Marc Andreessen on AI, Tech, Censorship, and Dining with Trump

From the free press, this is honestly, and I'm very wise. Democrats, until very recently, seem to have a monopoly on Silicon Valley. Perhaps you remember when 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 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 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 also WhatsApp co-founder Yan Kuhm, Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss who run the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, VCs like Sean McGuire, David Sachs and Chimoff Palapatia, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonstow, Oculus and Andrewl founder Palmer Lucky, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, and my guest today, one of the most influential investors in Silicon Valley and the man largely responsible for bringing the internet to the masses, Mark and Dresan. Mark was always with the Democrats. He supported Bill Clinton in 1996, Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry 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 P.A., 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 show that Mark donated at least $4.5 million to pro-chump superpacks. Why? Because he believed, as he tells me, that the Biden administration had "sealing contempt for tech" and that this election was existential for AI, crypto and startups in America. Mark and Dresan, if 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 most popular web browser in the 1990s, and he sold it to AOL in 1999 for $4.2 billion. Mark now runs a venture capital firm with Ben Horowitz, where they invest in startups who they think have potential to become billion-dollar unicorns. Their track record is pretty impressive. A16Z invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Instagram, Instacart, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, Lift, and Oculus, to name just a few. And for full disclosure, Mark and his wife, Laura, were small seed investors in the free press. And yes, we do expect for our name to be alongside those other companies sometime soon. Great investors are able to see around Ben's, and Mark has built a reputation as someone who can do just that, who can recognize the next big thing in tech, and really more broadly in our lives. He has been called the chief ideologist of the Silicon Valley Elite, a cultural tastemaker, and 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 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 tried to kill tech and control AI, why he thinks AI censorship is a million times more dangerous than social media censorship. Why technologists in his 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 America. Stay with us. Honestly, it's proudly supported by the Jack Miller Center. At a time when our democracy faces real challenges, one question matters more than ever. Are we preparing the next generation to understand and uphold the principles that define America? The Jack Miller Center, they believe the answer begins in the classroom. Their mission is bold to revive the teaching of America's founding ideals, documents, and history on college campuses in K through 12 schools and beyond. Since 2004, the Jack Miller Center has built a national network of over 1,300 scholars who are bringing the American political tradition to life for students across the country. And through their Teach for Freedom campaign, they're working to reach millions more by 2026, our nation's 250th anniversary. Why? Because the strong democracy depends on informed citizens. The Free Press is really proud to partner with the Jack Miller Center on old school, a new podcast about how great books can change your life hosted by the brilliant Shiloh Brooks. To learn more about their work or to get involved, visit jackmillercenter.org. Again, that's jackmillercenter.org. Mark Andreessen, welcome to, honestly. It's 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 because Donald Trump won the election. And I want to understand, what 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. I do think the analogy for what's happening right now is 1980. But look, I would start by saying it is not just Donald Trump, trust victory is part of it. But I think below that are two other things. So one is just in the election generally, there was, as you know, a dramatic shift to the right across broad swaths of the population, by the way, including in California. And one of the stories that hasn't fully been, I think, realized is the extent to which counties districts in California actually went red this time, including some that hadn't been red, and I think 30 years. And then the other is just like even in places like San Francisco, there was a pretty significant vote shift. And then the youth vote, you know, is I think maybe the single biggest part of what happened, which is, you know, the kids are changing. And then I would say even beyond that, even beyond the partisan politics of it, it feels like the last decade has been a very emotionally dark and repressive time. You know, in many ways, Silicon Valley was on the Vanguard, you know, what you might call sort of a soft authoritarian, you know, kind of social revolution starting about 10 years ago, 12 years ago. And that soft repressive authoritarianism, you know, had a real negative impact on basically my whole world, the tech industry, the country. And, you know, we'll see it certainly feels like that's cracked. You know, I get all these little data points on kind of things that are changing from people in all these different industries. And like there's just so many little micro stories right now of like movie projects that were dead in the water in October that all of a sudden have come alive. Or people who now think that they can write the book that they never thought they'd be able to write. And or, you know, comedians who think they can, you know, tell jokes that they couldn't tell. But there are all these little sparks, you know, kind of firing all over the place, you know, people basically poking their head out of the frozen tundra of the culture and sort of realizing that it's actually okay to like laugh and play and have fun and old things do things, hire on merit, you know, celebrate success. And then underneath that is sort of, you know, fundamentally be proud of the country. Be happy about the country. Be patriotic. There were many people broadly in your world. I think Elon Musk, most obviously, 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 was going to be the last American election. Did you buy that? You know, both sides have kind of intense views on that and the other side obviously has very intense views on that. Also, I, you know, I don't, maybe I have a little bit more faith in the system. Maybe I shouldn't, but maybe I do. So my model for the world when it's just different. 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. You know, politics 50, 100, 200 years ago, and there used to be dramatic breakpoints. You had these populations that were primed for physical violence. You know, they were primed to go into the street, not a moment's notice, and like start killing. I tend to think we're in a world in which we kind of do that, but we do that online. It's a virtual cold war, not a physical hot war. And so, you know, people beat the hell out of each other, but they do it on X and, you know, they kind of take their anger out that way. And look, that's why I say it's sort of like a soft authoritarianism. We don't live in the world of like, jack booted thugs, you know, searching for Anne Frank or something like that. We live in the world of, you know, you can't say that. And if you do say that, you're going to be completely obliterated, reputationally and economically, and you're going to lose your friends and family. And so it's been an intense situation. I think the American politics and culture will continue to be intense, but it's sort of a soft form of authoritarianism and repression, not a dramatic, physical, hard, breakpoint one. I don't think. Let's just spend a second for people and put some meat on the bones of this sort of like soft authoritarianism, soft totalitarianism you're describing. So I think what you mean when you say that in the realm of academia, right? I can think of certain particular flash points, like Nicholas Christakis at Yale, I believe it was in 2014 getting actually surrounded by a mob of hysterical students who were overwhelmingly offended by the idea that his wife had the gall to send out an email saying that students should 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 Dow getting drummed out of their jobs or reassigned for having the temerity to publish an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton. Why did this world view have so much purchase and why was it able to conquer so much territory 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 what you just might say is sort of the political cultural left, which is basically that society is unfair and unequal, and so we must therefore commit ourselves to whatever level of social revolution is required to get the total fairness and inequality. And you know, that's an impulse that you can trace it back, maybe to the French Revolution, maybe to the American Revolution, you can certainly trace it back to the Fabians, you know, in the UK in the 1880s, you can trace it to, you know, Marxism, the Communist Revolution had that in spades. There's a great book called Red Decade, which is 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. The movie Oppenheimer actually created actually quite vivid portrayal of what life was like in that case at UC Berkeley in the 1930s, which is, you know, there was a joke in the movie, which is, you know, well, it's Oppenheimer Communist and somebody laughs and says, yeah, like half the faculty at Berkeley are Communist. And if anything that understated it, right, it was probably 100%. So, you know, we had our version of that in the 20s and 30s. We had our version of that in the 60s and 70s with the Cultural Revolution of that period. We had a version of it, by the way, when I was in college in the late 80s or early 90s, you know, with so-called political correctness and multiculturalism. You know, look, I think a lot of people would believe that there's a lot of good that has come along the way and that you could argue that like a lot of what we call social progress has happened. And I don't even want to second guess that. But it does kind of arrive in these very intense waves. And then, you know, like the other part of it is, it's an instrument of power, right? It's a little bit like the ring of power. Like, if you have the ability to destroy somebody by calling them racist or calling them sexist or accusing them of one of them, any other thought crimes, are people going to wield the ring of power responsibly at all times? And of course, the answer from like what's the one thing we know for sure, you know, power corrupts. The whole point of the ring of power in the Tolkien stories was like, you can't wield it without getting corrupted. Like, of course, it's going to turn evil. Of course, it's going to get used because it's just simply too powerful, right? Of course, it's going to get used in ways that people will later regret. I guess I wonder when did you start to update your mental model of what was going on? And maybe another way of asking 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. What were those galvanizing moments? What were those signal events for you? So I would say the sort of thing of like, wow, this is weird. And then it keeps happening was sort of call it 2012 to 2015. We were investors in this company GitHub, which was one of the companies that went hyper woke super early and that place got completely surreal, very early on. But the really big turning point moments for me were actually what happened on the other side, what happened on the right. And specifically, I was completely floored. The Trump got nominated in 2015 and I didn't understand it at all. And then like, I was completely shocked, you know, times 10 that he won the general election in 2016. And what happened was sort of the woke stuff, the Silicon Valley stuff, the social media stuff, the censorship, which we'll talk about. Those things like 10x, when Trump got nominated, those things like 10x, and then when he won, they 10x again. And then when the steel dossier came out, they 10x again. And then when Charlottesville happened, they 10x again. And then when impeachment happened, they 10x again. And then 2020, COVID, they 10x again. And then BLM, they 10. So it was like this like incredible, like ramping up of emotion and drama and change. And that's when I psychologically, I was like, all right, 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 purchase. And then I was like, I don't understand Trump getting elected at all. And I felt very disoriented because my personal story is I grew up in rural Wisconsin, you know, which is now staunch, Trump country. So kind of my people historically, farmer world was in for Trump early in hard. And I had just like lost touch with the culture and didn't understand what was happening in that part of the world. But I spent I would say those five years basically confused. I tried deliberately to kind of reset my own, it's like how I was just like, I don't understand the country. I don't understand what's happening to their side. I need to really go think about this hard. And I need to read a lot. And I need to go like back in history, right? And I had to basically completely rebuild my worldview. And that took six years. And that's while we're basically fighting fires the entire time, trying to help our companies kind of navigate, you know, and 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 the left? James Burnham is I think, you know, super helpful on these topics for people who don't know who he is. He was one of the smartest political thinkers, political scientists, philosophers of the 20th century, un-American politics. And he had this particular life story, which is he was actually a full on communist revolution in Harry Activist. He was a personal friend of Leon Trosky in the 1920s, 1930s. 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 during the hard of kind of the big three way battle between communism, fascism, and liberalism was kind of raging in the world. One's called the managerial revolution. And it's basically, you know, these movements have real differences, obviously, those three big movements. But there is something in common, which he called managerialism, which is sort of the establishment of this expert class. The Communist call to the vanguard class, you know, in America, we call it, academic experts and fact-checkers. And it's sort of, it's the establishment of kind of this class of expert technocrats who are assumed to be able to steer society in healthy and beneficial ways. And then often lead you in very bad directions. And so that turns out to be a helpful framework for thinking about our time. And then he wrote this other book of the Machiavellians where he sort of looks at politics structurally as opposed to ideologically. One of the ideas from this school of political philosophy is basically what he calls the iron law of oligarchy, which basically is, democracy is never actually a thing. There's no actual system of democracy. You always end up with a small minority in charge of a large majority. And basically every society in human history, you always have a small elite minority in charge of a large majority. And the reason is because small elites can organize, and large majorities cannot. And by the way, this is built into the American system, right, where it's the classic thing. We're actually not a democracy, we're a republic. Right. And so the founders understood the iron law of oligarchy, and 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 and Senate representing us. Every experiment and direct democracy in the history of the world has ended in disaster. Because every error is 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 in which you just get the craziest stuff that comes in through the referendum system with no buffer at all. And so anyway, the conclusion, like, for example, from the ecuvelians is, okay, it doesn't matter what you think democracy should be. Any form of democracy that you're going to have is going to have an elite class that is going to be running things. 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 interests of the population in mind, or it's not. But to kind of pretend that they're just kind of arbitrarily voted in and out that people are in charge is just a myth. So are we living in a democracy in America or in oligarchy? Oh, oligarchy. And so this is the iron law of oligarchy. We are always in ever living in an oligarchy. Every society in the history has been an oligarchy of some kind. By the way, this view has been very common for a very long time in the American left. And people like Noam Shomsky, who've made their entire political career, is talking about the sort of, you know, presumptive business oligarchy that must run everything. And you know, and then how 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, the oligarchy, as expressed by the heads of the major corporations, the heads of the bureaucracies, that are no longer business oligarchs for the most part. They're kind of these academic press bureaucratic elites. But anyway, Burnham is a very good framework for thinking about that. Just to kind of like extend this idea, let's assume Burnham's right, everything's an oligarchy and that the election on 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 the ushering in of a new oligarchy. In other words, is part of the way to understand this election, the triumph or maybe the emergent victory, let's see, of if they can actually wield power and, you know, recreate themselves of a new counter elite. And are you Mark Andreessen, you know, someone who has supported Clinton in 1996, go in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, Obama in 2008, Hillary in 2016. Are you a turn coat 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, yes, depending on your point of view, right? But explain it from yourself if you can and what causes someone to turn against their, because you and Reid Hoffman, Mark Cuban, you're all like pedigree in much of the same way. But only some of you sort of have gone in the other direction. So let's talk about you and then the phenomenon more broadly. So basically the way I would describe it, I'm a politically, socially, culturally, I'm a child of the 1990s, California of the 1990s specifically, basically in the 1990s for somebody like me, tech founder kind of coming up, you know, educated in American universities, beneficiary of everything from federal research funding to, you know, student loan programs and so forth, kind of got in position to be able to start an attack company that became successful. There was basically something that was never, nobody ever wrote down, but everybody understood, which I call the deal. The deal was somebody like me basically could start a company, you could invent a new technology, in this case web browsers and all the other things that Netscape did. Everybody would think that that was great. And by the way, we got, you know, glowing press coverage, everybody loved us. It was great. And then you could go public, you could make a lot of money. That was great. You know, you would pay your taxes and that was fine. That was, you know, obviously, keep part of the social compact. And then at the end of your career, you would be left with this giant pot of money. And then what you would do is donate it to philanthropy. That washes away all of your sins. You know, reclassifies you as sort of, you know, suspect business mogul to a virtuous philanthropist and that's the arc. And it's all great, wonderful. You get honored degrees at all the universities. You get invited to all the great parties. You get invited to Davos. You get invited to Aspen. You get to come in and, you know, sit with the New York Times editorial board. The dinner parties are spectacular. You know, there's always incredibly important, like, wonderful people. And then, you know, you get married and you and your spouse have the exact same politics enough. And then you're trying to give them pledge and everything's awesome. You're saying to give them pledge and everything is great. And we're above it, talks about a great UR and it's just like, it's all like wonderful. And basically what happened, what I experienced was they, the people in charge of all this, basically broke the deal in basically every way that you possibly can. So basically every single thing I just said is, you know, for the last decade has been now held to be presumptively evil. Everything from, you know, just the whole idea that there are certain people who are, you know, married, a greater economic outcome than others is itself evil. Technology, of course, is held to be presumptively evil. Tech companies are held to be presumptively evil. Tech people are held to be this, you know, this evil class, anybody who's rich is evil. And then the thing that really shook me was when I realized that philanthropy was being redefined as evil. And so this very specific thing that happened there was my friend Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. Did this thing where they announced and committed that 99% of the money, you know, in their ownership and Facebook was going to go to philanthropic causes. By the way, non-political philanthropic causes, the big mission of what they call the Chan Zuckerberg initiative is literally to cure all disease in the next 100 years, right? So imagine $200 billion or whatever going to like, hearing all disease. And they just got hammered with criticism and attacks on that. And the line of argument was literally, oh, they're just slimy rich people and they're only doing it for the tax break, which is like a basic mathematical problem, which is you don't give away 99% of your money for a tax break. But what I realized is there's this real sentiment now, which is philanthropy is evil because the morally correct thing to do is for the government to do all this. And so what they should be doing is they should be getting taxed at 99%. The government should take the money and then the government should allocate the money. And that's a level of stateism and kind of bordering on communism that is sort of unfortunately kind of, you know, in fact, at the culture right now. So basically it's like, okay, every single part of that deal no longer works. And so it's basically the entire thing has been jettisoned out the airlock. And so it just, you know, for me, I then raise the question of like, okay, if none of that is true, then what world am I living in? What world do I play? How much was sort of going on just beneath the surface over the past few years? I thought about this a lot on July 13th, the day Trump got shot. I remember scrolling through X and seeing all of these people who I sort of privately knew from WhatsApp groups and signal groups that they were Trump curious or had moved right word. But in public, they were performing something very, very different. All of a sudden we're reposting this iconic image of Trump bloodied on his ear with the raised fist. Some of them explicitly endorsing him, but it was all sort of like a tacit endorsement or saying, you know, we're on this side. Come to me, Mark, how big of a group was that? 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 think you would describe it as on the 13th. The easy version of the story, I think the easy answer is there was a lot of what was called preference falsification happening. And so there were some number of true believers on the blue side. And then there were some number of true believers on the red side. But the true believers on the red side were lying in public about what they believed. Because of the threat of social sanction and career obliteration and losing their friends and family and everything else. 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 would never dare to say in the office or on X. Exactly. And in fact, there's actually two parts to preference falsification. There's not saying the things that you believe and then there's being forced to say things you don't believe, right? And of course, there's this famous essay by Voslav Habal who he talks about the power of the powerless. And he talks about the role of the slogan in like the communist, you know, behind the iron curtain, he talked about the role of the slogan, you know, the, it was the green grocer 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 workers are really not anybody believes. So why is the time cars are putting it in his window? Exactly. Right. And so that's the other side of it is people saying things that they don't believe. And, you know, these are both bad. Arguably, the second one is worse because you're forcing somebody to say something they don't believe, which is like, at least in the communist system, that's what broke the spirit, right? Which is, okay, if you're being forced to lie at that point, you've like completely lost yourself. You're drenched in so much internal shame that you're never going to recover. Team or Quran, who sort of is the best author on this topic with his book, Private Truths Public Lies, he went on, on X the other day, and he said the preference cascade is unwinding so fast now that we're now going to start to see people who are going to claim that they were for, they voted for Trump, even though they didn't. Right? Like it's going to go, it's going to go the other way. I don't know if that'll happen or not, but he's the expert and he thinks it will. I think there's a darker truth though, which I think has, if anything, more to do with it, which I think there are a lot of people who just don't have strong beliefs. By the way, they may think they do, but what they actually have is, they're basically just, they're in a social context where everybody around them either believes the same thing or is saying that they believe the same thing or hiding their true beliefs. And so, it's, go along, get along. You just didn't have to put a lot of thought into it. And especially like in the business world, which I know the best, most people are just busy at work trying to get their work done. Most people are just trying to get promoted and get a raise. And then they go home at night and they're 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, even in the elite classes, most people don't have these super strong concrete views. And so, if the entire momentum of society is heading one direction, you're just the most natural thing in the world to go along with it. And then when this kind of preference unwind happens, when the cascade tips tilts into the direction, then it may cascade hard in the other direction. And I think that's as much to do with it. Oh, and then back to the Trump-getting shot. So Trump-getting shot, you know, by the way, there may be a gender thing here, but I'll just tell you like, I think it was hard for any man. I won't speak. I don't say this 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 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 off the stage. And your response is to break free of the secret service and stand up and expose yourself to ongoing gunfire. With literally people being shot in the bleachers right behind you and screaming and like chaos and blood and all of it and to actually expose yourself to that love 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 sure you see it in wartime, but like we don't see that in our lives. And so I think it was one of those just such shocking, positively shocking moments that it was this thing where it's just like, all right, if we're not going to stand up for that, like what are we all doing? And so I think that made a big impact. You were one of the people that tweeted that image on that day. Yeah. 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's horrible and colonialism and on and it's 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, I mean, the iconography is amazing. He's literally wearing a red, white and blue suit and tie 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've been and I had already decided at that time. We had dinner with him eight days before that when we had a great, it was wonderful. It was incredible conversation. And then that happened the following Saturday and 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 stepped up and said, yep, I'm for him. That was the big moment in our industry where the most important iconic figure in tech by far, you know, did that in that moment. And so that, that was the real shift. Peter Till got up at the RNC in 2016 and endorsed 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 that? I mean, again, I think like I was just speaking for myself, like I didn't have anywhere near the depth of knowledge or awareness or had, like I hadn't really thought about any of it. And so what Peter did just seemed so completely offbeat from, by the way, he was like, I think in tech, he was the only one. I think he was the only public one. Yeah. Right. And by the way, Peter is a really good friend of mine and I talked him a lot during that time period and he and I were on the Facebook board together at that point and essentially led to a big blow up actually on the Facebook board that became public when one of the other board members actually attacked Peter for it in an email that then leaked. So like, you know, there was high drama around this. And by the way, Mark Zuckerberg showed at that time, actually a lot of bravery himself. There was tremendous pressure on Mark to kick Peter off the board for that and Mark really stood up for him and said, no, we precisely want him to stay on the board because he thinks differently than everybody else. After Trump won, I asked him, like, what do you think happened? And Peter made this really interesting, this is like December of 16 or something. So the country still doesn't know how to think about it all and he's like, I have a sneaking suspicion that Trump won because people are tired of political correctness. And I think Peter was sensing everything that followed. Like, Peter was dialed in on that and then again, not just the political correctness, but I think what Peter meant by that in retrospect was just, again, this sort of deeper thing 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. And maybe the people writ large in the country didn't realize that fully in 2016 or 2020, but they certainly realized it today. And so I think Peter in retrospect was sort of predicting what actually just happened in this election with, you know, with a leg. I want to ask you a few questions sort of about the political dynamics and Silicon Valley because there's a lot being written about the vibe shift happening. And I guess I wonder a little bit if that's overstated because the average worker at meta or Google, I imagine, has not changed their mind post November 5th. Like these are still extraordinarily progressive people that are dominating the most, you know, the biggest behemoths in the tech industry. How does the dynamic break down politically? Yeah. So to start with, I would say this has been a misperception and I believe actually fostered by the press for a long time. A misperception that Silicon Valley has some haven of libertarian, you know, ideal, ideal logs, you know, lunatics, Silicon Valley, my entire life, 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 Democrat. And you see that if you look at the voting, I mean, it's basically like the faculty of an Ivy League university, like maybe slightly more balanced, but barely. Yeah, you have companies where literally like the donations are like 99 to one. And by the way, that is reflective of like, right, if you took the top 200 executives at these big companies, that's roughly how it would break down. So overwhelmingly, the elites in Silicon Valley and California are still exactly where they were. Like they haven't changed, you know, so look, the vast majority of the CEOs, executives, founders of the big tech companies are still exactly where they were. And the vast majority of the employee bases, you know, especially you would say like in the creative fields, you go into like any of the like front end designers, developers, the people who build consumer apps like all that stuff, you know, it's going to be very left wing. And 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. You know, it is the generalized phenomenon. It's the value is just part of that. The elite counter elite thing is real. You know, again, Elon being the peak of the counter elite has had a big impact. David Sachs had a big impact. Joe Lanzdale has had a big impact. So I think what you have is you have this elite monoculture that's sort of very comfortably in power. And then you have this counter elite that is starting with Elon is kind of coming in on top and not to take huge credit for this myself. But I think a bunch of the people in the counter elite are like clearly more successful, clearly more productive, better results than most people in the elite. Bernie Sremork on this is the cause of the circulation of elites. And especially the idea of you have an elite class and then you have a group of up and commerce who are like aspirates to the elite class. And what the 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 and you're being praised and everybody loves you. And like it's just wonderful. And you're on the side of goodness and justice and you know, freedom and equality and great you're doing so many great things for black people, right? It's just like it's just amazing, right? That lasts for as long as it lasts until at some point there's a counter elite. There's a set of people who ideally are even better or even more accomplished or even higher status elites who basically come in and basically say, no, like this is not right. This is not how this should work. This is gone corrupt. How does that group of counter elite, like I'm sure you've noticed, there's just such sycophantic behavior going on right now towards particular members at the vanguard of that counter elite of people sort of just really brown nosing and like trying to get in good. There's been so much brown nosing in the other direction for my entire life. As someone just like brown nosing and doesn't like, how do you avoid the same ditto head behavior of everyone sitting around the table nodding along to whatever, you know, Tom Friedman wrote about Israel in the Middle East and the New York Times that day. How do you not replicate that same mirror image behavior on the other side or is that unavoidable according to you in Burnham? You know, I'm getting all these calls now and I'm not like hanging out with Trump every night, although you on this, but I'm not. But you know, I'm connected enough where I'm getting all these calls now from people where it's like, you know, they were fully certified members of the 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 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 doge or I've got an idea for, like you and their right mind would criticize Elon Musk right now. Not just because he's so powerful, but you know, we know what he does to people who disagrees with him. So like how do you avoid that, how do you create an anti-fragile counter elite is maybe the right way to phrase it? So I think part of the answer is you don't. I mean, what do you know happens when people get around power or they think they can get proximity to power? Like there's always a sun king. There's always a court. There's always a power center and people are always going to try to get to it, right? And so that like 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, at least sitting here today is still the case that 90 plus percent of the people in tech are on the other side. It's still the case that 90 plus percent of the fortune of 500, 90 plus percent of the universities, 90 plus percent of the experts, 90 plus percent of the bureaucrats. Now the thing you know is they didn't do that by like building rockets, right? They didn't do that by building things that like matter. They did that by basically being part of the government complex. And so overwhelmingly, the power structure in the country, overwhelmingly, the elites in the country, overwhelmingly, by the way, it is the same thing as it's like a Trump Trump's billionaires. Billionaires overwhelmingly went for Harris over Trump like a hundred to one. Of course, but that's the elite that just lost. No, I know, I know, I know. But my point is like, I don't think that's changed that much and look, maybe that just means that they continue to lose and maybe that's great. And I'm not saying that the new elite or counter-election aspire to be like that is just like, of all the problems that we have today, like I think that that is, I'm not worried about that right now. Look, I think the other thing is it is, I think just indisputably true that one side went in super hardcore for censorship over the last 15 years. And I think that actually was both damaging to the country and I think it was also damaging to itself as a movement because I think basically like the, called the Democratic Party writ large or the left, sort of that side of things decided that all dissent counter-argument objection to their points of view was hate speech misinformation as it was to be completely dismissed and then for the people who said those things to be ostracized. By the way, and again, I saw this happen. I saw it happen right up front. I was in the meetings where it was first formulated. What do you mean when you were in the meeting? I was in the meeting at Facebook where we defined the terms hate speech and misinformation for the first time. Then what's that and who defined them? 2013. Give or take. Why were they defined and who defined them? Well, let me back up all the way. No social media company can function without having some level of censorship. And the reason is because you're going to have things in, you know, terrorist recruitment and sightment of violence, child pornography, 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 cannot have them. Your service will fail. It's horrible. And so you're always going to have some censorship function. 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 N word. I got it. But then you know what happens. Then it's like straight down the slippery slope. And before you know it, you're censoring the claims that COVID was a lab leak. Like it's just a straight, it's the ring of power. It's a straight slide. And so I was in the meetings at a bunch of these companies, including Facebook, where it's like, okay, we need to define hate speech. We need to define this information. Right. And of course, hate speech, of course, gets to find as things, you know, statements that and of course, the immediate objection is like, well, the concept of hate speech makes me uncomfortable. Did you say that in the meeting? Of course. Yes, I did. I said, like, look, obviously this is going to get blown completely out of proportion. This could now apply to everybody. And so we are now going to empower a Commissar class, right? A professional activist who are now going to be able to apply this to fight all their political battles and to vent their political. Of course, they're going to do that. And this is the thing. It's just like, you know, in American, you know, the way we experience politics is, what everybody feels about 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 to work with, this isn't a political issue. This is a moral issue, 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 to everything under the sun, including politics. So there was that. And then the misinformation thing was early on was, was not that big of a deal. And I could tell you where that came from, but it was not that big of a deal. It was really the rush of gate, whatever you want to call it. I hope conspiracy hoax thing that sense got, I think you spent, I think completely debunked. But it was really this theory that Trump only got elected because he was a Russian asset and that Putin is Hillary Clinton put it, you know, Donald Trump is the only president because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook, right? And so basically it could, 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, right? Therefore you must censor misinformation. And again, it's the ring of power. The minute you have that, you censor everything else. But that actually predated Trump. That all started in like 2013. Looking back, Mark, do you 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, this is always the problem that I think people have, by the way, in government, as well as, you know, they have in companies, which is if you resign, you're gone, right? If you resign, you lose the information flow, right? And so if your job is to understand what's happening in the world, which is fundamentally my day job, like you just lose all that context. And then number two, it's like, all right, to be part of an organization should the requirement be that you agree with every single thing they do. And of course not, right? So there's basically three modes of how you resolve arguments and companies. You can agree and commit. That's the easy one. You can disagree and quit, or you can disagree and commit. What's the line between that and complicity with things that are really wrong? You know, that's a question of conscience. You know, I think everybody has to answer that kind of in their own soul. You know, I would say because I was in there the whole time and I saw the development. And by the way, not just Facebook, I saw this happen. I was in these conversations at many other companies and I was talking many other founders. 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. And then I knew them when they became, you know, one of the workers companies in the world. And so I saw that happening. By the way, this all has informed number one. My firm participated in Elon's buyout of Twitter, which now became X. And then also we are the major outside investor in substack. And I would say one of the things I'm proud to stop is being able to take the learnings from these other companies that kind of couldn't figure out how to deal with this up front because they didn't know these issues were coming. And I think the substack guys have done an amazing job building these questions and how to deal with them into the company from the very beginning. And substack has been, you know, far more resilient to these kinds of attacks and far more periphery speech than basically any other Lenovo company in the last 20 years. And I think the tide is turning a bit on this and we'll see what happens at the big companies. But, you know, yeah, that's where it ended up. I want to ask you something just about Ben Horowitz before we move on. Who's your partner and you've built this unbelievable firm with him. He endorsed Trump with you over the summer. Then a little while later, he talked about how he was going to give money to the Kamala Harris campaign. A lot of people saw that and thought this was a hedge. Basically for your firm, a 16 Z or in recent Horowitz, was it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes, it was a hedge. It was 100% a hedge. So it was a textbook definition of a hedge. So the context for that is the Biden administration was really bad. I was a seething contempt. What was their attitude towards the American tech industry? They went out of their way to damage it as much as they could. By the way, there's actually news in the press. They basically destroyed the career of the CEO of Intel. Well, just to back up for the listener, yeah. Let's talk about why the Biden administration had, I think you just said, seething contempt for tech and the way that that played out. Because for most civilians like me, the last group that maybe I would think of as being victim to the excesses of maybe the totalitarianism of the left or the excesses of the Biden White House would be the kind of companies that you invest in. So tell us what this actually practically looks like for a person that's coming to this pretty cold. Basically Silicon Valley and Washington have had a partnership going back literally 100 years. Silicon Valley, Northern California, was the home of invention of everything from guided missiles and radar, you know, pre-World War II, and then leading into the computer age and the microchip and everything that followed. And then obviously the internet, you know, was this payoff of this 40-year program by the government to fund these technologies, you know, that I was the beneficiary of. And then in the Clinton-Gore years, there was like tremendous partnership between DC and the Valley. And then by the way, in the first Obama term, there was like tremendous back and forth. You know, for example, a lot of Silicon Valley people remember the famous Obamacare website when it broke like a lot of the best and brightest Silicon Valley just put their hands up inside. We're going to go to Washington and fix it. And that created something called the US Digital Service where they now for 15 years have had really bright Valley people who go into the White House and work on all these tech topics. You know, the military runs an American technology, right? So like this dynamic was like 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 by the way, this took us totally by surprise. 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 was driving it? Who was driving it? You know, look, and I would say like when we endorsed Trump, we only did so on the basis of like tech policy and we're specifically weighing in on like tech business economics, you know, when we think about these things. But if you ask anybody who has a problem with what the Biden administration does, you have this incredible dichotomy between what seems like a reasonable moderate centrist thoughtful president who's been a senator forever and pillar of the old democratic establishment. And then you have this like incredibly radicalized set of policies with this young staff that just is like out for blood on all these different fronts. And they just adopted these very, very radical positions aimed squarely at damaging us as much as they possibly could. And that played out specifically for us in three areas that cost us to endorse Trump. One was crypto where they just declared war and tried to kill the entire industry and drive it off short. Number two was AI, where I became very scared earlier this year that they were going to do the same thing to AI that they did to crypto. And then third is what seems like an esoteric topic, but turns out to be I think very important, which is this concept of unrealized capital gains tax. So taxing private companies, which also by definition means, you know, will ultimately end up meeting homeowners and everybody else who owns a private asset, small business people, and basically destroying the ability to have small businesses to be able to have home ownership, and to be able to have tax turnups through this sort of structural change to taxes called unrealized capital gains. The crypto war we were on the receiving end for four years. It was incredibly brutal and incredibly destructive. AI, we had meetings in DC and May where we talked to them about this and the meetings were absolutely horrifying. And we came out basically deciding we had to endorse Trump. That's a little color to absolutely horrifying. What did you hear in those meetings? They said, look, AI is a technology, basically, that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They actually said flat outs, don't do AI startups, like don't fund AI startups. It's not something that we're going to allow to happen. They're not going to be allowed to exist. There's no point. They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. And we're going to basically wrap them in a, you know, I'm paraphrasing, but we're going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're going to protect them from competition. We're going to control them. We're going to dictate what they do. And then I said, I don't understand how you're going to lock this down so much, 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 classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community. And like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed. And that if we decide we need to, we're going to do the same thing to the math underneath AI. And I said, 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. And so they basically just said, yeah, we're going to look, we're going to take total control of the entire thing and just don't start startups. And Mark, what was the steel manate for the listener? Like, what was their argument? So this gets into this whole like, all these debates around like AI safety, AI policy. So there's sort of several dimensions on it and I'll do my best to steel manate. So one is just like, to the extent that this stuff is relevant to the military, which it is, if you draw an analogy between AI and autonomous 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 power and that was the atomic bomb. And the steel manate, the federal government didn't let startups go out and build atomic bombs. You had, you know, the Manhattan Project and everything was classified. And, you know, at least according to them, they classified down to the level of actual mathematics. And, you know, they tightly controlled everything. And that, you know, that determined a lot of the, you know, the shape of the world, right? That's part one. And then look, I think part two is, there's the social control aspect to it, which is where the censorship stuff comes right back, which is the exact same dynamic we've had with social media censorship and how it's basically been weaponized and how government became entwined with social media censorship, which is one of the real scandals the last decade or real problem, like a real constitutional problem. That is happening at like hyperspeed and AI. And these are the same people who have been using social media censorship against their political enemies. These are the same people who have been doing debanking against their political enemies and they want to use AI the same way. And then look, I think the third is, I think this generation of Democrats, the ones in the White House under Biden, they became very anti-capitalist. 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 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. And, you know, they demonize entrepreneurs as much as they can. And then, you know, the tax policy up to including proposing a tax policy that would just destroy the process of private company creation and destroy venture capital. I mean, I don't think there's been administration in this radical on economic and tech policy. I don't think it like ever. Like 100 years. Communist 100 years ago, love technology. They loved industrialization. Like communist 100 years ago, wanted industrialization because they knew that industrialization and technological advanced made everybody's lives better. They just wanted to seize it all once it was built. These people didn't even want it to get built. And so something went horribly, horribly wrong in this administration and in this movement. And by the way, let me just add one more thing, which is, look, this is not what you would consider to be mainstream democratic policy. You're thinking up until, you know, whatever 2020, you know, the Clinton people think this is insane. 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 Torres now saying this in public like this is wrong. Like this is clearly off the deep end. And, you know, 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 this loss. And I would say, I am cautiously optimistic that the smart moderate Democrats are going to figure out 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 a historical basis of the party. It doesn't have anything to 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 should just simply let it go and reestablish the historically close ties and move on with things and start winning elections. And I hope they reach the right conclusions. One of the things that the Biden administration did is that they aggressively went after Google, Amazon, and Metta over these anti-trust laws. And I think across the political spectrum, there's sort of a growing resentment of what you call big tech. I think what other people just call techs power their size arguably their profitability. JD Vance, the incoming vice president, supports a big tech anti-trust crackdown. Where do you agree with Vance? And where do you disagree? In other words, where should we be reigning in some of these big tech companies and protecting consumers? And where has this been at overreach in your view? Yeah, so start by saying we differentiate between what we call big tech and what we call little tech. Which is big tech. The companies that have made it and the companies that have some level of market power such that at least people are accusing them of being monopolies or cartels or, you know, oligopolis. These kind of big words that mean, you know, kind of very large amounts of market power. Those are household names. By definition, if you're big tech, you're a household name. We then define what we call little tech and little tech startups, right? And so it's new companies that have this aspiration to become big companies. There is this sort of funny cycle of life aspect to it, which is all the little companies start out wanting to be big companies, right? 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 the role of the venture capital firm is to fund each new generation of little tech company. And so 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 companies and replace them. And so the question is the question you asked, which is what's the right policy to deal with? The consequences of having at the end of the day, big companies with lots of concentrated market power. I think what I would say is in the last decade, I would say both sides of the political spectrum have really decided they really hate big tech. But for, I would say, diametrically opposed reasons. 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 companies, to the extent that they hate outsized economic success to start with. And then to the extent that they blame tech for getting Trump elected specifically. And they blame tech for kind of enabling the rise of let's call it populist right wing politics. Therefore, like intense pressure on these big tech companies from the left for all the censorship and debaking. The right hates big tech because of the censorship and the debanking. The right has a very particular bone to pick. And the bone to pick is you people at the big tech companies have been censoring and deplatforming Republicans now for over a decade. And by the way, you know, some of that is clearly true. And then there's a lot of gray area. And then there may be some claims that aren't true. But the level of mistrust is so high. And at least the Republicans believe that the level of deception of 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 neo progressiveism 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. And so I think that there are some people on the right who think that if they're, they come down harder and big companies generally, they'll be able to get more of the union vote, which by the way might be true. So that's like the new tinge. But I think most of it is anger at big tech and anger at the censorship and debanking. Look, I don't even really want to weigh in. I mean, I on on the specific politics of anitrust part of that is because I'm involved in a bunch of these companies. And I don't want to say things that are going to get going to show up in court. But also look, like for me, this is a legitimate time honored tension in the American system that goes all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt. And I think many smart people have worked on this for a very long time. There are very well thought through theories on many sides of this. There are many legal precedents on this. You know, clearly there's a level of big company behavior that goes too far, clearly also government involvement in business often has unanticipated side effects. These are very complex and difficult questions. I think these are questions that need to be litigated both literally and philosophically. Again, this is the case where the last administration was so aggressive on this and so out for blood that I think in many ways they suppressed the actual question. I would expect in the next decade the actual question will probably be confronted more directly. Let me ask you then another question about the relationship between government and tech. I think you can very plausibly make the argument that government, government walks, so tech could run. In other words, they invested in the 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 also founders to invest in. Essentially, they kind of like built or at least till the soil to create a very, very rich environment through which all of these companies could grow. Now a lot of people are in that environment are now turning around and saying government out of tech. How do you respond to that line of criticism? Yeah, so this goes to, I would say this is like a broader version of what I was saying about the deal. The deal for many decades was precisely as you said, the government invested deeply in R&D, the government invested deeply into infrastructure, the government invested deeply. By the way, procurement, the DOD was the early customer for a lot of these things that made them possible. The government invested deeply into education. All that is 100% true. By the way, for a very long time, all of that had brought bipartisan support. Republicans thought that that was great because that, to your point, created the seedbed for companies coming out the other side and the overall success of the American experiment, the entire complex of government and private action that makes America succeed. People on the left thought that it was great because education is fantastic. It's new to have a left-wing movement that's anti-technology. That's actually a new thing. Left-wing movements historically were pro-technology, not anti-technology because they progress. Technology quite literally represents progress. Technology represents in particular economic progress. If you're 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 need electric power. A huge focus of the Roosevelt administration was the deployment of electric power everywhere. Just like, by the way, at least in theory, a huge focus on administration has been the deployment of broadband internet everywhere, even though maybe not so much in practice, but at least in theory, right? They're spending a lot of money on that. Historically, this has been the deal with the capital deal. Of course, this is how it works. The success of American industry, the success of American business, the success of American tech has been viewed as good for America by both sides. It's a new phenomenon to have this very sharp anti-capitalist thing. I think 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 percent fine. And they were at the time, plenty progressive. They had progressive tax policy. They had progressive social policies. Same thing for the first Obama term. And so 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 out over the past few years was this phenomenon that you spoke about recently on Gerogin that you referenced a few times already in this conversation. And that's the phenomenon of debanking. You said on Rogan that roughly 30 founders of crypto companies and other companies were sort of quietly debanked during the Biden administration. And debanking, which is essentially having your bank accounts, your ability to transact, close or blocked, happens on both sides of the political spectrum. We have this really definitive piece by Rupa Sabarmania about how it has happened both to Muslim business owners who banks and companies like Stripe were concerned could be tied to terror. And also to people like Melania Trump. And I guess I wonder hearing 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 the time? So I would say so following. So I'd say some people did speak up. And actually we talked about it. Actually, I'm an example, Ben and I actually talked about it specifically in the podcast where we explained why we were endorsing Trump. And it basically came and went without people noticing. And you know, maybe that's just because we were not interesting enough, but you know, we actually were talking about it. It just didn't take. I think it's just one of those things they seem like one off when they're happening. And then it seems like if you say there's something systematic happening, it sounds like a conspiracy theory. And then look, the other thing is retaliation. I think especially a lot of small business people who have been subjected to this or small, you know, tech founders. I think a lot of them were hoping that it would just be a problem with one bank. And if they talked about it publicly, it might become a problem much more broadly. Also, another part of it is family members. Melania Trump in her new book actually says that she and her son Beren were both debanked. And of the many things that you could say about Trump, we know for a fact that Melania and Beren had nothing to do with anything that people are mad about. And so, you know, the idea that going after somebody's wife and son is just like, you know, that I mean, there you're in like Stalin level territory. And so I think people were scared about that. By the way, it's not just your bank account, you know, there's also been cases where you can't get insurance, can't get a car loan. I mean, there's lots of cases you get kicked off the internet. 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 should pass laws to protect? So, this is what I mean by like soft authoritarianism. Like, it's not the knock on the door for the morning. You get dragged off to the basement and some horrible building and beaten, right? 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 cargo license. When the state turns on you, they have all of these ways where somebody can press a button in a well lit office somewhere and ruin your life. The thing that you mentioned though about there's no right in the Constitution to banking the way there is to free speech, that actually is not completely true. And I'm not a lawyer on this. And so I won't get the details right. But the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is quite clear that the rights that you have do not all need to be enumerated to be rights. 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 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 without due process. And so I actually think that there actually is a pretty good case that a lot of this behavior is illegal, quite possibly criminal illegal. There are federal criminal statutes around denial of rights and conspiracies to deny rights. And at least I think there's a reasonable take that if there's been a conspiracy to deny somebody back accounts of that due process. And specifically that the government has been involved in that. It very well might be criminal felony behavior. In terms of what the new administration will do, a lot of people in the first Trump administration have told me that they have been through this themselves. So that in the wake of the first Trump administration, they were variously debanked or unable to get various kinds of insurance or home loans or other things. And so I think that there's a bunch of people who are in the 45th administration who I think are, you know, take that quite seriously. And then it's happened to a lot of their friends and allies over the last decade. 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 they certainly now have the power. I would say number one to discover what's actually been happening 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 they decide there are cases, they certainly are in a position to bring them. Okay. Well, speaking of sort of the next administration and the government, some have reported that you are considering in the running. I don't know what the right word is to join Doge. Is this true at all? I'm an unpaid volunteer. You're an unpaid intern for the new department of government efficiency. Yes. What do you think it's going to do? There's basically two big parts to it. One is they're going to do a top to bottom review of government spending. And they're going to 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 regulations. So they're going to basically do a top to bottom review of the regulatory, what's we call the regulatory state or the administrative state. And the connective tissue there that they don't talk about public is I think actually quite important, which is like a lot of the reaction of the Doge from like institutional Washington 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. You know the term impoundment. Yeah. So impoundment normally means as a civilian, it normally means like your car gets impounded. There's a different use of the word in the context of government spending. Impoundment is the principle in law today that the president has to go to Congress to get money for a program. The president is not allowed to either overspend or underspend. Why? So the president is obligated to spend the money whether he thinks it's a good idea or not. That's insane. On every government program. And so the president 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 the kind of constitutional question. Like we've 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 in another. You know, 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 ass-and-eye ideas about foreign policy I've ever heard in my life. What makes you confident that this is the right role for these two men and their various unpaid interns? Well, I mean, the first question is how good do you think the experts are? Very bad. Yes. But just to push back like yeah, sure. 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 I'm still going to be skeptical of the counter elite. Do you disagree with that? Obviously, the point in general terms is correct. And obviously, this will always be a question to concern. And look, you can even say it has nothing to do with one kind 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? Like you can agree, like Fauci abused his power and still believe that we need public health officials that deserve our trust. Oh, yeah. Of course. Oh, 100%. Then we don't want to live in a country where there is no coherent public health authority. Yeah, 100%. But look, what built the government we have today is in the 1930s. It was Roosevelt, like dramatically transformed the government. And if you recall, what Roosevelt 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. It was the Y Combinator of its time, right? The federal government was the Y Combinator of 1933, the New Deal, baby. Yes. The New Deal, right? And literally what they did is Roosevelt basically delegated a Harry Hopkins, like you got to build this new thing and do build all these programs and agencies and do it quickly because the Great Depression and then World War II. 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, 30-year-old who's good at anything. You bring him to Washington, you create an agency and you put him in charge and you haven't go do it. And it's like, you know, Harry, you go electrify the Tennessee Valley. You know, and Mary, you go, you know, create the art grants program, right? And, you know, can you go build naval warships? And these were all people who would be the exact same kinds of people that we have who come into Y Combinator and come into our firm and pitch and start companies. They're smart young athletes. You know, they haven't spent 30-year studying government. They haven't been, you know, government bureaucrats forever. 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 thinkers, right? What you really want is somebody who can wrap their head around a complex system. 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 reasons why FDR such a legend is because the FDR or federal government was actually high performance. It actually worked, right? Like, it did electrify the Tennessee Valley. The Biden administration did not build electric charging stations. 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 Bend, Indiana, or the guy who built the electric car, right? So it's definitely a change from how DC has been operating. It's definitely a change from the kinds of people who have been recruited to run these things for the last 40 years. It's hard for me to believe that they're going to do a worse job. 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 you want Elon Musk catching rocketships with chopsticks. You want him building electric cars. Do we want him, you know, meeting with foreign leaders of adversary nations and sort of like freelancing on that front? And it seems to be kind of like boundary-less situation right now. Yeah, look, the counterargument is number one. Elon decided that he had to do this because if not, he wasn't going to be able to launch rockets. Decided he needed to endorse Trump and get fully behind this movement. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Like literally what was happening was it was 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. And so that's just like clearly that should not be the case. And he's talked at length about all the crazy stories about that, you know, having kidnapped the seal and you know, strapped it at the board and see if, you know, the rocket launch is going to interfere with its mating impulse. Just this like lunacy just spiraled out of control. Regulatory thing has been happening. And so he concluded that he had to do it and then look on the foreign policy stuff. Here's what I would just say is like Elon already before any of the political stuff, Elon was already an integral part of both the national defense system and then also our allied defense system, you know, in Ukraine, the Ukrainian military runs on Starlink because the Russians have the cyber warfare capabilities to take out all the other communication systems. And so Starlink is the only communication system that the Ukrainian military can run on. It's the only one. And by the way, SpaceX has been in a pitch battle with the Russian cyber security offensive operators to keep trying to take Starlink down precisely because it's what the Ukrainian military is running on. And so yeah, like he's already in the middle of this. He's been a vendor to the US national security state for, you know, for a very long time. So 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 mentioned with Donald Trump 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 also, have you been down to Mar-a-Lago since the election? So in the second question, yes. A fair amount. Maybe half my time down there since the election. Wow. In and around there. Yeah, I mean, now look, I'm not claiming to be like in the middle of all the decision-making, but I've been trying to, you know, help as many ways as I can. Trump brings out a lot of feelings in a lot of people. People have very strong views. And then there are many political topics that, you know, we're very deliberately not weighing it on. And so I'm not Mr. foreign policy or Mr. abortion policy or guns or like I'm not an expert on those things. You know, when I talk about these things, it's around, as I said, tech policy, business, economics, and then, you know, the health of the country, the success of the country. I mean, so I guess the color that I give you is, I mean, it's everybody says this who meets with them, but like he's an incredible host. So we met with him at Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey, which is like, you know, absolutely beautiful. You know, we had a great time. We stayed overnight. You know, he loves being the host. He loves being surrounded by his friends and family and, you know, grandkids and, you know, the members of his various clubs. It's also one of the really interesting. We'll kind of watch him at work, which is he treats everybody the same and he talks to everybody. And this is, I think, one of his real and appreciated strengths that people didn't get for a long time, which is 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 it's been painted in a negative way, but there's a real strength to it, which is like he really talks to regular people like a lot. He's in that mode kind of all the time, talking to everybody. His thing with us basically was like, look, I just want an American to win. You know, you guys are in attack. I don't know much about tech, but I don't need to because you guys know a lot about it. You guys should go build tech companies. The American tech companies should win. American tech companies should be the winning companies. We should beat China. We should export. We should make the products the world wants. Our economy should be growing a lot faster. We should be creating a lot more jobs. Everybody in America who wants a good job should have one. And that will be the result of, you know, American company succeeding. And I want America to win. And I want us to sell our products not just America, but all over the world. You know, he said on trade. He said, I'm painted as Mr. Anti-Trade, but he said, look, I want a level playing field. I want all markets to be open to American companies. A lot of these countries claim to be pro-free trade, but they actually block their markets from American products. You know, there are not many American cars in the road in Japan. You know, nobody's using Facebook and China, right? 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. And so I'm going to go take that on directly, but the goal with it is for America to win. And so, you know, and most of the discussion is just around that half your time at Mar-a-Lago. What are you hanging on? What are the kind of meetings that you're taking, having, helping on? I've been involved in some of the interviewing process for some of the officials coming in. The caliber of a lot of the people that I met has been very high. A lot of the appointments that have come down in the last, you know, two weeks of sort of the next level down staff, I think have been very impressive people. And I think that flow of talent seems very strong. There was, I would say there was this fear, 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 outside the system in now is actually much stronger. I mean, they're just moving incredibly fast. You know, it's all in preparation for actually taking office on January 20th. So we still have a ways to go, but they're certainly going to hit the ground running on inauguration day. Feels like a honeymoon stage right now. How do you anticipate Donald Trump or the Trump administration breaking your heart? So I would say the following, which is, I hope the Biden administration is just uniquely bad. Like I genuinely hope that's the case. I genuinely hope the next democratic administration is going to be much more sensible than that. That would please me to know. And by the way, my firm, we actually support a lot of Democrats as well as Republicans. We plan to continue doing that. So I hope we're going to be dealing with a revitalized and sensible, you know, centrist moderate pro pro-American dynamism, democratic party. You know, look, I don't know. I have no idea. I learned from 2015 and 2016 and not try to predict. And so I'm, you know, very focused on trying to help as much as I can, trying to help get smart people in. I'm very focused on, you know, trying to help, you know, on any of the technical topics. But, you know, it's going to be a, I mean, the American government is complicated and things are going to happen. I no longer feel that I can predict, but I think it's, we needed it. Like it had to change. What we had in the last four years could not continue. After the break, why Mark has hope for America, despite once telling me that to build a media company, I needed to buy a used miniograph machine. Stay with us. The first ever piece I wrote for the free press, which 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 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, 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 demolished by the forces of Facebook and Twitter and Apple and Google and Amazon? And the thing you texted back to me was used miniograph machines. Okay. And at the time, you were also urging me and other people to 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 that online, they were all going to get re-edited to suit the political tastes of wokeness. Now, on the one hand, that's like a very bleak diagnosis, right? You're basically saying that building on the internet would mean submitting to this kind of political ideology and sort of bending a knee to it. And yet, you're the guy that wrote the Techno Optimus manifesto, this 5,000 word essay that I highly commend to everyone to listen to, arguing basically that technological 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 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 hundreds of years, you write, 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 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 wanted to ask you, which is it? Because some days, it seems like you wake up on the side of the bed and take what, you know, people on the internet call the black pill, you know, the pill of nihilism and despair. And other days, you wake up and it's, you know, the white flag, it's hope, 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 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, the vision of where we need the memiograph machine to get reliable information and maybe the vision where we have an open and free internet. One, it seems like you're feeling more these 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 it felt like everything just got increasingly repressive from 2013 through to maybe 2022. And then, you know, it feels like in the last two years, a counter movement has been building, you know, among other things, this election, it does feel like a new spirit is alive in the land, at least right now, which I hope will continue. Maybe the way to describe it the best is look, but my day job is venture capitalist, you know, tech entrepreneur, the thing you do when you're an entrepreneur 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, 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 and a billion people, it might become a big thing. And that's what the internet felt like in 1992, and that's what, you know, social media felt like in like 2007, and that's what, you know, AI, you know, in the tech industry felt like, you know, two years ago. So our day job is quite literally to try to like find these things and, you know, and tech, these things are some combination of technological change and then social change. I got a lot of things wrong in the last 15 years. 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, and then, you know, look, I felt and saw the kind of relate phenomenon that you're talking about. Part of it's just exposure to kids. The day job is meeting with lots of really sharp 22-year-olds, and starting in around 2021, 2022, I started meeting a completely different kind of college graduate. 22-year-old graduating in 2022, by definition, born in 2000, and so they were in high school and college, and they got like the full blast of woke. For 12-year straight, if you're, you know, a white male or an Asian, you're just like the worst possible person you can imagine, you know, the entire education system got weaponized against you. And so I started to see this new generation, kids coming out, and they're just like, they're just like not having it anymore. I'll give an example. I have a friend who has a teenage son who's 15 going on 16, his father is Jewish and his wife is Japanese, and so he is just rude. He's an incredibly thoughtful kid. He's incredibly, by the way, he's like Math Olympiad, he's like a super genius, incredibly bright kid, wonderful kid, and just every day at school is just constant, you're an evil person. And his reaction to that is, he is now to the right of a till of a hunt. He has read every piece of like dissident right-wing literature you can imagine, and he's just not having it. He's leaving that world behind. He's going to build his own world, and I don't know who knows what he's going to do, but like he's going to build something amazing. And there are a lot of kids like him. And so I started meeting kids like that kind of in this period, and you could kind of feel just people getting exhausted. And you know, look, these social revolutions, they curdle, communism curdled at the end, and the social revolution curdled at the end, they reach a point where they go for being their renegade exciting thing to being just like incredibly depressing and corrupt. And so anyway, that's the white pill, which is the time has come for a very different outlook, and that's what I've been trying to put on paper. But the used Mimeograph machine, as funny as it is, still feels relevant. In other words, even looking at the Wikipedia entry for Zionism, I'm like, well, we need to bring back used Mimeograph machines, or the printing press, at least, because history is getting revised and rewritten and lied about in the most astounding of ways. And we're not even living in an age yet, where the kind of politics we saw exhibited from Gemini, for example, are like the overlay of everything that we're searching for on the internet. How do we avoid a fate five years from now, where the politics that you've sort of been describing in this conversation and that I've encountered in my own way are not like embedded woven in to the very fabric of the 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. And what we have is we have, you know, you well know, the big institutions are fully under woke control, like they just are, and that's true across the board. It's true, the Fortune 500 is true, a big tech. They're just under control. Like 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, and with all the consequences that came from that. And so that illustrates the level of control that these things are under. And look, the use movie graph thing was always half a joke half serious. It's still half serious, you know, the censorship machine continues to run at a lot of companies, the do banking machine continues to run. You know, is the machine going to unwind or not? I don't know. Is it going to unwind in its own? I don't know. Again, there have been these little sparks. I'll give you one little spark. So the COVID lab leak hypothesis, which basically was misinformation right in the beginning, and was, you know, broadly censored on social media. I remember 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 Steve, the call bear show, and he did this like eight minute segment where he pointed out, he's like, it literally cannot be a coincidence that you had the Wuhan Institute of like, you know, viral bad viruses. I remember exactly right. And anyway, the point is I was in a discussion at one of the big tech companies, one of the big internet companies where the discussion was like, oh, did you see the John Stewart thing? Oh, ha, ha. That was really funny. Oh, okay. I guess we should stop censoring the lab leak theory now. Ha, ha. You know, yes. Now would be the time to stop censoring that. And literally they stopped censoring it that day. That's what make me feel good. Well, this is the, this is what I mean. On the one hand, you're horrified. On the one hand, you're in use mimeograph machine territory because you're like, oh, my God, they were censoring it up until that point. On the other hand, the minute it became socially permissible 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. All of a sudden, like, again, spark from the future. All of a sudden, it's a desensoring. And I just tell you, like, I have not seen many desensoring moments. There have not been that many of those, but like that was a big one. Point being like, if the cultural shift continues, you know, then maybe things really loosen up. The other thing goes to what we were talking about before about the new administration, which is, you know, look, Elon with the Twitter files did a privatized version of what now needs to happen broadly. We, the American population need to find out what's been happening all this time. And specifically about this intertwining of government pressure with censorship and debanking, like, we really need to know what happened there. And then there need to be consequences. Like, so it's consequences need to unfold. Let's put it that way. And like I said, I don't know with this new administration. What do you mean consequences need to unfold? Well, to start with, like, I think there were crimes committed. The government is not allowed to fund private organizations and then direct them to do things that it itself is constitutionally not allowed to do. That's like as big an offense and a actual federal crime in a lot of cases as when the government does things itself. And, you know, it's indisputable that that has been happening, the sort of censorship complex that you've written about at length, like that's 100% what's been happening. 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 simply not allowed. And a lot of them are actually are if a prosecutor wants to pursue them, there are federal criminal statutes that certainly apply that carried jail sentences, right? Like constitutional rights are a big deal. Like, there's real teeth behind these laws. And so, like, if there were laws broken, like that needs to be flushed out. And then we need to figure out 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 NGO or a think 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 what to be clear, what was happening was both the government was applying inappropriate. And I think illegal pressure itself for sure. And then in addition, they were funding a lot of private organizations. And I just, you know, to their enormous shame, you know, I'm next sort of Stanford, Stanford had one of these operations, the Stanford Internet Observatory. And it's funded by the federal government to implement a censorship policy 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 simply not allowed to do that. And so like, that stuff needs to be flushed out. And then we need to figure out how to prevent it from happening again. Is the other thing that needs to happen sort of robbing these institutions of philanthropic dollars? Like, I know your family has been very involved at you just referenced Stanford at Stanford. Do you wish you could claw that money back given the way they've spent it? Yeah. So I mean, look, so I don't want to speak for my family. A lot of this was my father-in-law who passed away. So, you know, a lot of this was in an earlier era. Having said that, there's no question to write. A lot of these universities, they run on development dollars, they run on philanthropic contributions, and then they run on an enormous amount of federal money. You know, J. Batticharia from Stanford has now been nominated to be the new head of NIH. There are many, many, many criticisms of the national NIH and the national health research funding complex that you could make. J. has made many of those himself. One of those is that NIH grants come with overhead money. So when the government issues money to a biomedical researcher at Stanford to try to cure cancer, they give additional money to Stanford University that Stanford University uses for overhead, which is to say essentially whatever it wants. The bureaucracy. Yeah. Right. Yeah. The bureaucracy. And then if you look at the headcount and places like Stanford, they now have more administrators than they have students. As is true in many, many, you know, bureaucratic institutions. It's true that it's true at lots of these elite schools. Yeah. It's been this massive bloat. And then, you know, as you well know, you have this extremely activated, you know, ideological, you know, activist class that's sort of conjoined 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, that can't happen. Like that's not allowed. Another one is foundations. The number of foundations that are tax exempt under, because they're assumed to 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, I think a lot of the big foundations are out of compliance with that. Like that, that should not be, you know, many, many, many examples of this. And as I said, at least now there's the opportunity to really dig into this and find out what happened and figure out how to have it not happen again. If there is a single household name that most Americans know when it comes to AI, it's chat GPT, which is owned by OpenAI, which is valued at $157 billion and was founded by Sam Altman, who's perhaps the biggest founder advocate for AI regulation. There's a tremendous amount of sort of back and forth in drama around OpenAI, started as a nonprofit. Now it wasn't. Sam was ousted that he came back. Elon was mad. Elon went on Tucker and said OpenAI was training the AI to lie. Can you explain the situation there and explain to the listener how we should be thinking about AI regulation? Yeah. So to start with, Sam was a co-founder, but Elon was a co-founder. So just for full credit and context, Elon was the original funder of OpenAI. And he and Sam worked together, but like Elon was definitely either A or, you know, the founder and was certainly a magnet for the early talent and as well as the funder. So, so Elon has been involved there from the beginning. The umbrella thing that I think has been happening is social media went on this arc that I've described from like 2013 to today where it became a censorship machine. AI has gone on a hyper accelerated version of that arc. It happened basically right up front. It took time for social media to become a censorship machine. It happened on AI right from beginning. It happened on AI right from beginning because AI companies learned 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. Now Mark, are you saying it's intentional or it's just learning off of information? It's 100% intentional. Yeah, that's how you get black George Washington at Google is because there's an override in the system that basically says everybody has to be black. Boom, right? Like there's squads, there are large sets of people in these companies that determine these policies and write them down and encode them into these systems. So overwhelmingly, what people experience is intentional. Like there's just no question about that. And they have these groups with this very or well-known name called trust and safety, right? You know, mistrust and no safety, you know, that do this. And a lot of these companies, it's common to have as many people on the trust and safety side deciding on all these policies as it is to have engineers building these systems. And then actually what happens right is you're an AI company and you know you need to build this kind of machine, this kind of censorship machine. And so you go higher the people out of social media who built the machine at social media. So it's literally in a lot of cases, it's actually the same people doing it in AI. And so these companies were born, well, they were born as censorship machines. They exhibit all of that behavior. And again, here, Elon is like the big break in that. And the big companies, they're doing it for 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 it. I was in a discussion with a professor who is at one of the big companies. And I was like, you know, it's crazy to have these AI's give you these patronizing moral lectures all the time. When you ask questions and this professor said, well, you know, my undergrad actually really liked that. Like that's how they expect technology to work, right? And I'm, you know, and I'm like screaming inside my own head. Like what the hell? It's like it's like baked into the culture, right? A lot of these people are newly arrived from these universities. They're fully, you know, indoctrinated. And so they, they're very sheltered isolated people. They're, you know, kind of people who spend all their time in a computer lab. So they don't haven't had a reason to think this stuff out more broadly. So it's the same thing. My concern is that 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 dangerous. 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 the future, right? So I think AI is going to be the control layer for how the healthcare system works. I think it's going to be the control layer for how the education system works. It's going to be the control layer for how the government works, right? And so in the future, when you deal with a healthcare system or with the education system or with the government, you're going to be dealing with an AI. And so if that AI is call it what you want, woke by a censored politically controlled, you are in a hyper or wellian China style social credit system nightmare, right? Absolute nightmare. And this goes directly to Elon's argument, which is the core of this. What you have to do is you have to train the AI to lie. 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 programmed to lie. It's hard to imagine things getting worse than that. And this hasn't rolled all the way out yet because AI is still new and 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 that this not happen. My hope is that the culture changes, the case studies, all the stuff that this new administration might do. My hope is that this all gets kind of peeled back and thrown out into sunlight. And people writ 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 happen by default unless people fight it. Are the incumbents pushing for regulation basically in order to protect themselves? Yeah, that's right. And this is not even a-- it sounds like a conspiracy theory. It's just simply something that happens. And it's a concept that's well known and understood in economics called regulatory capture. And what happens with regulatory capture is a big company goes to Washington and basically intertwines itself with the government 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 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. And then the government then gets to control that company. I mean, the banks are the case study of this. 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. After that, the big banks got much, much larger than the number of banks, you know, shrank dramatically. And so the banks have achieved regulatory capture. The banks control the regulators. The regulators control the banks. And by the way, this is why debanking happens. And this is why it works. It's because like it's-- you have the company intertwining with the government. There's no question. Yeah, no, the big internet companies, they try to do the big tech companies try every-- this is the standard logical play for big companies. It happens, I think, in every industry sector. And it's happening in tech just the same. And specifically with AI, this was actually not that relevant 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. But this for sure is a conscious strategy on the part of at least several of the big AI companies and very dangerous. I want to just connect it to what's at stake beyond the freedom to no information, which is sort of America's role as the world's sole superpower. And that now sort of being up for grabs. At the end of the Cold War, America had the military, the economic, the technological prowess. And you've made the case that our tech supremacy sort of allowed for that dominance to follow. Are we in a position right now to continue to dominate or how far close are we in the sort of race with China on AI, on chips, on any number of things that we could talk about? This has been one of the weird kind of things in DC for the last five years, which is, and this is many of the conversations we've had today sort of assumes that the US is in a vacuum, right? But then there's this whole other conversation, which is exactly that, which is the China situation. And at least I and out, you know, many others now believe that we're in some new version of a Cold War 2.0, which China. And, you know, it has, you know, certainly big economic dimensions. It has big cultural, political dimensions, you know, ideological dimensions. And then there is a big military dimension to it. And, you know, as we sit here today, there's been tension building in the Taiwan Strait for the last, you know, 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 an actual live military conflict between the two current superpowers. And then as a backdrop, you have that simultaneous with the technology of war, it's self-changing, right? And this is where 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 this multifaceted level of sort of competition rivalry, expanding out globally. Hopefully this remains a Cold War and, you know, something that sort of just bubbles along. But, you know, it's certainly possible that there's a hot war. You know, look, the good and the bad is sort of, I think, fairly obvious, which is America has all of the advantages and disadvantages of a decentralized system. We do capitalism, we, you know, the exceptions, exceptional times. Generally speaking, we do capitalism pretty well. Free markets, startups, entrepreneurship, technological development, you know, free speech in theory, like we have an open society, at least that's what we're supposed to have. And, you know, China has much more of a totalitarian dictatorial, you know, control system inside their country. They actually have been moving against capitalism over the last five years. And so they've actually been quite punitive to their own companies as an example, their own tech founders. And they've driven a lot of their best and brightest actually out of the country. So, so we have all the advantages 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 new technologies get developed. They can dictate how those get adopted and used throughout their society. And then they have this, you know, very explicit strategy to take their technology and their culture and their ideology global. And, you know, when their companies go to market globally, they go with their government. And their government is able to, you know, provide all kinds of curious and sticks for other countries to adopt their technology. And, you know, our government has been trying to kill us. So, you know, it's the opposite with us. We're doing it with the act of opposition of our own government. So, 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, they are probably neck and neck in AI right now. And they are, you know, absolutely determined to win these competitions. It is the most rational thing in the world for me to, you know, going back to what President Trump said at dinner with us. Like, the most rational thing in the world to say America needs to win this fight. Like, America needs to be the dominant technology superpower. When you write in you've written, we believe the deceleration of AI will cost lives, deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder. Are you thinking about China when you're writing that? Are you thinking about the way that AI five, ten years from now could save us in terms of detecting cancer? Is it both? Like, that line has stayed with me ever since you've written it. Yeah, the domestic, the easiest domestic example is healthcare. And at least everybody in the biotech world thinks that AI is going to sharply accelerate the process of curing disease. And so, that's an obvious case study there. The global version of this is warfare, which is, you know, how have societies like ours fought wars in the past, you know, we send a tremendous number of soldiers at a battle and they get killed, right? What is the future of warfare going to be? It seems like it's very clearly going to be based on autonomy, which is AI, right? And you're going to have everything from fighter jets to submarines and everything else tanks that are there on manned. Yeah. And then you see, by the way, the battlefield in Ukraine, you know, if you have technological superiority in the battlefield in Ukraine, it means that you have these first person drones and you've got these automated piloting systems and you are dropping in, you know, on top of a tank, you know, the tank caused millions of dollars to build, you drop a $300, you know, a drone with some some tanks at it and blow up the tank. It's a great illustration going to be on the side of technology. October 7th, you know, Israel had a technologically powered defensive line between Israel and Gaza that broke down. You know, one lesson from that is technology by itself won't save you, which, you know, the Chinese have taken a heart, but the other answer to that is that the technology needs to get a lot better. The next time something like that happens, God forbid, there ought to be a nationwide drone response system that's able to put an armed response and armed AI automated response under human control, but like within seconds. In example, so my partner Ben has funded a pilot program in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas PD now has the ability to put an unarmed drone with a high resolution camera on site at the location of any 911 call, any burglary alarm or any gunshot in Las Vegas. They're able to put a drone on site in 90 seconds. Wow. Right. And that has two consequences. Number one, if something goes wrong, if there's a break in or, you know, whatever, there's something happening, you know, a car jacking or whatever. Number one, 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. So you can't get away from these things. And then that means that the police officers are not at danger when they go in blind because they don't know what's happening. 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. That's one, but two, the deterrent effect. If you know that in Las Vegas, if you shoot somebody, you're going to get caught by a drone or break into it, you know, seven, eleven at two in the morning, you're not going to do it. And so these are like, just like examples right now of the kind of technologies that could be deployed. And again, these are like, I'm talking about unarmed drones, but just like eyes on massive deterrent to crime. And again, China is like racing ahead on every, so China has a two-press strategy. One is they take everything we do. You know, get access to it. And then two is they have a lot of their own smart people, right? And then they heavily support them from the government. And so they're racing ahead. They, by some measures, already have the best AI open sourcing at models. You know, one of the things the Biden administration is trying to do is kill open source AI in a world where the U.S. is not the leading open source AI world than China is. Then the entire world algae infrastructure is running on Chinese AI. That seems like a bad idea. You know, the Biden FAA tried to successfully, in large part, tried to kill the American drone industry as a consequence the Chinese own the global drone industry. You know, most drones in use by the American military today are made in China. Every single one of those is a potential weapon to be used against our soldiers. Right? So like, my view is just sort of patently obvious that like geopolitically we have to win this fight. You love tech. You probably love tech than any other person I've ever spoken to in my life. I've wanted to ask you, what are the blind spots? Because here's one that I see. I think that tech and progress sort of devoid or unmoored from a deeper moral world view, or maybe you want to call that God, can quickly sort of devolve into what I think of as like idle worship, worship specifically of intelligence in a way that I think can dip into something very scary. Like if 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 person with downs. How do you think about that problem? Yes, so what I would say is I think technology changes society, 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. Technology reorders power and status in society. It changes how society operates. 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. And then yeah, there's these two basically critiques of technology that kind of flow from that observation. One is what I would call is the left wing critique, which is interesting for a little bit, and then rapidly becomes uninteresting, because it ends up being the same critique, which basically is inequality. Technology drives inequality, inequality is bad. Therefore, the need for communism, whereas they say these days luxury, fully automated communism, I think it's the title of the book. But it's fundamentally, it's an economic power, zero sum sort of communist, neo Marxist kind of argument, fair enough. And then there's what I would call the right wing critiques of technology. And I think yours was an example of that, which is it's like, okay, fundamental questions of the human spirit and fundamental questions of humanity and fundamental questions of tradition and fundamental questions of social organization, fundamental questions of cultural change and losing important things. I find those critiques much more interesting. And quite frankly, they're harder to answer. And look, in the last hundred years, the march of technology, when we say technology, it's often we view technology and progress as synonyms. But that also means technology has come hand in hand with secularization, has come hand in hand. By the way, with the exultation of experts, I think these are quite frankly the questions that should be the center of the debate, as opposed to a lot of the other stuff that you know, at least has been dominating the discourse for the last decade. My claim, you know, that I wrote in my manifesto, my claim is these are all important and valid questions. But, but however, the thing you need to always kind of reiterate yourself too, is questions of like the human spirit and the social animal and organization of society and religion, like these are deep kind of permanent questions, you know, that go back many thousands of years. And I don't know that they ever get solved. It may be that these are the questions we need to think about the most, talk about the most. Are we likely to do a better job figuring those things out in a world in which we have higher levels of material prosperity or lower levels of material prosperity? And I think the easy caricature to form of the argument is technology changes society, changes society is bad, therefore we need to dial back on technology kind of the law, you know, 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 then you just have to imagine that, okay, now we're now we're in a better position to answer deep questions that human soul because we're poorer. I think that's unlikely to be the case. I would be more optimistic that as we get to higher, higher levels of material welfare, we actually have more time, right? And a larger opportunity to dress these deeper underlying questions. And so that's the claim I would make. Mark Andreessen, are you ready for a lighting round? 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 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 VC. Oh, I have no, I will not know for 30 years. Do you know the worst? No, I mean, you know, like the thing with VC is you can only lose one extra money. Although we've done plenty of that. You have fuck you, buddy, Mark Andreessen. How are you spending it? You don't. Nobody actually has that because if you end up responsible for other people. And so the concept doesn't work unless you literally drop out. It doesn't work. So how do I spend money mostly to buy time? Elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter. Was that a good use of funds? Well, we're in it. We're part of the syndicate. And I would say 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 determine the election in some key way? Probably. Yeah. Can California be saved? It's up to California. Signal or WhatsApp? Oh, equal opportunity. Both. I literally have the windows side by side. Is there any Democrat you would vote for? Oh, sure. I voted for many Democrats. I mean, a current favorite, as I mentioned, Richie Torres, who I think is a new leader of his party, which we're big supporters of. Do you believe in God? I'm not sure. What's the most important book you've read in the past decade? I'd say probably. I'd say probably the McEvellions probably, 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, he said, he said, what do you guys want to eat? And I just, I for some reason, I was just like, I know exactly what to say. And I'm like, meat. I want meat. And so he literally ordered every meat dish. By the way, he ordered every meat dish and nothing else. There were no sides. There were no sides. It asked Ben. There were no sides. It was all meat and it was glorious. There was so much meat. I don't think there was room on the table for sides. Were there drinks or no alcohol? It was a diet code. He made lies 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 do? DNC chair. I mean, the DNC chair, it has to be candidate recruitment. Like you got to get to work in candidate recruitment, I think at this point. Who do you think the Democrats will run in 2028? I hope it's a richie Torres or somebody like that. And then, yeah, they have other choices that, you know, would be doubling down on what they had. In 1996, Ben Horowitz, your business partner, criticized an interview you gave and you quipped back this next time who the fucking interview yourself fuck you. But the relationship endured 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 bullshit. Your son is now eight years old. He's too young, arguably, to be on social media. But will you let him when he's older? To be decided, having said that, there is so much that he is already learning from online resources. You have to, I think, have a very nuanced view of this. What's something you believe that most people disagree with? Oh, I look that there is like tremendous reason for optimism. Like the America's best days are ahead of it. The world is going to get much better that there are that kids coming out of school now are much sharper and more capable than in my generation. 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? Four years from now, how will we know if America has won? Oh, I mean, there will be economic indicators. There will be foreign competition indicators, reduction of war, economic growth, we two big ones. And then a lot of this is, I think, national spirit and psychology, animal spirits, enthusiasm, positivity, excitement. Mark Andreessen, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Barry. Thanks for listening. 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