#458 – Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America
en
January 26, 2025
TLDR: Marc Andreessen, entrepreneur, investor, and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, discusses his views on the best possible future of Western Civilization, Trump in 2025, tech TDS, self-censorship, censorship, Journalism, AI race, Yann LeCun, Andrew Huberman, God, and humanity.

In this engaging episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast, Marc Andreessen, a tech entrepreneur and investor well-known for his pivotal role in shaping Silicon Valley, shares his insights on a wide range of topics impacting America's future, including technology, politics, and culture.
Introduction
Andreessen's vast experience, from co-founding Netscape to establishing Andreessen Horowitz, positions him as a powerhouse in the tech industry. In this episode, he expresses profound optimism for the future while critically addressing current challenges.
The Best Possible Future
- Technological Growth: Andreessen highlights the resilience of the U.S. economy, noting that despite various crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, American economic growth has continued, largely due to its unique geographical advantages and social dynamism.
- American Spirit: He attributes America's entrepreneurial vigor to its diverse and aggressive populace, which fosters innovation and growth.
The Political Landscape: Trump and 2025
- Vision for Trump in 2025: Andreessen discusses the potential resurgence of Donald Trump and outlines how his administration could remove regulatory constraints on American industries, setting the stage for economic revitalization.
- Government Overreach: He expresses concerns about what he calls "soft authoritarianism," highlighting how excessive regulations can stifle innovation and economic progress.
Challenges in Tech and Media
- Censorship and Self-Censorship: Much of the conversation revolves around the rising threat of censorship in media and tech. Andreessen cites "preference falsification" as a critical issue where individuals publicly conform to the dominant narrative while privately holding differing opinions.
- The Role of Silicon Valley: He explores the impact of the tech elite's alignment with progressive ideologies, discussing how this has contributed to a polarized environment where dissenting voices face suppression.
Immigration and Talent Acquisition
- H1B Visa System: Andreessen supports high-skill immigration, arguing that it is vital for maintaining the competitive edge of the U.S. tech industry. He notes that many companies are relying more on O-1 visas for foreign talent rather than H1Bs due to systemic challenges in the visa application process.
- Cultural Implications: He cautions against the tendency to neglect the development of domestic talent, particularly from underrepresented groups, highlighting that the focus should not solely be on importing talent while overlooking the potential of local communities.
The AI Race and Future of Innovation
- AI and Tech Transformation: The conversation delves into the ongoing AI revolution, where Andreessen predicts an expansion in coding capacity and technological advances as AI transforms workflows and increases productivity across industries.
- Ownership of AI Technologies: Andreessen raises questions about the future control and financial viability of AI developments, discussing the potential struggles that innovative companies may face as they try to monetize new technologies.
The Importance of Media and Journalism
- Shifts in Journalism: He emphasizes the need for responsible and unfiltered media, criticizing the existing narratives fueled by corporate and political influences.
- Accountability: Andreessen believes media practitioners must be held accountable for their actions instead of being allowed to operate without scrutiny, which contributes to public distrust in journalism.
Conclusion
- Call to Action: As the discussion wraps up, Andreessen calls for renewed optimism and innovation. He believes 2025 could potentially be a turning point for re-establishing America as a leader in technological advancement.
- Community Engagement: Engaging the public in transparent discussions about the future of technology and policy-making is essential for navigating the many challenges ahead.
This episode captures Andreessen's visionary outlook on America's future, emphasizing the interplay between technology, politics, and society, while also urging listeners to remain engaged in these crucial conversations. Andreessen's insights underscore the importance of fostering an environment conducive to innovation and reform, crucial in navigating the complexities of our modern world.
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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's the co-creator of mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and is one of the most influential voices in the tech world, including at the intersection of technology and politics.
And now a quick few second mention and response. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got on-court for unifying your mail stack, get help for programming, notion for team projects and collaboration, Shopify for merch and element for hydration. Choose wise to my friends. Also, if you'll want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to electspeamer.com slash 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 this stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Enchord, 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. 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 isn't 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 a general case, based on any real evidence. So I do think synthetic data will play a part, but how big a part? There's still going to be some curation from humans. There's still going to need to be a human in a 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
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 human act collaboration, but also asking and answering the research question of how do you
pull it all off and make the resulting model more intelligent for a very specific application then for the general applications. Yeah, so Encore does a really good job on the tooling side. Go try them out to curate, annotate, and manage your AI data at oncord.com. That's oncord.com.
This episode is brought to you by GitHub and GitHub co-pilot. 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 co-pilot. 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. 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.
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 prime agent. And he, I think has a love hate relationship with AI and with AI agents and.
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 VM user, so he's going to be skeptical in general of new technology. He's a curmudgeon, sitting in 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 kids side with the child like joy, enjoy the new technology. For me, basically everything I do programming wise has the possibility of AI either reviewing 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 co-pilot for free today at gh.io slash co-pilot. This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool that Mark Andreessen on this very episode sings a lot of praises to. I believe he sings was it on my go-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. 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, 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 abuse 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 slash Lex. That's all lowercase notion.com slash 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. There are a few people embody 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
Again incredible person i said again again it's almost becoming funny that uh eventually will do a podcast. I don't know why we haven't done a podcast there's a few people in my life where. It's like like jeffy hit is one of those people it's like we agreed to do a podcast for so long.
And we've just been kind of lazy about it. And Toby is the same. Anyway, he's a CEO Shopify. I don't even know if he knows that Shopify sponsors his 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 can possibly fit. So I can pick whoever the hell I want. And whatever guests I choose will never have anything to do with this.
companies that sponsor the podcast. There's not even a tinge of influence. In fact, if there's anything that will be the opposite direction, but I also try to avoid that. It's possible I talk to the CEO of GitHub, for example, on this podcast, and GitHub sponsors this podcast. It's possible I talk 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. It's impossible. And most likely, if that's attempted, it's going to backfire.
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 Shopify store, luxurymy.com slash 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 slash Lex. That's all over case. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today.
This episode is also brought to you by Elment, my daily zero sugar and 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 or not silly? How sort of surprising
The things we converge on as being the store 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 is wars and sometimes there is complete destruction and the rise and fall of empires all over some resource. What a funny, strange little world.
mostly harmless as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy summarizes humans. For some reason, instead of that book, I was going to say, Catch in the Rye. In my exhausted brain, the books kind of all morphed together. Catch in the Rye is a really damn good book.
All of the classics I return to often the simple books is just even like the first book I read in English, Trivia book, Trivia book called The Giver. It's like I return to it in its simplicity. Maybe it's
Maybe you have sentimental value, maybe that's what it is. But just the simplicity of words, animal form, I've read, I don't know how many times, probably over 50 times, I've 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 drinkelements.com slash Lex. This is a Lex Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Mark Andreessen.
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. The Roaring 20s. The Roaring 20s. I mean, look, a couple of things.
It is remarkable over the last several years with all of the issues, including, you know, everything, not just everything in politics, but also COVID and every other thing that's happened. It's really amazing. The United States just kept growing. If you just look at economic growth charts, the U.S. just kept growing. And very significantly, many other countries stopped growing. So Canada stopped growing. The U.K. stopped growing. Germany stopped growing. And, you know, some of those countries may be actually going backwards at this point.
And there's a very long discussion to be had about what's wrong with those countries. And there's, of course, plenty of things that are wrong with our country. But the US is just flat out primed for growth. And I think that's a consequence of many factors, some of which are lucky and some of which through hard work. And so the lucky part is just, number one, we just have incredible physical security by being our own continent.
We have incredible natural resources. There's this running joke now that whenever it looks like the US is going to run out of some rare earth material, some farmer in North Dakota kicks over a hay bale and finds a $2 trillion deposit. We're just blessed with geography and with natural resources. We can be energy independent any time 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 dependent. We can be a giant net energy exporter. It's purely a question of choice. And I think the new administration is going to do that. And so, oh, and then I would say two other things. One is, we are the beneficiaries. And you're an example of this. We're a beneficiary.
Where the beneficiary of 50, 100, 200 years of the most aggressive driven, smartest people in the world, most capable people moving to the US and raising their kids here. We just have by far the most dynamic population, most aggressive set of characters 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. We have our issues and we have a particular issue with manufacturing, which we could talk about, but for anything in software, anything in AI, anything in all these advanced biotech, all these advanced areas of technology, like we're by far the leader. Again, in part, because many of the best scientists and engineers in those fields come to the US.
And so we have all of the preconditions for just a monster. Boom, I could see economic growth going way up. I could see productivity growth going way up, rate of technology going way up. And then we could do a global tour if you like. But basically, all of our competitors have profound issues. And we could go through them one by one. But the competitive landscape, it's remarkable how much better position we are for growth.
What about the humans themselves almost 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 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?
Yeah. So is this a family show or am I allowed to swear? You can say whatever the fuck you want. Okay. So the TV, the great TV show succession, the show, of course, that would, which you intended to root for exactly zero of the characters. Yes. The best line for succession was in the final episode of the first season when the whole family's over in Logan Royce 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, because he's been in New York for 50 years. He's totally miserable being back in, in, um,
In Scotland, and he gets in some argument with somebody, and he says, finally, he just says, I cannot wait to get out of here and go back to America where we could fuck without condoms. Was that a metaphor? Exactly. But it's exactly the thing, and everybody instantly knows what everybody watching that instantly starts laughing because you know what it means, which is exactly this. I think there's an ethnographic way of it. There's a bunch of books on, like you said, the Scots Irish, all the different derivations of all the different ethnic groups that have come to the US over the course of the last 400 years.
But what we have is this sort of amalgamation of the Northeast Yankees who were super tough and hardcore. Yeah, the Scots Irish are super aggressive. We've got the Southerners and the Texans and the whole kind of blended.
You know, kind of angle Hispanic thing, super incredibly tough, strong, driven, you know, capable characters, you know, the Texas Rangers, you know, we've got the California, you know, we've got the, you know, the wild, we've got the incredibly, you know, inventive hippies, but we also have the hardcore engineers, 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, you know, the best movies.
And so, yeah, there is all of our problems I think are basically, in my view to some extent, 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 in it.
And basically what we discover over time is we basically just need people to stand up at a certain point and say, you know, it's time to build. It's time to grow. You know, it's time to do things. And so, and there's something in the American spirit that just like first 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. Um, you know, cause the, the, the, the seventies were like horribly depressing, right? In the, in the US, like it was, they were at nightmare 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, and just this self-defeating negative attitude, and everybody's upset about everything. And then, by the way, energy crisis, and hostage crisis, and foreign wars, and just demoralization. The low point for
In the 70s was Jimmy Carter who just passed away. He went on TV and he gave this speech known as the Malay speech. And it was like the weakest possible trying to like rouse people back to a sense of like passion completely failed. And you know, we had the, you know, the hostages in, you know, Iran for I think 440 days and every night on the nightly news, it was, you know, lines around the block, energy crisis, depression, inflation. 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, nope, it's morning in America.
and we're the shining city on the hill and we're going to do it and he did it and we did it and the national spirit came roaring back and you know we're really hard for a full decade and I think that's exactly what I think you know we'll see but I think that's what could happen here.
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 there's a bunch of components to that, one of which is economic. 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.
Yeah, that's right. America has this incredible streak of individualism. And individualism in America probably peaked, I think, between roughly, call it the end of the Civil War 1865 through to probably call it 1931 or something. And there was this incredible run. I mean, that period, we now know that period is the second industrial revolution. And it's when the United States basically assumed global leadership and basically took over technological and economic leadership from England.
And then, you know, 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, there's a massive industrial, massive individualistic streak. By the way, Milton Friedman's old videos are all on YouTube. They are every bit as compelling and inspiring as they were then. He's a singular figure, and many of us, I never knew him, but he was at Stanford for many years at the Hoover Institution. But I never met him, but I know a lot of people who worked with him. He was a singular figure, but all of his lessons live on or are fully available.
But I would also say it's not just individualism, and this is one of the big things that's like playing out in a lot of our culture and political fights right now, which is basically this feeling certainly that I have and I share with a lot of people, which is it's not enough for America to just be an economic zone, and it's not enough for us to just be individuals, and it's not enough to just have line go up, and it's not enough to just have economic success. There are deeper questions.
at play and also, you know, there's more to a country than just that. And, you know, quite frankly, a lot of it is intangible. A lot of it is, you know, involved spirit and passion. And, you know, like I said, we have more of it than anybody else. But, you know,
We have to choose to want it. The way I look at it is like all of our problems are self-inflicted. Decline is a choice. All of our problems are basically demoralization campaigns, basically people telling us, people in positions of authority telling us that we shouldn't stand out. We shouldn't be adventurous. We shouldn't be exciting. We shouldn't be exploratory. We shouldn't miss that and the other thing. And we should feel bad about everything that we do. And I think we've lived through a decade where that's been the prevailing theme. And I think quite honestly, as of November, I think people are done with it.
If it 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, by if I could only pronounce the name French, historian, and numa denif, wustel du qu'en en uno.
That was amazing. 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. So what that book does, it's actually quite a striking book. So that book is written by this guy as a profuse that he likes to do the pronunciations, before language pronunciations for the day. He was a professor of classics at the Sorbonne in Paris, the top university yet, and actually in the 1860s, so actually it ran around after the
U.S. Civil War. And he was a savant of a particular kind, which is he, and you can see this in the book, is he had apparently read and sort of absorbed and memorized every possible scrap of Greek and Roman literature. And so it's like a walking like index on basically Greek and Roman, everything we know about Greek and Roman culture. And that's significant. The reason this matters is because basically none of that has changed, right? And so he had access to the exact same written materials that we have, we have access to. And so there, you know, 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 in society was like. And these were the people who were now known as the Indo-Europeans. And you may have heard of these. These are the people who came down from the steps. And so they came out of what's now like Eastern Europe, like around sort of the outskirts of what's now Russia. And then they sort of swept through Europe. They ultimately took over all of Europe, by the way, almost many of the ethnicities in America as the hundreds of years to follow are Indo-European.
So they were this, basically this warrior, basically class that came down and swept through and essentially populated much of the world. And there's a whole interesting saga there. But what he does, and then they basically, from there came basically what we know as the Greeks and the Romans were kind of evolutions off of that. And so what he reconstructs is sort of what life was like, what life was like, at least in the West for people in their kind of original social state.
And the significance of that is the original social state is living in the state of the absolute imperative for survival with absolutely no technology. No modern systems, no nothing. You've got the clothes in your back, you've got whatever you can build with your bare hands. This is predates basically all concepts of technologies we understand today. And so these are people under maximum levels of physical survival pressure. And so what social patterns did they evolve to be able to do that? And the social pattern basically was as follows.
There's a three-part social structure, family tribe and city, and zero concept of individual rights, and essentially no concept of individualism. And so you were not an individual, you were a member of your family, and then a set of families would aggregate into a tribe, and then a set of tribes would aggregate into a city.
And then the morality was completely, it was actually what Nietzsche talks about. The morality was entirely master morality, not slave morality, and so in their morality, anything that was strong was good. And anything that was weak was bad, and it's very clear why that is, right? It's because strong equals good equals survive, weak equals bad equals die.
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 if the risk of dying? Or are you willing to live as a slave on your knees in order to not die? And this is sort of the derivation of that moral framework. Christianity later inverted that moral framework, but the original framework lasted for many, many thousands of years.
No concept of individualism, the head of the family had total life and death control over the over the 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 contact, right? You were morally required to, like if you didn't do it, you were a bad person.
Um, 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. And the point of being in one of these collectives is that it's a collective, and people are sharing. And of course, that limited how big they could get, because the problem with communism is it does a scale. It works at the level of a family. It's much harder to make it work at the level of a country.
Impossible. Maximum fascism, maximum communism. And then it was all intricately tied into their religion. And their religion was, in two parts, it was veneration of ancestors, and it was veneration of nature. And the veneration of ancestors is extremely important, because it was basically the ancestors were the people who got you to where you were, the ancestors were the people who had everything to teach you. And then it was veneration of nature, because of course, nature is the thing that's trying to kill you.
And then you had your ancestor, every family, tribe, or city had their ancestor gods, and then they had their nature gods. Okay, so fast forward to today, like we live in a world that is like radically different, but in the book takes you through kind of what happened from that through the Greeks and Romans through to Christianity.
And so, but it's very helpful to kind of think in these terms because the conventional view of the progress through time is that we are, you know, the cliche is the arc of the, you know, moral universe, you know, Ben's towards justice, right? Or so-called wig history, which is, you know, that the arc of progress is positive, right? And so we, you know, which 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 purer and a better version of ourselves.
Our Indo-European ancestors would say, oh no, you people have fallen to shit. 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. And you're having children with a wedlock, and you regularly encounter people with other cities, and you don't try to kill them, and like, how crazy is that? And they would basically consider us to be living an incredibly diluted version of this highly religious, highly organized, highly 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 that still has tinges of Christianity, but largely prides itself on no longer being religious in that way. We being the most fully evolved modern secular expert scientists and so forth have basically re-evolved or fallen back on the exact same religious structure.
that the Indo-Europeans had, specifically ancestor worship, which is identity politics, and nature worship, which is environmentalism. And so we have actually worked our way all the way back to their cult religions without realizing it. And it just goes to show that in some ways we have fallen far from the family tree, but in some cases we're exactly the same.
You kind of described this progressive idea of walkism and so on as worshipping ancestors. Identity politics is worshipping ancestors, right? It's tagging newborn infants with either benefits or responsibilities or levels of condemnation based on who their ancestors were. The Indo-Europeans would have recognized it on site. We somehow think it's super socially progressive. Yeah, and it is not.
I mean, I would say obviously not, you know, get new ask, which is where I think you're headed, which is look like is the idea that you can like completely reinvent society every generation and have no regard whatsoever for what came before you. That seems like a really bad idea, right? That's like the Cambodians with your zero under poll pot and, you know, death, you know, follows it's obviously the Soviets tried that.
You know, the utopian fantasies who think that they can just rip up everything they came before and create something new in the human condition and human society have a very bad history of causing enormous destruction. So, on the one hand, it's like, okay, there is like a deeply important role for tradition. And the way I think about that is the process of evolutionary learning.
which is what tradition ought to be is the distilled wisdom of all, and this is how you knew your paints thought about it, should be the distilled wisdom of everybody who came before you, all those important and powerful lessons learned. And that's why I think it's fascinating to go back and study how these people lived, is because that's part of the history and part of the learning that got us to where we are today.
Having said that, there are many cultures around the world that are, you know, 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, they're gerontocracies. And it's all a bunch of 80 year olds running everything, which by the way, we have a little bit of that too. Right. And so I would say is like there's a doubt there's there's a real downside, you know, full traditionalism is communitarianism.
It's ethnic particularism. It's ethnic chauvinism. It's this incredible level of resistance to change. It just doesn't get you anywhere. It may be good and fine at the level of individual tribe, but it's a society living in the modern world. You can't evolve. You can't advance. You can't participate in all the good things that have happened. This is one of those things where extremeness on either side is probably a bad idea. But this needs to be approached in a sophisticated and nuanced way.
So the beautiful picture you painted of the roaring 20s, how can the Trump administration play a part in making that future happen? 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 ended up both then and now with this, you know, what I would I describe as sort of a form of soft authoritarianism.
The good news is it's not like a military dictatorship. It's not like you get thrown into Lubyanka for the most part. It's not coming at four in the morning. You're not getting dragged off to sell. It's not hard authoritarianism, but it is soft authoritarianism. It's this incredible, suppressive blanket of regulation rules this concept of a vitocracy. What's required to get anything done? You need to get 40 people to sign off in anything, any one of them can veto it.
There's a lot of how our now political system works, and then just this general idea of progress is bad, and technology is bad, and capitalism is bad, and building businesses is bad, and success is bad. Tall Poppy syndrome, basically anybody who sticks their head up deserves to get it chopped off, anybody who's wrong about anything deserves to get condemned forever.
You know, just this very kind of, you know, graining, you know, repression and then coupled with specific government actions such as censorship regimes, right? And the banking, right? And, you know, draconian, you know, deliberately kneecapping, you know, critical American industries.
Um, and then, you know, congratulating yourselves in the back for doing it or, you know, having these horrible social policies like let all the criminals out of jail and see what happens. Right. Um, and so like we've just been through this period. I, 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 it reasonably, you know, kind of optimistic, constructive, you know, pro growth frame of mind. There's just, there's so much pent up energy and potentially the American system that alone is going to, I think, cause, you know, growth and spirit to take off. And then there's a lot of things proactively, but yeah, and then there's a lot of things proactively that could be done.
So how do you relieve that? To what degree has the thing you describe ideologically permeated government and permeated big companies?
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 due administration and that they plan to take very rapid action on a lot of these fronts very quickly. They're going to do as much as they can through executive orders, and then they're going to do legislation and regulatory changes for the rest. And so they're going to move, I think, quickly on a whole bunch of stuff.
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. We just saw a great example of this with what Mark Zuckerberg is doing. Obviously, I'm involved with his company, but we just saw it in public, the scope and speed of the changes are reflective of a lot of these shifts.
But I would say 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 five 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 vocally were still very anti-Trump. But I said, you know, has anything changed since November 6? And they immediately said, oh, it's completely different. It feels like the ISIS thought, you know, woke us over.
They said that all kinds of projects are going to be able to get made now that couldn't afford, that Polly was going to start making comedies again. They were just like an incredible, immediate environmental change. As I talk to people, certainly throughout the economy, people who run businesses, I hear that all the time, which is just this last 10 years of misery is just over. I mean, the one that I'm watching that's really funny, Facebook'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, the 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 thing you can imagine. Every ESG and every possible satellite companies with every aspect of just these crazed ideological positions. He was coming in. He literally had aggregated together trillions of dollars of share holdings that he did not, that were his customers' rights. He seized their voting control of their shares and was using it to force all these companies to do all of this crazy ideological stuff.
And he was the typhoid Mary of all this stuff in corporate America. And he in the last year has been backpedaling from that stuff like as fast as he possibly can. And I saw just an example last week. He pulled out of the corporate net zero alliance. He pulled out of the crazy energy stuff. And so he's backing away as fast as he can. Remember that Richard Pryor backwards walk? Richard Pryor had this way where he could back out of a room while looking like he was walking forward.
Um, you know, even they're doing that. Um, and just the whole thing, I mean, I, if you saw the court recently ruled the Nasdaq had these crazy board of directors composition rules. One of the funniest moments of my life is when my friend Peter Teal and I were on the, 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 that met have explained with a 100% complete straight phase that Peter Thiel counts as diverse by virtue of being LGBT. And this is a guy who literally wrote a book called the diversity myth. And he literally looked like he 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 in his face was very funny. It was imposed by Nasdaq, you know, your stock exchange imposing this stuff on you and then the court, whatever the court of appeals just nuked that.
These things basically are being ripped down one by one, and what's on the other side of it is basically finally being able to get back to everything that everybody always wanted to do, which is run their companies, have great products, have happy customers, succeed, like succeed, achieve, outperform, and work with the best and the brightest and not be made to feel bad about it. And I think that's happening in many areas of American society. It's great to hear that Peter Thiel is fundamentally a diversity hire.
Well, so it was very, you know, there was a moment. So Peter, you know, Peter, of course, you know, is, you know, is, is, is, 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, all right, you know, I'm willing to do a lot for this company, but
It's all about sacrifice for diversity. Well, yeah. And then it's like, okay, like, is there a test? Right. You know, so. Oh, yeah. Exactly. How do you prove it? The questions that got asked, you know, what are you willing to do? Yeah. And I become very good at asking lawyers, completely absurd questions with a totally straight face. And do they answer with a straight face? Sometimes. Okay. I think in fairness, they have trouble telling when I'm joking.
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 20s in the way they've described?
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, at least historically, my entire time there has been overwhelmingly majority, just straight up Democrat. The other way to look at that is political donation records. And again, the political donations in the Valley range from 90% to 99% to one side.
And so I just bring that up because we'll see what happens with the voting and with donations going forward. We maybe talk about the fire later, but I can tell you there is a very big question of what's happening in Los Angeles right now. I don't want to get into the fire, but it's catastrophic. And there was already a rightward shift in the big cities in California. And I think a lot of people in LA are really thinking about things right now, as they're trying to literally save their houses and save their families.
But even in San Francisco, there was a big shift to the right in the voting in 24. So we'll see where that goes. But you observe that by just looking at the numbers over time. The part that I'm more focused on is, and I don't know how to exactly describe this, but it's like the top 1,000 or the top 10,000 people. And I don't have a list, but it's all the top founders, top CEOs, top executives, top engineers, top VCs, and then kind of into the ranks, the people who kind of built and run the companies.
And I don't have numbers, but I have a much more tactile feel for what's happening. So the big thing I have now come to believe is that the idea that people have beliefs is mostly wrong. I think that most people just go along. And I think even most high status people just go along. 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 as the Unabomber, uh, Ted Kuzinski 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, at Harvard super genius. Um, not that those are in conflict.
But he was a very bright guy, and he did this whole thing where he talked about basically he was very right-wing and talked about left is a lot. And he had this great concept that's just stuck in my mind ever since I read it, which is the other concept you just called over social over socialization.
Um, and so, you know, most people are social, not 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 difference to society. There's something about modern Western elites where they're over socialized. Um, and they're just like overly oriented towards what other people like themselves, you know, think, um, and believe and you can get a real sense of that. If you have a little bit of an outside perspective, which I just do, I think as a consequence of where I grew up, um,
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? Why are these positions not the same as they were five years ago?
Right. 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, I think they're taking their cues from it's some combination, the press, the universities, the big foundations. So basically it's like the New York Times, Harvard, the Ford Foundation, and I don't know, a few CEOs and a few public figures and maybe the president of your parties 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 of the Washington Post believe the exact same thing. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation believe the exact same thing. Google and, you know, whatever, you know, Microsoft believe the exact same thing.
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. How they was on the tail end of that and the same way New York's on the tail end of that. The same way the media's on the tail end of that. It's like some sort of collective hive mind thing.
And I just go through that to say like, I don't think most people in my orbit or, you know, let's say the top 10,000 people in the valley or the top 10,000 people in LA, I don't think they're sitting there thinking, basically, I have rocks. 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. 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 the socialization happens at the dinner parties?
When you go outside the inner circle of one, two, three, four people who you really trust, then you start to conform. But inside the mind, there is an actual belief or a struggle, attention within your times or with the listener. For the listener, there's a slow smile that overtook Mark Andreessen's face.
So look, I'll just tell you what I think, which is at the dinner parties and at the conferences. No, there's none of that. What there is is that all of the heretical conversations have anything that challenges the status quo, any heretical ideas and any new idea is a heretical idea. Any deviation is either discussed a one-on-one face-to-face. It's like a whisper network.
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. Well, yeah, humor. Somebody cracks a joke. Somebody cracks a joke. If the other person laughs, the conversation is on. Yeah. Yeah. If the other person doesn't laugh,
back slowly away from the scene. I didn't mean anything by it. By the way, it doesn't have to be like a super offensive joke. It just has to be a joke that's just up against the edge of one of the, use the Sam Bankman free term, one of the shibblas, 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 at that point, what happens is you have a peer-to-peer network.
You have a one-to-one connection with somebody, and then you have your little conspiracy of thought criminality. And then you have your network of thought criminals, and then they have their network of thought criminals, and then you have this delicate mating dances to whether you should bring the thought criminals together. And the dance, the fundamental mechanism of the dance is humor. Yeah, it's humor.
For two reasons. Number one, humor is a way to have deniability. Humor is a way to discuss serious things without having deniability. Oh, I'm sorry, it was just a joke, right? So that's part of it, which is one of the reasons why comedians can get away with saying things the rest of us can. They can always fall back on, oh, yeah, I was just going for the laugh. But the other key thing about humor right is that laughter is involuntary.
Right like you either laugh or you don't and it's not like a conscious decision whether you're gonna 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 on to something truthful. Like people don't laugh like made up bullshit stories that 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 as off limits and all of a sudden it's like the ice breaks and it's like oh yeah that's the thing and it's funny and like I laugh 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 is no no surprise to me like for example Joe has 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 got the question of 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, the Tharker middle dinner party, and you get six or eight people together and you join the networks. And those are like the happiest moment, at least in the last decade, those are like the happiest moments of everybody's lives, because 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 talk about real things.
So that's the livers of it. And then of course, the other side of it is the group chat phenomenon. And then basically the same thing played out until Elon bought X and until Substack took off, which were really the two big breakthroughs in free speech online. The same dynamic played out online, which is you had absolute conformity on the social networks, like literally enforced by the social networks themselves through censorship, and then also through cancellation campaigns and mobbing and shaming. But then group chats grew up to be the equivalent of some is done.
Anybody who grew up in the Soviet Union under communism, 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 again, that was the hard authoritarian version of this. And then we've been living through this weird mutant soft authoritarian version, but with some of the same patterns. And WhatsApp allows you to scale and make it more efficient to build on these groups of heretical ideas bonded by humor.
Exactly. Well, and this is the thing. And then well, this is kind of the running joke about group or the running kind of thing about group chats. It's not even a joke. 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. Yeah, as you can get without actually tripping it.
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 fast where, but it's walking, they walk right off 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 got to wait until next year to talk about that.
You know, they walk it back. And so it's that same thing. And yeah, and then group chats is a technological phenomenon. It was amazing to see because basically it was number one. It was obviously the rise of smartphones. Then it was the rise of the new messaging services. Then it was the rise specifically of, I would say, combination of WhatsApp and Signal. And the reason for that is those were the two big systems that did the full encryption.
So you actually felt safe and then the real breakthrough I think was disappearing messages which hit signal probably four or five years ago and hit WhatsApp three or four years ago.
And then the combination of the combination of encryption and disappearing messages, I think, really unleash it. Well, then there's the fight. Then there's the fight over the length of the disappearing messages. And so it's like, I often get behind my thing. So I set to seven day disappearing messages. And my friends who are like, no, that's way too much risk.
Yeah, it's got to be a day. And then every once in a while, somebody will set it to five minutes before they send something like particularly inflammatory. Yeah, 100%. Well, what, I mean, one of the things that bothers me about what's 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. Exactly.
Now, of course, what's happening right now is the big thought, right? And so the vibe shift. So what's happening on the other side of the election is, you know, Elon on Twitter two years ago, and now Mark with Facebook and Instagram. And by the way, with the continued growth of the sub stack 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
a tremendous amount of the verbotan conversations can now shift back into public view. And I mean, quite frankly, this is one of those things, quite frankly, even if I was opposed to what those people are saying, and I'm sure I am in some cases, I would argue it's still like net better for society that those things happen in public instead of private. Do you really want, like, yeah, like, does you want to know? And then it's just, look, it's just, I think, clearly much healthier to live in a society in which people are not literally scared of what they're saying.
I mean, to push back to come back to this idea that we're talking about, I do believe that people have beliefs and thoughts that are heretical, like a lot of people. I wonder what fraction of people have that. To me, 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 dynamical system that is the difference between those two is fascinating. Like there's throughout history, the fall of communism and multiple regimes throughout Europe is really interesting. Because everybody was following the line until not.
But for sure, privately, there was a huge number of boiling conversations happening where 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, the interesting question here is,
What is the landscape of private thoughts and ideas and conversations that are happening under the surface of Americans, especially my question is, how much dormant energy is there for this roaring 20s? What people are like, no more bullshit. Let's get shit done. Yeah. So let's go through that. We'll go through the theory of preference false. Yes. Just by the way, amazing. The books that unless it's fascinating.
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. And 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 truth, public lives. 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, and, and, and the commonality there is in both cases, you're lying.
You believe something internally and then you're lying about it in public. And so the thing, and there's sort of two classic forms of it. 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 Vasslop Havel talks about in the other good book on this topic, which is The Power of the Powerless, who is 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, um, workers of the world unite, right? And so he describes what he calls the parable, the green grocer, which is your green grocer in Prague in 1985. Um, and for the last 70 years, it has been, er, 50 years has been absolutely mandatory to have a sign in the window of your story. This is workers of the world unite, right? Um, and it's 1985. It is like crystal clear that the world, the workers of the world are not going to unite. Like, like all the things that could happen in the world, that is not going to happen.
The commies have been at that for 70 years. It is not happening, but that slogan had better be in your window every morning because if it's not in your window or morning, you are not a good communist. The secret place 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 green grocer knows the slogan is fake. He knows it's a lie. Every single person walking past the slogan knows that it's a lie.
Every single person walking past the store knows that the green grocer is only putting it up there because he has to lie in public. And the green grocer 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 worldization 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 world's 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 simply not true. I'll let the audience speculate on their own group chats.
um but mark your memes online as well please yes yes exactly but okay so anyway so it's the two sides of that right so it's it's it's it's it's private truth public lives um so then what preference falsification does is it talks about extending that from the idea of the individual experience that to the idea of the entire society experiencing that right and this gets 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 again, this literally is like how you get something like the communist system, which is like, okay, you end up in a situation in which 80 or 90 or 99% of society can actually all be thinking individually. I really don't buy this anymore.
And if anybody would just stand up and say it, I would be willing to go along with it, but I'm not going to be the first one to put my head on the chopping block. But 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 agree with you are 10% of the population and you become part of a movement, you're going to get killed. If 90% of the people agree with you, you're going to win the revolution.
And so the question of what the percentage actually is is like a really critical question. And then basically in any sort of authoritarian system, you can't run a survey to get an accurate result. And so you actually can't know until you put it to the test. And then what he describes in the book is it's always put at the test in the same way. And this is exactly what's happened for the last two years, 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.
Or the emperor is actually wearing no clothes. That famous parable. So one person stands up and does it. And literally, that person is standing there by themselves, and everybody else in the audience is like, ooh, I wonder what's going to happen to that guy. But again, nobody knows. Elon doesn't know, the first guy doesn't know, other people don't know, 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 you are now the leader of a revolution. And then basically, of course, what happens is, OK, 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, 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 believed a different thing, it turns out, all of a sudden, everybody has this giant epiphany that says, oh, I'm actually part of the majority. And at that point, like you were on the freight train to revolution, right? Like it is rolling, right? Now, 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 their aircoffer 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, 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 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, follow the counter elite. So that, 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.
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.
Yeah, and it's like, well, but then there's the test. Is it crazy shit or is it the truth? Yeah. Right. 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 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 100% consistent in my experience.
By the way, there's two guys who are 100% consistent like that, that I know, you learn in Trump. Whatever you think of them, what they say in private is 100% identical to what they say in public. They're completely transparent, they're completely honest in that way. Again, it's not like they're perfect people, but they're honest in that way. 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 know many or most or almost everyone else actually believe, 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.
Um, and he was the only one who was saying them. And so the, again, elite masses, he was elite, the voters of the masses and the voters decided, you know, no, no more bushes. Like we're going this other direction. That's the mechanism of social change. Like what we just described is like the actual mechanism of social change. It is.
Fascinating to me that we have been living through exactly this. We've been living through everything exactly what Tim McCrine describes, everything that Vaslav Havel described. Black squares in 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 little masses anymore and a set of new elites that are running away with things.
And so we're living through this incredible applied case study of these ideas. And if there's a moral of the story, it is fairly obvious, which is is a really bad idea for a society to wedge itself into a position in which most people don't believe the fundamental precepts of what they're told they have to do to be good people like that. That is just not a good state to be in. So one of the ways to avoid that in the future, maybe, is to keep the delta between what's set in private and what's set in public small.
Yeah, it's like, well, this is sort of the siren song of censorship as we can keep people from saying things, which means we can keep people from thinking things. Yeah. And, you know, by the way, that may work for a while, right? Like, you know, this, I mean, again, the hard form of the Soviet Union, you know, Soviet Union, owning a mimeograph, pre photocopiers, there were mimeograph machines that were used to make Thomas Dot underground newspapers, which is the mechanism, a 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 were erased from the internet right like it 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, he hates you and won't talk to you, you know, whatever the, you know, whatever the version of cancellation has been. And so, so, like, does that work? Like, maybe it works for a while. I could work 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 bottle of energy. Now, your question was like, what are the percentages? Like, what's 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 get 20% of people who are just like true believers of whatever they're, you know, whatever's in the, whatever's in your time, Harvard professors and the Ford Foundation, like just, they're just believe it. And by the way, maybe it's 10, maybe it's five, but let's say generously it's 20. So, you know, 20% kind of full on revolutionaries.
Um, and then you've got, let's call it 20% on the other side that are like, no, I'm not on board with this. This is, this is crazy. I'm not, I'm not signing up for this, but you know, you know, they, their view of themselves is they're in a small minority. And in fact, they start out in a small minority. Cause what happens is the 60% go with the first 20%, not the second 20%.
So you've got this large middle of people and it's not that there's anything like it's not the people in the middle are not smart or anything like that it's that they just have like normal lives. And they're just trying to get by and they're just trying to go to work each day and do a good job and be a good person and raise their kids and you know have a little bit of time to watch the game. And they're just not engaged in the cut and thrust of you know political activism or any of this stuff is just not their thing.
But that's where the over socialization comes in is just like, OK, 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.
Um, 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 is kind of my point. It's not even really does the 60% change their beliefs 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, you know, that 60% is pivoting in real time. They're just done. They've just had it.
And I would love to see where that pivot goes, because there's internal battles happening right now, right? So this is the other thing. Okay, so there's two forms of internal. There's two forms of things that, and teamer is actually talked about this. Professor Cronus talked about this. So one is he said, he said, this is the kind of unwind where what you're going to have is you're not going to have people in the other direction. You're going to have people who claim that they supported Trump all along who actually didn't. Right.
Right. So it's going to swing the other way. And by the way, Trump's not the only part of this, but he's just a convenient shorthand for a lot of this. But whatever it is, you'll have people who will say, well, I never supported the AI, or I never supported the ESG, or I never thought we should have canceled that person, where, of course, they were full on a part of the mob, kind of at that moment. And so anyway, so you'll have preference, falsification, happening in the other direction. And his prediction, I think, basically, is you'll end up with the same, quote, problem on the other side.
Will that happen here? I don't know how far is American society willing to go into these things? I don't know. But there is some question there. And then the other part of it is, okay, now you have this elite that is used to being in power for the last decade. And by the way, many of those people are still in power, and they're in very important positions, and the New York Times is still the New York Times, and Harvard is still Harvard, and those people haven't changed at all.
right uh... and they stand you know they've been the democrats in the government and you know senior democratic you know politicians and so forth and and they're sitting there you know right now feeling like reality is just smack them hard in the face because they lost the election so badly but they're not going into aid in specifically democratic party is going into a civil war
Right. And that form of the Civil War is completely predictable. And it's exactly what's happening, which is half of them are saying, we need to go back to the center. We need to de-radicalize because we've lost the people. We've lost the people in the middle. And so we need to go back to the middle in order to be able to get 50% plus one in an election. Right. And then the other half of them are saying, no, we weren't true to our principles. We were too weak. We were too soft. We must become more revolutionary. We must double down and we must celebrate murders in the street of health insurance executives. And that right now is like a real fight.
If I could tell you a little personal story that breaks my heart a little bit. There's a professor, historian, I won't say who I admire deeply, love his work. He's a kind of a heretical thinker. And we were talking about having a podcast, doing a podcast. And he eventually said that, you know what, at this time, given your guest list,
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 It would surprise a lot of people if I said who it is what you know This is a person who's not bothered by the 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 and that speaks to the thing that you've kind of mentioned that you just don't know what the headache is wanted. Just have a pleasant morning with some coffee and talk to your fellow professors and I think a lot of people 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 in 2060, 20 matters. And the contents of the private groups matters, and the dynamics of how that shifts matters. Because it's very possible, nothing really changes universities and in major tech companies. There's a kind of excitement right now for potential
Revolution and these new ideas, these new vibes, to reverberate through these companies and universities, but it's possible the wall will hold. 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? Yes.
You should use it. 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 top universities. It's like because the siren song for what it's been for 70 years, whatever, the tenure system, peer review system, tenure system, which is like, yeah, you work your butt off as an academic to get a professorship and then to get tenure because then you can say what you actually think.
Right? 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.
It's gone. 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.
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 that the population at large is going to realize the corruption in their industry and it's going to withdraw the funding.
It's okay, it's a desperation. No, no, no, no, think about what happens next. Okay, so let's go through it. The universities are funded by four primary sources of federal funding. The big one is the federal student loan program, which is in the many trillions of dollars at this point, and then only spiraling 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 university gets a research grant, the university rakes as much as 70% of the money for central uses. Number three is tax exemption at the operating level, which is based on the idea that these are nonprofit institutions as opposed to, let's say, political institutions. And then number four is tax exemptions at the endowment level, which is the financial buffer that these places have.
Anybody who's been close to a 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 don't necessarily go bankrupt. And then you could rebuild.
then you could rebuild. Cause the problem right now, you know, like the folks at university of Austin 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, you're now inserting, suppose we, 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. Oh, maybe the most direct reason we can't get access to that money. Uh, we can't get access to federal student funding. Do you know how universities are accredited, uh, 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 non-profits that do the accreditation. Guess what the composition of the accreditation bureaus is? The existing universities. They are in complete control. The incumbents are in complete control as to who gets access to post-student loan money. Guess how enthusiastic they are about accrediting a new university.
Right. And so we have a government funded and supported cartel, um, 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 in the on campus for being, you know, the wrong religion. And it's just, they're, they're just wrong in every possible way at this point. Um, and then there, it's all in the federal taxpayer back. Um, and there is no way, I mean, I, in my opinion, there is no way to fix these things without, without replacing them. Um, 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 does anything ever get better? Because things are tested and tried. And then the things that are good survive.
And so these places have cut themselves off. They've been allowed to cut themselves off from both from evolution at the institutional level and evolution at the individual level, as shown by the just widespread abuse of tenure. And so we've just stalled out. We built an ossified system, an ossified centralized corrupt system. We were surprised by the results. They are not fixable in their current form.
I disagree with you on that. Maybe it's grounded in hope that I believe you can revolutionize the system from within because I do believe Stanford and MIT are important. Oh, but that logic doesn't follow at all. That's underpants no logic.
Underpants, no more. Can you explain what that means? 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. Yes. And there is. Wow. And there is a, which by the way is a little aggressive for a nine year old. Very aggressive, but he likes it. So he's learning all kinds of new words and all kinds of new ideas. But yeah, I told him, I said, you're going to hear words on here that you are not allowed to use. Right. Education. And I said, do you know how we have an agreement that we never lied to mommy?
I said, not using a word that you learn in here does not count as lying. And keep that in mind or well in redefinition of lying. But yes, 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? We're off to the races. Yeah. Daddy, what's a dildo?
Um, yep. You know, I'm sorry. Sorry, son. I don't know. Yeah. Um, so, um, uh, other past notes. So famous episode of South Park, the underpants gnomes. And so the underpants gnomes. So there's, there's, there's this rat. All the kids basically realize that their underpants are going missing from their dresser drawers.
Somebody stealing the underpants, and it's just like, well, who on earth would steal the underpants? And it turns out it's the underpants gnomes. And it turns out the underpants gnomes have come to town, and they've got this little underground warren 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 the underpants gnomes, and they're, what are you doing? What's the point of this? And so the underpants gnomes present their master plan, which is a three-part plan, which is step one, collect underpants. Step three, profit. Step two, question mark.
Yeah. So you just proposed the underpants gnome, which is very common in politics. So the form of this in politics is we must do something. 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. Yeah, but it's the same thing. But this is what I hear all the time. And I will let you talk as the host of the show in a moment. But but here this all the time. I hear this. I have friends who are on these boards, right? They're very involved in these places. And I hear this all the time, which is like, Oh, these are very important. We must fix them. And so therefore they are fixable. There's no logic chain there at all.
If there's that pressure that you described in terms of cutting funding, then you have the leverage to fire a lot of the administration and have new leadership that steps up, that aligns with this vision that things really need to change at the heads of universities. And they put students and faculty to 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. It's this meaning like intellectual freedom, the idea of tenure, right? On the surface, it's aligned. Underneath has become corrupted. If we say free speech and academic freedom often enough, sooner or later, these tenured professors will get brave.
Wait, do you think the universities are fundamentally broken? Okay, so how do you fix it? How do you have institutions for educating 20 year olds and institutions that hosts researchers that have the freedom to do epic shit, like research type shit that's outside the scopes of R&D departments and inside companies? So how do you create an institution like that?
How do you create a good restaurant when the one down the street sucks? All right. You invent something new. You open a new restaurant? Yeah. Like how often in your life if you experienced a restaurant, this is 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 his great investor. Charlie Munger, the great comedy was once asked, he's like, you know, he was, you know, general electric was going through all these challenges. And he was asked to the Q and A said, how would you fix the culture of general electric? And he said, fix the culture of general electric. He said, I couldn't even fix the culture at a restaurant. Like it's insane. Like obviously you can't do it. I mean, nobody in business thinks you can do that. Like,
It's impossible. It's not. Now, look, having said all that, I should also express this because I have a lot of friends to work at these places and are involved in various attempts to fix these. I hope that I'm wrong. I would love to be wrong. I would love for the underpants gnome step two to be something clear and straightforward that they can figure out how to do. I would love to fix it. I'd love to see them come back to their spoken principles. I think that'd be great. I'd love to see the professors with tenure get bravery.
Um, I would love to see, I mean, it would be fantastic. Um, you know, my partner and I've 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. By the way, let me also say something positive, you know, especially post October 7th, there are a bunch of very smart people who are major donors and board members of these institutions like Mark Rowan, you know, who are really coming in trying to, you know, I think legitimately trying to fix these places. I have a friend on the executive committee at one of the top technical universities. He's working overtime to try to do this.
Man, I hope they can figure it out. But the counter question would just be like, do you see it actually happening in a single one of these places? I'm a person that believes in leadership. If you have the right leadership, the whole system can be changed. So here's a question for your friend who have tenure at one of these places, which is who runs his university. I think you know how I think runs it.
Whoever the fuck says they run it. That's what great leadership is. A president has that power. A president of university has the leverage because they can mouth off like Elon can. Can they fire the professors? They can fire them through being vocal publicly. Yes. They fire the professors.
What are you talking about? Can we find out? Can we not find the professors? Then we know who runs the university. The professors? Yeah, professors. The professors and the students, the professors and the Farrell students. Then they're, of course, in a radicalization feedback cycle driving you to the Farrell students. What happens when you're put in charge of your bureaucracy where the thing that the bureaucracy knows is that they cannot last you?
The thing that the tenured professors at all these places know is it doesn't matter who the president is because they cannot last 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 cannot last you. I mean, it's the whole thing that is the resistance. Like they can be the resistance. They can just sit there and resist.
which is what they do. They're not fireable. That's definitely a crisis 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 that the situation is dire, but I just think that institutions are important. And I should also add context, since you've been grilling me a little bit, you are using restaurants as an analogy
And earlier offline in this conversation, you said that Dairy Queen is a great restaurant. So let's say Dairy Queen is a great restaurant. Let the listener take that. I think Dairy Queen is the best restaurant. The best restaurant. There you go. So everything in my groceries is sick today. I don't want it to cut. You should go order a blizzard. Just one day you should walk down there and order a blizzard. Yeah. They can get like 4,000 calories in a cup. They can. And they're delicious. Amazing. They are truly delicious. They can. They'll put anything in there you want.
All right. Anyway, let me just close by saying, look, my friend's university system, I would just say, look, this is the challenge. I would just pose this as the challenge. To me, having had a lot of these conversations, this is the bar. In my view, this is the conversation that actually has to happen. This is the bar that actually has to be hit. These problems need to be confronted directly.
Because I think there's just, I think there's been way too much. I mean, I'm actually worried 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 to tolerate this for that much longer.
You've mentioned censorship a few times. Let us, if we can, go deep into the darkness of the past and how censorship 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.
that you were there when they invented or maybe developed the term hate speech in the context of censorship on social media. So take me through that history again, the use of censorship. So I was there on the ground floor in 1983. There's multiple floors to this building apparently. There are. Yeah. So I got the first ask to implement censorship on the internet.
Um, which was in the web browser. That is fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. And actually in 1882, uh, I was asked to implement a nudity filter. Did you have the courage to speak up back then? 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 look, in some sense, a legitimate request, which is working on a research project actually funded by the federal government at a public university. So I don't think my boss was in any way out of line, but it was like, yeah, this web browser thing is great, but 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-image net, right? And so I had a brief period where I tried to imagine an algorithm that I referred to as the breast detection algorithm that I was going to have to design. And then apparently a variety of other apparently body parts people are also sensitive about. And then I politely declined to do this for just the technical difficulties.
Well, number one, I actually didn't know how to do it, but number two is just like, no, I'm not building, I'm just not building a censorship engine. Like, I'm, you know, I'm just not doing it. And in those days, it was, you know, in those days, the internet generally was, you know, free fire zone for everything is 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. 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.
even politics at that time. So there really was not an issue there, but yeah, I didn't want to start the process. So I think the way to think about this. So first of all, yeah, so I was involved in this with Facebook every step. By the way, I've been involved with this with Facebook every step of the way. I joined the board there in 2007. So I saw I've seen everything in the last 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 and knew them really well. We were the founding investor in Substack.
I'm part of the elontic over of twitter with x i was an angel at linkedin so i i've been in these and we were the funder of pinterest we were one of the main investors there. Reddit as well and i was having these conversations with all these guys all the way through so as much talk specifically about facebook but i can just tell you like the general pattern and for quite a while it was kind of all the same across these companies.
Yeah, so basically the way to think about this, the true kind of nuanced view of this is that there is practically speaking no internet service that can have zero censorship. And by the way, that also mirrors there is no country that actually has limited free speech either.
The US First Amendment actually has 12 or 13 formal car bouts 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, they're 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.
You're always going to have a censorship engine. Hopefully it's not actually in the browser, but you're going to have it for sure at the level of an internet service. But then what happens is now you have a machine. Now you have a system where you can put in rules saying we allow this, we don't allow that. You have enforcement, you have consequences. And once that system is in place, it becomes the ring of power.
Right, which is like, okay, now anybody in that company or anybody associated with a 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 when there was this very, very kind of rapid pivot. I think the kickoff to it for some reason was the beginning of the Second Obama term. I think it also coincided with the sort of arrival of the first kind of Superwoke kids into these schools.
It's the kids that were in school for the Iraq war, and then the global financial crisis, and they came out super radicalized. They came into these companies. They immediately started mounting these social crusades to ban and censor lots of things.
And then, you know, quite frankly, the Democratic Party figured this out. And they figured out that these companies were very subject to being controlled. And the executive teams and boards of directors are almost all Democrats. And 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 law enforcement intelligence people came in and worked. And they were all Democrats.
for that set. And so they just, you know, the ring of power was lying on the table. It had been built and they, you know, pick it up and put it on. And then they just ran. 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 in which the answer is fair enough. Let's not have the N word. Okay. Now we set a precedent.
And then Jordan Peterson has talked a lot about this. The definition of hate speech ended up being things that make people uncomfortable. So we can't have things that make people uncomfortable. I, of course, people like me that are disagreeable, raise their hands and say, well, that idea right there makes me uncomfortable. But of course, that doesn't count as hate speech. So the ring of power is on one hand and not on the other hand.
And then basically that began this slide where it ended up being that, you know, completely anodyne is the point in markets 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, that the ring of power was wielded in grossly irresponsible ways we could talk about.
all the stuff that happened there. And then the other one was misinformation. And that wasn't as there was a little bit of that early on. But of course, that really kicked in with Trump. So the hate speech stop, the hate speech stop predated Trump by like three or four years. The misinformation stuff was basically, it was a little bit later and it was the 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 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? What do we know for 800 years or whatever Western civilization? It's that there's only a few entities that can determine the truth on every topic. There's God. There's the king. We don't have those anymore. And the rest of us are all imperfect in flawed. And so the idea that any group of experts is going to sit around the table and decide on the truth is deeply anti-Western and deeply authoritarian. And somehow the misinformation kind of crusade went from the Russiagate hoax into just full-blown
We're going to use that weapon for whatever we want. And then, of course, then the culminating moment on that that really was the straw that broke the camel's back was we're going to censor all theories that the COVID virus might have been manufactured in a lab as misinformation. And then inside these companies, like that was the point where people for the first time, this is like what three years ago, for the first time they were like,
And that was when it sucked in, where it's just like, OK, this has spun completely out of control. But anyway, that's how we got to where we are. And then basically that spell lasted. That complex existed and got expanded basically from college 2013 to 2023.
I think basically two things broke it. One is sub stack. And so when I'm super proud of those guys, because they started from scratch and declared right up front that they were going to be a free speech platform. And they came under intense pressure, including from the press, and they tried to beat them to the ground and kill them. And intense pressure, by the way, from, let's say, certain of the platform companies, basically threatening them.
And they stood up to it and, you know, sitting here today, they have the widest spectrum of speech 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. And then obviously, Elon, you know, with X was the, you know, the hammer below. And then I see the third one now is what Marcus doing at Facebook.
And there's also like singular moments. I think you've spoken about this, which like John Stewart going on Stephen Colbert and talking about the lab league theory. Yeah. I just, there's certain moments. They're just kind of shake everybody up. The right person, the right time, just it's a wake up call.
So that there, and I will tell you like, I should say, John Stewart attacked me recently, so I'm not that thrilled about him. But I would say I was a long run fan of John Stewart. I watched probably every episode of The Daily Show when he was on it for probably 20 years. But he did a very important public service, and it was that appearance on The Colbert Show. And I don't know how broadly this is, you know, at the time it was in the news briefly, but I don't know how if people remember this, but I will tell you in the rooms where people discuss what is misinformation and these policies. That was a very big moment. That was probably actually the key catalyzing moment.
And I think he exhibited, I would say, conspicuous bravery and had a big impact with that. And yeah, for people who don't recall what he did, and this was in the full blown, 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 Q and on person right and that was like uniform and that was enforced by the social media companies. And and and like I said that was the peak and and and John Stewart went on the call bear show and I don't know if they planted or not because go bear look 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 is wearing no clothes, things where he said, it's just not plausible that you had the COVID super virus appear 300 yards down the street from the Wuhan Institute of lethal coronaviruses. It's just not plausible that that certainly that you could just rule that out. And then there was another key moment actually, the more serious version was I think the author, Nicholson Baker wrote a big piece for New York magazine. And Nicholson Baker is like one of our great novelist writers of our time. And he wrote the piece and he did the complete addressing of it.
And that was the first, I think that was the first legit, there had been like, alt, you know, renegade, there had been, you know, people running around saying this, but getting censored all over the place. That was the first one that was like in the mainstream press where he, and he talked to all the heretics and he just like laid the whole thing out. And, and that was a moment. 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 a sensor 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 then the downstream, not that day, but the downstream conversations were like, okay, if we made such a giant, in retrospect, if we all made such a giant collective mistake, since we're in that, then what does that say about the rest of our regime? And I think that was the thread in the sweater that started to unravel it. I should say it again. I do think that John Stewart appearance in the statement he made was a courageous act.
I think we need to have more of that in the world. And like you said, Elon, everything he did with X is a series of courageous acts. And I think what Mark Zuckerberg did on Rogan a few days ago is a courageous act.
Can you just speak to that? He's becoming an outstanding communicator, right? And he's somebody who came in for a lot of criticism earlier in his career on that front. And I think he's one of these guys who can sit down and talk for three hours and make complete sense. And as you do with all of your episodes, when somebody sits and talks for three hours, you really get a sense of somebody because it's really hard to be artificial for that long. And he's not done that repeatedly. He's really good at it.
And then look, again, I would maybe put him in the third category now with, certainly after that appearance, I would say, I would put him up there now with, 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 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 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. I think his conception of what he's doing, which I think is correct, is he's running services that are bigger than any country. He's running over 3 billion people use of services. The company has many tens of thousands of employees and many investors, and it's a public company, and he thinks very deeply and seriously about his responsibilities.
Um, and so, you know, he has not felt like he has had, let's just say the complete flexibility that Elon has had. Um, and you know, people could argue that one way or the other, but you know, he's, he's, you know, yeah, he's, he's, you know, he talked about a lot. He's 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, um, 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 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. 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 active as complex coming at you. And then really critically, he talked about in Rogan, and these companies all went through this. In this last, especially five years, you had the government coming at you.
And that's the really stinky end of the pool where the government was, in my view, illegally exerting just in flagrant violation of the First Amendment and federal laws on speech and coercion and conspiracy forcing these companies to engage in activities. 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 just say, like I've known every CEO of Twitter, um, they, 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. Better matter. Yeah.
And he is in, 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.
And so 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, the cynicism, of course, is immediately out. It's a legitimate thing for people to say, but it's like, oh, you're only doing this because of Trump or whatever. And it's just like, no, 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 any time. So what do you think it's like to be him and other leaders of companies to be you and withstand internal pressure and external pressure? What's that life like? Is it deeply lonely?
That's a great question. So leaders are lonely to start with. And this is one of those things where almost nobody has sympathy. Nobody feels sorry for a CEO. It's not a thing. And again, legitimately so. CEOs get paid a lot. 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 is to a lonely job.
um, is because your words carry tremendous weight. Um, and you are dealing with extremely complicated issues and you're under a tremendous amount of emotional, you know, personal, emotional stress. Um, and you know, you often end up not being able to sleep well and you end up not being able to like, keep up and exercise routine and all those things. And you know, you're come under family stress cause you're working all the time or my partner, Ben, you know, was he was CEO of our last company before we started the venture firm. He, he said, you know, the problem he had like with, with his family life was he would, even when he was home at night, he wasn't home.
Because he was in his head trying to solve all the business problems. And so he was like supposed to be like him and 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. I have the 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 they can't resist like it's just human nature. And so you can't necessarily rely on what they say. It's very hard in most companies to talk to your board because they can fire you.
Now, Mark has the situation because he has control and actually turns out he can talk to his board and Mark talks to us about many things that most CEOs won't talk to their boards about because literally because we can't fire him. Including all the CEOs of Twitter, none of them had control and so they could all get fired. You can't talk to the board members who are going to fire you. You can't talk to the shareholders because they'll just dump your stock.
So every once in a while, what you find is basically the best case scenario they have is they can talk to other CEOs. And there's these little organizations where they kind of pair up and do that. And so they maybe get a little bit out of that. But even that's fraught with peril because can you really talk about confidential information with another CEO inside our trading risk? And so it's just a very lonely, isolating thing to start with. And then on top of that, you apply pressure.
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.
So, as long as the internal team is really bonded together and supporting each other, most forms of external pressure you can withstand. And by that, I mean, investors stop your stock, you lose your biggest customers, whatever negative headline.
You can withstand all that. In fact, many of those forms of pressure can be bonding experiences for the team where they come out stronger. What you 100% cannot withstand is the internal crack. And what I always look for in high pressure corporate situations now is the moment when the internal team cracks, because I know the minute that happens,
We're in a different regime like it's like the you know, the solid is turning to 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 is what's happening Los Angeles right now, the mayor and the fire chief turned on each other and that's it.
That government is dysfunctional. It is never going to get put back together again. It is over. It is not going to work ever again. And that's what happens to psych companies. Um, 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, um, 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? Yeah. Any CEO who thinks that they're bigger than their government has that notion beaten out of them in short order. Can you just linger on that? Because it is.
Uh, 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, flagrant criminality.
felonies, like obvious felonies. And I can actually cite the laws, but yes, absolutely criminality. Can you explain how those possible to happen? Maybe on a hopeful note, how we can avoid that happening again?
So as you just start with, there's a lot of this now is in the public record, which is good, because it needs to be in the public record. And so there's three forms of things that are in the public record that people can look at. So when 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, for the most part, certainly in terms of the kind of pressure that they got. So 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, and Facebook produced a lot of documents into that investigation, and many of those have now been made public, and you can download those reports, and there's like 2,000 pages worth of material on that. And that's essentially the Facebook version of the Twitter files just arrived at with a different mechanism. And then third is Mark himself talking about this on Rogan, so I'll just defer to his comments there.
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.
Um, and they just decided that they can just arbitrarily pressure, um, uh, just like literally arbitrarily call up companies and threaten and bully, um, and yell and scream and, and, you know, threaten repercussions and force people to force them to censor. Um, and you know, there's this whole thing of like, well, the first amendment only applies to, you know, the government 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 debanking either. Those are just as serious violations as the free speech violations.
And so this is just like flagrant on constitutional behavior. And then there are specific federal statutes. It's 18241 and 18242. And one of them applies to federal employees, government employees, and the other one applies to private actors around what's called deprivation of rights and conspiracy to deprive rights. 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. If the government takes away rights that you have, they don't need to be specifically enumerated rights in the Constitution in order to still be a felony. The Constitution 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 to access the financial system as 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, talked about the government employees, and then we've talked about the companies. The government employees, for sure, have misbehaved. The companies, there's a very interesting question there as to whether they are victims or perpetrators, or both.
Um, you know, they will defend and they will argue and I believe they have a good case that they are victims perpetrators, right? They are the downstream subjects of pressure, not the cause, you know, not the cause of pressure. But there's a big swath of people who are in the middle and specifically the ones that are funded by the government that I think are in possibly pretty big trouble.
And that's all of these third party censorship bureaus. I mean, the one that sort of is most obvious is the so-called Stanford Internet Observatory that got booted up there over the last several years. 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 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. So fundamentally, government should not do any kind of pressure, even soft pressure on companies to censor. Can't. Not allowed.
It really is disturbing. And you probably started soft, lightly, slowly, and then it escalates as the old will to power will instruct them to do. Because 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? There are so many ways that they can get you. Like, there are so many ways they can come at you and get you. And, you know, the thing here to think about is a lot of times when people think about government action, they think about legislation, right? Because you, so when I was a kid, we got trained at how does government work? There was this famous animated short, the thing we got shown is just the cartoon of how a bill becomes a law and it's like this, you know, if it's a little bill snicked along and guess this. I'm just a bill. Yeah. Exactly.
It's like, all right, number one, that's not how it works at all. That doesn't actually happen. We could talk about that. But even beyond that, mostly what we're dealing with is not legislation. When we talk about government power these days, mostly it's not legislation. Mostly it's either regulation, which is basically the equivalent of legislation, but having not gone through the legislative process, which is a very big open legal issue and one of the things that the doge is very focused on. Most government rules are not legislated. They're regulated. There's tons and tons of regulations that these companies are said.
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. So regulation is a big part of the way the power gets exercised. And then there's what's called just flat-out administrative power, the term that you'll hear. And administrative power is just literally the government calling you and telling you what to do.
Here's an example of this work. 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 sort of new cryptocurrency and they were going to build in every product and there were going to be three billion people who could transact with Libra and they went to the government and they went to the.
All these different try 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 have the whole thing ready to go. Two senators wrote letters to the big banks saying, we're not telling you that you can't work with Facebook on this. But if you do, you should know that every aspect of your business is going to come under greatly increased level of regulatory scrutiny.
which is, of course, the exact equivalent of it sure is a nice corner restaurant you have here. It would be a shame if somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail through the window and burned it down tonight. What is that letter? It's not a law. It's not even a regulation. It's just straight direct state power. And then it culminates in literally calls from the White House, where they're just flat out telling you what to do, which is, of course, what a king gets to do, but not what a president gets to do.
Um, and so anyway, so this bait. 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. And then just like flat out demands and then flat out threats were ultimately the most important. How do you fix it? Well, first of all, like you have to elect people who don't do it. So like as with all these things, ultimately the fault lies with the voters.
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 I, 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 sort of censorship.
So the voters definitely get a vote. Number one, number two, I think you need transparency. You need to know what happened. We know some of what happened. Peter Thiel has written in the FT just now saying we just need like, after what we've been through in the last decade, we need a broad-based truth and reconciliation efforts to really get to the root of things. So maybe that's part of it.
We need investigations for sure. Ultimately, we need prosecutions. We need ultimately, we need people to go to jail because we need to set object lessons that say that you don't get to do this. On those last two, I would say that those are both up to the new administration. I don't want to speak for them and I don't want to predict what they're going to do, but they for sure have the ability to do both of those things. We'll see where they take it.
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.
So I use the metaphor of the Ring of Power for people who don't catch the reference as Lord of the Rings. And the thing with the Ring of Power and Lord of the Rings, it's the ring that Gollum has in the beginning and it turns you invisible and it turns out it unlocks all this first and powerful thing in the world is to keep everything. And basically, the moral lesson of Lord of the Rings, which was written by a guy who thought very deeply about these things is, yeah, the Ring of Power is inherently corrupting.
The characters at one point, they're like, end off, just put on the ring and like fix this, right? And he's like, he will not put the ring on even to like end of the war because he knows that it will corrupt him. And then, you know, the character starts, the character of Gollum is the result of, you know, just 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 there, which is the ring of power is infinitely tempting.
You know, the censorship machine is infinitely tempting. 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.
Can I ask you a tough question here? Staying on the ring of power. Elon is quickly becoming the most powerful human on earth. Uh, I'm not sure about that. You don't, you don't think he, well, he doesn't have the nukes. So nukes.
Yeah, there's different definitions and perspectives on power, right? How can he and or Donald Trump avoid the corrupting aspects of this power?
I mean, I think the danger is there with power. It's just, it's flat out there. I, I would say with Elan, I mean, we'll, you know, we'll see. I would say with Elan 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 some combination of the money and the, the, in the proximity to the president. Um, and obviously both of those are, are instruments of power.
The kind of argument to that is I do think a lot of how Elon is causing change in the world right now. I mean, there's, there's the companies he's running directly where I think he's doing very well. And we're investors and multiple of them and doing very well. 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, 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 it's actually a preface 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 massive explosion of basically open conversation about it for the first time. And it's like this catalyzing. All of a sudden, everybody's kind of woken up and being like, oh, my God, this is really bad. And there will be now pretty pretty clearly big changes as a result.
And Elon was, you know, he played the role of the boy who said the emperor has no clothes, right? But here's the thing, here's my point. Like, he said it about something that was true, right? And so had he said it about something that was false, you know, he would get no credit for it. 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, like 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? But 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. And so.
I don't feel that bad about that. And then the money side, this rapidly gets into the money and politics question. And the money and politics question is a very interesting question because it seems like if there's a clear cut case that the more money and 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 says all most vanished as a topic in the last eight years. And once again, Trump spent far less, you know, Kamala raised and spent 1.5 billion on top of what Biden spent. So they were, they were, I don't know, something like three, three billion total in Trump, I think spent again, like a third or a fourth of that. And so the money in politics kind of topic has kind of vanished from the popular conversation in the last eight years. It has come back a little bit now that Elon is spending.
But again, it's like, okay, he's spending, but the data would seem to indicate in the last, at least in 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 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 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 use it in a definitive way.