#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America

Marc Andreessen is an entrepreneur, investor, co-creator of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape, and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep458-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/marc-andreessen-2-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Marc’s X: https://x.com/pmarca Marc’s Substack: https://pmarca.substack.com Marc’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@a16z Andreessen Horowitz: https://a16z.com SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Encord: AI tooling for annotation & data management. Go to https://encord.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/encord-ep458-sc GitHub: Developer platform and AI code editor. Go to https://gh.io/copilot https://lexfridman.com/s/github-ep458-sc Notion: Note-taking and team collaboration. Go to https://notion.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/notion-ep458-sc Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/shopify-ep458-sc LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/lmnt-ep458-sc OUTLINE: (00:00) – Introduction (12:46) – Best possible future (22:09) – History of Western Civilization (31:28) – Trump in 2025 (39:09) – TDS in tech (51:56) – Preference falsification (1:07:52) – Self-censorship (1:22:55) – Censorship (1:31:34) – Jon Stewart (1:34:20) – Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan (1:43:09) – Government pressure (1:53:57) – Nature of power (2:06:45) – Journalism (2:12:20) – Bill Ackman (2:17:17) – Trump administration (2:24:56) – DOGE (2:38:48) – H1B and immigration (3:16:42) – Little tech (3:29:02) – AI race (3:37:52) – X (3:41:24) – Yann LeCun (3:44:59) – Andrew Huberman (3:46:30) – Success (3:49:26) – God and humanity PODCAST LINKS: – Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast – Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr – Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 – RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ – Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 – Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Mark Andreessen, his second time on the podcast. Mark is a visionary tech leader and investor who fundamentally shaped the development of the internet and the tech industry in general over the past 30 years. He is the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and is one of the most influential voices in the tech world, including at the intersection of technology and politics. And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.

• 0:43Lex Fridman?

  We've got Encore for unifying your email stack, GitHub for programming, Notion for team projects and collaboration, Shopify for merch, and Element for hydration. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, onto the full ad reads. No ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Encore, a platform that provides data-focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation, and management, and for model evaluation once you train up the model on the data that you curate.

• 1:29Lex Fridman?

  In this conversation with Mark Andreessen, we actually discuss what he calls kind of like the trillion-dollar questions. And one of them for AI is, how effective will synthetic data be? It really is an open question. What piece, what fraction of the intelligence of future models will be based on training on synthetic data? At the top AI labs, I'm hearing a lot of optimism. As far as I can tell, that optimism is not currently, at least in the general case, based on any real evidence. So I do think synthetic data will play a part, but how big a part?

• 2:10Lex Fridman?

  There's still going to be some curation from humans. There's still going to need to be a human in the loop. I think the real question is, how do you effectively integrate the human in the loop so that the synthetic data, sort of 99 synthetic, 1% human?

• 2:30Lex Fridman?

  That combination can be most effective. That's a real question. And companies like Concord are trying to solve that very problem. First of all, I want to provide the tooling for the annotation, for the actual humaniac collaboration, but also asking and answering the research question of like, how do you pull it all off and make the resulting model more intelligent for very specific applications and for the general applications? Yeah, so Concord does a really good job on the tooling side. Go try them out to curate, annotate, and manage your AI data at Concord.com/lex. That's Concord.com/lex.

• 3:12Lex Fridman?

  This episode is brought to you by GitHub and GitHub Copilot. If you don't know what that is, my friends, you're in for a joyous, beautiful surprise. I think a lot of people that program regularly know and love GitHub and know and love Copilot. It's the OG AI programming assistant, and it's the one that's really trying to win this very competitive space. It is not easy. If you're somebody that uses VS Code, obviously, well, maybe not obviously, but you can use GitHub Copilot in VS Code, but you can use it also in other IDEs. I'm going to be honest with you.

• 3:56Lex Fridman?

  It's a very competitive space. I'm trying all the different tools in the space, and I really love how much GitHub and GitHub Copilot want to win in this competitive space. So I'm excitedly sort of sitting back and just eating popcorn like that Michael Jackson meme and just enjoying the hell out of it. And like I said, I'm going to be doing a bunch of programming episodes, including with Primogen, and he, I think, has a love-hate relationship with AI and with AI agents and

• 4:33Lex Fridman?

  With the role of AI in the programming experience and he's really at the forefront of people that are playing with all these languages, with all these different applications, with all the different use cases of code. And he is a new Vim user, so he's going to be skeptical in general of new technology. He's a curmudgeon, sitting on a porch, on a rocking chair, screaming at the kids, throwing stuff at them. But at the same time, he's able to play with the kids as well. So I am more on the kid's side, with a childlike joy, enjoy the new technology. For me, basically, everything I do, programming-wise, has the possibility of AI either reviewing

• 5:18Lex Fridman?

  it or assisting it. It's constantly in the loop. Even if I'm writing stuff from scratch, I'm always just kind of one second away from asking a question about the code, or asking it to generate, or rewrite a certain line, or to add a few more lines, all that kind of stuff. So I'm constantly, constantly using it. If you're learning to code, or if you're an advanced programmer, it is really important that you get better and better at using AI as an assistant programmer. Get started with GitHub Copilot for free today at gh.io/copilot. This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool

• 6:00Lex Fridman?

  that Marc Andreessen, on this very episode, sings a lot of praises to. I believe he sings, was it on mic or off mic? I don't remember. But anyway, he loves it. It's one of the tools, one of the companies, one of the ecosystems that integrate AI really effectively for team applications. When you have, let's see, like docs, and wikis, and projects, and all that kind of stuff, you can have the AI load all of that in and answer questions based on that. You can connect a bunch of apps, like you can connect Slack, you can connect Google Drive. I think in the context, we were talking about something like Notion for email for like Gmail.

• 6:43Lex Fridman?

  I don't know if Notion integrates email yet. They're just like this machine that's constantly increasing the productivity of every aspect of your life. So I'm sure they're going to start integrating more and more apps. I use it for Slack and Google Drive, but I use it primarily at the individual level for note taking. And even at the individual level, just incredible what Notion AI can do. Try it out for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase notion.com/lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store.

• 7:26Lex Fridman?

  There are a few people embody the, the joy and the power of capitalism than Mark Andreessen. I believe Mark and Toby are friends. I was at a thing where Mark and Toby were both there and they were chatting and they were very friendly. So I think they're friends and I got to hang out with Toby and he's again, incredible person. I say it again and again, it's almost becoming funny that eventually we'll do a podcast.

• 7:57Lex Fridman?

  I don't know why we haven't done a podcast. There's a few people in my life where it's like, like Jeffrey Hinton is one of those people. It's like, we've agreed to do a podcast for so long and we've just been kind of lazy about it.

• 8:14Lex Fridman?

  And Toby's the same. Anyway, he's the CEO of Shopify. I don't even know if he knows that Shopify sponsors this podcast. It doesn't matter. It goes without saying, it should be obvious to everybody that one doesn't affect the other. I am very fortunate to have way more sponsors than we could possibly fit. So I could pick whoever the hell I want and whatever guests I choose will never have anything to do with the companies that sponsor the podcast. There's no, there's not even like a. Tinge of influence. In fact, if there's anything, it'll be the opposite direction, but I also try to avoid that, you know? It's possible I talked to the CEO of GitHub, for example, on this podcast and GitHub sponsors

• 8:57Lex Fridman?

  this podcast. It's possible I talked to the CEO of Shopify, Toby, and Shopify sponsors this podcast. One doesn't affect the other. And obviously, again, goes without saying, but let me say it, make it explicit that nobody can buy their way onto the podcast, whether through sponsorships, or buying me dinner, or whatever. I don't know. This is just, it's impossible. And most likely, if that's attempted, it's going to backfire. So I think people intuitively know not to attempt, because it would really piss me off. Anyway, this is a detour. We're supposed to talk about Shopify. I have a Shopify store,

• 9:40Lex Fridman?

  luxuriam.com/store that sells t-shirts, but you can sell more sophisticated stuff, make a lot of money, and participate in this beautiful machinery of capitalism. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero-sugar delicious electrolyte mix, of which I consume very ridiculously large amounts. You know, salt used to be currency in the ancient world. How silly are humans? We're not silly. How sort of surprising

• 10:23Lex Fridman?

  the things we converge on as being the store of value. Just value in general, the kind of things we assign value to together. We just kind of all agree that this item, this material, this idea, this building is extremely valuable. And then we compete over that resource, or that idea, or that building. And we fight, and sometimes there's wars, and sometimes there's complete destruction, and the rise and fall of empires, all over some resource. What a funny, strange little world.

• 11:04Lex Fridman?

  Mostly Harmless as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy summarizes humans. For some reason, instead of that book, I was gonna say Catcher in the Rye. In my exhausted brain, the books kind of all morphed together. Catcher in the Rye is a really damn good book. All of the classics I return to often, the simple books, it's just even like the first book I read in English. Trivial book, trivial book called The Giver. It's like I return to it in its simplicity. Maybe it's, uh, maybe has sent them out the value. Maybe that's what it is, but just the simplicity of words. Animal Farmer, I've read, I don't know how many times, probably over 50 times.

• 11:48Lex Fridman?

  I returned to it over and over and over, the simplicity, the poetry of that simplicity. It's something that just resonates with my brain. Maybe it's a peculiar kind of brain. It is a peculiar kind of brain. And I have to thank you for being patient with this peculiar kind of brain. Get a simple pack for free with any purchase of whatever the thing I was talking about, which I think is Element. Try it at drinkelement.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Mark Andreessen.

• 12:46Lex Fridman?

  All right, let's start with optimism. If you were to imagine the best possible one to two years, 2025, 26, for tech, for big tech and small tech, what would it be? What would it look like? Lay out your vision for the best possible scenario, trajectory. For America.

• 13:05Marc Andreessen?

  The roaring twenties.

• 13:06Lex Fridman?

  Roaring twenties.

• 13:07Marc Andreessen?

  Roaring twenties. I mean, look, a couple of things. It is remarkable over the last several years with all of the issues, including, you know, every, not just everything in politics, but also COVID and every other thing that's happened. It's really amazing. The United States just kept growing. If you just look at economic growth charts, the US just kept growing and very significantly, many other countries stopped growing. So Canada stopped growing, the UK has stopped growing, Germany has stopped growing. And, you know, some of those countries may be actually going backwards at this point. And there's a very long discussion to be had about what's wrong with those countries. And there's of course, plenty of things that are wrong with our country, but the US is just flat out primed for growth. And I think that's a consequence of many factors. You know, some of which were are lucky and some of which through hard work. And so the lucky part is just, you know, number one, you know, we just have like incredible

• 13:51Marc Andreessen?

  physical security by being our own continent. You know, we have incredible natural resources, right? There's, there's, there's this running joke now that like whenever it looks like the US is going to run out of some like rare earth material, you know, some farmer in North Dakota like kicks over a hay bale and finds like a $2 trillion deposit. Right? I mean, we're just like blessed, you know, with, with, with geography and with natural resources. Energy, you know, we can be energy independent anytime we want. This last administration decided they didn't want to be. They wanted to turn off American energy. This new administration has declared that they have a goal of turning it on in a dramatic way. There's no question we can be energy independent. We can be a giant net energy exporter. It's purely a question of choice. And I think the, the new administration is going to do that. And so we, and oh, and then I would say two other things. One is, you know, we, we are the beneficiaries and, you know, you're an example of this.

• 14:36Marc Andreessen?

  We're a beneficiary. We're the beneficiary of, you know, 50, 100, 200 years of like the basically most aggressive driven, smartest people in the world, most capable people, you know, moving to the US and raising their kids here. And so we just have, you know, by far the most dynamic, you know, we're by far the most dynamic population, most aggressive, you know, we're the most aggressive set of characters in a, certainly in any, in any Western country and have been for a long time and certainly are today. And then finally, I would just say, look, we are overwhelmingly the advanced technology leader. You know, we, we have our issues and we have a, I would say, particular issue with manufacturing, which we could talk about, but for, you know, anything in software, anything in AI, anything in, you know, all these, you know, advanced biotech, all these advanced areas of technology, like we're, we're by far the leader. Again, in part because many of the best scientists and engineers in those fields, you know,

• 15:21Marc Andreessen?

  you know, come to the US. And so we just, we have all of the preconditions for a, for just a monster boom. You know, I could see economic growth going way up. I could see productivity growth going way up, rate of technology adoption going way up. And then we could, we can do a global tour if you like, but like, basically all of our competitors have like profound issues and you know, we could kind of go through them one by one. But the, the competitive landscape just is, it's like it's, it's remarkable how, how, how much better positioned we are for growth.

• 15:50Lex Fridman?

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

• 16:19Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So is this a family show or am I allowed to swear?

• 16:21Lex Fridman?

  You, you can say whatever the fuck you want.

• 16:23Marc Andreessen?

  Okay. So the TV, the great TV show Succession, the show, of course, that would, which you were intended to root for exactly zero of the characters.

• 16:30Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 16:30Marc Andreessen?

  The best line from Succession was in the final episode of the first season, when the whole family's over in Logan Roy's ancestral homeland of Scotland and they're at this castle, you know, for some wedding. And Logan is just like completely miserable after having to, you know, cause he's been in New York for 50 years. He's totally miserable being back in, in Scotland. And he gets in some argument with somebody and he's like, my, he says, finally just says, my God, I cannot wait to get out of here and go back to America where we can fuck without condoms.

• 16:58Lex Fridman?

  Was that a metaphor or?

• 16:59Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. Right. And so, no, but it's exactly the thing. And then everybody instantly knows what, like, everybody watching that instantly starts laughing because you know what it means, which is, it's exactly this. I think there's like an ethnographic, you know, way of it. There's a bunch of books on like all, like you said, the Scots Irish, like all the different derivations of all the different ethnic groups that have come to the US over the course of the last 400 years. Right. But it's been, and what we have is this sort of amalgamation of like, you know, the, you know, the, the Northeast, you know, Yankees who were like super tough and hardcore. Yeah. The Scots Irish are super aggressive. You know, we've got the, you know, the Southerners and the Texans, you know, and the, and you know, the sort of, you know, whole kind of blended, you know, kind of angle. Hispanic thing, you know, super incredibly tough, strong, driven, you know, capable characters. You know, the Texas Rangers, um, you know, we've got the, yeah, we've got the California, you know, we've got the, you know, the wild, we've got the incredibly, you know,

• 17:44Marc Andreessen?

  inventive hippies, but we also have the hardcore engineers. We've got, you know, the best, you know, rocket scientists in the world. We've got the best, you know, artists in the world. You know, creative professionals, uh, you know, the best movies. Um, and so, yeah, there, there, there is, you know, the, the, the, you know, I would say all of our problems, I think, are basically, you know, in my view, to some extent, you know, attempts to basically sand all that off and make everything basically boring and mediocre. But there is something in the national spirit that basically keeps bouncing back and it, and, and basically what we discover over time is we, we basically just need people to stand up at a certain point and say, you know, it's time to, you know, it's time to build, it's time to grow, you know, it's time to do things. Um, and so, and there's something in the American spirit that just like works right back to life. And I, and I've seen it before. I actually saw, you know, I, I saw it as a kid here in the, in the early eighties.

• 18:28Marc Andreessen?

  Um, you know, cause the, the, the seventies were like horribly depressing, right? In the, in the U S like that it was, they were a nightmare. Uh, on many fronts and in a lot of ways, the last decade to me has felt a lot like the seventies. Just being mired in misery. Um, and just this self-defeating, you know, negative attitude and everybody's upset about everything. And, you know, and then by the way, like energy crisis and hostage crisis and foreign wars and just demoralization, right? Um, you know, the, the low point for in the seventies was, you know, Jimmy Carter, who just passed away. He went on TV and he gave this speech known as the malaise speech. And it was like the weakest possible trying to like rouse people back to a sense of like passion.

• 19:05Marc Andreessen?

  Completely failed. And, you know, we had the, you know, the hostages in, you know, Iran for, I think 440 days. And every night on the nightly news, it was, you know, lines around the block, energy crisis, depression, inflation. And then, you know, Reagan came in and, you know, Reagan was a very controversial character at the time. And, you know, he came in and he's like, yep, nope, it's morning in America. And we're the shiny city on the hill and we're going to do it. And he did it and we did it. And the national spirit came roaring back and, you know, roared really hard for a full decade. And I, I think that's exactly what I, I think, you know, we'll see, but I think that's what could happen here.

• 19:34Lex Fridman?

  And I just did a super long podcast on Milton Friedman with Jennifer Burns, who's this incredible professor at Stanford. And he was part of the Reagan. So something, there's a bunch of components to that, one of which is economic.

• 19:46Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 19:46Lex Fridman?

  And one of which maybe you can put a word on it of. Not to be romantic or anything, but freedom, individual freedom, economic freedom, political freedom, and just in general, individualism.

• 19:59Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And as you know, as America has this incredible streak of individualism, you know, individualism in America probably peaked, I think, between roughly, call it the end of the Civil War, 1865 through to probably, call it 1931 or something. You know, and there was this like incredible run. I mean, that period, you know, we now know that period is the second industrial revolution. And it's when the United States basically assumed global leadership and basically took, took over technological and economic leadership from, from England. And then, you know, that, that led to, you know, ultimately then therefore being able to, you know, not only industrialize the world, but also win World War II and then win the Cold War. And yeah, you know, there's a massive industrial, you know, massive individualistic streak. By the way, you know, Milton Friedman, Milton Friedman's old videos are all on YouTube. They are every bit as compelling and inspiring.

• 20:41Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 20:42Marc Andreessen?

  As they, as they were then, you know, he's this, he's a singular figure and many of us, you know, you know, I never knew him, but he was at, actually at Stanford for many years at the Hoover Institution. But I never met him, but I know a lot of people who've worked with them and, you know, that, you know, he was, he was a singular figure, but his, his, all of his lessons, you know, live on or are fully available. But I would also say it's not just individualism. And this is, you know, one of, this is one of the big things that's like playing out in a lot of our culture and kind of political fights right now, which is, you know, basically this feeling, you know, certainly that I have and I share with a lot of people, which is it's not enough for America to just be an economic zone. And it's not enough for us to just be individuals and it's not enough to just have line go up and it's not enough to just have economic success. There are

• 21:23Marc Andreessen?

  deeper questions at play and also, you know, there, there's more to a country than just that. And, and, you know, quite frankly, a lot of it is intangible. A lot of it is, you know, involves spirit and passion. And, you know, like I said, we have more of it than anybody else. But, you know, we, we have to choose to want it. The, the way I look at it is like, all of our problems are self inflicted. Like they're, you know, decline is a choice. You know, all of our problems are basically demoralization campaigns, you know, basically people telling us, people in positions of authority telling us that we should, you know, we shouldn't, you know, stand out, we shouldn't be adventurous, we shouldn't be exciting, we shouldn't be exploratory. You know, we shouldn't, you know, this, that and the other thing, and we should feel bad about everything that we do. And I think we've lived through a decade where that's been the prevailing theme. And I, I think quite honestly, as of November, I think people are done with it.

• 22:10Lex Fridman?

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

• 22:18Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 22:19Lex Fridman?

  By, if I can only pronounce the name, French historian, Numé de Nif, Hébert de Cunon. I don't know.

• 22:25Marc Andreessen?

  That was amazing.

• 22:26Lex Fridman?

  Okay, all right, from the 19th century. Anyway, you said this is an important book to understand who we are and where we come from.

• 22:31Marc Andreessen?

  So what that book does, it's actually quite a striking book. So that book is written by this guy, as a professor, I'm gonna let Lex do the pronunciations, the foreign language pronunciations for the day. He was a professor of classics at the Sorbonne in Paris, you know, the top university at, actually in the 1860s, so actually right around after the US Civil War. And he was a savant of a particular kind, which is, and you can see this in the book, is he had apparently read and sort of absorbed and memorized every possible scrap of Greek and Roman literature. And so it's like a walking like index on basically Greek and Roman, everything we know about Greek and Roman culture. And that's significant, the reason this matters, is because basically none of that has changed,

• 23:13Marc Andreessen?

  right? And so he had access to the exact same materials that we have access to. And so we've learned nothing. And then specifically what he did is, he talked about the Greeks and the Romans, but specifically what he did is he went back further. He reconstructed the people who came before the Greeks and the Romans and what their life and society was like. And these were the people who were now known as the Indo Europeans. And these were, or you may have heard of these, these are the people who came down from the steppes. And so they came out of what's now like Eastern Europe, like around sort of outskirts of what's now Russia. And then they sort of swept through Europe, they ultimately took over all of Europe. By the way, you know, almost many of the ethnicities in the Americas in hundreds of years that follow, you know, are Indo European. And so like, you know, they were this, basically this warrior, basically class that like came down and swept through and, you know, essentially populated much of the world. And there's a whole interesting

• 23:57Marc Andreessen?

  saga there. But what he does, and then they basically, they, from there came basically what we know as the Greeks and the Romans, were kind of evolutions off of that. And so what he reconstructs is sort of what life was like, what life was like, at least in the West, for people in their kind of original social state. And the significance of that is, is the original social state is this, is living in the state of the absolute imperative for survival with absolutely no technology. Like no modern systems, no nothing, right? You've got the clothes on your back. You've got your, you know, you've, you've got whatever you can build with your bare hands. Right? This is, you know, predates basically all concepts of, of, of technologies we understand them today. And so these are people under like maximum levels of physical survival pressure. And so what, what social patterns do they evolve to be able to do that? And then the social pattern basically was as follows.

• 24:40Marc Andreessen?

  Is a, is a three-part social structure, family, tribe and city.

• 24:46Marc Andreessen?

  And zero concept of individual rights and essentially no concept of individualism. And so you were not an individual, you were a member of your family. And then a set of families would aggregate into a tribe and then a set of tribes would aggregate into a, into a city. And then the morality was completely, it was actually what Nietzsche talks, Nietzsche talks about, the morality was entirely master morality, not slave morality. And so in their morality, anything that was strong was good. And anything that was weak was bad. And it's very clear why that is, right? It's because strong equals good equals survive, weak equals bad equals die. And that led to what became known later as the master slave dialectic, which is, is it more important for you to live on your feet as a master, even at the risk of dying? Or are you willing to, you know, live as a slave on your knees in order to not die? And this is sort of the, the derivation of that moral framework.

• 25:31Marc Andreessen?

  Christianity later inverted that moral framework, but it, you know, the, the original framework lasted for, you know, many, many thousands of years. No concept of individualism, the head of the family had total life and death control over the, over, over the family, the head of the tribe, same thing, head of the city, same thing. And then you were morally obligated to kill members of the, of the other cities on, on contact. Right? You were morally required to, like, if you didn't do it, you were a bad person. And then the form of the society was basically maximum fascism combined with maximum communism. Right? And so it was maximum fascism in the form of this like absolute top-down control where the head of the family, tribe or city could kill other members of the community at any time with no repercussions at all. So maximum hierarchy. But combined with maximum communism, which is no market economy. And so everything gets shared, right?

• 26:16Marc Andreessen?

  And the, and sort of the point of being in one of these collectives is that it's a collective and, and, you know, and, and people are sharing. And of course, that limited how big they could get because, you know, the problem with communism is it doesn't scale, right? It works at the level of a family. It's much harder to make it work at the level of a country. Impossible. Maximum fascism, maximum communism. And then, and then it was all intricately tied into their religion. And their, their religion was, uh, it was in two parts. It was, uh, veneration of ancestors. Um, and it was veneration of nature. And the veneration of ancestors is extremely important because it was basically like, basically the ancestors were the people who got you to where you were. The ancestors were the people who had everything to teach you. Right? And then it was veneration of nature because of course, nature is the thing that's trying to kill you. Um, and then you had your ancestor, every family, tribe or city had their ancestor gods. And then they had their, um, they had their nature gods.

• 27:01Marc Andreessen?

  Okay. So fast forward to today, like we live in a world that is like radically different. But what you, and the, and the book takes you through kind of what happened from that through the Greeks and Romans, through the Christianity. And so, but, but it's very helpful to kind of think in these terms because the conventional view of the progress through time is that we are, you know, the, the cliche is the arc of the, you know, moral universe, you know, Ben Stur's justice, right? Or so-called wig history, which is, you know, that the arc of progress is positive. Right? And so we, you know, what you hear all the time, which you're taught in school and everything is, you know, every year that goes by, we get better and better and more and more moral and more and more pure and a better version of ourselves. Our Indo-European ancestors would say, oh no, like you people have like fallen to shit. Like you people took all of the principles of basically your civilization and you have diluted them down to the point where they barely even matter.

• 27:46Marc Andreessen?

  You know, and you're having, you know, children out of wedlock and you're, you know, you regularly encounter people of other cities and you don't try to kill them. And like, how crazy is that? And, and they would basically consider us to be living like an incredibly diluted version of this sort of highly religious, highly cult-like, right? Highly organized, highly fascist, fascist communist society. I can't resist noting that as a consequence of basically going through all the transitions we've been through, going all the way through Christianity, coming out the other end of Christianity, Nietzsche declares God is dead, we're in a secular society, you know, that still has, you know, tinges of Christianity, but you know, largely prides itself on no longer being religious in that way. Um, you know, we being the sort of most fully evolved, modern, secular, you know, experts, scientists and so forth have basically re-evolved or

• 28:31Marc Andreessen?

  fallen back on the exact same religious structure that the Indo-Europeans had, specifically ancestor worship, which is identity politics, and nature worship, which is environmentalism. And so we have actually like worked our way all the way back to their cult religions without realizing it. And it just goes to show that like, you know, in some ways we have fallen far from the, far from the family tree, but in some cases, we're exactly the same.

• 28:53Lex Fridman?

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

• 29:00Marc Andreessen?

  Identity politics is worshipping ancestors, right? It's, it's tagging newborn infants with either, you know, benefits or responsibilities or, you know, levels of condemnation based on who their ancestors were. The Indo-Europeans would have recognized it on sight. We somehow think it's like super socially progressive.

• 29:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and it is not.

• 29:17Marc Andreessen?

  I mean, I would say obviously not. Let's, you know, get new Oscars, which is where I think you're headed, which is look, like, is the idea that you can like completely reinvent society every generation and have no regard whatsoever for what came before you, that seems like a really bad idea, right? That's like the Cambodians with year zero under Pol Pot and, you know, death, you know, follows its, obviously the Soviets tried that. Um, you know, the, you know, the, the utopian fantasists who think that they can just rip up everything that came before and create something new in the human condition and human society have a very bad history of, of causing, you know, enormous destruction. So on the one hand, it's like, okay, there, there is like a deeply important role for tradition. And, and the way I think about that is it's the process of evolutionary learning, right? Which is what, what tradition ought to be is the distilled wisdom of all the, and you know, this is how the Indo-Europeans thought about it. It should be the distilled

• 30:01Marc Andreessen?

  wisdom of everybody who came before you, right? All those important and powerful lessons learned. Um, and that's, that's why I think it's fascinating to go back and study how these people lived is because that's, that's part of the history and, you know, part of the learning that got us to where we are today. Having said that, there are many cultures around the world that are mired in tradition to the point of not being able to progress. And in fact, you might even say globally, that's the default human condition, which is, you know, a lot of people are in societies in which, you know, there's like absolute seniority by age. You know, kids are completely, you know, like in the US, like for some reason, we decided kids are in charge of everything, right? And like, you know, they're the trendsetters and they're allowed to like set all the agendas and like set all the politics and set all the culture. And maybe that's a little bit crazy. But like in a lot of other cultures, kids have no voice at all, no role at all, because it's the old people who are in charge of everything, you know, their gerontocracies.

• 30:45Marc Andreessen?

  And it's all a bunch of 80 year olds running everything, which by the way, we have a little bit of that too. Right? And so I would say is like, there's a doubt, there's a, there's a real downside, you know, full traditionalism is communitarianism, you know, it's ethnic particularism, you know, it's ethnic chauvinism, it's, you know, this incredible level of resistance to change. You know, that's, I mean, it just doesn't get you anywhere. Like it may be good and fine at the level of individual tribe, but it's a society, society living in the modern world, you can't evolve, you can't, you can't advance, you can't participate in all the good things that, you know, that have happened. And so, you know, I think probably this is one of those things where extremeness on either side is probably a bad idea. And I, but you know, but, but this needs to be approached in a sophisticated and nuanced way.

• 31:28Lex Fridman?

  So the beautiful picture you painted of the roaring twenties. How can the Trump administration play a part in making that future happen?

• 31:37Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So look, a big part of this is getting the government boot off the neck of the American economy, the American technology industry, the American people. You know, and then again, this is a replay of what happened in the 60s and 70s, which is, you know, for what started out looking like, you know, I'm sure good and virtuous purposes, you know, we, we ended up both then and now with this, you know, what I, what I describe as sort of a form of soft authoritarianism. You know, the, the good news is it's not like a military dictatorship. It's not like, you know, you get thrown into Lubyanka, you know, for the most part, it's not coming at four in the morning. You're not getting dragged off to a cell. So it's not hard authoritarianism, but it is soft authoritarianism. And so it's this, you know, incredible suppressive blanket of regulation. Rules, you know, this concept of a vetoocracy, right? What's required to get anything done? You know, you need to get 40 people to sign off on anything. Any one of them can veto it.

• 32:22Marc Andreessen?

  You know, there's a lot of how our now political system works. And then, you know, just this general idea of, you know, progress is bad and technology is bad and capitalism is bad and building businesses is bad and success is bad. You know, tall poppy syndrome, you know, basically anybody who sticks their head up, you know, deserves to get it, you know, chopped off. Anybody who's wrong about anything deserves to get condemned forever. You know, just this, this very kind of, you know, grinding, you know, repression and then coupled with specific government actions such as censorship regimes, right? And de-banking, right? And, you know, draconian, you know, deliberately kneecapping, you know, critical American industries. And then, you know, congratulating yourselves in the back for doing it or, you know, having these horrible social policies like let's let all the criminals out of jail and see what happens.

• 33:07Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And so like we've just been through this period, you know, I call it a demoralization campaign. Like we've just been through this period where, you know, whether it started that way or not, it ended up basically being this comprehensive message that says you're terrible. And if you try to do anything, you're terrible and fuck you. And the Biden administration reached kind of the full pinnacle of that in our time. They got really bad on many fronts at the same time. And so just like relieving that and getting kind of back to reasonably, you know, kind of optimistic, constructive, you know, pro-growth frame of mind.

• 33:39Marc Andreessen?

  There's just, there's so much pent up energy and potential in the American system that that alone is going to, I think, cause, you know, growth and, and, and spirit to take off. And then there's a lot of things proactively that, yeah. And then there's a lot of things proactively that could be done.

• 33:50Lex Fridman?

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

• 34:00Marc Andreessen?

  Disclaimer at first, which is I don't want to predict anything on any of this stuff because I've learned the hard way that I can't predict politics or Washington at all. But I would just say that the plans and intentions are clear and the staffing supports it. And all the conversations are consistent with the administration in that they plan to take, you know, very rapid action on a lot of these fronts very quickly. They're going to do as much as they can through executive orders and then they're going to do legislation and regulatory changes for the rest. And so they're, they're going to move, I think, quickly on a whole bunch of stuff. You can already feel, I think, a shift in the national spirit. Or at least, let's put it this way, I feel it for sure in Silicon Valley. Like it, I mean, we, you know, we just saw a great example of this with what, you know, with what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, you know, and obviously I'm involved with his company. But, you know, we just saw it kind of in public, the scope of it and speed of the changes, you know, are reflective of sort of this, of a lot of these shifts.

• 34:45Marc Andreessen?

  But I would say that that same conversation, those same kinds of things are happening throughout the industry, right? And so the tech industry itself, whether people were pro-Trump or anti-Trump, like there's just like a giant vibe shift, mood shift that's like kicked in already. And then I was with a group of Hollywood people about two weeks ago, and they were still, you know, people who at least, at least vocally were still very anti-Trump. But I said, you know, has anything changed since, since November 6? And they immediately said, oh, it's completely different. It feels like the ISIS thought, you know, woke us over. You know, they said that all kinds of projects are going to be able to get made now that couldn't before, that, you know, Hollywood's going to start making comedies again. You know, like it's, they were just like, it's like, it's like, just like an incredible immediate environmental change. And I'm, as I talk to people kind of throughout, you know, certainly throughout the economy,

• 35:29Marc Andreessen?

  people who run businesses, I hear that all the time, which is just this, this last 10 years of misery is just over. I mean, the one that I'm watching that's really funny, I mean, Facebook's getting a lot, Meta's getting a lot of attention, but the other funny one is BlackRock, which I'm not, which, you know, and I don't know him, but I've watched for a long time. And so, you know, Larry Fink, who's the CEO of BlackRock, was like first in as a major, you know, investment CEO on like every dumb social trend and rule set, like every, all right, I'm going for it, every retarded, every retarded thing you can imagine.

• 36:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 36:01Marc Andreessen?

  Every ESG and every, like, every possible saddling companies with every aspect of just these crazed ideological positions. And, you know, he was coming in, he literally was like, had aggregated together trillions of dollars of, of, of, of shareholdings that he did not, that were, you know, that were his, his customers' rights. And he, you know, seized their voting control of their shares and was using it to force all these companies to do all of this, like crazy ideological stuff. And he was like the Typhoid Mary of all this stuff in corporate America. And he, in the last year, has been like backpedaling from that stuff like as fast as he possibly can. And I saw, just an example, last week, he pulled out of the Whatever the corporate net zero alliance, you know, he pulled out of the crazy energy, energy, energy stuff. And so like, you know, he's backing away as fast as he can. He's doing it. Remember that Richard Pryor backwards walk? Richard Pryor had this way where he could,

• 36:46Marc Andreessen?

  he could back out of a room while looking like he was walking forward. And so, you know, even there doing that. And just the whole thing. I mean, if you saw the court recently ruled that NASDAQ had these crazy board of directors, composition rules. One of the funniest moments of my life is when my friend Peter Thiel and I were on the, the meta board. And these NASDAQ rules came down mandated diversity on corporate boards. And so we sat around the table and had to figure out, you know, which of us counted as diverse. And the very professional attorneys at Meta explained with a 100% complete straight face that Peter Thiel counts as diverse by virtue of being LGBT. And this is a guy who literally wrote a book called The Diversity Myth.

• 37:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 37:27Marc Andreessen?

  And he literally looked like he swallowed a live goldfish. And this was imposed, I mean, this was like so incredibly offensive to him that like, it just like, it was just absolutely appalling. And I felt terrible for him, but the look on his face was very funny. It was imposed by NASDAQ. You know, your stock exchange is imposing this stuff on you. And then the court, whatever the court, court of appeals just nuked that. You know, it's like the, these things basically are being like ripped down one by one. And, and what's on the other side of it is basically, you know, finally being able to get back to, you know, everything that, you know, everybody always wanted to do, which is like run their companies, have great products, have happy customers, you know, like succeed, like succeed, achieve, outperform. And, you know, work with the best and the brightest and not, and not be made to feel bad about it. And I think that's happening in many areas of American society.

• 38:11Lex Fridman?

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

• 38:15Marc Andreessen?

  Well, so it was very, you know, there was a moment. So, so Peter, you know, Peter, of course, you know, is, is, you know, is publicly gay has been for a long time. You know, but you know, there are other men on the board, right? And, you know, we're sitting there and we're all looking at it. And we're like, all right, like, okay, LGBT. And we just, we keep coming back to the B, right? And it's like, you know, it's like,

• 38:37Lex Fridman?

  All right.

• 38:38Marc Andreessen?

  You know, I'm willing to do a lot for this company, but.

• 38:42Lex Fridman?

  It's all about sacrifice for diversity.

• 38:44Marc Andreessen?

  Well, yeah, and then it's like, okay, like, is there a test?

• 38:47Marc Andreessen?

  You know?

• 38:49Marc Andreessen?

  So.

• 38:50Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah, exactly. How do you prove it?

• 38:52Marc Andreessen?

  The questions that got asked, you know?

• 38:55Lex Fridman?

  What are you willing to do?

• 38:56Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, and I've become very good at asking lawyers completely absurd questions with a totally straight face.

• 39:02Lex Fridman?

  And do they answer with a straight face?

• 39:05Marc Andreessen?

  Sometimes.

• 39:06Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 39:06Marc Andreessen?

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

• 39:09Lex Fridman?

  So you mentioned the Hollywood folks, maybe people in Silicon Valley, and vibe shift. Maybe you can speak to preference falsification. What do they actually believe? How many of them actually hate Trump? What like, what percent of them are feeling this vibe shift and are interested in creating the roaring twenties? In the way they've described.

• 39:34Marc Andreessen?

  So first, we should maybe talk population. So there's like all of Silicon Valley. And the way to just measure that is just look at voting records, right? And what that shows consistently is Silicon Valley is just a, you know, at least historically, my entire time there has been overwhelmingly majority, just straight up Democrat.

• 39:49Marc Andreessen?

  The other way to look at that is political donation records. And again, you know, the political donations in the valley, you know, range from 90 to 99%, you know, to one side.

• 39:57Marc Andreessen?

  And so, you know, we'll, we'll, I just bring it up because like we'll see what happens with the voting and with donations going forward. We maybe talk about the fire later, but I can tell you there is a very big question of what's happening in Los Angeles right now. I don't want to get into the fire, but like it's catastrophic and, you know, there was already a rightward shift in the big cities in California. And I think a lot of people in LA are really thinking about things right now as they're trying to, you know, literally save their houses and save their families. But, you know, even in San Francisco, there was a big, right, it was a big shift to the right in the voting in 24. So we'll see, we'll see where that goes. But, you know, you observe that by just looking at, looking at the numbers over time. The part that I'm more focused on is, you know, and I don't know how to exactly describe this, but it's like the top 1000 or the top 10,000 people, right?

• 40:39Marc Andreessen?

  And, you know, and I don't have a list, but like it's the, you know, it's all the top founders, top CEOs, top executives, top engineers, top VCs, you know, and then kind of into the ranks. You know, the people who kind of built and run the companies. And they're, they're, you know, I don't have numbers, but I have a much more tactile feel, you know, for, for, for what's happening. So I, the big thing I, I have now come to believe is that the idea that people have beliefs is mostly wrong. Um, I think that most people just go along. Um, and I think even most high status people just go along. And I think maybe the most high status people are the most prone to just go along because they're the most focused on status. Um, and the way I would describe that is, um, you know, one of the great forbidden philosophers of our time is

• 41:24Marc Andreessen?

  the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. And amidst his madness, he had this extremely interesting articulation, you know, he was a, he was a, he was an insane lunatic murderer, but he was also a, you know, a Harvard super genius. Um, not that those are in conflict. Um, but Shots fired, man. But, uh, he, it was a very bright guy and he, he did this whole thing, um, where he talked about, basically he was very right wing and talked, talked about leftism a lot. Um, and he had this great concept that's just stuck in my mind ever since I read it, which is he had this concept just called over social, over socialization. Um, and so, you know, most people are social, most people are socialized, like most people are, you know, we live in a society, most people learn how to be part of a society, they give some deference to the society. There's something about modern Western elites where they're

• 42:08Marc Andreessen?

  over socialized. Um, and they're just like overly oriented towards what other people like themselves, you know, think, um, and believe. And you can get a real sense of that if you have a little bit of an outside perspective, which I just do, I think as a consequence of where I grew up. Um, like even before I had the views that I have today, there was always just this weird thing where it's like, why does every dinner party have the exact same conversation? Why does everybody agree on every single issue? Why is that agreement precisely what was in the New York Times today? Um, why are these positions not the same as they were five years ago? Right? Uh, but why does everybody like snap into agreement every step of the way? And that was true when I came to Silicon Valley and it's just, just true today, 30 years later. And so I think most people are just literally taking, I

• 42:53Marc Andreessen?

  think they're taking their cues from, it's some combination of the press, the universities, the big foundations. So it's like, basically it's like the New York Times, Harvard, the Ford Foundation and, you know, I don't know, um, you know, a few CEOs, um, and a few public figures and, you know, maybe, you know, maybe the president, if your party's in power. And like, whatever that is, everybody just, everybody who's sort of good and proper and elite and good standing and in charge of things and a sort of correct member of, you know, let's call it coastal American society, everybody just believes those things. And then, you know, the two interesting things about that is number one, there's no divergence among the organs of power, right? So Harvard and Yale believe the exact same thing. The New York Times, the Washington Post believe the exact same thing. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation believe the exact same thing.

• 43:35Marc Andreessen?

  Google and, you know, whatever, you know, Microsoft believe the exact same thing. But those things change over time, but there's never conflict in the moment. Right? And so, you know, the New York Times and the Washington Post agreed on exactly everything in 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020, despite the fact that the specifics changed radically, the lockstep was what mattered. And so I think basically we in the valley were on the tail end of that in the same way. Hollywood's on the tail end of that in the same way. New York's on the tail end of that, the same way the media's on the tail end of that. It's like some sort of collective hive mind thing. And I just go through that to say like, I don't think most people in my orbit or, you know, say the top 10,000 people in the valley or the top 10,000 people in LA, I don't think they're sitting there thinking, basically, I have rocks.

• 44:20Marc Andreessen?

  I mean, they probably think they have rocks out of beliefs, but they don't actually have like some inner core of rocks out of beliefs. And then they kind of watch reality change around them and try to figure out how to keep their beliefs like correct. I don't think that's what happens. I think what happens is they conform to the belief system around them. And I think most of the time they're not even aware that they're basically part of a herd.

• 44:38Lex Fridman?

  Is it possible that the surface chatter of dinner parties, underneath that, there is a turmoil of ideas and thoughts and beliefs that's going on, but you're just talking to people really close to you or in your own mind? And then the socialization happens at the dinner parties. Like when you go outside the inner circle of one, two, three, four people who you really trust, then you start to conform. But inside there, inside the mind, there is an actual belief or a struggle, a tension within New York Times or with the, for the listener, there's a, there's a slow smile that overtook Mark Andreessen's face.

• 45:18Marc Andreessen?

  So look, I'll just tell you what I think, which is at. At the dinner parties and at the conferences, no, there's none of that. It's what there is, is that all of the heretical conversations have anything that challenges the status quo. Any heretical ideas and any new idea, you know, is a heretical idea.

• 45:33Marc Andreessen?

  Any deviation, it's either discussed a one on one, face to face. It's like a whisper network or it's like a real life social network. There's a secret handshake, which is like, okay, you meet somebody and you like know each other a little bit, but like not well. And like, you're both trying to figure out if you can like talk to the other person openly, or whether you have to like be fully conformist. It's a joke.

• 45:52Lex Fridman?

  Well, yeah, humor.

• 45:53Marc Andreessen?

  Somebody cracks a joke, right? Somebody cracks a joke. If the other person laughs, the conversation is on.

• 45:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:59Marc Andreessen?

  If the other person doesn't laugh, back slowly away from the scene. Yeah, I didn't mean anything by it. Right. And by the way, it doesn't have to be like a super offensive joke. It just has to be a joke that's just up against the edge of one of the, use the Sam Bankman Freed term, one of the shibboleths. You know, it has to be up against one of the things of, you know, one of the things that you're absolutely required to believe to be the dinner parties. And then, and then at that point, what happens is you have a peer to peer network. Right. You have, you have, you have a one to one connection with somebody. And then you have your, you have your, your little conspiracy of thought criminality. And then you have your, you've probably been through this, you have your network of thought criminals. And then they have their network of thought criminals. And then you have this like delicate mating dance as to whether you should bring the thought criminals together. Right?

• 46:42Lex Fridman?

  And the dance, the fundamental mechanism of the dance is humor.

• 46:46Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, it's humor like, right. Well, of course.

• 46:48Lex Fridman?

  Memes, yeah.

• 46:48Marc Andreessen?

  Well, for two, for two reasons. Number one, number one, humor is a way to have deniability, right? Humor is a way to discuss serious things without, without, without, with having deniability. Oh, I'm sorry. It was just a joke, right? So, so that's part of it, which is one of the reasons why comedians can get away with saying things the rest of us can't. This is, you know, they can always fall back on, oh yeah, I was just going for the laugh. But, but the other key thing about humor, right, is that, is that laughter is involuntary. Right? Like you either laugh or you don't. And, and it's not like a conscious decision, whether you're going to laugh. And everybody can tell when somebody's fake laughing, right? And this, every professional comedian knows this, right? The laughter is the clue that you're onto something truthful. Like people don't laugh at like made up bullshit stories. They laugh because like you're revealing something that they either have not been allowed to think about, or have not been allowed to talk about. Right? Or is off limits and all of a sudden it's like the ice breaks and it's like, oh yeah,

• 47:30Marc Andreessen?

  that's the thing. And it's funny and like I laugh and then, and then of course, this is why, of course, live comedy is so powerful is because you're all doing that at the same time. So you start to have, right? The safety of, you know, the safety of numbers. And so, so the comedians have like the alt, it's no, no surprise to me to like, for example, Joe's been as successful as he has because they have, they have this hack that the, you know, the rest of us who are not professional comedians don't have, but, but you have your in-person version of it. Yeah. And then you've got the question of whether the, whether you can sort of join the networks together. And then you've probably been to this is, you know, then at some point there's like a different, there's like the alt dinner party, uh, the Tharkham Middle Dinner Party, and you get six or eight people together and you join the networks. And those are like the happiest mo, at least in the last decade, those are like the happiest moments of everybody's lives. Cause they're just like, everybody's just ecstatic because they're like, I don't have to worry about getting yelled at and shamed. Like for every third sentence that comes out of my mouth and we can actually

• 48:14Marc Andreessen?

  talk about real things. Um, so, so that's the live version of it. And then the, then of course, the other side of it is the, you know, the group chat, the group chat phenomenon. Um, right. And then this, and then basically the same thing played out, you know, until, until Elon bought X and until Substack took off, uh, you know, which were really the two big breakthroughs in free speech online. The, the same dynamic played out online, which is you had absolute conformity on the social networks, like literally enforced by the social networks themselves through censorship and, and then also through cancellation campaigns and mobbing and shaming, right? And, and, but then you had, but, but then group chats grew up to be the equivalent of Samus dot, right? Anybody who grew up in the Soviet Union under, you know, communism, no, you know, they had the hard version of this, right? It's like, how do you know who you could talk to? And then how do you distribute information? And, you know, like, you know, again, that was the hard authoritarian version of this.

• 48:58Marc Andreessen?

  And then we've been living through this weird mutant, you know, soft authoritarian version, but with, you know, with some of the same patterns.

• 49:03Lex Fridman?

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

• 49:13Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, and this is the thing. And then, well, this is kind of the running joke about groups, right? The running, running kind of thing about group chats. It's not even a joke. It's true. It's like, it's like every group chat, if you've noticed this, like every, this principle of group chats, every group chat ends up being about memes and humor. And the goal of the game, the game of the group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable.

• 49:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 49:31Marc Andreessen?

  As, as you can get without actually tripping it. Right? And like literally every group chat that I have been in for the last decade, even if it starts some other direction, what ends up happening is it becomes the absolute comedy fest where, but it's walking, they walk right up the line and they're constantly testing. And every once in a while, somebody will trip the line and people will freak out. And it's like, oh, too soon. Okay. You know, we gotta wait until next year to talk about that. You know, they, they walk it back. And so it's that same thing. And yeah, and then group chats is a technological phenomenon. It was amazing to see because basically it was number one, it was, you know, obviously the rise of smartphones. Then it was the rise of the, of the new messaging services. Then it was the rise specifically of, I would say, combination of WhatsApp and Signal. And the reason for that is those were the two, the two big systems that did the full encryption. So you actually had, you actually felt safe.

• 50:15Marc Andreessen?

  And then the real breakthrough, I think, was disappearing messages, which hit Signal probably four or five years ago and hit WhatsApp three or four years ago. And then the combination of, um, the combination of encryption and, um, uh, and disappearing messages, I think really unleashed it. Well, then there's the fight, then there's the fight over the, the length of the disappearing messages. Right? And so it's like, you know, I often get behind my, my things. So I set to seven day, you know, disappearing messages and my friends who, you know, are like, no, that's way too much risk.

• 50:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Marc Andreessen?

  It's gotta be a day. And then every once in a while, somebody will set it to five minutes before they send something like particularly inflammatory.

• 50:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. A hundred percent. Well, what, I mean, one of the things that bothers me about WhatsApp, the choices between 24 hours and, you know, seven days, one day or seven days. And I have to have an existential crisis about deciding whether I can last for seven days with what I'm about to say.

• 51:06Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. Now, of course, what's happening right now is the big thaw, right? And so the vibe shifts. So what's happening on the other, on the other side of the election is, you know, Elon on Twitter two years ago, and now Mark with Facebook and Instagram. And by the way, with the continued growth of Substack and with other, you know, new platforms that are emerging, you know, like I think it may be, you know, I don't know that everything just shifts back into public, but like a tremendous amount of the, uh, a tremendous amount of the verboten, um, uh, conversations, you know, can now shift back into, into public view. And I mean, quite frankly, this is one of those things, you know, quite frankly, even if I was opposed to what those people are saying, and I'm sure I am in some cases, um, you know, I would argue it's still like net better for society that those things happen in public instead of private. Um, you know, do you, do you really want, like, yeah, like, don't you want to know?

• 51:49Marc Andreessen?

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

• 51:56Lex Fridman?

  I mean, to push back and to come back to this idea that we're talking about, I do believe that people have beliefs and thoughts that are heretical, like a lot of people. I wonder what fraction of people have that. To me, this is the preference falsification is really interesting. What is the landscape of ideas that human civilization has in private as compared to what's out in public? Because like that, the the dynamical system that is the difference between those two is fascinating. Like, there's throughout history, the the fall of communism and multiple regimes throughout Europe is really interesting because everybody

• 52:34Lex Fridman?

  was following, you know, the line until not. But you better, for sure, privately, there was a huge number of boiling conversations happening, where like, this is this, the bureaucracy of communism, the corruption of communism, all of that was really bothering people more and more and more and more. And all of a sudden, there's a trigger that allows the vibe shift to happen. So to me, like, the the interesting question here is, what is the landscape of private thoughts and ideas and conversations that are happening under the surface of of Americans? Especially, my question is, how much dormant energy is there for this roaring twenties? Where people are like, no more bullshit, let's get shit done?

• 53:20Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So let's go through that. We'll go through the theory of preference falsification.

• 53:23Lex Fridman?

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

• 53:26Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah. So this is this is exactly, this is one of the all time great books. Incredibly, about 20, 30 year old book, but it's very, it's completely modern and current in what it talks about, as well as very deeply historically informed. So it's called Private Truths, Public Lies, and it's written by a social science professor named Timur Karan at, I think, Duke. And it's definitive work on this. And so he has this concept he calls preference falsification. And so preference falsification is two things. Preference falsification, and you get it from the title of the book, Private Truths, Public Lies. So preference falsification is when you believe something and you can't say it. Or, and this is very important, you don't believe something and you must say it. Right. And the commonality there is in both cases, you're lying.

• 54:08Marc Andreessen?

  You believe something internally and then you're lying about it in public. And so the thing, and there's sort of two classic forms of it. There's the, for example, there's the "I believe communism is rotten, but I can't say it" version of it. But then there's also the famous parable, the real life example. But the thing that Vassal Havel talks about in the other good book on this topic, which is "The Power of the Powerless", who was an anti-communist resistance fighter, who ultimately became the president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the wall. But he wrote this book and he describes the other side of this, which is "Workers of the world unite", right? And so he describes what he calls "The parable of the greengrocer", which is your greengrocer in Prague in 1985. And for the last 70 years, it has been, or 50 years,

• 54:53Marc Andreessen?

  it's been absolutely mandatory to have a sign in the window of your store that says "Workers of the world unite", right? And it's 1985, it is like crystal clear that the workers of the world are not going to unite. Like, of all the things that could happen in the world, that is not going to happen. The commies have been at that for 70 years, it is not happening. But that slogan had better be in your window every morning, because if it's not in your window every morning, you are not a good communist. The secret police are going to come by and they're going to get you. And so the first thing you do when you get to the store is you put that slogan in the window and you make sure that it stays in the window all day long. But he says, "The thing is, every single person", the greengrocer knows the slogan is fake. He knows it's a lie. Every single person walking past the slogan knows that it's a lie. Every single person walking past the store knows that the greengrocer is only putting it up there because he has to lie in public.

• 55:38Marc Andreessen?

  And the greengrocer has to go through the humiliation of knowing that everybody knows that he's caving into the system and lying in public. And so it turns into the moralization campaign. It's not just ideological enforcement. In fact, it's not ideological enforcement anymore, because everybody knows it's fake. The authorities know it's fake, everybody knows it's fake. It's not that they're enforcing the actual ideology of the workers of the world uniting, it's that they are enforcing compliance, right? And compliance with the regime and "fuck you, you will comply", right? And so, anyway, that's the other side of that. And of course, we have lived in the last decade through a lot of both of those. I think anybody listening to this could name a series of slogans that we've all been forced to chant for the last decade, that everybody knows at this point are just like simply not true.

• 56:21Marc Andreessen?

  I'll let the audience speculate on those on their own group chats.

• 56:27Lex Fridman?

  Send Mark your memes online as well, please.

• 56:29Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, yes, exactly. But okay, so anyway, so it's the two sides of that, right? So it's private truth, public lies. So then what preference falsification does is it talks about extending that from the idea of the individual experience and that to the idea of the entire society experiencing that, right? And this gets to your percentages question, which is like, okay, what happens in a society in which people are forced to lie in public about what they truly believe? What happens? Number one is that individually, they're lying in public and that's bad. But the other thing that happens is they no longer have an accurate gauge at all, or any way to estimate how many people agree with them. And this is how you, and again, this, this, this literally is like how you get something like, like the communist system, which is like, okay, it, you, you, you, you end up in a situation in which 80 or 90 or 99% of society can actually all be thinking individually, I really don't buy this anymore. And if anybody would just stand up and say it, I would be willing to go along with it,

• 57:14Marc Andreessen?

  but I'm not going to be the first one to put my head on the chopping block. But you have no, because of the suppression censorship, you have no way of knowing how many other people agree with you. And if the people, if the people who agree with you are 10% of the population and you become part of a movement, you're going to get killed.

• 57:29Marc Andreessen?

  If 90% of the people agree with you, you're going to win the revolution. Right? And so the question of like, what the percentage actually is, is like a really critical question. And then, and then basically in any sort of authoritarian system, you can, you can't like run a survey, right? To get an accurate result. And so you actually can't know until you put it to the test. And then what he describes in the book is it's always put to the test in the same way. And this is exactly what's happened for the last two years, like 100% of exactly what's happened. It's like straight out of this book, which is somebody, Elon, sticks his hand up and says, the workers of the world are not going to unite. Yeah. Right? Or the emperor is actually wearing no clothes, right? You know, that famous parable, right? So one person stands up and does it. And, and literally that person is standing there by themselves and everybody else in the audience is like, ooh, I wonder what's going to happen to that guy. Right?

• 58:13Marc Andreessen?

  But again, nobody knows. Elon doesn't know, the first guy doesn't know, other people don't know, like which way is this going to go? And it may be that that's a minority position and that's a way to get yourself killed. Or it may be that that's the majority position and that, and you are now the leader of a revolution. And then basically, of course, what happens is, okay, the first guy does that, doesn't get killed. The second guy does, well, a lot of the time that guy does get killed. But when the guy doesn't get killed, then a second guy pops his head up, says the same thing. All right? Now you've got two, two leads to four, four leads to eight, eight leads to 16. And then, as we saw with the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe in 89. You, when it, when it goes, it can go, right? And then it rips. And then what happens is very, very quickly, if it turns out that you had a large percentage of the population that actually believe the different thing, it turns out all of a sudden,

• 58:56Marc Andreessen?

  everybody has this giant epiphany that says, oh, I'm actually part of the majority. And at that point, like you were on the freight train to revolution, right? Like it is rolling, right? Now, the other part of this is the distinction between the role of the elites and the masses. And here, and here, the best book is called The True Believer, which is the Eric Hoffer book. And so the nuance you have to put on this is the elites play a giant role in this because the elites do idea formation and communication, but the elites by definition are a small minority. And so there's also this giant role played by the masses and the masses are not necessarily thinking these things through in the same intellectualized or formal way that the elites are, but they are for sure experiencing these things in their daily lives and they for sure have at least very strong emotional views on them. And so when you, when you really get the revolution, it's when you get the elites lined

• 59:41Marc Andreessen?

  up with, or a news, either the current elites change or the new set of elites, a new set of counter elites, basically come along and say, no, there's actually a different and better way to live. And then the piece, the people basically decide to follow the, you know, to follow the counter elite. So that's the other dimension to it. And of course, that part is also happening right now. And again, case study number, one of that would be Elon and his, you know, he turns out, you know, truly massive following.

• 1:00:03Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:00:20Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And it's like, well, and then, but then there's the test, is it crazy shit or is it the truth?

• 1:00:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And, and, and, you know, and this is where, you know, many, there are many specific things about Elon's genius, but one of the, one of the really core ones is an absolute dedication to the truth. And so when Elon says something, it sounds like crazy shit, but in his mind, it's true. Now, is he always right? No. Sometimes the rockets crash, like, you know, sometimes he's wrong. He's human. He's like anybody else. He's not right all the time, but at least my, my through line with him, both in what he says in public and what he says in private, which by the way, are the exact same things. He does not do this. He doesn't lie in public about what he believes in private, or at least he doesn't do that anymore. Like he's a hundred percent consistent in my, in my experience. By the way, there's two guys who are a hundred percent consistent like that, that I know, Elon and Trump.

• 1:01:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Marc Andreessen?

  Whatever you think of them.

• 1:01:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04Marc Andreessen?

  What they say in private is 100% identical to what they say in public. Like, they are completely transparent, they're completely honest in that way. Right? Which is like, and again, it's not like they're perfect people, but they're honest in that way. And it makes them potentially both, as they have been, very powerful leaders of these movements. Because they're both willing to stand up and say the thing. That if it's true, it turns out to be the thing in many cases that, you know, many or most or almost everyone else actually believes. But nobody was actually willing to say out loud. And so they can actually catalyze these shifts. And I mean, I think this framework is exactly why Trump took over the Republican Party. Is I think Trump stood up there on stage with all these other kind of conventional Republicans. And he started saying things out loud that it turned out the base really was. They were either already believing or they were prone to believe. And he was the only one who was saying them. And so the, again, elite masses, he was the elite, the voters of the masses and the voters decided.

• 1:01:48Marc Andreessen?

  You know, no, no more bushes, like we're going this other direction. That's the mechanism of social change. Like what we just described is like the actual mechanism of the social change. It is fascinating to me that we have been living through exactly this. We've been living through everything exactly what Tim Mark Ron describes. Everything that Vassal Havel described. You know, black squares and Instagram, like the whole thing. Right? All of it. And we've been living through the, you know, the true believer elites masses, you know, thing with, you know, with a set of like, basically incredibly corrupt elites. Wondering why they don't have the loyalty masses anymore and a set of new elites that are running away with things. And so like, we're living through this like incredible applied case study of these ideas. And, you know, if there's a moral of the story, it is, you know, I think fairly obvious, which is it's a really bad idea for a society to wedge itself into a position

• 1:02:32Marc Andreessen?

  in which most people don't believe the fundamental precepts of what they're told they have to do, you know, to be, to be good people like that. That is just not, not a good state to be in.

• 1:02:39Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:02:47Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, it's like, well, this is sort of the, the siren song of censorship is we can keep people from saying things, which means we can keep people from thinking things.

• 1:02:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:54Marc Andreessen?

  And, you know, by the way, that may work for a while, right? Like, you know, I mean, again, the hard form of the Soviet, you know, Soviet Union owning a mimeograph, pre photocopyers. There were mimeograph machines that were used to make some of those top underground newspapers, which is the mechanism of written communication of radical ideas, radical ideas. Ownership of a mimeograph machine was punishable by death. Right? So that's the hard version, right? You know, the soft version is somebody clicks a button in Washington and you are erased from the internet.

• 1:03:23Marc Andreessen?

  Right? Like, which, you know, good news, you're still alive. Bad news is, you know, shame about not being able to get a job. You know, too bad your family now, you know, hates you and won't talk to you, right? You know, whatever, you know, whatever the version of cancellation has been. And so, so, so like, does that work? Like, maybe it works for a while. Like, it worked for the Soviet Union for a while, you know, in its way, especially when it was coupled with, you know, official state power. But when it unwinds, it can unwind with like incredible speed and ferocity. Because to your point, there's all this bottled up energy. Now, your question was like, what are the percentages? Like, what was the breakdown? And so, my, my rough guess, just based on what I've seen in my world, is it's something like 20, 60, 20. It's like, you've got 20% like true believers in whatever is, you know, the current thing. You know, you got 20%,

• 1:04:07Marc Andreessen?

  of people who are just like true believers of whatever they're, you know, whatever's in the, like I said, whatever's in the New York Times, Harvard professors, and the Ford Foundation, like, just, they're just believing. By the way, maybe it's 10, maybe it's five, but let's say generously, it's 20. So, you know, 20% kind of full-on revolutionaries. And then you've got, let's call it 20% on the other side that are like, no, I'm not on board with this. This is, this is crazy. I'm not, I'm not signing up for this. But, you know, you know, they, their view of themselves is they're in a small minority. And in fact, they start out in a small minority, because what happens is the 60% go with the first 20%, not the second 20%. So, you've got this large middle of people. And it's not that there's anything like, it's not that people in the middle are not smart or anything like that. It's that they just have like normal lives. And they're just trying to get by. And they're just trying to go to work each day and do a good job

• 1:04:49Marc Andreessen?

  and be a good person and raise their kids and, you know, have a little bit of time to watch the game. And they're just not engaged in the cut and thrust of, you know, political activism or any of this stuff. It's just not their thing. But then, but that's where the over-socialization comes in. It's just like, okay, by default, the 60% will go along with the 20% of the radical revolutionaries, at least for a while. And then the counter-elite is in this other 20%. And over time, they build up a theory and network and ability to resist, and a new set of representatives and a new set of ideas. And then, at some point, there's a contest. And then, and then, and then, and then, right? And then the question is, what happens in the middle? What happens in the 60%? And it, and it's kind of my point. It's not even really, does the 60% change their beliefs?

• 1:05:32Marc Andreessen?

  As much as it's like, okay, what, what is the thing that that 60% now decides to basically fall into step with? And I think that 60%, in the valley, that 60% for the last decade decided to be woke. And, you know, extremely, I would say. On edge on a lot of things and I you know that 60% is pivoting in real time. They're just done. They're they're just had it.

• 1:05:55Lex Fridman?

  And I would love to see where that pivot goes because there's internal battles happening right now. Right?

• 1:06:00Marc Andreessen?

  So this is the other thing. Okay, so there's two, two forms of internal. There's two forms of things that and Timmer Karan is Timmer has actually talked about this. Professor Karan has talked about this. So so one is he said that he said this is the kind of unwind where what you're going to have is you're now going to have people in the other direction. You're going to have people who claim that they supported Trump all along, who actually didn't.

• 1:06:16Marc Andreessen?

  Right?

• 1:06:17Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:06:17Marc Andreessen?

  So it's going to swing the other way. And by the way, Trump's not the only part of this. But you know, he's just a convenient shorthand for, you know, for a lot of this. But you know, whatever it is, you'll you'll have people who will say, well, I never supported the EI. Right. Or I never supported ESG, or I never thought we should have canceled that person. Right. Where of course they were full on a part of the mob like, you know, kind of at that moment. And so anyway, so you'll have preference falsification happening in the other direction. And in his prediction, I think basically is you'll end up with the same quote problem on the on the other side. Now, will that happen here? I don't know. You know, how far is American society willing to go in any of these things? I don't know. But like, there is some some question there. And then and then the other part of it is, okay, now you have this, you know, elite that is used to being in power for the last decade. And by the way, many of those people are still in power and they're in very, you know,

• 1:07:00Marc Andreessen?

  important positions and the New York Times is still the New York Times and Harvard is still Harvard. And like those people haven't changed like at all. Right? And they still, you know, they've been bureaucrats in the government and, you know, senior democratic, you know, politicians and so forth. And they're sitting there, you know, right now, feeling like reality has just smacked them hard in the face because they lost the election so badly. But they're now going into a and specifically the Democratic Party is going into a civil war. Right. And and and that form of the civil war is completely predictable. And that's exactly what's happening, which is half of them are saying, we need to go back to the center. We need to de-radicalize because we've lost the people. We've lost that the people in the middle. And so we need to go back to the middle in order to be able to get 50% plus one in an election. Right. And then the other half of them are saying, no, we weren't true to our principles. We were too weak. We were too soft. You know, we must become more revolutionary.

• 1:07:45Marc Andreessen?

  We must double down and we must, you know, celebrate, you know, murders in the street of health insurance executives. And that's and that that right now is like a real fight.

• 1:07:52Lex Fridman?

  If I could tell you a little personal story that breaks my heart a little bit. There's a there's a professor historian, I won't say who, who I admire deeply, love his work. He's a kind of a heretical thinker. And we were talking about having a podcast or doing a podcast. And he eventually said that, you know what, at this time, given your guest list.

• 1:08:16Lex Fridman?

  I just don't want the headache of being in the faculty meetings in my particular institution. And I ask, who are the particular figures in this guest list? He said, Trump. And the second one, he said that you announced your interest to talk to Vladimir Putin. So I just don't want the headache. Now, I fully believe he, uh, it would surprise a lot of people if I said who it is. But, you know, this is a person who's not bothered by the, uh, the guest list. And I should also say that 80 plus percent of the guest list is left wing. Okay. Nevertheless, he just doesn't want the headache.

• 1:08:59Lex Fridman?

  And that speaks to the, the thing that you've kind of mentioned, that you just don't, don't want the headache. You just want to just have a pleasant morning with some coffee and talk to your fellow professors. And I think a lot of people are feeling that in universities and in other contexts and tech companies. And I wonder if that shifts, how quickly that shifts. And there, the percentages you mentioned, 2060, 20 matters. And the, and the, the contents of the private groups matters and the dynamics of how that shifts matters. Cause it's very possible, nothing really changes in universities and in major tech companies. Or just, there's a kind of, um, excitement right now for potential

• 1:09:41Lex Fridman?

  revolution and these new ideas, this new vibes to reverberate through these companies and universities. But it's possible the, the, the wall will hold.

• 1:09:51Marc Andreessen?

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

• 1:10:00Lex Fridman?

  Yes. He should use it.

• 1:10:04Marc Andreessen?

  So this is the thing, right? But this is the ultimate indictment of the corruption and the rot at the heart of our education system, at the heart of these universities. And it's, by the way, it's like across the board. It's like all the, all the top universities. It's like, because the, the siren song for, right? What it's been for 70 years, whatever, the tenure system, peer review system, tenure system. Which is like, yeah, you work your butt off as an academic to get a professorship and then to get tenure. Because then you can say what you actually think. Right, then you can do your work and your research and your speaking and your teaching without fear of being fired, right? Without fear of being canceled. Like academic freedom, I mean, think of the term academic freedom and then think of what these people have done to it.

• 1:10:49Marc Andreessen?

  Like it's gone. Like that entire thing was fake and is completely rotten. And these people are completely, completely giving up the entire moral foundation of the system that's been built for them, which by the way, is paid for virtually 100% by taxpayer money.

• 1:11:10Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:11:20Marc Andreessen?

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

• 1:11:25Lex Fridman?

  It's okay, it's desperation.

• 1:11:27Marc Andreessen?

  No, no, no, no, no. Think about what happens next. Okay, so let's go, let's go through it. So the universities, the universities are funded by four primary sources of federal funding. The big one is the federal student loan program, which is, you know, in the many trillions of dollars at this point and then only spiraling, you know, way faster than inflation. That's number one. Number two is federal research funding, which is also very large. And you probably know that when a scientist at the university gets a research grant, the university rakes as much as 70% of the money for central uses.

• 1:11:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Marc Andreessen?

  Number three is tax exemption at the operating level, which is based on the idea that these are nonprofit institutions as opposed to, let's say, political institutions. And then number four is tax exemptions at the endowment level, you know, which is the financial buffer that these places have. Anybody who's been close to university budget will basically see that what would happen if you withdrew those sources of federal taxpayer money? And then for the state schools, the state money, they all instantly go bankrupt. And then you could rebuild.

• 1:12:27Marc Andreessen?

  Then you could rebuild because the problem right now, and you know, like the folks at University of Boston are like mounting a very valiant effort and I hope that they succeed and I'm sure I'm cheering for them. But the problem is you're now inserting, suppose you and I want to start a new university and we want to hire all the free thinking professors and we want to have the place that fixes all this. Practically speaking, we can't do it because we can't get access to that money. Either the most direct reason we can't get access to that money, we can't get access to federal student funding. Do you know how universities are accredited for the purpose of getting access to federal student funding, federal student loans? They're accredited by the government, but not directly, indirectly. They're not accredited by the Department of Education. Instead, what happens is the Department of Education accredits accreditation bureaus that are nonprofits that do the accreditation.

• 1:13:09Marc Andreessen?

  Guess what the composition of the accreditation bureaus is? The existing universities. They are in complete control. The incumbents are in complete control as to who gets access to federal student loan money. Guess how enthusiastic they are about accrediting a new university?

• 1:13:26Marc Andreessen?

  Right. And so we have a government funded and supported cartel that has gone, I mean, it's just obvious now, it's just gone like sideways and basically any possible way it could go sideways, including, I mean, literally, as you know, students getting beaten up on campus for being, you know, the wrong religion. They're just wrong in every possible way at this point. And it's all in the federal taxpayer back. And there is no way, I mean, my opinion, there is no way to fix these things without replacing them. And there's no way to replace them without letting them fail. And by the way, it's like everything else in life. I mean, in a sense, this is like the most obvious conclusion of all time, which is what happens in the business world, when a company does a bad job is they go bankrupt and another company takes its place, right? And that's how you get progress. And of course, below that is what happens is this is the process of evolution, right? Why

• 1:14:10Marc Andreessen?

  does anything ever get better? It's because things are tested and tried and then you know, the things that are good survive. And so these places have cut themselves off, they've been allowed to cut themselves off from both through evolution at the institutional level and evolution at the individual level, as shown by the just widespread abuse of tenure. And so we've just stalled out. We built an ossified system, an ossified centralized corrupt system. We're surprised by the results.

• 1:14:36Marc Andreessen?

  They are not fixable in their current form.

• 1:14:38Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:14:48Marc Andreessen?

  Oh, but that logic doesn't follow at all. That's underpants gnome logic.

• 1:14:52Lex Fridman?

  Underpants gnome, can you explain what that means?

• 1:14:54Marc Andreessen?

  Underpants knows logic. So I just started watching a key touchstone of American culture with my nine year old, which of course is South Park.

• 1:15:00Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:15:01Marc Andreessen?

  And there is.

• 1:15:01Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 1:15:02Marc Andreessen?

  And there is a, which by the way, is a little aggressive for a nine year old.

• 1:15:04Lex Fridman?

  Very aggressive.

• 1:15:05Marc Andreessen?

  But, but he likes it. So he's learning all kinds of new words.

• 1:15:09Lex Fridman?

  And all kinds of new ideas, but yeah.

• 1:15:11Marc Andreessen?

  I told, I told him, I said, you're going to hear words on here that you are not allowed to use.

• 1:15:14Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:15:15Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 1:15:15Lex Fridman?

  Education.

• 1:15:16Marc Andreessen?

  And I said, you know how we have an agreement that we never lie to mommy?

• 1:15:22Marc Andreessen?

  I said, not using a word that you learn in here does not count as lying.

• 1:15:27Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 1:15:28Marc Andreessen?

  And keep, and keep that in mind.

• 1:15:29Lex Fridman?

  Orwellian redefinition of lying, but yes.

• 1:15:31Marc Andreessen?

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

• 1:15:38Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:15:39Marc Andreessen?

  Daddy, what's a dildo?

• 1:15:40Lex Fridman?

  Um. Yep.

• 1:15:44Marc Andreessen?

  You know, I'm sorry, sorry, son. I don't know.

• 1:15:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:46Marc Andreessen?

  Um, so, um, uh, the underpants, so a famous episode of South Park, the underpants gnomes. And so the, the underpants, so there's, there's, there's this, all the kids basically realize that their underpants are quite missing from their dresser drawers. Somebody's stealing the underpants. And it's just like, well, who on earth would steal the underpants, the underpants? And it turns out it's the underpants gnomes. And it turns out the underpants gnomes have come to town and they've got this little underground warrant of tunnels and storage places for all the underpants. And so they go out at night, they steal the underpants and the kids discover that, you know, the underpants gnomes and they're, you know, what, what are you doing? Like what's, what's the point of this? And so the underpants gnomes present their, their master plan, which is a three-part plan, which is step one, uh, collect underpants. Step three, profit.

• 1:16:25Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:16:26Marc Andreessen?

  Step two, question mark.

• 1:16:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:30Marc Andreessen?

  So you just you just proposed the underpass gnome.

• 1:16:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:32Marc Andreessen?

  Which is very common in politics. So the form of this in politics is we must do something.

• 1:16:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:37Marc Andreessen?

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

• 1:16:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:47Marc Andreessen?

  But it's the same thing. But this is what I hear all the time. And I'm I'll I will let you talk as the host of the show in a moment, but.

• 1:16:55Marc Andreessen?

  But the but I hear this all the time. I hear this. I have friends who are on these boards, right? Very involved with these places. And I hear this all the time, which is like, oh, these are very important. We must fix them. And so therefore, they are fixable.

• 1:17:07Marc Andreessen?

  There's no logic chain there at all.

• 1:17:09Lex Fridman?

  If there's that pressure that you described in terms of cutting funding, then you have the leverage to fire a lot of the administration and have new leadership that steps up that that aligns with this vision that things really need to change at the heads of the universities. And they put students and faculty primary, fire a lot of the administration and realign and reinvigorate this idea of freedom of thought and intellectual freedom. I mean, I don't because there is already a framework of great institutions that's there. And the way they talk about what it means to be a great institution is aligned with this very idea that you're talking about.

• 1:17:51Lex Fridman?

  It's this meaning like intellectual freedom, the idea of tenure, right? On the surface, it's aligned. Underneath, it's become corrupted.

• 1:18:00Marc Andreessen?

  If we say free speech and academic freedom often enough, sooner or later, these tender professors will get brave.

• 1:18:04Lex Fridman?

  Wait, do you think the universities are fundamentally broken? OK, so how do you fix it? How do you have institutions for educating 20 year olds? And institutions that hosts

• 1:18:18Lex Fridman?

  researchers that have the freedom to do epic shit, like research type shit that's outside the scopes of R and D departments and inside companies? So how do you create an institution like that?

• 1:18:28Marc Andreessen?

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

• 1:18:32Lex Fridman?

  Right. You invent something new?

• 1:18:34Marc Andreessen?

  You open a new restaurant.

• 1:18:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:37Marc Andreessen?

  Like, how often in your life have you experienced a restaurant that's just absolutely horrible? And it's poisoning all of its customers and the food tastes terrible. And then three years later, you go back and it's fantastic. Charlie Munger actually had the great, the best comment on this great investor Charlie Munger. The great comment he was once asked, he's like, you know, he's, you know, General Electric was going through all these challenges. And he was asked at a Q and A, he said, how would you fix the culture at General Electric? And he said, fix the culture at General Electric? He said, I couldn't even fix the culture at a restaurant.

• 1:19:02Marc Andreessen?

  Like, it's insane. Like, obviously, you can't do it. I mean, nobody in business thinks you can do that. Like, it's impossible. Like, it's not, it's, now, now, look, having said all that, I should also express this because I have a lot of friends to work at these places and, and are involved in various attempts to fix these. I hope that I'm wrong. I would love to be wrong. I would love for the, I would love for the underpants gnome step two to be something clear and straightforward that they can figure out how to do. I would love to, love to fix it. I'd love to see them come back to their spoken principles. I think that'd be great. I'd love to see the professors with tenure get bravery. I would love to see, I mean, it'd be fantastic. You know, my partner and I have done like a lot of public speaking on this topic. It's, it's been intended to not just be harsh, but also be like, okay, like these, these challenges have to be confronted directly.

• 1:19:44Marc Andreessen?

  By the way, let me also say something positive, you know, especially post October 7th. There are a bunch of very smart people who are major donors and board members of these institutions like Mark Rowan, you know, who are really coming in trying to, you know, I think legitimately trying, trying to fix these places. I have a friend on the executive committee at one of the top technical universities. He's working overtime to try to do this. Man, I hope they can figure it out. But, but the counter question would just be like, do you see it actually happening at a single one of these places?

• 1:20:11Lex Fridman?

  I'm a person that believes in leadership. If you have the right leadership, the whole system can be changed.

• 1:20:18Marc Andreessen?

  So here's a question for your friend who have tenure at one of these places, which is who runs his university?

• 1:20:23Lex Fridman?

  I think, you know, you know how I think runs it? Whoever the fuck says they run it. That's what great leadership is. Like, a president has that power. The president of a university has the leverage because they can mouth off like Elon can.

• 1:20:35Marc Andreessen?

  Can they fire the professors?

• 1:20:36Lex Fridman?

  They can fire them through being vocal publicly, yes.

• 1:20:39Marc Andreessen?

  Fire the professors?

• 1:20:41Lex Fridman?

  What are you talking about legally? No, they cannot fire the professors.

• 1:20:44Marc Andreessen?

  Then we know who runs the university.

• 1:20:45Lex Fridman?

  The professors?

• 1:20:46Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, professors. The professors and the students, the professors and the feral students. And they're, of course, in a radicalization feedback cycle driving each other crazy. The feral students, yeah, the feral students. What happens when you're put in charge of your bureaucracy where the, where the thing that the bureaucracy knows is that they can outlast you? The thing that the tenure professors at all these places know is it doesn't matter who the president is because they can outlast them, because they cannot get fired. By the way, it's the same thing that bureaucrats in the government know. It's the same thing that bureaucrats in the Department of Education know. They know the exact same thing. They can outlast you. It's, I mean, it's the whole thing that it's the resistance. Like, they can be the resistance. They can just sit there and resist, which is what they do. They're not fireable.

• 1:21:24Lex Fridman?

  That's definitely a crisis that needs to be solved. That's a huge problem. And I also don't like that I'm defending academia here. I agree with you. The situation is dire. And, uh, but I just think that institutions are important. And I should also add context, since you've been grilling me a little bit. You were using restaurants as an analogy. And earlier offline in this conversation, you said that Dairy Queen is a great restaurant. So let's, let the listener take-

• 1:21:50Marc Andreessen?

  I said Dairy Queen is the best restaurant.

• 1:21:52Lex Fridman?

  The best restaurant. There you go. So everything Mark Adris is saying today-

• 1:21:56Marc Andreessen?

  I don't want to- You should go order a Blizzard. Just one, one day you should walk down there and order a Blizzard.

• 1:22:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:01Marc Andreessen?

  They can get like 4,000 calories in a cup.

• 1:22:03Lex Fridman?

  They can, and they're delicious.

• 1:22:04Marc Andreessen?

  It's amazing.

• 1:22:05Lex Fridman?

  They are truly delicious.

• 1:22:06Marc Andreessen?

  And they'll put, they'll put anything in there you want.

• 1:22:08Lex Fridman?

  All right.

• 1:22:09Marc Andreessen?

  Okay, so, but anyway, let me just close by saying, look, I, my friends in the university system, I would just say, look, like, this is the challenge. Like, I would just, I would just pose this as the challenge. Like, to me, like, this is, having had a lot of these conversations, like, this is the bar, in my view. This is the conversation that actually has to happen. This is the bar that actually has to be hit. These problems need to be confronted directly. Because I think there's just, I think there's been way too much. I mean, I'm actually, we're kind of on the other side. There's too much happy talk in these conversations. I think the taxpayers do not understand this level of crisis. And I think if the taxpayers come to understand it, I think the funding evaporates. And so I think that the fuse is going through, you know, no fault of any of ours, but like, the fuse is going, and there's some window of time here to fix this and address it and justify the money. Because it just, normal taxpayers sitting in normal towns in normal jobs are not going

• 1:22:53Marc Andreessen?

  to tolerate this for, for that much longer.

• 1:22:55Lex Fridman?

  You've mentioned censorship a few times. Let us, if we can, go deep into the darkness of the past and how censorship mechanism was used. So you are a good person to speak about the history of this because you were there on the ground floor in 2013-ish, Facebook. I heard that you were there when they invented, or maybe-

• 1:23:20Lex Fridman?

  I developed the term hate speech in the context of censorship of on social media. So take me to through that history, if you can, the use of censorship.

• 1:23:32Marc Andreessen?

  So I was there on the ground floor in 1983.

• 1:23:36Lex Fridman?

  There's multiple floors to this building, apparently.

• 1:23:39Marc Andreessen?

  There are.

• 1:23:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40Marc Andreessen?

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

• 1:23:45Lex Fridman?

  That is fascinating.

• 1:23:46Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah. 19, actually, 1982, uh, I was asked to implement a nudity filter.

• 1:23:51Lex Fridman?

  Did you have the courage to speak up back then?

• 1:23:53Marc Andreessen?

  I didn't have any problem speaking up back then. Um, I was making $6.25 an hour. Um, I did not have a lot to lose. Um, no, I was asked at the time and then, look, I, you know, legitimate, you know, in some sense, a legitimate request, which is working on a, on a research project, actually funded by the federal government. At a public university. So, you know, I don't think my boss was like in any way out of line, but it was like, yeah, like this, this web browser thing is great, but like, could it just make sure to not have any photos of naked people that show up? But if you think about this for a second, as a technologist, I had an issue, which is this was like pre-ImageNet, right? And so I had a brief period where I tried to imagine an algorithm, um, that I referred to as the breast detection algorithm.

• 1:24:30Marc Andreessen?

  That I was going to have to design. And then apparently a variety of other, apparently body parts people are also sensitive about.

• 1:24:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:36Marc Andreessen?

  And, um, and then I politely declined to do this.

• 1:24:38Lex Fridman?

  For, for just the, the technical difficulties of it.

• 1:24:41Marc Andreessen?

  Well, number one, I did, I actually didn't know how to do it. But number two is just like, no, I'm not, I'm not building, I'm just not building a censorship engine. Like I'm a, you know, I'm just not doing it. Um, and, and in those days, it was, you know, in those days, the internet generally was, you know, a free fire zone for everything. It was actually interesting. It's sort of pre 93, the internet was such a specific niche community, like it was like the million kind of highest IQ nerds in the world. Um, and so it actually like, didn't really have a lot of, you know, issues that people were like super interested in talking about like astrophysics and not very interested in. You know, even politics at that, at that time. So there really was not an issue there, but, um, yeah, I didn't, I didn't want to start the process. So I think the way to think about this, so first of all, you know, yeah, so I was involved in this at Facebook every step, by the way, I've been involved with this at Facebook every step of the way. I joined the board there in 2007. So I saw, I've seen everything in

• 1:25:26Marc Andreessen?

  the last, you know, almost 20 years, every step of the way. But also, I've been involved in most of the other companies over time. So I was an angel investor in Twitter, knew them really well. We were the founding investor in Substack, part of the Elon takeover of Twitter with X. I was an angel at LinkedIn. So I've been in these, we were the funder of Pinterest, we were one of the, one of the main investors there, Reddit as well. And I was having these conversations with all these guys all the way through. So as much talk specifically about Facebook, but I can just tell you like the, the general pattern. And for quite a while, it was kind of all the same across these companies. Yeah. So, so basically, the, the way to think about this, the, the true kind of nuanced view of this is that there is practically speaking, no internet service that can have zero censorship. And, and by the way, that also mirrors, there is no country that actually

• 1:26:09Marc Andreessen?

  has unlimited free speech either. The US First Amendment actually has 12 or 13 formal carve-outs from the Supreme Court over time, you know, so incitement to violence and terrorist recruitment and child abuse. And so, you know, child pornography and so forth are like, they're not covered by the First Amendment. And just practically speaking, if you and I are going to start an internet company and have a service, we can't have that stuff either, right? Because it's illegal or it will just clearly, you know, destroy the whole thing. So you, you're always going to have a censorship engine. I mean, hopefully it's not actually in the browser, but like, you're going to have it for sure at the level of an, of an internet service. And, but then what happens is now you have, now you have a machine, right? Now, now you have a system where you can put in rules saying, we allow

• 1:26:49Marc Andreessen?

  this, we don't allow that. You have enforcement, you have consequences, right? And once that system is in place, like it becomes the ring of power, right? Which is like, okay, now anybody in that company or anybody associated with that company or anybody who wants to pressure that company will just start to say, okay, you should use that machine for more than just terrorist recruitment and child pornography, you should use it for XYZ. And basically that transition happened, call it 2012, 2013 is, is when there was this like very, very kind of rapid pivot. I think the kickoff to it for some reason was this, it was the beginning of the second Obama term. I think it also coincided with the sort of arrival of the first kind of super woke kids into these, into these schools, you

• 1:27:31Marc Andreessen?

  know, that kind of, you know, it's, it's the kids that were in school between like, you know, for the Iraq war and then the global financial crisis. And like, they came out like super radicalized, they came into these companies and they immediately started mounting these social crusades to ban and censor lots of things.

• 1:27:45Marc Andreessen?

  And then, you know, quite frankly, the Democratic Party figured this out. And they figured out that these companies were, you know, very subject to being controlled. And they, and the, you know, the executive teams and boards of directors are almost all Democrats. And, you know, there's tremendous circulation, a lot of Obama people from the first term actually came and worked in these companies and a lot of FBI people and other, you know, law enforcement, intelligence people came in and worked and they're all, you know, they were all Democrats for that set. And so they just, you know, the, the ring of power was lying on the table. It had been built and they, you know, picked it up and put it on and then they just ran. And the original discussions were basically always on two topics. It was hate speech and misinformation. Hate speech was the original one. And the hate speech conversation started exactly like you'd expect, which is we can't have the N word and which the answer is fair enough. Let's not have the N word.

• 1:28:30Marc Andreessen?

  Okay. Now we've set a precedent. Right. And then, but the, and then the, and Jordan Peterson has talked a lot, a lot about this. The definition of hate speech ended up being things that make people uncomfortable. Right? So we can't have things that make, you know, people uncomfortable. I, of course, you know, people like me that are disagreeable raise our hands and say, well, that idea right there makes me uncomfortable. But of course that doesn't count as hate speech. Right? So, you know, the ring of power is on one hand and not, not, not on the other hand. And then basically that began this slide where it ended up being that, you know, completely anodyne, this is a point that Mark has been making recently, like completely anodyne comments that are completely legitimate on television or on the Senate floor. All of a sudden our hate speech can't be said online. So that, you know, the, the ring of power was wielded in grossly irresponsible ways.

• 1:29:14Marc Andreessen?

  We can talk about all the stuff that happened there. And then the other one was misinformation and that wasn't as, there was a little bit of that early on, but of course that really kicked in with, with Trump. So, so the hate speech stopped, the hate speech stopped predated Trump by like three or four years. The misinformation stuff was basically, uh, it was a little bit later and it was a consequence of the Russiagate hoax. And then that was, you know, a ring of power that was even more powerful. Right? Because, you know, hate speech is like, okay, at some point, if some, if something offensive or not, like at least you can have a question as to whether that's the case. But the problem with misinformation is like, is it the truth or not? You know? You know, what do we know for 800 years or whatever Western civilization? It's that, you know, there's only a few entities that can determine the truth on every topic. You know, there's God, you know, there's the king.

• 1:29:58Marc Andreessen?

  We don't have those anymore and the rest of us are all imperfect and flawed. And so the idea that any group of experts is going to sit around the table and decide on the truth is, you know, deeply anti-Western and deeply authoritarian. And somehow the misinformation kind of crusade went from the Russiagate hoax into just full blown, we're going to use that weapon for whatever we want. Up and then, and then of course, then then the culminating moment on that, that really was the straw that broke the camel's back was, um, we're going to censor all theories that the COVID virus might have been manufactured in a lab as misinformation. And, and, and inside these companies, like that was the point where people, for the first time, this is like, what, three years ago, if for the first time they were like, that was when it sunk in where it's just like, okay, this has been completely out of control. But anyways, that, that, that's how we got to where we are.

• 1:30:41Marc Andreessen?

  And then basically that spell lasted, that, that, that complex existed and got expanded basically from call it 2013 to 2023. I think basically two things broke it. Um, one is Substack and so, and I'm super proud of those guys because they started from scratch and declared right up front that they were going to be a, a free speech platform. Um, and they came under intense pressure, um, including from the press, um, and, you know, they tried to just beat them to the ground and kill them. An intense pressure, by the way, from, you know, let's say certain of the platform companies, um, you know, basically threatening them. Um, and they stood up to it and, you know, sitting here today, they have the widest spectrum of, of speech and, and, and conversation, you know, anywhere on planet earth. And they've done a great job and it's worked, by the way, it's great.

• 1:31:25Marc Andreessen?

  Uh, and then obviously Elon, uh, you know, with X was the, the, you know, the hammer blow. And then I, the third one now was what Mark is doing at Facebook.

• 1:31:34Lex Fridman?

  And there's also like singular moments, I think you've spoken about this, which, uh, like Jon Stewart going on Stephen Colbert and talking about the lab leak theory.

• 1:31:45Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 1:31:46Lex Fridman?

  I just, there's certain moments, they just kind of shake everybody up. The right person, the right time, just it's a wake up call.

• 1:31:54Marc Andreessen?

  So that there, and I will tell you like, and I should say Jon Stewart attacked me recently, so I'm not that thrilled about him, but I would say I was a long run fan of Jon Stewart. I watched probably every episode of The Daily Show when he was on it. Um, for probably 20 years, but.

• 1:32:09Marc Andreessen?

  He did a very important public service and it was that appearance on the Colbert Show. And I don't know how broadly this is, you know, at the time it was in the news briefly, but I don't know how, if people remember this, but I will tell you, in, in the rooms where people discuss what is misinformation and these policies, that was a very big moment. That was probably actually the key catalyzing moment. And I think he exhibited, I would say conspicuous bravery and had a big impact with that. And, and yeah, what, what, for people who don't recall what he did, what, and this was in the full blown, like you absolutely, you know, you absolutely must lock down for two years. You absolutely must keep all the schools closed. You absolutely must have everybody work from home. You absolutely must wear a mask, like the whole thing. And then one of those was you absolutely must believe that COVID was completely natural. You must believe that. And not believing that means you're a fascist Nazi Trump supporter, mega evil QAnon person, right? And that was

• 1:32:53Marc Andreessen?

  like uniform. And that was enforced by the social media companies. And, and, and like I said, that, that was the peak. And, and John Stewart went on the Colbert Show and I don't know if they planned it or not, because Colbert looked shocked. I don't know how much it was a bit, but he went on there and he, he just had one of these, like, the emperor's wearing no clothes things where he said, it's just not plausible that you had the COVID super virus appear 300 yards down the street from the Wuhan Institute of lethal coronaviruses. Like, it's just not plausible that that, that certainly that you could just rule that out. And then there was another key moment, actually, the more serious version was, I think the author Nicholson Baker wrote a big piece for New York Magazine. And Nicholson Baker is like one of our great novelist writers of our time. And he wrote the piece and he did the complete undressing of it. And that was the first, I think that was

• 1:33:37Marc Andreessen?

  the first legit, there had been like alt, you know, renegade, there had been, you know, people running around saying this, but getting censored all over the place. That was the first one that was like in the mainstream press where he, and he talked to all the heretics and he just like laid the whole thing out. And, and that was a moment. And I remember, let's say, a board meeting at one of these companies after that, where basically, you know, everybody looked around the table and it was like, all right, like, I guess we're not, we don't need to censor that anymore. And, you know, and then of course, what immediately follows from that is, well, wait a minute, why were we censoring that in the first place? And okay, like, and then, you know, the downstream, not that day, but the downstream conversations were like, okay, if, if, if we made such a giant, in retrospect, if we all made such a giant collective mistake censoring that, then what does that say about the rest of our regime? And I think that was the thread in the sweater that started unraveling.

• 1:34:21Lex Fridman?

  I should say it again. I do think that the Jon Stewart appearance and the statement he made was a courageous act.

• 1:34:26Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:34:27Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:34:49Marc Andreessen?

  He has become, I think, an outstanding communicator, right? And he's, you know, somebody who came in for a lot of criticism earlier in his career on that front. And I think he's, you know, he's one of these guys who can sit down and talk for three hours and, and make complete sense. And, and, you know, as, as you do with, with all of, all of your episodes, like when somebody sits and talks for three hours, like you really get a sense of somebody because it's, it's really hard to be artificial for that long. And, you know, he's, he's not done that repeatedly. He's really good at it. And then, look, I, again, I would maybe put him in the third category now with, certainly after that appearance, I would say, I would put him up there now with, you know, kind of Elon and Trump in the sense of the public, the public and the private are now synchronized. I guess I'd say that. Like he, he, he said on that show what he really believes. He said all the same things that he says in private. Like, I don't think there's really any, any discrepancy

• 1:35:30Marc Andreessen?

  anymore. I would say he has always taken upon himself a level of obligation, responsibility to running a company the size of Meta and to running services that are that large. And I think, you know, his conception of what he's doing, which I think is correct, is he's running services that are bigger than any country, right? He's running, you know, over 3 billion people use those services. And so, and then, you know, the company has, you know, many tens of thousands of employees and many investors, and it's a public company, and he thinks very deeply and seriously about his responsibilities. And so, you know, he has not felt like he has had, let's just say, the complete flexibility that Elon has had. And, you know, people could argue that one way or the other, but, you know, he's, he's, you know, yeah, he's, he's, you know, he talked about it a lot.

• 1:36:12Marc Andreessen?

  He's evolved a lot. A lot of it was, he learned a lot. And by the way, I'm going to put myself right back up there. Like, I'm not claiming any huge foresight or heroism on any of this. Like, I've also learned a lot. Like, like, I, my views on things are very different than they were 10 years ago, on lots of topics. And so, you know, I've been on a learning journey. He's been on a learning journey. He is a really, really good learner. He assimilates information, you know, as good as or better than anybody else I know. The other thing, I guess I would just say is, he talked on that show about something very important, which is, when you're in a role where you're running a company like that, there are a set of decisions that you get to make, and you deserve to be criticized for those decisions and so forth, and it's valid. But you are under tremendous external pressure as well.

• 1:36:56Marc Andreessen?

  And by the way, you're under tremendous internal pressure. You've got your employees coming at you. You've got your executives, in some cases, coming at you. You've got your board, in some cases, coming at you. You've got your shareholders coming at you. So you've got your internal pressures, but you also have the press coming at you. You've got academia coming at you. You've got the entire nonprofit complex coming, activist complex coming at you. And then, really critically, you know, he talked about it on Rogan, and these companies all went through this. In this last, especially, five years, you had the government coming at you. And, you know, that's the really, you know, stinky end of the pool, where, you know, the government was, in my view, you know, illegally exerting, you know, just in flagrant violation of the First Amendment and federal laws on speech

• 1:37:37Marc Andreessen?

  and coercion and conspiracy, forcing these companies to engage in activities. You know, then, again, in some cases, they may have wanted to do, but in other cases, they clearly didn't want to do and felt like they had to do. And the level of pressure, like I say, like, I've known every CEO at Twitter. They've all had the exact same experience, which, when they were in the job, it was just daily beatings. Like it's just getting punched in the face every single day constantly. And, you know, Mark is very good at getting physically punched in the face.

• 1:38:06Lex Fridman?

  Getting better and better. Yeah.

• 1:38:07Marc Andreessen?

  And he is and he, you know, and he's very good at, you know, taking a punch and he has taken many, many punches. So I would encourage people to have a level of sympathy for, these are not kings. These, these are people who operate with like, I would say extraordinary levels of external pressure. I think if I had been in his job for the last decade, I would be a little puddle on the floor.

• 1:38:26Marc Andreessen?

  And so it, it says, I think a lot about him that he has risen to this occasion, the way that he has. And by the way, I should also say, you know, the cynicism of course is immediately out and you know, it's a legitimate thing for people to say, but you know, it's like, oh, you're only doing this because of Trump or, you know, whatever. And it's just like, no, like he has been thinking about and working on these things and trying to figure them out for a very long time. And so I think what you saw are legitimate, deeply held beliefs, not some, you know, you know, sort of just in the moment thing that could change at any time.

• 1:38:52Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:39:04Marc Andreessen?

  That's a great question. So leaders are lonely to start with, and this is one of those things where almost nobody has sympathy. Right? Nobody feels sorry for a CEO, right? Like it's not a thing, right? And, and you know, and again, legitimately so, like CEOs get paid a lot, like the whole thing. There's a lot of great things about it. So it's not like they should be out there asking for a lot of sympathy, but it is the case that they are human beings. And it is the case that it is a lonely job. And the reason it's a lonely job is because your words carry tremendous weight.

• 1:39:30Marc Andreessen?

  And you are dealing with extremely complicated issues and you're under a tremendous amount of emotional, you know, personal emotional stress. And, you know, you often end up not being able to sleep well and you end up not being able to like, keep up an exercise routine and all those things. And, you know, you come under family stress because you're working all the time. Or my partner, Ben, you know, was he was CEO of our last company before we started the venture firm. He, he said, you know, the problem he had like with, with his family life was he would, even when he was home at night, he wasn't home. Because he was in his head trying to solve all the business problems. And so he was like supposed to be able to have a dinner with his kids and he was physically there, but he wasn't mentally there. So, you know, you kind of get, you get that a lot. But the key thing is like, you can't talk to people, right? So you can't, I mean, you can talk to your spouse and your kids, but like, they don't understand that they're not working in your company. They don't understand, have the

• 1:40:11Marc Andreessen?

  context to really help you. You, if you talk to your executives, they all have agendas, right? And so they're all, they're all, and they can't resist. Like, it's just human nature. And, and, and so you, you can't necessarily rely on what they say. It's very hard in most companies to talk to your board because they can fire you. Right? Now, now Mark has the situation because he has control. It actually turns out he can talk to his board and Mark talks to us about many things that he does, that most CEOs won't talk to the boards about because we, literally because we can't fire him. But the general, a general, including all the CEOs of Twitter, that none of them had control. And so they could all get fired. So you can't talk to the board members, they're going to fire you. You can't talk to shareholders because they'll just like dump your stock. Right? Like, okay, so who's the, so, so, so every once in a while, what you find is

• 1:40:54Marc Andreessen?

  basically the best case scenario they have is they can talk to other CEOs. And there's these little organizations where they kind of pair up and do that. And so they maybe get a little bit out of that. But, but even that's fraught with peril because can you really talk about confidential information with another CEO insider trading risk? And so it's just a very, it's just a very lonely and isolating thing to start with. And then you, and then on top of that, you apply pressure. Right? And that's where it gets painful. And then maybe I'll just spend a moment on this internal, external pressure thing. My general experience with companies is that they can withstand most forms of external pressure as long as they retain internal coherence. Right? So as long as the internal team is really bonded together and

• 1:41:36Marc Andreessen?

  supporting each other, most forms of external pressure you can withstand. And by that, I mean, investors dump your stock, you lose your biggest customers, you know, whatever negative article, you know, negative headline, you know, you can, you can withstand all that. And basically, in fact, many of those forms of pressure can be bonding experiences for the team where they, where they, where they come out stronger. What you 100% cannot withstand is the internal crack. And what I always look for in high pressure corporate situations now is the moment when the internal team cracks, because I know the minute that happens, We're in a different regime. Like, it's like the, you know, the solid has turned into liquid. Like, we're in a different regime and like the whole thing can unravel in the next week. Because then people turn it. I mean, this, I guess, this is what's happening in Los Angeles right now.

• 1:42:21Marc Andreessen?

  The, the, the, the mayor and the, and the fire chief turned on each other. And that's it. That government is dysfunctional. It is never going to get put back together again. It is over. It is not going to work ever again. And that's what happens inside companies. And so, so, so somebody like Mark is under like profound internal pressure and external pressure at the same time. Now, he's been very good at maintaining the coherence of his executive team, but he has had over the years, a lot of activist employees. As a lot of these companies have had. And so that's been continuous pressure. And then the final thing I'd say, as I said, that companies can withstand most forms of external pressure, but not all. And the special, although not all, one is government pressure. Is it when your government comes for you? Like, yeah.

• 1:43:04Marc Andreessen?

  Any CEO who thinks that they're bigger than their government has that notion beaten out of them in short order.

• 1:43:09Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:43:27Marc Andreessen?

  Flagrant criminality. Felonies, like obvious felonies. And I can, I can actually cite the laws. But yes, absolute criminality.

• 1:43:36Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain how those possible to happen? And maybe on a hopeful note, how we can avoid that happening again?

• 1:43:44Marc Andreessen?

  So just to start with, is a lot of this now is in the public record, which is good because it needs to be in the public record. And so there's, there's three forms of things that are in the public record that people can look at. So one is the Twitter files, right? Which Elon put out with the set of journalists when he took over. And I will just tell you, the Twitter files are 100% representative of what I've seen at every other one of these companies. And so you can just see what happened in Twitter and you can just assume that that happened in these other companies. You know, for the most part, certainly in terms of the kind of pressure that they got. So that's, that's number one. That stuff, you can just read it and you should, if you haven't. The second is, Mark referenced this in the Rogan podcast, there's a Congressman Jim Jordan, who has a committee, congressional committee called the Weaponization Committee. And they, in the last, you know, whatever, three years have done a full-scale investigation of this.

• 1:44:27Marc Andreessen?

  And Facebook produced a lot of documents into that investigation. And those have, many of those have now been made public and you can download those reports. And there's like, I'd like 2,000 pages worth of material on that. And that's essentially the Facebook version of the Twitter files just arrived at with a different mechanism. And then third is Mark himself talking about this on Rogan. So I'll you know, just defer to his comments there. But yeah, basically, what those three forms of information show you is basically the government, you know, over time, and then culminating in 2020, 2021, you know, in the last four years, just decided that the First Amendment didn't apply to them. And they just decided that federal laws around free speech and around conspiracies to take away the rights of citizens just don't apply.

• 1:45:10Marc Andreessen?

  And they just decided that they can just arbitrarily pressure, just like literally arbitrarily call out companies and threaten and bully and yell and scream and, you know, threaten repercussions and force people to force them to censor. And, you know, there's this whole thing of like, well, the First Amendment only applies to, you know, the government, it doesn't apply to companies. It's like, well, there's actually a little bit of nuance to that. First of all, it definitely applies to the government. Like 100%, the First Amendment applies to the government. By the way, so does the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, including the right to due process, also applies to the government. There was no due process at all to any of the censorship regime that was put in place. There was no due process put in place, by the way, for de-banking either. Those are just as serious violations as the as the free speech violations. And so this is just like flagrant, flagrant unconstitutional

• 1:45:54Marc Andreessen?

  behavior. And then there are specific federal statutes. There's it's 18241 and 18242. And one of them applies to federal employees, government employees, and the other one applies to private actors around what's called deprivation of rights and conspiracy to deprive rights. And it is not legal, according to the United States Criminal Code, for government employees or in a conspiracy, private entities to take away constitutional rights. And interestingly, some of those constitutional rights are enumerated, for example, in the First Amendment, freedom of speech. And then some of those rights actually do not need to be enumerated. It is, if the government takes away rights that you have, they don't need to be specifically enumerated rights in the Constitution in order to still be a felony.

• 1:46:35Marc Andreessen?

  The Constitution does not, very specifically, does not say you only have the rights that it gives you. It says you have all the rights that have not been previously defined as being taken away from you. Right? And so de-banking qualifies as a right, you know, right to access to the financial system is every bit, something that's subject to these laws as free speech. And so, yeah, this has happened. And then I'll just add one final thing, which is we've talked about two parties so far. Talk about the government employees, and then we've talked about the companies. The government employees, for sure, have misbehaved. The companies, there's a very interesting question there as to whether they are victims or perpetrators, or both. You know, they will defend, and they will argue, and I believe they have a good case that they are victims, not perpetrators. Right? They are the downstream subjects of pressure, not the cause, you know, not the cause of pressure.

• 1:47:19Marc Andreessen?

  But there's a big swath of people who are in the middle, and specifically the ones that are funded by the government, that I think are in possibly pretty big trouble. And that's all of these third-party censorship bureaus. I mean, the one that is sort of, is most obvious is the so-called Stanford Internet Observatory. That got booted up there over the last several years, and they basically were funded by the federal government to be third-party censorship operations. And they're private sector actors, but acting with federal funding. And so it puts them in this very interesting spot where there could be a very obvious theory under which they're basically acting as agents of the government. And so I think they're also very exposed on this and have behaved in just flagrantly illegal ways.

• 1:47:59Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:48:07Marc Andreessen?

  Can't. Not allowed.

• 1:48:09Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:48:31Marc Andreessen?

  There are so many ways that they can get you, like, there are so many ways they can come at you and get you. And, you know, the thing here to think about is, a lot of times when people think about government action, they think about legislation, right? Because you, so. When I was a kid, we got trained, how does government work? There was this famous animated short thing we got shown. It was just a cartoon of how a bill becomes a law. And it's like this, you know, fancy little bill snuck along and goes this.

• 1:48:52Lex Fridman?

  I'm just a bill.

• 1:48:53Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. Like, it's like, all right, number one, that's not how it works at all. Like, that doesn't actually happen. We could talk about that. But even beyond that, mostly what we're dealing with is not legislation. When we talk about government power these days, mostly it's not legislation. Mostly, it's either regulation, which is basically the equivalent of legislation, but having not gone through the legislative process, which is a very big, open legal issue and one of the things that the Doja is very focused on. Most government rules are not legislated, they're regulated. And there's tons and tons of regulations that these companies are subject to. This is another cliche you'll hear a lot, which is, oh, private companies can do whatever they want. And it's like, oh, no, they can't. They're subject to tens of thousands of regulations that they have to comply with. And the hammer that comes down when you don't comply with regulations is profound. Like, they can completely wreck your company with no ability for you to do anything about it.

• 1:49:38Marc Andreessen?

  So, so, so, regulation is a big part of the way the power gets exercised. And then there's what's called just flat-out administrative power, is the term that you'll hear. And administrative power is just literally the government telling you, calling you and telling you what to do. Here's an example of how this works. So, Facebook had this whole program a few years back to do a global cryptocurrency for payments called Libra. And they built the entire system and it was this high-scale, you know, sort of new cryptocurrency. And they were going to build in every product and there were going to be 3 billion people who could transact with Libra. And they went to the government and they went to the, all these different, tried to figure out how to make it so it's like fully compliant with anti-money laundering and all these, you know, controls and everything. And they had the whole thing ready to go. Two senators wrote letters to the big banks saying, "We're not telling you that you can't work with Facebook on this, but if you do, you should know that every aspect of your business

• 1:50:21Marc Andreessen?

  is going to come under greatly increased level of regulatory scrutiny", which is, of course, the exact equivalent of, "It sure is a nice corner restaurant you have here. It would be a shame if, you know, somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail through the window and burned it down tonight", right? And so, that letter, like, what is that letter? Like, it's not a law. It's not even a regulation. It's just like straight, direct state power. And then, and then it culminates in literally calls from the White House, where they're just like flat-out telling you what to do, which is, of course, what a king gets to do, but not what a president gets to do. And so, anyway, so this, so, so what these companies experienced was, they experienced the full panoply of this, but it was, it was, the level of intensity was in that order. It was actually legislation was the least important part. Regulation was more important. Administrative power was more important.

• 1:51:05Marc Andreessen?

  And then just like flat-out demands and flat-out threats were ultimately the most important. How do you fix it? First of all, like you have to elect people who don't do it. So like, as with all these things, ultimately, the fault lies with the voters.

• 1:51:19Marc Andreessen?

  And so, you know, you have to decide you don't want to live in that regime. I have no idea what part of this recent election mapped to the censorship regime. I do know a lot of people on the right got very angry about the censorship, but you know, I think it probably at least helped with enthusiasm on that side. You know, maybe some people on the left will now not want their, you know, democratic nominees to be so pro censorship. So the voters definitely, you know, get a vote. Number one, number two, I think you need transparency. You need to know what happened. We know some of what happened. Peter Thiel has written in the FT just now saying, we just need like broad, after what we've been through in the last decade, we need to broad based truth and reconciliation. You know, efforts to really get to the root of things. So maybe that's part of it. We need investigations for sure.

• 1:52:01Marc Andreessen?

  Ultimately, we need prosecutions like we need ultimately, we need people to go to jail. Cause we need to set object lessons that say that you don't get to do this. And on those last two, I would say that that those are both up to the new administration and I don't want to speak for them and I don't want to predict what they're going to do, but they have, they for sure have the ability to do both of those things. And, you know, we'll, we'll see where they take it.

• 1:52:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's truly disturbing. I don't think anybody wants this kind of overreach of power for government. Including perhaps people that were participating in it. It's like this dark momentum of power that you just get caught up in it. And that's the reason there's that kind of protection. Nobody wants that.

• 1:52:37Marc Andreessen?

  So I use the metaphor of the ring of power.

• 1:52:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:40Marc Andreessen?

  For people who don't catch the reference as Lord of the Rings. And the thing with the ring of power and Lord of the Rings, it's the ring the Gollum has in the beginning and it turns you invisible. And it turns out it like unlocks all this like fearsome power. It's the most powerful thing in the world. It's the key to everything. And basically the, the moral lesson of Lord of the Rings, which was, you know, written by a guy who thought very deeply about these things is yeah, the ring of power is inherently corrupting. The characters at one point, they're like, Gandalf, just put on the ring and like fix this. Right. And he's like, he'd like, he will not put the ring on even to like end the war. Because he knows that it will corrupt him. And then, you know, the character as it starts, the character of Gollum is the result of, you know, it's like a normal character who ultimately becomes, you know, this incredibly corrupt and deranged version of himself. And so, I mean, I think you, I think you said something actually quite profound

• 1:53:23Marc Andreessen?

  there, which is the ring of power is infinitely tempting. You know, the censorship machine is infinitely tempting. If you, if you have it, like you are going to use it. It's overwhelmingly tempting because it's so powerful and that it will corrupt you. And yeah, I don't know whether any of these people feel any of this today. They should. I don't know if they do. But yeah, you go out five or 10 years later, you know, you would hope that you would realize that your soul has been corroded and you probably started out thinking that you were a patriot and you were trying to defend democracy and you ended up being, you know, extremely authoritarian and anti-democratic and anti-Western.

• 1:53:57Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you a tough question here?

• 1:54:01Lex Fridman?

  Staying on the ring of power. Elon is quickly becoming the most powerful human on earth.

• 1:54:11Marc Andreessen?

  I'm not sure about that.

• 1:54:12Lex Fridman?

  You don't, you don't think he is?

• 1:54:13Marc Andreessen?

  Well, he doesn't have the nukes, so.

• 1:54:16Lex Fridman?

  Nukes.

• 1:54:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's different definitions and perspectives on power, right? How can he and/or Donald Trump? Uh, avoid the corrupting aspects of this power?

• 1:54:30Marc Andreessen?

  I mean, I think the danger is there with power. It's just, it's flat out there. I, I would say with Elon, I mean, we'll, you know, we'll see. I would say with Elon, and I would say, by the way, overwhelmingly, I would say so far, so good. I'm extremely, extremely thrilled by what he's done on almost every front. Um, for like, you know, the last 30 years. But including all this stuff recently, like I think he's, he's been a real hero on a lot of topics where we needed to see heroism. But look, I would say, I guess the sort of case that he has this level of power is it's some combination of the money and the, and the proximity to the president. Um, and obviously both of those are, are instruments of power. The counterargument to that is, I do think a lot of how Elon is causing change in the world right now, I mean, there's the companies he's running directly where I think he's doing very well, and we're investors in multiple of them and doing very well.

• 1:55:13Marc Andreessen?

  But I think like a lot of the stuff that gets people mad at him is like it's the social and political stuff and it's, you know, it's his statements and then it's downstream effects of his statements. So like, for example, it's, you know, for the last couple of weeks, it's been him, you know, kind of weighing in on this rape gang scandal, you know, this rape, organized child rape thing in the UK. And, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's actually, it's a preference cascade. It's one of these things where people knew there was a problem, they weren't willing to talk about it. It kind of got suppressed. And then Elon brought it up and then all of a sudden, there's now in the UK, this like massive explosion of basically open conversation about it for the first time. And, you know, it's like this catalyzing, all of a sudden, everybody's kind of woken up and being like, oh, my God, you know, this is really bad. And then there will be now, you know, I'm pretty sure, pretty, pretty clearly, big changes as a result.

• 1:55:56Marc Andreessen?

  So, and Elon was, you know, he played the role of the boy who said the emperor has no clothes, right? But, but, but here's the thing, here's my point, like, he said it about something that was true, right? And so had he said it about something that was false, you know, he would get no credit for it, he wouldn't deserve any credit for it. But he said something that was true. And by the way, everybody over there instantly, they were like, oh, yeah, he's right. Right, like, nobody, nobody seriously said, they're just arguing the details now. So, so number one, it's like, okay, he says true things. And so it's like, okay, how far, I'll put it this way, like, how worried are we about somebody becoming corrupt by virtue of their power being that they get to speak the truth? And I guess I would say, especially in the last decade of what we've been through, where everybody's been lying all the time about everything, I'd say, I think we should run this experiment as hard as we can to get people to tell the truth.

• 1:56:39Marc Andreessen?

  And so I don't feel that bad about that. And then the money side, you know, this rapidly gets into the money and politics question. And the money and politics question is this very interesting question because it seems like there's a clear cut case that the more money in politics, the worse things are and the more corrupted the system is. That was a very popular topic of public conversation up until 2016, when Hillary outspent Trump three to one and lost. You'll notice that money in politics has almost vanished as a topic in the last eight years. And, and once again, Trump spent far, you know, Kamala raised and spent 1.5 billion on top of what Biden had spent. So they were, they were at, I don't know, something like three, three billion total. And Trump, I think, spent again, like a third or a fourth

• 1:57:20Marc Andreessen?

  of that. And so the money in politics kind of topic has kind of vanished from the popular conversation the last eight years. It has come back a little bit now that Elon is spending.

• 1:57:32Marc Andreessen?

  You know, but, but again, like, it's like, okay, he's spending, but the data would seem to indicate in the last, at least the last eight years, that money doesn't win the political battles. It's actually like the voters actually have a voice and they actually exercise it and they don't just listen to ads. And so again, there, I would say like, yeah, clearly there's some power there, but I don't know if it's, I like, I don't know if it's some like, I don't know if it's some weapon that he can just like turn on and, and use in a definitive way.

• 1:57:54Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:58:12Marc Andreessen?

  Frodo?

• 1:58:13Lex Fridman?

  Frodo, yeah.

• 1:58:14Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe one of the lessons of Lord of the Rings, right, is even, even Frodo would have been, you know, even Frodo would have been corrupted, right? But, you know, nevertheless, you had somebody who could do what it took at the, at the time. The thing that I find just so amazing about the Elon phenomenon and all the critiques is, you know, the one thing that everybody in our societies universally agrees on because of our, it's sort of our, our, our post-Christian egalitarian. So, you know, we live in sort of this post secularized Christian context in the West now. And it's, you know, we, we consider Christianity kind of, you know, backwards, but we still believe essentially all the same things. We just dress them up and, and sort of fake science. So the one thing that we're all told, we're all taught from, from early, is that the best people in the world are the people who care about all of humanity. Right? And we venerate, you know, all of our figures are people who care about all of, you know, Jesus cared about

• 1:58:59Marc Andreessen?

  all of humanity, Gandhi cared about all of humanity, Martin Luther King cared about all of humanity. Like it's this universe, the person who cares the most about everybody. And with Elon, you have a guy who literally like is, he's literally, he talks about this constantly, and he talks about exactly the same in private is literally, he is operating on behalf of all of humanity to try to get us to, you know, he goes through to get us through multi-planetary civilizations so that we can survive a strike on any one planet, so that we can extend the light of human consciousness into the world and, you know, into the universe and have it persist. You know, and the good of the whole thing. And like, literally, the critique is, yeah, we want you to care about all of humanity, but not like that.

• 1:59:33Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:59:39Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I think that's, that's clear.

• 1:59:42Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:59:50Marc Andreessen?

  So this comes from a Italian political philosopher from about 100 years ago named Robert. I'm gonna mangle the, let you pronounce the Italian, Michelle's or Michael's. And then it was, I learned about it through a famous book on, on politics, probably the best book on politics written in the 20th century called The Machiavellians by this guy, James Burnham, who has had a big impact on me. But in The Machiavellians, he resurrects what he calls, is this sort of Italian realist school of, of political philosophy from the, from the 10s and 20s. And these were people, to be clear, this was not like a Mussolini thing. These were people who were trying to understand the actual mechanics of how politics actually works. So to get to the actual sort of mechanical substance of like how the political machine operates. And this guy, Michelle's had this concept he ended

• 2:00:35Marc Andreessen?

  up with called the iron law of oligarchy. And so what the iron law of oligarchy, and I may take a step back to say what he meant by oligarchy, because it has multiple meanings. So basically, in classic political theory, there's basically three forms of government at core. There's democracy, which is rule of the many. There's oligarchy, which is rule of the few. And there's monarchy, which is rule of the one. And you can just use that as a general framework of any government you're gonna be under is gonna be one of those, just a mechanical observation, without even saying which one's good or bad, just a structural observation. And so the question that Michelle's asked was, like, is there such a thing as democracy? Like, is there actually such a thing as democracy? Is there ever actually, like, direct, direct government? And what he did was he mounted this sort of incredible historical exploration of whether democracies had ever existed in the

• 2:01:18Marc Andreessen?

  world. And the answer basically is almost never. And we could talk about that. But the other thing he did was he sought out the most democratic, private organization in the world that he could find at that point, which he concluded was some, basically communist German Auto Workers Union, that was like wholly devoted to the workers of the world uniting, you know, back when that was like the hot thing. And he went in there and he's like, okay, this is the organization out of all organizations on planet Earth that must be operating as a, as a, as a direct democracy. And he went in there and he's like, oh, nope, there's a leadership class. You know, there's like six guys at the top and they control everything. And they lead the rest of the membership along, you know, by the nose, which is, of course, the story of every union. The story of every union is always the story of, you know, there's a Jimmy Hoffa in there, you know, kind of running the thing. You know, we just saw that with the dockworkers

• 2:02:00Marc Andreessen?

  union, right? Like, you know, there's a guy. And he's in charge. And by the way, the number two is his son, right? Like, that's not like, you know, an accident, right? So the iron law of oligarchy basically says democracy is fake. There's always a ruling class. There's always a ruling elite structurally. And he said, the reason for that is because the masses can't organize, right? What's the fundamental problem? Whether the masses, 25,000 people in a union, or 250 million people in a country, the masses can't organize, the majority cannot organize, only a minority can organize. And to be effective in politics, you must organize. And therefore, every political structure in human history has been some form of a small organized elite ruling a large and dispersed majority. Every single one.

• 2:02:44Marc Andreessen?

  The Greeks and the Florentines had brief experiments in direct democracy, and they were total disasters. In Florence, I forget the name of it, it was called like the Workers' Revolt, or something like that. There was like a two-year period where they basically experimented with direct democracy during the Renaissance, and it was a complete disaster. And they never tried it again. In the state of California, we have our own experiment on this, which is the proposition system, which is an overlay on top of the legislature. And, you know, anybody who looks at it for two seconds concludes it's been a complete disaster. It's just a catastrophe. And it's caused enormous damage to the state. And so basically, the presumption that we are in a democracy is just sort of by definition fake. Now, good news for the US. It turns out the founders understood this. And so,

• 2:03:26Marc Andreessen?

  of course, they didn't give us a direct democracy. They gave us a representative democracy, right? And so they built the oligarchy into the system in the form of Congress, and the executive branch, and the judicial branch. But so anyway, so as a consequence, democracy is always and everywhere fake. There is always a ruling elite. And basically, the lesson of the Machiavellians is you can deny that if you want, but you're fooling yourself. The way to actually think about how to make a system work and maintain any sort of shred of freedom is to actually understand that that is actually what's happening.

• 2:03:55Lex Fridman?

  And lucky for us, the founders saw this, and...

• 2:04:00Lex Fridman?

  Figured out a way to, given that there's going to be a ruling elite, how to create a balance of power among that elite.

• 2:04:08Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 2:04:08Lex Fridman?

  So it doesn't get out of hand.

• 2:04:10Marc Andreessen?

  And it was very clever, right? And, you know, some of this was based on earlier experiments. Some of this, by the way, you know, they, these, these were very, very smart people, right? And so they, they knew tremendous amounts of like Greek and Roman history. They knew the Renaissance history, you know, they, the Federalist Papers, they argued this at great length. You can read it all, um, you know, they, they, they ran like a, one of the best seminars in world history, trying to figure this out. Um, and they, they went through all this and yeah. And so they, they thought through it very carefully, but just to give you an example, which continues to be a hot topic. So, you know, one way they did it is through the three branches of government, right? Executive, legislative and judicial, um, sort of balance of powers. But the other way they did it was they sort of echoing what had been done earlier. I think in the UK Parliament, um, uh, they created the two different bodies of the legislature. Right? And so the, you know, the House and the Senate, and as you know, the, the House is apportioned

• 2:04:53Marc Andreessen?

  on the basis of population and the Senate is not, right? Uh, the small states have just as many senators as the big states. Um, and then they made the deliberate decision to have the House get reelected every two years to make it very responsive to the will of the people. And they made the decision to have the Senate get reelected every six years so that it had more buffer from the passions of the moment. But what's interesting is they didn't choose one or the other, right? They did them both. And then to get, to get legislation passed, you have to get through both of them. And so they, they built in like a second layer of checks and balances. And then there's a thousand observations we could make about like how well the system is working today. And like, how much does it live up to the ideal? And how much are we actually complying with the constitution? And there's lots of, you know, there's lots of open questions there, but you know,

• 2:05:35Marc Andreessen?

  this system has survived for coming on 250 years with a country that has been spectacularly successful. But I don't think at least, you know, I don't think any of us would trade this system for any other one. And so it's, yeah, one of the great all time achievements.

• 2:05:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's incredible. And we should say they were all pretty young relative to our current.

• 2:05:51Marc Andreessen?

  They were.

• 2:05:51Lex Fridman?

  Set of leaders.

• 2:05:52Marc Andreessen?

  Many in their twenties at the time and like super geniuses. This is one of those things where it's just like, all right, something happened where there was a group of people where, you know, nobody ever tested their IQs, but like, these are Einsteins of politics. Yeah. An amazing thing, but anyway, it's, I, I just, I go through all that, which is they were very keen students of the actual mechanical practice of democracy, not fixated on what was desirable. They were incredibly focused on what would actually work, which is, you know, I think the, the way to think about these things.

• 2:06:17Lex Fridman?

  There were engineers of sort, not the fuzzy humanities students of.

• 2:06:22Marc Andreessen?

  They were shape rotators, not word cells.

• 2:06:24Lex Fridman?

  I remember that. Wow. That meme came and went. I think you were centered to them. You're centered to a lot of memes.

• 2:06:31Marc Andreessen?

  I was.

• 2:06:32Lex Fridman?

  You're the meme dealer and the meme popularizer.

• 2:06:36Marc Andreessen?

  That meme I get some credit for, and then the current thing is the other one I get some credit for. I don't know that I invented either one, but I popularized them.

• 2:06:42Lex Fridman?

  Take credit and run with it.

• 2:06:46Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:07:11Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so a lot of it, you know, we already talked about this a bit with the universities, which is you can apply a Machiavellian-style lens to the, it's why I posed the question to you that I did, which is, okay, who runs the university? The trustees, the administration, the students or the faculty? And, you know, the answer, the true answer is some combination of the three or of the four, plus the donors. By the way, plus the government, plus the press, et cetera, right? And so there, you know, there's, there's a mechanical interpretation of that. I mean, companies operate under the exact same, you know, set of questions. Who runs a company? You know, the CEO, but like the CEO runs the company basically up to the day that either the shareholders or the management team revolt. If the shareholders revolt, it's very hard for the CEO to stay in the seat. If the management team revolts, it's very hard for the CEO to stay in the seat. By the way, if the employees revolt, it's also hard to stay in the seat.

• 2:07:56Marc Andreessen?

  By the way, if the New York Times comes at you, it's also very hard to stay in the seat. If the Senate comes at you, it's very hard to stay in the seat. So, you know, like a reductionist version of this that is a good shorthand is who can get who fired? You know, so, so who has more power? You know, the newspaper columnist who makes, you know, $200,000 a year, or the CEO who makes, you know, $200 million a year? And it's like, well, I know for sure that the columnist can get the CEO fired. I've seen that happen before. I have yet to see a CEO get a columnist fired.

• 2:08:24Lex Fridman?

  Did anyone ever get fired from the Bill Ackman assault on journalism? So Bill, Bill like really showed the bullshit that happens in journalism.

• 2:08:36Marc Andreessen?

  No, because what happens is they, they, they wear it with the, I mean, they, and I would say to their credit, they wear it as a badge of honor and then to their shame, they wear it as a badge of honor. Right. Which is if, you know, if they're doing the right thing, then they are justifiably priding themselves for standing up under pressure. But it also means that they can't respond to legitimate criticism. And, you know, they're obviously terrible at that now. As I recall, he went straight to the CEO of, I think, Asher Springer that owns Insider. And I, you know, and I happen to know the CEO and I think he's quite a good CEO. But like, I, like, well, there's a good example. It was the CEO of Asher Springer run his own company. Right. Like, well, there's a fascinating, okay, so there's a fascinating thing playing out right now. But not to dwell on these fires. But it's a, you see, the pressure reveals things, right? And so if you've been watching what's happened with the LA Times recently.

• 2:09:21Marc Andreessen?

  So this guy, biotech entrepreneur buys the LA Times, like whatever, eight years ago. It is just like the most radical, social revolutionary thing you can possibly imagine. It endorses every crazy left wing radical you can imagine. It endorses Karen Bass. It endorses Gavin Newsom. It's just like a litany of all the people who are currently burning the city to the ground. It's just like endorsed every single bad person, every step of the way. He's owned it the entire time. You know, he put his foot down right before, for the first time, I think, put his foot down right before the November election and said, we're not, we're, we're getting, he said, we're going to get out of this thing where we just always endorse the Democrat. And we said, we're not endorsing, I think he said, we're not endorsing for the, for the presidency. And like the paper flipped out, right? It's like, our billionaire backer who's, and I don't know what he spends, but like, he must be burning 50 or a hundred million dollars a year out of his pocket to keep this thing running.

• 2:10:05Marc Andreessen?

  He paid 500 million for it, which is amazing. Back when people still thought these things were businesses. And then he's probably burned another 500 million over the last decade, keeping it running. And he burns probably another 50, 100 million a year to do this. And the journalists at the LA Times hate him with the fury of a thousand suns. Like they just like absolutely freaking despise him and they have been like attacking him and you know, the ones that can get jobs elsewhere quit and do it and the rest just stay and say the worst, you know, most horrible things about him and they want to constantly run these stories attacking him. And so he has had this reaction that a lot of people in LA are having right now to this fire into this just like incredibly vivid collapse of leadership and all these people that he had his paper had endorsed are just disasters.

• 2:10:48Marc Andreessen?

  And he he's on this tour, he's basically just, he's decided, he's, he's decided to be the the boy who says the emperor has no clothes, but he's doing it to his own newspaper. Very smart guy, he's on a press tour and he's basically saying, yeah, we, we, yes, we did all that and we endorsed all these people and it was a huge mistake and we're going to completely change. And his paper is, you know, in a complete internal revolt. But I go through it, which is, okay, now we have a very interesting question, which is who runs the LA Times? Because for the last eight years, it hasn't been him. It's been the reporters. Now, for the first time, the owner is showing up saying, oh, no, I'm actually in charge. And the reporters are saying, no, you're not. And like, like it is freaking on. And so again, if the Machiavellian's mindset on this is like, okay, how is power actually exercised here?

• 2:11:33Marc Andreessen?

  Can, can, can a guy who's like even super rich and super powerful, who even owns his own newspaper, can he stand up to a full-scale assault, not only by his own reporters, but by every other journalism outlet who also now thinks he's the Antichrist?

• 2:11:45Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:11:50Marc Andreessen?

  And firing people. And, and you know, he has removed people and he has set new rules. I mean, he is, he is now, I think at long, I think he's saying, he's now at long last actually exercising prerogatives of an owner of a business, which is decide on the policies and staffing of the business. There are certain other owners of these publications that are doing similar things right now. He's the one I don't know, so he's the one I can talk about. But there are others that are going through the same thing right now. And I think it's a really interesting, open question, like, you know, in a fight between the employees and the employer, like, it's not crystal clear that the employer wins that one.

• 2:12:20Lex Fridman?

  And just to stay on journalism for a second, we mentioned Bill Ackman, I just want to say, put him in the category we mentioned before of a really courageous person. I don't think I've ever seen anybody so fearless.

• 2:12:34Lex Fridman?

  In going after, you know, in following what he believes in publicly, that's courage. That, that, that several things he's done publicly has been really inspiring, just being courageous.

• 2:12:47Marc Andreessen?

  What do you think is like the most impressive example?

• 2:12:49Lex Fridman?

  Where he went after journalists whose whole incentive is to like, I mean, it's, uh, it's like sticking your, like kicking the beehive or whatever. You know what's gonna follow. And to do that, I mean, that's why it's difficult to challenge journalistic organizations. Because they're going to, you know, there's just so many mechanisms they use, including like writing articles and get cited by Wikipedia. Then drive the narrative and then they can get you fired, all this kind of stuff. Bill Ackman, like a bad MF'er, just, just tweets these essays and just goes after them. Uh, legally and also in the public eye and just, I don't know.

• 2:13:31Lex Fridman?

  That was truly inspiring. There's not many people like that out, uh, in public. And I, hopefully that inspires not just me, but many others to be like, to be courageous themselves.

• 2:13:42Marc Andreessen?

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

• 2:13:45Lex Fridman?

  I knew of Neri, his, his wife, who's this brilliant researcher and scientist. And so I admire her, look up to her, I think she's amazing.

• 2:13:52Marc Andreessen?

  Well, the reason I ask if you knew about Bill is because a lot of people had not heard of him before, especially like before October 7th and before some of the campaigns he's been running since in public, but, um, and with Harvard and so forth. But, um, he was very well known in the, in the investment world before, before that. So, uh, he was a famous, um, he was a so-called activist investor for, you know, very, very successful and very widely respected for probably 30 years before, before, before now. And, and I bring that up because it, it turns out they weren't for the most part battles that happened in kind of full public view. They weren't national stories, but in the business and investing world, it, the activist investor is a very, it's like in the movie Taken, it's a very specific set of skills.

• 2:14:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:30Marc Andreessen?

  On how to like really take control of situations and how to wreck the people who you're going up against. And, um, just, and there's a lot, there's been controversy over the years on this topic and there's too much detail to go into. But the, the defense of activist investing, which I think is valid is, um, you know, these are the guys who basically go in and take stakes in companies that are being poorly managed or under optimized. And, and, and then generally what that means is, at least the theory is that means the existing management has become entrenched and. Lazy, mediocre, you know, whatever, not responding to the needs of the shareholders, often not responding to the customers. And the activists basically go in with a minority position and then they rally support among other investors who are not activists. And then they basically show up and they force change. But they are the aggressive

• 2:15:15Marc Andreessen?

  version of this. And I've been on the, I've been involved in companies that have been on the receiving end of these, where it is amazing how much somebody like that can exert pressure on situations even when they don't have formal control. So it's another, it would be another chess piece on the mechanical board of kind of how power gets exercised. And basically what happens is the effective analysts, a large amount of the time, they end up taking, they end up taking over control of companies, even though they never own more than like 5% of the stock. And so anyway, so it turns out with Bill's, it's such a fascinating case because he has that like complete skillset.

• 2:15:45Marc Andreessen?

  And he has now decided to bring it to bear in areas that are not just companies. And two interesting things for that. One is, you know, some of these places, you know, and some of these battles are still ongoing. But number one, like a lot of people who run universities or newspapers are not used to being up against somebody like this. And by the way, also now with infinitely deep pockets and lots of experience in courtrooms and all the things that kind of go with that. But the other is through example, he is teaching a lot of the rest of us, the activist playbook, like in real time. And so the Liam Neeson skillset is getting more broadly diffused, just by being able to watch and learn from him. So I think he, I think he's having a, you know, I would put him up there with Elon in terms of somebody who's really affecting how all this is playing out.

• 2:16:25Lex Fridman?

  But even skillset aside, just courage.

• 2:16:27Marc Andreessen?

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

• 2:16:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:31Marc Andreessen?

  Right. You know, because like he hasn't, I'll give you an example, like my, my firm, venture capital firm, we have LPs. There are things that I feel like I can't do or say, because I feel like I would be bringing, you know, I would be bringing embarrassment or other consequences to our LPs. He has investors also where he worries about that. And so his, so a couple of things. One is his willingness to go out a bit and risk his relationship with his own investors. But I will tell you the other thing, which is his investors, I know this for a fact, his investors have been remarkably supportive of him doing that. Because as it turns out, a lot of them actually agree with him. And so he's, it's the same thing he does in his activism campaigns. He is able to be the tip of the spear on something that actually a lot more people agree with.

• 2:17:10Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:17:14Marc Andreessen?

  And just again, you know, how I started is a lot of people are just fed up.

• 2:17:18Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:17:33Marc Andreessen?

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

• 2:17:40Lex Fridman?

  I believe you said unpaid intern.

• 2:17:42Marc Andreessen?

  I'm an unpaid intern. So I'm a volunteer and, you know, when helpful, but I'm not, I'm not making the decisions, nor am I in a position to, you know, speak for the administration. So I don't want to say anything that would cause people to think I'm doing that. This is a very unusual situation, right? Where you had an incumbent president and then you had a four-year gap where he's out of office and then you have him coming back, right? And as you'll recall, there was a fair amount of controversy over the end of the first term.

• 2:18:04Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:18:05Marc Andreessen?

  The fear, the specific concern was, you know, the first Trump administration, you know, they, they will all say this is like, they, they didn't come in with a team, right? So they, you know, they, they didn't come into the team and most of the sort of institutional base of the Republican Party were Bush Republicans and they were, and many of them had become Never Trumpers. And so they had a hard time putting the team together. And then, by the way, they had a hard time getting people confirmed. And so if you talk to the people who were there in the first term, it took them two to three years to kind of even get the government in place. And then they basically only had the government in place for, you know, for basically like 18 months and then COVID hit. You know, and then sort of aftermath and everything and all the, all the drama and headlines and everything. And so the, the concern, you know, including from some very smart people in the last two years has been, boy, if Trump gets a second term, is he going to be able to get a team that is as good as the team he had last time or a team that is actually not as good?

• 2:18:50Marc Andreessen?

  Because maybe people got burned out, maybe they're more cynical now, maybe they're not willing to go through the drama. By the way, a lot of people on, in the first term came under like, you know, with their own withering, legal assaults. And, you know, some of them went to prison and like, you know, a lot, a lot of stuff happened. Lots of investigations, lots of legal fees, lots of bad press, lots of de-banking, by the way. A lot of the officials in the first Trump term got de-banked, including the president's wife and son.

• 2:19:16Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:19:18Marc Andreessen?

  In the wake of the first term, yes, we now take out spouses and children with our ring of power. And so there was like this legitimate question as to like whether, okay, what will the team for the second term look like? And at least what I've seen and what you're seeing this appointment says it looks much, much better. First of all, it just looks better than the first term and not because the people in the first term were not necessarily good, but just you just have this like influx of like incredibly capable people that have shown up that want to be part of this. And you just didn't have that the first time. And so they're just drawing on a much deeper, richer talent pool than they had the first time. And they're drawing on people who know what the game is, like they're drawing on people now who know what is going to happen and they're still willing to do it. And so they're going to get, I think, you know, some of the best people from the first term, but they're bringing in a lot of people who they couldn't get the first time around.

• 2:20:05Marc Andreessen?

  And then second is there's a bunch of people, including people in the first term, where they're just 10 years older. And so they went through the first term and they just learned how everything works. Or they're young people who just had a different point of view and now they're 10 years older and they're ready to go serve in government. And so there's a generational shift happening. And actually, one of the interesting things about the team that's forming up is it's remarkably young. Some of the cabinet members and then many of the second and third level people are like in their 30s and 40s, you know, which is a big change from the gerontocracy that, you know, we've been under for the last 30 years. And so I think the caliber has been outstanding, you know, and we could sit here and list tons and tons of people, but like, you know, the people who are running, it's everything from the people who are running all the different departments at HHS.

• 2:20:45Marc Andreessen?

  It's the people running, you know, the number two at the Pentagon is Steve Feinberg, who's just like an incredible legend of private equity, incredible capable guy. We've got two, actually two of my partners are going in who I both think are amazing. Yeah, like many, many parts of the government, the people are like really impressive.

• 2:21:02Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think one of the concerns is actually that.

• 2:21:07Lex Fridman?

  Given the human being of Donald Trump, that there would be more tendency towards, let's say, favoritism versus meritocracy, that there's kind of circles of sycophancy that form. And if you're be able to be loyal and never oppose and just be basically suck up to the president, that you'll get a position. So that's one of the concerns. And I think you're in a good position to speak to the degree that's happening versus hiring based on merit and just getting great teams.

• 2:21:43Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So, look, I just start by saying any leader at that level, by the way, any CEO, there's always some risk of that, right? So there's always some, you know, it's just, it's like a natural reality warps around, around powerful leaders. And so there's always some risk to that. Of course, the good and powerful leaders are, you know, very aware of that. And Trump, at this point in his life, I think is highly aware of that, at least my interactions with him, like, he definitely seems very aware of that. So, so that's one thing. I would just say that I think the way to look at that, I mean, and look, like I said, I don't want to predict what's going to happen once this whole thing starts unfolding. But I would just say that, again, the caliber, the people who are showing up and getting the jobs, and then the fact that these are some of the most accomplished people in the business world, and in the medical field, I just, you know, Jay Bhattacharya coming in to run NIH, when, so I was actually in the, I was actually, I was part of the interview team for a lot of the HHS folks.

• 2:22:29Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:22:32Marc Andreessen?

  So I literally got, this is a story, I got to the, the transition office for one of the days of the HHS interviews, and I was on one of the interviewing teams, and they gave us, I didn't know who the candidates were, and they gave us the sheet in the beginning, and I go down the sheet, and I saw Jay's name, and I like, I almost physically fell out of my chair.

• 2:22:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:45Marc Andreessen?

  And I was just like, you know, and I have, I happen to know, I have to know Jay, and I like, respect him enormously. And then he proved himself under this, like, talk about a guy who proved himself under extraordinary pressure over the last five years.

• 2:22:57Lex Fridman?

  And then go radical under the pressure. He maintained balance and thoughtfulness and depth. I mean, incredible.

• 2:23:05Marc Andreessen?

  Very serious, very analytical, very applied, and, and, and, and, yes, 100% tested under pressure, came out like, the more people look back at what he said and did, and you know, he's not, you know, none of us are perfect, but like overwhelmingly. Like overwhelmingly insightful throughout that whole period. And, you know, we, you know, we would all be much better off today had he been in charge of the response.

• 2:23:26Marc Andreessen?

  And so just like an incredibly capable guy and, and look, and then he learned from all that, right? He, he learned a lot in the last five years. And so the idea that somebody like that could be head of NIH as compared to the people we've had is just like breathtakingly. It's just a gigantic upgrade, you know? And then Marty Makary coming in to run FDA, exact same thing. The guy coming around to CDC, exact same thing.

• 2:23:47Marc Andreessen?

  I mean, I've been spending time with Dr. Oz. So, um, you know, and I'm not like, again, I'm not like, I'm not on these teams. I'm not in the room, but like, I've been spending enough time trying to help that like his level of insight into, into the healthcare system is like, it's like astounding. And it comes from being a guy who's been like in the middle of the whole thing and been talking to people about this stuff and working on it and serving as a doctor himself and in medical systems for, you know, his entire life. And it's just like, you know, he's like a walking encyclopedia on these things. And so, and, you know, very dynamic, you know, very charismatic, very smart, organized, effective. So, you know, to have somebody like that in there. And so anyway, they're just, I have like 30 of these stories now across all these different, all these different positions. And so I, and then I just, I'd be quite honest, I do the compare and contrast to the last four years. And it's not even, these people are not in the same ballpark.

• 2:24:32Marc Andreessen?

  They're just like wildly better.

• 2:24:36Marc Andreessen?

  And so, you know, the pound for pound is maybe the best team in the White House since, you know, I don't even know. Maybe the nineties, maybe the, maybe the thirties, maybe the fifties, you know, maybe Eisenhower had a team like this or something, but it's, it's, there's a lot of really good people in there now.

• 2:24:53Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:25:12Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So, and I'll start by saying again, I'm not disclaimer, I have to disclaimer, I'm not on Doge. I'm not a member of Doge.

• 2:25:19Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:25:25Marc Andreessen?

  Both the angels and the devils on my shoulder.

• 2:25:27Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 2:25:27Marc Andreessen?

  So, um, yeah, so I'm not speaking for Doge. Um, I'm not in charge of Doge. Those guys are doing it. I'm not doing it, but I am, you know, again, I'm, I'm volunteering to help as much as I can. Um, and I'm a hundred percent supportive.

• 2:25:39Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So, look, I, I, I think the way to think about, I mean, the, the, the basic outlines are in public, right? Which is it's a, it's a time limited, you know, basically commission. It's not a formal government agency. It's a, you know, time limited 18 month. It'll, it'll, in terms of implementation, it will advise the executive branch. Right. And so the, the, the implementation will happen through the, the White House. And the president has total latitude on what he wants to, what he wants to implement. And then basically what I think about it is three sort of kind of streams, you know, kind of target sets. And they're related but different. So money, uh, people and regulations. And so, you know, the headline number, they, you know, put us the $2 trillion number and there's already, you know, disputes over, over that and whatever. And there's all question there, but then there's the people thing.

• 2:26:21Marc Andreessen?

  And the people thing is interesting because you get into these very, um, kind of, um, fascinating questions. And I've been doing this, I, I won't do this for you as a pop quiz, but I do this for people in government as a pop quiz. And I can stump them every time, which is a, how many federal agencies are there? And the answer is somewhere between 450 and 520, and nobody's quite sure. And then the other is how many people work for the federal government? And the answer is, you know, something on the order, I forget, but like 4 million full-time employees and maybe up to 20 million contractors. And nobody is quite sure. And so there's a large people component to this. And then, by the way, there's a related component to that, which is how many of them are actually in the office? And the answer is not many. Most of the federal buildings are still empty.

• 2:27:03Marc Andreessen?

  Right. And so, and then there's questions of like, are people, you know, working from home or are we actually working from home? So there's the people dimension and of course the money and the people are connected. And then there's the third, which is the, the regulation thing, right? And I, I described earlier how basically our system of government is much more now based on regulations than legislation. Right. Most of the rules that we all live under are not from a bill that went through Congress. They're from an agency that created a regulation. That turns out to be very, very important. So one is Elon have already described, we want to do, the Doge wants to do broad-based regulatory relief and Trump has talked about this and basically get the government off of people's backs and liberate the American people to be able to do things again. So that's part of it. But there's also something else that's happened, which is very interesting, which was there were a set of Supreme Court decisions about two years ago that went directly

• 2:27:47Marc Andreessen?

  after the idea that the executive branch can create regulatory agencies and issue regulations and enforce those regulations without corresponding congressional legislation. And most of the federal government that exists today, including most of the departments and most of the rules and most of the money and most of the people, most of it is not enforcing laws. The Congress passed, most of it is regulation. And the Supreme Court basically said, large parts, you know, large to maybe all of that regulation that did not directly result from a bill that went through Congress, the way that the cartoon said that it should, that may not actually be legal. Now, the previous White House, of course, was super in favor of big government. They

• 2:28:30Marc Andreessen?

  had no desire to, they did nothing based on this. They didn't, you know, pull anything back in. But the new regime, if they choose to, could say, look, the thing that we're doing here is not, you know, challenging the laws. We're actually complying with the Supreme Court decision that basically says we have to unwind a lot of this and we have to unwind the regulations, which are no longer legal, constitutional. We have to unwind the span and we have to unwind the people. And so, and that's how you get from, basically you connect the thread from the regulation part, back to the money part, back to the people part. They have work going on all three of these threads. They have, I would say incredibly creative ideas on how to deal with this. I'm, I know lots of former government people who 100% of them are super cynical on this topic and they're like, this is impossible. This could never possibly work. And I'm like, well, I can't tell you what the secret plans are, but like,

• 2:29:16Marc Andreessen?

  Like blow my mind like and all three of those like they had they have ideas that are like really quite amazing as you'd expect from you know from from the people involved and so over the course of the next few months you know that'll start to become visible and then the final thing I would say is this is going to be very different than than attempts like there have been other programs like this in the past the Clinton Gore administration had one and then there were others before that Reagan had one

• 2:29:42Marc Andreessen?

  that the difference is this time their social media

• 2:29:46Marc Andreessen?

  and so there has never been like it's interesting one of the reasons people in Washington are so cynical is because they know all the bullshit like they know all the bad spending and all the bad rules and all the like you know I mean look we're adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days right now and that's compounding and it's now passing the size of the Defense Department budget and it's compounding and it's pretty soon it's going to be adding a trillion dollars every 90 days and then it's gonna be adding a trillion dollars every 80 days and then it's gonna be trillion dollars every 70 days and then if this doesn't get fixed at some point we enter a hyperinflationary spiral and we become Argentina or Brazil and

• 2:30:22Marc Andreessen?

  Kablooey right and so like everybody in DC knows that something has to be done and then everybody in DC knows for a fact that it's impossible to do anything right they know all the problems and they also know the sheer impossibility of fixing it but I think what they're not taking into account that what the critics are not taking into account is these guys can do this in the full light of day and they can do it on social media they can completely bypass the press they can completely bypass the cynicism they can expose any element of you know unconstitutional or you know silly government spending they can run victory laps every single day on what they're doing they can they can bring the people into the process and again if you think about it this goes back to our Machiavellian's structure which is if you think about again you've got democracy oligarchy monarchy rule of the many

• 2:31:05Marc Andreessen?

  rule of the few rule of the one you could think about what's happening here is a little bit of a sandwich right which is you have you have we don't have a monarch but we have a president rule of the one with some power and then we have the people who can't organize but they can be informed and they can be aware and they can express themselves through voting and polling right and so there's a sandwich happening right now is the way to think about it which is you've got basically monarch monarchy if you got rule of one combining with rule of many Right, and the rule of many is that you get to vote, right? The people do get to vote, basically. And then essentially, Congress and this sort of permanent bureaucratic class in Washington has the oligarchy in the middle. And so, the White House plus the people, I think, have the power to do all kinds of things here. And I think that would be the way I would watch it.

• 2:31:48Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:32:08Marc Andreessen?

  These people are spending our money.

• 2:32:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:10Marc Andreessen?

  These people have enormous contempt for the taxpayer. Okay, here's the thing you hear in Washington. Here's one of the things. So the first thing you hear is, this is impossible, they'll be able to do nothing. And then, yeah, I walk them through this, and they're like, they start to get, it starts to dawn on them that this is a new kind of thing. And then they're like, well, it doesn't matter, because all the money is in entitlements and the debt and the military. And so, like, yeah, you've got like this silly fake whatever, you know, NPR funding or whatever, and like, it just is a rounding error and it doesn't matter. And you look it up in the budget and it's like, whatever, $500 million or $5 billion. Or it's the charging stations that don't exist. It's the $40 billion of charging stations and they build eight charging stations. Or it's the broadband internet plan that delivered broadband to nobody, right? And cost you $30 billion. Like, so these boondoggles.

• 2:32:54Marc Andreessen?

  And what everybody in Washington says is, $30 billion is a rounding error on the federal budget, it doesn't matter. Who cares if they make it go away? And of course, any taxpayer is like, what the?

• 2:33:04Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean?

• 2:33:05Marc Andreessen?

  It's $30 billion! Right? And then the experts are like, and the press is in on this too, then the experts are like, well, it doesn't matter, because it's a rounding error. No, it's $30 billion. And if you're this cavalier about $30 billion, imagine how cavalier you are about the 3 trillion.

• 2:33:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:20Marc Andreessen?

  Okay. Then there's the, okay, $30 billion, is $30 billion a lot of the federal budget in percentage? No, it's not. But $30 billion divided by, do the math, $30 billion divided by, let's say, 300 million taxpayers, right? Like, what's that? Math expert?

• 2:33:34Lex Fridman?

  $100?

• 2:33:34Marc Andreessen?

  $100 per taxpayer per year. Okay. So, $100 to an ordinary person, working hard every day to make money and provide for their kids, $100 is a meal out. It's a trip to the amusement park. It's the ability to, you know, buy additional educational materials. It's the ability to have a babysitter, to be able to have a romantic relationship with your wife. It's, there's like a hundred things that that person can do with a hundred dollars. That they're not doing because it's going to some bullshit program that is being, basically where the money's being looted. Out in the form of just like ridiculous, ridiculousness and graft. And so the idea that that thirty billion dollar program is not something that is like a very important thing to go after is just like the level of contempt for the taxpayer. It's just off the charts. And then that's just one of those programs.

• 2:34:18Marc Andreessen?

  There's like a hundred of those programs. And they're all just like that. Like, it's not like any of this stuff is running well. Like, the one thing we know is that none of this stuff is running well. Like, we know that for sure. Right? And we're like, we know these people aren't showing up to work and like, we know that all this crazy stuff is happening. Right? And like, you know, the, the, do you remember Elon's story of the, um? Do you remember Elon's story of what got the Amish to turn out to vote in Pennsylvania? Okay, so like Pennsylvania, okay, so Pennsylvania is like a wonderful state, great history. It has these cities like Philadelphia that have descended like other cities into just like complete chaos, violent madness and death. Right? And the federal government has just like let it happen. It's incredibly violent places. And so the Biden administration decided that the big pressing law enforcement thing that they needed to do in Pennsylvania was that they needed to start raiding Amish farms to prevent them from selling raw milk.

• 2:35:03Marc Andreessen?

  With armed raids.

• 2:35:05Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:35:05Marc Andreessen?

  And it turns out it really pissed off the Amish. And it turns out they weren't willing to drive to the polling places because they don't have cars. But if you came and got them, they would go and they would vote. And that's one of the reasons why Trump won. Anyway, so like, the law enforcement agencies are off working on like crazy things, like the system's not working. And so you, you add up, pick a hundred thirty billion dollar programs. All right, now you're, okay, math major, a hundred times a hundred.

• 2:35:30Lex Fridman?

  Ten thousand.

• 2:35:30Marc Andreessen?

  Ten thousand dollars, okay, ten thousand dollars per taxpayer per year.

• 2:35:34Lex Fridman?

  And but it's also not just about money. That's really, obviously money is a hugely important thing, but it's the cavalier attitude.

• 2:35:40Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 2:35:40Lex Fridman?

  That then in sort of in the ripple effect of that. It makes it so nobody wants to work in government and be productive. It makes it so the corruption can, it breeds corruption. It breeds laziness. It breeds secrecy because you don't want to be transparent about having done nothing all year. All this kind of stuff. And you don't want to reverse that. So it will be exciting for the future to work in government. Because the amazing thing, if you're to steal man government, is you can do shit at scale. You have money and you can directly impact people's lives in a positive sense at scale. It's super exciting.

• 2:36:22Lex Fridman?

  As long as there's no bureaucracy that slows you down or not huge amounts of bureaucracy that slows you down significantly.

• 2:36:30Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So here's, here's the trick. This blew my mind because I was, you know, you, once you look into it, once you open the hell mouth of looking into the federal budget, you, you learn all kinds of things. So there is a term of art in government called impoundment.

• 2:36:43Lex Fridman?

  Uh huh.

• 2:36:43Marc Andreessen?

  And so you, you, if you're like me, you've learned this the hard way when your car has been impounded. The government meaning of impoundment, the federal budget meaning is a, is a different meaning. Impoundment is as follows. The constitution requires Congress to authorize money to be spent by the executive branch. Right? So the, the executive branch goes to Congress, says, we need money X. Congress does their thing. They come back and they say, you can have money Y. The money is appropriated from Congress. The executive branch spends it on their military or whatever they spend it on or on roads to nowhere, charging stations to nowhere or whatever. The, the, and what's in the constitution is the, the Congress appropriates the money. Over the last 60 years, there has been an additional interpretation of appropriations

• 2:37:23Marc Andreessen?

  applied by the courts and by the system, which is the executive branch not only needs Congress to appropriate X amount of money, the executive branch is not allowed to underspend.

• 2:37:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I'm aware of this. I'm aware of this.

• 2:37:37Marc Andreessen?

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

• 2:37:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:50Marc Andreessen?

  To the tune of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. A president that doesn't want to spend the money can't not spend it.

• 2:37:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:57Marc Andreessen?

  Like, okay, A, that's not what's in the Constitution. And there's actually quite a good Wikipedia page that goes through the great debate on this. It's played out in the legal world over the last 60 years. And like, basically, if you look at this with anything resembling, I think, an open mind, you're like, all right, this is not what the founders meant.

• 2:38:13Marc Andreessen?

  And then number two, again, we go back to this thing of contempt. Like, can you imagine showing up and running the government like that and thinking that you're doing the right thing and not going home at night and thinking that you've sold your soul? Right? Like, it's just like, I actually think you sort of had a really good point, which is it's even unfair to the people who have to execute this.

• 2:38:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:31Marc Andreessen?

  Right? Because it makes them, it makes them bad people. And they didn't, they didn't start out wanting to be bad people. And so there is stuff like this, like.

• 2:38:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, everywhere.

• 2:38:38Marc Andreessen?

  Everywhere. And so we'll see how far these guys get. I'm, I am extremely encouraged what I've, what I've seen so far.

• 2:38:44Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:38:46Marc Andreessen?

  For sure.

• 2:38:47Lex Fridman?

  I hope they get far.

• 2:38:48Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:48Lex Fridman?

  Another difficult topic, immigration. What's your take on the, let's say, heated H1B visa debate that's going on online? And legal immigration in general?

• 2:38:59Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so I should start by saying I am not involved in any aspect of government policy on this. I am not planning to be. This is not an issue that I'm working on or that I'm going to work on. I'm, we're not, this is not part of the agenda of what the firm is doing. So my firm is doing so like, I'm not, I'm not in, I'm not in this, in the new administration of the government. I'm not planning to be. So purely just personal opinion. So I would say, I would describe, say, as a complex or nuanced, hopefully nuanced view on this issue that's maybe a little bit different than what a lot of my peers have. And I think, and I kind of thought about this, you know, I didn't say anything about it all the way through the big kind of debate over Christmas, but I thought about it a lot and read everything. I think what I realized is that I just have a very different perspective on some of these things. And the reason is because of the combination of where I came from and then where I ended up.

• 2:39:44Marc Andreessen?

  And so, um, I'll start with this, where I ended up, Silicon Valley. So, um, and I have made the pro skilled, high skilled immigration argument many, many times, the H1B argument many times. In past lives, I've been in DC many times, arguing with prior administrations about this, always on the side of trying to get more H1Bs and trying to get more high skilled immigration. And, you know, I think that argument is very strong and very solid and very, um, you know, has paid off for the US in some, in many, many ways. And we can go through it, but I think it's the argument everybody already knows, right? It's like the stock. You take any Silicon Valley person, you press the button and they tell you why we need to brain drain the world to get more H1Bs, right? So, everybody kind of gets that argument.

• 2:40:23Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:40:35Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, and then it's not just good for them and it's not just good for Silicon Valley or the tech industry, it's good for the country because they then create new companies and create new technologies and create new industries that then create many more jobs for Americans, native born Americans than would have previously existed. And so, you've got a, it's a positive sum flywheel thing where everybody wins. Like, everybody wins, there are no trade offs, it's all absolutely glorious in all directions. You cannot possibly, there cannot possibly be a moral argument against it under any circumstances. Anybody who argues against it is obviously doing so from a position of racism, is probably a fascist and a Nazi, right? Right? I mean, that's the thing. And like I said, I've made that argument many times, I'm very comfortable with that argument. And then I'd also say, look, I would say, number one, I believe a lot of it, I'll talk about the parts I don't believe, but I believe a lot of it.

• 2:41:20Marc Andreessen?

  And then the other part is, look, I benefit every day. I always describe it as I work in the United Nations, like I, my own firm and our founders and our companies and the industry and my friends, you know, are just this like amazing, you know, panoply cornucopia of people from all over the world. And, you know, I just, I don't know, at this point where people from, it's gotta be, I don't know, 80 countries or something, and hopefully over time it'll be, you know, the rest as well. And, you know, it's just, it's been amazing and they've done many of the most important things in my industry and it's been really remarkable. So, so that's all good. And then, you know, there's just the practical version of the argument, which is, we are the main place, these people get educated anyway, right? The best and the brightest tend to come here to get educated.

• 2:42:03Marc Andreessen?

  And so, you know, this is the old kind of Mitt Romney staple of green card to every, you know, at least, you know, maybe not every university degree, but every technical degree. Maybe the sociologists we could quibble about, but, you know, the roboticists for sure, for sure, for sure, we can all agree that-

• 2:42:17Lex Fridman?

  At least I won you over on something today.

• 2:42:19Marc Andreessen?

  Well, no, I'm exaggerating for effect, so-

• 2:42:21Lex Fridman?

  And I lost you, I had you for a half a second.

• 2:42:24Marc Andreessen?

  I haven't gotten, I haven't gotten to the other side of the argument yet.

• 2:42:26Lex Fridman?

  Okay, thank you.

• 2:42:27Marc Andreessen?

  So, surely, we can all agree. That we need to staple a green card.

• 2:42:31Lex Fridman?

  The roller coaster is going up.

• 2:42:32Marc Andreessen?

  The roller coaster is rationing slowly up. So, um, yeah, so surely we can all agree that the roboticists should all get green cards. And again, like, there's a lot of merit to that. Obviously, like, look, we want the US to be the world leader in robotics. What's step one to being the world leader in robotics is have all the great robotics people, right? Like, you know, very unlike the underpants gnome, it's like a very straightforward formula, right? All right, that's all well and good. All right, but it gets a little bit more complicated. Because there is a kind of argument that's sort of right underneath that, that you also hear from, you know, these same people. And I have made this argument myself many times, which is we need to do this because we don't have enough people in the US who can do it otherwise. Right? We have all these unfilled jobs. We've got all these, you know, all these companies that wouldn't exist. We don't have enough good founders. We don't have enough engineers. We don't have enough scientists.

• 2:43:14Marc Andreessen?

  Or then the next version of the argument below that is our education system is not good enough to generate those people. And which is a weird argument, by the way, because like our education system is good enough for foreigners to be able to come here preferentially. And like a very large number of cases, but somehow not good enough to educate our own native born people. So there's like a weird, these little cracks in the matrix that you can kind of stick your fingernail into and kind of wonder about. Now, we'll come back to that one. But like, at least, yes, our education system has its flaws. And then, and then underneath that is the, is the argument that, you know, Vivek made, um, you know, which is, you know, we have cultural rot in the country. And, you know, native born people in the country aren't, you know, don't work hard enough and spend too much time watching TV and TikTok. And don't spend enough time studying differential, you know, equations. And again, it's like, all right, like, you know, yeah, there's a fair amount to that.

• 2:43:59Marc Andreessen?

  Like, there's a lot of American culture that is, um, you know, there's a lot of frivolity. There's a lot of, you know, look, I mean, we have well documented social issues on many fronts, many things that cut against having a culture of just like straightforward, high achievement and effort and striving. Anyway, like, you know, those are the basic arguments. But then I have this kind of other side of my, you know, kind of personality and thought process, which is, well, I grew up in a small farming town of rural Wisconsin, the rural Midwest. And, you know, it's interesting, there's not a lot of people who make it from rural Wisconsin to, you know, high tech. And so it's like, all right, why is that exactly right? And then I know I'm an aberration. Like I was the only one from anybody I ever knew who ever did this, right? I know what an aberration I am, and I know exactly how that aberration happened.

• 2:44:40Marc Andreessen?

  And it's a very unusual, you know, set of steps, including, you know, many that were just luck. But like it, there is in no sense, a talent flow from rural Wisconsin into high tech, like not at all. There is also like, in no sense, a talent flow from the rest of the Midwest into high tech. There is no talent flow from the South into high tech. There is no flow from the Sun Belt into high tech. There's no flow from, you know, the deep South into high tech. Like just like literally, it's like the blanks, but there's this whole section of the country just where the people just like, for some reason don't end up in tech. Now, that's a little bit strange because these are the people who put a man on the moon. These are the people who built the World War II war machine.

• 2:45:23Marc Andreessen?

  These are the people, at least their ancestors are the people who built the second industrial revolution and built the railroads and built the telephone network, telephone network and built, you know, logistics and transportation in the auto industry. I mean, the auto industry was built in Cleveland and Detroit. And so at least these people's parents and grandparents and great grandparents somehow had the wherewithal to like, build all of this, like amazing things, invent all these things. And then there's many, many, many, many stories in the history of American invention and innovation and capitalism, where you had people who grew up in the middle of nowhere. Philo Farnsworth invented the television and just like, you know, tons and tons of others, endless stories like this. Now you have like a puzzle, right? And the conundrum, which is like, okay, like what is happening on the blank spot of the map? And then of course, you also can't help noticing that the blank spot on the map, the Midwest,

• 2:46:07Marc Andreessen?

  the South, you've also just defined Trump country, the Trump voter base, right? And it's like, oh, well, that's interesting. Like, how, how did that happen? Right? And so either you really, really, really have to believe the very, very strong version of like the Vivek thesis or something where you have to believe that like that basically culture, the whole sort of civilization in the middle of the country and the South of the country is so like deeply flawed, either inherently flawed or culturally flawed such that for whatever reason, they are not able to do the things that their, you know, their parents and grandparents were able to do and that their peers are able to do. Or something else is happening. Would you care to guess on what else is happening?

• 2:46:40Lex Fridman?

  You mean what affirmative action?

• 2:46:42Marc Andreessen?

  Affirmative action.

• 2:46:45Marc Andreessen?

  Okay, this is very, think about this is very entertaining, right? What are the three things that we know about affirmative action? It is absolutely 100% necessary. But however, it cannot explain the success of any one individual.

• 2:46:59Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:46:59Marc Andreessen?

  Nor does it have any victims at all.

• 2:47:02Lex Fridman?

  And that could explain maybe disproportionate, but it surely doesn't explain why you're probably the only person in South Valley from Wisconsin.

• 2:47:11Marc Andreessen?

  What educational institution last 60 years was one of farm boys from Wisconsin?

• 2:47:15Lex Fridman?

  But what institution rejected farm boys from Wisconsin?

• 2:47:18Marc Andreessen?

  All of them.

• 2:47:19Lex Fridman?

  All of them?

• 2:47:19Marc Andreessen?

  Of course. Okay, so we know this. We know this. The reason we know this is because of the Harvard and UNC Supreme Court cases. So this was like three years ago. These were, these were big court cases, you know, because the idea of affirmative action has been litigated for many, many, many years and through many court cases. And the Supreme Court repeatedly in the past had upheld that it was a completely legitimate thing to do. And a lot of these, and there's basically two categories of affirmative action that like really matter. Right? The one is admissions into educational institutions and then the other is jobs, right? Getting hired, like those are the two biggest areas. The education one is like super potent, has been a super potent political issue for a very long time for all, you know, people have written and talked about this for many decades. I don't, I don't need to go through it. There's many arguments for why it's important. There's many arguments as to how it could backfire.

• 2:48:01Marc Andreessen?

  It's been this thing, but the Supreme Court upheld it for a very long time. The most, the most recent ruling, I don't, I'm not a lawyer. I don't have the exact reference in my head, but there was a case in 2003 that said that Senator Day O'Connor famously wrote that, you know, it's, although it had been 30 years of affirmative action and although it was not working remotely as it had, had been intended. She said that, you know, well, basically we need to try it for another 25 years. But she said basically as a message to future Supreme Court justices, if it hasn't resolved basically, basically the issues it's intended to resolve within 25 years, then we should probably call it off. By the way, we're coming up on the 25 years. It's a couple, it's a couple of years away. The Supreme Court just had these cases as a Harvard case and I think a U at University of North Carolina case.

• 2:48:44Marc Andreessen?

  And what's interesting about those cases is the, the lawyers in those cases put a tremendous amount of evidence into the record of how the admissions decisions actually happen at Harvard and happen at UNC. And it is like every bit as cartoonishly garish and racist as you could possibly imagine. Because it's a ring of power. And if you're an admissions officer at a private university or an administrator, you have unlimited power to do what you want and you can justify any of it under any of these rules or systems. And up until these cases, it had been a black box where you didn't have to explain yourself and show your work. And what the Harvard and USC cases did is they basically required showing the work. And so there was like all kinds of like phenomenal detail. I mean, number one is there were text messages in there that will just curl your hair of people,

• 2:49:29Marc Andreessen?

  of students being spoken of and just like crude racial stereotypes that would just make you want to jump out the window. It's horrible stuff, but also there was statistical information. And of course, the big statistical kicker to the whole thing is that at top institutions, it's common for different ethnic groups to have different cutoffs for SAT that are as wide as 400 points. Right, so different groups. So specifically Asians need to perform at 400 SAT points higher than other ethnicities in order to actually get admitted into these. I mean, this is not even about, I mean, white people are a part of this, but like Asians are like a very big part of this. And actually, the Harvard case was actually brought by an activist on behalf of actually the Asian students who were being turned away. And it's basically, I mean, it's the cliche now in the valley and in the medical community,

• 2:50:12Marc Andreessen?

  which is like, if you want a super genius, you hire an Asian from Harvard. Because they are guaranteed to be freaking Einstein. Because if they weren't, they were never getting admitted. Right, almost all the qualified Asians get turned away. So they've been running this, it's a very, very explicit, very, very clear program. This, of course, has been a third rail of things that people are not supposed to discuss or under any circumstances. The thing that has really changed the tenor on this is, I think, two things. Number one, those Supreme Court cases, the Supreme Court ruled that they can no longer do that. I will tell you, I don't believe there's a single education institution in America that is conforming with the Supreme Court ruling. I think they are all flagrantly ignoring it. And we could talk about that.

• 2:50:51Lex Fridman?

  Mostly because of momentum, probably, or what?

• 2:50:53Marc Andreessen?

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

• 2:51:08Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:51:09Marc Andreessen?

  They're trying to have the press write nice things about them. Like it's nearly impossible for them and you know, to be clear, like, nobody has been fired from an admissions office for, you know, 25 years prior, what we now, the Supreme Court now is ruled to be illegality. And so they're all the same people under the exact same pressures. And so like, you know, the numbers are moving a little bit, but like, I don't think, I don't know anybody in the system who thinks that they're complying with the Supreme Court. Like, who's in charge? In the rank ordering of who rules who, the universities rule the Supreme Court way more than the Supreme Court rules the universities. Right? Well, another example of that is I think it's, is that every sitting member of the Supreme Court right now went to either Harvard or Yale. Right? Like, the, the level of incestuousness here is like, anyway,

• 2:51:51Marc Andreessen?

  so, so there's that. And so, so this has been running for a very long time. So one is the Harvard and USC cases kind of gave up the game, number one, or at least showed what the mechanism was. And then number two, the other thing is obviously the aftermath of October 7th, right? And what we discovered was happening with Jewish applicants. And what was happening at all the top institutions for Jewish applicants was they were being managed down, they were being actively managed down as a percentage of the, of the base. And let's see, I have heard reports of like extremely explicit, basically plans to manage, to manage the Jewish admissions down to their representative percentage of the US population, which is 2%. And, and you know, there's a whole backstory here, which is 100 years ago, Jews were not admitted into a lot of these institutions. And then there was a big campaign to get them in. Once they could get in,

• 2:52:34Marc Andreessen?

  they immediately became 30% of these institutions because there's so many smart, talented Jews. So it went from 0% to 30%. And then the most recent generation of leadership has been trying to get it done to 2%. And a lot of Jewish people, at least a lot of Jewish people I know, sort of, they kind of knew this was happening, but they discovered it the hard way after October 7th, right? And so all of a sudden, so basically, the, the Supreme Court case meant that you could address this in terms of the Asian victims. The October 7th meant that you could address it in terms of the Jewish victims. And for sure, both of those groups are being systematically excluded, right? And then, of course, there's the thing that you basically can't talk about, which is all the white people are being excluded. And then it turns out it's also happening to black people.

• 2:53:17Marc Andreessen?

  And this is the thing that like blew my freaking mind when I found out about it. So I just assumed that like this was great news for like American blacks. Because like, you know, obviously if you know whites, Asians and Jews are being excluded, then you know, the whole point of this in the beginning was to get the black population up. And so this must be great for American blacks. So then I discovered this New York Times article from 2004 called Blacks Are Being Admitted Into Tough Schools At Greater Numbers, But Which Ones? Uh oh. And again, and by the way, this is in the New York Times. This is not in like, you know, whatever National Review. This is New York Times, 2004. And the two authorities that were quoted in the story are Henry Louis Gates, who's the dean of the African American Studies, you know, community in the United States. Super brilliant guy.

• 2:54:01Marc Andreessen?

  And then Lani Guinear, who was a, she was a potential Supreme Court appointee under, I think, a close friend of Hillary Clinton. And there was, for a long time, she was on the shortlist for Supreme Court. So one of the top, you know, jurists, lawyers in the country, but both black.

• 2:54:17Marc Andreessen?

  Sort of legendarily successful in their, in their, in the academic and legal worlds and black. And they are quoted as the authorities in this story. And the story that they tell is actually very, it's amazing. And by the way, it's happening today in education institutions and it's happening in companies. And you can see it all over the place and the government. Which is, at least at that time, the number was half of the black admits into a place like Harvard were not American born blacks. They were foreign born blacks. Specifically, northern African, off generally Nigerian or West Indian. Right. And by the way, many Nigerians and northern Africans have come to the US and have been very successful. Nigerian Americans as a group like way outperformed.

• 2:55:02Marc Andreessen?

  They're, you know, this is a super smart cohort of people. And then West Indian blacks in the US are incredibly successful. Most recently, by the way, Kamala Harris, as well as Colin Powell, like just two sort of examples of that. And so basically what Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinear said in the story is Harvard is basically struggling to either, whatever it was, identify, recruit, make successful, whatever it was, American born native blacks. And so therefore they were using high school immigration, high school immigration as an escape hatch to go get blacks from other countries. And then, and then this was 2004, when you could discuss such things. Obviously that is a topic that nobody has discussed since. It has sailed on. All of the DEI programs of the last 20 years have had this exact characteristic.

• 2:55:45Marc Andreessen?

  There's large numbers of black people in America who are fully aware of this and are like, it's obviously not us that are getting these slots. We're obviously, we're literally competing with people who are being imported. And, and you know, if, if you believe in the basis of affirmative action, you are trying to make up for historical injustice of American black slavery. And so the idea that you import somebody from, you know, Nigeria that never experienced that, you know, is like tremendously insulting to, to, to, to black Americans. Anyway, so you can see where I'm heading with this. We have been in a 60 year social engineering, engineering experiment to exclude native born people from the educational slots and jobs that high school immigration has been funneling foreigners into. Right. And so it turns out it's not a victim free thing. There's, there's like 100% there's victims because why? There's only so many, for sure, there's only so many education slots.

• 2:56:29Marc Andreessen?

  And then for sure, there's only so many of these jobs. Right. You know, Google only hires so many, you know, whatever, level seven engineers. Right. And so, so, so, so that's the other side of it. Right. And so you're a farm boy in Wisconsin, right? Or a, you know, black American whose ancestors arrived here, you know, on a slave ship 300 years ago in Louisiana, or a, you know, Cambodian immigrant in, you know, the Bronx. And your kid or a Jewish immigrant, uh, or, you know, or from a very successful Jewish family. Um, and you know, your entire, you know, for three generations, you and your parents and grandparents went to Harvard. And what all of those groups know is the system that has been created is not for them. Right. It's designed specifically to exclude them. And then what happens is all of these tech people show up in public and say, yeah,

• 2:57:14Marc Andreessen?

  let's bring in more foreigners. Right. And so, so anyway, so the, the, the short version of it is you can't anymore. I don't think just have the, the, the, the, the quote, high school immigration conversation for either education or for, um, uh, or for employment without also having the DEI conversation. And then underneath, and then DEI is just another word for affirmative action. So it's the, it's the affirmative action conversation. And you, you need to actually deal with this at substance and to see what's actually happening to people you needed to join these topics. And, and, and I think it is much harder to make the moral claim for high school immigration, given the, the, the extent to which DEI took over both the education hiring, uh, education process and the, and the hiring process.

• 2:57:52Lex Fridman?

  Okay. So first of all, that was brilliantly laid out, the nuance of it. So just to understand, it's not so much a criticism of H1B, high school immigration. It's that there needs to be more people saying, yay, we need more American born hires.

• 2:58:08Marc Andreessen?

  So I spent the entire Christmas holiday reading every message on this and not saying anything. And what I was, which you know me well enough to know that's a serious level of.

• 2:58:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's very zen.

• 2:58:18Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, thank you. No, it wasn't. There was tremendous rage on the other side of it.

• 2:58:22Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 2:58:22Marc Andreessen?

  I suppressed it. So I was waiting for the dog that didn't bark, right? And the dog that didn't bark was, I did not, and you tell me if you saw one, I did not see a single example of somebody pounding the table for more high school immigration, who was also pounding the table to go get more smart kids who are already here into these educational institutions and into these jobs. I didn't see, I didn't see a single one.

• 2:58:44Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:58:49Marc Andreessen?

  But it was like, literally, it was like the proponents of high skilled immigrant. And again, this was me for a very long time. I mean, I kind of took myself by surprise on this because I was on, you know, I, I, I had the much, say, simpler version of this story for a very long. Like I said, I, I've been in Washington many times under past presidents lobbying for this. By the way, never made any progress, which we could talk about, like, it never actually worked. But, um, you know, I, I've been on the other side of this one, but I was literally sitting there being like, all right, which of these like super geniuses, um, who, you know, many of whom, by the way, are very, you know, successful high school immigrants or are children of high school immigrants. You know, which of these super geniuses are gonna like, say, actually, we have this like incredible talent source here in the country, which again, to be clear, I'm not talking about white people. I'm talking about native born Americans, whites, Asians, Jews, blacks, for sure, for sure, for sure, those four groups.

• 2:59:32Lex Fridman?

  But also white people.

• 2:59:34Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And, and also white people.

• 2:59:36Lex Fridman?

  People that are making the case for American born hires are usually not also supporting H1B. This is, it's an extreme divide and those people that are making that case are often not making it in a way that's like. Making it in quite a radical way.

• 2:59:55Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:56Lex Fridman?

  Let's put it this way.

• 2:59:56Marc Andreessen?

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

• 3:00:01Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 3:00:02Marc Andreessen?

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

• 3:00:08Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 3:00:08Marc Andreessen?

  One side has all the certified experts. The other side just has a bunch of people who are like, they know that something is wrong and they don't quite know how to explain it. And what was so unusual about the Harvard UNC cases, by the way, in front of Supreme Court is they actually had sophisticated lawyers for the first time in a long time, actually put all this evidence together and actually put it in the public record. They actually, they actually had experts, which is just, which is just really rare. Generally, what you get is you get, because if you don't have experts, what do you have? You know something is wrong and you have, but you have primarily an emotional response. You feel it. But can you put it, you know, can you put it in the words and tables and charts, you know, that a certified expert can? And no, you can't like, that's not, you know, that's not who you are. That doesn't mean that you're wrong. And it also doesn't mean that you have less of a moral stance. Yeah. And so it's just like, all right.

• 3:00:51Marc Andreessen?

  Now, by the way, look, I think there's, I think there are ways to square the circle. I think there's a way to have our cake and eat it too. Like, I think there'd be many ways to resolve this. I think, again, I think the way to do it is to look at these, these, these issues combined. Look at DEI combined with high school immigration. It so happens the DEI is under much more scrutiny today than it has been for probably 20 years. Affirmative action is. The Supreme Court did just rule that it is not legal for universities to do that. They are still doing it, but they should stop.

• 3:01:23Marc Andreessen?

  And then there are more and more, you've seen more companies now also dishing their DEI programs. In part, that's happening for a bunch of reasons, but it's happening in part because a lot of corporate lawyers will tell you that the Supreme Court rulings in education either already apply to businesses or it just is a clear foreshadowing. The Supreme Court will rule on new cases that will ban it in businesses. And so, so, so there is a moment here to be able to look at this on both sides. Let me add one more nuance to it that makes it even more complicated.

• 3:01:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:55Marc Andreessen?

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

• 3:02:05Lex Fridman?

  In the cliche, that's a super positive thing.

• 3:02:07Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. Okay. So what happens to the rest of the world?

• 3:02:12Lex Fridman?

  They lose?

• 3:02:13Marc Andreessen?

  Well.

• 3:02:15Marc Andreessen?

  How fungible are people?

• 3:02:18Marc Andreessen?

  How many highly ambitious, highly conscientious, highly energetic, high achieving, high IQ super geniuses are there in the world? And if there's a lot, that's great, but if there just aren't that many, and they all come here, and they all aren't where they would be otherwise, what happens to all those other places? So it's almost impossible for us here to have that conversation, in part because we become incredibly uncomfortable as a society, talking about the fact that people aren't just simply all the same. Um, just a whole thing we could talk about, but um, it also, we are purely the beneficent of this effect, right? We are brain draining the world, not the other way around. There's only four, so if you look at the flow of high skilled immigration over time,

• 3:03:00Marc Andreessen?

  there's only four permanent sinks of high skilled immigration, places people go. It's the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. It's the, it's the Ooh, Australia. It's the four, it's four of the five, five eyes. It's the major anglosphere countries. And so for those countries, this, this seems like a no lose proposition. It's all the other countries that basically what we, what we four countries have been doing is draining all those smart people out. It's actually much easier for people in Europe to talk about this, I've discovered, because the eurozone is whatever, you know, 28 countries. And within the eurozone, the high skilled people over time have been migrating to originally the UK, but also specifically, I think it's the Netherlands, Germany and France. But specifically, they've been migrating out of the peripheral eurozone countries. And the, the, the one where this really hit the fan was in Greece, right?

• 3:03:43Marc Andreessen?

  So, you know, Greece falls into chaos, disaster, and then, you know, you're running the government of Greece and you're trying to figure out how to put an economic development plan together. All of your smart young kids have left. Like, what are you gonna do? Right? By the way, this is a potential, I know you care a lot about Ukraine. This is a potential crisis for Ukraine, not because, in part because of this, because we enthusiastically recruit Ukrainians, of course. And so we've been drain, brain draining Ukraine for a long time. But also, of course, you know, war does tend to cause people to migrate out. And so, you know, when it comes time for Ukraine to rebuild as a peaceful country, is it gonna have the talent base even that it had five years ago? It's like a very big and important question. By the way, Russia, like we have brain drained a lot of really smart people out of Russia. A lot of them are here, right? Over the last, you know, 30 years.

• 3:04:28Marc Andreessen?

  And so there's this thing, it's actually really funny if you think about it, like the one thing that we know to be the height of absolute evil that the West ever did was colonization and resource extraction, right? So we know the height of absolute evil was when the Portuguese and the English and, you know, everybody else went and had these colonies and then went in and we, you know, took all the oil and we took all the diamonds or we took all the whatever, lithium or whatever it is, right? Well, for some reason, we realized that that's a deeply evil thing to do when it's a physical resource, when it's a non-conscious physical matter. For some reason, we think it's completely morally acceptable to do it with human capital. In fact, we think it's glorious and beautiful and wonderful and, you know, the great flowering of peace and harmony and moral justice of our time to do it. And we don't think for

• 3:05:11Marc Andreessen?

  one second what we're doing to the countries that we're pulling all these people out of. And I, this is one of these things, like, I don't know, like, maybe we're just gonna live in this delusional state forever and we'll just keep doing it and it'll keep benefiting us and we just won't care what happens. But like, I think there may come, this is one of these, this is like one of these submarines under 10 feet under the waterline, like, I think it's just a matter of time until people suddenly realize, oh my God, what are we doing? Because like, we need the rest of the world to succeed too, right? Like, we need these other countries to like flourish. Like, we don't want to be the only successful country in the middle of just like complete chaos and disaster. And we just extract and we extract and we extract and we don't think twice about it.

• 3:05:48Lex Fridman?

  This is so deeply profound, actually. So what is the cost of winning, quote unquote, if these countries are drained in terms of human capital? On the, on the level of geopolitics, what does that lead to? Even if we talk about wars and conflict and all of this, we actually want them to be strong in the way we understand strong, not just in every way, so that cooperation and competition can build a better world for all of humanity. It's interesting. I've been, this is one of those truths where you just speak and it resonates and I didn't even think about it.

• 3:06:28Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:06:29Lex Fridman?

  So this is, you were sitting during the holiday season, just boiling over. So all that said, there's still to use some good to the H1B?

• 3:06:40Marc Andreessen?

  Okay, so then you get this other, okay, so then there's

• 3:06:42Lex Fridman?

  Come all the way around.

• 3:06:43Marc Andreessen?

  There's another nuance. So there's another nuance. There's another nuance, which is mostly the valley. We don't use H1Bs anymore. Mostly we use L1s. So there's a separate class of visas and the O1 is like this, it turns out the O1 is the super genius visa. So the O1 is basically our founder, like when we have like a, when we have somebody from anywhere in the world and they've like invented a breakthrough in new technology and they want to come to the US to start a company, they come in through an O1 visa. And that actually is like, it's a fairly high bar. It's a high acceptance rate, but it's like a pretty high bar and they do a lot of work and they, there's like a, you have to put real work into it, really, really prove your case. Mostly what's happened with the H1B visa program is that it has gone to basically two categories of employers.

• 3:07:24Marc Andreessen?

  One is the basically a small set of big tech companies that hire in volume, which is exactly the companies that you would think. And then the other is it goes to these, what they call kind of the mills, the consulting mills, right? And so there's these set of companies with names, I don't want to pick on companies, but you know, names like Cognizant that, you know, hire basically have, their business model is primarily Indian, bringing in primarily Indians in large numbers. And, you know, they often have, you know, offices next to company-owned housing and they'll have, you know, organizations that are, you know, they'll have, you know, organizations that are literally thousands of Indians, you know, living and working in the US and they do basically, call it mid-tier like IT consulting. So, you know, these folks, they're making good, good, good wages, but they're making six year, eight year, a hundred thousand dollars a year, not the, you know, 300,000 that you'd make

• 3:08:09Marc Andreessen?

  in the valley. And so like in practice, the startups basically, like little tech, as we call it, or the startup world mainly doesn't use H1Bs at this point and mainly can't because the system is kind of rigged in a way that we really can't. And then, and then, and then again, you get to the sort of underlying morality here, which is it's like, well, you know, Amazon, like Amazon's a, I love Amazon, but like they're a big, powerful company. You know, they've got, you know, more money than God. They've got resources, they've got a long-term planning horizon, they do big, you know, profound things over, you know, decades at a time. You know, they could, you know, or any of these other companies could launch massively effective programs to go recruit the best and brightest. From all throughout the country and you know, you'll notice they don't do that. You know, they bring in, you know, 10,000, 20,000 H1Bs a year.

• 3:08:54Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and so you've got a question there. Um, and then these mills, like there's lots of questions around them and whether they should, you know, whether that's even a ethical way to, you know, I don't want to say they're unethical, but there's questions around like exactly what, what the trade offs are there.

• 3:09:08Marc Andreessen?

  And so, you know, this, this, yeah, and this is like a Pandora's box that really, you know, nobody really wanted to be opened, um, you know, to, to, to play devil's advocate on all this in terms of like national immigration issues, you know, none of this is like a top end issue just because the numbers are small. Right. And so, you know, I don't think, you know, the administration has said like this is not like a priority of theirs for right now. But I guess what I would say is like, there, there is actually a lot of complexity and nuance here.

• 3:09:32Marc Andreessen?

  I have a lot of friends, like I said, I have a lot of friends and colleagues who are, you know, came over on H1Bs or O1s, green cards, many are now citizens and, you know, every single one, one of them was, not every single one, a lot of them were enthusiastic to, you know, defend the honor of immigrants throughout this whole period. And they said to me, it's like, well, Mark, how can we, you know, how can we, how can we more clearly express, you know, the importance of high school immigration to the US? And I was like, um, I think you can do it by advocating for also developing our native born talent. And like, do you want to inflame the issue or do you want to diffuse the issue? Right. And I, I think, I think the answer is to diffuse the issue. Uh, let me give you one more positive scenario, which, and then I'll also beat up on the university some more. Do you, but you know about the National Merit Scholarship System? Have you heard about this? Not really.

• 3:10:17Marc Andreessen?

  So there's a system that was created during the Cold War, um, called the National Merit Scholars. And, um, it is a basically, um, it was created, I forget in the 90s, 50s or 60s when, it was when people in government actually wanted to identify the best and the brightest, as heretical an idea as that sounds today. Um, and so it's basically a national talent search for basically IQ. Um, it, it, its goal is to identify basically the top 0.5% of the IQ, um, uh, in the country. By the way, completely regardless of other characteristics. So there's no race, gender, any other aspect to it. It's just going for straight intelligence. Um, it uses the, first the PSAT, um, which is the preparatory SAT that you take, um, and then the SAT. Uh, so it uses those scores that, that, that is the scoring. It's a straight PSAT SAT scoring system.

• 3:11:02Marc Andreessen?

  So they use the SAT as a proxy for IQ, which it is.

• 3:11:08Marc Andreessen?

  They run this every year. They identify, they, it's like they get down to like 1% of the population of the kids, 18 year olds in a given year who've scored highest on the PSAT, and then they get down to, for the qualified down to the 0.5% that also replicate on the SAT. And then it's like, the scholarship amount is like $2,500, right? So it's like, it was a lot of money 50 years ago, not as much today. But it's a national system being run, literally, to find the best and the brightest. How many of our great and powerful universities use this as a scouting system? Like, our universities all have sports teams. They all have national scouting, they have full-time scouts who go out and they go to every high school and they try to find all the great basketball players and bring them into the NCAA, into all these leagues. How many of our great and powerful and enlightened

• 3:11:51Marc Andreessen?

  universities use the national merit system to go do a talent search for the smartest kids and just bring them in?

• 3:11:58Lex Fridman?

  Let me guess, very few.

• 3:11:59Marc Andreessen?

  Zero.

• 3:12:01Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:12:07Marc Andreessen?

  Go get the smartest ones. Give you one more kicker on this topic, if you're not, if I haven't beaten it to death. You know, the SAT has changed. So the SAT used to be a highly accurate proxy for IQ. That caused a bunch of problems. People really don't like the whole idea of IQ. And so the SAT has been actively managed over the last 50 years by the College Board that runs it, and it has been, essentially like everything else, it's been dumbed down. And so, the, in two ways. Number one, it's been dumbed down where an 800 from 40 years ago does not mean what an 800 means today. And 800, 40 years ago, it was almost impossible to get an 800. Today, there's, today, there's

• 3:12:48Marc Andreessen?

  so many 800s that you could stock the entire Ivy League with 800s, right? And so, so, so, it's been deliberately dumbed down. And then two is, they have, they have tried to pull out a lot of what's called the G-loading. And so, they've, they've tried to detach it from being an IQ proxy, because IQ is such an inflammatory concept. And, and the consequence of that is, and this is sort of perverse, they've made it more coachable.

• 3:13:09Marc Andreessen?

  Right, so the SAT 40 years ago, coaching didn't really work. And more recently, it has really started to work. And one of the things you see is the Asian spike. You see this like giant leap upward in Asian performance over the last decade. And I think, looking at the data, I think a lot of that is because it's more coachable now. And the Asians do the most coaching.

• 3:13:26Marc Andreessen?

  So there's a bunch of issues with this. And so the coaching thing is really difficult because the coaching thing is a subsidy then to the kids whose parents can afford coaching. Right, and I don't know about you, but where I grew up, there was no SAT coaching. So there's like an issue there. I didn't even know what the SAT was until the day I took it, much less that there was coaching, much less that it could work. So, much less we could afford it. So, so number one, there's issues there. But the other issue there is think about what's happened by the dumbing down. 800 no longer captures all the smart. 800 is too crude of a test. It's like the AI benchmarking problem. It's the same problem they have in AI benchmarking right now. 800 is too low of a threshold. There are too many kids scoring 800. Because what you want is you want whatever, if it's going to be 100,000 kids, I don't know what it is, it's going to be 50,000 kids a year scoring 800.

• 3:14:10Marc Andreessen?

  You also then want kids to be able to score 900 and 1,000 and 1,100 and 1,200. And you want to ultimately get to, you know, you'd like to identify, ultimately identify the top 100 kids and make sure that you get them in MIT. And the resolution of the test has been reduced so that it actually is not useful for doing that. And again, as I would say, this is like part of the generalized corruption that's taken place throughout this entire system where we have been heading in the reverse direction from wanting to actually go get the best and brightest and actually put them in the places where they should be. And then just the final comment would be the great thing about standardized testing and the national merit system is it's completely, like I said, it's completely race blind, it's gender blind, it's blind on every other characteristic, it's only done on test scores. You know, and you can make an argument about whether that's good or bad, but it is, you

• 3:14:52Marc Andreessen?

  know, for sure, you know, it's the closest thing that we had to get to merit. It was the thing that they did when they thought they needed merit to win the Cold War. And of course, we could, we could choose to do that anytime we want. And I just say, I find it like incredibly striking and an enormous moral indictment of the current system that there are no universities to do this today. So back to the immigration thing, just real quick, it's like, okay, we aren't even trying to go get the smart kids out of the center and south. And even if they think that they can get into these places, they get turned down. And the same thing for the smart Asians and the same thing for the smart Jews and the same thing for the smart black people. And like, it just like, it's just like, I don't know how, like, I don't know how that's moral. Like, I don't get it at all.

• 3:15:31Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:16:09Marc Andreessen?

  Well, you asked me in the beginning, like what, what would, what's the most optimistic forecast, right? That we could have. And the most optimistic forecast would be, my God, what if we did both?

• 3:16:20Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:16:27Marc Andreessen?

  Well, and it would diffuse, it would diffuse the entire issue.

• 3:16:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:29Marc Andreessen?

  If everybody in the center and the south of the country and every Jewish family, Asian family, black family knew they were getting a fair shake, like it would diffuse the issue. Like, how about diffusing the issue? Like, what a crazy radical. Sorry, I don't mean to really get out of my skis here, but.

• 3:16:43Lex Fridman?

  I think your profile on X states, it's time to build. It feels like 25, 2025 is a good year to build. So I wanted to ask your advice and maybe for advice for anybody who's trying to build, who's trying to build something useful in the world, maybe launch a startup or maybe just launch apps, services, whatever, ship software products. So maybe by way of advice, how do you actually get to shipping?

• 3:17:21Marc Andreessen?

  So, I mean, a big part of the answer, I think, is we're in the middle of a legit revolution. And I know you've been talking about this on your show, but like AI coding. I mean, this is the biggest earthquake to hit software and certainly my life. Maybe since the invention of software. And I'm sure, you know, we're involved in various of these companies, but you know, these, these tools, you know, from a variety of companies are like absolutely revolutionary. And they're getting better at leaps and bounds right every day. And you, you know, all this, but like the thing with coding, like there, there's like open questions of whether AI can get better at like, I don't know, understanding philosophy or whatever, creative writing or whatever, but like for sure, we can make it much better at coding. Right. Because you can validate the results of coding.

• 3:18:01Marc Andreessen?

  And so, you know, there's all these methods of, you know, synthetic data and self-training and reinforcement learning that for sure you can do with, with coding. And so everybody I know who works in the field says AI coding is going to get to be phenomenally good. And it's, it's already great. And you can, I mean, anybody wants to see this, just go on YouTube and look at AI coding demos, you know, little, little kids making apps in 10 minutes, working with an AI coding system. And so I think it's the golden, I mean, I think this is an area where it's clear that the golden age, the toolset is extraordinary. You know, in a day, as a coder, for sure, in a day, you can retrain yourself. You know, start using these things, get a huge boost in productivity as a non-coder, you can learn much more quickly than you could before.

• 3:18:36Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:18:55Marc Andreessen?

  I agree with that up to a point. So the, um, I think for sure, for quite a long time, the people who are good at coding are going to be the best at actually having AIs code things. Cause they're going to understand what, I mean, very basic, they're going to understand what's happening. Right. And they're going to be able to evaluate the work and they're going to be able to, you know, literally like manage AIs better. Like even if they're not literally handwriting the code, they're just going to have a much better sense of what's going on. So I definitely think like a hundred percent, my nine-year-old is like doing all kinds of coding classes and he'll keep doing that for, certainly through 18. We'll see after that. Um, and so like for sure, that's the case. But, but look, having said that, one of the things you can do with an AI is say, teach me how to code.

• 3:19:34Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And so, and you know, there's, there's a whole bunch of, you know, I'll name names, you know, Khan Academy, like there's a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of work that they're doing at Khan Academy for free. And then, you know, we have this company, Replit, which is originally specifically built for kids for coding, that is, has AI built in. That's just absolutely extraordinary now. And then, you know, there's a variety of other, of other systems like this. And yeah, I mean, the AI is going to be able to teach you to code. AI, by the way, is, as you know, spectacularly good at explaining code. Right? And so, you know, the tools have these features now where you can talk to the code base. And so you can like literally like ask the code base questions about itself. And you can also just do the simple format, which is you can copy and paste code into ChatGPT and just ask it to explain it, what's going on, rewrite it, improve it,

• 3:20:19Marc Andreessen?

  make recommendations. And so there's, yeah, there's dozens of ways to, to do this. By the way, you can also, I mean, even more broadly than code, like, okay, you want to make a video game. Okay. Now you can do AI art generation, sound generation, dialogue generation, voice generation, right? And so all of a sudden, like you don't need designers, you know, you don't need, you know, voice actors. You know, so yeah, so there's just like unlimited. And then, you know, a big, you know, a big part of coding is so-called glue, you know, it's, it's interfacing into other systems. So it's interfacing into, you know, Stripe to take payments or something like that. And, you know, AI is fantastic at writing glue code.

• 3:20:54Marc Andreessen?

  So, you know, really, really good at making sure that you can plug everything together, really good at helping you figure out how to deploy. You know, it'll even write a business plan for you.

• 3:21:03Marc Andreessen?

  So it's just this, it's like everything happening with AI right now. It's just, it's like this latent superpower. And there's this incredible spectrum of people who have really figured out massive performance increases, productivity increases with it already. There's other people who aren't even aware it's happening. And there's some gearing to whether you're a coder or not, but I think there are lots of non-coders that are off to the races. And I think there are lots of professional coders who are still like,

• 3:21:27Marc Andreessen?

  you know, the blacksmiths were not necessarily in favor of, you know, car business. So, yeah, there's the old William Gibson quote, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." And this is maybe the most potent version of that that I've ever seen.

• 3:21:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a, you know, the old meme with the, with the bell curve, the, the people on both extremes say AI coding is the future.

• 3:21:52Lex Fridman?

  It's very common to programmers to say, no, if you're any good of a programmer, you're not going to be using it. That's just not true. Now, I consider myself reasonably good programmer and I, my productivity has been just skyrocketed and the joy of programming skyrocketed. Every aspect of programming is more efficient, more productive, more fun, all of that kind of stuff.

• 3:22:15Marc Andreessen?

  I would also say code is, you know, code has, code has of anything in like industrial society, code is, has the highest elasticity, which is to say the easier it is to make it, the more it gets made. Like, I think effectively there's unlimited demand for code. Like, in other words, like, there's always some other idea for a thing that you can do, a feature that you can add or a thing that you can optimize. And so, and so like overwhelmingly, you know, the amount of code that exists in the world is a fraction of even the ideas we have today. And then we come up with new ideas all the time. And so I, I think that like, you know, I was, I was late eighties, early nineties when sort of automated coding systems started to come out. Expert systems, big deal in those days. And there were all these, there was a famous book called The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. You know, that predicted that these new coding systems were going to mean we wouldn't have programmers in the future.

• 3:23:00Marc Andreessen?

  And of course, the number of programming jobs exploded by like a factor of a hundred. Like, my guess will be we'll have more, my guess is we'll have more coding jobs probably by like an order of magnitude 10 years from now.

• 3:23:11Marc Andreessen?

  That will be different, there'll be different jobs, so they'll involve orchestrating AI. But there will be, we will be creating so much more software that the whole industry will just explode in size.

• 3:23:21Lex Fridman?

  Are you seeing the size of companies decrease in terms of startups? What's the landscapes of little tech?

• 3:23:28Marc Andreessen?

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

• 3:23:32Lex Fridman?

  Oh, for the big tech.

• 3:23:33Marc Andreessen?

  People and little tech. Everybody's trying to hire as many engineers as they can to build AI systems. It's just, it's 100%. I mean, there's a handful of company, you know, there's a little bit, there's customer service. You know, there we have some companies and others, I think it's Klarna that's publicizing a lot of this in Europe.

• 3:23:51Marc Andreessen?

  Where, you know, there, you know, there are jobs that can be optimized and jobs that can be automated. But like for engineering jobs, like it's just an explosion of hiring.

• 3:24:02Marc Andreessen?

  At least so far, there's no trace of any sort of diminishing effect. Now, having said that, I am looking forward to the day. I am waiting for the first company to walk in saying, yes, like the more radical form of it. But so basically the companies that we see are basically one of two kinds. We see the companies that are basically.

• 3:24:19Marc Andreessen?

  Sometimes you use weak form, strong form. So the weak form companies, I sometimes use the term is it's the call it the sixth bullet point. AI is the sixth bullet point on whatever they're doing.

• 3:24:28Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 3:24:29Marc Andreessen?

  Right. And it's on the slide, right? So they've got the, you know, whatever, dot, dot, dot, dot. And then AI is the sixth thing. And the reason AI is the sixth thing is because they had already previously written the slide before the AI revolution started. And so they just added the sixth bullet point in the slide, which is how you're getting all these products that have like the AI button up in the corner. Right. The little sparkly button.

• 3:24:44Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 3:24:44Marc Andreessen?

  Right. And all of a sudden Gmail is offering to summarize your email, which I'm like, I don't need that. Like, I need, I need you to answer my email, not summarize it. Like, what the hell? Okay. So we see those and that's fine. That's like, I don't know, putting sugar on the cake or something. But then we see the strong form, which is the companies that are building from scratch for AI. Right. And they're, they're building it. I actually just met with a company that is building literally an AI email system as an example. So just.

• 3:25:08Lex Fridman?

  Oh, nice. I can't wait.

• 3:25:11Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, they're going to completely, right. So the very obvious idea, very smart team, you know, it's going to be great. You know, and then, you know, Notion, just, you know, another, not one of our companies, but just came out with a product. And so, so now companies are going to basically come through, sweep through, and they're going to do basically AI first versions of basically everything. And those are like companies built, you know, AI is the first bullet point. It's the strong form of the argument.

• 3:25:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Cursor is an example that they basically said, okay, we're going to rebuild the thing with AI as the first citizen.

• 3:25:38Marc Andreessen?

  What if we knew from scratch that we could build on this? And, and, and again, this is like, this is part of the full employment act for startups and VCs is it just like, if, if a, if a technology transformation is sufficiently powerful, then you actually need to start the product development process over from scratch because you need to reconceptualize the product. And then usually what that means is you need a new company because most incumbents just, just won't do that. And so, yeah, so that's underway across many categories. What I'm waiting for is the company where it's like, no, our org chart is redesigned as a result of AI. Right. And so I'm looking at, I'm waiting for the company where it's like, no, we're going to have like, you know, and the cliche, here's a thought experiment, right? The cliche would be, we're going to have like the human executive team and then we're going to have the AIs be the workers.

• 3:26:19Marc Andreessen?

  Right. So we'll have a VP of engineering supervising 100 instances of coding, of coding agents. Right. Okay, maybe. Right. By the way, or maybe, maybe the VP of engineering should be the AI. Maybe supervising human coders who are supervising AIs. Right. Because one of the things that AI should be pretty good at is managing. Because it's like not, you know, it's like a process driven. It's the kind of thing that AI is actually pretty good at, right? Performance evaluation coaching. And so should it be an AI executive team? And then, you know, and then of course, the ultimate question, which is AI CEO. Right. And then, you know, and then there's, and then maybe the most futuristic version of it would be an actual AI agent that actually goes fully autonomous. Yeah. What if you really set one of these things loose and let it, let it basically build itself a business?

• 3:27:05Marc Andreessen?

  And so I will say like, we're not yet seeing those. And I think there's a little bit of the systems aren't quite ready for that yet. And then I think it's a little bit of you really do need at that point, like a founder who's really willing to break all the rules. And really willing to take the swing and I, and I, those people exist. And so I'm sure we'll see that.

• 3:27:23Lex Fridman?

  And some of it is, as you know, with all the startups, this is the execution, the idea that you have a AI first email client. This seems like an obvious idea, but actually creating one, executing and then taking on Gmail is really, is really difficult. I mean, Gmail, it's fascinating to see. Google can't do it. Because, because why? Because of momentum? Because it's hard to re-engineer the entirety of the system? It feels like Google's perfectly positioned to. To do it. Same with like your perplexity, uh, which I love. Like Google could technically take on perplexity and do it much better, but they haven't not yet. So it's fascinating why that is for large companies.

• 3:28:06Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that that is an advantage for little tech. They could be agile.

• 3:28:10Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 3:28:11Lex Fridman?

  They can move fast.

• 3:28:11Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. Little companies can break glass in a way big companies can't.

• 3:28:14Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 3:28:14Marc Andreessen?

  Uh, this is sort of the big breakthrough that Clay Christiansen had in the innovator's dilemma, which is sometimes when big companies don't do things, it's because they're screwing up. And that certainly happens. But a lot of times they don't do things because it would break too much glass. It was specifically, it would, uh, it would, it would interfere with their existing customers, um, and their existing businesses, and they just simply won't do that. And by the way, responsibly, they shouldn't do that. Right? Um, and so they just get, but this is Clay Christiansen's big thing is they, they often don't adapt because they are well-run, not because they're poorly run. But they're optimizing machines. They're, they're, they're optimizing against the existing business. And, and, and as, as you kind of just said, this is like a permanent state of affairs for large organizations. Like every once in a while, one breaks the pattern and actually does it. But for the most part, like this is a very predictable form of human behavior.

• 3:28:59Marc Andreessen?

  And this fundamentally is why startups exist.

• 3:29:03Lex Fridman?

  It feels like 2025 is when the race for dominance in AI will see some winners. Like it's, it's a big year. So who do you think wins the race? OpenAI, Meta, Google, XAI? Who do you think wins the AI race?

• 3:29:16Marc Andreessen?

  I would say I'm, I'm not going to predict. I'm going to say there's questions all over the place. Um, and then we have, we have this category of question we call the trillion dollar question, which is like literally depending on how it's answered, people make or lose a trillion dollars. And I think there's like, I don't know, five or six trillion dollar questions right now that are hanging out there, which is an unusually large number.

• 3:29:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:33Marc Andreessen?

  And I just, you know, I'll just hit a few of them and we can talk about them. So one is big models versus small models. Um, another is open models versus closed models. Another is whether you can use synthetic data or not. Another is chain of thought. How far can you push that and reinforcement learning? And then another one is political trillion dollar questions, um, you know, policy questions, which, you know, the US and the EU have both been flunking dramatically. And the US hopefully is about to really succeed at.

• 3:30:00Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And then there's probably another, you know, half dozen big, important questions after that. And so these are all just like, say, this is an industry that's in flux in a way that I, even more dramatic, I think, than the ones I've seen before. And look, the most example, most obvious example, the flux is sitting here three, sitting here in the summer, you know, sitting here less than three years ago, sitting here in December of 22, we would have said that OpenAI is just running away with everything. And sitting here today, it's like, you know, there's at least six, you know, world-class god model companies and teams that are, by the way, generating remarkably similar results. That's actually been one of the most shocking things to me is like, it turns out that once you know that it's possible to build one incredibly smart Turing test passing

• 3:30:40Marc Andreessen?

  large language model, which was a complete shock and surprise to the world. It turns out within, you know, a year, you can have five more. There's also a money component thing to it, which is to get the money to scale one of these things into the billions of dollars. There's basically right now only two sources of money that will do that for you. One is the hyperscalers giving you the money, which you turn around and round trip back to them. Or, you know, foreign sovereigns, you know, other countries sovereign, sovereign wealth funds, which can be, you know, difficult in some cases to, for companies to access.

• 3:31:10Marc Andreessen?

  So there's a, there's another, this may be another trillion dollar question is the financing question. Here's one. So Sam Altman has been public about the fact that he wants to transition OpenAI from being a nonprofit to being a for-profit. The way that that is legally done is that, and there is a way to do it. There is a way in US law to do it. The IRS and other legal entities, government entities scrutinize this very carefully because the US takes foundation nonprofit law very seriously because of the tax exemption. And so the way that historically, the way that you do it is you start a for-profit and then you, you raise money with the for-profit to buy the assets of the nonprofit at fair market value.

• 3:31:46Marc Andreessen?

  And, you know, the last financing round at OpenAI was, you know, 150 some billion dollars. And so logically, the, if, if, if the flip is going to happen, the for-profit has to go raise 150 billion dollars out of the chute to buy the assets. You know, raising 150 billion is a challenge.

• 3:32:04Marc Andreessen?

  So, you know, is that even possible? If that is possible, then OpenAI maybe is off to the races as a for-profit company. If not, you know, you know, I don't know. And then, you know, obviously the Elon lawsuit. So, so just because they're the market leader today, you know, there's big, important questions there. You know, Microsoft has this kind of love hate relationship with them. Where does that go? Apple's, you know, lagging badly behind, but you know, they're very good at catching up. Amazon, you know, is primarily hyperscaler, but they now have their own models.

• 3:32:29Lex Fridman?

  And then there's the other questions like you laid out brilliantly, briefly and brilliantly, open versus closed, big versus little models, synthetic data, that's a huge, huge question. And then test time compute with a chain of thought, the role of that. And this is fascinating, and these are, I think it's fair to say trillion dollar questions.

• 3:32:48Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, these are big, like, look, you know, it's like, here's a trillion dollar question, which is kind of embedded in that, which is just hallucinations, right? Like, so if you are trying to use these tools creatively, you're thrilled because they can draw new images and they can make new music and they can do all this incredible stuff, right? They're creative. The flip side of that is if you need them to be correct, they can't be creative. And that's, you know, the term hallucination. And these things do hallucinate. And, um, you know, there have been, you know, court cases already where lawyers have submitted legal briefs that contain made up court citations, case citations. The judge is like, wait a minute, this doesn't exist. And the very next question is, did you write this yourself? And the lawyer goes, uh.

• 3:33:26Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:33:29Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 3:33:29Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:33:35Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right. And I, my sense, uh, this is a very contentious topic at the industry. My sense is if, to the extent that there is a domain in which there is a definitive and checkable and provable answer, and you might say math satisfies that, coding satisfies that, and maybe some other fields, then you should be able to generate synthetic data. You should be able to do chain of thought reasoning. You should be able to do reinforcement learning and you should be able to ultimately, you know, eliminate hallucinations.

• 3:34:01Marc Andreessen?

  For, but by the way, that's a trillion dollar question right there as to whether that's true. Um, but then, but then there's a question of like, okay, is that going to work in the more general domain? Like, so for example, one possibility is these things are going to get truly superhuman at like math and coding, but at like discussing philosophy, they're gonna just, they're basically as smart as they're ever going to be. Um, and they're going to be kind of, you know, say mid-wit grad student level. Um, and the theory there would just be they're already out of training data. Like they, they, they literally, if you know, you talk to these people, like literally, the big models, the big models are like within a factor of two X of consuming all the human generated training data, to the point that some of these big companies are literally hiring people like doctors and lawyers to sit and write your training data by hand. And so does this mean that like you have to, if you want your model to get better at philosophy, you have to go hire like a thousand philosophers and have them write new content? And is anybody going to do that?

• 3:34:47Marc Andreessen?

  And so, you know, maybe, maybe these things are topping out in certain ways and they're going to leap way ahead in other ways. And so, anyway, so we just don't, you know, I guess this is, I'll tell you, maybe my main, main conclusion is I don't, any of these, anybody telling, you know, anybody telling you these big sweeping conclusions. You know, this whole super, you know, all of these abstract, generalized, superintelligence, AGI stuff like it, you know, maybe it's the engineer in me, but like, no, like that's not, that's not the, that's too abstract, like it's got to actually work. And then, by the way, it has to actually be able to pay for it.

• 3:35:19Marc Andreessen?

  I mean, this is a problem right now with, you know, the big models, the big models that are like really good at coding and math, they're like actually very expensive to run. You know, they're quite slow.

• 3:35:28Marc Andreessen?

  Another trillion dollar question, future of chips, which I know you've talked a lot about. Another trillion dollar question. Yeah, I mean, all the global issue, oh, another trillion dollar question censorship.

• 3:35:40Marc Andreessen?

  Right, like, and, and, and, and, and all the, as they say, all the human feedback, training process. Exactly what are you training these things to do? What are they allowed to talk about? How long do they give you these, how, how often do they give you these incredibly preachy moral lectures? How, here's a, here's a, here's a good, here's a trillion dollar question. How many other countries want their country to run its education system, healthcare system? News system, political system on the basis of an AI that's been trained according to the most extreme left wing California politics?

• 3:36:12Marc Andreessen?

  Right, because that's kind of what they have on offer right now. And I think the answer to that is not very many. So there's like massive open questions there about like, what, you know, and by the way, like what morality are these things going to get trained on as a?

• 3:36:25Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:36:45Marc Andreessen?

  So what, what I experienced, you know, going back to how we started, what I experienced was, all right, social media censorship regime from hell. De-banking, right, at like a large scale, and then the war on the crypto industry, trying to kill it. And then basically declared intent to do the same thing to AI. And to put AI under the same kind of censorship and control regime as, as, as social media and the banks. And I, and I think this election tipped in, in America, I think this election tipped us from a timeline in which things were going to get really bad on that front, to a timeline in which I think things are going to be quite good. But look, those same questions also apply outside the US and you know, the EU is doing their thing. They're being extremely draconian and they're trying to lock in a political censorship regime on AI right now. That's so harsh that even American AI companies are not even willing

• 3:37:29Marc Andreessen?

  to launch new products in the EU right now. Like, that's not gonna last, but like, what happens there, right? And what are the trade offs? You know, what levels of censorship are American companies gonna have to sign up for if they want to operate in the EU? Or is the EU still capable of generating its own AI companies? Or have we brain drained them? So that they can't? So, big questions.

• 3:37:52Lex Fridman?

  Quick questions. So you're very active on X, a very unique character. Flamboyant, exciting, bold. You post a lot. I think there's a meme, I don't remember it exactly, but that Elon posted, something like, inside Elon, there are two wolves. One is, please be kind or more positive. And the other one is, I think, you know, doing the, take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face guy. How many wolves are inside your mind when you're tweeting?

• 3:38:28Marc Andreessen?

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

• 3:38:31Lex Fridman?

  Tropic Thunder, yeah. Legendary movie.

• 3:38:33Marc Andreessen?

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

• 3:38:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's nothing offensive about it.

• 3:38:41Marc Andreessen?

  Nothing offensive about it at all. Tom Cruise's greatest performance.

• 3:38:49Marc Andreessen?

  So, yeah, no, look, just start by saying like, I'm not supposed to be tweeting at all. So, yes, yes, yes. But, you know.

• 3:38:59Lex Fridman?

  So how do you approach that? Like, how do you approach what to tweet?

• 3:39:02Marc Andreessen?

  I mean, I don't. Look, so it's a, it's a, I don't, I don't well enough. It's mostly an exercise in frustration. Look, there's a glory to it and there's, there's, there's an issue with it. And the glory of it is like, you know, instantaneous global communication, you know, and X, X in particular is like the, you know, the town square on all these, you know, social issues, political issues, everything else, current events. But I mean, look, there's no question the format, the format of at least the original tweet is, you know, prone to be inflammatory. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm the guy who at one point, the entire nation of India hated me. Um, so I once tweeted something, it turned out that is still politically sensitive. Um, and the entire continent, um, I stayed up all night that night as, as I became front page headline and leading television news in each time zone in India.

• 3:39:45Marc Andreessen?

  For a single tweet. So like the single tweet out of context is a very dangerous thing. Um, obviously. X now has the, the middle ground where they, you know, they, they now have the longer form essays. Um, and so, um, you know, probably the most productive thing I can do is, is, is longer form. Um, is, is longer form things.

• 3:40:02Lex Fridman?

  You're not gonna do it though, are you?

• 3:40:04Marc Andreessen?

  I do, I do from time to time. I should, I should do more of them. And then, yeah, I mean, look, but, and yeah, obviously X is, X is doing great. And then, uh, like I said, like Substack, you know, has become the center for a lot, you know, a lot of them. I, I think the best kind of, you know, deeply thought through, you know, certainly intellectual content. Um, you know, tons of current events, uh, stuff there as well. Um, and then, um, yeah. So, and then there's a bunch of other, you know, a bunch of new systems that are very exciting. So. I think one of the things we can look forward to in the next four years is number one, just like a massive reinvigoration of social media. As a consequence of the changes that are happening right now, uh, I'm very excited to see the content, to see what's gonna happen with that. And then, um, I mean, it's happened on X, but it's now gonna happen on other platforms. And then, um, the other is, um, crypto is gonna come, you know, crypto is gonna come right back to life.

• 3:40:47Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and actually that's very exciting. Actually, that's worth noting is that's another trillion dollar question on AI, which is, um, um, in a world of pervasive AI, and especially in a world of AI agents, and imagine a world of billions or trillions of AI agents running around, they need an economy. Um, and in crypto, in our view, happens to be the ideal economic system for that, right? Cause it's a programmable money. It's a very easy way to plug in and do that. And there's this transaction processing system that can, that can do that. And so I think the crypto AI intersection, you know, is potentially very, a very, very big deal. Um, and so that was, that was going to be impossible under the prior regime. And I think under the new regime, hopefully it'll be something we can do.

• 3:41:25Lex Fridman?

  Uh, almost for fun, let me ask, uh, a friend of yours, Jan LeCun, what are your top 10 favorite things about Jan LeCun?

• 3:41:33Lex Fridman?

  He's a, I think he's a, he's a brilliant guy. I think he's important to the world. I think you guys disagree on a lot of things. But I personally like vigorous disagreement. I, as a person in the stands, like to watch the gladiators go at it.

• 3:41:48Marc Andreessen?

  And No, he's a super genius. I mean, look, I haven't said we're super close, but you know, casual, casual friends. I worked with him at Meta. You know, he's the chief scientist at Meta for a long time and is still, you know, works with us. And, um, you know, and as obviously is a legendary figure in the field and one of the main people responsible for what's happening. I, it's my serious observation would be that it's, it's, it's the thing I keep, I've talked to him about for a long time and I keep trying to read and follow everything he does is he's probably, he is the, I think, see if you agree with this, he is the smartest and most credible critic of LLMs is the path to AI.

• 3:42:23Marc Andreessen?

  And, um, he's not, you know, there's certain, I would say troll-like characters who are just like crap on everything, but like Ian has like very deeply thought through basically, um, theories as to why LLMs are an evolutionary dead end. And, um, and I actually like, um, I try to do this thing where I try to model, you know, I try to have a mental model of like the two different sides of a serious argument. And so I've, I've tried to like internalize that argument as much as I can. Which is difficult because like we're investing it behind LLMs as aggressively as we can. So if he's right, like, that can be a big problem, but like, we should also know that. Um, and then I sort of use his ideas to challenge all the bullish people, you know, to really kind of test their level of knowledge.

• 3:43:01Marc Andreessen?

  So I like to kind of grill people. Like, I'm not like, I'm not, you know, I'm, I'm, I was not, you know, I was, got my CS degree 35 years ago. So I'm not like deep in the technology, but like if, if to the extent I can understand Yan's points, I can use them to, um, you know, to really surface a lot of the questions for the people who are more bullish. Um, and that's been, I think, very productive. Yeah. So I, yeah, just, it's very striking that you have somebody who is like that central in the space, who is actually like a full-on, a full-on skeptic. And, and you know, and again, this could go different ways. He could end up being very wrong. He can end up being totally right, or it could be that he will provoke the evolution of these systems to be much better than they would have been.

• 3:43:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he could be both right and wrong. I, I, first of all, I do, I do agree with that. He's one of the most legit and rigorous and deep critics of the LLM path to AGI. You know, his basic notion is that there needs, AI needs to have some physical.

• 3:43:56Lex Fridman?

  Understanding of the physical world and that's very difficult to achieve with LLMs. And that that is a really good way to challenge the limitations of LLMs and so on. He's also been a vocal and a huge proponent of open source, which is a whole nother, which you have been as well.

• 3:44:12Marc Andreessen?

  Which is very useful. Yeah.

• 3:44:13Lex Fridman?

  And that's been just fascinating to watch.

• 3:44:15Marc Andreessen?

  And anti Doomer.

• 3:44:17Lex Fridman?

  Anti Doomer.

• 3:44:17Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he's.

• 3:44:19Marc Andreessen?

  He's very anti Doomer.

• 3:44:20Lex Fridman?

  He embodies, he also has many wolves.

• 3:44:23Marc Andreessen?

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

• 3:44:25Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:44:27Marc Andreessen?

  The other two, okay, here's my other wolf coming out.

• 3:44:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:29Marc Andreessen?

  The other two of the three godfathers of AI are like radicals, like, like full on left, you know, far left, you know, like they, I would say like either Marxists or borderline Marxists. And they're like, I think quite extreme in their social and political views. And I think that feeds into their Doomerism. And I think, you know, they, they, they are lobbying for like draconian government. I think what would be ruinously destructive government legislation and regulation. And so it's, it's actually super helpful, super, super helpful to have you on as a counterpoint to those two.

• 3:44:59Lex Fridman?

  Another fun question, our mutual friend Andrew Huberman.

• 3:45:02Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 3:45:03Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:45:11Marc Andreessen?

  Oh, three.

• 3:45:13Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:45:17Lex Fridman?

  That's good.

• 3:45:18Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. Well, so he can, he did, he convinced me to stop drinking alcohol, um, which was a big.

• 3:45:23Lex Fridman?

  Successfully.

• 3:45:24Marc Andreessen?

  Well, it was like my, other than my family, it was my favorite thing in the world.

• 3:45:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:27Marc Andreessen?

  And so it was a major, major reduction, like having like a glass of scotch at night was like a major, like, it was like the thing I would do to relax. And so he has profoundly negatively impacted my emotional health. I, I blame him for making me much less happy as a person, but much, much, much healthier.

• 3:45:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:43Marc Andreessen?

  Physically healthier so that, that I, I credit him with that. I'm glad I did that. But then his sleep stuff, like, yeah, I'm not doing any of that.

• 3:45:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:45:51Marc Andreessen?

  I have no interest in his sleep shit, like, no. This whole light, natural light, no, we're not doing.

• 3:45:57Lex Fridman?

  You're too hardcore for this?

• 3:45:58Marc Andreessen?

  I don't see any, I say, I don't see any natural, I don't see any natural light in here.

• 3:46:01Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:46:04Marc Andreessen?

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

• 3:46:09Lex Fridman?

  In darkness.

• 3:46:10Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 3:46:10Lex Fridman?

  That must be a metaphor for something.

• 3:46:12Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, it's a test. Look, it's a test of manhood as to whether you could have a blue screen in your face for three hours and then go right to sleep. Like, I don't understand why you shouldn't want to take shortcuts.

• 3:46:21Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:46:28Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:46:39Marc Andreessen?

  I would probably say it is a combination of two things. I think it is, um, contribution.

• 3:46:48Marc Andreessen?

  So, you know, have you done something that mattered ultimately? Um, and, um, and, you know, and specifically a matter to people. Um, and then the other thing is I think happiness is either overrated or almost a complete myth.

• 3:47:02Marc Andreessen?

  And in fact, interesting, Thomas Jefferson did not mean happiness the way that we understand it when he said pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. He meant it more of the, the Greek meaning, um, which is closer to satisfaction, uh, or fulfillment.

• 3:47:16Marc Andreessen?

  And so I think happiness is, so I think about happiness as the first, the first ice cream cone makes you super happy. The first mile of the walk in the park during sunset makes you super happy. The first kiss makes you super happy. The thousandth ice cream cone, not so much. The thousandth mile of the walk through the park. The thousandth kiss can still be good, but maybe just not right in a row. Um, right. And so happiness is this very fleeting concept. Um, and the people who anchor on happiness seem to go off the rails pretty often. So did the deep sense of having been,

• 3:47:52Marc Andreessen?

  I don't know how to put it, useful.

• 3:47:57Lex Fridman?

  So that's a good place to arrive at in life.

• 3:48:00Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I mean, can you sit, can you, yeah, you know, who was it who said the source of all the ills in the world is man's inability to sit in a room by himself doing nothing?

• 3:48:11Marc Andreessen?

  But like, if you're sitting in a room by yourself and you're like, all right, you know, four in the morning, it's like, all right, have I like, you know, have I lived up to my expectation of myself? Like if you have, you know, the people I know who feel that way are pretty centered and, you know, generally seem very, I don't know how to put it, pleased with, you know, proud,

• 3:48:30Marc Andreessen?

  calm, at peace. The people who are, you know, sensation seekers.

• 3:48:37Marc Andreessen?

  You know, some of the sensations, by the way, some, you know, there's, there's certain entrepreneurs, for example, who are like into every form of extreme sport and they get, you know, huge satisfaction out of that. Or, you know, there's sensation seeking in sort of useful and productive ways. You know, Larry Ellison was always like that. Zuckerberg is like that.

• 3:48:52Marc Andreessen?

  And then, you know, there's a lot of entrepreneurs who end up, you know, drugs.

• 3:48:57Marc Andreessen?

  You know, like, sexual, you know, sexual escapades that seem like they'll be fun at first and then backfire.

• 3:49:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but at the end of the day, if you're able to be at peace by yourself in a room at 4 a.m.

• 3:49:08Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:09Lex Fridman?

  And I would even say happy, but I know, I understand Thomas Jefferson didn't mean it the way, the way maybe I mean it. But I can be happy by myself at 4 a.m. with a blue screen.

• 3:49:20Marc Andreessen?

  That's good. Exactly.

• 3:49:21Lex Fridman?

  Staring at cursor.

• 3:49:22Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly.

• 3:49:26Lex Fridman?

  As a small tangent, a quick shout out to an amazing interview you did with Barry Weiss and just to her in general, Barry Weiss of the Free Press. She has a podcast called Honestly with Barry Weiss. She's great. People should go listen. You were asked, if you believe in God.

• 3:49:45Lex Fridman?

  One of the joys, see, we talked about happiness. One of the things that makes me happy is making you uncomfortable.

• 3:49:50Marc Andreessen?

  Thank you.

• 3:49:50Lex Fridman?

  So this, this question is designed for, many of the questions today were designed for that. You were asked if you believe in God and you said after a pause, you're not sure. So it felt like the pause, the uncertainty there was

• 3:50:07Lex Fridman?

  some kind of ongoing search for wisdom and meaning.

• 3:50:11Lex Fridman?

  Are you in fact searching for wisdom and meaning?

• 3:50:14Marc Andreessen?

  I guess I'll put it this way, there's a lot to just understand about people that I feel like I'm only starting to understand.

• 3:50:25Marc Andreessen?

  And that certainly a simpler concept than God. So that's what I've spent a lot of the last, you know, 15 years trying to figure out. I feel like I spent my first, like, whatever, 30 years figuring out machines. And then now I'm spending 30 years figuring out people, which turns out to be quite a bit more complicated. And then, I don't know, maybe God's the last 30 years or something.

• 3:50:47Marc Andreessen?

  And then, you know, look, I mean, just, you know, like Elon is just like, okay, the known universe is like very, you know, complicated and, you know, mystifying. I mean, every time I, you know, pull up in astronomy, you know, I get super in astronomy and it's like, you know, you know, daddy, how many galaxies are there in the universe? And, you know, what's, how many galaxies are there in the universe?

• 3:51:03Lex Fridman?

  A hundred billion.

• 3:51:04Marc Andreessen?

  Okay, like, how?

• 3:51:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:08Marc Andreessen?

  Like, like, how is that freaking possible? Like, what, like, it's just, it's such a staggering concept that I.

• 3:51:16Lex Fridman?

  I actually wanted to show you a tweet that blew my mind from Elon from a while back. He said, Elon said, as a friend called it, this is the ultimate skill tree. This is a wall of galaxies, a billion light years across. So these are all galaxies.

• 3:51:32Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, like, what the, like, how was it that big? Like, how the hell, and like, you know, I can read the textbook and the this and the that and the whatever, eight billion years and the big bang and the whole thing. And then it's just like, all right, wow. And then it's like, all right, the big bang, all right, like, what was, what was before the big bang?

• 3:51:50Lex Fridman?

  You think we'll ever, we humans will ever colonize like a galaxy and maybe even go beyond?

• 3:51:56Marc Andreessen?

  Sure. I mean, yeah, I mean, in the fullness of time, yeah.

• 3:51:59Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:52:02Marc Andreessen?

  In the fullness of time, I mean, yeah, I mean, you know, all the, all the problems, all the challenges with it that I do, but like, yeah, why not? I mean, again, in the fullness of time, it'll, it'll take a long time.

• 3:52:10Lex Fridman?

  You don't think we'll destroy ourselves?

• 3:52:11Marc Andreessen?

  No, I doubt it. I doubt it. And, you know, fortunately, we have Elon. Giving us, giving us the backup plan. So, so I don't know, like, I grew up, you know, rural Midwest, sort of just like conventionally, kind of Protestant Christian. It never made that much sense to me. Got trained as an engineer and a scientist. I'm like, oh, that definitely doesn't make sense. I'm like, I know, I'll spend my life as an empirical, you know, rationalist and I'll, I'll figure everything out. And then, you know, and then again, you walk up against these things. You know, you, you bump up against these things and you're just like, all right, I, like, okay, I guess there's a scientific explanation for this, but like, wow. And then there's like, all right, where did that come from? Right? And then how, how far back can you go on the causality chain?

• 3:52:51Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, and then, yeah, I mean, then even even just, you know, experiences that we all have on Earth. It's hard to it's hard to rationally explain it all. And then, you know. So yeah, I guess I just say I'm kind of radically open minded. At peace with the fact that I'll probably never know. The other thing, though, that's happened, and maybe the more practical answer to the question is, I think I have a much better understanding now of the role that religion plays in society than I didn't have when I was younger. And my partner Ben has a great, I think he quotes his father on this. He's like, if if man does not have a real religion, he makes up a fake one. And the fake ones go very, very badly. And so there's this class, it's actually really funny. There's this class of intellectual, there's this class of intellectual that has what appears to be a very patronizing point of view, which is,

• 3:53:34Marc Andreessen?

  yes, I am an atheist, but it's very important that the people believe in something. Right? And Marx had like the negative view on that, which was religion is the opiate of the masses. But there's a lot of like right wing intellectuals who are themselves, I think, pretty atheistic or agnostic that are like, it's deeply important that the people be Christian or something like that. And on the one hand, it's like, wow, that's arrogant and presumptive. But on the other hand, you know, maybe it's right. Because, you know, what have we learned in the last hundred years is in the absence of a real religion, people will make up fake ones.

• 3:54:04Marc Andreessen?

  There's this writer, there's this political philosopher who's super interesting on this named Eric Vogel, and he wrote this, he wrote in that sort of mid mid part of the century, mid and late part of the 20th century. He's like born in, I think, like 1900 and like died in like 85. So he saw the complete run of communism and Nazism. And himself, you know, fled, I think he fled Europe and, you know, the whole thing. And, you know, his his sort of big conclusion was basically that both communism and Nazism, fascism were were basically religions were were but like in the deep way of religions like they were, you know, he called them political religions, but they were they were like actual religions. And, you know, they were the they were what Nietzsche forecasted when he said, you know, God is dead, we've killed him, and we won't wash the blood off our hands for a thousand years. Right?

• 3:54:48Marc Andreessen?

  Is we will come up with new religions that will just cause just mass murder and death.

• 3:54:53Marc Andreessen?

  And like you read his stuff now, and you're like, yep, that happened, right? And then, of course, as fully, you know, elite moderates, of course, we couldn't possibly be doing that for ourselves right now. But of course, we are. And you know, I would argue that Eric Vogel and for sure would argue that the last 10 years, you know, we have been in a religious frenzy. You know, the woke has been a full-scale religious frenzy and has had all of the characteristics of a religion, including everything from patron saints to holy texts to, you know, sin. It's that wokeness has had every aspect of a wokeness has had every, I think it's had every single aspect of an actual religion other than redemption. Right? Which is maybe like the most dangerous religion you could ever come up with is the one where there's no forgiveness. Right?

• 3:55:36Marc Andreessen?

  And so I think if Vogel and were alive, I think he would have zeroed right in on that and would have said that. And, you know, we just like sailed right off. I mentioned earlier, like we somehow rediscovered the religions of the Indo-Europeans. We're all into identity politics and environmentalism. Like, I don't think that's an accident. So, so anyway, like there, there is something very deep going on in the human psyche on religion that is not dismissible and needs to be taken seriously, even if one struggles with the specifics of it.

• 3:56:08Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:56:27Marc Andreessen?

  Thank you, Lex. Is that it? That's only, only, how long is that?

• 3:56:31Lex Fridman?

  Four hours with Mark Andreessen. It's like 40 hours of actual content, so.

• 3:56:36Marc Andreessen?

  I'll, I'll accept being one of the short ones.

• 3:56:38Lex Fridman?

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

• 3:56:48Marc Andreessen?

  Thank you, Lex.

• 3:56:49Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Mark Andreessen. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Thomas Sowell. "It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.