[0:00] from the free press this is honestly and I'm Barry Weiss Democrats until very recently seem to have a monopoly on Silicon Valley perhaps you remember when

[0:10] Elon Musk bought Twitter and posted pictures I saw them in real life of cabinet after cabinet of t-shirts that just said stay woke in many ways that

[0:21] was emblematic of an entire culture but just as the country is realigning itself along new ideological and political lines so is the tech capital of the

[0:31] world in 2024 several of silicon Valley's biggest Tech Titans came out with their unabashed support for Donald Trump there was of course Elon Musk but

[0:43] also WhatsApp co-founder Yan Kum Cameron and Tyler winlos Who Run The cryptocurrency Exchange Gemini VCS like Shawn Maguire David saaks and chamath

[0:53] palaa paler co-founder Joe Lonsdale Oculus and andal founder Palmer lucky hedge fund manager Bill Amman and my guest today one of the most influential

[1:05] investors in Silicon Valley and the man largely responsible for bringing the internet to the masses Mark Andre Mark was always with the Democrats he supported Bill Clinton in 1996 Al Gore

[1:17] in 2000 John KY in 2004 he endorsed Obama in 2008 and then Hillary in 2016 but over the summer a few days after Trump's assassination attempt in Butler

[1:28] PA Mark hosted a podcast with his VC partner Ben Horowitz and announced that both of them were going to endorse and donate to president Trump public records

[1:39] show that Mark donated at least $4.5 million to prot trump super Pacs why because he believed as he tells me that the Biden administration had quote

[1:50] seething contempt for Tech and that this election was existential for AI crypto and startups in America Mark andrees if

[2:01] you haven't heard of him got his start as the co-creator of Mosaic the first widely used web browser which is said to have launched the internet boom he then co-founded Netscape which became the

[2:13] most popular web browser in the 1990s and he sold it to AOL in 1999 for $4.2 billion he later became an angel investor and board member at Facebook

[2:25] and in 2006 when everyone told Mark Zuckerberg to sell to Yahoo for $1 billion Mark was the voice saying don't today Facebook now meta has a market cap

[2:37] of $1.4 trillion Mark now runs a venture capital firm with Ben Horowitz where they invest in startups who they think have potential to become billion dooll

[2:48] unicorns their track record is pretty impressive a16z invested in Airbnb coinbase Instagram instacart Pinterest

[2:59] Slack Reddit Lyft and Oculus to name just a few for full disclosure Mark and his wife Laura were small seed investors in the Free Press and yes we do expect

[3:10] our company to be listed alongside those at some point in the near future great investors are able to see around bz and Mark has built a reputation as someone who can do just that who can recognize

[3:22] the next big thing in Tech and really more broadly in our lives he has been called the chief ideologist of the Silicon Elite a cultural taste maker and

[3:32] even silicon Valley's resident philosopher king today I sit down with Mark to understand his reasons for supporting Trump and the broader Vibe shift in Silicon Valley we talk about

[3:44] why he thinks we've been living under soft authoritarianism over the last decade and how we get out of it we talk about why he's so confident in Elon Musk and his band of counter Elites how Biden

[3:56] tried to kill Tech and control AI why he thinks AI censorship is a million times more dangerous than social media censorship why technologists and his

[4:08] view are the ones to restore American greatness what Trump serves for dinner why Mark has apparently spent half of his time in Palm Beach since November 5th and why he thinks it's morning in

[4:20] America stay with [Music] us Mark Andre welcome to honestly it's

[4:31] great to be here I'm really happy to have you I have to say I have never seen you with more of a pep in your step and more of a kind of Perma smile on your face than I have over the last four weeks in public and I think that that's

[4:44] because Donald Trump won the election and I want to understand and I want everyone listening to this to understand what made you so happy about it and what

[4:54] about Trump's win to you felt so fundamentally important for America yeah so I'd start by saying first of all it's morning in America so I am very happy um

[5:04] I I do think the analogy for what's happening right now is 1980 but but look I would start by saying it's not just Donald Trump but um Trump's Victory is part of it but I I think below that are

[5:15] two other things so one is just in the election generally there was as you know a dramatic shift uh to the right uh across you know broad swaps of of of of the population um by the way including in California um and one of the stories

[5:27] that hasn't you know fully been I think realized is the the extent to which um number one a lot of actually counties districts in in California actually actually went R this time um including some that hadn't been read in I think 30

[5:37] years and then the other is just like even in places like San Francisco there was a pretty significant vote shift um and then uh the youth vote um you know is I think maybe the single biggest part of what happened which is you know the

[5:47] the kids are not you know the kids are changing so that's happening but but and then I would say even beyond that even beyond the partisan politics of it just it feels like the last decade has been a very I would say emotionally um dark and

[5:59] you know sort of repressive time and you know you have talked about you know and written about many aspects of that um but you know we've certainly felt it um you know in many way Silicon Valley was on the Vanguard of sort of the you know

[6:10] what you might call sort of a soft authoritarian you know kind of social Revolution starting you know about 10 years ago 12 years ago um and you know that that that sort of soft repressive authoritarianism you know had a real U

[6:22] negative impact um on you know basically my whole world uh the tech industry uh uh you know the country um and you know I think an entire generation of of of young people and and so it you know we'll see it certainly feels like that's

[6:33] cracked I'm getting all the you know I get all these little data points I'm in the Venture Capital business and so I I get all these little data points on kind of things that are changing you know from people in all these different Industries and like there's just so many little micro stories right now of like

[6:43] movie projects that were dead in the water in October that all of a sudden have come alive um or you know people who now think that they can write the book that they never thought they'd be able to write um and or you know comedians who think they can you know

[6:54] tell jokes that they couldn't tell um so there are all these little Sparks you know kind of firing all over the place um and uh you know people basically you know essentially poking their head out of the you know frozen tundra of the of the culture um and sort of realizing

[7:07] that it's actually okay to like laugh and play and have fun and you know build things do things um you know hire on Merit you know celebrate success um and and then you know and then underneath that is sort of you know fundamentally

[7:17] be be proud of the country be happy about the country be be patriotic um which I I think has a lot to do with it how despairing were you like there there were many people sort of broadly in your

[7:28] world I think think Elon Musk most obviously who who repeated again and again in the weeks leading up to the election that if Donald Trump didn't win if the right didn't come to power this

[7:40] was going to be the last American election did you buy that you know you know both sides have kind of intense you know views on that and you know the the other side

[7:50] obviously has very intense views on that also um I you know I don't maybe I have a little bit more faith in the system maybe I shouldn't but but but but maybe I do so my mental model for the worldwin is just different I don't think

[8:01] we're in the world I I don't think we're in the world where there's like sudden dramatic change like I don't think we're in the world where it's 1917 and Lenin shows up or it's you know 19 you know whatever you know all these precedents where there's these you know incredible historical break points before and after

[8:13] I I don't really think that's the world we live in I don't think you know politics 50 100 200 years ago and there used to be the dramatic break points you had these populations that were primed for physical violence you know they they were primed to go into the street on a

[8:23] moment notice and like start killing um and you know there were many examples of this in American history as well as in a lot of other you know a lot of the rest of Western and also Eastern history I I tend to think we're we're in a world in

[8:34] which we kind of do that but we do that online um you know it's a you know it's it's a virtual it's a virtual Cold War not a physical Hot War um and so you know people beat the hell out of each other but they do it on they do it on X

[8:45] um or they do it on Facebook um and um you know they they kind of take their anger out that way um and and and and look that's why I say it's sort of like a soft authoritarianism right it's like you know no no you know there there we

[8:56] don't live in the world of like Jack boot Jack booted thugs you know kind of you know searching for you know an Frank or something like that we we live in the world of you know you can't say that right and if you do say that you're going to be completely you know

[9:06] obliterated reputationally and economically and you're going to lose your friends and family and so it's you know like it's an intense it's it's been an intense situation I think that you know American politics and culture will

[9:16] continue to be intense but it's sort of a soft form of author of authoritarianism and repression not a not a not a dramatic physical hard break point one I don't think put some meat on

[9:27] the bones of this sort of like soft author arianism soft totalitarianism you're describing so I think what you mean when you say that in the world in the realm of Academia right I can think of certain particular flash points like

[9:39] Brett Weinstein and Heather Hy getting drummed out of Evergreen University for opposing a day of racial segregation or Nicholas Christus at Yale I believe it was in 2014 getting sort of actually

[9:51] surrounded by a mob of hysterical students who were you know overwhelmingly offended by the idea that his wife had sent had the gall to send out an email saying that students should

[10:03] be able to choose their own Halloween costumes you know in my own experience at the New York Times this looked like James Bennett and Jim da getting either drummed out of their jobs or reassigned

[10:13] for having the tarity to publish an oped by Senator Tom Cotton why did this worldview have so much purchase and why was it able to conquer so much territory

[10:25] and so many institutions so broadly and effectively yeah I think there's two reasons one is look it's sort of the fundamental impulse of which you just might say is sort of the political cultural left which is basically that

[10:37] Society is unfair and unequal and by the way Society is manifestly unfair and unequal and every society has been and you know presumably every society will be and so we you know we must therefore you know commit ourselves to whatever

[10:48] level of social Revolution is required to get to Total fairness and inequality um and you know that's an Impulse that you know you can trace it back you know maybe to the French Revolution maybe to the American Revolution you can certainly trace it back to the fabians

[11:00] you know in the UK in the 1880s you can trace it to you know Marxism the Communist Revolution had that in Spades um you know there was a version of this in the 20s and 30s in the there's this great book called red decade um which is

[11:10] sort of the chronicle of basically the Communist Revolution that sort of happened in the cultural and intellectual Elites in America in the 1920s and 1930s U the movie Oppenheimer actually is the it actually sort of

[11:20] created actually quite Vivid portrayal of what life was like at in that case UC Berkeley in the 1930s which is you know there was a joke in the movie which is you know well you know it's appenheimer communist and somebody laughs and says

[11:31] yeah like half the faculty of Berkeley are communist right and if anything that understated it right it was probably 100% um so you know we we had our version of that you know in the in in the 20s and 30s we had our a version of

[11:42] that in the 60s and 70s with the you know the cultural revolution of that period we had a version of it by the way when I was in college in the late 80s early 90s um you know with so-called political correctness and multiculturalism you know were the terms

[11:53] that were used then but it was a lot of the same stuff um and then um you know it sort of kicked off again so it's it's kind of these waves it's a you know it's been compared to it's a secular version of what's you know referred to in

[12:03] religion as a Great Awakening it's a giant surge of emotion you know look like I'm not even I I wouldn't even say like I think a lot of people would believe that there's a lot of good that you know has come along the way and that you know you could argue that like a lot

[12:14] of what we call social progress has happen and I don't even want to Second you know I don't I don't particularly want to second guess that but it does kind of arrive in these very intense waves and then you know look the other part of it is it's an instrument of power right it's it's a little bit like

[12:25] the ring of power like if if you have the ability to if you have the ability to to destroy Somebody by calling them racist um or calling them sexist um or accusing them of one of the many other you know kind of thought crimes are

[12:36] people going to wield the ring of power responsibly at all times and of course you know the answer from like what's the one thing we know for sure you know uh power corrupts um and uh you know the

[12:47] the whole point of the ring of power in the tolken stories was like you can't you can't wield it you can't wield it without getting corrupted like of course it's going to get used of course it's going to turn to evil of course it's going to get used because it's just simply too powerful right of course it's

[12:58] going to get used um in ways that people will later regret and I guess I wonder when did you start to update your mental model of what was going on and maybe another way of asking

[13:09] that is there have been I think a bunch of signal events over the past 10 years that have served to either shift or like fully radicalize people's views like for me it was

[13:21] definitely watching what I view as this worldview we describing that that to me functions in a totalitarian way I saw the way that it affected me and people

[13:31] that I loved and I was sort of like I want to be as far away from that as possible to the extent that like I will learn how to build a company because I can't be part of a company where this is in sort of social Force for other people

[13:43] I think it was Co lockdowns and sort of the public health establishment and realizing that the science maybe wasn't the science like what was your if there is one or maybe several what were those

[13:55] galvanizing moments what were those signal events for you so so I would say the sort of thing of like wow this is weird and then it it keeps happening was sort of call it 2012

[14:07] to 2015 um we were investors in this company GitHub which was um one of the companies that went hyper woke super early and that place got completely surreal very early on the the really big

[14:19] Turning Point moments for me were actually what happened on the other side um what what happened on on the right um and specifically I was completely floored as you know a lot of people were but I was completely shocked that Trump got nominated in 15 and I didn't

[14:30] understand it at all I was like completely shocked you know times 10 that he W when he won the general election in in 2016 um and and and it's really those two moments and and what happened was uh sort of the woke stuff

[14:42] the Silicon Valley stuff the Social Media stuff the censorship which we'll talk about um those things like 10x on sort of when when when Trump got nominated those things like 10x and then

[14:52] when he won they txed again and then when the steel dossier came out they txed again and then when Charlottes fell happened they txed again and then when impeachment happened they txed again and then you know 2020 Co they txed again

[15:03] and then BLM they so it was like this like incredible like ramping up of of uh you know kind of emotion and and and drama and change and and that's when I psychologically I was like all right

[15:14] like I need to take a step back here because I don't understand what's happening on the left because I don't understand these these purges and all that stuff and then I was like I don't understand Trump getting elected at all and I I felt very disoriented because my

[15:25] my personal story is I grew up in Royal Wisconsin you know which is now staunched country um and was in 2016 and 2020 and 2024 and so kind of my my people historically you know kind of

[15:35] fmer world you know was in for Trump early and hard um and and I had just like lost touch with the culture and didn't understand what was happening in that part of the world you I was a fully assimilated Californian and I no longer

[15:45] understood what was happening in California um but I spent I would say those five years basically confused um I I tried deliberately to kind of reset my own like how I was just like I just

[15:55] don't I don't understand the country I don't understand what's happening either side I need to really go think about this hard and I need to read a lot and I I need to go like back in history you know to your earlier question like has this ever happened before and like what

[16:06] you know what the hell right and I had to basically completely rebuild my worldview and that took you know like six years and and that's you know and that's while we're basically fighting fires the entire time you know trying to help our companies kind of nav you know

[16:17] trying to get the tech industry to kind of navigate through this what did you read in that six-year period that most helped you understand both sort of like the mode of the right and the mode of

[16:28] the left James Burnham is I think you know is super helpful on these topics um and uh his his writings today remain very relevant uh for people who don't know who he is um he's this very interesting he was one of the smartest

[16:40] political thinkers political scientists philosophers of the 20th century on American politics and he he had this particular life story which is he was actually a full-on communist revolutionary activist he was a personal friend of Leon troski in the 1920s 1930s

[16:53] um and then he broke from communism in the 40s and he went hard to the right and he actually became a co-founder of National Review with William F Buckley but he wrote These two books in the 1940s the first of these books was

[17:03] written actually during World War II where it actually was not clear who was going to win um and so there's two books one's called the managerial Revolution um and it's basically um you could spend

[17:13] time on it if you want but it's basically it it basically says you know basically these movements that look like they have you know these movements have real differences obviously those three big movements but there there is something in common which is he called

[17:24] managerialism which is sort of the establishment of this kind of expert class um the Communists called it the Vanguard you know class you know in America we call it you know the the you know academics you know experts right

[17:35] experts and fact Checkers um and sort of it's the establishment of kind of this class of kind of uh expert technocrats who are assumed to be able to steer society and healthy and beneficial ways

[17:46] um and then often lead you in in in in very bad directions and so that turns out to be a helpful framework for thinking about our time where we have that in Spades um and then he wrote this other book called The Mackie elliance

[17:56] where he resurrected an old school of political science called the the Italian realist school um and he sort of looks at Politics structurally as opposed to ideologically so one one of the ideas from this this school of political

[18:07] philosophy is basically what he calls the iron law of oligarchy um which basically is democracy is never actually a thing uh democracy never there's no actual system of democracy um there and

[18:18] the reason is because um you always end up with a small minority in charge of a large majority uh in basically every society in human history you always have a small Elite minority in charge of a large majority the reason is because

[18:29] small Elites can organize and large majorities cannot um and and and and and by the way this is built into the American system right with it's the classic thing we're actually not a democracy we're a republic right and so

[18:39] the founders understood the iron law of oligarchy and they they knew that if we were just like a straight you know direct democracy it would end up collapsing and it would lead to something very bad and so that's why we have this intermediate layer of Congress

[18:50] and Senate right uh representing us um every exper every experiment in direct democracy in the history of the world has ended in disaster um the you know from the Greeks to the to the to to to

[19:03] to basically every everywhere has tried direct democracy fails by the way direct democracy is a huge problem right now in California where we have this ballot system referendum system um in which you just get the craziest stuff that comes

[19:14] in through the referendum system with with with no buffer at all um and so anyway the conclusion like for example from the melians is okay there it doesn't matter what you think it doesn't matter what you think democracy should be any form of democracy that you're

[19:26] going to have is going to have an Elite Class that is going to be running things um and that's just going to be a structural reality and that Elite Class is either going to be good and beneficial and have the best interest of the population in mind or it's not um

[19:38] but to kind of pretend that they're just kind of arbitrarily voted in and out um and that the people are in charge is just is is just a myth so anyway so are we living in a democracy in America or an oligarchy an oligarchy I so this is

[19:50] the the iron law of oligarchy U we we are always and ever living in an oligarchy every society in in history has been an oligarchy of some kind uh by the way way this view is like was very

[20:00] has been very common for a very long time in the American left and you people like n Shamsky whove made their entire you know political careers talking about the sort of you know presumptive business oligarchy that must must run everything um and you know and then how

[20:11] they work through their allies in the press to basically manufacture consent you know people like me look at at least what's happening today and kind of say actually now the shoes on the other foot you know the ol the oligarchy as

[20:21] expressed by the heads of the major corporations the heads of the bureaucracies right are are are no longer business oligarchs for the most part they're kind of these um you know kind of Academic Press um uh uh

[20:31] bureaucratic Elites uh but anyway Burnham is a very good framework for thinking about that just just to kind of like extend this idea let's assume Burnham's right everything's an oligarchy and that the election on

[20:43] November 5th was sort of the voting out by the American public or at least a giant middle finger to the old Elite the Old Guard the old oligarchy and perhaps

[20:55] the ushering in of a new oligarchy in other words are we is is part of the way to understand this election the Triumph or maybe the emergent um Victory let's

[21:08] see of if they can actually wield power and you know recreate themselves of a new counter Elite and are you Mark andreon you know someone who has supported Clinton in 1996 Gore in 2000

[21:20] John KY in 2004 Obama in 2008 Hillary in 2016 and then of course in this election Donald Trump are you representative of like are you a

[21:32] are you a turn cat or are you someone who saw the corruption of the old Elite and decided to sort of switch into a new counter Elite yeah so yes both of those

[21:44] yes turn coat and okay yes depending on your point of view right um so uh yeah so look okay another thing from bur explain it from yourself if you can and also what causes someone to turn against

[21:56] their you know cuz you and Reed Hoffman and let's say Mark cubin you all like pedigreed in much of the same way but only some of you sort of have gone in the other direction so let's talk about

[22:08] you and then the phenomenon more broadly so basically the the way I would describe it um is as follows which is I I'm a I'm a I'm a politically you know socially culturally I'm a child of the 1990s um California the 1990s

[22:19] specifically um basically in the 1990s for somebody like me Tech founder you know kind of coming up you know educated in American universities benefic beneficiary of everything from fed research funding to you know to student

[22:30] loan programs and so forth you know kind of got in position to be able to start a tech company that became successful there was basically something that was never nobody ever wrote down but everybody understood which I call the deal um the deal was somebody like me

[22:42] basically could start a company um uh you could invent a new technology in this case you know the you know web browsers and all the other things that Netscape did um everybody would think that that was great and by the way we got you know glowing press coverage

[22:53] everybody loved us it was great um and then you could go public um you could make a lot of money also great that was great um you know you would pay your taxes and that was fine that was you obviously you know key key part of the

[23:03] social compact um you know within the context of a progressive tax system that was fine and then and then at the end at the end of your you know career you would be left with this giant pot of money and then what you would do is donate it to philanthropy that washes

[23:14] away all of your all of your sins uh you know reclassifies you as from a bus you know from a sort of you know suspect business Mogul to a you know virtuous philanthropist and and and then that's that and and that's the arc and it's

[23:25] it's all great wonderful and then by the way along the way the Press loves you um you know you get invited you get honorary degrees at all the universities you get invited to all the great parties you get invited to Davos you get invited

[23:36] to Aspen you get to come in and you know sit with the New York Times editorial board um you get um you know the dinner parties are spectacular you know all these incredibly important like

[23:46] wonderful people and then and then you you know you get married and you and your spouse have the exact same politics and and then you sign the giving pledge and everything's awesome you say the giving pledge and everything is great and then Warren Buffett talks about how great you are and it's just like it's

[23:56] it's all like wonderful and and basically what what what happened what I experienced and what I experienced was they the people in charge of all this basically broke the deal um and basically every way that you possibly

[24:07] can right so so basically every single thing I just said is you know for the last decade has been now held to be presumptively evil um and and we you know we can kind of go step by step kind of through that you know so it's everything from you know just the whole

[24:18] idea that there are certain people who are you know Merit a greater economic outcome than others is itself evil um you know technology of course is held to be presumptively evil tech companies are held to be presum evil um you know tech

[24:30] tech people are are held to be this you know this evil class anybody who's rich is evil um and then you know the Capstone for me the thing that really shook me was when I realized that it the the philanthropy was being redefined as

[24:41] evil um which is a and that's not like uniform yet but like that's a real thing um and um the and the the the the so this very specific thing that happened there was my friend Mark Zuckerberg and

[24:51] his wife did this thing because they were operating according to the deal right and so they did this thing where they they they they they they announced and committed that 99% of their ownership in Facebook um was going to go to philanthropic causes and in fact by

[25:03] the way non-political philanthropic causes the big mission of the what they call the chorg initiative is literally to cure all disease in the next hundred years and they just got hammered with criticism and attacks on that and the

[25:14] the and the line of argument was literally oh they're they're just they're they're just slimy rich people and they're only doing it for the tax break which is like a basic mathematical problem which is you don't give away 99%

[25:26] of your money for a tax break it doesn't make any sense but what but what I realized is there's this real sentiment now um and and this is real and this is this is this is real and still growing which is philanthropy is evil because

[25:36] the morally correct thing to do is for the government to do all this um and so what they should be doing is they should they should be getting taxed at 99% the government should take the money then the government should allocate the money and and that and that's a level of

[25:47] statism and you know kind of bordering on communism that you know is is sort of unfortunately kind of you know infected infected the culture right now but so so basically it's like okay every single part of that deal no longer works and so

[25:57] it's basically the entire thing has been jettisoned out the airlock and so it just you know for me it then raised the question of like okay if none of that is true then what world am I living in what role do I play I wonder like kind of looking back

[26:09] being at those dinner parties with all the ditto heads repeating what they read on the New York Times oped page how many of them sort of privately were thinking something different um I thought about

[26:21] this a lot on July 13th the day Trump got shot the thing I remember of course was scrolling through X and seeing all of these people who I

[26:31] sort of privately knew from WhatsApp groups and Signal groups that they were Trump curious or definitely sort of had moved rightward but in public they were performing something very very different

[26:42] all of a sudden were reposting this iconic image of trump blooded on his ear with the raised fist some of them explicitly endorsing him but it was all sort of like a tacit endorsement or

[26:53] saying you know we're on this side explain to me Mark like how many of those like how much was sort of going on just beneath the surface over the past

[27:04] few years of people who sort of felt that they couldn't risk either because of their company their economic interest their reputational interest even their kids getting into the right schools felt

[27:15] they couldn't risk sort of socially going public with their Trump support but felt either prot Trump or disenchanted enough that they weren't going to vote for Kamala like how big of a group was that

[27:27] when did you start understanding that there were a lot of closeted people and were you surprised by what you saw in the sort of like Mass coming out of the closet I I think you would describe it as on the 13th the

[27:39] easy version of the story I think the easy answer is there was a lot of what was called preference falsification happening and so the the easy version of the story is there were some number of True Believers on the blue side and then

[27:50] there were some number of True Believers on the red side but the True Believers in the red side were were lying in public about what they believe because of the threat of social sanction and career obliteration and losing their friends and family and everything else

[28:00] and just for the listen that's what preference falsification means sort of everyone who listens will be familiar with this phenomenon of like there are certain things that you'll say to your spouse alone in bed at night that you

[28:11] would never dare to say at in the office or on X yes exactly and in fact there's there's actually two parts to preference falsification there's not saying the things that you believe um and then

[28:22] there's being forced to say things you don't believe right and of course there's this famous essay by vas hav who talks about the power of the powerless and he talks about the role of the slogan in like the Communist you know

[28:32] behind the the Iron Curtain he talked about the role of the slogan you know the what was the the it was the green grosser putting in his window workers of the World Unite workers of the World Unite and he does this whole thing where he's like nobody believes that the

[28:44] workers are really uniting nobody believes why putting it in his window exactly right and so that's the other side of it is people saying people saying things that they don't believe and and you know these are both bad

[28:55] arguably the second one is worse because you're forcing somebody the the system is forcing somebody to say something they don't believe which is like which is okay if you're being forced to lie at that point you've like completely lost yourself and you're like you're you're drenched in so much internal shame that

[29:06] you you know you're just you're never going to recover um and so the the easy version of the story is that it's basically a bip bipolar thing and then what you saw on on that day and and then on Election Day and then sense was was

[29:18] an unwinding of the preference falsification and then a Cascade in the other direction te Mar Kuran who um who sort of is the best uh author on this topic um with his book um uh private

[29:28] truths public lies um he he went on on X the other day and he said the preference Cascade is unwinding so fast now um that we're now going to start to see people who are going to claim that they were they voted for Trump even though they

[29:40] didn't um right like it's G to go it's going to go the other way I don't know if that'll happen or not but he he's the expert he thinks it will um I think there's some truth to that theory I think the there's a there's a darker um

[29:51] truth though which I think has has if anything more to do with it which I think there are a lot of people who just don't have strong beliefs um and and and and they may by the way they may think they do but what they actually have is just they're they're they're basically

[30:02] just they're basically just they're in a social context where everybody around them either believes the same thing or or is saying that they believe the same thing or hiding their true beliefs it's it's go along get along you just didn't

[30:13] have to put it it wasn't required to put a lot of thought into it like and especially like in the business World which which I know the best like most people are just you know most people are just busy at work trying to get their their work done and trying to get along

[30:24] with their colleagues most people are just trying to get promoted and get a raise and then they go home at night and just trying to take care of their families and they're trying to take care of their kids and you know whatever there's a leak in the roof and they're trying to deal with that and so I think most people just don't even even in the

[30:35] elite elite classes most people don't have these super strong concrete views and so if the entire momentum of society is heading One Direction it's just the most natural thing in the world to go along with it and then when this kind of

[30:46] preference unwind happens when the Cascade tips tilts the other direction then then this is what what what teer is saying is you know it it it it it it may cast cascate hard in the other direction and I think that's as much to do with oh

[30:57] and then back to the Trump getting shot so Trump getting shot you know everybody experienced this but you know I'll just tell you I by the way there may be a gender thing here but I'll just tell you like I think it was hard to see I think

[31:09] it was hard for any man I won't speak I don't I don't say this to to imply women think differently I can just only speak for myself as a man I think it was hard for any man to see somebody get shot in

[31:20] the head bleeding not knowing how badly he's been injured the shots are still coming in the Secret Service comes in shoves you to the ground is dragging you off the stage and your response is to break free of the Secret Service and

[31:30] stand up and expose yourself to ongoing gunfire with literally people being shot in the bleachers right behind you right and screaming and like chaos and blood and all of it and to actually expose

[31:40] yourself to that level of physical danger and put your fist up in the air and say fight fight fight like we don't see physical bravery like that like I'm sure they saw it in World War II I'm I'm sure you see it in war time but like we

[31:51] don't see that in our lives um and so I I think it was one of those just such shocking positive ly shocking moments um that it was this thing where it's just like all right if we're not going to

[32:02] stand up for that like what are we all doing um and so I I I I I think that definitely I think that made a big impact yeah I mean of course it go I I should have said you were one of the people that tweeted that image on that

[32:14] day were you nervous to do that you know look it's just like it's the United States of America we've all been told for 10 years that we're all racist and sexist and horrible and the country is horrible and colonialism and on and it's

[32:25] just like all horrible and Tech is horrible and the whole thing is horrible and here's this guy bleeding out of his head who's standing up and he's literally it's I mean the iconography is amazing he's literally wearing a a red white and blue suit and tie the colors

[32:37] of the country with the American flag behind him by the way we knew at that point that we were going to come out for him like we Ben Ben and I had already decided at that time we had dinner with him eight days before that and then that happened the following Saturday um and

[32:48] then we were headed in actually to record our podcast where we were going to endorse him on that Monday and then of course the other of course important thing about that moment is that's the moment when Elon right then Elon stepped up and said yep I'm for him that was the

[33:00] big moment um in in in in our industry where you know the most important iconic figure in Tech by far um you know did that in that moment and so that that was the real shift Peter teal got up at the

[33:12] RNC in 2016 and Endor Trump that didn't have the same effect of sort of giving people cover or Shifting the tide in the way that Elon did how do you understand

[33:23] that I mean again I think it's the the mindset what we all knew or thought we knew in 2016 or 2015 2016 I was just speaking for myself like I didn't have anywhere near the depth of knowledge or

[33:34] awareness or like I hadn't really thought about any of it and so what Peter did just seem so you know completely offbeat from you know by the way he was like I think in Tech he was the only one I think you only public one

[33:44] yeah the only public one right and by the way Peter is a really good friend of mine and I I I I talked to him a lot during that time period and he he and I were on the Facebook board together at that point and this was this was a this is a this actually led to a big blow up

[33:56] actually on the Facebook board that became public um when one of the other board members actually attacked Peter for it in an email that then leaked um so like you know there was high drama around this um but um uh and by the way

[34:06] Mark Zuckerberg showed at that time actually a lot of Bravery U himself um and there was tremendous pressure on Mark to kick Peter off the board for that and Mark really stood up for him and and said no we precisely want him to stay on the board because he thinks

[34:18] differently than everybody else um after Trump won I asked him like what do you think happen and and Peter made this really interesting this is like December of 16 or something so the country still like doesn't know how to think about it

[34:28] all and he's like you know he's like I have a sneaking suspicion that Trump won because people are tired of political correctness I think Peter was dialed in on that and and then and again not just the political correctness but I think what Peter meant by that in retrospect was just again this sort of deeper thing

[34:40] in the country which is the majority of people in the country are just not willing to live under this kind of soft basically repressive negative hostile emotional hysterical repression they're

[34:50] just not willing to do it and and maybe they maybe the the sort of people r large in the country didn't realize that fully in 2016 or 2020 um but they certainly realize it today and I you know and and so I think Peter in

[35:00] retrospect was sort of predicting what actually just happened in this election with you know with the lag I want to ask you a few questions sort of about the political Dynamics in Silicon Valley because there's a lot being written

[35:11] about the the vibe shift happening not just you know certainly culturally in the country but specifically in Silicon Valley and this is part of the bigger political realignment and I guess I wonder a little bit if that's overstated

[35:22] because the average worker at meta or Google I imagine like has not changed their mind post November 5th like these are still extraordinarily Progressive

[35:32] people that are dominating the most you know the biggest behemoths in the tech industry can you like is this a phenomenon where the people at the very top are sort of breaking the way of you

[35:44] and Elon and and a sort of handful of others but the majority of people that are powering these companies are still sort of let's just say on the left or the woke left is the phenomenon a

[35:55] division between big tech company and what you've termed little Tech in other words startup Founders how does the dynamic break down politically yeah so to start with I would say this has been

[36:06] a misperception and I believe actually fostered by the press for a long time a misperception that Silicon Valley is some Haven of libertarian you know you know IDE ideologues you know lunatics um Silicon Valley my entire life career you

[36:17] know certainly from the 80 you know I I got here in the 90s but like certainly back to the 80s and I'm sure probably the 70s and 60s too is overwhelmingly just like straight up Democrats it's basically like the faculty of an IV

[36:28] league university like maybe slightly more balanced but barely yeah you have companies where literally like the donations are like 99 to1 right um and so uh yeah and by the way that is that is reflective of like what the right if

[36:39] you took the top 200 Executives at these big companies that's roughly how it would break down like overwhelmingly the Elites in Silicon Valley and California are still they're still they're still exactly where they were like they they

[36:49] haven't changed um you know so look the vast the vast majority of the CEOs Executives founders of the big tech companies are still exactly where they were um the vast majority of the you know employee bases um you know

[37:00] especially especially you would say like in the creative Fields there's a little bit of a sort by field but like you you go into like any of the like you know front-end designers developers the people who build consumer apps like all that stuff you know it's going to be

[37:11] very very very leftwing um um and but and it's the same thing but it's the same thing in the Fortune 500 it's the same thing in the universities it's the same thing in the Press it's the same thing in the big bureaucracies like it's it you know it is it is the generalized

[37:23] phenomenon and so the the the value is just part of that and so I I think what you have is you have this like mon you have this Elite monoculture that's sort of very comfortably in power and then you have this counter Elite that is you know starting with Elon is kind of

[37:33] coming in on top um and not to take huge credit for this myself but I think a bunch of the people in the counter Elite are like clearly like more successful you know clearly more productive better results than most people in the elite so

[37:46] the bur bur burner's framework on this is he calls it the circulation of Elites um and it's basically the idea of you have an elite class and then you have a group of upand comers who are like aspirates to the elite class and what

[37:57] Elite Class does to retain its own status is it invites the aspirants into itself so you get pulled into the elite and you're in right you're in and then by the way you don't want to do anything

[38:08] that would cause you to get kicked out because like it's great it's amazing and these are all amazing people and they're doing so much and they all return your calls and it's fantastic and you're being praised and everybody loves you and like it's just wonderful and and

[38:18] you're on the side of goodness and Justice and you know freedom and equality and you know all these things it's just amazing right um you're doing this just you're so great you're doing so many great things for black people right it's just like it's just amazing

[38:29] right um and so and you just like live in that world right and so anyway and his so the the the sort of Burnham Paro kind of kind of kind of argument on that is that lasts for as long as it lasts

[38:41] until at some point there's a cter elite there's a set of people who ideally are even better are even more accomplished are even higher status Elites who basically come in and basically say no

[38:51] like this is not right this is not how this should work this has gone this has gone corrupt but how how does that group of counter Elite like I I'm sure you've noticed there's just such sort of

[39:03] sycophantic Behavior going on right now towards particular members at the Vanguard of that counter Elite of people sort of just really Brown noosing and like trying to get in good no no no it

[39:14] there's been so much brown nosing in the other direction for my entire life as someone who just like doesn't like brown noosing and doesn't like how do you avoid how do you avoid um the same ditto

[39:24] head behavior of everyone sitting around the table at in Aspen or whatever I'm sure there's some famous restaurant there nodding along to whatever you know

[39:35] Tom fredman wrote about Israel in the Middle East in the New York Times that day like how do you not replicate that same mirr image behavior on the other side or is that unavoidable according to you and Burnham you know I'm getting all

[39:47] these calls now uh and I'm not like it's not like I'm you know like I'm not like hanging out with Trump every night um you know um although Elon is um uh but I'm not but um you know I'm enough where

[39:57] I'm getting all these calls now from people where it's like you know they were fully you know certified members of the woke Vanguard you know Executives at these companies fully committed to every possible cause you can imagine who all of a sudden are like oh you know I'm

[40:08] starting to rethink things and oh by the way I've got an idea for you know Elon or I've got an idea for the do I've got an idea like who in their right mind would criticize Elon Musk right now not just because he's so powerful but you

[40:19] know we we know what he does to people who disagrees with him so like how do you avoid that like how do you how do you create an anti or how do you create create an anti- fragile counter Elite is

[40:30] maybe the right way to phrase it yeah so look I so I think part of the answer is you don't it's there there's a there's now an orbit of there's now a universe of power I mean what do you know what happens when people get around power or

[40:41] they think they can get proximity to power like there's always a court right again this would be like a this would be like a a Burnham thing like there there's always a court there there's always a Sun King there's always a court there's there's always a power center

[40:51] and people are always going to try to get to it right and so that like that I I think that's a permanent State of Affairs I think my main reaction to what you're saying is actually though that it's still so strong in the other direction right like sitting here at least sitting here today is still the

[41:03] case that 90 plus% of the people in Tech are on the other side it's still the case that you know 90 plus perc of the Fortune 500 90 plus per of the universities 90 plus per of the experts 90 plus% of the bureaucrats the thing

[41:14] you know is they didn't do that by like building Rockets right they they they didn't do that by building things that like matter they they did that by basically being part of the part of the government complex and so um so like overwhelmingly the power structure in

[41:26] the country overwhelmingly the Elites in the country overwhelming by the way is the same thing it's it's like a trump Trump's billionaires like billionaires overwhelmingly went for Harris over Trump like 100 to one like

[41:37] overwhelmingly right of course of course again it's so that's the elite that just lost no I know I know I know but my point is like it it that that hasn't I don't think that's changed that much and

[41:48] look maybe that just means that they continue to lose maybe that's great and I'm not saying that the new Elite or counter Elite should aspire to be like that it's just like of all the problems that we have today like I think think that that is I'm not yeah I'm I'm not

[42:00] the question you ask I I'm not worried about that right now look I think the other thing is it is I think just indisputably true um that one side went in super hardcore for censorship over the last 15 years and I think that

[42:11] actually was both damaging to the country and I think it was also damaging to itself as a movement um because I I think um I think I think basically like the call it the Democratic party r large or the the left sort of that side of

[42:21] things decided that all descent counterargument objection to their points of view was hate speech misinformation as and was to be was to be completely dismissed um and and and then for the people who who said those

[42:32] things to be ostracized um and and and then that that formed showed up culturally and then that formed up literally you were in the meeting I was in the meeting I was I was in the Mee I was in the me I was in the meeting at Facebook where we Define the terms hate

[42:43] speech and misinformation for the first time when was that and who defined them 2013 give or take why were they defined and who defined them let me back up all the way

[42:55] um no social Media Company can function without having some level of censorship and the reason is because you're going to have things and you know terrorist recruitment incitement of violence child pornography you can't

[43:07] frauds and scams you cannot have those things they're illegal they're actually not covered under the First Amendment there's no protection for them you are you cannot have them your service will fail it's horrible um and so you're always going to have some censorship

[43:19] function and these companies all had functions to do that and then it's like from there it's like okay hate speech and then it's like all right well you can't have the n-word right and it's like all right fair enough you can't have the NW I got it right but then you

[43:29] know what happens then it's like straight down the slippery slope and before you know it you're censoring the claims that Co was a lab leak like it's just a straight it's the ring of power it's a straight slide and so I I was in I was in the meetings at a bunch of

[43:39] these companies um including Facebook where it's like okay we need to Define hate speech we need to Define misinformation right and of course hate speech of course gets defined as thing you know statements that make people

[43:49] uncomfortable and of course the immediate objection is like well the the the concept of hate speech makes me uncomfortable well that doesn't did you say that in the meeting of course of course yes I did yes I did I said like

[44:01] look obviously this is going to get obviously this is going to get blown completely out of proportion because this is this could this could now apply to everybody and so we are now going to empower a commissar class right of professional activists who are now going

[44:11] to be able to apply to apply this to fight all their political battles and to Vanquish their political of course they're going to do and this is the thing it's just like you know an American you know the way we experience politics is what everybody feels about

[44:22] their most important political issue is that it's not a political issue they feel like it's a moral issue right we heard this in these companies all the time starting around this time which is this you know you don't want any politics at work well this isn't a political issue this is a moral issue

[44:33] right in the minute you have a moral trump card and then the ability to censor People based on the morality of course it's going to get used in in for for everything under the Sun including politics so so there was that and then the misinformation thing was early on

[44:44] was was not that big of a deal um and I I could tell you where that came from but it was not that big of a deal it was really the Russia gate you know the Russia gate whatever you want to call it h conspiracy hoax thing that since got I

[44:54] think has been I think completely debunked um but it was really this theory that Trump only got elected because he was a Russian asset and that Putin you know as as as Hillary Clinton put it and I saw this with my own eyes

[45:04] you know Donald Trump is only President because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook right and so so basically it nobody would ever vote for Donald Trump out of their own you know free will if therefore had to be literally a Russian misinformation active measures campaign

[45:17] right therefore you must censor misinformation and again it's the ring of power the minute you have that you you you censor everything else but yeah no that that that's that start that actually predated Trump that that all started in like 2013 back Mark do you

[45:28] feel like you could have played it differently like is there is there anything you regret about that should you have resigned from the board for example so this is the thing you resign this is always the problem that I think people have by the way in government as

[45:38] well as you know they have in um in in companies which is if you resign you're gone you you lose the information flow right and so if if your job is to understand what's happening in the world which is which is fundamentally my like my day job like you just lose all that

[45:48] context um and then number two it's like all right you know if you stay are you endorsing things you don't agree with to be part of an organization should the requirement be that you agree with every single thing they do of course of course

[45:59] not and of course not right so there's a there's so there's a thing in like healthy corporate cultures which they call um disagree and commit he so there's basically three modes of how you resolve arguments in companies you can agree and commit that's the easy one um

[46:10] You can disagree and quit or you can disagree and commit right what's the line between that and complicity with things that are really wrong I you know it's a question of conscience I you know

[46:21] I think everybody has to answer that kind of in their own you know in their own soul um you know I I would say because I was in there the whole time and I saw the develop and by the way not just Facebook I saw this happen I you know I was in these conversations at

[46:31] many other companies and I was talking to many other Founders I knew the Twitter guys really well I knew the Twitter guys really well I was an angel investor I knew them when they were the Free Speech wing of the Free Speech party right which and then I knew them

[46:42] when when when that when they became you know one of the wokest companies in the world um and so I saw that happening by the way this all has informed number one you know we we my firm participated in elon's you know buyout of of Twitter

[46:53] which now became X and you know I think hopefully my experiences there have been somewhat helpful um you know as as as he's done what he's done um as sort of a member of that Syndicate and then also as you know but we are the major outside

[47:05] investor in substack um and I would say one one of the one of the things I'm proudest of is being able to take the learnings from these other companies that kind of could didn't did couldn't figure out how to deal with this upfront

[47:15] because they didn't know these issues were coming um and I think the substat guys have done an amazing job building um these questions and how to deal with them into the company from the very beginning uh and substack has been you

[47:26] know far more resilient uh to these kinds of attacks and far more you know Pro free speech than than basically any other denovo company in the last 20 years um and so you know I and I think the tide is turning a bit on this and we'll see what happens to the big

[47:37] companies but um you know very brief I want to ask you something just about Ben Horwitz before we move on who's your partner and you know you've built this unbelievable firm with him he endorsed

[47:49] Trump with you over the summer then a little while later he talked about how he was going to give money to the kamla Harris campaign a lot of people saw that and thought this was a hedge basically

[48:00] for your firm a16 Z or andreason horrorwitz was it yeah oh yeah yes it was a hedge it was it was 100% a hedge um so it's a textbook definition of a

[48:11] hedge um so uh yes it was for sure so the the context for that is the Biden Administration was really bad I would say contempt I would say seething contempt um was their attitude towards

[48:23] the American tech industry they went out of their way to damage it as as they could um by the way there's actually news in the Press today the they they basically they basically destroyed the career of the the the the the CEO of

[48:34] Intel the last group that maybe I would think of as being victim to the excesses of maybe the totalitarianism of the left

[48:45] or the excesses of the Biden White House would be the kind of companies that you invest in so like tell us what this actually practically looks like for a person that's coming to this pretty cold

[48:56] yeah so basically the way I would describe it is the Clinton Gore years there was it was like Silicon Valley and Washington had a partnership going back literally 100 years right like the the

[49:07] the California Silicon Valley Northern California was the home of the the invention of everything from guided missiles and and radar you know um in the pre-World War II and then leading

[49:17] into um you know the computer age um and the microchip and and everything that followed um and then obviously the internet you know was this payoff of this 40-year program by the government to fund

[49:27] you know these Technologies you know that I was the beneficiary of and then in the Clinton Gore years like there was like tremendous partnership I would say between between DC and the valley tremendous amount of Love um and then by

[49:39] the way in the first Obama term there was like tremendous um you know Back in Forth um a lot of you know for example a lot of Silicon Valley people remember the famous Obamacare website you know when it when it broke like a lot of the best and brightest in Silicon Valley

[49:50] just put their hands up and said we're going to go to Washington and fix it of course I remember that website right exactly right and and that created something called the US digal service where they they they have these you know they now for 15 years have had really

[50:00] bright value people who go into the White House and work on all these Tech topics um and then you know look the military you know the military runs an American Technology right and so so so like this this Dynamic part part you know the deal this Dynamic was like

[50:11] super healthy and productive under both Democratic and Republican administrations basically for my entire career up until this one up until the Biden Administration and they and by the way this took us totally by surprise and

[50:21] again this is one of these things where I feel like I should have been able to see it coming and I didn't see it coming well you just don't you don't think about like Joe Biden and his administration as being particularly passionate about this issue so like what

[50:32] what what was driving it who is driving it name I think this is I you know look and I would say like when we endorsed Trump we only did so on the basis of like Tech policy um and and and I come back to that because we're we're we're

[50:42] specifically weighing in on like Tech business economics um you know when we think about these things um but yeah no look like I I think basically if you ask anybody who has a problem with what the B Administration does whether it's in

[50:53] Tech or in many other issues including many that you talk about you have this incredible dichotomy between what seems like a reasonable moderate Centrist thoughtful you know sort of President who's been a senator forever and sort of

[51:03] you know pillar of the old Democratic establishment and then you have this like incredibly radicalized you know set of policies with this young staff that just is like Out For Blood um on all these different fronts um and you know

[51:15] how much of that was because Biden was scile and didn't know what was happening um how much of that was a conscious political trade-off that he made to get the support of the progressives in 2020

[51:27] um how much of that is just the entire core 20s something 30s something base of democratic staffers is now just like super aggressive and super woke um and you know look I think foreign policy

[51:37] people have that question and I think Economic Policy people have that question and people concerned about like inflation have that question and people concerned about taxes have that question and and and we have our version of that which is they just adopted these very

[51:48] very radical positions aimed squarely damaging us as much as they possibly could and that played out specifically for us in three areas um that that caused us to to to to to endorse Trump

[51:59] um one was crypto where they just declared war um and tried to kill the entire industry um and drive it offshore U number two was AI where I became very scared uh earlier this year that they

[52:10] were going to do the same thing to AI that they did to crypto um and then third is um what seems like an esoteric topic but turns out to be I think very important which is this concept of unrealized capital gains tax um so

[52:21] taxing uh private companies um which also by definition means you know will ultimately end up meaning homeowners and everybody else who owns a private asset small business people um and basically destroying the ability to have small

[52:31] businesses to be able to have home home ownership and to be able to have Tech startups through this sort of structural change to tax is called unrealized capital gains um the crypto War we were just on we were on the receiving end for

[52:42] four years it was incredibly brutal incredibly destructive um AI we had a meeting uh we had meetings uh in DC in May uh where we we talked to them about this and the meetings were absolutely

[52:53] horrifying and we came out basically deciding we had to endorse Trump um add so little color to absolutely horrifying what what what what did you hear in those meetings yeah so they said

[53:04] yeah so they they said look they said AI they said look they said look ai ai is one of these techn AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control um this is not going to be a startup thing they

[53:14] actually said flat out to us don't start don't do AI startups like don't don't fund AI startups it's not something that we're going to allow to happen um they're they're not going to be allowed to exist uh there's no point um they

[53:25] basically said AI is going to be a a game of two or three big companies um working closely with the government um and we're going to basically wrap them in a you know they I'm paraphrasing but we're going to basically wrap them in a

[53:35] government cocoon uh we're going to protect them from competition um we're going to control them um and we're going to dictate what they do um and then I said well I said I don't understand how you're going to lock this down so much

[53:46] because like the math for you know AI is like out there and it's being taught everywhere and you know they literally said well you know during the Cold War we we classified entire areas of physics um and took them out of the research

[53:56] chch community and and and and and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed um and that if we if we decide we need to we're going to do the same thing to to ma to the math underneath AI um wow and I said

[54:08] I've just learned two very important things because I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were you know even conceiving of doing it to the latter um and so they basically just said yeah we're going to look we're

[54:19] going to take total control of the entire thing and just don't don't and mark what was steel Manet for The Listener like what was their argument why were it's so this gets into this whole like all these debates around like AI safety um

[54:30] AI policy so there's sort of several dimensions on it and I'll do my best to steal Mana so one is just like to the extent that this stuff is relevant to the military which it is like if you draw an analogy between AI on autonomous

[54:41] weapons being like the new thing that's going to determine who wins and loses Wars then you draw an analogy to the in the cold war that was nuclear that was nuclear power and that was the atomic bomb um and you know the federal

[54:51] government the steel man would be the federal government didn't let startups go out and build atomic bombs right you you had you know the Manhattan Project and everything was classified and you know at least according to them

[55:01] they classified down to the level of actual mathematics um and um and uh you know they tightly controlled everything and that and look you know that that determined a lot of the you know the shape of the world right um and so

[55:12] there's that and then look there there there's the other that that's that's part one and then look I think part two is there's the social control aspect to it um which you which is where the the censorship stuff comes comes right back

[55:22] which is the the the exact same Dynamic we've had with social media censorship and how it's basically been weaponized and how it and how the government became entwined with social media censorship which is one of the real scandals of the last decade and a real problem like a

[55:34] real constitutional problem um like I that is happening at at like hypers speed and AI um and you know these are the same people who have been using social media censorship against their political enemies these are the same

[55:45] people who have been do doing debank against their political enemies and they basically I think they want to do they want to use AI the same way um and then look I think the third is I think this this generation of Dem R the ones in the

[55:57] White House under Biden they became very anti- capitalist um and they wanted to go back to much more of a centralized controlled planned economy and you saw that in many aspects of their policy but I think quite frankly they think that

[56:07] the idea that the private sector plays an important role is not high up on their priority list and they think generally companies are bad and capitalism is bad and entrepreneurs are bad and they've said that a thousand different ways um and you know they they

[56:18] you know they demonize you know entrepreneurs as much as they can um and you know up and then you know the tax policy up to including promoting you know proposing a tax policy that would just destroy the process of private company creation and Destroy venture

[56:28] capital I don't think there's been an Administration this radical on economic policy on these economic and Tech policy I don't think in like ever like a hundred years like I always say this I

[56:39] always say this Communists 100 years ago love technology like they loved industrialization like Communists 100 years ago wanted industrialization because they knew that industrialization and technological Advance made everybody's lives better they just

[56:50] wanted to seize it all once it was built these people didn't even want it to get built and so something something just something went horribly horribly wrong in this Administration and and and

[57:00] and in this movement and and by the way let me just add one more thing which is look this is not this is not what you would consider to be mainstream Democratic policy you're thinking up until you know whatever 2020 um you know

[57:10] the the the Clinton people think this is insane the the the Obama first term people think this is insane the moderate Democrats today think this is insane and by the way it's not me saying this you got people like Richie Tores now saying this in public like this is wrong like

[57:22] this is clearly like off the deep end um and and you know the Democratic party right now is going through a soul-searching process to try to figure out what it's going to do in the wake of of this loss and I I would say I am cautiously optimistic that the smart

[57:33] moderate Democrats are going to figure out that that these are unnecessary fights like there's just no reason to have these fights there's no reason to have this approach it doesn't have anything to do with the historical basis of the party it doesn't have anything to

[57:44] do with what people think that they're voting for it doesn't have anything to do with the ability to you know take care of poor people it doesn't have anything to do with the ability to have Progressive social policy it's like just this extreme level of anti- business anti-tech animus and they and and they

[57:57] should just simply Let It Go and reestablish the historically close ties and move on with things and start winning elections and and I and I hope they reach the right the right conclusions one of the things that the

[58:07] Biden Administration did is that they aggressively went after Google Amazon and meta over these Anti-Trust laws and I think across the political Spectrum there's sort of a growing resentment of

[58:20] what you call Big Tech I think what other people just call Tech's power their size arguably their profitability JD Vance incoming vice president supports a big Tech antitrust Crackdown

[58:31] where do you agree with Vance and where do you disagree in other words where should be we be reigning in some of these big tech companies and protecting consumers and where has this been an

[58:42] overreach in your view yeah so start by saying we differentiate to your point between what we call Big Tech and what we call Little Tech um and so people can decide whether this is valid or not but we we believe

[58:53] it is just big Tech are the the companies that have made it and the compan that have some level of Market power such that at least people are accusing them you know of of of of being you know the dread you know monopolies or cartels or you know

[59:04] olop these kind of big words that mean you know kind of very large amounts of Market power um so that's big Tech um and you know everybody there's a household name by definition if you're big Tech you're a house household name

[59:15] um we we we then Define what we call Little Tech and little Tech are startups right and so it's new companies that have this aspiration to become big companies um there is this sort of funny cycle of Life aspect to it which is all

[59:25] the little companies start out wanting to be big companies right yeah what is the goal of little Tech it's to be big Tech is to be big Tech right exactly and so there is this cycle of and this is how the tech industry has played out for

[59:36] you know 80 years which is you you have you have your existing big tech companies and then you have these little Tech startups and then when they most of them fail but when they succeed they become big Tech and then basically the cycle repeats and then and then what

[59:47] what the role of the Venture Capital firm is to fund each new generation of little tech company right and so you you you end up basically what we end up doing like most of our day job is to fund companies that are trying to grow up to take out the existing big tech

[59:59] companies and replace them and and and so there's not I would not even characterize this in like moral terms it's not like the little tech companies don't want to become big tech companies they do it's it it's it's the the question is the question you asked which

[1:00:09] is what's the right policy to deal with the consequences of having at at the end of the day big companies with lots of concentrated Market power and you know and there's always a big economic legal debate around antitrust and you know it goes back 100 120 years uh around around

[1:00:21] that question I think what I would say is in the last decade I would say both sides of the itical Spectrum have really decided they really hate big Tech um and but but for I would say like

[1:00:31] diametrically opposed reasons um in a lot of ways so the left hates big tech for several reasons one is they just hate to the extent that they hate capitalism to the extent that they hate

[1:00:42] companies to the extent that they hate outsid economic success to start with um and then to the extent that they blame tech for the for getting Trump elected specifically uh and and they blame tech

[1:00:52] for kind of enabling the rise of you know let's call it populist right-wing politics and they you know this this came out in the last 10 years in many ways but it's like if we didn't have these big tech companies these big social networks we wouldn't have Trump and you know da these are therefore you

[1:01:03] know presely evil um and then by the way therefore like intense pressure you know on these big tech companies from the left to you know for for all the censorship and de banking um the right hates big Tech because of the censorship

[1:01:15] in the D banking right so specifically the right has a very particular bone to pick um and and and the bone to pick is you people at the big tech companies have been censoring and deplatforming Republicans now for over a decade um and

[1:01:27] and and by the way you know some of that is clearly true and then there's a lot of gray area and then you know there may be some claims that aren't true but the level of mistrust is so high um and at least the Republicans believe that the

[1:01:37] level of deception and lying is so high that you know there's been like a complete breakdown of relationship the populist right has a little bit of just a general Edge also against big companies in general there's almost like a right-wing sort of Neo uh

[1:01:49] progressivism on on that and that's where you kind of hear and I think frankly that has something to do with electoral politics which is you know the union vote has really started to shift um and so I think that there are some

[1:02:00] people on the right who think that if they're they come down harder on big companies generally they'll be able to get more the union vote which by the way might be true so so that's like the new tinge but I think most of it is anger at Big Tech and anger at at uh at the

[1:02:11] censorship and de banking um look I don't even really want to weigh in I mean I I on on on the specific politics of of of antitrust part of that is because I'm involved in a bunch of these companies and I don't want to say things

[1:02:22] that are going going to show up in court um but also look like I I think this is like for me this is a legitimate Tim honored tension in the American system

[1:02:32] that goes all the way back to Teddy Rosevelt um and I think many smart people have um worked on this for a very long time they are very well thought through theories on many sides of this um there are many legal precedents um on

[1:02:44] this um you know clearly there's a level of big company behavior that goes too far um clearly also uh government involvement in business often has unanticipated side effects um these are

[1:02:56] very complex and difficult questions I I think these are questions that need to be litigated both literally and philosophically um again this is a case where the last Administration was so aggressive on this and so out for blood

[1:03:08] that I think in many ways they suppressed the ashual you they suppress the actual question um I I would expect in the next decade that the actual question will probably be confronted more directly let me ask you then another question about the relationship

[1:03:19] between government and Tech I think you can very plausibly make the argument that government I hate using this but it's like government walk so Tech could run in other words they invested in the

[1:03:30] original internet which made your career they funded GPS they gave loans to Tesla to keep Tesla afloat they fund the California Public University system which arguably gives you employees and

[1:03:40] also Founders to invest in essentially they kind of like built or at least you know tilled the soil to create a very

[1:03:50] very rich environment through which all of these companies could grow and now a lot of people are in that environment are now turning around and saying government out of tech how do you

[1:04:01] respond to that line of criticism yeah so this goes to I would say this like a broader version of what I was saying about the deal right which is and this is kind of there's lots of historical ironies to this which is the

[1:04:12] deal for many decades was precisely as you said the government invested deeply in R&D uh the government invested deeply into infrastructure the government invested deeply by the way procurement you know the the the dod was early

[1:04:24] customer for a lot of these things that made them possible um the government invested deeply into education like all that is 100% True by the way for a very long time all of that had bip partis and support um

[1:04:35] Republicans thought that that was great because that to your point created the seedbed for for companies coming out the other side and the overall success of the American you know experiment the entire complex of government and private action that makes America succeed um you

[1:04:47] know people on the left thought that it was great because of course education is fantastic and like I said you know earlier earlier versions of the like it's new to a left-wing movement that's anti- technology like that's actually a

[1:04:58] new thing leftwing movements historically were Pro technology not anti- technology because they they they progress right technology quite literally represents progress and Technology represents in particular economic progress right and if you're

[1:05:09] trying to actually lift everybody up economically you need technology because you need economic growth you need new devices you need washing machines you need all these things you know you need electric power right I mean a huge focus of the Roosevelt administration was the

[1:05:19] deployment of electric power everywhere right just like by the way at least in theory a huge Focus the Obama Administration has been the deployment of broadband internet everywhere even though you know maybe not so much in practice but at least in theory right

[1:05:29] they had you know they were spending a lot of money on that um and so like historically this has been as I said this has been the you might call this the deal with the capital D like it just like of course this is how it works and

[1:05:39] then of course there are issues out the other side if these companies get you know whatever too big out of control whatever there's issues but like generally speaking the success of American industry the success of American Business the success of American Tech has been viewed as good

[1:05:51] for America by both sides it's a new phenomenon to have this very sharp anti-c capitalist um thing and I think that's I think and and at least I don't know my defense or whatever I I think

[1:06:02] that's the reaction at least for people like me if we went back to the Clinton Gore attitude on this that would be 100% fine and they were by the way I would say at the time plenty Progressive they had progressive tax policy they had

[1:06:12] Progressive social policies same thing for the first Obama term uh for sure um and so I I think we actually got kind of off the rails as opposed to as opposed to there being some deeper underlying issue one of the things that flipped you

[1:06:25] out over the past few years was this phenomenon that you spoke about recently on Joe Rogan that you've referenced a few times already in this conversation and that's the phenomenon of debank you

[1:06:35] said on Rogan that roughly 30 founders of crypto companies and other companies were sort of quietly debanked during the Biden Administration and debank which is essentially having your bank accounts

[1:06:48] your ability to transact closed or blocks blocked happens on both sides of the political Spectrum we have this really definitive piece by Rupa saberman about how it has happened both to Muslim

[1:07:00] business owners who Banks and companies like stripe or concern could be tied to Terror and also to people like Melania Trump um and I guess I wonder hearing

[1:07:10] you talk about that on Rogan and then subsequently what's happened is that a lot of these Founders have come out and say hey I am Spartacus it happened to me why did these people not say anything at

[1:07:22] the time so I would say so following so I say some some people did speak up um and so some people tried um and actually we talked about it actually I'll give you an example Ben and I actually talked about it specifically in the podcast

[1:07:32] where we explained why we were endorsing Trump um and it it basically came and went without people noticing and and you know maybe that's just because we were're not interesting enough but you know we we actually were talking about it um it just didn't didn't take

[1:07:43] culturally and then I think a lot of individuals you know we're talking about I think it's just one of those things it's like a lot of the stuff we talked about earlier which is just just they seem like one-offs when they're happening um and then it seems like if you say there's something systematic

[1:07:54] happening it sounds like a conspiracy theory the other thing is retaliation um I think especially a lot of small business people who have been subjected to this or small you know Tech you know early Tech Founders um I think a lot of them

[1:08:04] were hoping that it would just be a problem with One Bank um and if they talked about it publicly it might become a problem much more broadly oh another part of it as family members um you know part of the phenomenon is sometimes when

[1:08:15] you get go after your your yeah they go after your yeah they go after your family and you know one of the things I didn't even realize when I went on Rogan but I I I learned since is Melania Trump in her new book actually says that and

[1:08:25] her son bar were both debanked um you know and and of the many things that you could say about you know Trump you know we know for a fact that Melania and baron had nothing to do with you know anything that people are mad about um

[1:08:36] and so you know the idea that going you know going after somebody's you know wife and son is just like you know that I mean there you're in like Stalin level territory um and so I think people were scared about that by the way it's not just your bank account you know there's

[1:08:47] also been cases where you you lo you can't get insurance um you know you can't get a car loan um you know you can't get a you know I mean there's lots of cases you get kicked off the internet um this first came on my radar during

[1:08:59] the trucker protest in Ottawa where people involved in the trucker protest you know was a very mixed group of people would go and try and buy a cup of coffee or a bagel and they would learn

[1:09:11] then that they had been locked out of their accounts and were unable to purchase anything at all do you think that there should be you know there's no right to banking obviously in the constitution do you think this is something that the next Administration

[1:09:22] should pass laws to protect so this is what I mean by like soft authoritarianism like it's not the knock on the door at 4 in the morning you get dragged off to the basement in some horrible building and beaten right that

[1:09:32] that's not for the most part what happens what happens is oops sorry about your bank account oops sorry about your home loan oops sorry about your insurance oops sorry about your trucker license when the state turns on you right they they have all of these ways

[1:09:43] where somebody can press a button in a well-lit office somewhere and ruin your life this is the kind of thing that I'm worried about this is the kind of state power that I'm worried about um the thing that you mentioned though about there's no right in the Constitution to

[1:09:54] banking the way there is to free speech that that actually is not completely true um and I'm not a lawyer on this and so I won't get the details right but um there are there the the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is quite clear that you that you do not that the rights that

[1:10:06] you have do not all need to be enumerated to be rights um and that the government cannot arbitrarily suppress your rights even if they're not enumerated in the Constitution so like for example the government cannot act on you without due process to take away for

[1:10:17] example your bank account they're not allowed to there's no right to the bank account in the Constitution but it does say the government cannot act on you in that way um without due process um and so I actually think that the at least

[1:10:28] the lawyers tell me and by the way the law firm of C GPT Claud and Gemini also tell me there actually is a pretty good case that a lot of this behavior is illegal um and and further quite

[1:10:39] possibly criminally illegal there are Federal Criminal statutes um criminal statutes um around what uh denial of rights um and conspiracies to to deny rights and at least I I think there's a

[1:10:49] reasonable take that if there's been a conspiracy to deny somebody bank accounts of that due process and and and specifically the government has been involved in that um that it very well might be criminal felony behavior in terms of what the new Administration

[1:11:00] will do um you know um I will say this um I have there's this controversy online about whether there's been like an anti-conservative thing happening here or whether this is just like an

[1:11:10] anti you know crypto thing or whatever um a lot of people in the first Trump Administration have told me that they have been through this themselves um so that in the wake of the first Trump Administration they were unable they

[1:11:21] they they were variously debanked or unable to get various kinds of you know ins or Home Loans or other things there's a bunch of people who were in the 45 Administration who I think you know take that quite seriously um and then it's happened to a lot of their

[1:11:32] friends and friends and allies over the last over the last decade um I I I you know I I don't want to speak for them I don't know what they're going to do I know that they're keenly aware of this and and they they certainly they certainly now have the power I would say

[1:11:43] number one to discover what's actually been happening um because there's a big Discovery component of this because what happens in the shadows in Washington is always not easy to see from the outside but they can now go find out and then number two if if they decide there are

[1:11:54] cases they certainly are in a position position to bring them okay well speaking of sort of the the next Administration and the government um some have reported that you are considering in the running I don't know

[1:12:05] what the right word is to join Doge oh is this true at all I'm an unpaid I an unpaid volunteer you're an unpaid intern for the new Department of government

[1:12:16] efficiency um yes what do you think it's going to do there's basically two two two big parts to it one is they're going to do a top to bottom uh review of government spending um and they're going to they're going to

[1:12:26] go cut as much cost as they possibly can and they have a whole Theory and strategy on that and then in conjunction with that and related to that they're going to do the same thing for uh regulations um so they're going to basically do a top to bottom review of

[1:12:37] the regulatory what's they call the regulatory State or the administrative State and the connective tissue there that that they that they they don't talk about in public um is is I think actually quite quite important um which

[1:12:49] is like a lot of the reaction of the Doge from like institutional Wasington is like well that's impossible you can't do that there are all these laws and statutes and regulations there's this thing there's this thing there's this thing you know the term impoundment yes yeah so impound

[1:13:02] impounded so okay so so impoundment normally means as a as a civilian it normally means like your carg gets impounded yeah uh there's there's a different uh use of the word in the context of government spending um

[1:13:14] impoundment is the principle in law today um that the the president has to go to Congress to get money for a program um the president is not allowed

[1:13:25] to either overspend or underspend what so so the the president is obligated to spend the money whether he thinks it's a good idea or not that's

[1:13:35] insane on every government program um look up impoundment the president is required by law to spend every money allocated by every dollar allocated by Congress whether he thinks it's a good idea to or not and so the president

[1:13:47] literally like legally quote unquote today can't actually save money he can't say I'm just not going to spend on this he has to spend the money so this is like how crazy and like weird the thing has by the way the Constitution there's a very good argument that's been

[1:13:58] litigated for a long time the Constitution does not actually say this the Constitution says the president needs to go get money from Congress it doesn't say that he has to spend the money so so like this is the kind of constitutional question like we've we've

[1:14:09] been living under a regime in which there's a lot of these things that have been taken for granted that are probably not constitutional so like that that's one of the things that I'm sure is going to get looked at just because you're brilliant in one area doesn't mean you're brilliant and another you know

[1:14:20] like I there's certain people I'm thinking of right now who are just absolutely brilliant obviously in Tech and entrepreneurship and have like the most asinine ideas about foreign policy I've ever heard in my life like what

[1:14:30] makes you confident that this is the right role for these two men and their various unpaid interns sure well I mean the first question is how good do you think the experts are very bad

[1:14:44] yes and I think the American people would agree with that yes exactly right and so if you can't rely on the expert class to like make good have good judgment or like run these things which I think it's pretty clear now that you can't like but just to push back like

[1:14:58] you can agree that the experts are bad but believe that you still need experts in other words I think the current Elite is bad but but I'm still going to be skeptical of the counter Elite do you

[1:15:10] disagree with that well look it goes I look obviously the point obviously the point in general terms is correct and obviously this will always be a question and concern and and look you could even say it has nothing to do with one kind

[1:15:20] of expert or another it's just these are complex systems right with tremendous consequences to the decisions and how many people in any from any background are qualified to make these calls um I would say agree

[1:15:33] like fouchi abused his power and still believe that we need you know Public Health officials that deserve our trust and oh yeah of course oh then we don't

[1:15:44] want to live in a country where there is no coherent public health authority yeah 100% but look here's what happened here's what built the government that we have today what built the government we have today is in the 1930s it was

[1:15:55] Roosevelt like dramatically transformed the government it was like it was a fraction of what it what it in the 1920s a fraction of what it became like that was the discontinuous step function and if you recall what what what Roosevelt

[1:16:05] did which was widely lauded at the time and since is he put out the call for basically all of the smart young people in the country to put their hands up and volunteer and if you were a smart aggressive if you know it was the ycombinator of its time right the

[1:16:16] federal government was the why combinator of 193 New Deal baby yes the new deal right and so and literally what they did is RO Roosevelt basically delegated to Harry Hopkins like you got got to build you know build this new thing and do build all these programs

[1:16:27] and agencies and do it quickly because the Great Depression and then World War II um and we don't have the people to do it today because the government is just tiny as compared to what it needs to be and so you put out the call and the call is every smart 25 30y Old who's good at

[1:16:40] anything you you you bring him to Washington and you you create an agency and you put him in charge and you have him go do it and it's like you know Harry you go Electrify the Tennessee Valley you know and and you know and Mary you go you know create the art grants program right and you know you

[1:16:51] know can you go you know build Naval warships right um and these were all people who would be the exact same kinds of people that we have who come and into Y combinator and come into our firm and pitch and start companies they're smart

[1:17:03] young athletes um you know they haven't spent 30 years studying government they haven't been you know government bureaucrats for you know forever they you know they don't come from a long history of government service but they're very smart they're very well educated they're very good systems

[1:17:14] thinkers right what you really want is somebody who can wrap their head around a complex system um you know they're really good at understanding incentives they're really good at understanding how to build things they're really understanding how to demand high levels of performance one of the the things

[1:17:25] that one of the reasons why FDR is such a legend is because he the the FDR era federal government was actually high performance right like it actually worked right like it it it did it did

[1:17:37] Electrify the Tennessee Valley well let's just take that one as an example FDR did Electrify the Tennessee Valley the Biden Administration did not build electric charging

[1:17:47] stations right so right it's like okay and then and then it goes back to your question it's like okay who do you assume is going to do a better job building electric charging stations you know the mayor of South B Indiana or the

[1:17:57] guy who built the electric car right so it's anyway so anyway look it's definitely a change from how DC has been operating um it's definitely a change from the kinds of people who have been recruited to run these things for the

[1:18:08] last 40 years um it's hard for me to believe that they're going to do a worse job um it's quite straightforward for me to believe that they're going to do a better job but I think there's an argument to be made that like you want Elon Musk

[1:18:20] catching rocket ships with chopsticks you want him building electric cars do we want him you know meeting with foreign leaders of adversary Nations and

[1:18:30] sort of like freelancing on that front and it seems to be it seems to be kind of like boundaryless situation right now yeah look the counter argument is number one Elon not speaking for Elon but Elon decided that he had to do this because

[1:18:42] if not he wasn't going to be able to launch rockets just to be clear decided he needed to endorse Trump and get fully behind this yeah this movement okay yeah yeah yeah like literally what was happening was it was like the FAA was

[1:18:53] the FAA was trying to prevent him from launching rockets and it was taking longer to get the paperwork approved to launch a rocket than it was taking to build the rocket right and so like that that's just like clearly that should not be the

[1:19:04] case and he's he's talked at length about all the crazy stories about the you know having to kidnap the seal and you know strap it at the board and see if you know the rocket launch is going to interfere with its mating impulse like like you know just this like lunacy

[1:19:15] right of of this just spiral out of control regulatory thing has been happening so he he concluded that he had to do it and then look on the foreign policy stuff like here's what I would just say is like Elon is Elon already before any of the political stuff Elon

[1:19:26] was already an integral part of I would say the both the National Defense System and then also our the Allied defense system um and you know look we see that today in the you know in Ukraine you know through starlink through starlink

[1:19:37] yeah the Ukrainian the Ukrainian military runs the starlink um like without starlink because the the Russians the Russians have the cyber warfare capabilities to take out all the other communication systems um and so

[1:19:47] starlink is the only communication system that the Ukrainian military can run on it's the only one um and and by the way SpaceX El said this SpaceX has been in a pitch battle with the Russian um um uh cyber security uh offensive

[1:19:58] operators to keep trying to take starlink down precisely because it's what the Ukrainian military is running on um and so yeah like he's he's already in the middle he's already in the middle of this he's he's I mean you know he he

[1:20:10] was you know he's been a he's been a vendor to the to the US National Security State for you know for a very long time so he he's he was already in the middle of it he's just in the middle of it in a more direct way now I want to go back briefly to the dinner that you

[1:20:21] mentioned with Donald Trump um in the days before he got shot and before you endorsed him you said it was a wonderful dinner tell us about what you heard there that made you feel comforted and maybe even excited and enthusiastic and

[1:20:33] also have you been down to Mar Lago since the election um so on the second question yes um uh a fair amount you know maybe half my

[1:20:44] time down there since the election wow in and around there yeah I look I'm not like in the room I'm like not you know again I I'm not claiming to be like in the middle of all the decision- making but I've been trying to you know help in

[1:20:54] as as many ways as I can um so uh so look I start by saying look you know as as we discussed like Trump brings out a lot of feelings in a lot of

[1:21:04] people people have very strong views and then there are many political topics that you know we're very I'm very deliberately not weighing in on and so I'm not like I'm not Mr foreign policy or Mr abortion policy or guns or you

[1:21:15] know when when I talk about these things it's it's around as I said Tech policy business economics and then you know the you know the health of the country the the the success of the country um I so I guess the color that I give you is I

[1:21:26] mean it's everybody says this who meets with him but like he's he's an incredible host like for however people think whatever um like he's an incredible host you know he he runs his own private worlds uh so we met with him

[1:21:37] at his his Bedminster Golf Club in uh in New Jersey which is like breathtaking you know absolutely beautiful um you know we had a great time we we stayed overnight um and had a great time um and

[1:21:47] then uh yeah I mean he's just he's an incredible host and so he you know he loves being the host he loves being surrounded by by his friends and family um and you know grandkids and and and um you know the members of of his various clubs um and so it's a you know it's

[1:21:58] just kind of this like amazing scene um it's also one of really interesting we kind of watch him at work which is he he he treats everybody the same and he talks to everybody um and this is I think one of his real unappreciated

[1:22:08] strengths that people didn't get for a long time which is he he he will happily talk to distinguished visitors about like you know who the Vice President should be and then he'll ask the caddy right and and and that's been painted in

[1:22:18] a negative way but there's a real strength to it which is like he he really talks to regular people like a lot um and uh you you know there's many stories of him from the campaign Trail like spending a lot of time with like the cops on the ground at every site

[1:22:28] that he goes to and so forth and the you know hotel workers um you know the people you know the bus boys and the you know the um you know the the cocktail waitresses at these events and so so he's just kind of he's in that mode kind of all the time uh talking to everybody

[1:22:40] um yeah and then look he just you know his his thing with us basically was like look like he he just like look I just want America to win like I just want America to win you know you guys are in Tech I don't know much about tech but I

[1:22:50] don't need to cuz you guys know a lot about it you guys should go build tech companies you're the American tech companies should win American tech companies should be the winning companies we should beat China we should export we should make the products the

[1:23:00] world wants uh our economy should be growing a lot faster we should be creating a lot more jobs you know everybody in America who wants a good job should have one and that will be the result of you know American company

[1:23:11] succeeding um and I want America to win um and you know I want us to sell our products not just America but all over the world um you know he said on trade you know he said on trade he said I'm painted as Mr antitrade but he said look

[1:23:22] I want I want a Level Playing Field I want America I want all markets to be open to American companies uh a lot of these countries claim to be pro- free trade but they actually you know block their markets from you know American Products you know there there are not

[1:23:34] many American cars on the road in Japan right um you know nobody's using Facebook in China right um and so he's like okay when these countries aren't fair I'm going to I'm going to basically make them be fair um and so I'm I'm

[1:23:45] going to go you know take that on directly but the the the goal with it is for America to win um and so you know and most of the discussion was just around that half your time at maral Lago or or broadly in in the environments in

[1:23:57] the environments around Mara Lago like what what are you weighing in on what are the kind of meetings that you're taking having helping on i' I've been involved in some of the interviewing process for some of the some of the

[1:24:08] officials uh coming in the caliber of a lot of the people that I've met has been very high um the a lot of the appointments that have come down in the last you know two weeks um of sort of the the next level down staff I think

[1:24:19] have been very impressive people um and I think that that that that flow of talent seems very strong um like there was I would say there was this fear there was this General concern

[1:24:29] people would say which is like if people were leery if qualified people were leery about working for Trump 45 are they going to be even more leery about working for Trump 47 and I think the opposite has happened which is I think the flow of qualified people from

[1:24:40] outside the system in now is actually much stronger it's all in preparation for actually taking office on on January 20th so we still have ways to go but there there certainly they are certainly going to hit the ground running uh on

[1:24:50] inauguration day feels like a honeymoon stage right now how do you anticipate Donald Trump or the Trump Administration breaking your [Laughter] heart so I would say the I would say the

[1:25:02] following which is again the the Biden I hope the Biden Administration was just uniquely bad like I I I I genuinely hope that's the case I genuinely hope the next Democratic Administration is going to be much more sensible than that um

[1:25:14] that that that that would please me please me to to to to no end by the way my firm we actually support a lot of Democrats as well as Republicans on the on the political side uh we plan to continue doing that so I I hope we're

[1:25:24] going to be dealing with a a revitalized and uh sensible uh you know Centrist moderate um Pro you know pro pro pro America Pro uh Pro American dynamism um

[1:25:35] uh Democratic party you know look I I don't know I have no idea I I I learned from 2015 in 2016 and not try to predict um and so I'm you know very focused on the you know I'm very focused on trying

[1:25:46] to help as much as I can trying to help get smart people in I'm very focused on you know trying to help um you know on any of the technical topics um but you know it's going to be a I mean the American government is complicated and things are going to happen and yeah I

[1:25:57] don't yeah I I I no longer feel that I can predict but I think it's um it we needed it like it had to change it what we had in the last four years could could could not continue the first ever piece I wrote for the Free Press which

[1:26:09] was then called Common Sense was a piece called the Great unraveling and it was sort of about my thinking out loud about whether or not I would be able to build a new journalistic institution at the

[1:26:20] height of what felt like this soft totalitarianism you know that had certainly been enforced in the press and in it I reference a big wig in Silicon Valley

[1:26:31] which is you and I don't know if you remember this but I basically say to you how is it possible to build something new that isn't vulnerable to being purged or compromised or otherwise

[1:26:42] demolished by the forces of Facebook and Twitter and Apple and Google and Amazon and the thing you texted back to me was used mograph machines okay and at the time you were

[1:26:53] also urging me and other people to like buy hard copies of encyclopedias and buy hard copies of books we cared about not on the assumption that it's very nice to have a library but on the assumption

[1:27:04] that online they were all going to get re-edited to suit the political tastes of wokeness and you know for the person just listening and not watching the video you are nodding at how precient you were now on the one hand that's like

[1:27:16] a very Bleak diagnosis right you're basically saying building on the internet would mean submitting to this kind of political ideology and sort of

[1:27:28] bending a knee to it and yet you're the guy that wrote The technno Optimist Manifesto this 5,000-word essay that I highly commend to everyone to listen to arguing basically that technological

[1:27:40] progress is the key to solving Humanity's greatest challenges from poverty to climate change and that we should prioritize it at all costs I want to read just a few lines of from that essay our civilization was built on

[1:27:52] technology our civilization is built on technology technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement the spearhead of progress and the realization of our potential for

[1:28:02] hundreds of years you WR we properly glorified this until recently but I am here to bring the good news we can advance to a far superior way of living and of being we have the tools the

[1:28:13] systems the ideas we have the will it is time once again to raise the technology flag it is time to be techno optimists and I've wanted to ask you which is it

[1:28:23] because some days it seems like you wake up on the side of the bed that is like and and take what you know people on the internet call the black pill you know the pill of nalism and despair and other

[1:28:33] days you wake up and it's you know the White Flag it's hope it's it's all good things lie ahead and I'm sure in your mind these things are not an obvious contradiction but maybe somehow fit

[1:28:45] together so I'd love if you can explain how they do fit together and also if you can kind of lay out maybe a vision for us you know the the vision of where we

[1:28:56] need the mograph machine to get reliable information and maybe the vision where we have an open and free internet um one it seems like you're feeling more these

[1:29:07] days yeah so look I think I've just been through the same thing you've been through and a lot of people have been through who are listening which is you know it just it felt like everything just got increasingly repressive from

[1:29:18] like 2013 through to maybe 2022 um and then you know it feels like in the last two years a counter movement has been building um culminating in you know among other things this election um

[1:29:30] uh it does feel like a new spirit is is alive in the land U at least at least right now which I hope I hope will continue um maybe the way to describe it the best is look but my my day job is

[1:29:40] the venture capitalist you know Tech entrepreneur the thing you do when you're an entrepreneur of VC is you're trying to find these like I call them like Sparks from the future like you're trying to find these little sort of indicators these little flashes of like

[1:29:51] okay there's a thing that's not like a big thing yet but like it's interesting and if it happens another thousand times or if a thousand people pick it up and then another thousand people after that and then a million people in a billion

[1:30:02] people it might become a big thing um and that's what the internet felt like in 1992 and that's what you know social media felt like in like 2007 um and that's what you know AI you know in the

[1:30:12] tech industry felt like you know you know two years ago um you know so so our our day job is quite literally to try to like find these things and you know in Tech these things are some combination of technological change and then social

[1:30:23] change I I I didn't understand what was happening having said that I saw the early Sparks of woke and all this other stuff early on in from 2013 2014 for sure before a lot of other people did um

[1:30:34] and then you know look I I felt and saw you know a sort of growing the counter relate phenomenon that you're talking about um and look part of it's just exposure to kids um you know like the

[1:30:44] day job is meeting with lots of really sharp 22y olds um and I'll just give you a specific thing starting in around 2021 2022 I started meeting a completely different kind of college graduate um

[1:30:56] where you know they I forget what they're called if this is the are these the zumers or the alphas um but um you know 22y olds you know so they 22-year-old graduating in 2022 um you

[1:31:07] know by definition born in 2000 um and so they were in high school and college and they got like the full blast of woke just like every possible for 12 years

[1:31:17] straight 16 years straight if you're you know a white male or an Asian or you know or a um uh you know if you're like you're just like the worst possible you know person you can imagine you know the

[1:31:29] entire education system got weaponized against you um and so I I started to see this new generation of kids coming out and they're just like they're just like not having it anymore um I'll give you an example I have a I have a friend who has a teenage son who's uh 15 going on

[1:31:41] 16 his father is Jewish and his wife is Japanese um and so he is just screwed um he's an incredibly thoughtful kid um he's incredibly he's by by the way he's

[1:31:52] like math Olympiad he's like a super genius um incredibly bright kid wonderful kid um and it just every day at school is just like constant you're an evil person um and his reaction to

[1:32:02] that is he is now to the right of a of the Hun um he has read every piece of like dissident rightwing literature you can imagine like he's ready to go and he's just not having it like he's just not having it like that he's leaving

[1:32:13] that World Behind he's going to build his own world he's going to build something he's going to build something amazing and there are a lot of there are a lot of kids like him um and so I started meeting kids like that kind of in this period um and you know you could kind feel of just people getting

[1:32:24] exhausted and you know look these social revolutions you know they they curdle right they they you know they curdled you know communism curdled at the end and you know the sexual Revolution curdled at the end you know they they they reach a point where they go from

[1:32:35] being the Renegade exciting you know thing to being just like incredibly depressing and you know corrupt um and so anyway that that that's as you said that that that's the white pill which is that the time has come for a very

[1:32:46] different Outlook and that's what I've been trying to put on paper but the used mograph machine as funny as it is still feels relevant in other words you know even looking you know at the Wikipedia

[1:32:57] entry for Zionism I'm like well we need to bring back used mograph machines you know or the printing press at least because history is getting revised and

[1:33:08] Rewritten and lied about in in the most astounding of ways and we're not yet we're not even living in an age yet where the kind of politics we saw

[1:33:19] exhibited you know from Gemini for example are like the overlay of everything that we're searching for on the internet how do we avoid a fate 5 years from now where the politics that

[1:33:31] you've sort of been describing in this conversation and that I've encountered in my own way are not like imem embedded woven in to the very fabric of the

[1:33:42] internet through these AI programs so I think the way to think about it is there's the cultural movements which we've been discussing and then there's institutional control um and you know what we have is we have you know you

[1:33:53] know the big institutions are fully Under World control like they they they just are and that's true across the board it's true of the Fortune 500 it's true of the it's true of big Tech they're just under control um and you know look Elon demonstrated what a like

[1:34:04] Elon demonstrated how hard it is to break them out of control which is what he did at Twitter which nobody else has done with any of these things um you know and with all the consequences that came from that and so that illustrates the level of control that these things are under and you know look the use MIM

[1:34:16] graph thing was always you know it was always half a joke half serious it's still you know it's still half serious um you know the censorship machine continues to run at a lot of companies the de Banking Machine continues to run

[1:34:26] you know is the machine going to unwind or not I don't know um is it going to unwind on its own I don't know um again there have been these little Sparks I I'll give you one little spark I'll give you one little spark so remember the the

[1:34:37] the co lab hypothesis right um which basically was like uh you know misinformation right in the beginning um and was you know broadly censored on social media um so uh I if you remember

[1:34:48] there was a moment where all of a sudden you were allowed to talk about that and it was the moment when John Stewart went on Ste the coar show and he did this like8 minute segment where he pointed out in his you know he pointed out he's like it it like it it it literally it

[1:34:59] cannot be a coincidence that you had the Wuhan Institute of like you know viral B viruses and Hershey PA I remember the whole time exactly right and and anyway the point is I was in it I was in it I was in a discussion at one of the big at

[1:35:11] one of the big tech companies one of the big internet companies uh where the discussion was like oh did you see the John Stewart thing oh haha that was really funny oh okay I guess we should stop censoring the lablak theory now haha you know yes now would be the time

[1:35:23] to stop censoring that and literally they stopped censoring it that day on the one hand you're horrified on the one hand you're in used mograph machine territory CU you're like oh my God they were censoring it up until that point on

[1:35:33] the other hand the minute it became socially permissible uh to not have it be censored which John Stewart like the one really amazing thing he's done in the last decade is that moment um um all

[1:35:43] of a sudden like again spark from the future all of a sudden it's a it's a des censoring and I I just tell you like I I I have not seen many Des censoring moments like I you know there there have not been that many of those but like that was a big one um and so like point

[1:35:56] being like if the cultural shift continues um you know then maybe things really loosen up um the other thing um however um uh you know goes to what we were talking about before about the new Administration which is the other side

[1:36:07] of this is you know look Elon with you know you were involved in the Twitter files early on you know Elon with the Twitter files did a privatized version of what now needs to happen broadly um right and you know we we need we the

[1:36:17] American population need to find out what's been happening all this time and specifically about this intertwining of government pressure with censorship and de banking like we really need to know what happened there um and and then you

[1:36:27] know there need to be consequences like the consequences need to unfold let's put it that way and like I said I don't know what this new Administration what do you mean consequences need to unfold well to start with like I think there

[1:36:38] were crimes committed right like I I the government is not all the government is not allowed to fund private companies and then direct private organizations and then direct them to do things that it itself is constitutionally not

[1:36:49] allowed to do right that that that's like as big an offense and a actual federal crime in a lot of cases as as when the government does things itself um and you know it's indisputable that that has been happening the sort of

[1:37:00] censorship complex that you've written about at length like that that's 100% what's been happening uh the government all the government and its ancillary arms are also not allowed to pressure private companies in this way like there's all these things that are just

[1:37:11] simply that are simply not allowed and a lot of them are actually or if if a prosecutor wants to pursue them there are Federal Criminal statutes that certainly apply that you know carry jail sentences right like you know these the

[1:37:22] constitutional rights are big deal like there there there's real teeth Behind these laws um and so like if if there were laws broken like that needs to be that needs to be flushed out and then and then um we need to figure out like

[1:37:33] what the safeguards need to be so that this doesn't happen again like it can't happen again you can't have Government funding of like private censorship bureaus it can't be allowed so in other words like funding an NGL or a think

[1:37:43] tank in order to pressure a corporation to do something so you don't as the federal government pressure Facebook yourself yeah exactly now now to be clear what was happening both the

[1:37:53] government was applying inappropriate and I think illegal pressure itself for sure and then in addition they were funding a lot of private organizations um right and I just you know to to their enormous shame you know I'm next door to Stanford Stanford had

[1:38:04] one of these operations the Stanford internet Observatory and it's funded by the federal government to implement a censorship policy uh on the on the Silicon Valley companies and it's just like no that's not legal it's not even like an ambiguous question you're just

[1:38:14] simply not allowed to do that and so like that stuff needs to be flushed out and then we we need to figure out how to prevent it from happening again is the other thing that needs to happen sort of robbing these instit tions of you know

[1:38:25] philanthropic dollars like I know your family has been you know very involved at you just referenced Stanford at Stanford you know do you wish you could claw that money back given the way

[1:38:36] they've spent it yeah so I mean look um uh uh so I don't want to speak for my family a lot a lot of this was my father-in-law who passed away so you know a lot of this was in an earlier a lot of this was in an earlier era um

[1:38:48] having said that there's no question you're right like you know no absolutely like the these things these these these a lot of these universities they run on they run on development dollars they run on on philanthropic contributions and then they run on an enormous amount of

[1:38:59] federal money Jay bataria from Stanford is is now been nominated to be the new head of NIH um uh one of the there are many many many you know kind of criticisms of of of the national uh NIH

[1:39:10] and the National Health you know research funding complex that you could make um and Jay has made many of those himself um one of those is that NIH grants come with overhead money um and so right so when the government issues

[1:39:21] money to a biomedical researcher at Stanford to try to cure cancer it's they give additional money to Stanford University that Stanford University uses for overhead which is to say you know essentially whatever it wants the

[1:39:31] bureaucracy um yeah right yeah the bureaucracy and then if you look at the the headcount at places like Stanford you know they now have more administrators than they have students right um right um and so there's been

[1:39:42] this as as is true in many many drew it lots of these Elite schools yeah there's been this massive blo and then you and then you know as as you well know you have this extremely activated you know ideological you know activist class that

[1:39:52] sort of joined you know administrators faculty and students and then they go out and they sort of Mount all these political Crusades and you know all basically on the back of like literally like in part Federal research dollars

[1:40:03] like it's like no no that that can't happen like that's no that's not allowed right uh another one is foundations the number of foundations that are tax exempt under because they're assumed to

[1:40:14] be philanthropic good causes that have become politically active and have tripped over I think the line of what you're allowed to do with as a tax exempt organization I think you know I think lot of the big foundations are out of compliance with that like that that

[1:40:25] should not be you know many many many examples of this and and you know as I said at least now there's the opportunity to really dig into this and find out what happened and figure out how how to have it not happen again one

[1:40:35] thing that I've been wanting to ask you about is sort of this war that's a little bit above my pay grade but this war about AI regulation if there is a single sort of household name that most

[1:40:47] Americans know when it comes to AI it's chat GPT which is owned by open AI which is valued at $157 billion and was founded by Sam Alman who's perhaps the

[1:40:57] biggest founder advocate for AI regulation there's a tremendous amount of sort of back and forth and drama around open AI it started as a nonprofit now it wasn't Sam was ousted then it

[1:41:08] came back Elon was mad Elon went on Tucker and said open AI was training the AI to lie like can you explain the situation there and explain to The Listener how we should be thinking about

[1:41:19] AI regulation yeah so to start with it it was Sam was invol Sam was a co-founder but Elon was a co-founder um so just for for for full credit and context Elon was Elon was the original funer of open a

[1:41:32] excuse me the original donor and he was he he was sort of this he was sort of the central founder um and and and he and Sam worked together but like Elon was Elon was was was definitely either a or you know the founder and was

[1:41:42] certainly a magnet you know for the for the early Talent um and as well as the the funer so so Elon has been involved there from the beginning um yeah so look I I the the the I happy to go through the details on that the the umbrella

[1:41:53] thing that I think has been happening is the social media social media went on this Arc that I've described from like 2013 to today where they became a censorship machine um uh AI has gone on

[1:42:05] a a hyper accelerated version of that Arc it it it happened basically right up front it like it took time for social media to become a censorship machine it happened on AI right from the beginning it happened on AI right from the beginning because AI companies learned

[1:42:16] from the experience of the social media companies and they just said well if we're going to end up building a censorship machine over a decade we might as well just do it up front you saying it's intentional or it's just learning off of information that yeah

[1:42:27] please go on it's 100% intentional yeah so that's how you get black George Washington at Google is because somebody there's there's an override in the system that basically says everybody has to be like literally everybody has to be

[1:42:37] black boom right like there's there there's there's squads there large sets of people in these companies that determine these policies and write them down and encode them into these systems like so so overwhelmingly what people

[1:42:48] experience is is is intentional like there's just no question about that and and they have these groups with is a very orwellian name called trust and safety right um right um you know mistrust and no safety um you know that

[1:43:00] that that do this and and in a lot of these companies it's common to have as many people on the trust and safety side sort of deciding on all these policies as it is to have Engineers building these systems and then actually what happens right is what happened is you're

[1:43:11] an AI company and you know you need to build this kind of machine this kind of censorship machine and so you go hire the people out of social media who built a machine at social media and you so you so it's literally in a lot of cases it's actually the same people um doing it in

[1:43:23] Ai and so these companies these companies were born woke they were born woke they were born as censorship machines they exhibit all of that all of that behavior and and and the big companies they're they're doing it for

[1:43:34] the same reason the social media companies did they're doing it because either they've already gotten pressure or they know they're going to get pressure and so you might as well just do it most of the people who work at these companies agree with that side of things and so they think that they need

[1:43:45] it um uh I was I you know I was in a discussion with a professor who is uh at one of the big companies um and I was like you know it's crazy to have this you know these AIS give you these you

[1:43:56] know these patronizing moral lectures all the time when when you ask ask questions and this professor said well you know my undergrads actually really like that like that's how they expect technology to work right and I'm you know and I'm like I'm like screaming inside my own

[1:44:06] head being like what the hell right so so like you know it's it's it's the same thing it's like it's like baked into the culture right um uh and you know these are these are you know these are a lot of these people are newly arrived from

[1:44:17] these universities they're fully you know indoctrinated and so they you know they're very sheltered isolated people right they're you know kind of people who SP all their time in a computer lab so they don't haven't had a reason to think this stuff out more broadly so

[1:44:27] it's the same thing um my concern and this goes back to the the censorship and political control of AI is like a thousand times more dangerous than censorship and political control of social media maybe a million times more

[1:44:37] dangerous um social media censorship and political control is very dangerous but at least it's only like people talking to each other and communicating the thing with AI is I think AI is going to be the control layer for everything in

[1:44:49] the future right so I think AI is going to be the control layer for how the healthcare system works works I think it's going to be the control layer for how the education system works it's be the control layer for how the government works right and so in the future when you deal with a healthcare system or

[1:45:01] with the education system or with the government you're going to be dealing with an AI and so if that AI is you know call it what you want woke by a censored you know politically controlled like you are in like a hyper orwellian you know

[1:45:13] China style social credit system nightmare right absolute Nightmare and this this goes directly to elon's argument which is at the core of this what you have to do is you have to train the a adult

[1:45:24] um and it it's just like if you wanted to create the ultimate dystopian World you'd have a world where everything is controlled by an AI that's been it's been programmed a lie like it's hard to imagine things getting worse than that

[1:45:34] and and the you know the precond you know this is this hasn't rolled all the way out yet because AI is still knew and it's not in charge you know it's not being put in control of everything but like this is where things are headed and so it's like I think vitally important

[1:45:44] that this not happen um My Hope Is that the culture changes the case studies the you know and all the stuff we already just talked about but all the stuff that this new Administration might do my hope

[1:45:55] is that this all gets kind of peeled back and thrown out into the sunlight and people RIT large come to really understand this and people don't stand for it and this doesn't happen but like this has to be fought like this will

[1:46:07] happen by default unless people fight it are the incumbents pushing for regulation basically in order to protect themselves yeah that's right this is not even a this one things sounds like a conspiracy theory it's just simply

[1:46:18] something that happens um and it's a it's a concept that's well known and understood in economics called regulatory capture right um and and and what happens with regulatory capture is a big company goes to Washington and

[1:46:28] basically basically intertwines itself with the government uh to establish a wall of Regulation that new companies cannot comply with you can't afford to comply with it's too complicated it's

[1:46:39] too hard to get to from a standing start and then what happens is the big company now basically has a permanent government supported Monopoly right um and then the government then gets to control that company um and so this is what happened

[1:46:51] with the I mean the banks are the case study of this right um you know the banks got giant they got too big to fail we had all this banking reform That was supposed to solve the too big to fail problem um after that the big Banks got

[1:47:01] much much larger and the number of banks you know shrank dramatically right and so the the banks have achieved regulatory capture the banks control their Regulators The Regulators control the banks and by the way and this is why de banking happens and this is why it

[1:47:12] works it's because like it's it's you have you have the company intertwined with the government there's no question yeah no the big internet companies they try to do the big tech companies try every every set by the the energy every

[1:47:23] set of big the healthcare companies they all this is a this is the standard logical play for big companies it happens I think in every industry sector um and it's it's it's happening in Tech just the same and specifically with AI

[1:47:34] this was actually not that relevant a concept to like computers and chips and stuff like that it didn't really matter that much because there wasn't really any political implications to like chips at least at the time um but this for

[1:47:45] sure is a conscious strategy on the part of of at least several of the big AI companies um and and and very dangerous I want to just connect connected to what's at stake beyond the freedom to

[1:47:56] know information which is sort of America's role as the the world's sole superpower and that now sort of being up for grabs at the end of the Cold War America had the

[1:48:07] military the economic the technological prowess and you've made the case that you know it our Tech Supremacy sort of allowed for that dominance to follow are

[1:48:17] we in a position right now to continue to dominate or or how far how like close are we in the sort of race with China on

[1:48:28] AI on chips on on any number of things that we could talk about yeah that's right so this has been one of the weird kind of things in DC for the last five years which is there's and this many of the

[1:48:39] conversations we've had today is it's it sort of assumes that the US is in a vacuum right so it's it's all questions of like us domestic politics and policy but then there's this whole other conversation which is exactly that which

[1:48:49] is the China situation and at least I and you know many others now believe that we're in some new version of a cold war 2.0 with China um and you know it has you know certainly big economic Dimensions it has big cultural political

[1:49:00] Dimensions you know ideological Dimensions um and then there is a big military Dimension to it and you know as we sit here today there is you know there's been tension building um in the Taiwan Strait for the last you know

[1:49:11] several years with you know at least a lot of American Military planners thinking that at some point China's going to move and try to take Taiwan and then at least in theory America is committed to defend Taiwan and so you have the preconditions for what might be

[1:49:22] an actual live military conflict between the two super the two current superpowers um and then and then as a on a as a backdrop you have that simultaneous with the technology of War itself changing right and this is where

[1:49:33] Ai and autonomy are now Central to how the US Department of Defense is planning to fight wars in the future and Central to how the Chinese military is planning to fight wars in the future and so it's it's it's this multifaceted level of sort of comp say competition rivalry um

[1:49:46] expanding out globally hopefully um you know this remains a cold war um um and you know something that sort of just bubbles along um but you know it's certainly possible that there there's a

[1:49:56] hot War um you know look the the the the good and the bad is sort of I think fairly obvious which is um the America has all of the advantages and disadvantages of a decentralized system

[1:50:08] um you know we we do capitalism we you know x x x the exceptions uh exceptional times generally speaking we do capitalism pretty well uh free markets startups entrepreneurship um

[1:50:18] technological development um you know free speech in theory like we we have an open Society at least that's what we're supposed to have um and you know China has much more of a totalitarian dictatorial you know control system

[1:50:28] inside their country um uh you know they they actually have been moving against capitalism over the last five years and so they've actually been quite punitive to their own tech companies as an example their own Tech Founders and they

[1:50:39] they've driven a lot of their best and brightest actually out of the country so so we have all the advantages of of of our dynamic system but they have the advantages of tremendous resources tremendous control they can dictate what their companies do they can dictate What

[1:50:50] new technologies get developed they can dictate um how those get adopted um and used um by um you know by you know throughout their society um and then they they have this you know very explicit strategy to take their

[1:51:01] technology and their culture and their ideology Global um and you know when their companies go to market globally they go with their government um and their government is able to do all kinds of you know provide all kinds of carrots

[1:51:12] and sticks for other countries to adopt their technology and you know our government has been trying to kill us so you know the opposite with us we're doing it with the active opposition of our own government so so anyway that

[1:51:22] that's the thing China's got lots of really smart people they're doing very well in AI they are you know I would say ahead of us in robotics um they are probably neck and- neck in AI right now

[1:51:32] um and and um and they are you know absolutely determined to win these competitions um it is the most rational thing in the world for me to you know going back to what what what what president Trump said at dinner with us

[1:51:43] like the most rational thing in the world to say America needs to win this fight like America needs to be the the dominant technology superpower when you write and you've written we believe that deel a of AI will cost lives deaths that

[1:51:55] were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder are you thinking about like China

[1:52:05] when you're writing that or are you thinking about the way that AI you know in theory 5 10 years from now could save us in terms of detecting cancer is it both like that line has stayed with me

[1:52:16] ever since you've written it yeah the the domestic the easiest domestic example is Healthcare um and at least everybody in the the biotech world thinks that AI is going to sharply accelerate the process of curing disease

[1:52:26] um and that that's already started to happen um and so that that's that's an obvious case study there um uh the global version of this is is Warfare um which is you know how how have how have

[1:52:37] societies like ours fought wars in the past you know we send a tremendous number of soldiers into a battle and they get killed right um how is the what is the future of warfare going to be it seems like it's very clearly going to be based on autonomy which is which is a

[1:52:48] which is AI right and you're going to have you know you're going to have everything from um you know fighter jets to submarines um and everything else tanks that are that're unmanned um and obviously it's far better to send in

[1:53:00] unmanned systems than it is to send in pilots and seamen and so forth who are going to get killed um and then um uh yeah and then you you see by the way the battlefield in Ukraine right um if you

[1:53:10] have um you know if you have technological superiority on the battlefield in Ukraine it means that you have these first-person drones and you've got these you know automated piloting systems and you are dropping in you know on top of a tank you know the

[1:53:21] tank cost Millions to build you drop a $300 you know drone with some sex at it blow up the tank right so like you want to be on the it's a great illustration you want to be on the side of Technology you know October 7th you know Israel had

[1:53:33] a they had a you know technologically powered defensive line you know between between Israel and Gaza that broke down um you know one lesson from that is technology by itself won't save you um

[1:53:44] which you know the Chinese have taken to heart but the other answer that is that the technology needs to get a lot better right and and they're you know they're in retrospect now you know they they like the next time something like that happens God forbid there ought to be

[1:53:56] Nationwide a nationwide drone response system that's able to put an armed response an armed AI automated response under human control but like within seconds um give an example so my partner

[1:54:08] Ben has funded a pilot program in Las Vegas uh the Las Vegas PD now has the ability to put a an unarmed drone with a high resolution camera um on site at any 91 at the location of any 911 call any

[1:54:20] burglary alarm or any gunshot uh in Las Vegas they're able to put a drone on site in 90 seconds wow right and and so and so and that has two consequences number one um

[1:54:30] if something goes wrong if there's a break-in or you know whatever there's something happening you know a carjacking or whatever number one you're going to you're going to have instant response you're going to be able to see it by the way the Drone can then follow the perpetrator right so the guy drives

[1:54:42] away the Drone follows right so you can't get away from these things um uh and then that means that the police officers are not at danger when they when they go in blind because they don't know what's happening right and a lot of

[1:54:53] a lot when when when police encounters go bad and somebody gets shot and killed a lot of it is because the you have a live police officer under stress in a situation that's unclear where they don't know what they're going into and something goes wrong so if you have the

[1:55:04] Drone in there even if the Drone doesn't have a weapon on it you have the visibility such that the police officer will know what to do when they get there and there's there's much higher likelihood um of of of the of things of things going better and lives being

[1:55:14] saved um that's one but two the deterrent effect right if if you know that in Las Vegas if you shoot somebody you're going to get caught by a drone like right or break into you know 7-Eleven at 2: in the morning you're not

[1:55:25] going to do it right and so these are like just like examples right now of the kind of technologies that could be deployed again these are like I'm talking about unarmed drones but just like eyes on massive deterrent to Crime

[1:55:36] um and so there's like examples of that basically all the way across all these systems all the way across the military all the way across law enforcement civil civil services fire emergency response you know all basically just like across

[1:55:48] the board there's all these things that you can do and again on this like is like racing ahead on every so China has a two China has a two PR strategy one is they they they take everything we do

[1:56:00] steal it steal it you know get access to it um uh and then um and then two is they have a lot of their own smart people right um and then they and then they heavily support them from the government um and so they're racing

[1:56:12] ahead they by some measures already have the best AI open source AI models um you know one of the things the B one of the things the Biden Administration was trying to do is kill open source AI you know in in a world where you the US is

[1:56:22] not the leading open source AI world than China is then the entire world technology infrastructure is running on Chinese AI that seems like it be a bad idea um you know the Biden FAA you know tried to successfully in large part

[1:56:33] tried to kill the American drone industry as a consequence the Chinese own the global drone industry you know mo most drones in use by the American Military today are made in China um every single one of those is a potential weapon to be used against our

[1:56:45] soldiers right like so yeah so like yes uh like my view is just is sort of just sort of patently obvious that like geopolitically we have to win this fight you love Tech okay you you you probably

[1:56:57] love Tech than any other person I've ever spoken to in my life and I guess I've wanted to ask you what are the blind spots cuz here's one that I see I

[1:57:07] think that Tech and progress sort of devoid or unored from a deeper moral worldview or maybe you want to call that God can quickly worship can quickly sort

[1:57:19] of devolve into what I think of as like worship like worship specifically of intelligence in a way that I think can dip into something very scary like if

[1:57:31] you believe in the good of intelligence which I do but without any belief in a view of sort of like fundamental human dignity and equality a person with 170 IQ becomes much more valuable than a

[1:57:43] person with Downs how do you think about that problem yeah so what I would say is I think look say right up front like technology changes Society like

[1:57:54] technology and it it it always has and this goes all the way back to everything from the invention of fire and everything that followed and there's a long history to this um many great books written on it but technology changes Society Technology reorders power and

[1:58:04] status in society it changes how Society operates it always does um and so it like it kind of has to right because if it's going to have an effect it's going to change how things are done that's going to change society um and then yeah

[1:58:15] there's there are these two basically critiques of technology that kind of flow from that observation one is what I would call is the leftwing critique which I which is interesting for a little bit and then rapidly becomes uninteresting because it ends up being the same critique which basically is

[1:58:26] inequality um you know technology drives inequality inequality is bad therefore therefore the need for communism oras they say these days luxury luxury fully automated communism I think is the title of the book um so uh you know but it's

[1:58:39] fundamentally it's an economic you know it's an economic power Zero Sum you know sort of communist Neo Marxist kind of kind of argument fair enough um and then there's what I would call the right-wing criti of technology and I think your

[1:58:49] yours was an example of that um what what what what the right-wing critiques all have in common is it they all kind of get to what you're saying which is it's like okay like fundamental questions of the human Spirit um and fundamental

[1:59:01] questions of humanity and fundamental questions of tradition and fundamental questions of social organization um and fundamental questions of um cultural change um and you know losing losing

[1:59:12] important things um and and at least I I find those those I find those those those critiques much more interesting um in my view and quite frankly they're they're harder to answer and look in in

[1:59:23] the last you know 100 years you know the march of Technology you know when when we say technology we you know it's often we view technology in progress as synonyms right like technological progress it's like one of the standard

[1:59:33] terms and you know but like you know that that also means like technology is like a you know technology is sort of at least has come hand inand with you know secularization I think these are quite

[1:59:44] frankly the questions that should be the center of the debate um as opposed to a lot of the other stuff that you know at least has been dominating the discourse for the last decade um my claim you know that I wrote in my

[1:59:55] Manifesto my claim is these are all important and valid questions but but however the thing is the thing you need to always kind of reorient yourself to is questions of like the human spirit and The Social Animal and organization

[2:00:06] society and religion like these are deep kind of permanent questions you know that go back many thousands of years um and I don't know that they ever get solved it it may be that these are the questions we need to think about the

[2:00:17] most talk about the most are we likely to do a better job figuring things out in a world in which we have higher levels of material Prosperity or lower levels of material Prosperity um and I

[2:00:28] think that you know the sort of easy answer the the easy caricatured form of the argument is you know technology changes Society changing societ is bad therefore we need to dial back on technology kind of the L you know

[2:00:38] argument the problem with that is you're deliberately then pulling yourself back from economic growth you're pulling yourself back from growth of standards of living material prosperity and and then you just have to imagine that okay

[2:00:49] now we're now we're in a better position to answer deep questions of the human Soul CU we're poor like I I I think that's unlikely to be the case I I I I I would be more optimistic that as we get to higher

[2:00:59] higher levels of material welfare we actually have more time right and and a larger opportunity to address these deeper underlying questions and so that that that that's the claim I would make so Mark andreon are you ready for a

[2:01:10] lightning round I I'll do my best okay best thing about the creation of the internet oh just the explosion of culture creativity worst thing about the

[2:01:20] creation of the internet the extent to which it drives monoculture and group think but I think that's not the main thing that it does best bet that you've made as a

[2:01:31] VC oh um I have I will not know for 30 years do you know the worst no I mean you know look the thing with VC is you can only lose one extra

[2:01:41] money um although we've done plenty of that you have you money Mark andrion how are you spending it you don't nobody nobody actually has that cuz if you if you like you end up

[2:01:51] responsible for other people um and so that the concept doesn't work unless you literally drop out it doesn't work so how do I spend money mostly to buy time

[2:02:02] Elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter was that a good was that a good use of funds well we're in it we're we're part of The Syndicate um and and I would say

[2:02:12] we we have confidence that in the long run that will prove to be a great investment do you think that his decision to buy Twitter determined the election in some key way probably yeah can California be

[2:02:26] saved it's up to California signal or WhatsApp oh equal equal opportunity both I I literally have the window side by side

[2:02:37] is there any Democrat you would vote for oh sure I voted for many Democrats I mean a current favorite is I mentioned Richie Torres uh who I think is a new leader of his party which which I we're big supporters of do you believe in God

[2:02:50] I'm not sure what's the most important book you've read in the past decade i' say probably I say probably the McAllan

[2:03:01] probably from in terms of usefulness probably I don't know if it's the most important but the most useful what did Trump serve at dinner at Bedminster oh um he said he said what do you guys want

[2:03:13] to eat and I I just I for some reason I was just like I I I I know exactly what to say I'm like meat I want meat uh and so he literally ordered every meat dish uh by the way ordered every meat dish and nothing else there were no sides

[2:03:25] there were no sides asked Ben there were no sides um it was all meat and it was glorious just well there was so M there was so much meat I don't think there was room on the table for sides were there drinks or no alcohol there it was a diet

[2:03:36] Co he he he he mainlines Diet Coke and I was mainlining it right next to him tomorrow you wake up and you're the DNC chair what's the first thing you would

[2:03:47] do DNC chair I mean the DNC chair it has to be it has to be it has to be candidate recruitment like you you got to get to work on candidate recruitment I think at this point who do you think the Democrats will run in

[2:04:01] 2028 I hope it's a Richie Torres or somebody like that and then yeah they have other choices that you know would would be doubling down on what what they had in 1996 your business partner Ben Horowitz criticized an interview you

[2:04:12] sorry in 1996 Ben Horowitz your business partner criticized an interview you gave and you quipped back this next time do the interiew interview yourself you but the relationship endured

[2:04:25] and you guys are still running the company together what's your advice for Partnerships in business find somebody who can tolerate a lot of your your son is now eight years old he's too

[2:04:35] young arguably to be on social media but will you let him when he's older to be decided having said that

[2:04:48] there is so much that he is already learning uh from online resources um I you have to I think have a very nuanced view of this what's something you believe that most people disagree with

[2:04:59] oh I look that there is like tremendous reason for optimism that like the America's best days are ahead of it that the world is going to get much better that there are that kids you know kids coming out of school now are much sharper and more capable than than in My

[2:05:11] Generation Um there there is no reason that this can't be a golden age you've spent time with Trump as we've talked about here you've noted that he's very focused on America winning what does America winning mean to you for you

[2:05:21] years from now how will we know if America has won oh I mean there will be economic indicators there will be you know foreign competition competition indicators you know reduction of War you

[2:05:32] know economic growth uh be two big ones and then a lot of this is I think National spirit and psychology uh animal spirits enthusiasm positivity excitement mark andreon thank you so much for

[2:05:43] joining me great thank you Barry