good news is it's not like a military dictatorship. It's not like you get thrown into Lubyanka. For the most part, it's not coming at 4:00 in the morning. You're not getting dragged off to a cell. So it's not hard authoritarianism, but it is soft authoritarianism. It's this incredible suppressive blanket of regulations and rules, this concept of a vetocracy, right? What's required to get anything done? You need to get 40 people to sign off on anything, and any one of them can veto it. That's how our political system works.

Then there's this general idea that progress is bad, technology is bad, capitalism is bad, 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. It's just this grinding repression.

Then it's coupled with specific government actions, such as censorship regimes and debanking, and draconian, deliberately kneecapping critical American industries and then patting yourselves on the back for doing it. Or having these horrible social policies, like, “Let's let all the criminals out of jail and see what happens,” right?

We've just been through this period—I call it a demoralization campaign—where, 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.” 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.

Just relieving that and getting back to a reasonably optimistic, constructive, pro-growth frame of mind—there's so much pent-up energy and potential in the American system that alone is going to, I think, cause growth and spirit to take off. Then there are a lot of things proactively that could be done.

So how do you relieve that? To what degree has the thing you describe ideologically permeated government and permeated big companies?

#458

Disclaimer first, which is that 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, the staffing supports it, and all the conversations are consistent with the new administration. 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. So they're going to move, I think, quickly on a whole bunch of stuff. You can already feel a shift in the national spirit, or at least—let's put it this way—I feel it for sure in Silicon Valley.

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 in public that the scope and speed of the changes are reflective of a lot of these shifts. I would say that the same conversation, those same kinds of things, are happening throughout the industry. The tech industry itself, whether people were pro-Trump or anti-Trump, there's just a giant vibe shift, a mood shift, that's kicked in already.

I was with a group of Hollywood people about 2 weeks ago, and they were still people who, at least vocally, were very anti-Trump. But I said, “Has anything changed since November 6th?” They immediately said, “Oh, it's completely different. It feels like the ice has thawed. Woke is over.” They said that all kinds of projects are going to be able to get made now that couldn't before, and that Hollywood's going to start making comedies again. There was just an incredible immediate environmental change.

As I talk to people throughout the economy, certainly throughout the economy, and people who run businesses, I hear that all the time: This last 10 years of misery is just over. The one that I'm watching that's really funny—I mean, Meta's getting a lot of attention, but the other funny one is BlackRock. I don't know him, but I've watched for a long time.

Larry Fink, who's the CEO of BlackRock, was first in as a major investment CEO on every dumb social trend and rule set—every retarded thing you can imagine.

Yeah.

#458

Every ESG initiative and every possible saddling of companies with every aspect of these crazed ideological positions. He was coming in and literally had aggregated together trillions of dollars of shareholdings that were his customers’ assets. He seized the voting control of their shares and was using it to force all these companies to do this crazy ideological stuff. He was the Typhoid Mary of all this stuff in corporate America.

In the last year, he has been backpedaling from that stuff as fast as he possibly can. I saw an example last week: he pulled out of the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, or whatever the corporate net-zero alliance was. He pulled out of the crazy energy stuff, so he’s backing away as fast as he can. Remember Richard Pryor’s backwards walk? Richard Pryor had this way where he could back out of a room while looking like he was walking forward.

He’s even doing that, and the whole thing is happening in many areas. I don’t know if you saw, but the court recently ruled that NASDAQ’s crazy board-of-directors composition rules were invalid. One of the funniest moments of my life was when my friend Peter Thiel and I were on the Meta board and these NASDAQ rules came down mandating diversity on corporate boards. We sat around the table and had to figure out which of us counted as diverse. The very professional attorneys at Meta explained, with a 100% completely straight face, that Peter Thiel counted as diverse by virtue of being LGBT.

And this is a guy who literally wrote a book called The Diversity Myth.

Yeah.

#458

He literally looked like he’d swallowed a live goldfish.

Yeah.

#458

This was imposed by NASDAQ, your stock exchange imposing this stuff on you, and then the Court of Appeals just nuked that. These things are basically being ripped down one by one. What’s on the other side of it is finally being able to get back to everything everybody always wanted to do: run their companies, have great products, have happy customers, succeed, achieve, outperform, and work with the best and the brightest without being made to feel bad about it. I think that’s happening in many areas of American society.

It’s great to hear that Peter Thiel is fundamentally a diversity hire.

#458

Well, it was very—Peter, of course, is publicly gay and has been for a long time, but there are other men on the board, right? We’re sitting there and we’re all looking at it, and we’re like, “All right, LGBT,” and we keep coming back to the B, right? I’m willing to do a lot for this company, but—

It’s all about sacrifice for diversity.

#458

Well, yeah. And then it’s like, okay, is there a test?

Right. How do you prove it?

#458

The questions that got asked, you know.

What are you willing to do for the greater good?

#458

I’ve become very good at asking lawyers completely absurd questions with a totally straight face.

And do they answer with a straight face, like lawyers?

#458

Sometimes.

Okay.

#458

I think, in fairness, they have trouble telling when I’m joking.

So you mentioned the Hollywood folks, maybe people in Silicon Valley, and the vibe shift. Maybe you can speak to preference falsification. What do they actually believe? What percentage of them actually hate Trump? What percentage of them are feeling this vibe shift and are interested in creating the Roaring ’20s in the way they’ve described?

#458

First, we should maybe talk about the population. There’s all of Silicon Valley, and the way to measure that is just to look at voting records. What that shows consistently is that Silicon Valley has, for my entire time there, been overwhelmingly Democrat. The other way to look at that is political donation records. Again, 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 can maybe talk about the fire later, but I can tell you there’s a very big question about what’s happening in Los Angeles right now. I don’t want to get into the fire, but it’s catastrophic. 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.

Even in San Francisco, there was a big shift to the right in the voting in 2024. We’ll see where that goes, but you observe that by just looking at the numbers over time. The part that I’m more focused on is—I don’t know how to exactly describe this—but it’s the top 1,000 or the top 10,000 people. I don’t have a list, but it’s all the top founders, top CEOs, top executives, top engineers, top VCs, and then down into the ranks: the people who built and run the companies.

I don’t have numbers, but I have a much more tactile feel for what’s happening. The big thing I’ve now come to believe is that the idea that people have beliefs is mostly wrong. I think most people just go along, and I think even most high-status people just go along. Maybe the highest-status people are the most prone to just go along because they’re the most focused on status.

One of the great forbidden philosophers of our time is the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Amidst his madness, he had this extremely interesting articulation. He was an insane lunatic murderer, but he was also a Harvard super-genius. Not that those are in conflict.

Shots fired, man.

#458

He was a very bright guy, and he did this whole thing where he talked a lot about leftism. He was basically very right-wing, and he had this great concept that’s just stuck in my mind ever since I read it: he called it oversocialization. Most people are socialized. We live in a society, and most people learn how to be part of a society. They give some deference to society.

There’s something about modern Western elites where they’re over-socialized and overly oriented toward what other people like themselves think and believe. You can get a real sense of that if you have a little bit of an outside perspective, which I do as a consequence of where I grew up. Even before I had the views that I have today, there was always this weird thing where I thought, “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 5 years ago?”

Why does everybody snap into agreement every step of the way? That was true when I came to Silicon Valley, and it’s just as true today, 30 years later. I think most people are literally taking their cues from some combination of the press, the universities, and the big foundations. Basically, it’s The New York Times, Harvard, the Ford Foundation, and a few CEOs, a few public figures, and maybe the president if your party is in power.

Whatever that is—everybody who’s sort of good and proper and elite and in good standing and in charge of things, a correct member of coastal American society—everybody just believes those things. The 2 interesting things about that are, number 1, there’s no divergence among the organs of power. 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 Microsoft believe the exact same thing.

Those things change over time, but there’s never conflict in the moment. 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. I think we in the Valley are on the tail end of that, in the same way Hollywood is on the tail end of that, in the same way New York is on the tail end of that, and in the same way the media is on the tail end of that.

It’s like some sort of collective hive-mind thing. I just go through that to say that 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—are sitting there thinking, basically, “I have rock-solid beliefs.” They probably think they have rock-solid beliefs, but they don’t actually have some inner core of rock-solid beliefs. Then they watch reality change around them and try to figure out how to keep their beliefs correct. I don’t think that’s what happens.

I think what happens is that they conform to the belief system around them, and most of the time, they're not even aware that they're basically part of a herd.

Is it possible that beneath the surface chatter of dinner parties, there is turmoil of ideas, thoughts, and beliefs going on, but you're just talking to people really close to you or in your own mind, and the socialization happens at the dinner parties? When you go outside the inner circle of 1, 2, 3, or 4 people who you really trust, then you start to conform. But inside there, inside the mind, there is an actual belief or a struggle, a tension within.

#458

So look, I'll just tell you what I think: 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 idea, 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—or it's like a real-life social network.

There's a secret handshake, which is like, okay, you meet somebody and you know each other a little bit, but not well. You're both trying to figure out if you can talk to the other person openly or whether you have to be fully conformist. It's a joke. Somebody cracks a joke, right? If the other person laughs, the conversation is on. If the other person doesn't laugh, back slowly away from the scene: "I didn't mean anything by it."

Yep.

#458

Right. And it doesn't have to be a super-offensive joke. It just has to be a joke that's up against the edge of one of the—I'll use the Sam Bankman-Fried term—one of the shibboleths. It has to be up against one of the things that you're absolutely required to believe at the dinner parties.

At that point, what happens is you have a peer-to-peer network, right? You have a one-to-one connection with somebody, and then you have your own little conspiracy of thought criminality. You've probably been through this: you have your network of thought criminals, and then they have their network of thought criminals. Then you have this delicate mating dance as to whether you should bring the thought criminals together, right?

And the fundamental mechanism of the dance is humor.

#458

Yeah, it's humor. Of course.

Memes, yeah.

#458

For 2 reasons. Number 1, humor is a way to have deniability, right? Humor is a way to discuss serious things while having deniability: "Oh, I'm sorry. It was just a joke." That's part of it, which is one of the reasons comedians can get away with saying things the rest of us can't, because they can always fall back on, "Oh, yeah, I was just going for the laugh."

Yeah.

#458

But the other key thing about humor is that laughter is involuntary, right? You either laugh or you don't. It's not a conscious decision whether you're going to laugh. Everybody can tell when somebody's fake-laughing, right? Every professional comedian knows this. Laughter is the clue that you're onto something truthful.

People don't laugh at made-up bullshit stories. They laugh because you're revealing something that they either have not been allowed to think about, have not been allowed to talk about, or that's off-limits. All of a sudden, the ice breaks, and it's like, oh, yeah, that's the thing. It's funny, and I laugh.

Of course, this is why live comedy is so powerful: you're all doing that at the same time, so you start to have the safety of numbers. The comedians have the ultimate hack. It's no surprise to me. For example, Joe has been as successful as he has because 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.

Then you've got the question of whether you can join the networks together. You've probably been to this. At some point, there's the alt-dinner-party, the dissident dinner party, and you get 6 or 8 people together and join the networks. Those are the happiest moments of everybody's lives, at least in the last decade, because everybody's just ecstatic. They're like, "I don't have to worry about getting yelled at and shamed for every third sentence that comes out of my mouth, and we can actually talk about real things."

That's the live version of it. The other side of it is the group-chat phenomenon, right? Basically, the same thing played out until Elon bought X and until Substack took off, which were really the 2 big breakthroughs in free speech online.

The same dynamic played out online: you had absolute conformity on the social networks, literally enforced by the social networks themselves through censorship, and also through cancellation campaigns, mobbing, and shaming. But then group chats grew up to be the equivalent of samizdat.

Anybody who grew up in the Soviet Union under communism had the hard version of this, right? How do you know who you can talk to? And then how do you distribute information? Again, that was the hard authoritarian version of this. We've been living through this weird, mutant, soft-authoritarian version, but with some of the same patterns.

And WhatsApp allows you to scale and make it more efficient to build these groups of heretical ideas bonded by humor.

#458

Yeah, exactly. This is the running thing about group chats. It's not even a joke; it's true. Every group chat ends up being about memes and humor. The game of the group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable as you can without actually tripping it, right?

Literally every group chat that I've been in for the last decade, even if it starts in some other direction, ends up becoming an absolute comedy fest. They walk right up to the line, and they're constantly testing it. Every once in a while, somebody will trip the line and people will freak out. It's like, "Oh, too soon. Okay, we have to wait until next year to talk about that." Then they walk it back.

Group chats, as a technological phenomenon, were amazing to see. Basically, number 1, it was the rise of smartphones. Then it was the rise of the new messaging services. Then it was specifically the rise of the combination of WhatsApp and Signal. The reason for that is those were the 2 big systems that did full end-to-end encryption, so you actually felt safe.

The real breakthrough, I think, was disappearing messages, which hit Signal probably 4 or 5 years ago and hit WhatsApp 3 or 4 years ago. The combination of encryption and disappearing messages really unleashed it.

Then there's the fight over the length of the disappearing messages, right? I often get behind on my messages, so I set them to 7-day disappearing messages. My friends are like, "No, that's way too much risk. It's got to be 1 day." Every once in a while, somebody will set it to 5 minutes before they send something particularly inflammatory.

Yeah, 100%. One of the things that bothers me about WhatsApp is the choice between 24 hours and 7 days—1 day or 7 days.

#458

Right.

And I have to have an existential crisis about deciding—

#458

Yes.

—whether I can last for 7 days with what I'm about to say.

#458

Yeah, exactly. Now, of course, what's happening right now is the big thaw, right? The vibe shift. What's happening on the other side of the election is Elon on Twitter 2 years ago, and now Mark with Facebook and Instagram. With the continued growth of Substack and other new platforms that are emerging, I think a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view.

I don't know that everything just shifts back into public, but quite frankly, even if I were opposed to what people are saying—and I'm sure I am in some cases—I would still argue that it's net better for society that those things happen in public instead of private.

Do you really want—yeah. Does she want to know?

Yeah.

#458

And then it's just, look, I think it's clearly much healthier to live in a society in which people are not literally scared of what they're saying.

I mean, to push back, to come back to this idea that we're talking about, I do believe that people have beliefs and thoughts that are heretical—like, a lot of people. I wonder what fraction of people have that. To me, preference falsification is really interesting. What is the landscape of ideas that human civilization has in private compared to what's out in public? The dynamical system that is the difference between those 2 is fascinating.

Throughout history, the fall of communism and multiple regimes throughout Europe is really interesting, because everybody was following the line until they weren't. But for sure, privately, there were a huge number of boiling conversations happening: this is the bureaucracy of communism, the corruption of communism, all of that was bothering people more and more and more. Then all of a sudden, there's a trigger that allows the vibe shift to happen.

To me, the interesting question here is: What is the landscape of private thoughts and ideas and conversations happening under the surface of Americans? Especially, my question is, how much dormant energy is there for this roaring ’20s? People saying, “No more bullshit. Let's get shit done.”

#458

Yeah, so we'll go through the theory of preference falsification.

Yes. By the way, amazing. The books on this are fascinating.

#458

Yeah. This is one of the all-time great books. It's a 20- or 30-year-old book, but it's completely modern and current in what it talks about, as well as being very deeply historically informed. It's called “Private Truths, Public Lies,” and it's written by a social science professor named Timur Kuran at, I think, Duke. It's the definitive work on this.

He has this concept he calls preference falsification. You get it from the title of the book, “Private Truths, Public Lies.” 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. The commonality there is that in both cases, you're lying. You believe something internally, and then you're lying about it in public.

There are two classic forms of it. There's the, “I believe communism is rotten, but I can't say it” version of it. But then there's also the famous parable—the real-life example, the thing that Václav Havel talks about in the other good book on this topic, “The Power of the Powerless.” He was an anti-communist resistance fighter who ultimately became the president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Wall.

He wrote this book, and he describes the other side of this, which is, “Workers of the world, unite!” He describes what he calls the parable of the greengrocer. Your greengrocer in Prague in 1985 has had, for the last 50 years, an absolutely mandatory sign in the window of his store that says, “Workers of the world, unite!”

It's 1985, and it is crystal clear that the workers of the world are not going to unite. Of 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. The secret police are going to come by, and they're going to get you.

The first thing you do when you get to the store is put that slogan in the window and make sure that it stays in the window all day long. But he says the thing is, every single person—the greengrocer—knows the slogan is fake. He knows it's a lie. Every single person walking past the slogan knows that it's a lie. Every single person walking past the store knows that the greengrocer is only putting it up there because he has to lie in public.

The greengrocer has to go through the humiliation of knowing that everybody knows he's caving into the system and lying in public. It turns into a demoralization campaign. 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: “Fuck you, you will comply.” It's compliance with the regime.

Anyway, that's the other side of that. Of course, we have lived through a lot of both of those in the last decade. 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 simply not true. I'll let the audience speculate on their own group chats.

Send Marc your memes online as well, please.

#458

Yes, exactly. So it's the two sides of that: “Private Truths, Public Lies.” What preference falsification does is extend that from the idea of the individual's experience to the idea of the entire society experiencing it.

This gets to your percentages question. What happens in a society in which people are forced to lie in public about what they truly believe? First, individually, they're lying in public, and that's bad. But the other thing that happens is they no longer have an accurate gauge, or any way at all, to estimate how many people agree with them.

This is how you get something like the communist system. You end up in a situation in which 80, 90, or 99% of a society can all be thinking individually, “I really don't buy this anymore. 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.”

Because of the suppression and censorship, you have no way of knowing how many other people agree with you. 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. If 90% of the people agree with you, you're going to win the revolution. The question of what the percentage actually is becomes a really critical question.

Basically, in any sort of authoritarian system, you can't run a survey to get an accurate result. You actually can't know until you put it to the test. What he describes in the book is that it's always put to the test in the same way.

This is exactly what's happened for the last 2 years—100% exactly what's happened. It's straight out of this book. Somebody—Elon—sticks his hand up and says, “The workers of the world are not going to unite.”

Yeah.

#458

Or, “The emperor is actually wearing no clothes,” that famous parable. One person stands up and does it, and literally that person is standing there by themselves, while everybody else in the audience is thinking, “I wonder what's going to happen to that guy?”

But again, nobody knows. Elon doesn't know. The first guy doesn't know. Other people don't know which way this is going to go. It may be that this is a minority position, and that's the way to get yourself killed. Or it may be that this is a majority position, and you are now the leader of a revolution.

Basically, what happens is that the first guy does that and doesn't get killed. A lot of the time, that guy does get killed, but when he doesn't get killed, a second guy pops his head up and says the same thing. Now you've got 2. Two leads to 4, 4 leads to 8, 8 leads to 16.

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. Then it rips. What happens is, if it turns out that you had a large percentage of the population that actually believed the different thing, all of a sudden everybody has this giant epiphany that says, “Oh, I'm actually part of the majority.”

At that point, you're on the freight train to revolution. It is rolling.

Now, the other part of this is the distinction between the role of the elites and the masses. Here, the best book is “The True Believer,” the Eric Hoffer book. The nuance you have to put on this is that 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. There's also this giant role played by the masses. The masses are not necessarily thinking these things through in the same intellectualized, 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.

When you really get the revolution is when you get the elites lined up with the masses—when either the current elites change or a new set of counter-elites comes along and says, “No, there's actually a different, better way to live.” Then the people decide to follow the counter-elite. That's the other dimension to it. Of course, that part is also happening right now.

Again, case study one of that would be Elon, who turns out to have a truly massive following.

And he has done that over and over in different industries—not just saying crazy shit online, but saying crazy shit in the realm of space, in the realm of autonomous driving, in the realm of AI, just over and over and over again. It turns out saying crazy shit is one of the ways to do a revolution and to actually make progress.

#458

Yeah. But then there's the test: Is it crazy shit, or is it the truth?

Yeah.

#458

Right. There are many specific things about Elon's genius, but one of the really core ones is an absolute dedication to the truth. When Elon says something, it sounds like crazy shit, but in his mind, it's true.

Now, is he always right? No. Sometimes the rockets crash; sometimes he's wrong. He's human, 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—is that 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 are 2 guys I know who are 100% consistent like that: Elon and Trump. (Both laugh.)

Yeah.

#458

Whatever you think of them.

Yeah.

#458

What they say in private is 100% identical to what they say in public. They're completely transparent and completely honest in that way, right? Again, it's not like they're perfect people, but they're honest in that way.

It makes them potentially very powerful leaders, as they have been, of these movements, because they're both willing to stand up and say the thing that, if it's true, turns out to be the thing that many, most, or almost everyone else actually believes, but nobody was willing to say out loud. So they can actually catalyze these shifts.

I think this framework is exactly why Trump took over the Republican Party. Trump stood up there onstage with all these other conventional Republicans, and he started saying things out loud that it turned out the base was either already believing or prone to believe, and he was the only one who was saying them. So again: elite, masses. He was the elite; the voters were the masses, and the voters decided, “No, no more Bushes. We're going this other direction.”

That's the mechanism of social change. What we just described is the actual mechanism of social change. It is fascinating to me that we have been living through exactly this. We've been living through everything exactly as Timur Kuran describes, everything that Václav Havel described—black squares on Instagram, the whole thing.

We've been living through the true-believer elites-and-masses thing, with a set of incredibly corrupt elites wondering why they don't have the loyalty of the masses anymore, and a set of new elites that are running away with things. We're living through this incredible applied case study of these ideas.

If there's a moral of the story, it is fairly obvious: it's 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 to be good people. That is just not a good state to be in.

So one of the ways to avoid that in the future, maybe, is to keep the delta between what's said in private and what's said in public small.

#458

Yeah. This is sort of the siren song of censorship: we can keep people from saying things, which means we can keep people from thinking things.

Yeah.

#458

That may work for a while, right? The hard form is the Soviet Union owning a mimeograph. Before photocopiers, there were mimeograph machines that were used to make samizdat and underground newspapers, which was the mechanism of written communication for radical ideas. Ownership of a mimeograph machine was punishable by death, right? That's the hard version.

The soft version is somebody clicks a button in Washington and you are erased from the internet. Good news, you're still alive. Bad news is, shame about not being able to get a job. Too bad your family now hates you and won't talk to you. Whatever the version of cancellation has been.

Does that work? Maybe it works for a while. It worked 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.

Your question was, what are the percentages? What's the breakdown? My rough guess, just based on what I've seen in my world, is something like 20-60-20.

You've got 20% who are true believers in whatever is the current thing. You have 20% of people who are true believers in whatever is in The New York Times, Harvard professors, and the Ford Foundation. They're just believers. Maybe it's 10%, maybe it's 5%, but let's say, generously, it's 20%.

Then you've got, let's call it, 20% on the other side who are saying, “No, I'm not on board with this. This is crazy. I'm not signing up for this.” But they view themselves as being in a small minority, 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%.

You've got this large middle of people. It's not that the people in the middle aren't smart or anything like that. They just have normal lives. They're trying to get by, go to work each day, do a good job, be a good person, raise their kids, and have a little bit of time to watch the game. They're just not engaged in the cut and thrust of political activism or any of this stuff. It's just not their thing.

But that's where the oversocialization comes in. By default, the 60% will go along with the 20% of the radical revolutionaries, at least for a while. Then the counter-elite is in this other 20%. Over time, they build up a theory, a network, an ability to resist, a new set of representatives, and a new set of ideas.

At some point, there's a contest. The question is, what happens in the middle? What happens in the 60%? It's not even really, “Do the 60% change their beliefs?” It's more like, “What is the thing that 60% now decides to basically fall into step with?”

I think that, in the Valley, the 60% decided to be woke for the last decade and, I would say, extremely on edge about a lot of things. That 60% is pivoting in real time. They're just done. They've had it.

I would love to see where that pivot goes, because there are internal battles happening right now, right?

#458

So this is the other thing. There are 2 forms of things, and Timur Kuran—Professor Kuran—has talked about this.

One is that this is the kind of unwind where you're going to have people in the other direction. You're going to have people who claim that they supported Trump all along, who actually didn't.

Right.

#458

It's going to swing the other way. Trump's not the only part of this, but he's a convenient shorthand for a lot of it. Whatever it is, you'll have people who say, “I never supported DEI,” or “I never supported ESG,” or “I never thought we should have canceled that person,” when of course they were a full-on part of the mob at that moment.

You'll have preference falsification happening in the other direction. His prediction, I think, basically is that you'll end up with the same “problem” on the other side. Now, will that happen here? I don't know. How far is American society willing to go on any of these things? I don't know. But there is some question there.

The other part of it is that now you have this elite that is used to being in power for the last decade. Many of those people are still in power, and they're in very important positions. The New York Times is still The New York Times, and Harvard is still Harvard. Those people haven't changed at all. There are bureaucrats in the government, senior Democratic politicians, and so forth.

They're sitting there right now feeling like reality has just smacked them hard in the face, because they lost the election so badly. But now, specifically, the Democratic Party is going into a civil war. That form of the civil war is completely predictable, and it's exactly what's happening.

Half of them are saying, “We need to go back to the center. We need to deradicalize, because we've lost the people. We've lost the people in the middle, so we need to go back to the middle in order to be able to get 50% plus 1 in an election.”

The other half are saying, “No, we weren't true to our principles. We were too weak, 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.” That right now is a real fight.

If I could tell you a little personal story that breaks my heart a little bit, there's a professor—a historian, I won't say who—whose work I admire deeply and love. He's a kind of heretical thinker.

We were talking about doing a podcast, and he eventually said, “You know what? At this time, given your guest list, I just don't want the headache of being in the faculty meetings at my particular institution.”

I asked, “Who are the particular figures on this guest list?” He said, “Trump.” The second one, he said, “You announced your interest in talking to Vladimir Putin.” So he said, “I just don't want the headache.”

Now, I fully believe it would surprise a lot of people if I said who it is. This is a person who's not bothered by the guest list. I should also say that 80-plus percent of the guest list is left wing. Nevertheless, he just doesn't want the headache.

And that speaks to the thing that you've kind of mentioned, that you just don't want the headache. You just want to have a pleasant morning with some coffee and talk to your fellow professors. I think a lot of people are feeling that in universities and in other contexts, in tech companies. I wonder if that shifts, and how quickly that shifts.

The percentages you mentioned—20, 60, 20—matter, and the contents of the private groups matter, and the dynamics of how that shifts matter. It's very possible that nothing really changes in universities and in major tech companies. There's a kind of excitement right now for potential revolution and these new ideas, these new vibes to reverberate through these companies and universities, but it's possible the wall will hold.

#458

Yeah. So he's a friend of yours. I respect that you don't want to name him. I also respect that you don't want to beat on him, so I would like to beat on him on your behalf. Does he have tenure?

Yes. He should use it.

#458

So this is the thing, right? This is the ultimate indictment of the corruption and the rot at the heart of our education system, at the heart of these universities. It's, by the way, across the board—all the top universities.

The siren song of the tenure system, what it's been for 70 years or whatever, the peer-review system, the tenure system, is: 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? Then you can do your work and your research and your speaking and your teaching without fear of being fired, without fear of being canceled. Academic freedom.

Think of the term “academic freedom,” and then think of what these people have done to it. It's gone. That entire thing was fake and is completely rotten. 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.

What's the inkling of hope in this? What can give this particular person and others who hear this strength, inspiration, and courage?

#458

That the population at large is going to realize the corruption in their industry and it's going to withdraw the funding?

It's okay. So, desperation.

#458

No, no, no, no, no. Think about what happens next. Let's go through it. The universities are funded by 4 primary sources of federal funding. The big one is a federal student loan program, which is in the many trillions of dollars at this point, and it's only spiraling way faster than inflation. That's number 1.

Number 2 is federal research funding, which is also very large. You probably know that when a scientist at a university gets a research grant, the university rakes as much as 70% of the money for central uses.

Yeah.

#458

Number 3 is tax exemption at the operating level, which is based on the idea that these are nonprofit institutions as opposed to, let's say, for-profit institutions. Number 4 is tax exemptions at the endowment level, which is the financial buffer that these places have.

Anybody who's been close to a university budget will basically see what would happen if you withdrew those sources of federal taxpayer money, and then, for the state schools, the state money: They all instantly go bankrupt. Then you could rebuild. Then you could rebuild, because the problem right now—the folks at the 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. 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. Federal student loans?

Do you know how universities are accredited for the purpose of getting access to federal student funding? They're accredited by the government, but not directly—indirectly. They're not accredited by the Department of Education. Instead, what happens is, the Department of Education accredits accrediting agencies that are nonprofits that do the accreditation.

Guess what the composition of the accrediting agencies is? The existing universities. They're in complete control. The incumbents are in complete control as to who gets access to federal student loan money. 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, literally, as you know, students getting beaten up on campus for being the wrong religion. They're just wrong in every possible way at this point. And it's all on the federal taxpayer's back.

There is no way, in my opinion, to fix these things without replacing them. There's no way to replace them without letting them fail. By the way, it's like everything in life. In a sense, this is the most obvious conclusion of all time: What happens in the business world when a company does a bad job? They go bankrupt and another company takes its place, right? That's how you get progress.

Of course, below that is what happens in the process of evolution, right? Why does anything ever get better? Because things are tested and tried, and then the things that are good survive. These places have cut themselves off—they've been allowed to cut themselves off—from evolution at the institutional level and evolution at the individual level, as shown by the widespread abuse of tenure. We've just stalled out.

We built an ossified system, an ossified, centralized, corrupt system, where we're surprised by the results. They are not fixable in their current form.

I disagree with you on that. Maybe it's grounded in hope, but I believe you can revolutionize the system from within because I do believe Stanford and MIT are important.

#458

That logic doesn't follow at all. That's Underpants Gnome logic.

Underpants Gnome logic? Can you explain what that means?

#458

Underpants Gnomes' logic. I just started watching a key touchstone of American culture with my 9-year-old, which, of course, is South Park.

Yes.

#458

It is, by the way, a little aggressive for a 9-year-old.

Very aggressive.

#458

But he likes it, so he's learning all kinds of new words. I told him, “You're going to hear words on here that you are not allowed to use.”

I said, “You know how we have an agreement that we never lie to Mommy?”

Yeah.

#458

I said, “Not using a word that you learn in here does not count as lying. Keep that in mind.”

Wow.

#458

And, of course, in the very opening episode, in the first 30 seconds, one of the kids calls the other kid a dildo. Right, we're off to the races.

Yep. Let's go.

#458

“Daddy, what's a dildo?”

Yep.

#458

“Sorry, son, I don't know.”

Yeah.

#458

So, a famous episode of South Park: Gnomes. All the kids basically realize that their underpants are going missing from their dresser drawers. Somebody's stealing the underpants. And it's just like, well, who on earth would steal the underpants? It turns out it's the underpants gnomes.

The underpants gnomes come to town, and they've got this little underground warren of tunnels and storage places for all the underpants. They go out at night, they steal the underpants, and the kids discover the underpants gnomes. They say, “What are you doing? What's the point of this?”

The underpants gnomes present their master plan, which is a 3-part plan: Step 1, collect underpants; Step 3, profit.

Yeah.

#458

Step 2, question mark.

Yeah, yeah.

#458

So you just proposed the underpants gnome—

Yeah.

#458

—which is very common in politics. The form of this in politics is: We must do something.

Yeah.

#458

This is something; therefore, we must do this. But there's no causal logic chain in there at all to expect that it's actually going to succeed, because there's no reason to believe that it will.

And it's the same thing. This is what I hear all the time. I have friends who are on these boards, very involved in these places, and I hear this all the time, which is like, “Oh, these are very important. We must fix them.” Therefore, they're fixable. There's no logic chain there at all.

If there's that pressure that you described in terms of cutting funding, then you have the leverage to fire a lot of the administration and have new leadership that steps up, that aligns with this vision that things really need to change at the heads of the universities. They can put students and faculty first, fire a lot of the administration, and realign and reinvigorate this idea of freedom of thought and intellectual freedom.

Because there is already a framework of great institutions that's there, and the way they talk about what it means to be a great institution is aligned with this very idea that you're talking about.

#458

It’s this meaning: intellectual freedom, the idea of tenure, right? On the surface, it’s aligned; underneath, it’s become corrupted. If we say “free speech” and “academic freedom” often enough, sooner or later, these tenured professors will get brave.

Wait, do you think the universities are fundamentally broken? Okay, so how do you fix it? How do you have institutions for educating 20-year-olds and institutions that host researchers who have the freedom to do epic shit, like research-type shit that’s outside the scopes of R&D departments and inside companies? So how do you create an institution like that?

#458

How do you create a good restaurant when the one down the street sucks?

Right. You invent something new?

#458

You open a new restaurant.

Yeah.

#458

How often in your life have you experienced a restaurant that’s absolutely horrible, poisoning all of its customers, and the food tastes terrible—and then, 3 years later, you go back and it’s fantastic? Charlie Munger, this great investor, had the best comment on this. General Electric was going through all these challenges, and he was asked during a Q&A, “How would you fix the culture at General Electric?”

And he said, “Fix the culture at General Electric?” He said, “I couldn’t even fix the culture at a restaurant.”

It’s insane. Obviously, you can’t do it. Nobody in business thinks you can do that. It’s impossible.

Now, look, having said all that, I should also express this because I have a lot of friends who work at these places and are involved in various attempts to fix them. I hope that I’m wrong. I would love to be wrong. I would love for the Underpants Gnomes step 2 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. It would be fantastic.

My partner and I have done a lot of public speaking on this topic. It’s been intended not just to be harsh, but also to say, “Okay, these challenges have to be confronted directly.” By the way, let me also say something positive. Especially post-October 7, there are a bunch of very smart people who are major donors and board members of these institutions, like Marc Rowan, who are really coming in and trying—legitimately trying, I think—to fix these places.

I have a friend on the executive committee at one of the top technical universities. He’s working overtime to try to do this. Man, I hope they can figure it out. But the counterquestion would just be: Do you see it actually happening at a single one of these places?

I’m a person who believes in leadership. If you have the right leadership—

Right.

The whole system can be changed.

So here’s a question for your friend who has tenure at one of these places: Who runs his university?

You know who I think runs it?

Yeah.

Whoever the fuck says they run it. That’s what great leadership is. A president has that power.

But how does—

The president of a university has the leverage because they can mouth off like Elon Musk can.

Can they fire the professors?

They can fire them through being vocal publicly, yes.

Can they fire the professors?

What are you talking about legally?

Can they fire—

No, they cannot fire the professors.

Then we know who runs the university.

The professors?

Yeah, professors. The professors and the feral students.

You said “feral students?”

The feral students. Yeah. What happens when you’re put in charge of your bureaucracy, where the thing that the bureaucracy knows is that it can outlast you? The thing that the tenured professors at all these places know is that 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. It’s the same thing that the bureaucrats in the Department of Education know. They know the exact same thing. They cannot outlast you.

I mean, it’s the whole thing that—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.

That’s definitely a crisis that needs to be solved. That’s a huge problem. I also don’t like that I’m defending academia here. I agree with you that the situation is dire, but I just think that institutions are important.

I should also add context, since you’ve been grilling me a little bit. You were using restaurants as an analogy, and earlier, offline in this conversation, you said Dairy Queen is a great restaurant. So let’s—

I didn’t say Dairy Queen is a great restaurant.

Let the listener take—

I said Dairy Queen is the best restaurant.

The best restaurant. There you go. So everything that Marc Andreessen is saying today—

I don’t wanna—

Put that into context.

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’re truly delicious—

They’re really fantastic. And they’ll put anything in there you want.

All right—

Okay, so, anyway, let me just close by saying: My friends in the university system, I would just say, “Look, this is 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 because I think there’s been way too much happy talk in these conversations. I’m actually worried, on the other side, that there’s too much happy talk. I think the taxpayers do not understand this level of crisis, and I think if the taxpayers come to understand it, the funding evaporates.

The fuse is going, through no fault of any of ours, and there’s some window of time here to fix this, address it, and justify the money. Normal taxpayers sitting in normal towns, in normal jobs, are not going to tolerate this for that much longer.

You’ve mentioned censorship a few times. Let us, if we can, go deep into the darkness of the past and how censorship mechanisms were used. You’re a good person to speak about the history of this because you were there on the ground floor in 2013 or so at Facebook.

I heard that you were there when they invented, or maybe developed, the term “hate speech” in the context of censorship on social media. Take me through that history, if you can—the use of censorship.

#458

I was there on the ground floor in 1993.

There are multiple floors to this building, apparently.

#458

There are.

Yeah.

I got the first request to implement censorship on the internet, which was in the web browser.

That is fascinating.

Yeah. Actually, in 1992, I was asked to implement a nudity filter.

Did you have the courage to speak up back then?

I did not have any problems speaking up back then. I was making $6.25 an hour. I did not have a lot to lose.

I was asked at the time, and it was, in some sense, a legitimate request. I was working on a research project funded by the federal government at a public university. I don’t think my boss was in any way out of line, but it was, “Yeah, this web-browser thing is great, but could it just make sure not to have any photos of naked people show up?”

But if you think about this for a second, as a technologist, I had an issue. This was before ImageNet, right? 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. Apparently, people are also sensitive about a variety of other body parts.

Yeah.

I politely declined to do this.

For just the technical difficulties of it.

Well, number 1, I actually didn’t know how to do it. But number 2, no, I’m just not building a censorship engine. I’m just not doing it.

In those days, the internet generally was a free-fire zone for everything. Before 1993, the internet was such a specific niche community. It was, like, the million highest-IQ nerds in the world. It actually didn’t have a lot of issues that people were super interested in talking about, like astrophysics, and not very interested in even politics at that time.

So there really wasn’t an issue there. But I didn’t want to start the process.

I think the way to think about this is, first of all, I was involved in this at Facebook. By the way, I’ve been involved with this at Facebook every step of the way. I joined the board there in 2007, so I’ve seen everything in the last almost 20 years, every step of the way.

But I’ve also been involved in most of the other companies over time. I was an angel investor in Twitter. I knew them really well. We were the founding investor in Substack. I was part of the Elon takeover of Twitter, now X. I was an angel at LinkedIn.

We were the funder of Pinterest. We were one of the main investors there, and in Reddit as well. I’ve been in these conversations with all these guys all the way through.

#458

And for quite a while, it was all the same across these companies. So basically, the nuanced view is that, practically speaking, there is no internet service that can have zero censorship. By the way, that also mirrors the fact that there is no country that actually has unlimited free speech either.

The US First Amendment has 12 or 13 formal carve-outs from the Supreme Court over time: incitement to violence, terrorist recruitment, child abuse, child pornography, and so forth. Practically speaking, if you and I are going to start an internet company and have a service, we can’t have that stuff either, right? Because it’s illegal, or it will clearly destroy the whole thing.

So you’re always going to have a censorship engine. Hopefully, it’s not actually in the browser, but you’re going to have it for sure at the level of an internet service. Then what happens is, now you have a system where you can put in rules saying, “We allow this. We don’t allow that.” You have enforcement, and you have consequences.

Once that system is in place, it becomes the ring of power, right? Anybody in that company, anybody associated with that company, or anybody who wants to pressure that company will 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, and Z.”

Basically, that transition happened around 2012 or 2013, when there was this very rapid pivot. I think the kickoff, for some reason, 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.

These were the kids who were in school during the Iraq War and then the global financial crisis. They came out super-radicalized. They came into these companies and immediately started mounting these social crusades to ban and censor lots of things.

Quite frankly, the Democratic Party figured this out. They figured out that these companies were very subject to being controlled, and the executive teams and boards of directors were almost all Democrats. There was tremendous circulation. A lot of Obama people from the first term came and worked in these companies, and a lot of FBI people and other law enforcement and intelligence people came in and worked there. They were all Democrats, for that set.

The ring of power was lying on the table. It had been built, and they picked it up and put it on. Then they just ran. The original discussions were basically always on 2 topics: hate speech and misinformation.

Hate speech was the original one. The hate speech conversation started exactly like you’d expect, which is, “We can’t have the N-word.” The answer is, “Fair enough. Let’s not have the N-word.” Okay, now we’ve set a precedent, right?

Jordan Peterson has talked a lot about this. The definition of hate speech ended up being things that make people uncomfortable. We can’t have things that make people uncomfortable. Of course, people like me who 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? The ring of power is on one hand and not on the other hand. Basically, that began this slide where completely anodyne comments—this is the point Mark has been making recently—completely legitimate comments that could be made on television or on the Senate floor all of a sudden became hate speech that couldn’t be said online.

The ring of power was wielded in grossly irresponsible ways. We could talk about all the stuff that happened there. The other one was misinformation.

There was a little bit of that early on, but of course, it really kicked in with Trump. The hate speech stuff predated Trump by 3 or 4 years. The misinformation stuff was a little bit later, and it was a consequence of the Russiagate hoax.

That was a ring of power that was even more powerful, right? With hate speech, it’s like, okay, at some point, whether something is offensive or not, you can at least have a question as to whether that’s the case. But the problem with misinformation is, is it the truth or not?

What do we know from 800 years or whatever of Western civilization? There are 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.

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. Somehow, the misinformation crusade went from the Russiagate hoax into, “We’re going to use that weapon for whatever we want.”

The culminating moment—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.” Inside these companies, that was the point where, for the first time—this was about 3 years ago—people were like, “Okay, this has spun completely out of control.”

But anyway, that’s how we got to where we are. Basically, that spell lasted, and that complex existed and expanded from around 2013 to 2023.

I think 2 things broke it. One is Substack, 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. They came under intense pressure, including from the press. People tried to beat them to the ground and kill them.

There was intense pressure, by the way, from certain platform companies, basically threatening them. They stood up to it. Sitting here today, they have the widest spectrum of speech and conversation anywhere on planet Earth. They’ve done a great job, and it’s worked. It’s great.

Then obviously Elon, with X, was the hammer blow. The third one now is what Mark is doing at Facebook.

And there are also singular moments. I think you’ve spoken about this, like Jon Stewart going on Stephen Colbert and talking about the lab-leak theory. There are certain moments that just kind of shake everybody up—the right person at the right time. It’s a wake-up call.

So, there, and I will tell you—and I should say, Jon Stewart attacked me recently, so I’m not that thrilled with him—but I would say I’m a long-run fan of Jon 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. I don’t know how broadly this was understood at the time. It was in the news briefly, but I don’t know how many people remember this. I will tell you that, in the rooms where people discussed misinformation and these policies, that was a very big moment. That was probably the key catalyzing moment.

I think he exhibited conspicuous bravery and had a big impact with that. For people who don’t recall what he did, this was in the full-blown period of, “You absolutely must lock down for 2 years. You absolutely must keep all the schools closed. You absolutely must have everybody work from home. You absolutely must wear a mask”—the whole thing.

One of those rules was, “You absolutely must believe that COVID was completely natural. You must believe that.” Not believing that meant you were a fascist, Nazi, Trump-supporting, MAGA, evil QAnon person, right? That was uniform, and it was enforced by the social media companies.

Like I said, that was the peak. Jon Stewart went on the Colbert Show, and I don’t know if they planned it or not, because Colbert looked shocked. I don’t know how much of it was a bit, but Jon Stewart went on there and had one of those “the emperor is wearing no clothes” moments.

He said, “It’s just not plausible that you had the COVID supervirus appear 300 yards down the street from the Wuhan Institute (laughs) of lethal coronaviruses.” It’s just not plausible that you could rule that out.

There was another key moment. The more serious version was, I think, when the author Nicholson Baker wrote a big piece for New York Magazine. Nicholson Baker is one of the great novelists and writers of our time. He wrote the piece and did a complete undressing of the issue.

That was the first legitimate one. There had been alternative and renegade people running around saying this, but they were getting censored all over the place. That was the first one that was in the mainstream press. He talked to all the heretics and laid the whole thing out.

That was a moment. I remember, let’s say, a board meeting at one of these companies after that, where basically everybody looked around the table and was like, “All right, I guess we don’t need to censor that anymore.”

Then, of course, what immediately follows from that is, “Well, wait a minute. Why were we censoring that in the first place?” The downstream conversations—not that day, but afterward—were, “Okay, if we all made such a giant collective mistake censoring that, then what does that say about the rest of our regime?”

I think that was the thread in the sweater that started to unravel it.

I should say it again: I do think that Jon Stewart's appearance and the statement he made were courageous acts.

Yeah, I agree.

I think we need to have more of that in the world. And as you said, Elon, everything he did with X is a series of courageous acts. I think what Mark Zuckerberg did on Rogan a few days ago was a courageous act. Can you just speak to that?

He has become, I think, an outstanding communicator. He's somebody who came in for a lot of criticism earlier in his career on that front. I think he's one of these guys who can sit down and talk for 3 hours and make complete sense.

As you do with all of your episodes, when somebody sits and talks for 3 hours, you really get a sense of somebody, because it's really hard to be artificial for that long. He's now done that repeatedly. He's really good at it.

And then, look, again, I would maybe put him in the third category now. Certainly after that appearance, I would say I would put him up there with Elon and Trump, in the sense that 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. I don't think there's really any discrepancy anymore. I would say he has always taken upon himself a level of obligation and responsibility for running a company the size of Meta and running services that are that large.

I think his conception of what he's doing, which I think is correct, is that he's running services that are bigger than any country. Over 3 billion people use those services. The company has many tens of thousands of employees and many investors, and it's a public company. He thinks very deeply and seriously about his responsibilities.

He has not felt like he has had the complete flexibility that Elon has had. People could argue that one way or the other, but he talked about it a lot. He's evolved a lot. A lot of it was that he learned a lot.

By the way, I'm going to put myself right back up there. I'm not claiming any huge foresight or heroism on any of this. I've also learned a lot. My views on things are very different than they were 10 years ago on lots of topics.

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 well as, or better than, anybody else I know.

The other thing I would just say is that he talked on that show about something very important. 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. That's valid.

But you are under tremendous external pressure as well. 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.

You've got your internal pressures, but you also have the press coming at you. You've got academia coming at you. You've got the entire nonprofit complex and activist complex coming at you.

Then, really critically, he talked about this on Rogan, and all these companies went through this. In the last 5 years especially, you had the government coming at you. That's the really stinky end of the pool, where the government was, in my view, illegally exerting pressure—in flagrant violation of the First Amendment and federal laws on speech—and using coercion and conspiracy to force these companies to engage in activities.

In some cases, they may have wanted to do those things, but in other cases, they clearly didn't want to do them and felt like they had to. The level of pressure—I've known every CEO of Twitter, and they've all had the exact same experience. When they were in the job, it was just daily beatings. They were getting punched in the face every single day, constantly.

Mark is very good at getting physically punched in the face, and—

Getting better and better.

#458

He's very good at taking a punch, and he has taken many, many punches. I would encourage people to have a level of sympathy. These are not kings. These are people who operate under extraordinary levels of external pressure.

I think if I had been in his job for the last decade, I would be a little puddle on the floor. It says a lot about him that he has risen to this occasion the way that he has.

By the way, I should also say that the cynicism is, of course, immediately out there, and it's a legitimate thing for people to say: "Oh, you're only doing this because of Trump," or whatever. But he has been thinking about and working on these things and trying to figure them out for a very long time.

I think what you saw were legitimate, deeply held beliefs, not something that just happened in the moment and could change at any time.

So what do you think it's like to be him and other leaders of companies—to be you—and withstand internal pressure and external pressure? What's that life like? Is it deeply lonely?

#458

That's a great question. Leaders are lonely to start with. This is one of those things where almost nobody has sympathy. Nobody feels sorry for a CEO. Again, legitimately so. CEOs get paid a lot. There's a lot of great things about it, 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. The reason it's a lonely job is because your words carry tremendous weight, you are dealing with extremely complicated issues, and you're under a tremendous amount of personal and emotional stress.

You often end up not being able to sleep well, and you end up not being able to keep up an exercise routine and all those things. You come under family stress because you're working all the time.

My partner Ben was the CEO of our last company before we started the venture firm. He said the problem he had with his family life was that even when he was home at night, he wasn't home, because he was in his head trying to solve all the business problems.

He was supposed to be having dinner with his kids. He was physically there, but he wasn't mentally there. You get that a lot.

The key thing is that you can't talk to people. You can talk to your spouse and your kids, but they don't understand the network in your company. They don't have the context to really help you.

If you talk to your executives, they all have agendas. They can't resist; it's just human nature. 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. Mark has this situation because he has control. It turns out he can talk to his board. Mark talks to us about many things that most CEOs won't talk to their boards about because we literally can't fire him.

In general, including all the CEOs of Twitter, none of them had control, so they could all get fired. You can't talk to board members who are going to fire you. You can't talk to the shareholders because they'll just dump your stock.

Every once in a while, the best-case scenario they have is that they can talk to other CEOs. There are these little organizations where they pair up and do that, so they may get a little bit out of it.

But even that's fraught with peril. Can you really talk about confidential information with another CEO? There's insider-trading risk. It's a very lonely, isolating thing to start with.

Then on top of that, you apply pressure, and that's where it gets painful. Maybe I'll spend a moment on this internal-external-pressure thing.

My general experience with companies is that they can withstand most forms of external pressure as long as they retain internal coherence.

Hmm.

#458

As long as the internal team is really bonded together and supporting each other, you can withstand most forms of external pressure. By that I mean investors dumping your stock, losing your biggest customers, a negative article, a negative headline—you can withstand all that.

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.

What I always look for in high-pressure corporate situations now is the moment when the internal team cracks. I know the minute that happens, we're in a different regime. It's like the solid has turned into a liquid. We're in a different regime, and the whole thing can unravel in the next week.

Then people turn on each other. I guess this is what's happening in Los Angeles right now. 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.

That's what happens inside companies. Somebody like Mark is under profound internal 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. And the final thing I'd say, as I said, is that companies can withstand most forms of external pressure, but not all. Especially—although not the only one—is government pressure. When your government comes for you, any CEO who thinks that they're bigger than their government has that notion beaten out of them in short order.

Can you just linger on that, because it is maybe educating and deeply disturbing? You've spoken about it before, but we're speaking about it again: this government pressure. So you think they've crossed a line into essentially criminal levels of pressure?

#458

Flagrant criminality—felonies, like obvious felonies. And I can actually cite the laws (laughs), but yes, absolute criminality.

Can you explain how those could happen and maybe, on a hopeful note, how we can avoid that happening again?

#458

I'll just start with the fact that a lot of this is now in the public record, which is good, because it needs to be in the public record. There are 3 forms of things that are in the public record that people can look at.

One is the Twitter Files, which Elon put out with a set of journalists when he took over. And I will just tell you, the Twitter Files are 100% representative of what I've seen at every other one of these companies. You can see what happened at Twitter, and you can assume that it happened at these other companies, for the most part, certainly in terms of the kind of pressure that they got. So that's number 1. That's stuff you can just read, and you should if you haven't.

The second is Mark referenced this on the Rogan podcast. There's a congressman, Jim Jordan, who has a congressional committee called the Weaponization Committee. In the last 3 years, they have done a full-scale investigation of this. Facebook produced a lot of documents for that investigation, and many of those have now been made public. You can download those reports, and there are 2,000 pages worth of material in them. That's essentially the Facebook version of the Twitter Files, just arrived at through a different mechanism.

And then third is Mark himself talking about this on Rogan, so I'll just defer to his comments there. But basically, what those 3 forms of information show you is that the government, over time—and then culminating in 2020 and 2021, in the last 4 years—just decided that the First Amendment didn't apply to them. They decided that federal laws around free speech and around conspiracies to take away the rights of citizens just don't apply. They decided that they can arbitrarily pressure companies. They would literally call up companies, threaten and bully them, yell and scream, threaten repercussions, and force them to censor.

There's this whole thing of, “Well, the First Amendment only applies to the government; it doesn't apply to companies.” Well, there's actually a little bit of nuance to that. First of all, it definitely applies to the government. The First Amendment applies to the government 100%. By the way, so do the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, including the right to due process. There was no due process at all for any of the censorship regime that was put in place. There was no due process put in place, by the way, for de-banking either. Those are just as serious violations as the free speech violations.

And so this is just flagrant, flagrant unconstitutional behavior. Then there are specific federal statutes: 18 U.S.C. § 241 and 18 U.S.C. § 242. One of them applies to federal employees, government employees, and the other one applies to private actors in what's called deprivation of rights and conspiracy to deprive rights. 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.

Interestingly, some of those constitutional rights are enumerated, for example, in the First Amendment: freedom of speech. Some of those rights actually do not need to be enumerated. 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.

De-banking qualifies as a right. The right of access to the financial system is every bit as much something that's subject to these laws as free speech. So, yeah, this has happened.

And then I'll just add one final thing, which is that we've talked about 2 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. The companies—there's a very interesting question as to whether they are victims or perpetrators or both. They will defend and argue, and I believe they have a good case, that they are victims, not perpetrators. They're the downstream subjects of pressure, not the cause of pressure.

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 possibly in pretty big trouble. That's all of these third-party censorship bureaus. The one that is most obvious is the so-called Stanford Internet Observatory that got booted up over the last several years. They were basically funded by the federal government to be third-party censorship operations. They're private-sector actors, but acting with federal funding.

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. So I think they're also very exposed on this and have behaved in just flagrantly illegal ways.

So fundamentally, government should not do any kind of pressure, even soft pressure, on companies to censor?

#458

Can't. Not allowed.

It really is disturbing. It probably started soft, lightly, slowly, and then it escalates, as the old will to power will instruct them to do. Yeah, that's why there's protection, because you can't put a check on power for government, right?

#458

There are so many ways that they can get you. There are so many ways they can come at you and get you. The thing to think about here is that, a lot of times, when people think about government action, they think about legislation.

When I was a kid, we were trained: How does government work? There was this famous animated short. The thing we were shown was just a cartoon of how a bill becomes a law. It's like this fancy little bill sneaks along and goes—

“I'm just a bill.” Yeah.

#458

Exactly. It's like, all right, number 1, that's not how it works at all. That doesn't actually happen. We could talk about that. 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 DOGE is very focused on.

Most government rules are not legislated. They're regulated. There are tons and tons of regulations that these companies are subject to and have to comply with. This is another cliché you'll hear a lot: “Oh, private companies can do whatever they want.” It's like, “Oh, no, they can't.” The hammer that comes down when you don't comply with regulations is profound. 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 power gets exercised. Then there's what's called flat-out administrative power, the term that you'll hear. Administrative power is literally the government telling you—calling you and telling you what to do.

Here's an example of how this works. Facebook had this whole program a few years back to do a global cryptocurrency for payments called Libra. They built the entire system, and it was this high-scale, new cryptocurrency. They were going to build it into every product, and there were going to be 3 billion people who could transact with Libra.

They went to the government and tried to figure out how to make it fully compliant with anti-money-laundering requirements and all these controls. They had 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, but if you do, you should know that every aspect of your business is going to come under a greatly increased level of regulatory scrutiny.”

That 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,” right? What is that letter? It's not a law. It's not even a regulation. It's just straight, direct state power.

Then it culminates in literally calls from the White House where they're 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. So what these companies experienced was the full panoply of this. The level of intensity was in that order. Actually, legislation was the least important part.

Regulation was more important, administrative power was more important, and then flat-out demands and flat-out threats were ultimately the most important.

How do you fix it? Well, first of all, you have to elect people who don't do it, right? As with all these things, ultimately the fault lies with the voters. You have to decide: You don't want to live in that regime.

I have no idea what part of this recent election mapped to the censorship regime. I do know a lot of people on the right got very angry about the censorship, but I think it probably at least helped with enthusiasm on that side. Maybe some people on the left will now not want their Democratic nominees to be so pro-censorship.

So the voters definitely get a vote, number 1. Number 2, 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.

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.

On those last 2, I would say that those are both up to the new administration. 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.

Yeah, it's truly disturbing. I don't think anybody wants this kind of overreach of power from government, including perhaps people who are participating in it. It's this dark momentum of power that you just get caught up in. That's the reason there's that kind of protection. Nobody wants that.

#458

So I use the metaphor, the Ring of Power.

Yeah.

#458

For people who don't catch the reference, that's The Lord of the Rings. The thing with the Ring of Power in The Lord of the Rings is, it's the ring that Gollum has in the beginning, and it turns you invisible. It turns out it unlocks all this fearsome power. It's the most powerful thing in the world. It's the key to everything.

Basically, the moral lesson of The Lord of the Rings, which was written by a guy who thought very deeply about these things, is that the Ring of Power is inherently corrupting. The characters at one point are like, “Gandalf, just put on the ring and fix this.” He will not put the ring on, even to end the war, because he knows that it will corrupt him.

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. I think you said something actually quite profound there, which is that the Ring of Power is infinitely tempting. The censorship machine is infinitely tempting. If you have it, you are going to use it. It's overwhelmingly tempting because it's so powerful, and it will corrupt you.

I don't know whether any of these people feel any of this today. They should. I don't know if they do. But you go out 5 or 10 years later, and you would hope that you would realize that your soul has been corroded. You probably started out thinking that you were a patriot and that you were trying to defend democracy, and you ended up being extremely authoritarian, anti-democratic, and anti-Western.

Can I ask you a tough question here? Staying on the Ring of Power, Elon is quickly becoming the most powerful human on Earth.

#458

I'm not sure about that.

You don't think he is?

#458

Well, he doesn't have the nukes.

Nukes. Yeah, there are different definitions and perspectives on power, right?

#458

Yeah.

How can he and/or Donald Trump avoid the corrupting aspects of this power?

#458

The danger is there with power. It's flat-out there. I would say with Elon, we'll see. I would say with Elon—and, by the way, overwhelmingly—I would say so far, so good. I'm extremely, extremely thrilled by what he's done on almost every front for the last 30 years, including all this stuff recently. I think he's been a real hero on a lot of topics where we needed to see heroism.

But look, I would say the case that he has this level of power is some combination of the money and the proximity to the president. Obviously, both of those are instruments of power.

The counterargument to that is, I do think a lot of how Elon is causing change in the world right now—I mean, there are the companies he's running directly, where I think he's doing very well, and we're investors in multiple of them and doing very well. But a lot of the stuff that gets people mad at him is the social and political stuff. It's his statements, and then it's the downstream effects of his statements.

For example, for the last couple of weeks, it's been him weighing in on this rape gang scandal, this rape organized child rape thing in the UK. 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, and it got suppressed. Then Elon brought it up, and all of a sudden there's now, in the UK, this massive explosion of open conversation about it for the first time.

It's this catalyzing event. All of a sudden, everybody's woken up and is saying, “Oh, my God, this is really bad.” There will now pretty clearly be big changes as a result. Elon played the role of the boy who said, “The emperor has no clothes,” right?

But here's the thing, here's my point: He said it about something that was true, right? Had he said it about something that was false, he would get no credit for it. He wouldn't deserve any credit for it. But he said something that was true. By the way, everybody over there instantly was like, “Oh, yeah, he's right.” Nobody seriously said otherwise. They're just arguing the details now.

Number 1, he says true things. So it's like, okay, how far—put it this way: How worried are we about somebody becoming corrupt by virtue of their power, when that power means they get to speak the truth? 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 think we should run this experiment as hard as we can to get people to tell the truth. I don't feel that bad about that.

Then the money side rapidly gets into the money-in-politics question. The money-in-politics question is very interesting 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.

That was a very popular topic of public conversation up until 2016, when Hillary outspent Trump 3 to 1 and lost. You'll notice that money in politics has almost vanished as a topic in the last 8 years. Once again, Trump spent far less. Kamala raised and spent $1.5 billion on top of what Biden had spent. They were at, I don't know, something like $3 billion total, and Trump, I think, spent again like a third or a fourth of that.

The money-in-politics topic has kind of vanished from popular conversation in the last 8 years. It has come back a little bit now that Elon is spending. But again, he's spending, and the data would seem to indicate that, at least in the last 8 years, money doesn't win the political battles. The voters actually have a voice and exercise it, and they don't just listen to ads.

So again, I would say, clearly there's some power there, but I don't know if it's some weapon that he can just turn on and use in a definitive way.

I don't know if there are parallels there, but I could also say, just on a human level, he has a good heart. I interact with a lot of powerful people, and that's not always the case. So that's a good thing there, if we can draw parallels to The Hobbit or whatever. Who gets to put on the ring?

Frodo.

Frodo, yeah.

Yeah. Maybe one of the lessons of The Lord of the Rings is that even Frodo would have been corrupted, right? Nevertheless, you had somebody who could do what it took at the time.

The thing that I find just so amazing about the Elon phenomenon and all the critiques is, the one thing that everybody in our societies universally agrees on, because it's sort of our post-Christian egalitarianism—we live in this post-secularized Christian context in the West now, and we consider Christianity backward, but we still believe essentially all the same things. We just dress them up in fake science.

The one thing that we're all told, that we're all taught from early on, is that the best people in the world are the people who care about all of humanity, right? We venerate all of our figures as people who care about all of humanity. Jesus cared about all of humanity. Gandhi cared about all of humanity. Martin Luther King cared about all of humanity.

It's this universal idea: the person who cares the most about everybody. With Elon, you have a guy who literally talks about this constantly, and he talks about exactly the same thing in private. He is literally operating on behalf of all of humanity to try to get us to a multiplanetary civilization, so that we can survive a strike on any one planet, so that we can extend the light of human consciousness into the universe and have it persist for the good of the whole thing.

#458

And, literally, the critique is, “Yeah, we want you to care about all of humanity, but not like that.” (Both laugh.)

Yeah. All the critics, all the surface turmoil—the critics will be forgotten.

#458

Yeah, I think that’s clear.

You said that we always end up being ruled by the elite of some kind. Can you explain this law, this idea?

#458

So this comes from an Italian political philosopher from about 100 years ago named Robert.... I’m going to mangle it, so I’ll let you pronounce the Italian: Michels or Michels. I learned about it through a famous book on politics, probably the best book on politics written in the 20th century, called “The Machiavellians,” by James Burnham, who has had a big impact on me.

In “The Machiavellians,” he resurrects what he calls the Italian realist school of political philosophy from the 1910s and 1920s. To be clear, this was not a Mussolini thing. These were people who were trying to understand the actual mechanics of how politics works, to get to the mechanical substance of how the political machine operates.

Michels had a concept that ended up being called the iron law of oligarchy. To explain the iron law of oligarchy, let me take a step back and say what he meant by oligarchy, because it has multiple meanings. In classic political theory, there are basically 3 forms of government at the core: democracy, which is rule by the many; oligarchy, which is rule by the few; and monarchy, which is rule by the one.

You can use that as a general framework. Any government you’re going to be under is going to be one of those. That’s just a mechanical observation, without even saying which one is good or bad—a structural observation.

The question Michels asked was, “Is there such a thing as democracy? Is there actually such a thing as democracy? Is there ever actually direct government?” What he did was mount this incredible historical exploration of whether democracies had ever existed in the world. The answer is basically, almost never. We could talk about that.

But the other thing he did was seek out the most democratic private organization in the world that he could find at that point, which he concluded was some basically communist German Social Democratic Party that was wholly devoted to the workers of the world uniting, back when that was the hot thing. He went in there and said, “Okay, this is the organization, out of all the organizations on planet Earth, that must be operating as a direct democracy.”

He went in there and said, “Oh, nope.” There was a leadership class. There were 6 guys at the top, and they controlled everything, and then they led the rest of the membership along by the nose. Of course, that’s the story of every union. The story of every union is always that there’s a Jimmy Hoffa in there running the thing.

We just saw that with the dockworkers’ union, right? There’s a guy, and he’s in charge. By the way, the number 2 is his son, right? That’s not an accident.

The iron law of oligarchy basically says democracy is fake. There’s always a ruling elite, structurally. He said the reason for that is because the masses can’t organize. What’s the fundamental problem? 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.

To be effective in politics, you must organize. 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.

The Greeks and the Florentines had brief experiments in direct democracy, and they were total disasters. In Florence, I forget the name of it. It was called The Workers' Revolt or something like that. There was a 2-year period where they basically experimented with direct democracy during the Renaissance, and it was a complete disaster. They never tried it again.

In the state of California, we have our own experiment on this, which is the proposition system, an overlay on top of the legislature. Anybody who looks at it for 2 seconds concludes it’s been a complete disaster. It’s just a catastrophe, and it’s caused enormous damage to the state.

The presumption that we are in a democracy is, by definition, fake. The good news for the United States is that it turns out the founders understood this. Of course, they didn’t give us a direct democracy; they gave us a representative democracy. They built the oligarchy into the system in the form of Congress, the executive branch, and the judicial branch.

As a consequence, democracy is always and everywhere fake. There is always a ruling elite. The lesson of “The Machiavellians” is that 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 understand that this is what’s actually happening.

And lucky for us, the founders saw this and figured out a way, given that there’s going to be a ruling elite, to create a balance of power among that elite—

#458

Yes.

—so it doesn’t get out of hand.

#458

And it was very clever. Some of this was based on earlier experiments. By the way, these were very, very smart people. They knew tremendous amounts of Greek and Roman history. They knew Renaissance history. In “The Federalist Papers,” they argue this at great length. You can read it all.

They ran one of the best seminars in world history trying to figure this out. They went through all this and thought through it very carefully. I’ll give you an example, which continues to be a hot topic.

One way they did it was through the 3 branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial—the balance of powers. The other way they did it was by echoing what had been done earlier, I think in the UK Parliament. They created 2 different bodies of the legislature: the House and the Senate.

As you know, the House is apportioned on the basis of population, and the Senate is not. The small states have just as many senators as the big states. They made the deliberate decision to have the House get reelected every 2 years, to make it very responsive to the will of the people. They made the decision to have the Senate get reelected every 6 years, so that it had more of a buffer from the passions of the moment.

What’s interesting is that they didn’t choose one or the other. They did them both. To get legislation passed, you have to get through both of them. They built in a second layer of checks and balances.

There are a thousand observations we could make about how well the system is working today, how much it lives up to the ideal, and how much we’re actually complying with the Constitution. There are lots of open questions there, but this system has survived for coming on 250 years, with a country that has been spectacularly successful.

I don’t think any of us would trade the system for any other one. It’s one of the great all-time achievements.

Yeah, it’s incredible. And we should say they were all pretty young relative to our current set of leaders.

#458

They were. Many were in their 20s at the time, and they were 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 nobody ever tested their IQs, but these are the Einsteins of politics. An amazing thing.

But anyway, I go through all that because 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, I think, the way to think about these things.

They were engineers of sorts, not the fuzzy humanities students of sorts.

#458

They were shape rotators, not wordcels. (Laughs.)

I remember that. Wow. That meme came and went. I think you were central to it. You’re central to a lot of memes.

#458

I was.

You’re the meme dealer and the meme popularizer.

#458

That’s true. 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.

Take credit and run with it.

#458

Yep.

If we can just linger on “The Machiavellians,” it’s a study of power and power dynamics, like you mentioned, looking at the actual reality of the machinery of power. From everything you’ve seen now in government, but also in companies, what are some interesting things you can continue to say about the dynamics of power, the jostling for power that happens inside these institutions?

#458

A lot of it—we already talked about this a bit with the universities. You can apply a Machiavellian-style lens to the university. That’s why I posed the question to you that I did: Who runs the university? The trustees, the administration, the students, or the faculty?

The true answer is some combination of the 3 or the 4, plus the donors, by the way, plus the government, plus the press, et cetera. There’s a mechanical interpretation of that. Companies operate under the exact same set of questions.

Who runs a company? 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. 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? Who has more power—the newspaper columnist who makes $200,000 a year, or the CEO who makes $200 million a year? I know for sure that the columnist can get the CEO fired. I’ve seen that happen. I have yet to see a CEO get a columnist fired.

Did anyone ever get fired from the Bill Ackman assault on journalism? (laughs) Bill really showed the bullshit that happens in journalism.

#458

No, because what happens is they wear it as a badge of honor. 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? If they’re doing the right thing, then they are justifiably priding themselves on standing up under pressure. But it also means that they can’t respond to legitimate criticism, and they’re obviously terrible at that now.

As I recall, he went straight to the CEO of Axel Springer, which owns Business Insider. I happen to know the CEO, and I think he’s quite a good CEO. But this is a good example: Does the CEO of Axel Springer run his own company?

There’s a fascinating thing playing out right now. Not to dwell on these fires, but you see that pressure reveals things. If you’ve been watching what’s happened with the LA Times recently, this biotech entrepreneur bought the LA Times, like, whatever, 8 years ago. It was just the most radical social-revolutionary thing you could possibly imagine. It endorsed every crazy left-wing radical you could imagine. It endorsed Karen Bass, it endorsed Gavin Newsom. It was just a litany of all the people who are currently burning the city to the ground. It endorsed every single bad person every step of the way.

He’s owned it the entire time. For the first time, I think he put his foot down right before the November election and said, “We’re getting out of this thing where we just always endorse the Democrat.” I think he said, “We’re not endorsing for the presidency.” The paper flipped out. It was like, “Our billionaire backer…” I don’t know what he spends, but he must be burning $50 or $100 million 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. He’s probably burned another $500 million over the last decade keeping it running, and he probably burns another $50 or $100 million a year to do this. The journalists at the LA Times hate him with the fury of 1,000 suns. They absolutely freaking despise him. They’ve been attacking him, and the ones who can get jobs elsewhere quit and do it. The rest stay and say the worst, most horrible things about him. They constantly want to run stories attacking him.

He’s had this reaction that a lot of people in LA are having right now to this fire and to this incredibly vivid collapse of leadership. All these people that his paper had endorsed are just disasters. He’s on a press tour. He’s basically decided to be the boy who says the emperor has no clothes, but he’s doing it to his own newspaper. (laughs) Very smart guy. He’s basically saying, “Yes, we did all that, and we endorsed all these people, and it was a huge mistake, and we’re going to completely change.”

His paper is in a complete internal revolt. I go through it and think, okay, now we have a very interesting question: Who runs the LA Times? Because for the last 8 years, it hasn’t been him. It’s been the reporters. Now, for the first time, the owner is showing up and saying, “Oh, no, I’m actually in charge.” And the reporters are saying, “No, you’re not.” It is freaking on.

Again, the Machiavellian mindset on this is: How is power actually exercised here? Can a guy who’s super rich and super powerful, who even owns his own newspaper, stand up to a full-scale assault—not only by his own reporters, but by every other journalism outlet that also now thinks he’s the Antichrist?

And he is trying to exercise power by speaking out publicly, so that’s the game of power there.

#458

And firing people.

Firing people. Yeah.

#458

He has removed people and set new rules. I mean, he is now, I think, at long last, actually exercising the prerogatives of an owner of a business, which is deciding on the policies and staffing of the business. There are certain other owners of these publications that are doing similar things right now. He’s the one I know, so he’s the one I can talk about. But there are others that are going through the same thing right now.

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.

And just to stay on journalism for a second, we mentioned Bill Ackman. I just want to put him in the category we mentioned before of a really courageous person. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody so fearless in going after people and following what he believes in publicly. That’s courage. Several things he’s done publicly have been really inspiring—just being courageous.

#458

What do you think is the most impressive example?

Where he went after journalists, whose whole incentive is to—I mean, it’s like kicking the beehive or whatever. You know what’s going to follow, and he did that. That’s why it’s difficult to challenge journalistic organizations: They’re going to use so many mechanisms, including writing articles that get cited by Wikipedia, then driving the narrative, and then they can get you fired—all this kind of stuff.

Bill Ackman, like a bad MFer, just tweets these essays and goes after them legally and also in the public eye. I don’t know. That was truly inspiring. There aren’t many people like that out in public, and hopefully that inspires not just me but many others to be courageous themselves.

#458

Did you know about him before he started doing this in public?

I knew of Neri, his wife, who’s a brilliant researcher and scientist. I admire her, looked up to her, and think she’s amazing.

#458

Well, the reason I ask if you knew about Bill is because a lot of people had not heard of him before, especially before October 7 and before some of the campaigns he’s been running since in public, with Harvard and so forth. But he was very well known in the investment world before that. He was a famous, so-called activist investor—very, very successful and very widely respected for probably 30 years before now.

I bring that up because it turns out they weren’t, for the most part, battles that happened in full public view. They weren’t national stories, but in the business and investing world, the activist investor is a very specific thing. It’s like in the movie “Taken.” It’s a very specific set of skills.

Yeah.

#458

On how to really take control of situations.

Yeah.

#458

And how to wreck the people you’re going up against. There’s been controversy over the years on this topic, and there’s too much detail to go into. But the defense of activist investing, which I think is valid, is that these are the guys who basically go in and take stakes in companies that are being poorly managed or under-optimized.

Generally, what that means—or at least the theory is that it means—the existing management has become entrenched, lazy, mediocre, whatever, and is not responding to the needs of the shareholders. Often, it’s not responding to the customers. The activists basically go in with a minority position, rally support among other investors who are not activists, and then show up and force change.

But they are the aggressive version of this. I’ve been involved in companies that have been on the receiving end.

Oh-oh.

#458

It is amazing how much somebody like that can exert pressure on situations even when they don’t have formal control. So it would be another chess piece on the mechanical board of how power gets exercised.

Basically, what happens is the activists, a large amount of the time, end up taking over control of companies even though they never own more than 5% of the stock. Anyway, with Bill, it’s such a fascinating case because he has that complete skill set.

(laughs)

#458

And he has now decided to bring it to bear in areas that are not just companies. There are 2 interesting things about that. One is that some of these places—and some of these battles are still ongoing—are not used to being up against somebody like this, with infinitely deep pockets and lots of experience in courtrooms and all the things that kind of go with that.

The other is that, through his example, he is teaching a lot of the rest of us the activist playbook in real time. Liam Neeson’s skill set is getting more broadly diffused just by being able to watch and learn from him. I think he’s having a really significant effect. I would put him up there with Elon in terms of somebody who’s really affecting how all this is playing out.

But even skillset aside, just courage.

#458

Yes, including, by the way, the courage to go outside of his own zone.

Yeah.

#458

Right. I'll give you an example. My firm, a venture capital firm, has 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 also has investors, so he worries about that.

And so, a couple of things. One, it's his willingness to go out a bit and risk his relationship with his own investors. But I will tell you the other thing, which is his investors—I know this for a fact—have been remarkably supportive of him doing that. Because, as it turns out, a lot of them actually agree with him. And so it is the same thing he does in his activism campaigns. He is able to be the tip of the spear on something that a lot more people actually agree with.

Yeah. It turns out if you have truth behind you, it helps.

#458

And just again, how I started: a lot of people are just fed up.

You've been spending a bunch of time in Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, helping the new administration in many ways, including interviewing people who might join. So what's your general sense of the talent, of the people who are coming into the new administration?

#458

So I should start by saying that I'm not a member of the new administration. I'm not in the room when a lot of these people are being selected.

I believe you said unpaid intern.

#458

I'm an unpaid intern. So I'm a volunteer, and I help 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 a 4-year gap where he is out of office, and then you have him coming back. And as you'll recall, there was a fair amount of controversy over the end of the first term.

Oh, yeah.

#458

The specific concern was that, as they'll all say, the first Trump administration didn't come in with a team. Most of the institutional base of the Republican Party was made up of Bush Republicans, and many of them had become Never Trumpers. And so they had a hard time putting the team together. And, by the way, they had a hard time getting people confirmed.

If you talk to the people who were there in the first term, it took them 2 to 3 years to get the government in place. And then they only had the government in place for 18 months, and then COVID hit. Then came the aftermath and everything—all the drama and headlines and everything.

The concern, including from some very smart people over the last 2 years, has been: 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? Maybe people got burned out. Maybe they're more cynical now. Maybe they're not willing to go through the drama.

A lot of people in the first term came under withering legal assaults of their own, and some of them went to prison. A lot of stuff happened: lots of investigations, lots of legal fees, lots of bad press, lots of debanking, by the way. A lot of the officials in the first Trump term got debanked, including the president's wife and son.

Yeah, I heard you tell that story. That's insane. That's just insane.

#458

In the wake of the first term, we now take out spouses and children with our ring of power. And so there's this legitimate question as to what the team for the second term will look like.

At least what I've seen, and what you're seeing with the appointments, is that it looks much, much better. First of all, it just looks better than the first term—not because the people in the first term were necessarily not good, but you just have this influx of incredibly capable people who have shown up and want to be part of this, and you just didn't have that the first time.

They're drawing on a much deeper, richer talent pool than they had the first time. And they're drawing on people who know what the game is. They're drawing on people who know what is going to happen, and they're still willing to do it. 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.

And then, second, there's a bunch of people, including people from the first term, who are just 10 years older. They went through the first term and 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 ready to go serve in government. So there's a generational shift happening.

Actually, one of the interesting things about the team that's forming up is that it's remarkably young. Some of the Cabinet members, and many of the second- and third-level people, are in their 30s and 40s, which is a big change from the gerontocracy that we've been under for the last 30 years.

I think the caliber has been outstanding. We could sit here and list tons and tons of people, but the people who are running everything range from the people who are running all the different departments at HHS to the number 2 at the Pentagon, Steve Feinberg, who's an incredible legend in private equity and an incredibly capable guy.

We've got 2 of my partners going in, and I think they're both amazing. Many, many parts of the government have people who are really impressive.

Well, I think one of the concerns is actually that, given the human being that is Donald Trump, there would be more tendency toward, let's say, favoritism versus meritocracy. That there are circles of sycophancy that form. And if you're able to be loyal, never oppose him, and just basically suck up to the president, you'll get a position.

So that's one of the concerns. And I think you're in a good position to speak to the degree to which that's happening versus hiring based on merit and just getting great teams.

#458

Yeah, so look, I would just start by saying that for any leader at that level—any CEO—there's always some risk of that, right? There's always some risk of that. It's like reality naturally warps around powerful leaders.

Of course, good and powerful leaders are very aware of that. Trump, at this point in his life, I think is highly aware of that, at least in my interactions with him. He definitely seems very aware of that.

That's one thing. I would just say that, again, the way to look at that—and, look, like I said, I don't want to predict what's going to happen once this whole thing starts unfolding—but I would just say that, again, it's the caliber of the people who are showing up and getting the jobs, and the fact that these are some of the most accomplished people in the business world and in the medical field.

Jay Bhattacharya is coming in to run NIH. I was actually part of the interview team for a lot of the HHS folks.

Nice. Jay's amazing. I was so happy to see that.

#458

So I literally got to the transition office for 1 of the days of the HHS interviews. I was on 1 of the interviewing teams, and they gave us the sheet at the beginning. I didn't know who the candidates were. I went down the sheet and saw Jay's name, and I almost physically fell out of my chair.

Yeah.

#458

I happen to know Jay, and I respect him enormously. And then he proved himself under extraordinary pressure over the last 5 years.

And he didn't go radical under the pressure. He maintained balance, thoughtfulness, and depth.

#458

Very serious, very analytical, very applied. And yes, 100%. Tested under pressure, he came out of it. The more people look back at what he said and did—none of us are perfect—but he was overwhelmingly insightful throughout that whole period.

We would all be much better off today had he been in charge of the response. He's just an incredibly capable guy. And then he learned from all that, right? He learned a lot in the last 5 years.

So the idea that somebody like that could be head of NIH, compared with the people we've had, is just breathtaking. It's a gigantic upgrade.

Marty Makary coming in to run the FDA is the exact same thing. The guy coming to run the CDC is the exact same thing. I've been spending time with Dr. Oz, and, again, I'm not on these teams. I'm not in the room. But I've been spending enough time trying to help that his level of insight into the healthcare system is astounding.

It comes from being a guy who's been in the middle of the whole thing, talking to people about this stuff, working on it, serving as a doctor himself, and working in medical systems for his entire life. He's like a walking encyclopedia on these things. He's very dynamic, very charismatic, very smart, organized, and effective.

To have somebody like that in there is remarkable. I have, like, 30 of these stories now across all these different positions. And then, to be quite honest, you do the compare-and-contrast with the last 4 years.

And it's not even close: these people are not in the same ballpark. They're just wildly better. Pound for pound, this may be the best team in the White House since—I don't even know—maybe the 1990s, maybe the 1930s, maybe the 1950s. Maybe Eisenhower had a team like this or something. There's a lot of really good people in there now.

Yeah, the potential for change is certainly extremely high. Can you speak to DOGE? What's the most wildly successful next 2 years for DOGE that you can imagine? Maybe also, can you think about the trajectory that's most likely and what kind of challenges it would be facing?

#458

To start by saying, again, I'm not on DOGE. Disclaimer: I'm not a member of DOGE.

We should say there's about 10 lawyers in the room. They're staring. No, I'm just kidding.

#458

So, yeah, 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.

Yeah.

#458

I think the basic outlines are in public, right? It's a time-limited commission. It's not a formal government agency. It's an 18-month, time-limited commission. In terms of implementation, it will advise the executive branch, right? The implementation will happen through the White House, and the president has total latitude on what he wants to implement.

I think about it as 3 streams, or 3 target sets. They're related, but different: money, people, and regulations. The headline number—they put out the $2 trillion number, and there are already disputes over that, and there's a whole question there. But then there's the people thing.

The people thing is interesting because you get into these very fascinating questions. I won't do this to you as a pop quiz, but I do this for people in government as a pop quiz, and I can stump them every time. One is: How many federal agencies are there? The answer is somewhere between 450 and 520, and nobody's quite sure. The other is: How many people work for the federal government? The answer is something on the order of—I forget—4 million full-time employees and maybe up to 20 million contractors, and nobody's quite sure.

There's a large people component to this. There's also a related component, which is: How many of them are actually in the office? The answer is not many. Most of the federal buildings are still empty, right? Then there are questions of, 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.

Then there's the third, which is the regulation thing, right? I described earlier how our system of government is now much more 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.

One thing Elon has already described is that DOGE wants to do broad-based regulatory relief. Trump has talked about this: 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.

But there's also something else that's happened, which is very interesting. There were a set of Supreme Court decisions about 2 years ago that went directly after the idea that the executive branch can create regulatory agencies, issue regulations, and enforce those regulations without corresponding congressional legislation.

Most of the federal government that exists today—including most of the departments, most of the rules, most of the money, and most of the people—is not enforcing laws that Congress passed. Most of it is regulation. The Supreme Court basically said, “Large parts, maybe all, of that regulation that did not directly result from a bill that went through Congress, the way that the Constitution said it should, may not actually be legal.”

The previous White House, of course, was super in favor of big government. They had no desire to do anything based on this. They didn't pull anything back in. But the new regime, if they choose to, could say, “Look, what 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. We have to unwind the regulations, which are no longer legal or constitutional; we have to unwind the spending; and we have to unwind the people.”

That's how you connect the thread from the regulation part back to the money part and back to the people part. They have work going on across all 3 of these threads. They have, I would say, incredibly creative ideas on how to deal with this.

I know lots of former government people who are 100% cynical on this topic. 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 they blow my mind.” All 3 of those areas—they have ideas that are really quite amazing, as you'd expect from the people involved.

Over the course of the next few months, that'll start to become visible. The final thing I would say is that this is going to be very different from attempts like this in the past. There have been other programs like this. The Clinton-Gore administration had one, and there were others before that. Reagan had one. The difference is that this time, there's social media.

One of the reasons people in Washington are so cynical is because they know all the bullshit. They know all the bad spending and all the bad rules. We're adding $1 trillion to the national debt every 100 days right now. That's compounding, and it's now passing the size of the defense department budget. Pretty soon, it's going to be adding $1 trillion every 90 days, then $1 trillion every 80 days, and then $1 trillion every 70 days.

If this doesn't get fixed, at some point we enter a hyperinflationary spiral and become Argentina or Brazil, right? Everybody in D.C. knows that something has to be done, and everybody in D.C. knows for a fact that it's impossible to do anything. They know all the problems, and they also know the sheer impossibility of fixing them.

But I think what the critics are not taking into account is that 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 and completely bypass the cynicism. 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.

Again, if you think about it, this goes back to our Machiavellian structure. You've got democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy: rule of the many, rule of the few, and rule of the one. You could think about what's happening here as a little bit of a sandwich. We don't have a monarch, but we have a president—rule of the one—with some power.

Then we have the people, who can't organize, but they can be informed and aware, and they can express themselves through voting and polling. There's a sandwich happening right now. You've got rule of the one combining with rule of the many. The rule of the many means they do get to vote, right? The people do get to vote, basically.

Then, essentially, you have Congress as this sort of permanent bureaucratic class in Washington, as the oligarchy in the middle. So the White House plus the people, I think, have the power to do all kinds of things here, and I think that's the way I would watch it.

The transparency. Elon, just by who he is, is incentivized to be transparent, show the bullshit in the system, and celebrate the victories. It's going to be so exciting. Honestly, it just makes government more exciting, which is a win for everybody.

#458

These people are spending our money.

Yeah.

#458

These people have enormous contempt for the taxpayer. Here's one of the things you hear in Washington. The first thing you hear is, “This is impossible. They'll be able to do nothing.” Then I walk them through this, and it starts to dawn on them that this is a new kind of thing.

Then they're like, “Well, it doesn't matter because all the money is in entitlements, the debt, and the military.” So you've got this silly, fake-whatever, NPR funding or whatever, and it's a rounding error and it doesn't matter. You look it up in the budget, and it's whatever—$500 million or $5 billion.

It's the charging stations that don't exist. It's the $40 billion of charging stations, and they built 8 charging stations. Or it's the broadband Internet plan that delivered broadband to nobody and cost you $30 billion. What everybody in Washington says is that $30 billion is a rounding error on the federal budget. It doesn't matter.

Who cares if they make it go away? And, of course, any taxpayer is like, “What the fuck?” (Lex laughs.)

What do you mean?

#458

It’s $30 billion.

Yeah.

#458

Right. And then the experts—and the press is in on this, too—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 $3 trillion.

Yeah.

#458

Okay, then there’s the question: Is $30 billion a lot of the federal budget, percentage-wise? No, it’s not. But $30 billion divided by, let’s say, 300 million taxpayers—what’s that math, expert?

$100.

#458

$100 per taxpayer per year. Okay, so $100 to an ordinary person working hard every day to make money and provide for their kids—that’s 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 so you can have a romantic relationship with your wife.

There are 100 things that person can do with $100 that they’re not doing because it’s going to some bullshit program where the money is basically being looted in the form of ridiculousness and graft. The idea that a $30 billion program is not something that is a very important thing to go after is just the level of contempt for the taxpayer—

Yeah.

#458

—is just off the charts. And that’s just one of those programs. There are 100 of those programs, and they’re all just like that. It’s not like any of this stuff is running well. The one thing we know is that none of this stuff is running well. We know that for sure, right?

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?

Okay.

#458

Okay, so Pennsylvania is a wonderful state with a great history. It has cities like Philadelphia that have descended, like other cities, into complete chaos, violent madness, and death. The federal government has just let it happen in these incredibly violent places.

The Biden administration decided that the big, pressing law enforcement thing they needed to do in Pennsylvania was start raiding Amish farms to prevent them from selling raw milk—with armed raids.

Right.

#458

And it turns out it really pissed off the Amish. It turns out they weren’t willing to drive to the polling places because they don’t have cars. But if you came and got them, they would go and vote. And that’s one of the reasons why Trump won.

Anyway, the law enforcement agencies are off working on crazy things. The system’s not working. So you add up—just pick 100 $30 billion programs. All right, now you’re okay. Math major: 100 times 100.

10,000.

#458

$10,000. Okay, $10,000 per taxpayer per year.

But it’s also not just about money. Obviously, money is a hugely important thing, but it’s the cavalier attitude—

#458

Yes.

—that then, in the ripple effect of that, makes it so nobody wants to work in government and be productive. It makes it so that corruption can thrive. It breeds corruption, laziness, and secrecy, because you don’t want to be transparent about having done nothing all year—all this kind of stuff.

And you now want to reverse that so that it will be exciting for the future to work in government, because the amazing thing, if you steelman government, is that you can do things at scale. You have money, and you can directly impact people’s lives in a positive sense at scale. It’s super exciting, as long as there’s no bureaucracy that slows you down—or not huge amounts of bureaucracy that slow you down significantly.

#458

Yeah. So here’s the trick. This blew my mind, because once you open the hellmouth of looking into the federal budget, you learn all kinds of things. There is a term of art in government called impoundment.

If you’re like me, you learned this the hard way when your car has been impounded. The government meaning of impoundment—the federal budget meaning—is different. 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 and says, “We need money X.” Congress does their thing. They come back and say, “You can have money Y.” The money is appropriated by Congress, and the executive branch spends it on the military or whatever they spend it on—or on roads to nowhere, charging stations to nowhere, or whatever.

What’s in the Constitution is that Congress appropriates the money. Over the last 60 years, there has been an additional interpretation of appropriations applied by the courts and by the system, which is that the executive branch not only needs Congress to appropriate X amount of money; the executive branch is not allowed to underspend.

Yeah, I’m aware of this. I’m aware of this.

#458

And so there’s this thing that happens in Washington at the end of every fiscal year, which is September 30, and it’s the great budget flush. Any remaining money in the system that they don’t know how to spend productively, they deliberately spend unproductively—

Yep.

#458

—to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. A president who doesn’t want to spend the money can’t not spend it.

Yeah.

#458

Like, okay, A, that’s not what’s in the Constitution. 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. If you look at this with anything resembling an open mind, you’re like, “All right, this is not what the founders meant.”

And then, number 2, again, we go back to this thing of contempt. Can you imagine 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? It’s just like—I actually think you had a really good point, which is that it’s even unfair to the people who have to execute this.

Yeah.

#458

Right? Because it makes them bad people, and they didn’t start out wanting to be bad people. There is stuff like this—

Yeah, everywhere.

#458

Everywhere. And so we’ll see how far these guys get. I am extremely encouraged by what I’ve seen so far.

It seems like a lot of people will try to slow them down, but, yeah—

#458

For sure.

—I hope they get far.

#458

Yeah.

Another difficult topic: immigration.

#458

Yeah.

What’s your take on the heated H-1B visa debate that’s going on online, and legal immigration in general?

#458

I should start by saying I am not involved in any aspect of government policy on this. I’m not planning to be. This is not an issue that I’m working on or that I’m going to work on. This is not part of the agenda of what my firm is doing. I’m not in the new administration or the government, and I’m not planning to be. So this is purely just personal opinion.

I would describe it as a complex, or nuanced—hopefully nuanced—view on this issue that’s maybe a little bit different from what a lot of my peers have. I thought about this. I didn’t say anything about it all the way through the big 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 where I ended up. So, let’s start with where I ended up: in Silicon Valley.

I have made the pro-high-skilled-immigration argument many, many times—the H-1B argument, many times. In past lives, I’ve been in D.C. 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.

I think that argument is very strong, very solid, and has paid off for the U.S. in many, many ways. We can go through it, but I think it’s the argument everybody already knows. It’s like the stock answer: You take any Silicon Valley person, press the button, and they tell you why we need to brain-drain the world to get more H-1Bs, right? So everybody kind of gets that argument.

So, basically, just to summarize, it’s a mechanism by which you can get super-smart people from the rest of the world, import them in, and keep them here to increase the productivity of U.S. companies.

#458

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, new technologies, and new industries that create many more jobs for Americans—native-born Americans—than would have previously existed.

You’ve got a positive-sum flywheel thing where everybody wins. Everybody wins. There are no trade-offs. It’s all absolutely glorious in all directions. There cannot possibly be a morally right 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, right?

Right.

#458

I mean, that’s the thing. And, like I said, I’ve made that argument many times. I’m very comfortable with that argument. I would say, number 1, 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 benefit every day. I always describe it as working in the United Nations. My own firm, our founders and our companies, the industry, and my friends are just this amazing panoply, this cornucopia, of people from all over the world.

I’ve worked, at this point, with people from—it’s got to be 80 countries or something. Hopefully, over time, it’ll be the rest as well. It’s been amazing, and they’ve done many of the most important things in my industry. It’s been really remarkable.

So that’s all good. And then there’s the practical version of the argument, which is that we are the main place these people get educated anyway, right? The best and the brightest tend to come here to get educated. This is the old Mitt Romney staple: a green card to every—at least maybe not every university degree, but every technical degree. Maybe we could quibble about the sociologist, but the roboticist, for sure.

At least I won you over on something today.

#458

Well, no, I’m exaggerating for effect. I lost you. I had you for half a second. I haven’t gotten to the other side of the argument yet.

Okay, thank you.

#458

So surely, we can all agree that the roboticists should all get green cards. Again, there’s a lot of merit to that, obviously. We want the U.S. to be the world leader in robotics. Step 1 to being the world leader in robotics is to have all the great robotics people, right? Unlike the underpants gnomes, it’s a very straightforward formula.

Yeah.

#458

All right, that’s all well and good, but it gets a little bit more complicated because there’s an argument that’s right underneath that, which you also hear from these same people—and I’ve made this argument myself many times—which is that we need to do this because we don’t have enough people in the U.S. who can do it otherwise, right? We have all these unfilled jobs. We have all these companies that wouldn’t exist. We don’t have enough good founders, engineers, or scientists.

The next version of the argument is that our education system is not good enough to generate those people, which is a weird argument, by the way, because our education system is good enough for foreigners to come here preferentially in a very large number of cases, but somehow not good enough to educate our own native-born people. There are cracks in the matrix that you can stick your fingernail into and wonder about, and we’ll come back to that one.

At least, yes, our education system has its flaws. And then underneath that is the argument that Vivek made, which is that we have cultural rot in the country. Native-born people in the country don’t work hard enough, spend too much time watching TV and TikTok, and don’t spend enough time studying differential equations.

Again, there’s a fair amount to that. There’s a lot of American culture that is frivolous. We have well-documented social issues on many fronts, many things that cut against having a culture of straightforward high achievement, effort, and striving. Anyway, those are the basic arguments.

But then I have this other side of my personality and thought process, which is that I grew up in a small farming town in rural Wisconsin, in the rural Midwest. It’s interesting: there aren’t a lot of people who make it from rural Wisconsin to high tech. So why is that exactly?

I know that I’m an aberration. I was the only person from anybody I ever knew who ever did this. I know what an aberration I am, and I know exactly how that aberration happened. It’s a very unusual set of steps, including many that were just luck.

But there is, in no sense, a talent flow from rural Wisconsin into high tech—not at all. There’s also no talent flow from the rest of the Midwest into high tech. There’s no talent flow from the South into high tech. There’s no flow from the Sun Belt into high tech. There’s no flow from the Deep South into high tech. It’s literally like a blank spot on the map. There’s this whole section of the country where people, for some reason, just don’t end up in tech.

Now, that’s a little 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. These are the people—at least, their ancestors are the people—who built the Second Industrial Revolution, built the railroads, built the telephone network, and built logistics and transportation. I mean, the auto industry was built in Cleveland and Detroit.

At least these people’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents somehow had the wherewithal to build all of these amazing things and invent all of these things. There are many stories in the history of American invention, innovation, and capitalism where people grew up in the middle of nowhere—Philo Farnsworth, who invented television, and tons and tons of others. There are endless stories like this.

Now you have a puzzle. The conundrum is, what is happening in the blank spot on the map? And then, of course, you also can’t help noticing that the blank spot on the map—the Midwest and the South—has also just defined Trump country, the Trump voter base. It’s like, “Oh, well, that’s interesting. How did that happen?”

Either you really, really, really have to believe the very, very strong version of the Vivek thesis, where you have to believe that the whole civilization in the middle of the country and the South is so deeply flawed—either inherently flawed or culturally flawed—that, for whatever reason, people there 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. Would you care to guess what else is happening?

You mean affirmative action?

#458

Affirmative action. Okay. Think about this. This is very entertaining, right? What are the 3 things that we know about affirmative action? It is absolutely 100% necessary. However, it cannot explain the success of any 1 individual.

Right.

#458

Nor does it have any victims at all.

That could explain maybe disproportionate representation, but surely it doesn’t explain why you’re probably the only person in Silicon Valley from Wisconsin.

#458

What educational institution in the last 60 years has wanted farm boys from Wisconsin?

But what institution rejected farm boys from Wisconsin?

#458

All of them. Of course. Okay, so we know this. The reason we know this is because of the Harvard and UNC Supreme Court cases.

This was 3 years ago. These were big court cases. The idea of affirmative action has been litigated for many years and through many court cases. The Supreme Court repeatedly upheld that it was a completely legitimate thing to do.

There are basically 2 categories of affirmative action that really matter. One is admissions into educational institutions, and the other is jobs—getting hired. Those are the 2 biggest areas. The education one is super potent. It’s been a super potent political issue for a very long time. People have written and talked about this for many decades. There are many arguments for why it’s important, and many arguments as to how it could backfire. It’s been this thing.

But the Supreme Court upheld it for a very long time. The most recent ruling—I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t have the exact reference in my head—was a case in 2003 in which 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, we needed to try it for another 25 years.

She was basically sending a message to future Supreme Court justices: if it hasn’t resolved the issues it was 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—the Harvard case and, I think, a University of North Carolina case. What’s interesting about those cases is that the lawyers put a tremendous amount of evidence into the record about how the admissions decisions actually happen at Harvard and at UNC.

It is every bit as cartoonishly garish and racist as you could possibly imagine, because it’s a ring of power. 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.

Up until these cases, it had been a black box where you didn’t have to explain yourself or show your work. What the Harvard and UNC cases did was basically require showing the work. There was all kinds of phenomenal detail.

Number 1, there were text messages in there that will just curl your hair—students being spoken of using crude racial stereotypes that would just make you want to jump out the window.

It’s horrible stuff. But there was also statistical information. The big statistical kicker to the whole thing is that at top institutions, it’s common for different ethnic groups to have different SAT cutoffs that are as wide as 400 points, right? Asians specifically need to perform 400 SAT points higher than other ethnicities in order to actually get admitted into these institutions.

I mean, this is not even about—white people are a part of this, but Asians are a very big part of this. The Harvard case was actually brought by an activist on behalf of the Asian students who were being turned away. It’s the cliché now in the Valley and in the medical community: if you want a super genius, you hire an Asian from Harvard because they’re guaranteed to be freaking Einstein. Because if they weren’t, they were never getting admitted, right?

Almost all the qualified Asians get turned away. They’ve been running this 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, 2 things. Number 1, those Supreme Court cases: the Supreme Court ruled that they can no longer do that.

I will tell you, I don’t believe there’s a single educational institution in America that is conforming with the Supreme Court ruling. I think they’re all flagrantly ignoring it. We could talk about that.

Mostly because of momentum, probably, or what?

They’re trying to make the world a better place. They’re trying to solve all these social problems. They’re trying to have diverse student populations. They’re trying to live up to the expectations of their donors. They’re trying to make their faculty happy. They’re trying to have their friends and family think that they’re good people.

Right.

They’re trying to have the press write nice things about them. It’s nearly impossible for them. To be clear, nobody has been fired from an admissions office for 25 years of prior practices that the Supreme Court has now ruled to be illegal. They’re all the same people under the exact same pressures.

The numbers are moving a little bit, but I don’t know anybody in the system who thinks that they’re compliant with the Supreme Court. Who’s in charge, in the ranking of who rules whom? The universities rule the Supreme Court way more than the Supreme Court rules the universities, right?

Another example of that is, I think every sitting member of the Supreme Court right now went to either Harvard or Yale, right? The level of incestuousness here is—anyway, so there’s that. This has been running for a very long time.

One is that the Harvard and UNC cases gave up the game, or at least showed what the mechanism was. Number 2, the other thing is obviously the aftermath of October 7th, right? What we discovered was happening with Jewish applicants, and what was happening at all the top institutions for Jewish applicants, was that they were being managed down, either being actively managed down as a percentage of the base.

I’ve heard reports of extremely explicit plans to manage Jewish admissions down to their representative percentage of the U.S. population, which is 2%. There’s a whole backstory here, which is that 100 years ago, Jews were not admitted into a lot of these institutions. Then there was a big campaign to get them in. Once they could get in, they immediately became 30% of these institutions because there are so many smart, talented Jews.

So it went from 0% to 30%, and then the most recent generation of leadership has been trying to get it down to 2%. A lot of Jewish people, at least a lot of Jewish people I know, kind of knew this was happening, but they discovered it the hard way after October 7th, right?

Basically, the Supreme Court case meant that you could address this in terms of the Asian victims. October 7th meant that you could address it in terms of the Jewish victims. For sure, both of those groups are being systematically excluded, right?

Then, of course, there’s the thing that you basically can’t talk about, which is that all the white people are being excluded. It turns out it’s also happening to Black people, and this is the thing that blew my freaking mind when I found out about it.

I assumed that this was great news for American Blacks because, obviously, if you know whites, Asians, and Jews are being excluded, then the whole point of this in the beginning was to get the Black population up. This must be great for American Blacks.

Then I discovered this New York Times article from 2004 called “Blacks are Being Admitted into Top Schools at Greater Numbers, but which ones?” Lex Fridman: Uh-oh. This was in The New York Times. This wasn’t in the National Review or something; this was The New York Times in 2004.

The 2 authorities quoted in the story were Henry Louis Gates, who was the dean of the African-American studies community in the United States, a super brilliant guy, and Lani Guinier. She was a potential Supreme Court appointee under— I think she was a close friend of Hillary Clinton. For a long time, she was on the shortlist for the Supreme Court.

They were 2 of the top jurists and lawyers in the country, both Black, and both were sort of legendarily successful in the academic and legal worlds. They were quoted as the authorities in this story, and the story that they told was actually amazing.

By the way, this is happening today in educational institutions, in companies, and you can see it all over the place, including in the government. At least at that time, the number was that half of the Black admits into a place like Harvard were not American-born Blacks. They were foreign-born Blacks, specifically North African, generally Nigerian, or West Indian, right?

Many Nigerians and North Africans have come to the U.S. and have been very successful. Nigerian Americans as a group have way outperformed. They’re a super-smart cohort of people. West Indian Blacks in the U.S. are incredibly successful. Most recently, Kamala Harris and Colin Powell are 2 examples of that.

Basically, what Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier said in the story is that Harvard was struggling to either identify, recruit, or make successful—whatever it was—American-born, native Blacks. Therefore, they were using high-skill immigration as an escape hatch to go get Blacks from other countries.

This was in 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 in the last 20 years have had this exact characteristic.

There are large numbers of Black people in America who are fully aware of this and are saying, “It’s obviously not us who are getting these slots. We’re literally competing with people who are being imported.” If you believe in the basis of affirmative action, you’re trying to make up for the historical injustice of American Black slavery.

The idea that you import somebody from Nigeria who never experienced that is tremendously insulting to Black Americans. Anyway, 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-skill immigration has been funneling foreigners into, right? It turns out it’s not a victim-free thing. There are, 100%, victims.

There are only so many educational slots, and there are only so many of these jobs, right? Google only hires so many Level 7 engineers, right? That’s the other side of it.

You’re a farm boy in Wisconsin, a Black American whose ancestors arrived here on a slave ship 300 years ago in Louisiana, or a Cambodian immigrant in the Bronx, and you are a kid. Or you’re a Jewish immigrant, or from a very successful Jewish family, and for 3 generations, you and your parents and grandparents went to Harvard.

What all of those groups know is that the system that has been created is not for them, right? It’s designed specifically to exclude them. Then what happens is all of these tech people show up in public and say, “Yeah, let’s bring in more foreigners,” right?

The short version of it is that I don’t think you can have the “high-skill immigration” conversation anymore, either for education or for employment, without also having the DEI conversation. DEI is just another word for affirmative action, so it’s the affirmative-action conversation.

You actually need to deal with this at a substantive level and see what’s actually happening to people. You need to join these topics. I think it is much harder to make the moral claim for high-skilled immigration, given the extent to which DEI took over both the education process and the hiring process.

Okay, so first of all, that was brilliantly laid out, the nuance of it. Just to understand, it’s not so much a criticism of H-1B, high-skilled immigration. It’s that there needs to be more people saying, “Yay, we need more American-born hires.”

I spent the entire Christmas holiday reading every message on this and not saying anything, and what I was—

(laughs) Which you know me well enough to know that's a serious level of—

Yeah, that was very Zen.

Yes, thank you. No, it wasn't. There was tremendous rage on the other side of it, but I suppressed it. So I was waiting for the dog that didn't bark, right? And the dog that didn't bark was that I did not—and you tell me if you saw one—I did not see a single example of somebody pounding the table for more high-skilled 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.

That's true. I think I agree with that. There really was a divide.

#458

But it was literally the proponents of high-skilled immigration. Again, this was me for a very long time. I took myself by surprise on this because I had the much 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. By the way, I never made any progress, which we could talk about. It never actually worked.

But I've been on the other side of this one, and I was literally sitting there thinking, all right, which of these super geniuses—many of whom, by the way, are very successful high-skilled immigrants or children of high-skilled immigrants—which of these super geniuses are going to say, "Actually, we have this incredible talent source here in the country"?

Again, to be clear, I'm not talking about white people. I'm talking about native-born Americans: whites, Asians, Jews, Blacks—for sure. Those 4 groups.

But also—

Yes.

White people.

Yeah, and also white people.

#458

People who are making the case for American-born hires are usually not also supporting H-1B. It's an extreme divide, and the people making that case are often not making it in quite a radical way.

Yeah.

#458

Let's put it this way.

Yeah, but you have this interesting thing, this split between the sides that I've noticed, which is that one side has all of the experts.

#458

Right.

Right, and I'm using air quotes for people listening to audio. I'm making quotes in the air with my fingers as vigorously as I can.

#458

Yep.

One side has all the certified experts. The other side just has a bunch of people who know that something is wrong and don't quite know how to explain it. And what was so unusual about the Harvard and UNC cases, by the way, in front of the Supreme Court, is that they actually had sophisticated lawyers, for the first time in a long time, put all this evidence together and put it in the public record. They actually had experts, which is really rare.

Generally, what you get is—if you don't have experts, what do you have? Something is wrong, but you have primarily an emotional response. You feel it, but can you put it in the words and tables and charts that a certified expert can? No, you can't. 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 are many ways to resolve this. Again, I think the way to do it is to look at these issues combined—look at DEI combined with high-skilled immigration.

It so happens that DEI and affirmative action are under much more scrutiny today than they have been for probably 20 years. 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.

And then more and more—you've seen more companies now also ditching their DEI programs. 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 are a clear foreshadowing that the Supreme Court will rule on new cases that will ban it in businesses. And so there is a moment here to look at this from both sides.

Let me add one more nuance to it that makes it even more complicated.

#458

Yeah.

So the cliché is, we're going to brain-drain the world, right? You've heard that? We're going to take all the smart people from all over the world, we're going to bring them here, we're going to educate them, and then we're going to keep them. Then they're going to raise their families here, create businesses here, create jobs here, right?

#458

In the cliché, that's a super-positive thing.

Yeah. Okay, so what happens to the rest of the world?

#458

They lose?

Well, how fungible are people? How many highly ambitious, highly conscientious, highly energetic, high-achieving, high-IQ super-geniuses are there in the world? 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?

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 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.

There are only 4 permanent sinks of high-skilled immigration—places people go. It's the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia.

#458

Oh, Australia.

It's 4 of the 5 Five Eyes. It's the major Anglosphere countries. And so for those countries, this seems like a no-lose proposition, but it's all the other countries that lose. Basically, what the 4 of us have been doing is draining all the smart people out.

It's actually much easier for people in Europe to talk about this, I've discovered, because the Eurozone is 28 countries. Within the Eurozone, the high-skilled people over time have been migrating, originally, to the U.K., but also specifically to the Netherlands, Germany, and France. Specifically, they've been migrating out of the peripheral European Union countries.

The one where this really hit the fan was Greece, right? Greece falls into chaos and disaster, and then you're running the government in Greece and trying to figure out how to put an economic development plan together. All of your smart young kids have left. What are you going to do?

By the way, I know you care a lot about Ukraine. This is a potential crisis for Ukraine—not only because of this, because we enthusiastically recruit Ukrainians, of course, and so we've been brain-draining Ukraine for a long time, but also because war does tend to cause people to migrate out.

When it comes time for Ukraine to rebuild as a peaceful country, whether it's going to have even the talent base that it had 5 years ago is a very big and important question. By the way, Russia, too—we have brain-drained a lot of really smart people out of Russia. A lot of them are here, over the last 30 years.

There's this thing that's actually really funny if you think about it. The one thing that we know to be the height of absolute evil that the West ever did was colonization and resource extraction, right? We know the height of absolute evil was when the Portuguese and the English and everybody else went and created these colonies, and then we took all the oil, the diamonds, the lithium, or whatever it is, right?

For some reason, we realize that's a deeply evil thing to do when it's a physical resource, when it's nonconscious 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—the great flowering of peace and harmony and moral justice of our time—to do it. We don't think for one second about what we're doing to the countries that we're pulling all these people out of.

This is one of these things where maybe we're just going to live in this delusional state forever. We'll just keep doing it, it'll keep benefiting us, and we just won't care what happens. But I think there may come a point—this is like one of these submarines 10 feet under the waterline—when people suddenly realize, "Oh, my God, what are we doing?"

We need the rest of the world to succeed too, right? We need these other countries to flourish. We don't want to be the only successful country in the middle of complete chaos and disaster, while we just extract and we extract and we extract, and don't think twice about it.

#458

Well, this is so deeply profound, actually. So what is the cost of "winning," quote unquote, if these countries are drained in terms of human capital? On the level of geopolitics, what does that lead to? Even if we talk about wars and conflict and all of this, we actually want them to be strong in the way we understand strong—not just in every way—so that cooperation and competition can build a better world for all of humanity.

Yep.

#458

It's interesting. This is one of those truths where you just speak and it resonates, and I didn't even think about it.

Yeah, exactly.

So you were sitting during the holiday season, just boiling over. So all that said, is there still some good to H-1B?

#458

Okay, so then there's another nuance.

Come all the way around. (laughs)

#458

There's another nuance.

So there's another nuance, which is that mostly, in the Valley, we don't use H-1Bs anymore. Mostly, we use O-1s. There's a separate class of these, and the O-1 is, it turns out, the super-genius visa. The O-1 is basically for our founders: when we have somebody from anywhere in the world who has invented a breakthrough new technology and wants to come to the US to start a company, they come in through an O-1 visa.

That actually is a fairly high bar. It has a high acceptance rate, but it's a pretty high bar. They do a lot of work, and you have to put real work into it and really prove your case.

Mostly, what's happened with the H-1B visa program is that it has gone to basically 2 categories of employers. One is a small set of big tech companies that hire in volume, which is exactly the companies that you would think of. The other is what they call the mills—the consulting mills. There are these companies with names—I don't want to pick on companies, but names like Cognizant—that basically have a business model of bringing in primarily Indians in large numbers. They often have offices next to company-owned housing, and they'll have organizations that are literally thousands of Indians living and working in the US. They do what's basically called mid-tier IT consulting.

These folks are making good wages, but they're making $60,000, $80,000, or $100,000 a year, not the $300,000 that you'd make in the Valley. In practice, startups—basically, little tech, as we call it, or the startup world—mainly don't use H-1Bs at this point and mainly can't, because the system is rigged in a way that we really can't.

Then again, you get to the underlying morality here. It's like, well, Amazon—I love Amazon, but they're a big, powerful company. They've got more money than God. They've got resources and a long-term planning horizon. They do big, profound things over decades at a time. They could, as could any of these other companies, launch massively effective programs to recruit the best and brightest from all throughout the country. You'll notice they don't do that. They bring in 10,000 or 20,000 H-1Bs a year. So you've got a question there.

These mills raise lots of questions, including whether that's even an ethical way to operate. I don't want to say they're unethical, but there are questions around exactly what the trade-offs are there. This is a Pandora's box that really nobody wanted to open.

To play devil's advocate on all this in terms of national immigration issues, none of this is a top-end issue just because the numbers are small. I don't think the administration has said this is a priority of theirs right now. But what I would say is that there is actually a lot of complexity and nuance here.

I have a lot of friends and colleagues who came over on H-1Bs or O-1s or green cards, and many are now citizens. It wasn't every single one, but a lot of them were enthusiastic to defend the honor of immigrants throughout this whole period. They said to me, “Well, Marc, how can we more clearly express the importance of high-skilled immigration to the US?” I said, “I think you can do it by also advocating for developing our native-born talent. Do you want to inflame the issue, or do you want to defuse the issue?” I think the answer is to defuse the issue.

Let me give you 1 more positive scenario, and then I'll also beat up on the universities some more. Do you know about the National Merit Scholarship Program? Have you heard about this?

Not really. Can you explain?

#458

There's a system that was created during the Cold War called the National Merit Scholars. It was created—I forget whether it was in the late '50s or '60s—when people in government actually wanted to identify the best and the brightest, as heretical an idea as that sounds today.

It's basically a national talent search for IQ. Its goal is to identify the top 0.5% in IQ in the country, completely regardless of other characteristics. There's no race, gender, or any other aspect to it. It's just going for straight intelligence. It uses the PSAT, which is the preparatory SAT that you take, and then the SAT. It uses those scores; that's the scoring. It's a straight PSAT/SAT scoring system.

They use the SAT as a proxy for IQ, which it is. They run this every year. They identify about 1% of the 18-year-olds in the population who scored highest on the PSAT, and then further qualify down to the 0.5% who also replicate on the SAT. The scholarship amount is about $2,500, so it was a lot of money 50 years ago, but not as much today. 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? Our universities all have sports teams. They all have national scouting. They have full-time scouts who go out to every high school and try to find all the great basketball players and bring them into the NCAA, into all these leagues. How many of our great, powerful, and enlightened universities use the National Merit system to do a talent search for the smartest kids and just bring them in?

Let me guess: very few. Zero.

#458

Zero.

As you say it, that's brilliant. There should be that same level of scouting for talent internally. Go get the smartest ones.

I'll give you 1 more kicker on this topic, if I haven't beaten it to death. The SAT has changed. The SAT used to be a highly accurate proxy for IQ, which 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. Essentially, like everything else, it's been dumbed down.

It's been dumbed down in 2 ways. Number 1, an 800 from 40 years ago does not mean what an 800 means today. Forty years ago, it was almost impossible to get an 800. Today, there are so many 800s that you could stock the entire Ivy League with 800s. It's been deliberately dumbed down.

Number 2, they've tried to pull out a lot of what's called the g-loading. They've tried to detach it from being an IQ proxy because IQ is such an inflammatory concept. The consequence of that is perverse: they've made it more coachable. The SAT 40 years ago, coaching didn't really work. More recently, it has really started to work.

One of the things you see is the Asian spike—a giant leap upward in Asian performance over the last decade. Looking at the data, I think a lot of that is because it's more coachable now, and Asians do the most coaching. There are a bunch of issues with this. The coaching thing is really difficult because it's a subsidy to the kids whose parents can afford coaching.

I don't know about you, but where I grew up, there was no SAT coaching. 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, much less that we could afford it. So, number 1, there are issues there.

But the other issue is, think about what's happened by the dumbing down. An 800 no longer captures all the smart kids. An 800 is too crude of a test. It's like the AI benchmarking problem. It's the same problem they have with AI benchmarking right now: 800 is too low of a threshold. There are too many kids scoring 800.

What you want is, whatever—if it's going to be 100,000 kids, I don't know what it is—it's going to be 50,000 kids a year scoring 800. You also want kids to be able to score 900, 1,000, 1,100, and 1,200. Ultimately, you'd like to identify the top 100 kids and make sure that you get them into MIT. The resolution of the test has been reduced, so it's actually not useful for doing that.

Again, I would say this is part of the generalized corruption that's taken place throughout this entire system, where we've been heading in the reverse direction from wanting to actually go get the best and brightest and put them in the places where they should be.

The final comment would be that the great thing about standardized testing and the National Merit system is that it's, like I said, completely race-blind, gender-blind, and blind to every other characteristic. It's based only on test scores. You can make an argument about whether that's good or bad, but for sure, it's the closest thing we had to merit. It was what they did when they thought they needed merit to win the Cold War.

Of course, we could choose to do that any time we want. 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: okay, we aren't even trying to go get the smart kids out of the center of—

Yeah.

#458

And even if they think they can get into these places, they get turned down. The same thing is true for the smart Asians, the smart Jews, and the smart Black people. I don't know how that's moral. I don't get it at all.

As you said about the 800, I took the SAT and the ACT many times, and I've always gotten a perfect 800 on math. I'm not special; it doesn't identify genius. I think you want to search for genius and create measures that find genius of all different kinds, speaking of diversity. I guess we should reiterate, and say over and over and over: defend immigrants, yes, but we should hire more and more native-born.

#458

Well, you asked me in the beginning, what's the most optimistic forecast that we could have? The most optimistic forecast would be, my God, what if we did both? (laughs)

So that's the reasonable, rational, smart thing to say here. In fact, we don't have to have a war.

#458

Well, it would defuse the entire issue.

Yeah.

#458

If everybody in the center and the South of the country, and every Jewish family, Asian family, and Black family knew they were getting a fair shake, it would defuse the issue. How about defusing the issue?

I think your profile on X states, “It's time to build.” It feels like 2025 is a good year to build. I wanted to ask your advice, and maybe advice for anybody who's trying to build something useful in the world, launch a startup, or just launch apps, services, whatever—ship software products. So, by way of advice, how do you actually get to shipping?

#458

A big part of the answer is that we're in the middle of a legitimate revolution. I know you've been talking about this on your show, but AI coding is the biggest earthquake to hit software in certainly my life, maybe since the invention of software. I'm sure you know this, and we're involved in various of these companies, but these tools from a variety of companies are absolutely revolutionary, and they're getting better by leaps and bounds every day.

You know all this, but there are open questions about whether AI can get better at understanding philosophy or creative writing or whatever. But we can certainly make it much better at coding, right? Because you can validate the results of coding. There are all these methods of synthetic data, self-training, and reinforcement learning that you can definitely use with coding. Everybody I know who works in the field says AI coding is going to get phenomenally good. It's already great.

Anybody who wants to see this can just go on YouTube and look at AI coding demos: little kids making apps in 10 minutes, working with an AI coding system. I think it's the golden age. This is an area where it's clearly the golden age; the toolset is extraordinary. In a day, as a coder, you can retrain yourself, start using these things, and get a huge boost in productivity. As a non-coder, you can learn much more quickly than you could before.

That's actually a tricky one in terms of learning as a non-coder to build things. You still need to learn how to code, but it becomes a superpower. It helps you be much more productive. You could legitimately be a 1-person company and get quite far.

#458

I agree with that, up to a point. For quite a long time, the people who are good at coding are going to be the best at actually having AIs code things, because they're going to understand what's happening. They're going to be able to evaluate the work, and they're going to be able to manage AIs better. Even if they're not literally handwriting the code, they're going to have a much better sense of what's going on.

I definitely think that's 100% the case. My 9-year-old is doing all kinds of coding classes, and he'll keep doing that certainly through 18. We'll see after that.

Having said that, one of the things you can do with an AI is say, “Teach me how to code.” There's a whole bunch of work being done at Khan Academy for free. We have this company, Replit, which was originally specifically built for kids to learn coding and now has AI built in. It's absolutely extraordinary.

There are a variety of other systems like this. AI is spectacularly good at explaining code. The tools have features now where you can talk to the codebase, so you can literally ask the codebase questions about itself. You can also do the simple thing, which is copy and paste code into ChatGPT and ask it to explain what's going on, rewrite it, improve it, or make recommendations. There are dozens of ways to do this.

Even more broadly than code, you can make a video game. You can use AI for art generation, sound generation, dialogue generation, and voice generation. All of a sudden, you don't need designers or voice actors. There's just an unlimited number of possibilities.

A big part of coding is so-called glue code, interfacing with other systems. It's interfacing with Stripe to take payments or something like that. AI is fantastic at writing glue code. It's really, really good at making sure you can plug everything together and helping you figure out how to deploy. It'll even write a business plan for you.

Everything happening with AI right now is this latent superpower. There's an incredible spectrum of people who have really figured out massive performance and productivity increases with it already. There are other people who aren't even aware it's happening. There's some gearing based on whether you're a coder or not, but I think there are lots of non-coders who are off to the races.

I think there are lots of professional coders who are still like, “Eh.” The blacksmiths were not necessarily in favor of the car business. (laughs) There's the old William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.” This is maybe the most potent version of that that I've ever seen.

Yeah, there's the old meme with the bell curve. The people on both extremes say, “AI coding is the future.”

#458

Right.

It is very common for programmers to say, “If you're any good as a programmer, you're not going to be using it.” That's just not true. I consider myself a reasonably good programmer, and my productivity has skyrocketed. The joy of programming has skyrocketed. Every aspect of programming is more efficient, more productive, and more fun.

#458

Of anything in industrial society, code has the highest elasticity, which is to say, the easier it is to make, the more of it gets made. I think there's effectively unlimited demand for code. In other words, there's always some other idea for a thing you can do, a feature you can add, or a thing you can optimize.

Overwhelmingly, the amount of code that exists in the world is a fraction of even the ideas we have today. We come up with new ideas all the time. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when automated coding systems started to come out, expert systems were a big deal. There was a famous book called The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer that predicted these new coding systems would mean we wouldn't have programmers in the future.

Of course, the number of programming jobs exploded by a factor of 100. My guess is we'll have more coding jobs, probably by an order of magnitude, 10 years from now. They'll be different jobs. They'll involve orchestrating AIs, but we'll 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 landscape of little tech?

#458

All we're seeing right now is the biggest AI hiring boom of all time.

For the big tech?

#458

And little tech. Everybody's trying to hire as many engineers as they can to build AI systems. It's 100%.

There's a handful of companies doing a little bit of customer service. We have some companies and others, because I think it's Klarna that's publicizing a lot of this in Europe, 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. 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,” in the more radical form of it. So basically, the companies that we see are basically one of 2 kinds. We see companies that sometimes use the weak form and the strong form. For the weak-form companies, I sometimes use the term—I call it the sixth bullet point.

AI is the sixth bullet point on whatever they’re doing. It’s on the slide, right?

(laughs) Sure.

#458

Right? So they’ve got the usual list of things, and then AI is the sixth thing. The reason AI is the sixth thing is because they had already written the slide before the AI revolution started, and so they just added the sixth bullet point to the slide. That’s how you’re getting all these products that have the AI button up in the corner—the little sparkly button.

Yep.

#458

Right? All of a sudden, Gmail is offering to summarize your email, which I’m like, “I don’t need that. I need you to answer my email, not summarize it. What the hell?” So we see those, and that’s fine. That’s like putting sugar on the cake or something.

Then we see the strong form, which is the companies that are building from scratch for AI. I actually just met with a company that is building literally an AI email system, as an example.

Oh, nice. I can’t wait.

#458

So the very obvious idea, a very smart team—it’s going to be great. Notion, just as another example—not one of our companies—just came out with a product. Now companies are going to sweep through, and they’re going to do AI-first versions of basically everything. Those are companies built where AI is the first bullet point. It’s the strong form of the argument.

Cursor is an example of that. They basically said, “Okay, we’re going to rebuild the thing with AI as the first citizen.”

#458

What if we knew from scratch that we could build on this? Again, this is part of the Full Employment Act for startups and VCs: if a technology transformation is sufficiently powerful, then you actually need to start the product development process over from scratch because you need to reconceptualize the product. Usually, what that means is that you need a new company, because most incumbents just won’t do that. 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.” Here’s a thought experiment. The cliché would be that we’re going to have the human executive team, and then we’re going to have the AIs as the workers. We’ll have a VP of engineering supervising 100 instances of coding agents.

Okay, maybe. Or maybe the VP of engineering should be the AI, supervising human coders who are supervising AIs. One of the things that AI should be pretty good at is managing. It’s process-driven; it’s the kind of thing that AI is actually pretty good at, right? Performance evaluation, coaching.

Should it be an AI executive team? Then, of course, the ultimate question: AI CEO?

The most futuristic version of it would be an actual AI agent that goes fully autonomous. What if you really set one of these things loose and let it build itself a business? I will say that we’re not yet seeing those, and I think the systems aren’t quite ready for that yet. Then I think you really do need a founder who’s willing to break all the rules and take the swing. Those people exist, and so I’m sure we’ll see that.

Some of it is, as you know with all the startups, the execution. The idea that you have an AI-first email client seems like an obvious idea, but actually creating one, executing it, and then taking on Gmail is really difficult.

I mean, it’s fascinating to see that Google can’t do it with Gmail. Why? Because of momentum, because it’s hard to reengineer the entirety of the system. It feels like Google is perfectly positioned to do it. The same with Perplexity, which I love. Google could technically take on Perplexity and do it much better, but they haven’t—not yet.

So it’s fascinating why that is for large companies. That is an advantage for little tech: they can be agile. They can move fast.

#458

Yeah, that’s right. Little companies can break glass in a way big companies can’t.

Right.

#458

This is the big breakthrough that Clay Christensen had in The Innovator’s Dilemma. Sometimes when big companies don’t do things, it’s because they’re screwing up. That certainly happens. But a lot of times they don’t do things because it would break too much glass. Specifically, it would interfere with their existing customers and their existing businesses, and they simply won’t do that.

By the way, responsibly, they shouldn’t do that, right? This is Clay Christensen’s big thing: they often don’t adapt because they’re well-run, not because they’re poorly run. But they’re optimizing machines. They’re optimizing against the existing business.

As you just said, this is a permanent state of affairs for large organizations. Every once in a while, one breaks the pattern and actually does it, but for the most part, this is a very predictable form of human behavior. This fundamentally is why startups exist.

It feels like 2025 is when the race for dominance in AI will see some winners. It’s a big year. Who do you think wins the race? OpenAI, Meta, Google, or xAI? Who do you think wins the AI race?

#458

I’m not going to predict. I’m going to say there are questions all over the place. We have this category of question we call the trillion-dollar question, where literally, depending on how it’s answered, people make or lose a trillion dollars. I think there are 5 or 6 trillion-dollar questions hanging out there right now, which is an unusually large number.

Yeah.

#458

I’ll just hit a few of them, and we can talk about them. 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? And reinforcement learning.

Then there are political trillion-dollar questions—policy questions, which the US and the EU have both been flunking dramatically, and the US is hopefully about to really succeed at. There are probably another half dozen big, important questions after that.

This is an industry that’s in flux in a way that is even more dramatic, I think, than the ones I’ve seen before. The most obvious example of the flux is that, less than 3 years ago, in December 2022, we would have said that OpenAI was running away with everything. Sitting here today, there are at least 6 world-class God-model companies and teams that are, by the way, generating remarkably similar results.

That’s actually been one of the most shocking things to me. It turns out that once you know it’s possible to build one incredibly smart, Turing-test-passing large language model—which was a complete shock and surprise to the world—you can have 5 more within a year.

There’s also a money component to it. To get the money to scale one of these things into the billions of dollars, there are basically only 2 sources of money right now that will do that for you. One is the hyperscalers giving you the money, which you turn around and round-trip back to them. The other is foreign sovereigns—other countries’ sovereign wealth funds—which can be difficult in some cases for companies to access. So maybe there’s another trillion-dollar question: the financing question.

Here’s one. Sam Altman has been public about the fact that he wants to transition OpenAI from being a nonprofit to being a for-profit. There is a way to do that under US law. The IRS and other legal and government entities scrutinize it very carefully, because the US takes foundation and nonprofit law very seriously because of the tax exemption.

Historically, the way that you do it is you start a for-profit, and then you raise money with the for-profit to buy the assets of the nonprofit at fair market value. The last financing round at OpenAI was, you know, $150-some billion. Logically, if the flip is going to happen, the for-profit has to go raise $150 billion out of the chute to buy the assets.

Raising $150 billion is a challenge. Is that even possible? If it is possible, then OpenAI may be off to the races as a for-profit company. If not, I don’t know. Then, obviously, there’s the Elon lawsuit.

Just because they’re the market leader today, there are big, important questions there. Microsoft has this kind of love-hate relationship with them. Where does that go? Apple is lagging badly behind, but they’re very good at catching up. Amazon is primarily a hyperscaler, but they now have their own models.

Then there are the other questions, like you laid out briefly and brilliantly: open versus closed, big versus little models, and synthetic data. That’s a huge, huge question. Then there’s test-time compute with chain of thought. They’re all of that, and it’s just fascinating. These are, I think it’s fair to say, trillion-dollar questions.

#458

Yeah, these are big. Look, here’s a trillion-dollar question that’s kind of embedded in that: hallucinations, right?

If you’re trying to use these tools creatively, you’re thrilled because they can draw new images, make new music, and do all this incredible stuff. They’re creative.

The flip side of that is if you need them to be correct, they can't be creative. And that's the term: hallucination. These things do hallucinate. There have already been court cases 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, “Er—” (laughs)

I mean, that's why, with Elon, with Grok—

#458

Yes.

Looking for truth. I mean, that's an open technical question: How close can you get to truth with LLMs?

#458

Yeah, that's right. And my sense is—this is a very contentious topic in the industry—that, to the extent that there is a domain in which there is a definitive, checkable, provable answer, 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. You should be able to do reinforcement learning, and you should ultimately be able to eliminate hallucinations.

But that's a trillion-dollar question right there as to whether that's true. Then there's the question of whether that's going to work in the more general domain. For example, one possibility is these things are going to get truly superhuman at math and coding, but when discussing philosophy, they're going to be as smart as they're ever going to be. They're going to be, say, midwit grad-student level.

The theory there would just be that they're already out of training data. Literally, the big models are within a factor of 2X of consuming all the human-generated training data, to the point that some of these big companies are hiring doctors and lawyers to sit and write new training data by hand. Does this mean that if you want your model to get better at philosophy, you have to hire 1,000 philosophers and have them write new content? Is anybody going to do that? Maybe these things are topping out in certain ways and are going to leap way ahead in other ways. We just don't know.

Actually, maybe my main conclusion is that anybody telling you these big, sweeping conclusions—all of this abstract, generalized superintelligence and AGI stuff—maybe it's the engineer in me, but no. That's too abstract. It's got to actually work. And, by the way, it has to actually be able to pay for itself.

I mean, this is a problem right now with the big models that are really good at coding and math: they're actually very expensive to run, and they're quite slow. 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. Oh, another trillion-dollar question: censorship, right? And all the, as they say, 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: How many other countries want their country to run its education system, healthcare system, news system, and political system on the basis of an AI that's been trained according to the most extreme left-wing California politics? Because that's kind of what they have on offer right now. I think the answer to that is not very many. So there are massive open questions about what morality these things are going to be trained on as a—

And that one we're cracking wide open with what's been happening over the past few months: censorship on every level of these companies, and just the very idea of what truth means and what it means to expand the Overton window of LLMs or the Overton window of human discourse.

#458

So what I experienced, going back to how we started, was a social media censorship regime from hell, debanking at large scale, and then the war on the crypto industry, trying to kill it. Then there was basically a 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.

I think this election tipped us, in America, from a timeline in which things were going to get really bad on that front to a timeline in which things are going to be quite good. But those same questions also apply outside the US. The EU is doing its thing; they're being extremely draconian, and they're trying to lock in a political censorship regime on AI right now that's so harsh that even American AI companies aren't willing to launch new products in the EU right now.

That's not going to last, but what happens there? What are the trade-offs? 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 (laughs) so that they can't? So, big questions.

Quick questions. You're very active on X—a very unique character: flamboyant, exciting, bold. You post a lot. I think there's a meme—I don't remember it exactly—but Elon posted something like, “Inside Elon, there are 2 wolves. One is ‘Please be kind,’ or more positive, and the other one is, I think, doing the ‘I take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face’ guy.” How many wolves are inside your mind when you're tweeting?

#458

To be clear, that's a reference from the comedy classic Tropic Thunder.

Tropic Thunder, yeah. Legendary movie.

#458

Yes. Any Zoomers listening to this who haven't seen that movie, go watch it immediately.

Yeah, there's nothing offensive about it.

#458

Nothing offensive about it at all. Tom Cruise's greatest performance. (Lex laughs)

I should start by saying I'm not supposed to be tweeting at all.

So how do you approach that? How do you approach what to tweet?

#458

I don't do it well enough. It's mostly an exercise in frustration. There's a glory to it and there's an issue with it. The glory of it is instantaneous global communication. X in particular is the town square for all these social issues, political issues, everything else, and current events.

But there's no question that the format, at least the original tweet, is prone to be inflammatory. I'm the guy who, at one point, the entire nation of India hated because I had tweeted something. It turned out that it was still politically sensitive across the entire continent. I stayed up all night that night as I became a front-page headline and leading television news in each time zone in India for a single tweet.

So the single tweet out of context is a very dangerous thing. Obviously, X now has the middle ground where they have longer-form essays. Probably the most productive thing I can do is longer-form things.

You're not going to do it, though, are you?

I do, from time to time. I do. I should do more of them.

Sometimes.

And obviously, X is doing great. Like I said, Substack has become the center for a lot of the best deeply thought-through intellectual content, certainly tons of current-events stuff there as well. There are a bunch of other new systems that are very exciting.

One of the things we can look forward to in the next 4 years is, number 1, a massive reinvigoration of social media as a consequence of the changes happening right now. I'm very excited to see what's going to happen with that. It's happened on X, but it's now going to happen on other platforms.

The other is that crypto is going to come right back to life. Actually, that's very exciting, and worth noting: 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.

Crypto, in our view, happens to be the ideal economic system for that. It's programmable money, it's a very easy way to plug in and do that, and there's a transaction-processing system that can do that. So I think the crypto-AI intersection is potentially a very, very big deal.

That was going to be impossible under the prior regime, and I think under the new regime, hopefully, it'll be something we can do.

Almost for fun, let me ask a friend of yours, Yann LeCun, what your top 10 favorite things about Yann LeCun are. I think he's a brilliant guy. I think he's important to the world. I think you guys disagree on a lot of things, but I personally like vigorous disagreement. As a person in the stands, I like to watch the gladiators go at it.

No, he's a supergenius. I wouldn't say we're super close, but we're casual friends. I worked with him at Meta. He was the chief scientist at Meta for a long time and still works with us. Obviously, he's a legendary figure in the field and one of the main people responsible for what's happening.

My serious observation is something I've talked to him about for a long time, and I keep trying to read and follow everything he does. He is, I think—see if you agree with this—the smartest and most credible critic of LLMs as the path for AGI.

Yeah.

And he's not—there are certain, I would say, troll-like characters who are just crapping on everything. But Yann has deeply thought-through theories as to why LLMs are an evolutionary dead end. I actually try to do this thing where I try to have a mental model of the 2 different sides of a serious argument. I've tried to internalize that argument as much as I can, which is difficult because we're investing behind LLMs as aggressively as we can.

If he's right, that could be a big problem. But we should also know that. I use his ideas to challenge all the bullish people, to really test their level of knowledge. I like to grill people. I got my CS degree 35 years ago, so I'm not deep in the technology, but to the extent I can understand Yann's points, I can use them to really surface a lot of the questions for the people who are more bullish. That's been very, very productive.

Yeah, he could be both right and wrong. First of all, I do agree with that. He's one of the most legitimate, rigorous, and deep critics of the LLM path to AGI. His basic notion is that AI needs to have some physical understanding of the physical world, and that's very difficult to achieve with LLMs. That is a really good way to challenge the limitations of LLMs and so on.

He's also been a vocal and huge proponent of open source.

Yes.

Which you have been as well.

Which is very useful. Yeah.

And that's been fascinating to watch.

And anti-doomer.

Anti-doomer?

Yeah.

Yeah, he's—

He's very anti-doomer.

He also has many wolves inside.

Yes, he does. Yes, he does. Yes, he does.

So it's been really, really fun to watch.

The other 2 of the 3 godfathers of AI are radicals, full-on left, far left—either Marxists or borderline Marxists. They're quite extreme in their sociopolitical views. I think that feeds into their doomerism, and they are lobbying for what I think would be draconian, ruinously destructive government legislation and regulation. It's super helpful, super, super helpful to have Yann as a counterpoint to those 2.

Another fun question: our mutual friend Andrew Huberman.

Yes.

First, what do you love most about Andrew? And second, what score, on a scale of 1 to 10, do you think he would give you on your approach to health?

Oh, 3.

Physical 3. You think you'd score that high, huh? Okay.

Exactly. Well, he convinced me to stop drinking alcohol, which was a major—

Successfully?

Well, other than my family, it was my favorite thing in the world. It was a major, major reduction. Having a glass of Scotch at night was the thing I would do to relax. He has profoundly negatively impacted my emotional health.

Yeah.

I blame him for making me much less happy as a person.

Yeah.

But much, much, much healthier. Physically healthier. I credit him with that. I'm glad I did that. But his sleep stuff? Yeah, I'm not doing any of that.

Yeah.

I have no interest in his sleep shit. No. This whole light-and-natural-light thing? No, we're not doing it.

You're too hardcore for this?

I don't see any natural light in here.

It's all covered. It's all horrible.

I'm very happy. I would be very happy living and working here because I'm totally happy without natural light.

In darkness.

Yes.

It must be a metaphor for something.

Yes, it's a test. It's a test of manhood as to whether you can have a blue screen in your face for 3 hours and then go right to sleep. I don't understand why you should want to take shortcuts.

I now understand what they mean by toxic masculinity. All right.

So let's see. You're exceptionally successful by most measures, but what, to you, is the definition of success?

#458

I would probably say it is a combination of 2 things. I think it is contribution. Have you done something that mattered, ultimately, and specifically, mattered to people?

The other thing is that I think happiness is either overrated or almost a complete myth. Interestingly, 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 in the Greek sense, which is closer to satisfaction or fulfillment.

I think about happiness this way: 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, not so much. The thousandth mile of the walk through the park, not so much. The thousandth kiss can still be good, but maybe just not right in a row.

Happiness is this very fleeting concept, and the people who anchor on happiness seem to go off the rails pretty often. So it's the deep sense of having been useful.

That's a good place to arrive at in life.

#458

Yeah, I think so. Who was it who said the source of all the ills in the world is man's inability to sit in a room by himself doing nothing? If you're sitting in a room by yourself, at 4:00 in the morning, and you're like, “All right, have I lived up to my expectations of myself?”—if you have, the people I know who feel that way are pretty centered and generally seem very pleased with themselves: proud, calm, at peace.

The people who are sensation-seekers—some of the sensations, by the way, can be useful and productive. There are certain entrepreneurs, for example, who are into every form of extreme sport, and they get huge satisfaction out of that. There's sensation-seeking in useful and productive ways. Larry Ellison was always like that. Zuckerberg is like that.

And then there are a lot of entrepreneurs who end up doing drugs or getting involved in sexual escapades that seem like they'll be fun at first and then backfire.

Yeah, but at the end of the day, if you're able to be at peace by yourself in a room at 4:00 AM—

Yeah.

—I would even say happy, but I understand Thomas Jefferson didn't mean it the way maybe I mean it—I can be happy by myself at 4:00 AM—

Yeah.

—with a blue screen.

Exactly.

Staring at a cursor.

Exactly.

As a small tangent, a quick shout-out to an amazing interview you did with Bari Weiss, and to her in general. Bari Weiss of The Free Press has a podcast called “Honestly, with Bari Weiss.” She's great. People should go listen.

You were asked if you believe in God, and you said, after a pause, that you're not sure. It felt like the pause and the uncertainty suggested some kind of ongoing search for wisdom and meaning. Are you, in fact, searching for wisdom and meaning?

One of the joys—we talked about happiness—one of the things that makes me happy is making you uncomfortable. This question, like many of the questions today, was designed for that.

I guess I'd put it this way: there's a lot to understand about people that I feel like I'm only starting to understand. That's certainly a simpler concept than God. That's what I've spent a lot of the last 15 years trying to figure out.

I feel like I spent my first 30 years figuring out machines, and now I'm spending 30 years figuring out people, which turns out to be quite a bit more complicated. Maybe God's the last 30 years or something.

Look, like Elon, it's just, okay, the known universe is very complicated and mystifying. Every time I pull up an astronomy [site]—my kid is super into astronomy—it's like, “Daddy, how many galaxies are there in the universe?”

100 billion?

Okay, like, how? How is that freaking possible? It's such a staggering concept.

Yeah.

I can read the textbook and this and that and whatever—13.8 billion years, the Big Bang, the whole thing—and then it's just like, all right, wow. And then it's like, all right, the Big Bang. What was before the Big Bang?

Do you think we humans will ever colonize a galaxy and maybe even go beyond?

Sure. In the fullness of time, yeah.

So you have that kind of optimism, that kind of hope that extends across thousands of—

In the fullness of time. All the problems, all the challenges with it, I do understand, but yeah, why not? 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. Fortunately, we have Elon giving us the backup plan. (Lex laughs.)

I grew up in the real Midwest, sort of conventionally Protestant Christian. It never made that much sense to me. I got trained as an engineer and a scientist, and I'm like, “Oh, that definitely doesn't make sense.” I thought, “I know I'll spend my life as an empirical rationalist, and I'll figure everything out.”

Then again, you run up against these things, you bump up against these things, and you're just like, “All right. Okay, I guess there's a scientific explanation for this, but wow.” Then there's, “All right, where did that come from?” How far back can you go on the causality chain?

Even just experiences that we all have on Earth are hard to rationally explain. I guess I would say I'm radically open-minded and at peace with the fact that I'll probably never know.

The other thing that's happened, and maybe the more practical answer to the question, is that I think I have a much better understanding now of the role that religion plays in society than I did when I was younger. My partner, Ben, has a great quote—I think he quotes his father on this. He's like, “If a man does not have a real religion, he makes up a fake one, and the fake ones go very, very badly.”

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.” Marx had the negative view on that, which is, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” But there are a lot of right-wing intellectuals who are themselves, I think, pretty atheist or agnostic, who say that it's deeply important that the people be Christian or something like that.

On the one hand, it's like, wow, that's arrogant and presumptive. But on the other hand, maybe it's right, because what have we learned in the last 100 years? In the absence of a real religion, people will make up fake ones.

There's this writer, this political philosopher who's super interesting on this, named Eric Voegelin. He wrote in the middle to late part of the 20th century. He was born, I think, around 1900 and died in 1985, so he saw the complete run of communism and Nazism. He fled Europe and experienced the whole thing.

His big conclusion was basically that both communism and Nazism, or fascism, were religions in the deep way of religions. We call them political religions, but they were actual religions. They were what Nietzsche forecast when he said, “God is dead. We've killed him, and we won't wash the blood off our hands for 1,000 years.” We would come up with new religions that would cause mass murder and death.

You read his stuff now and you're like, “Yep, that happened.” (Laughs.) Of course, as fully elite moderates, we couldn't possibly be doing that ourselves right now—but of course, we are.

I would argue that Eric Voegelin would certainly argue that in the last 10 years, we've been in a religious frenzy. Wokeness has been a full-scale religious frenzy and has had all of the characteristics of a religion, including everything from patron saints to holy texts to sin. Wokeness has had, I think, every single aspect of an actual religion other than redemption.

That's maybe the most dangerous religion you could ever come up with: the one where there's no forgiveness. I think if Voegelin were alive, he would have zeroed right in on that. He would have said that, and we just sailed right off.

I mentioned earlier that we somehow rediscovered the religions of the Indo-Europeans. We're all into identity politics and environmentalism. I don't think that's an accident.

So there is something very deep going on in the human psyche around religion that is not dismissible and needs to be taken seriously, even if one struggles with the specifics of it.

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that it's been a real joy and, for me, an honor to get to watch you seek to understand the human psyche, as you described. You're in that 30-year part of your life, and it's been an honor to talk with you today. Thank you, Marc.

Thank you, Lex. Is that it? How long is that?

Four hours with Marc Andreessen is like 40 hours of actual content, so—

I'll accept being one of the short ones. (Both laugh.)

For the listener, Marc looks like he's ready to go for 20 more hours, and I need a nap. Thank you, Marc.

Thank you, Lex.