Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America | Lex Fridman Podcast #458

I mean look we're adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days right now and it's now passing the size of the defense department budget and it's compounding and it's pretty soon it's going to be adding a trillion dollars every 90 days and then it's going to be adding a trillion dollars every 80 days and then it's going to be a trillion dollars every 70 days and then if this doesn't get fixed at some point we enter a hyperinflationary spiral and we become Argentina or Brazil and the following is a conversation with Mark

andreon his second time on the podcast Mark is a Visionary Tech leader 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 andreon Horwitz and is one of the most influential voices in the tech world including at the intersection of technology and politics this is Freedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Mark and

Reon 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 couple things it is remarkable over the last several years with all of the issues including you know every not just everything in politics but also Co and every other thing that's happened it's really amazing the United States just kept

growing if you just look at economic growth charts the US just kept growing and very significantly many other countries stopped growing so Canada stopped growing the UK has stopped growing Germany has stopped growing and you know some of those countries may be actually going backwards at this point and there's a very long discussion to be had about what's wrong with those countries and there's of course plenty of things that are wrong with our country but um the US is just Flatout primed for growth um and I think that's a consequence of many factors um you

know some of which were are lucky and some of which through hard work and so the lucky part is just you know number one you know we just have like incredible physical security by being our own continent um you know we have incredible natural resources right there's there's there's this running joke now that like whenever it looks like the us is going to run out of some like Rare Earth material you know some farmer in North Dakota like kicks over a hay bale and finds like a $2 trillion deposit right I mean we're just like

blessed you know with with with geography and with natural resources um energy you know we can be energy independent anytime we want um this last Administration decided they didn't want to be they wanted to turn off American Energy this new Administration has declared that they have a goal of turning it on in a dramatic way there's no question we can be energy independent we can be a giant net energy exporter it's purely a question of choice um and I think the the new Administration is going to do that um and so we and oh and

then I would say two other things one is um you know we we are the beneficiaries and you know you're an example of this for a beneficiary for the beneficiary of you know 50 100 200 years of like the basically most aggressive driven smartest people in the world most capable people you know moving to the US and raising their kids here um and so we just have you know by far the most dynamic you know we're by far the most dynamic population most aggressive um you know we're the most aggressive set of characters in certainly

any in any Western Country and have been for a long time and certainly are today um and then finally I would just say look we are overwhelmingly the advanced technology leader um you know we we have our issues and we have a a particular issue with manufacturing which we could talk about but for you know anything in software anything in AI anything in um you know all these you know Advanced biotch all these Advanced areas of Technology like we're we're by far the leader again in part because many of the best scientists and engineers in

those fields you know you know come to the US um and so we we we just we have all of the preconditions for a uh for just a monster um boom you know I could see economic growth going way up I could see productivity growth going way up rate of Technology adoption going way up and then we could we can do a global tour if you like but like basically all of our competitors have like profound issues and you know we could kind of go through them one by one but the the competitive landscape just

is it's like it's it's remarkable how U how how much better positioned we are for growth what about the humans themselves almost a philosophical questions you know I travel across the world and there's something about the American Spirit the entrepreneurial Spirit that's uniquely intense in America I don't know what that is uh I've talked to Saga who claims it might be the Scots Irish blood that runs through uh the history of America what is it you at the heart of Silicon Valley is there something in the water why is there's this entrepreneurial Spirit yeah so

is this a family show or am I allowed to swear you you can say whatever the fuck you want okay so the T the great TV show succession the show of course that with which you were intended to root for exactly zero of the characters yes the best line from succession was in the final episode of the first season when the whole family is over in uh Logan Roy and Cal 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's like my he says finally just says my God I cannot wait to get out of here and go back to America where we can fuck without condoms uh was that a metaphor or okay exactly right and so no but it's exactly the thing and then everybody instantly knows what like everybody watching that instantly starts laughing cuz you know what it means which is it's exactly this I think there's

like an ethnographic you know way of it there's a bunch of books on like all like you said the Scots Irish like all the different derivations of all the different ethnic groups that have come to the US over the course of the last 400 years right but it's and what we have is this sort of amalgamation of like you know the you know the the Northeast you know Yankees who were like super tough and hardcore yeah the Scots Irish are super aggressive you know we've got the you know the southerners and the Texans uh you

know and the and you know the sort of you know whole kind of Blended you know kind of Anglo Hispanic thing with you know super incredibly tough strong driven you know capable character you know the Texas Rangers um you know we've got the yeah we've got the California you know we've got the you know the wild we've got the incredibly you know 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 um and so yeah there there there is you know the the the the you know say all of our problems I think are basically you know in my view to some extent you know attempts to basically sand all that off and make everything basically boring and mediocre but there is something in the National spirit that basically keeps bouncing back and it and and basically what we discover over time is we we basically just need people to stand up at a certain point and say you know it's time to you

know it's time to build it's time to grow you know it's time to do things um and so and there's something in the American Spirit that just like Worth 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 80s um you know because the the the 70s were like horribly depressing right in the in the US like it was they were a nightmare on many fronts and in a lot of ways the last decade to me has

felt a lot like the' 70s just being mired in misery um and just this self-defeating you know negative attitude and everybody's upset about everything and you know and then by the way like energy crisis and hostage crisis and Foreign Wars and just demoralization right um you know the low point for in the 70s was you know 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 yep 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 roared really hard for a full decade and I 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 some there's a bunch of components to that one of which is economic yes and one of which maybe you can put a word on it of not to be romantic or anything but Freedom uh individual Freedom economic

freedom political freedom and just in general individualism yeah that's right yeah you know America has this incredible streak of individualism you know individualism in America probably PE I think between roughly call it the end of the Civil War 1865 through to probably call it 1931 or something um you know and there was this like incredible r i mean that period you know we now know that period is the Second Industrial Revolution and it's when the United States basically assumed Global Leadership and basically took took over technological and economic leadership from from England um and then

you know that that led to you know ultimately then therefore being able to you know not only industrialize the world but also win World War II and then win the Cold War um and yeah you know there's a massive industrial you know massive individualistic streak um by the way you know Milton fre Milton fredman's old videos are all on YouTube they are every bit as compelling and inspiring yeah um as they uh as they were then um you know he's he's a singular figure and many of us you know have you know I never knew

him but um he was at actually at Stanford for many years at the Hoover institution but uh I never met him but I know a lot of people who worked with him and you know that you know he was he was a singular figure but his his all all of his lessons you know live on or fully available um but I would also say it's not just individualism and this is you know one of this is one of the big things it's like playing out in a lot of our culture and kind of political fights

right now which is you know basically this feeling you know certainly that I have and I share with a lot of people which is it it's not enough for America to just be an economic zone um 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 uh at play and and and also you know there there there's more to a country uh than just that and and you know quite quite frankly a lot

of it is intangible um a lot of it is you know involves Spirit um and passion and you know I said we we have more of it than anybody else um but um you know we we have to choose to want it the way I look at it is like all of our problems are self-inflicted like they're you know decline is a choice you know all of our problems are basically demoralization campaigns you know basically people telling us people in positions of authority telling us that we should you know we shouldn't you know stand out

we shouldn't be adventurous we shouldn't be exciting we shouldn't be exploratory you know we shouldn't you know this that and the other thing and we should feel bad about everything that we do and I think we've lived through a decade where that's been the prevailing theme and I I think I think quite honestly as of November I think people are done with it if we could go on a tangent of a tangent since we're talking about individualism and that's not all that it takes you've mentioned in the past the book the ancient city yes by

if I can only pronounce the name French historian num I don't know 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 um so that book is written by this guy um as a I'm let let Lex do the pronunciations the foreign language pronunciations for the day um he was a professor Classics um at uh the sbon in um in uh Paris you know the top university uh

at um in the in the actually in the 1860s so actually R around after the US Civil War and he was a Sant of a particular kind which is he and you can see this in the book as he had apparently read and you know sort of absorbed and memorized every possible scrap of Greek and and Roman literature um and so it's like a walk 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 he he had access to the exact same R 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 and Society was like and these were the people who were now known as the as the indo-europeans and these were you may heard to these these are the people who came

down from the steps and so they they they came out of what's now like Eastern Europe like around sort of the outskirts of what's now Russia um and then they sort of swept through uh Europe they ultimately took over all of Europe by the way you know almost many of the ethnicities in the Americas the hundreds of years that follow you know are Indo European and so like you know they were this basically this Warrior basically class that like came down and swept through and and um and you know essentially um you know populated much

of the world um and there's a whole interesting Saga there but what he does and then they basically they from there came basically what we know is the Greeks and the Romans were kind of Evolutions off of that um and so what he reconstructs is sort of what like 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 this is living in the state of the absolute imperative for survival with absolutely no technology right like

no modern systems no nothing right you've got the clothes in your back you've got your you know you you've got whatever you can build with your bare hands right this is you know predates basically all concepts of of of Technologies we understand them today and so these are people under like maximum levels of physical survival pressure and so what what social p did they evolve to be able to do that and then the social pattern basically was as follows um is a a three-part social structure family um tribe and city um and um zero concept

of individual rights um 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 um into a city um and then the morality was completely it was actually what n talks n 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 you it more important for you to live on your feet as a master even at the risk of dying or are you willing to um you know live as a slave on your knees in order to not die and this is sort of the the derivation of that moral framework Christianity later inverted that moral framework but you know the the original framework lasted for you know many many thousands of

years no conserv individualism the head of the family had total life and death control over the over over the family the head of the tribe same thing head of the city same thing and then you were morally obligated to kill members of the of the other cities on on contact right 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 right and and sort of the point of being in one of these collectives is that it's a collective and and and you know and people are sharing and of course that limited how big they could get because you know the problem with Communism is it doesn't scale right it works at the level

of a family it's much harder to make it work at the level of a country impossible maximum fascism maximum communism and then and then it was all int intricately uh tied into their relig religion and their their religion was it was in two parts it was uh veneration of ancestors um and it was veneration of Nature and the veneration of ancestors is extremely important because it was basically like basically the ancestors were the people who got you to where you were the ancestors were the people who had everything to teach you right and then it

was veneration of nature because of course nature is the thing that's trying to kill you um and then you had your ancestor every family tribe or city had their ancestor gods and then they had their um they had their nature Gods okay so fast forward to today like we live in a world that is like radically different but and the book takes you through kind of what happened from that through the Greeks and Romans through the Christianity and so the but but it's very helpful to kind of think in these terms because the conventional view

of the progress through time is that we are you know the cliche is the Arc of the moral Universe you know benro Justice right or so-called wig history which is you know that the Arc of progress is positive right and so we we you know what you hear all the time what you're taught in school and everything is you know every year that goes by we get better and better and more and more moral and more and more Pur and a better version of of ourselves our Indo ancestors would say oh no like you people

have like Fallen to shit like you people took all of the principles of basically your civilization and you have deluded them down to the point where they barely even matter you know and you're having you know children out of wedlock and you're you know you regularly encounter people of other cities and you don't try to kill them and like how crazy is that and and they would basically consider us to be living like an incredibly diluted version of this sort of Highly religious highly cult-like right highly organized highly fascist fascist communist Society I can't resist

no 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 nature declares God is dead we're in a secular society you know that still has you know tinges of Christianity but you know largely Prides itself on no longer being religious in that way um you know we being the sort of most fully evolved modern secular you know expert scientists and so forth have basically re-evolved or Fallen back on the exact same religious structure uh that the indo-europeans had uh

specifically ancestor worship which is identity politics um and nature worship which is environmentalism um and so we have actually like worked our way all the way back to their cult religions without realizing it and and and it just goes to show that like you know in some ways we have fallen far from the far from the family tree but in some in some cases we're exactly the same you kind of described this Progressive idea of wokeism and so on as uh worshiping ancestors identity politics is worshiping ancestors right it's it's it's tagging newborn infants with

either you know or responsibilities or you know levels of condemnation based on who their ancestors were the Indo Europeans would have recognized it on site we somehow think it's like super socially Progressive yeah and it is not I mean I would say obviously not you know get get nuanced which is where I think you're headed which is look like is the idea that you can like completely reinvent Society every generation and have no regard whatsoever for what came before you that seems like a really bad idea right that's like the cambodians with year zero under

P pot and you know death you know follows it's obviously the Soviets tried that um you know the the you know the the utopian fantasists who think that they can just rip up everything they came before and create something new in The Human Condition in human society have a very bad history of of causing you know enormous destruction so on the one hand it's like okay there there is like a deeply important role for tradition and and and the way I think about that is it's the process of evolutionary learning right which is what what

tradition ought to be is the distilled wisdom of all and and you know this is how IND Europeans thought about it should be the distilled wisdom of everybody who came before you right all those important and Powerful learned um and that's that's why I think it's fascinating to go back and study how these people lived is cuz that's that's part of the history and you know part of the learning that got us to where we are today having said that there are many cultures around the world that are you know mired in Tradition to the

point of not being able to progress um 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 trend setters and they're allowed to like set all the agendas and like settle the politics and settle 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 gerres 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 um and so I I would say is like there's a down there's there's a real downside you know full traditionalism is communitarianism you know it's ethnic particularism um you know it's ethnic chauvinism it's um you know this incredible level of of resistance to change

um you know that's I mean it just doesn't get you anywhere like it it may be good and fine at the level of individual tribe but it's a societ society living in the modern world you can't evolve you can't you can't Advance you can't participate in all the good things that you know that that have happened and so you know I think probably this is one of those things where extremeness on either side is probably a bad idea um and I but you know but but this needs to be approached in a sophisticated and Nuance

way so the beautiful picture you painted of the Roaring 20s how can the Trump Administration play A Part and 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 um you know and then again this is a replay of what happened in the 60s and 70s which is you know for what started out looking like you know I'm sure good and virtuous purposes you know we we ended up both then and now with this you

know what I what I describe as sort of a form of soft authoritarianism you know the good news is it's not like a military dictatorship it's not like you know you get thrown into Lu Bianca you know for the most part it's not coming at four in the morning you're not getting dragged off to a cell so it's not hard authoritarianism but it is soft authoritarianism and so it's this you know incredible suppressive blanket of Regulation rules you know this concept of a ocracy right what's required to get anything done you know you need to

get 40 people to sign off on anything any one of them can veto it you know a lot of how now political system works um and then you know just this general idea of you know progress is bad and technology is bad and capitalism is bad and building businesses is bad and success is bad um you know tall poppy syndrome you know basically anybody who sticks their head up you know deserves to get it you know chopped off anybody who's wrong about anything deserves to get condemned forever you know just this this very kind of

you know grinding you know repression and then coupled with specific government actions such as censorship regimes right and Deb banking right um 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's let all the criminals out of jail and see what happens right um and so like we 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 um and the Biden Administration reached kind of the full Pinnacle of that in in in our time they they got really bad on on many fronts at the same time um and so just like relieving that um and getting kind of back to IR reasonably you know kind of optimistic destructive um you know progrowth frame of mind um there's just there's so much pent up

energy and potential in the American system that that alone is going to I think cause you know growth and and and and and spirit to take off and then there's a lot of things proactively that yeah and then there's a lot of things proactively that could be done so how do you Rel that to what degree has the thing you describ ideologically permeated government and permeated big companies disclaimer 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 prct predict politics or Washington

at all um but I would just say that the the plans and intentions are clear and the Staffing supports it um and all the conversations are consistent um with the new Administration and that they plan to take you know very rapid action on a lot of these fronts very quickly they're going to do as much as they can through executive orders and then they're going to do legislation and and Regulatory changes for the rest and so they're they're going to move I think quickly on a whole bunch of stuff you can already feel I think

a shift of the national Spirit or at least let's put it this way I feel it for sure in in Silicon Valley like it it you I mean we we you know we just saw a great example of this with what you know with what Mark Zuckerberg is doing um you know obviously I'm I'm involved with with his company but you know we we just saw it kind of in public the scope of and speed of the changes you know are are reflective of of sort of this of a lot of these shifts but I

would say that that same conversation those same kinds of things are happening throughout the industry right and so the the tech industry itself whether people were Pro Trump or antitrump like there's just like a giant Vibe shift mood shift that's like kicked in already and then I was with a group of Hollywood people about two weeks ago um and they were still you know people who at least at least vocally were still very antitrump but I said you know has anything changed since since November 6 and they they immediately said oh it's completely different um

it feels like the Isis Tha um you know woke us over um you know they said that all kinds of projects are going to be able to get made now they couldn't before that you know Hollywood's going to start making comedies again you know like it it they were just like it's like it's like a just like an incredible immediate uh environmental change and I'm as I talk to people kind of throughout you know certainly throughout the economy people who run businesses I I hear that all the time which is just this this last 10

years of misery is just over I mean the one that I'm watching that's really funny I mean Facebook's getting a lot meta is getting a lot of attention but the other funny one is Black Rock 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 fin who's the CEO of Black Rock was like first in as a major you know investment CEO on like every dumb social Trend and Rule set like every all right I'm going for it every retarded every retarded

thing you can imagine yeah every ESG and every like every possible saddling companies with every aspect of just the these crazed ideological positions and you know he was coming in he literally was like had AG aggregated together trillions of dollars of of of of of of shareholdings that he did not that were you know that were his his customers rights and he you know seized their voting control of their shares and was using it to force all these companies to do all of this like crazy ideological stuff and he was like the tyho Mary of

all this stuff in Corporate America and and he in the last year has been like backpedaling from that stuff like as fast as he possibly can and I saw just an example last week he pulled out of the whatever the corporate Net Zero Alliance you know he pulled out of the crazy energy energy energy stuff and so like you know he's backing away as fast as he can he's doing remember the Richard prior um backwards walk Richard PRI had this way where he could he could back out of a room while looking like he was

walking forward um and so um you know even they're doing that um and just the whole thing I mean I if you saw the court recently ruled that NASDAQ had these crazy board of directors composition rules one of the funniest moments in 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 um and so we sat around the table and had to figure out you know which of us counted as diverse and the um very professional Attorneys at

at meta explained with a 100% complete um straight face that Peter teal counts as diverse uh by virtue of being LGBT and and this is a guy who literally wrote a book called The diversity myth yeah um and he literally looked like he swallowed alive goldfish um and and that and this was imposed I mean this was like so incredibly offensive to 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 um and it was imposed by NASDAQ you know your

Stock Exchange imposing the stuff on you and then the court whatever the court court of appeals just nuked that you know so like the these things basically are being like ripped down one by one and and and what's on the other side of it is basically you know finally being able to get back to you know everything that you know everybody always wanted to do which is like run their companies have great products happy customers you know like succeed like succeed achieve outperform um and you know work with the best and the brightest and not

and not be made to feel bad about it and I I think that's happening in many areas of American society it's great to hear that Peter teal is fundamentally A diversity higher well so it was very you know there was a moment so so Peter you know Peter of course um you know is is uh you know is publicly gay has been for a long time you know but you know there are other men on the board right and you know we're sitting there and we're all looking at it and we're like all right like

okay LGBT and we just we keep coming back to the B right um 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 like you know um 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 I've become very good at asking um uh lawyers uh completely absurd questions with a totally straight face

and do they answer with a straight face law sometimes okay I think In fairness they have trouble telling when I'm joking so you mentioned the the Hollywood folks maybe people in Silicon Valley and Vibe shift maybe you can speak to um preference falsification what do they actually believe how many of them actually hate Trump what like what percent of them are uh feeling this Vibe shift and are interested in uh creating the Roaring 20s in the way they've described so first we should maybe talk po population so there's like all of Silicon Valley um and

and the way to just measure that is just look at voting records right and and and what that shows consistently Silicon Valley is just a you know at least historically my entire time there has been overwhelmingly majority just straight up Democrat um uh the other way to look at that is political donation records and again you know the political donations in the valley you know range from 90 to 99% you know to one side um and so you know we'll we'll I just bring it up because like we'll see what happens with the voting and

with donations going forward um I 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 um I don't want to get into the fire but like it's catastrophic and you know there was already a rightward shift in the big cities in California and I think a lot of people in LA are really thinking about things right now as they're trying to you know literally save their houses and save their families um but you know even in San Francisco there was

a big right there was a big shift to the right in the voting um in um in 24 so we'll see where we'll see where that goes but you know you observe that by just looking at looking at the numbers over time um the part that I'm more focused on is you know and I don't know how to exactly describe this but it's like the top thousand or the top 10,000 people right um and um you know I don't have a list but like it's the you know it's all the top Founders top CEOs top

Executives top Engineers top VCS you know and then kind of into the ranks um you know the people who kind of build and run the companies um and there there you know I don't have numbers but I have a much more tactile feel you know for for for what's happening um so I the big thing I I have now come to believe is that the idea that people have beliefs is mostly wrong um I think that most people just go along um and I think even most high status people just go along and I think

maybe the most high status people are the most prone to just go along because they're the most focused on status um and the way I would describe that is um you know one of the great forbidden philosophers of our time is the uni bomber uh Ted kazinski 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 you know at Harvard Super Genius um not that those are in Conflict um but shot fired yeah but uh he it was

a very bright guy and he he did this whole thing um where he talked about basically he he was very right-wing and talked about leftism a lot um and he had this great concept that's just stuck in my mind ever since I read it which is see this concept just called over social overs socialization um and so you know most people are social most people are socialized like most people are you know we live in a society most people learn how to be part of a society they give some different 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 um why are these positions not the same as they were 5 years ago right um 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 as true today 30 years later and so I I think most people are just literally take I think they're taking their cues from it's some combination the press the universities the big foundations so it's like basically it's like the New York Times Harvard the

Ford foundation and you know I don't know um you know a few CEOs um and a few public figures and you know maybe you know maybe the president if your 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 the organs of power

right so Harvard and Ne believe the exact same thing the New York Times The Washington Post believe the exact same thing the Ford foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation believe the exact same thing Google and you know whatever you know Microsoft believe the exact same thing um but those things change over time but there's never conflict in the moment right um 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 the lock step was

What mattered um and so I I think basically we we in the valley we're on the tail end of that in the same way Hollywood's on the tail end of that and the same way New York's on the ta end that the same way the media's on the tail end that it's it's like some sort of collective H 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 rockle beliefs but they don't actually have like some inner core of rockle 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 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 like uh when you go outside the inner circle of one 2 3 four people who you really trust then you start to conform but inside there inside the mind there is an actual belief or a struggle attention with the New York Times or with the uh for the listener there's a there's a slow smile that overtook Mark Andre's

face so look I'll just tell you what I think which is at at at the dinner parties and at the conferences no there's none of that um it's what what there is is that all of the heretical conversations anything that challenges the status quo um any heretical ideas and any new idea you know is a heretical idea um any deviation it's either just a one-onone face to face it's 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 oh yeah humor somebody cracks a joke right somebody cracks a joke y if the other person laughs the conversation is on yeah yeah if the other person doesn't laugh back slowly away from the scene yeah I didn't mean anything by it yeah right 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 S bankman freed term one of the shth you know it has to be up against one of the things um of um you know one of the things that you're absolutely required to believe to be the dinner parties and then and then at that point what happens is you have a peer-to-peer Network right you have you have you have a a onetoone connection with somebody and then you you have your you have your your your little conspiracy of thought thought criminality

um and then you have your you probably been through this you have your network of thought criminals and then they have their network of thought criminals and then you have this like delicate mating dance as to whether you should bring the thought criminals together M right um and the dance the fundamental uh mechanism of the dance is humor yeah is humor like CU right well of course memes yeah well for two for two reasons number one number one humor is a way to have deniability right humor is a way to discuss serious things without without

without with having deniability oh I'm sorry it was just a joke right so so that's part of it which is one of the reasons why comedians can get away with saying things the rest of us can't is you know 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 is that laughter is involuntary right like you either laugh or you don't and and it's not like a conscious decision whether you're going to laugh and everybody can tell when somebody's fake laughing

right and this every professional comedian knows this right the laughter is the clue that you're onto something truthful like people don't laugh at like made up bullshit stories they laugh cuz like you're revealing something that they either have not been allowed to think about or have not been allowed to talk about right or is off limits and all of a sudden it's like the ice breaks and it's like oh yeah 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

as cuz 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 all there 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 the whether you can sort of join the networks

together and then you've probably been to this is you know then at some point there's like a different there's like the alt dinner party uh the ther middle dinner party and you get six or eight people together and you join the networks and those are like the happiest Mo at least in the last decade those are like the happiest moments of everybody's lives cuz they're just like everybody's just ecstatic cuz 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 um so so that's the live version of it and then the and then of course the other side of it is the you know the group chat the group chat phenomenon um right and then this and then basically the same thing played out you know until until Elon bought X and until substack took off um you know which were really the two big breakthroughs in free speech online the same Dynamic played on online which is you had absolute Conformity on the social networks like literally enforced by the social networks

themselves through censorship and and then also through cancellation campaigns and mobbing and shaming right and and but then you had but but then group chats grew up to be the equivalent of s do right anybody who grew up in the Soviet Union under you know communism know you know they had the hard version of this right it's like how do you know who you could talk to and then how do you distribute information and you know like you know again that was the hard authoritarian version of this and then we've been living through this weird

mutant you know soft authoritarian version but with you know with some of the same patterns and what's app allows you to scale it make it more efficient to uh to build on these uh groups of heretical ideas bonded by humor yeah exactly well and this is the thing and well this is kind of the running joke about group the running running kind of thing about group chats it's not even a joke it's true it's like it's like every group chat if you 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 as you can get without actually tripping it right and like literally every group chat that I have been in for the last decade even if it starts some other direction what ends up happening is it becomes the Absolute Comedy Fest where but it's walking they walk right up the line and they're constantly testing and every once in a while somebody will trip the line and people

will freak out and it's like oh too soon okay you know we got to wait till next year to talk about that you know they they walk it back and so it's that same thing and yeah and then group chats is a technological phenomenon it was amazing to see because basically it was number one it was you know obviously the rise of smartphones then it was the rise of the of the the new messaging services um then it was the rise specifically of I would say combination of What's Happen signal and the reason for that

is those were the two the two big systems that did the full encryption um so you actually had you actually felt safe and then the real breakthrough I think was disappearing messages uh which hit signal probably four or five years ago and hit WhatsApp three or four years ago and then the combination of um the combination of encryption and um uh and disappearing messages I think really unleash it well then there's the fight then there's the fight over the the the length of the disappearing mess mes right and so it's like you know I often

get behind my my thing so I set to 7day you know disa messages and my friends who you know 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 up the choices between 24 hours and you know 7 days one day or seven days and I I have to have an existential crisis deciding yes whether I

can last for seven days with what I'm about to say yeah exactly now of course what's happening right now is the big thaw right and so the VIP shift so what's happening on the other on the other side of of the election is you know Elon on Twitter two years ago and now Mark with Facebook and Instagram and by the way with the continued growth of substack and with other you know new platforms that are emerging you know like I I think it may be you know I don't know that everything just shifts back into

public but like a tremendous amount of the uh a tremendous amount of the verboten um uh conversations you know can now Shi back in into public view um and I mean quite frankly and this is one of those things you know quite frankly even if I was opposed to what those know people are saying and I'm sure I am in some cases um you know I I would argue it's still like net better for society that those things happen in public instead private um you know do do you really want like yeah like don't you

want to know yeah um and and so and 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 to push back to come back to this idea that we were talking about I do believe that people have beliefs and thoughts that are heretical like a lot of people I wonder what fraction of people have that to me this is the preference falsification is really interesting what is the landscape of ideas that human civilization has in

private as compared to what's out in public cuz like that the the the dynamical system that is the difference between those two is fascinating like there's throughout history the the fall of Communism in multiple regimes throughout Europe is really interesting because everybody was following you know the line until not but you better for sure privately there was a huge number of boiling conversations happening where like this is this the bureaucracy of Communism the corruption of Communism all of that was really bothering people more and more and more and more and all of a sudden there's

a trigger that allows the vibe shift to happen so to me like the the interesting question here is what is the landscape of private thoughts and ideas and conversations that are happening under the surface of uh of of Americans especially my question is how much dormant energy is there for this Roaring 20s where people are like no more bullshit let's get shit done yeah so let's go through the we'll go through the theory of preference falsification just just by the way amazing the books on this is fascinating yeah yeah so this is this is exactly

this is one of the UL time great books incredibly about 20 30y old book but it's very it's completely modern and current in what it talks about as well well is very deeply historically informed um so it's called private truths public lies and it's written by a social science Professor named Ur Kuran um at I think Duke um and it's it's definitive work on this and so he 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 lies so preference falsification is when you believe something and you can't say it or and this is very important you don't believe something and you must say it right um and and and and and the commonality there is in both cases you're lying you you believe you believe something internally and then and then you're lying about it in public um and so the the thing you know and and there's sort of two two classic forms of it there's the I you know for example there's the I believe communism is rotten but I can't say

it version of it um but then there's also the the the famous Parable the real life example but um the thing that vaslav hav talks about in the other good book on this topic which is the power of the powerless um you know who is an anti-communist resistance F who ultimately became the you know the the president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the wall but he wrote this book and he he describes the other side of this which is um workers of the World Unite right and so he he describes what he calls the

parable of the green grer which is your green grer in Prague in 1985 um and for the last 70 years it has been or 50 years it's been absolutely mandatory to have a sign in the window of your story this says 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 of all the things that could happen in the world that is not going to happen the commies have been at that for 70 years it is

not happening but that slogan had better be in your window every morning because if it's not in your window every morning you are not a good communist the secret police are going to come by and they're they're going to get you um and so the first thing you do when you get to the stories you put that slogan in the window and you make sure that it stays in the window all day long and but he says the thing is every single person the green grer 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 story knows that the green grosser is only putting it up there because he has to lie in public um and the green grosser 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 it it turns into demoralization campaign it it it's 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 man fuck you you will comply right uh and so so anyway that that that's the other side of that and and of course we have lived in the last decade through a lot of both of those um I think anybody listening to this could name a series of slogans that we've all been forced to chant for the last decade that everybody knows at this point are just like

simply not true I I'll let the audience you know speculate on those on their own group chats um send 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 TR it's public lies um so then what preference falsification does is it talks about extending that from the idea of the individual experiencing that to the idea of the entire Society experiencing that right and this gets to your percent's 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 and this is how you and again this this this literally is like how you get something like like the Communist system which is like okay it you you you you end up in a situation in which 80 or 90 or 99% of

society can actually all be thinking individually I really don't buy this anymore and if anybody would just stand up and say it I would be willing to go along with it 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 right and so the the question of like what the percentage actually is is like a really critical question and then and then basically in any sort of authoritarian system you can you can't like run a survey right to get an accurate result and so you actually can't know until you put it to the test and then what he describes in the book is it's always put to the test in the same way and this is exactly what's happened for the last two years like

100% of exactly what's happened it's like straight out of this book which is somebody Elon sticks his hand up and says the workers of the world are not going to unite yeah right or the emperor is actually wearing no clothes right you know that famous Parable right um so one person stands up and does it and and literally that person is standing there by themselves and everybody else in the audience is like ooh I wonder what's going to happen to that guy right but again nobody knows Elon doesn't know the first guy doesn't know other

people don't know like which way is this going to go and it may be that that's a minority position and that's a way to get yourself killed or it may be that that's the majority position and that and you are now the leader of a revolution and then basically of course what happens is okay the first guy does that doesn't get killed the second guy does well a lot of the time that guy does get killed but when the guy doesn't get killed then a second guy pops his head up says the same thing all

right now you've got two two leads to four four leads to eight eight leads to 16 and then as we saw with the fall of the Berlin Wall this is what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe in ' 89 you when it when it goes it can go right and then it rips and then what happens is very very quickly if it if it turns out that you had a large percentage of the population that actually believe 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 trainer 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 um and here and here the best book is called the True Believer which is the the Eric Hofer book um and so the the Nuance you have to put on this is the the the elites play a giant role in this because the 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 or or or a new either the current Elites change or the new set of Elites a new set of counter Elites

um basically come along and say no there's actually a different and better way to live and then the PE the people basically decide to follow the you know to follow the counter Elite so that that that's the other dimension to it and of course that part is also happening right now um 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 atomous 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 to actually make progress yeah and it's like well and but then there's the test is it crazy shit or is it the truth yeah right and and and you know and this is where you know many there are many specific things about elon's genius but one of the one of the really core ones is an absolute dedication to the truth

um and so when Elon says something it s 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 with he's human he's like anybody else he's not right all the time but at least my my through line with him both in what he says in public and what he says in private which by the way are the exact same things he 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 in my experience by the way there's two guys who are 100% consistent like that that I know um Elan and Trump yeah whatever you think think of them yeah what they say in private is 100% identical to what they say in public like they are completely transparent they're completely honest in that way right which is like again it's not like they're perfect people but they're honest in that way and and it makes them potentially both as they have been very powerful leaders of these movements because they're

both willing to stand up and say the thing that if it's true it turns out to be the thing in many cases that you know many or most or almost everyone else actually believes but nobody was actually willing to say out loud and so that they can actually catalyze these shifts and I I mean I think this framework is exactly why Trump took over the Republican party is I think Trump up there on stage with all these other kind of conventional Republicans and he started saying things out loud that it turned out the Bas 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 ma again Elite masses he was the elite the voters of the ma 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 as 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 ex everything exactly what Tean describes everything that

VAV hav described we you know black squares an Instagram like the whole thing right all of it um uh and we've been living through the um 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 Lo masses anymore and a set of New Elites that are running away with things and so like we're living through this like incredible applied case study um of these ideas and you know if there's a moral of the story it is you know

I think fairly obvious which is it's 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 you know to be to be good people like that that is just not 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 the siren song of

censorship is 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 I mean again the hard form that Soviet you know Soviet Union owning a mograph pre photocopy there mograph machines that were used to make sist underground newspapers which is the the mechanism of written communication of of radical ideas radical ideas um ownership of a mograph machine was punishable by death um right so that that's the hard version right you know the soft

version is somebody clicks a button in Washington and you are erased from the internet right like which you know good news you're still alive bad news is you know Shame about not being able to get a job you know too bad your family now you know they hates you and won't talk to you but you know what or whatever the you know whatever the version of cancellation has been um and so so so like does that work like maybe it works for a while like it worked for the Soviet Union for a while you know

in its way especially when it was coupled with you know official state power but when it unwinds it can unwind with like incredible speed and ferocity because to your point there's all this bottled up energy now your question was like what are the percentages like what 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 6020 um it's like you've got 20% like True Believers in whatever ever is you know the current thing you know you got 20 you 20% of people who

are just like True Believers of whatever they they're you know whatever's in the like I said whatever's the New York Times Harvard professors and the Ford Foundation like just they just believe by maybe it's 10 maybe it's five but let's say generously it's it's 20 so so you know 20% kind of full-on revolutionaries um 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 their view

of themselves as they're in a small minority and in fact they start out in a small minority CU 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 um 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 then but that's where the over socialization comes in it's just like okay by default the 60% will go along with the 20% of the radical revolutionaries at least for a while and then the counter Elite is in this other 20% and over time they build up a theory and network and ability to resist 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 and it and it's kind of my point it's not even really does the 60% change their beliefs as much as it 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 um and you know extremely I would say on edge on a lot of things and I you know that 60% is pivoting in real time they're they're just done they've just had it and I would love to see where that pivot goes cuz there's internal battles happening right now right so this is the other thing okay so there's two two forms of internal there's two forms of things and teer CR teer has actually talked about this professor CR has talked about this so so one is he said he said this is the kind of

unwind where what you're going to have is you're now going to have people in the other direction you're going to have people who claim that they supported Trump all along who actually didn't right right so it's going to swing the other way and by the way Trump's not the only part of this but you know he's just a convenient short hand for you know for for a lot of this um but you know whatever it is you'll you'll have people who will say well I never supported Dei right or I never supported ESG or I

never thought we should have canceled that person right where of course they were fullon a part of the mob like you know kind of at that moment and so anyway so you'll have preference falsification happening in the other direction and and his prediction I think basically is you'll end up with the same quote problem on the on the other side now will that happen here I don't know you know how far is American society willing to go any of these things I don't know but like there is some some question there um and then and

then the other part of it is okay now you have this you know Elite that is used to being in power for the last decade and and by the way many of those people are still in power and they're in very you know important positions and the New York Times is still the New York Times and Harvard is still hared and like those people haven't changed like at all right um and they you know they bureaucrats and 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 has just smacked them hard in the face because they lost the election so badly but they're now going into a and specifically the Democratic party is going into a civil war right and and and and 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 deradicalize because we've lost the people we've lost that the people in the middle and so we need to go back to the middle

in order to be able to get 50% plus one in an election right and then the other half of them are saying no we weren't true to our principles we were too weak we were too soft you know we must become more revolutionary we must double down and we must you know celebrate you know murders in the street of health insurance Executives and that's and that that right now is like a real fight if I can tell you a little personal story that breaks my heart a little bit there's uh there's a professor historian I

won't say who who I admire deeply love his work he's a kind of a heretical thinker and we were talking about having a podcast or doing a podcast and he eventually said that you know what at this time given your guest list 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

I fully believe he uh it would surprise a lot of people if I said who it is but you know this is a person who's not bothered by the uh the guest list and I should also say that 80 plus% of the guest list is leftwing okay uh nevertheless he just doesn't want the headache and that speaks to the the thing that you've kind of mentioned that you just don't don't want the headache you just want to just have a pleasant morning with some coffee and talk to your fellow professors and I think a lot

of people are feeling that in universities and in other context in tech companies and I wonder if that shifts how quickly that shifts and there the percentages you mentioned 20 6020 matters and the and the the contents of the private groups matters and the Dynamics of how that shifts matters cuz it's very possible nothing really changes you universities and in major tech companies or just there's a kind of um excitement right now for potential Revolution and these new ideas this new Vibes to reverberate through these companies universities but it's possible the the the wall will

hold yeah so he's a friend of yours I respect that you don't want to name him I also respect you don't want to beat on him so I would like to beat on him on your behalf um does he have tenure yes you should use it so this is the thing right this is the ultimate indictment of the corruption and the rot at the heart of our education system at the heart of these universities and it's by the way it's like across the board it's like all the all the top universities It's like because the

the siren song for right what it's been for 70 years whatever the tenure system peerreview system tenure system um 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 in your research and your speaking and your teaching without fear of being fired right without fear of being canceled um like academic freedom I mean think of the term academic freedom and then think of what these people have done to it

like it's gone like that entire thing was fake and is completely rotten and these people are completely completely giving up the entire moral foundation of the system that's been built for them which by the way is paid for virtually 100% by taxpayer money 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 um that the population at large is going to realize the corruption in their industry and it's going to withdraw all the funding it's okay it's a desperation

no no no no no think about what happens next okay so let's go let's go through it so the the the universities the the universities are funded by four primary sources of federal funding the big one is the federal student loan program which is you know in the many trillions of dollars at this point and and only spiraling you know way faster than than inflation um that's number one number two is federal research funding which is also very large and you probably know that um um when a scientist at University gets a research Grant the

university rakes as much as 70% of the money uh for Central uses yeah uh 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 um and then number four is tax exemptions at the endowment level um you know which is the financial buffer that these places have um hypothet 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 they all instantly go bankrupt and then you could rebuild then you could rebuild because 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 and I'm I'm cheering for them but the problem is you're you're now inserting suppose suppose you and I want to start a new University and we want to hire all the free thinking professors and we want to have the place that fixes all this practically speaking we can't do it because we can't get access to

that money I give you 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 and instead what happens is the Department of Education accredits accreditation bureaus that are nonprofits 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 um as to who gets access to fell 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 sideways in 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 I just they're just wrong in every possible way at this point um and

and they're it's all in the federal text pair back um and there is no way I mean I my opinion there is no way to fix these things without without replacing them um and 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 in the business world when a company does a bad job is they go bankrupt and another another company takes its place right and

that that's how you get progress um and of course below that is what happens is this is the process of evolution right what why does anything ever get better because things are tested and tried and then you you know the things that 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 the the the just widespread abuse of tenure um and so we've just stalled out we we

built we built an aifi system an aifi centralized system we're surprised by the results they are not fixable in their current form I disagree with you on that I have maybe it's grounded and hope that I believe you can revolutionize a system from within because I do believe Stanford and MIT are important oh but that logic doesn't follow at all that's underpants gnome logic underpants gnome can you explain Underpants NOS logic so I just started watching a key Touchstone of American culture with my 9-year-old which of course is South Park yes and there is wow

and there is if which by the way is a little aggressive for a 9-year-old very aggressive but but he likes it so he's learning all kinds of new words and all kinds of new ideas but yeah go I I told him I said you're going to hear words on here that you are not allowed to use right and I said do you know how we have an agreement that we never lie to Mommy I I said not using a word that you learn in here uh does not count as L mhm wow keep and keep

that in mind orwellian redefinition of lying but yes go ahead 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 We're Off to the Races y Daddy what's a dildo um yep you know sorry sorry son I don't know yeah um so um uh the underpant so famous episode of South Park The Underpants Gnomes and so the The Underpants GN so there's there there's this rat all the kids basically realize that their underpants are quite missing

from their dresser drawers somebody stealing the Underpants and it's just like well who on Earth would steal the underpant the Underpants and it turns out it's the Underpants Gnomes and it turns out the Underpants Gnomes that come to town and they've got this little underground warrant of tunnels and storage places for all the Underpants and so they go out at night they steal the Underpants and the kids discover that you know the Underpants Gnomes and they're you know what what are you doing like what what's what's the point of this and so the Underpants Gnomes

present their their master plan which is a three-part plan which is step one uh collect Underpants step three profit yeah step two question mark yeah so you just you just proposed The underpant Gnome yeah which is very common in politics so the form of this in politics is we must do something yeah 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 it's the same thing but this is what I

hear all the time and I'll I will let you talk as the host of the show in a moment but uh but the but I hear this all the time I hear this I have friends who are on these boards right um 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 that uh aligns with this Vision that things really need to change at the heads of universities and they put students and faculty primary fire a lot of the administration and realign and reinvigorate this idea of freedom of thought and intellectual freedom I mean I don't because there is already a framework of 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 the on the surface it's aligned underneath is become corrupted if we say free speech and academic freedom often enough sooner later these tendered professors will get Brave wait do you think the universities are fundamentally broken okay so how do you fix it how do you have institutions for educating 20-year-olds and institutions that host uh 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 uh invent something new you open a new restaurant yeah like how often in your life if you experienced a restaurant that's just absolutely horrible and it's poisoning all of its customers and the food tastes terrible and then three years later you go back and it's fantastic Charlie Munger actually had the great the best comment on this great investor Charlie M the great comment he was once asked he's like you know you know General Electric was going through all these challenges and he was

asked at a Q&A he said how would you fix the culture of General Electric and he said fix the culture at 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 nobody in business thinks you can do that like it's impossible like it's not it's now now look having said all that I should also Express this because I have a lot of friends to work at these places and and um and and are involved in various attempts to fix these I hope that I'm

wrong I would love to be wrong I would love for the I would love for the underpants gnome step two to be something clear and straightforward that they can figure out how to do I would love to love to fix it I'd love to see them come back to their spoken principles I 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 have done like a lot of public speaking on this topic

it's it's been intended to not just be harsh but also be like okay like these these challenges have to be confronted directly by the way let me also say something positive you know especially post October 7th there are a bunch of very smart people who are major donors and board members of these institutions like Mark Rowan you know who are really coming in trying to you know I think legitimately trying trying to fix these places I have a friend on the executive committee at one of the top technical universities he's working over time to try

to do this man I hope they can figure it out um but I I but the counter question would just be like do you see it actually happening at a single one of these places I'm a person that believes in leadership if you have the right leadership right the whole system can be changed so here's a question for your friend who have tenure at one of these places which is who runs his university I think you know you know who I think runs it yeah whoever the fuck says they run it that's what great leadership

is like a president has that power president of university has leverage cuz they can mouth off like Elon can can they fire the professors they can fire them through being vocal publicly yes can they fire the professors what are you talking about legally no they cannot fire the professors then we know who runs the university the professors yeah the professors the professors and the students the professors and the feral students and they're of course in a radicalization feedback cycle driving each other crazy students the feral students yeah the feral students yeah the feral students what

happens when you're put in charge of of your bureaucracy where the where the thing that the bureaucracy knows is that they can Outlast you the thing that the tendered professors at all these places know is it doesn't matter who the president is because they can Outlast them because they cannot get fired by the way it's the same thing the bureaucrats in the government know it's the same thing that the the bureaucrats in the Department of Education know they know the exact same thing they they cannot last you it's I mean it's the whole thing that

it's the resistance like they can be the resistance they can just sit there and resist which is what they do they're not firable that's definitely a crisis that needs to be solved that's a huge problem and I also don't like that I'm defending Academia here I I agree with you that the situation dire and uh but I just think that institutions are important and I should also add context since you've been grilling me a little bit you were using restaurants as an analogy and earlier offline in this conversation you said that Dairy Queen is a

great restaurant so let's say der Queen is a great Let The Listener take I said da Queen is the best restaurant the best restaurant there you go so everything Mark adri is saying today I don't want you should go order a blizzard one one day you should walk down there and order a blizzard yeah they can get like 4,000 in a cup they can and they're delicious amazing they are ftic they'll put they'll put anything in there you want all right okay so but anyway let me just close by saying look I I My Friends

University system I would just say look like I this is the challenge like I would just I would just pose this is the challenge like to me like this is having had a lot of these conversations like this is the bar in my view this is the conversation that actually has to happen this is the bar that actually has to be hit these problems need to be confronted directly because I think there's just I think there's been way too much I mean I'm actually worri kind of on the other side there's too much happy talk

in these conversations mhm 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 I think the 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 uh to fix this and address it and justify the money because that just normal taxpayers sitting in normal towns in normal jobs are not going to tolerate this for for that much longer You' 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 uh 2013 is Facebook I heard that uh you were there when they invented or maybe uh uh developed the term hate speech in the context of censorship of on social media so uh take me to through that history if you can the use of uh ship so I was there on the ground floor in

1993 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 FAS yeah yeah 19 actually 1992 uh I was asked Implement a nudity filter did you have the courage to speak up back then I I didn't have any problem speaking up back then um I was making $625 an hour um I did not have a lot to lose um no I was asked at the time and then look I you know legitimate you know in

some sense a legitimate request which is working on a research project actually funded by the federal government at a public university so you know I don't think my boss was like any way out of line but it was like yeah like this this web browser thing is great but like could it just make sure to not have any photos of naked people that show up but if you think about this for a second as a technologist like 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 um that I refer to as the breast detection algorithm um that I was going to have to design and then apparently a variety of other apparently body parts people are also sensitive about yeah and um and then I I politely declined to do this for for just the the technical difficulties of it well number one I I actually didn't know how to do it but number two is just like no I'm not I'm not building I'm just not building a censorship engine like I'm a you know I'm just not

doing it um and and in those days it was you know in those days the internet generally was you know free fire zone for everything it was actually interesting as sort of pre 93 the internet was such a specific Niche Community like it was like the million kind of highest IQ nerds in the world um and so it actually like didn't really have a lot of you know issues the people were like super interested in talking about like astrophysics and not very interested in you know even politics at that at that time so there really

was not an issue there but um yeah I didn't I didn't want to start the process um so I think the way to think about this so first of all um you know yeah so I was involved in this at Facebook every step by the way I've been involved in this at Facebook every step by the way I joined the board there in 2007 so I saw I've seen everything in the last you know almost 20 years um 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 Twitter knew them really well um we were the founding investor in substack I'm part of the Elon takeover of Twitter with X I was an angel at LinkedIn so I I've been in these we were the funer of Pinterest we were one of the one of the main investors there rdit um 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 um yeah so so basically the way to think about this the the true kind of nuanced view of this is that there is ially speaking no internet service that can have zero censorship um and 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 carve outs from the Supreme Court over time you know so incitement to violence and terrorist Recruitment and child abuse and so you know child pornography and so

forth they're like they're not covered by the First Amendment um and just practically speaking if you and I are going to start an Internet company and have a service we can't have that stuff either right because it's illegal or it will just clearly you know destroy the whole thing so you you're always going to have a censorship engine I mean hopefully it's not actually in the browser but like you're going to have it for sure at the level of an of an Internet service and but then what happens is now you have now you have

a machine right now now you have a system where you can put in a rules saying we allow this we don't allow that you have enforcement you have consequences right um and once that system is in place like it becomes the ring of power right which is like okay now anybody in that company or anybody associ with that company or anybody who wants to pressure that company will just start to say okay you should use that machine for more than just terrorist Recruitment and child pornography you should use it for XYZ um and basically that

transition happened call it 2012 2013 is is when there was this like very very kind of Rapid pivot I think the kickoff to it for some reason was this it was the beginning of the second Obama term um I think it also coincided with the sort of arrival of the first kind of super woke kids into these into these schools um you know that kind of you know it's the kids that were in school between like you know for the Iraq War and then the global financial crisis and like they came out like super radicalized

they came into these companies they immediately started mounting these social Crusades to ban and censor uh lots of things and then you know quite frankly the Democratic party figured this out um and they figured out that these companies were you know very subject to being controlled and they and the you know the executive teams and Boards of directors are almost all Democrats and you know there tremendous circulation a lot of Obama people from the first term actually came and worked in these companies and a lot of FBI people and other you know law enforcement intelligence

people came in and worked and they're all Dem you know they were all democrats for that set um and so they just you know the the the ring of power was lying on the table it had been built and they you know picked it up and put it on and then they just ran and the original discussions were basically always on two topics it was hate speech and misinformation uh hate speech was the original one um and the hate speech conversation started exactly like you'd expect which is we can't have the n-word and which the

answer is fair enough let's not have the nword okay now we've set up precedent right and then the and and Jordan Peterson has talked lot about this the definition of hate speech ended up being things that make people uncomfortable right so we can't have things that make you know people uncomfortable I of course you know people like me that are disagreeable raise our hands and say well that idea right there makes me uncomfortable but of course that doesn't count as hate speech right so you know the ring of power is on one hand and not

not not on the other hand um and then basically that began this slide where it ended up being that you know completely an this a point Mark has been making recently like completely anod comments that are completely legitimate on television or on the senate floor all of a sudden our hap can't be set online so that you know 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 with Trump um so so the hate speech stop the hate speech stuff predated Trump by like 3 or four years um the misinformation stuff was basically a it was a little bit later and it was a consequence of the Russia gate hoax um and then that was you know a ring of power that was even more powerful right because you know hate speech is like okay at some point if some if something offensive or not like at least you can have a question as to whether that's

the case but the problem with misinformation is like is it the truth or not you know you know what do we know from 800 years or whatever Western Civilization it's that you know there's only a few entities that can determine the truth on every topic you know there's God you know there's the king we don't have those anymore and the rest of us are all imperfect and flawed and so the idea that any group of experts is going to sit around the table and decide on the truth is you know deeply anti-western and deeply authoritarian

and somehow the misinformation kind of crusade went from the Russia gate hoax into just full-blown we're going to use that weapon for whatever we want up and then and then of course then then the culminating moment on that that really was the straw that broke the camel's back was um we're going to censor all theories that the covid virus might have been manufactured in a lab as misinformation and and and and and inside these companies like that was the point where people for the first time this is like what three years ago if for the

first time they were like that was when it sunk in we it's just like okay this has spun completely out of control anyway that that that's how we got to where we are and then basically that spell lasted that that that complex existed and got expanded basically from call it 2013 to 2023 I think basically two things broke it um one is substack and so and I'm super proud of those guys cuz they started from scratch and declared right up front that they were going to be a a free speech platform um and they came

under intense pressure um including from the Press um and you know they tried to just beat them to the ground and kill them an intense pressure by the way from you know let's say certain of the platform companies um you know basically threatening them um and they stood up to it and you know sitting here today they have the widest spectrum of of speech and and and conversation you know anywhere on planet Earth and they've done a great job and it's worked by the way it's great uh and then obviously Elon uh you know with

X was the you know the hammer blow um and then I the third one now was what ring at Facebook mhm and there's also like singular moments I think You' spoken about this which uh like John Stewart going on Steven coar and talking about the lab League theory yes I just there's certain moments that just kind of shake everybody up the right person the right time just it's a wakeup call so that there and I will tell you like and 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 um you for probably 20 years but he did a very important public service and it was that appearance on the Cobar show and I don't know how broadly this is you know at the time it was in the news briefly but I don't know how if people remember this but I will tell you in in the rooms where people discuss what is misinformation and these policies that was a very big

moment that was probably actually the key catalyzing moment and I think he exhibited I would say conspicuous bravery and had a big impact with that um and and yeah what what for people who don't recall what he did and this was in the full blown like you Absolut you know you absolutely must lock down for 2 years you absolutely must keep all the schools closed you absolutely must have everybody work from home you absolutely must wear a mask like the whole thing um and one of those was you absolutely must believe that um Co was

completely natural you must believe that and not believing that means you're a fascist nazi Trump supporter Mega evil Q andon person right and that was like uniform and that was enforced by the social media companies um and and and like I said that that was the peak and and John Stewart went on the coar show and I I don't know if they planned it or not cuz coar looked shocked I don't know how much of it was a bit but he went on there and he he just had one of these like the Emperors wearing

no clothes things where he said it's just not plausible that you had the co super virus appear 300 yards down the street from the Wuhan Institute of of lethal Corona viruses um like it's just not plausible that that that certainly that you could just rule that out and then there was another key moment actually the more serious version was I think the author Nicholson Baker wrote a big piece for New York Magazine uh Nicholson Baker is like one of our great novelist writers um of our time and he wrote the piece and he did the

complete undressing of it um 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 was like all right like I guess we're not we don't need to censor that anymore and you know and then of course what immediately follows from that is well wait a minute why were we censoring that in the first place and okay like and then you know the downstream not that day but the downstream conversations were like okay if if if we made such a giant in retrospect if we all made such a giant Collective mistake censoring that then what does that say about the rest of our regime and I think that

was the thread in the sweater that started to unravel it I should say it again I do think that John Stewart appearance and the statement he made was a courageous act uh agree and I think we need to have more that of that in the world and like you said Elon everything he did with acts is is is a series of courageous acts and I think what um Zuck what Mark Zucker did on Rogan a few days ago is a courageous act can you just speak to that he has become I think an outstanding Communicator

right um and he's you know somebody who came in for a lot of criticism earlier in his career on that front and I think he's you know he's one of these guys who can sit down and talk for three hours and and make complete sense and and you know as as you do with with all of all of your episodes like when somebody sits and talks for three hours like you really get a sense of somebody because it's it's really hard to to be artificial for that long and you know he's he's not done that

repeatedly he's really good at it and then look I I again I would maybe put him in the third category now with um certainly after that appearance uh I would say um I would put him up there now with you know kind of el Trump in the sense of the public the the public and the private are not synchronized I guess I'd say that like he he he said on that show what he really believes he said all the same things that he says in private like I don't think there's really any any discrepancy anymore

um I would say he has always taken upon himself a level of obligation responsibility to running a company the size of meta and running services that are that large um and I think you know his conception of what he's doing which I think is correct is he's running services that are bigger than any country right he's running you know over three billion people use of services um and so and then you know the company has you know many tens of thousands of 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 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 learn 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 I've been on a Learning Journey he's been on a Learning Journey um he is a really really good learner um he assimilates information you know as good as or better than anybody else I know um 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 and you deserve to be criticized for those decisions and so forth and it's valid um but you are under tremendous external pressure um as well and and by the way you're under tremendous internal pressure you've got your employees coming at you you you've got your Executives in some cases coming at you you've got your board in some cases coming at you um you've got your shareholders coming at you so you you've got your internal pressures but you also have the Press coming

at you you've got Academia coming at you you've got the entire nonprofit complex coming activist complex coming at you and then really critically you know he talked about in Rogan um and these companies all went through this in this last especially five years you had the government coming at you um and you know that's the really you know stinky end of the pool um where you know the government was in my view you know illegally exerting um you know just in flagrant violation of the First Amendment and federal laws on on speech and coercion and

uh and conspiracy uh forcing these companies to uh engage in activities um you know then again in some cases they may have wanted to do but in other cases they clearly didn't want to do and felt like they had to do and the level of pressure like I say like I've known every CEO 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 con and you know Mark is very good at getting physically

punched to the face getting better and better yeah and he is and he you know and he's very good at you know taking a punch and he has taken many many punches so I would encourage people to have a level of sympathy for these are not Kings these These are people who operate with like I would say extraordinary levels of external pressure I think if I had been in his job for the last decade I would be a little puddle on the floor um and so it it it says I think a lot about him

that he has you know risen to this occasion the way that he has and by the way should also say you know the the cynicism of course is immediately out and you know it's a it's you know legitimate thing for people to say but you know it's like oh you're only doing this because of trump or you know whatever and it's just like no like he has been thinking about and working on these things and trying to figure them out for a very long time and so I I think what you saw are legitimate deeply

held beliefs not some you know you know sort of just in the- moment thing that could change at any time so what do you think it's like to be him and uh 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 and this is one of those things where almost nobody has sympathy right nobody feels sorry for a CEO right like it's not a thing right um and you know again legitimately so

like CEOs get paid a lot like the whole thing there's a lot of great things about it so it's not like they should be out there asking for a lot of sympathy but it is the case that they are human beings um and it is the case that it is a lonely job and the reason it's 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 an exercise routine and all those things and you know you come under family stress because you're working all the time or my partner Ben you know was he was CEO of our last company before we started the Venture firm he he said you know the problem he had like with with his family life was he would even when he was home at night he wasn't home because he was in his head trying to solve all the business problems and

so he was like supposed to be like having 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 they 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 and they can't resist like it's just human nature and and and so you you can't necessarily rely on what they say it's very hard in most companies to talk to your board because they can fire you right now now Mark has the situation because he has control and turns out he can talk to his board and Mark talks to us about many things that he does that most CEOs won't talk to their boards about because we literally because we can't fire him um but the general a general C including all the CEOs of

Twitter that that none of them had control and so they they could all get fired so um you can't talk to the board members they're going to fire you you can't talk to the shareholders because they they'll just like dump your stock right like okay so who's the so so the so every once in a while what you find is basically the the best case scenario they have is they can talk to other CEOs um and there's these little organizations where they kind of pair up and do that and so they may we get a

little bit out of that but but even that's Frau with Peril because can you really talk about confidential information with another CEO insider trading risk um and so it's just a very it's just a very lonely and isolating thing to start with um and then you you and then on top of that you apply pressure um right and that's where it gets painful and then maybe I'll just spend a moment on this internal external pressure thing um my general experience with companies is that they can withstand most forms of external pressure as long as they

retain internal coherence MH right so as long as the internal team um is really bonded together and supporting each other um most forms of external pressure you can withstand and by that I mean investors dump your stock you lose your biggest customers you know whatever negative article you know negative headline you know um you can you can withstand all that and basically in fact many of those forms of pressure can be bonding experiences for the team where they where they where they come out stronger um 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 turned into liquid like we're in a different regime and like the whole thing could unravel in the next week because then people turn I mean this I gu this is what's happening in Los Angeles right now the the the the mayor and and the fire chief turned on each other and that's it that government is dysfunctional it

is never going to get put back together again it is over it is not going to work ever again and that's what happens inside companies 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 is I said that companies can

withstand most forms of external pressure but not all and the special of the not all one is government pressure um is that when your government comes for you like yeah any CEO who thinks that they're bigger than their government um 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 worth speaking about again this government pressure so you think they've crossed a line into essentially criminal levels of pressure flagrant criminality felonies like obvious and I

can I can actually cite the laws but yes absolute criminality can you explain how those possible to happen and maybe on a hopeful note how we can avoid that happening again so to start with is a lot of this now is in the public record um which is good because it needs to be in the public record and so there's there's three forms of things that are in the public record that people can look at so one is the Twitter files um 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% represent 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 in these other companies um you know for the most part and certainly in terms of the kind of pressure that they got so that's that's number one that stuff you can just read it and you should if you haven't um the second is um 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 fullscale investigation of this and Facebook produced a lot of documents into that investigation and those have many of those have now been made public and you can download those reports and there's like i' 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 um and then third is Mark himself talking about this on on on on Rogan so I'll

you know just defer to his comments there but yeah basically what what those three forms of information show you is basically the government you know over time um and then culminating in 2020 2021 you know in the last four years just decided that the First Amendment didn't apply to them um and they just decided that um 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 old thing of like well the first amendment only applies to you know the government it doesn't apply to companies it's like well there's actually a little bit of nuance to that first of all 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 Deb banking either those are just as serious violations as the as the Free Speech violations and so this is just like flagrant flagrant unconstitutional behavior and then there are specific Federal statutes um there's it's 18241 and 18242 and one of them applies to federal employees government employees and the other one uh applies to private actors um around what's called deprivation of Rights um and conspiracy to deprive rights and

it is not legal according to the United States criminal code for government employees or in a conspiracy private entities to take away constitutional rights and interestingly some of those constitutional rights are enumerated for example in the First Amendment freedom of speech and then some of those rights actually do not need to be enumerated it is if the government takes away right 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 debank qualifies as a right you know right to access to the financial system is every bit something that's subject to these laws as as as free speech um and so yeah this is happen and then I'll just add one final thing which is we've talked about two parties so far talked about the government employees um and then we've talked about the company the government employees for sure have misbehaved um 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 they will argue and I believe they have a good case that they are victims not perpetrators right they are the downstream subjects of pressure not the ca 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 um censorship bureaus um I

mean the one that is sort of is most obvious is the so-called Stanford internet Observatory um 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 you know very obvious Theory under which they're basically acting as agents of the government um and so I think they're also very Exposed on this and have behaved in just flagrantly illegal ways

so fundamentally govern should not do any kind of pressure even soft pressure on companies to censor can't not allowed it really is disturbing I mean probably started soft lightly slowly and then escalates as the the old will to power will instruct them to do CU you get you get I mean yeah that's why that's why there's protection cuz you can't put a check on power for govern 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 how does government work there was this famous animated short u the thing we got shown was just the cartoon of how a bill becomes a law it's like this you know fancy little Bill sneak along and goes this I'm just the bill yeah exactly like it's like all right number one that's not how it works at all like that that doesn't actually happen we could talk

about that but but 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 U 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 most government rules are not legislated they're regulated um and that that and there's tons and tons of regulations that these companies are so this is another cliche you'll hear a

lot which is oh private companies can do whatever they want it's like oh no they can't they're subject to tens of thousands of regulations that they have to comply with um and the the hammer that comes down when you don't comply with regulations is profound like they can completely wreck your company with no abil no ability for you to do anything about it so so so regulation is a big part of the way the power gets exercised and then there's what's called just Flatout administrative power the term that you'll hear and administrative power is just

literally the government telling you calling you and telling you what to do here's an example how this works so Facebook had this whole program a few years back to do a global cryptocurrency for payments called Libra and they built the entire system and it was this highs scale you know sort of new cryptocurrency and they were going to build in every product and there were going to be 3 billion people who could transact with Libra and they went to the government and they went to the all these different 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 had the whole thing ready to go two senators wrote letters to the big Banks um 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 you know somebody tossed

a Molotov cocktail through the window and burned it down tonight right and so that letter like what is that letter like it's not a law it's not even a regulation it's just like straight direct state power and and then and then it culminates in literally calls from the White House where they're just like flat out telling you what to do which is of course what a king gets to do but not what a president gets to do um and and so anyway so this so so what these companies experienced was they experienced the full panoply

of this but it was it was the level of intensity was in that order it was actually legislation was the least important part regulation was more important administrative power was more important and then just like flat out demands and 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 um 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 map to the censorship regime I do know a lot of people on the right got very angry about the censorship but you know I think it probably at least helped with enthusiasm on that side um you know maybe some people in the left will now not want their you know Democratic nominees to be S pro censorship um so the the voters definitely you know get a vote um number one number two I think you need transparency you need to know what happened we know some of what

happened um Peter teal has written in the Ft just now saying we just need like broad after what we've been through in the last decade we need broad-based Truth and Reconciliation uh you know efforts to really get to the rout of things um so maybe that's part of it we need investigations for sure ultimately we need prosecutions like we we need ultimately we need people to go to jail um because we need to set object lessons that say that you don't get to do this and on those last two I would say that that those

are both up to the new Administration and I don't want to speak for them and I I don't want to predict what they're going to do but they have they for sure have the ability to do both of those things and you know we'll we'll see where they take it 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 it it's like this dark moment momentum of power they you just get caught up in it and that's the reason there's that kind of

protection nobody wants that so I Ed the metaphor of the ring of power and for people who don't catch the reference that's Lord Lord of the Rings and the thing with the ring of power and Lord of the Rings it's the ring the gollum has in the beginning and it turns you invisible and it turns out it like unlocks all this like f and power it's the most powerful thing in the world is the key to everything and basically the the the moral lesson of BL of the Rings which was you know written by a

guy who thought very deeply about these things is yeah the ring of power is inherently corrupting the characters at one point they're like andolf just put on the ring and like fix this right and he's like he like he will not put the ring on even to like end the war um because he knows that it will corrupt him and then you know the charact as it starts the character of Gollum is the result of you know 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 if you have it like you are going to use it it's overwhelmingly tempting because it's so powerful and then it will corrupt you and yeah I I don't know whether any of these people feel any of this today they should I don't know if they do um 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 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 is 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 uh avoid

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 Elon I mean we you know we'll see I would say with Elon and I would say by the way overwhelmingly I would say so far so good I'm extremely extremely thrilled by what he's done on almost every front um for like you know the last 30 years but including all this stuff recently like I think he's he's been a real hero on a lot of topics where we needed to see

heroism but look I 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 and the proximity to the president um and obviously both of those are you know are instruments of power the counter 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 um and we're investors and multiple of them and doing very well um uh

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 the down Downstream effects of his statements so like for example it's you know for the last couple 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 um and you know it's it's you know it's actually it's a preference Cascade it's one of these things where people KN knew

there was a problem they weren't willing to talk about it it kind of got suppressed um and then um Elon brought it up and then all of a sudden there's now in the UK this like massive explosion of basically open conversation about it for the first time and you know it's like this catalyzing all of a sudden everybody's kind of woken up and being like Oh my God you know this is really bad and and and there will be now you know I'm pretty sure pretty pretty clearly big changes as a result so and Elon

was you know he played the role of the boy who said the emperor has no clothes right but but but here's the thing here's my point like he said it about something that was true right and so had he said it about something that was false you know he would get no credit for it he wouldn't deserve any credit for it but he said something that was true and by the way everybody over there instantly they were like oh yeah he's right right like nobody 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 put it this way like how worried are we about somebody becoming corrupt by virtue of their power being that they get to speak the truth and I guess I would say especially in the last decade of what we've been through where everybody's been lying all the time about everything I'd say I think we should run this experiment as hard as we can to get people to tell the truth and so uh I don't feel that bad about that and

then the money side you know this rapidly gets into the money and politics question and the money in politics question is this very interesting question because um it seems like there's a clear-cut case that the more money in politics the worse things are and the more corrupted the system is um that was a very popular topic of public convers up until 2016 um when Hillary outspent Trump 3 to1 and lost you'll notice that money and politics has all almost vanished as a topic um in the last eight years and and once again Trump spent far

you know K rised and spent 1.5 billion on top of what Biden spent so they were they were at I don't know something like three three billion total and Trump I think spent again like a third or a fourth of that um and so the money in politics kind of topic has kind of vanished from the popular conversation the last eight years it has come back a little bit now that Elon is spending you know but but again like it's like okay he's spending but the data would seem to indicate in the last at least

the last eight years that money doesn't win the political battles it's actually like the voters actually have a voice and they actually exercise it and they don't just listen to ads and so again there I would say like yeah clearly there's some power there but I don't know if it's like I don't know if it's some like I don't know if it's some weapon that he can just like turn on and and use in a definitive way and I don't know if there's parallels there but I could also say just on a human level he

has a good heart and I interact with a lot of powerful people and that's not always the case so that's a good thing there if we if we can draw parallels to The Hobbit or whatever who gets to put on the ring froto froto yeah yeah I mean maybe one of the lessons of Lord of the Rings right is even even froto would have been you know even froto would have been corrupted right but you know nevertheless you had somebody who could do what it took at the at the time the thing that I find

just so amazing about the Elon phenomenon and all the critiques is um you know the one thing that everybody in our society's agrees on because of our sort of our our postchristian egalitarian so you know we live in sort of this post secularized Christian context in the west now and it's we you know we we consider Christianity kind of you know backwards but we still believe essentially all the same things we just address them up in in in sort of fake science um um so the one thing that we're all told we're all taught from

from ear is that the best people in the world are the people who care about all of humanity right U and we venerate you know all of our figures are people who care about all of you know Jesus cared about all Humanity Gandhi cared about all Humanity Martin Luther King cared about all Humanity like un the person who cares the most about everybody and and with Elon you have a guy who literally like is he's lit he he talks about this constantly and he talks about exactly the same in private is literally he is operating

on behalf of all of humanity to try to get us to you know he goes through to get us to be multiplanetary civilization so that we can survive a strike on any one planet so that we can extend the light of human consciousness into the world and you know into the universe and have it persist you know in the good of the whole thing and like literally the critique is yeah we want you you care about all of humanity but not like that yeah all the critics all the all the surface Tor all the critics

will be forgotten yeah I think that's yeah that's clear you said that uh we always end up being ruled by the elites of some kind can you explain this law this idea so this comes from a Italian political philosopher from about 100 years ago named Robert I'm G to mangle the let you pronounce the Italian uh M Michelle's um or Michaels um and then it was I learned about it through a famous book on on politics probably the best book on politics written in the 20th century called the mack of Ellens by this guy James

Burnham um who has had a big impact on me but um in the mack of Ellens he resurrects what he calls this sort of Italian realist School of of political philosophy from the from the tens and 20s um and these were people to be clear this was not like a musini thing these were people who were trying to understand the actual mechanics of how politics actually works so to get to the actual sort of mechanical substance of like how the political machine operates and um this guy Michelle's had this concept he he ended up with

called the iron law of oligarchy um and so what the iron law of oligarchy and I mean take a step back to say what he meant by oligarchy because it has multiple meanings so basically in classic political Theory there's basically three forms of government at core there's democracy which is Rule of the many there's oligarchy which is Rule of the few um and there's monarchy which is Rule of the one and you can just use that as a general framework of any government you're going to be under is going to be one of those just

mechanical observation without even saying which one's good or bad just a structural observation um and so the question that Michelle's asked was like is there such a thing as democracy like is there actually such a thing as democracy is is there ever actually like direct direct government and what he did was he mounted this sort of incredible historical uh exploration of whether democracies had ever existed in the world and the answer basically is almost never and we could talk about that but the other thing he did was he he sought out the most democratic uh

private organization in the world that he could find at that point which he concluded was some basically communist German Auto Workers Union that was like wholly devoted to the workers of the world uniting you know back when that was like the hot thing and he went in there and he's like okay this is the organization out of all organizations on planet Earth that must be operating as a as as a direct democracy and he went in there and he's like oh nope there's a leadership class you know there's like six guys at the top and

they control everything then they lead the rest of the membership along you know by the nose which is of course the story of every Union the story of every Union is always the story of you know there's there's a Jimmy Hof and there you know kind of running the thing um you know just saw that with the doc Workers Union right like you know there's a guy um and he's in charge and by the way the number two is his son right like that's not like you know an accident right so the iron law of

oligarchy basically says democracy is fake um there's always a ruling class there's always a ruling Elite structurally and he said the reason for that is because the masses can't organize right what what's the fundamental problem whether the masses 25,000 people in Union or 250 million people in a country the masses can't organize the majority cannot organize only a minority can or organize um and to be effective in politics you must organize um and therefore every political structure in human history has been some form of a small organized Elite ruling a large and dispersed majority every

single one um the Greeks and the florentines had brief experiments in direct democracy and they were total disasters uh in Florence I forget the name of it it was called like the workers Revolt or something like that there was like a 2-year period um where they basically experimented with direct during the Renaissance and it was a complete disaster and they never tried it again in the state of California we have our own experiment on this which is the proposition system which is an overlay on top of the legislature and it you know anybody who looks

at it for two seconds concludes it's been a complete disaster it's just a catastrophe um and it's caused enormous damage to the state and so basically the the the basically the presumption that we are in a democracy is just sort of by definition fake now good news for the US it turns out the founders understood this and so of course they didn't give us a direct democracy they gave us a representative democracy right and so they they they built the oligarchy into the system in the form of Congress and the and the executive branch and

the judicial branch um but but so anyway so as a consequence democracy is always and everywhere fake there is always a ruling Elite um and and basically the the the lesson of the macallans is you can deny that if you want but you're fooling yourself um the way to actually think about how to make a system work and maintain any sort of shred of Freedom um is to actually understand that that is actually what's happening and uh lucky for us the vanders saw this and figured out a way to given that there's going to be

a ruling Elite how to create a balance of power among that Elite yes so it doesn't get out of hand and it was very clever right and you know some of this was based on earlier experiments some of this by the way you know they these these were very very smart people right and so they they knew tremendous amounts of like Greek and Roman history they knew the Renaissance history you know they The Federalist Papers they argued this a great length you can read it all um you know they they they they ran like a

one of the best seminars in world history trying to figure this out um and they through all this and yeah and so they they thought through it very carefully but just I'll give you an example which continues to be a Hot Topic so you know one way they did it is through the three branches of government right executive legislative and judicial um sort of balance of powers but the other way they did it was they sort of echoing what had been done earlier I think in the UK Parliament um uh they created the two different

bodies of the legislature right and so the you know the house and the Senate and as you know the the house is a portion on the basis of population and the Senate is not right the small states have just as many senators as the big States um and then they made the deliberate decision to have the house get reelected every 2 years to make it very responsive to the will of the people and they made the decision to have the Senate get re-elected every six years so that it had more buffer from the passions of

the moment um but what's interesting is they didn't choose one or the other right they did them both and then to get legislation passed you have to get through both of them and so they they built in like a second layer of checks and balances and then there's a thousand observations we could make about like how well the system is working today and like how much does it live up to the ideal and how how much are we actually complying with the Constitution and there's lots of you know there's lots of open questions there but

you know this system has survived for coming on 250 years with a country that has been spectacularly successful that I don't think at least you know I don't think any of us would trade this system for any other one and so it's yeah one of the great alltime achievements yeah it's incredible and we should say they were all pretty young relative to our current they were set of leaders many in their 20s at the time and like super Geniuses this is one of those things where it's just like all right something happened where there was

a group of people where you know no body ever tested their IQs but like these are Einstein of politics yeah an amazing thing but anyway I I I just I go through all that which is they were very keen students of the actual mechanical practice of democracy not fixated on what was desirable they were incredibly focused on what would actually work which is you know I think the the way to think about these things they were engineers of sort not the fuzzy Humanity students of sort they were shape rotators not word cells I remember that

wow that Meme came and went I think were Center to them you're Center to a lot of memes I was you're you're the meme dealer and the meme popularizer that Meme I get some credit for and then the current thing is the other one I get some credit for I don't know that I invented either one but um I I popularized them take credit and run with it uh if we can just Linger on the meave alance it's a it's a study of power and power dynamics like you mentioned looking at the actual reality of

the Machinery of power from everything you've seen now in government but also in companies what are some interesting things you can sort of continue to say about the Dynamics of power the jostling for power that happens inside these institutions yeah so it a lot of it you know we we already talked about this a bit with the universities which is you can apply a mellan style lens to the it's why I posed the question to you that I did which is okay who runs the university the trustees the administration the students or the faculty and

and you know the answer the true answer is some combination of the three or of the four plus the ERS by the way plus the government plus the Press Etc right and so there you know there's there's a mechanical interpretation of that I mean companies operate under the exact same you know set of questions who runs a company you know the CEO but like the CEO runs the company basically up to the day that either the shareholders or the management team Revolt if the shareholders Revolt it's very hard for the CEO to stay in the

seat if the management team revolts it's very hard for the CEO to stay in the seat by the way if the employees Revolt it's also hard to stay in the seat by the way if the New York Times comes at you it's also very hard to stay in the seat if the Senate comes at you it's very hard to stay in the seat so you know like a a a a reductionist version of this that is a good shorthand is who can get who fired you know so so who has more power you know the

the newspaper columnist who makes you know $200,000 a year or the CEO who makes you know $200 million a year and it's like well I know for sure that the columnists can get the CEO fired I've seen that happen before I have yet to see a CEO get a columnist fired did anyone ever get fired from the bill Amman assault on journalism so Bill Bill like really showed the bullshit that happens in journalism no because what happens is they they they wear it with a I mean they and I would say to their credit they

wear it as a badge of honor and then to their shame they wear it as a badge of honor right which is if you know if they're doing the right thing then they are justifiably pring themselves for standing up under pressure but it also means that they can't respond to legitimate criticism and you know they're obviously terrible at that now um as I recall he went straight to the CEO of the a Springer M that owns Insider and I you know and I I happen to know the CEO and I think he's quite a good

CEO but like I like well there is a good example is the CEO of Axel Springer run his own company right like well there's a fasc okay so there's a fascinating thing playing out right now got to dwell on these fires um but um it's a you see pressure reveals things right and so if you been watching what's happening with the LA times recently so so this guy biotech entrepreneur buys the LA Times like whatever eight years ago um it is just like the most radical social revolutionary thing you can Poss imagine it endorses every

crazy leftwing radical you can imagine it endorses Karen bass it endorses Gavin Newsome it's just like an Litany of all the people who you know currently burning the city to the ground it's just like endorsed every single bad person every step of the way um he's owned it the entire time you know he put his foot down right before for the first time I think put his foot down right before the November election and said we're not we we're getting he said we're going to get out of this thing where we just always endorse a

Democrat we said we're not endorsing I think he said we're not endorsing for the for the presidency and like the paper flipped out right it's like our billionaire backer who and I don't know what he spends but like he must be burning $50 or $100 million a year out of his pocket to keep this thing running he paid 500 million for it which is amazing U Back when people still thought these things were businesses um and then he's probably burned another 500 million over the last decade keeping it running and he burns probably another 50

100 million a year to do this and the journalists at the LA Times hate him with the fury of a thousand Sons like they just like absolutely freaking despise him and they have been like attacking him and you know the ones can get jobs elsewhere quit and do it and the rest just stay and say the worst you know most horrible things about him and they want to constantly run these stories attacking him um and so he has had this reaction that a lot of people in la la are having right now to to this

fire and this just like incredibly Vivid collapse of leadership and all these people that he had his paper head endorsed are just disastrous um and he he's on this tour he's basically just he's decided he's he's decided to be the the boy who says the emperor has no clothes but he's doing it to his own newspaper very smart guy he's not a press tour and he's basically saying yeah we we yes we did all that and we endorsed all these people and it was a huge mistake and we're going to completely change and his paper

is you know in a complete internal Revolt but I go through it which is okay now we have a very interesting question which is who runs the La times because for the last eight years it hasn't been him it's been the reporters now for the first time the owner is showing up saying oh no I'm actually in charge and the reporters are saying no you're not and like like it is freaking on and so again if the the Mel's mindset on this is like okay how is power actually exercised here can can can a guy

who's like even super rich and super powerful who even owns his own newspaper can he stand up to a full scale assault not only by his own reporters but by every other journalism Outlet who also now thinks he's the Antichrist and he is trying to exercise Power by speaking out publicly and so that's the game of power there and firing people and you know he has removed people and he has set new rules I mean he he is he is now I think at long I think he's saying he's now at long last actually exercising

prerogatives of owner of a business which just decide on the policies and Staffing of the business there are certain other owners of these Publications that are doing similar things right now um he's the one I don't know so he's the one I can talk about um but there are others that are going through the same thing right now um and I think it's a really interesting open question like you know in a fight between the employees and the employer like it's not crystal clear that the employer wins that one and just to stay on journalism

for a second we mentioned Bill lman I just want to say put him in the category we mentioned before of a really courageous person I don't think I've ever seen anybody so Fearless in going after you know in following what he believes in publicly that's courage that that that several things he's done publicly has been really inspiring just being courageous what do you think is like the most impressive example where he went after a journalist whose whole incentive is to like I mean it's uh it's like sticking your like kicking the beehive or whatever you

know what's going to follow and do that I mean that's why it's difficult to challenge journalistic organizations because they're going to you know there's just so many mechanisms they use including like writing articles and get cited by Wikipedia then drive the narrative and then they can get you fired all this kind of stuff Bill Amman like a bad mfer just just tweets these essays and just goes after them uh legally and also in the public and just I I don't know that was truly inspiring there's not many people like that out uh in public and

I hopefully that inspires not just me but many others to be like to be courageous themselves did you know of him before he started doing this in public I knew of ner his his wife she's just brilliant researcher and scientist and so I I admire her look up to her think she's amazing well the reason I ask if you knew about Bill is because a lot of people had not heard of him before especially like before October 7th and before some of the campaigns he's been running sens in public but um and with Harvard and

so forth but um he was very well known in the in the investment world before before that so uh he was a famous um he's a so-called activ activist investor for you know very very successful and very widely respected for probably 30 years before before before now and and I bring that up because it it turns out they weren't for the most part battles that happen in kind of full public view they weren't National stories but in the business and investing world the activist investor is a very it's like in the movie Taken it's a

very specific set of skills um yeah on how to like really take control of situations um and how to wreck the people who you're going up against um and um just and there's lot there's been controversy over the years on this topic and there's too much detail to go into but the the defense of activist investing which I think is valid is um you know these are the guys who basically go in and take stakes in companies that are being poorly managed or under optimized and and and and then generally what that means is at

least the theory is that means the existing management has become entrenched and lazy mediocre you know whatever not you're responding to the needs of the shareholders often not responding to the customers um and the activists basically go in with a minority position and then they rally support among other investors who are not activists um and then they basically show up and they force change um but they are the aggressive version of this um and I've been on the I've been involved in companies that have been on the receiving end of these oh um where it

is amazing how much somebody like that can exert pressure on situations even when they don't have formal control so so it's another it would be another chess p on the mechanical Board of kind of how power gets exercised and basically what happens is the effective analysts a large amount of the time they end up taking they end up taking over control of companies even though they never own more than like 5% of the stock and so anyway so it turns out with bills it's such a fascinating case because he has that like complete skill set

um and he has now decided to bring it to bear in areas that are not just companies and two interesting things for that one is you know some of these places you know and some of these battles are still ongoing but number one like a lot of people who run universities or newspapers are not used to being up against somebody like this um and by the way also now with infinitely Deep Pockets and lots of experience in courtrooms and all the things that kind of go with that um but the other is through example he

is teaching a lot of the rest of us the activist Playbook like in real time and so the Liam need skill set is getting more broadly diffused um just by being able to watch and learn from him so I think he I think he's having a you know I would put him up there with Elon in terms of somebody who's really affecting how all this is playing out but even skill set aside just courage and yes including by the way C courage to go outside of his own Zone yeah right um you know because like

he has I'll give you an example like my my firm vure Capital firm we have LPS there are things that I feel like I can't do or say because I feel like I would be bringing you know I would be bringing embarrassment or other consequences to rlps he has investors also where he worries about that um and so his so a couple things one is his willingness to go out a bit and risk his relationship with his own investors but I will tell you the other thing which is his investors I know this for a

fact his investors have been remarkably supportive of him doing that because as it turns out a lot of them actually agree with him um and so he's it's the same thing he does in his activism campaigns he is able to be the tip of the spear on something that actually a lot more people agree with yeah it turns out if you have truth behind you it it helps and just again you know how I started is a lot of people are just fed up you've been spending a bunch of time in Mar Lago and Palm

Beach helping the new Administration in many ways including uh interviewing people whom I join so uh what's the general sense about the talent about the people who are coming in into the new Administration so I should start by saying I'm not a member of the new Administration um I'm not I'm not in the room I'm not like in the room when a lot of these people are being selected I believe you said unpaid intern I am an unpaid intern uh so I'm I'm I'm a volunteer and you know when helpful but I'm not I I'm

not making the decisions nor am I in a position to you know speak for the administration so I don't want to say anything that would cause people to think I'm doing that this a very unusual situation right where you had an incumbent president and then you had a four-year Gap where he's out of office and then you have him coming back right um and as you'll recall there was a fair amount of controversy over the end of the first term oh yeah the fear the specific concern was um you know the first Trump Administration they

you know they they will all say this is like they didn't come in with a team right so they you know they didn't come in with a team and most of the sort of institutional base of the Republican Party were Bush Republicans and they were and many of them had become never trumpers and so they had a hard time putting the team together and then by the way they had a hard time getting people confirmed and so if you talk to the people who were there in the first term it took them two to three

years to kind of even get government in place and then they basically only had the government in place for um you know for basically like 18 months and then Co hit you know and then sort of aftermath and everything and all the all the drama and headlines and everything and so the the concern you know including from some very smart people in the last two years has been boy if Trump gets a second term is he going to be able to get a team that is as good as the team he had last time or

a team that is actually not as good because maybe people got burned out maybe they're more cynical now maybe they're not willing to go through the drama by the way a lot of people on in the first term came under like you know their own withering legal assaults and you know some of them went to prison and like you know a lot of lot of stuff happened uh lots of Investigations lots of legal fees um lots of bad press um lots of debank by the way a lot of the officials in the first Trump term

got debanked um including the president's wife and son yeah I heard you tell that story that's insane that's just insane in the wake of the first term yes we we now take out spouses and children with our ring of power um and so there there was like this legitimate question as to like whether okay what what will the team for the second term look like and at least what I've seen and what you're seeing the the appointments is it looks much much better U first of all it just looks better than the first term and

not because the people in the first term were not necessarily good but just you you just have this like influx of like incredibly capable people that have shown up that want to be part of this um and you just didn't have that the first time um and so they they're just drawing on a much deeper richer talent pool than they had the first time and and they're drawing on people who know what the game is like they're drawing on people now who know what is going to happen and they're still willing to do it um

and so they're going to get I think you know some of the best people from the first term but they're bringing in a lot of people who they couldn't get uh the first time around um and then second is there's a bunch of people including people in the first term where they're just 10 years older um and so they went through the first term and they just learned how everything works um or there young people who just had a different point of view and now they're 10 years older and they're ready to go serve in

government um and so there's a generational shift happening and actually one of the interesting things about the team that's forming up is it's remarkably young some of the cabinet members and then many of the second and third level people people are like in their 30s and 40s you know which is a big change from the jocy that you know we've been under for the last 30 years um and so I think the caliber has been outstanding you know we could sit here and list tons and tons of people but like you know the people who

are running you know it's everything from the people who are running all the different departments at HHS it's the people running you know the the number two at the Pentagon is Steve heinberg who's just like an incredible Legend of private Equity incredible capable guy um we've got uh two actually two of my partners are going in who I both think are amazing yeah like many many parts of the government the people are like really impressive well I think one of the concerns is is actually that um given the human being of Donald Trump that there

would be more tendency towards let's say favoritism versus meritocracy that there's kind of circles of sick of fancy that form and if you're be able to uh be loyal and never oppose and just be uh basically suck up to the president that you'll get a position so that's one of the concerns and I think you're in a good position to speak to the degree that's happening versus uh hiring based on Merit and just getting great teams yeah so look I just start by saying any leader at that level by the way any CEO there's always

some risk of that right so there there's always some you know it's just it's like a natural reality Wars around around powerful leaders and so there's always some risk to that of course the good powerful leaders are you know very aware of that and Trump this point in his life I think is highly aware of that at least in my interactions with him like he he he definitely seems very aware of that so um so so that's one thing I would just say that I think the way to look at that I mean look like

I said I don't want to predict what's going to happen once this whole thing starts unfolding but um I I would just say again the caliber of the people who are showing up and getting the jobs and then the fact that these are some of the most accomplished people in the business World um and in the medical field um I I just you know Jay bataria coming in run NIH when so I was actually in the I was actually I was part of the interview team for a lot of the h CH folks um Jay

is amazing oh I was so I was so happy to see that so I literally got this is story I got to the the the transition office for one of the days of the HS interviews and I was on one of the interview teams and they gave us I didn't know who the candidates were and they gave us the sheet in the beginning and I go on the sheet and I saw Jay's name and I like I almost physically fell it on my chair yeah right and I was just like you know and I have

I haveen to know I have to noj and I like respect him enormously and then he proved himself under this like talk about a guy who proved himself under extraordinary pressure uh over the last 5 years and then so radical under the pressure he maintained balance and thoughtfulness and depth I mean incredible very serious very analytical very applied and and and and yes 100% tested Under Pressure came out like the more people look back at what he said and did and you know he's not you know none of us are perfect but like overwhelmingly like

overwhelmingly insightful throughout that whole period um and you know we you know we would all be much better off today had he been in charge of the response um and and so just like an incredibly capable guy and and look and then he learned from all that right he he learned a lot in the last 5 years um and so the idea that somebody like that could be had of NIH as compared to the people we've had is just like breathtakingly it's just a gigantic upgrade um you know and then Marty Macker coming in to

run FDA exact same thing um the guy coming to run a CDC exact same thing um um um I mean I've been spending time with Dr Oz um so um you know I'm not like again I'm not like I'm not on these teams I'm not in the room but like I've been spending enough time trying to help that like his level of insight into into the Healthcare System like it's like astounding and it comes from being a guy who's been like in the middle of the whole thing and been talking to people about this stuff

and working on it and serving as a doctor himself and in medical systems for you know his entire life and it's just like you know he's like a walking encyclopedia on these things and so and you know very Dynamic you know very charismatic very smart organized effective um so you know to have somebody like that in there and so anyway there just I have like 30 of these stories now across all these different um all these different positions and so I and then I just I'd be quite honest you do the compare and contrast to

the last four years and it's not even these people are not in the same ballpark they're just like wildly better um and so you know pound-for-pound is may be the best team in the white house since you know I don't even know maybe the 90s maybe the maybe the 30s maybe the 50s you know maybe Eisenhower had a team like this or something but um it it's it's there's a lot of really good people in there now yeah the potential for change is certainly extremely high well can you speak to Doge what's the most wildly

successful next two years for Doge can you imagine maybe also can you think about the trajectory that's the most likely and uh what kind of challenges would it be facing yeah so and start by saying again I'm not disclaimer I have to disclaim I'm not on Doge I'm not a member of Doge we we should say there's about 10 lawyers in the room they're staring no I'm just kidding both the angels and the Devils on my shoulder so yeah so I'm not speaking for Doge I'm not in charge of Doge um those guys are doing

it I'm not doing it but I am you know again I'm I'm volunteering to help as much as I can um and I'm 100% supportive um yeah so look I I I think the way to think I mean the basic outlines are in public right which is it's a it's a Time limited you know basically commission um uh it's not a formal government agency um it's a you know time limited 18month um it'll it'll in terms of implementation it will advise the executive branch right and so the the the implementation will happen through the the

house um the president has total attitude on what he wants to what he wants to implement um and then basically what I think about it is three kind of streams you know kind of Target sets and they're related but different so money uh people and regulations um and so you know the headline number they you know put us the $2 trillion dollar number and there's already you know disputes over over that whatever and there's a whole question there but then there's the people thing and the people think is interesting because you get into these very

um kind of um fascinating questions um and I've been doing this I I won't do this for you as a pop quiz but I do this for people in government as a pop quiz and I can stump them every time which is a how many federal agencies are there and the answer is somewhere between 450 and 520 and nobody's quite sure and then the other is how many people work for the federal government um and the answer is you know something on the order I forget but like four million full-time employees and maybe up to

20 million contractors and nobody's quite sure and so there's a large people component to this um and then by the way there's a related component to that which is how many of them are actually in the office and the answer is not many most of the federal buildings are still empty right and so and then there's questions of like are people you know working from home or are we actually working from home so there's the people Dimension and of course the money and the people are connected and then there's the third which is the regulation

thing right and I I described earlier how basically our system of government is much more now based on regulations than legislation right most of the rules that we all live under are not from a bill that went through Congress they're from an agency that that created a regulation that turns out to be very very important so one is Elon have already described we want to do the Doge wants to do broad-based regulatory relief and Trump has talked about this and basically get the government off people's backs and Liberate the American people to be able to

do things again um so that's part of it but there's also something else that's happened which is very interesting which was there were a set of Supreme Court decisions about two years ago um that went directly after the idea that the executive branch can create Regulatory Agencies and issue regulations and enforce those regulations without corresponding Congressional legislation um and most of the federal government that exists today including most of the Departments and most of the rules and most of the money and most of the people most of it is not enforcing laws the Congress passed

most of it is is regulation and the Supreme Court basically said large Parts you know large to maybe all of that regulation that did not directly result from a bill that went through Congress the way that the cartoon said that it should um that may not actually be legal now the previous White house of course was super in favor of big government they had no desire to they did nothing based on this they they didn't you know pull anything back in but the new regime if they choose to could say look the the thing that

we're doing here is not you know challenging the laws we're actually complying with the Supreme Court decision that basically says we have to unwind a lot of this and we have to unwind the regulations which are no longer legal constitutional we have to unwind the spend and we have to unwind the people um and and so and that's how you get from basically you connect the thread from the regulation part back to the money part back to the people part um they have work going on all three of these threads they have I would say

incredibly creative ideas on how to deal with this um I'm I I know lots of former government people who 100% of them are super cynical on this topic and they're like this is impossible this could never possibly work and I'm like well I can't tell you what the secret plans are but like like blow my mind like and all three of those like they they have ideas that are like really quite amazing as you'd expect from you know from from the people involved and so um over the course of the next few months you know

that'll start to become visible and then the final thing I would say is um this is going to be very different than than attempts like there have been other programs like this in the past um the Clinton Gore administration had one and then their brothers before that Reagan had one um the the difference is this time there social media um and so there has never been like it's interesting one of the reasons people in Washington are so cynical is because they know all the bullshit like they know all the bad spending and all the bad

rules and all the like you know I mean look we're adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days right now and that's compounding and it's now passing the size of the defense department budget and it's compounding and it's pretty soon it's going to be adding a trillion dollars every 90 days and then it's going to be adding a trillion dollars every 80 days and then it's going to be trillion dollars every 70 days and then if this doesn't get fixed at some point we enter a hyperinflationary spiral and we become Argentina or

Brazil and K right and so like everybody in DC knows that something has to be done and then everybody in DC knows for a fact that it's impossible to do anything right they know all the problems and they also know the sheer impossibility of fixing it but I think what they're not taking into account what the critics are not taking into account is these guys can do this in the full light of day and they can do it on social media they can completely bypass the Press they can completely bypass the cynicism they can expose

any element of you know unconstitutional or you know Silly government spending they can run Victory laps every single day on what they're doing they can they can bring the people into the process and again if you think about it this goes back to our mellan structure which is if you think about again you've got democracy oligarchy monarchy rule of the many rule of the few rule of the one you could think about what's happening here as a little bit of a sandwich right which is you have you have we don't have a monarch but we

have a president rule of the one with some power and then we have the people who can't organize but they can be informed and they can be aware and they can express themselves through voting and polling right and so there's a sandwich happening right now is a way to think about it which is you've got basically monarch monarchy you got rule of one combining with rule of many right rule of many is they do get to vote right the people do get to vote basically and then essentially Congress as and the sort of permanent bureaucratic

class in Washington as the oligarchy in the middle and so the White House plus the people um I think have the power to do all kinds of things here and I and I think that that would be the way I would watch it the transparency I mean Elon just uh by who he is in is incentivized to be transparent and show the bullshit in the system and to celebrate the victories so it's going to be so exciting I mean honestly just makes government more exciting which is a win for everybody these people are spending our

money yeah these people have enormous contempt for the taxpayer okay here's the thing you hear in Washington here's one of the things so the first thing you hear is this is impossible they'll be able to do nothing and then I walk them through this and they're like they start to get it starts to Dawn on them that this is a new kind of thing and then they're like well it doesn't matter because all the money is in entitlements and the debt and the military and so like yeah you've got like this silly fake whatever you

know NPR funding or whatever and like it just it's a rounding ER and it doesn't matter and you look it up in the budget and it's like whatever $500 million or5 billion or it's or it's the the the the it's the charging stations that don't exist it's the $40 billion of charging stations and they build eight charging stations or it's the it's the broadband internet plan that delivered Broadband to nobody right and cost you $30 billion like so these boondoggles and what everybody in Washington says is that $30 billion is a rounding area on the

federal budget it doesn't matter who cares if they if they if they make it go away and of course any taxpayer is like what theu what do you mean it's $30 billion yeah right and then then the experts are like and the Press is in on this too then the experts are like well it doesn't it doesn't matter because it's rounding area no no it's $30 billion and if you're this Cavalier about $30 billion imagine how Cavalier you are about the 3 trillion yeah okay then there's the okay $30 billion is $30 billion a lot

of the federal budget in percentage no it's not but $30 billion divided by 30 do the math $30 billion divided by let's say 300 million taxpayers right like what's that Ma math expert $100 $100 per taxpayer per year okay so $100 to an ordinary person working hard every day to make money and provide for their kids $100 is a meal out it's a trip to the amusement park it's the ability to you know buy additional educational materials it's the ability to have a babysitter to be able to have a romantic relationship with your wife it's

there's like a hundred things that that person can do with $100 that they're not doing because it's going to some bullshit program that is being basically where the money is being looted out in the form of just like ridiculous ridiculousness in CFT and so the idea that that $3 billion program is not something that is like a very important thing to go after is just like the level of contempt for the taxpayer is just off the charts and then that's just one of those programs and there's like a hundred of those programs and they're all

just like that like it's not like any of the stuff is running well like the one thing we know is that none of this stuff is running well like we know that for sure right and like we know these people aren't showing up to work and like we know that all this crazy stuff is happening right um like you know the the do you remember elon's story of the um do you remember elon's story of what got the Amish to turn out to vote in Pennsylvania oh okay so like Pennsylvania okay so Pennsylvania is like

a wonderful State great history it has these cities like Philadelphia that have descended like other cities into just like complete chaos violence Madness and death right and the federal government has just like let it happen it's incredibly violent places and so the Biden Administration decided that the big pressing law enforcement thing that they needed to do Pennsylvania was that they needed to start raiding Amish farms to prevent them from selling raw milk with armed raids right and it turns out it really pissed off the A and it turns out they weren't willing to drive to

the polling places because they don't have cars but if you came and got them they would go and they would vote and that's one of the reasons why Trump W anyway so like the law enforcement agencies are off working on like crazy things like the system's not working and so you you add up pick $130 billion programs all right now you're okay math major 100 times 100 $10,000 $10,000 okay $10,000 per taxpayer per year and but but it's also not just about money that's really obviously money is a hugely important thing but it's the Cavalier

attitude yes that then in sort of in the ripple effect of that it makes it so nobody wants to work in government and be productive it makes it so the corruption can it breeds corruption it breeds laziness it breeds secrecy cuz you don't want to be transparent about having done nothing all year all this kind of stuff and you want to reverse that so it would be exciting for the future to work at government to because the the amazing thing if you were to steal man government is you can do shit at scale you have

money and you can directly impact people's lives in a positive uh sense at scale that's it's super exciting as long as there's no bureaucracy that slows you down or not huge amount of bureaucracy that slows you down significantly yeah so uh here's here's the TR this blew my mind because I was you know once you look into once you open the hellmouth of looking into the federal budget you learn all kinds of things um so there is a term of Art in government called impoundment and so you you if you're like me you've learned this

the hard way when your car has been impounded the government meaning of impoundment the federal budget meaning is a is a different meaning um empowerment is as follows the Constitution uh requires Congress to authorize money to be spent by the executive branch right so the the the Executive Branch goes to Congress says we need money X Congress does their thing they come back and they say you can have money y the money is appropriated from Congress the executive branch spends it on the military or whatever they spend it on or on roads to Nowhere charging

stations to Nowhere or whatever um the and what's in the constitution is the the Congress appropriates the money um over the last 60 years um there has been an additional interpretation of Appropriations applied by the courts um and by the system um which is the Branch not only needs Congress to appropriate x amount of money the executive branch is not allowed topend yeah I'm aware of this I'm aware of this and so there's this thing that happens in Washington at the end of every fiscal year which is September 30th and it's the it's the great

budget flush and any remaining money that's in the system that they don't know how to productively spend they deliberately spend it unproductively yep to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars a president that doesn't want to spend the money canot spend it yeah like okay a that's not what's in the Constitution um and there's actually quite a good Wikipedia page that goes through the the great debate on this has played out in the legal world over the last 60 years and like basically if you look at this with anything resembling I think

an open mind you're like all right this is not what the founders meant um and then number two again we go back to this thing of contempt like can you imagine showing up and running the government like that and thinking that you're doing the right thing and not going home at night and thinking that you've sold your soul right like it's just like I actually think sort of headed into a really good point which is it's even unfair to the people who have to execute this yeah right because it makes them it makes them bad

people and they didn't they didn't start out wanting to be bad people and so there is stuff like this like yeah everywhere everywhere and so we'll see how far these guys get I'm I am extremely encouraged what I've what I've seen so far it seems like a lot of people try to slow them down but yeah I hope they get far yeah another difficult topic immigration what's your take on the uh let's say heated H1B Visa debate that's going on online and legal immigration in general yeah to start by saying I am not involved in

any aspect of government policy on this I not planning to be this is not an issue that I'm working on or that I'm going to work on I'm we're not this is not part of the agenda of what the firm is doing so my firm is doing so like I'm not I'm not in I'm not in this in the new Administration or the government I'm not planning to be so purely just personal opinion so I would say I would describe I have as a complex or nuanced hopefully nuanced view on on this issue that's maybe

a little bit different than what a lot of my peers um and I think and I kind of thought about this you know I didn't say anything about it all the way through the big kind of debate over Christmas but I thought about it a lot and read everything um I think what I realized is that I just have a very different perspective on some of these things and the reason is because of the combination of where I came from and then where I end ended up um and so um let's start with this I

where I ended up Silicon Valley so um and I have made the pro skilled High skill immigration argument many many times the H1B argument many times in past lives I've been in DC many times arguing with prior administrations about this always on the side of trying to get more h-1bs and trying to get more High skilled immigration um and you know I think that argument is very strong and very solid and very um you know has paid off for the US in some in many many ways and we can go through it but I think

it's the argument everybody already knows right it's like the stock you take any silicon value person you press the button and they tell you why we need to brain drain the world to get more h1p right so everybody kind of gets that argument so it's basically just to summarize it's a mechanism by which you can get super smart people from the rest of the world import them in keep them here to uh increase the productivity of the U us companies yeah and and then and then and then it's not just good for the them and

it's not just good for Silicon Valley or the tech industry it's good for the country because they then create new companies and create new technologies and create new industries that then create many more jobs for Americans native born Americans than would have previously existed and so you've got a it's a positive sum flywheel thing where everybody wins like everybody wins there are no trade-offs it's all absolutely glorious in all directions you cannot possibly there cannot possibly be a moral right argument against it under any circumstances anybody who argues against it is obviously doing so from

a position of racism is probably a fascist and a Nazi right right I mean right that's the thing and like I said I've made that argument many times I'm very comfortable with that argument and then I'd also say look I I I would say number one I believe a lot of it I'll talk about the parts I don't believe but I believe a lot of it and then the other part is look I I benefit every day I I I always describe it as I work in in the United Nations like I my own firm

and our Founders and our companies and the industry um and my friends um you know are just this like amazing you know panoply cornicopia of people from all over the world um and you know I just I've worked I don't at this point where people from it's got to be I don't know 80 countries or something um and hopefully over time it'll be you know the rest as well and you know it's just it's been amazing and they've done many of the most important things in my industry and it's it's been really remarkable so so

that's all good um and then you know there's just the practical of the argument which is we are the we are the main place these people get educated anyway right they the the best and the brightest tend to come here to get educated and so you know this is the old kind of Mitt Romney staple a green card to every you know at least you know maybe not every University degree but every technical degree maybe the sociologists we could quibble about but you know the roboticist for sure for sure for sure we can all agree

that at least I W you over on something today well no I'm I'm exaggerating for effect so and I lost you I had you for a second I hav I haven't gotten to the other side of the argument yet okay thank you so surely we can all agree that uh we need to staple a green card the roller coaster is going up the roller coaster is rationing slowly up so um yeah so surely we can all agree that the roboticist should all get green cards and again like there's a lot of Merit to that obviously

like look we want the US to be the world leader in robotics what's step one to being the world leader in robotics is have all the great robotics people right like you know very unlike the Underpants noome it's like a very straightforward formula right yeah all right that's all well and good all right but it gets a little bit more complicated um because um there is a kind of argument that's sort of right underneath that that you also hear from you know these same people and I have made this argument myself many times which is

we need to do this because we don't have enough people in the US who can do it otherwise right we have all these unfilled jobs we've got all these you know all these companies that wouldn't exist we don't have enough good Founders we don't have enough Engineers we don't have enough scientists or or then the next version of the argument below that is our education system is not good enough to generate those people um and which is a weird argument by the way because like our education system is good enough for foreigners to be able

to come here preferentially and like a very large number of cases but somehow not good enough to educate our own native born people so there's like a weird these little cracks in the Matrix that you can kind of stick your fingernail into and kind of wonder about and we'll come back to that one but like at least yes our education system has its flaws and then and then underneath that is the is the argument that you know VC made um you know which is you know we have a cultural rot in the country and you

know native born people in the country aren't you know don't work hard enough and spend too much time watching TV and Tik Tok and don't spend enough time studying differential you know equations um and again it's like all right like you know yeah there's a fair amount to that like there's a lot of American culture that um is um you know there's a lot of frivolity there's a lot of you know look I mean we have well documented social issues in many fronts many things that cut against having a culture of just like straightforward high

achievement and and effort and striving anyway like you know those are the basic arguments um but then I have this kind of other side of my you know kind of personality and thought process which is well I grew up in a small farming town in rural Wisconsin the rural Midwest and you know it's interesting there's not a lot of people who make it from Ral Wisconsin to you know Hightech um and so it's like all right why is that exactly right and and I know I'm an aberration like I I was the only one from

anybody I ever knew who ever did this right I know what an aberration I am and I know exactly how that aberration happened and it's a very unusual you know set of steps um including you know many that were just luck um but like it there is in no sense a talent flow from Earl Wisconson into high-tech like not at all um there is also like in no sense a talent flow from the rest of the Midwest into Hightech there is no Talent flow from the south into high-tech there is no flow from the Sun

Belt into Hightech there is no flow from you know the Deep South in the Hightech like just like literally it's like the blank there's this whole section of the country that just where the people just like for some reason don't end up in Tech now that's a little bit strange because these are the people who put a man on the moon these are the people who built the World War II war machine these are the people at least their ancestors are the people who built the Industrial Revolution and built the railroads and built the telephone

Network telephone Network and built you know Logistics and transportation in the auto I mean the Auto industry was built in Cleveland and Detroit and so at least these people's parents and grandparents and great-grandparents somehow had the wherewithal to like build all of this like amazing things invent all these things and then there's many many many many stories in the history of American invention and Innovation and capitalism where you had people who grew up in the middle of nowhere Pho Farnsworth who invented the television and just like you know tons and tons of others endless stories

like this now you have a look a puzzle right and a conundrum which is like okay like what is happening on the blank spot of the map and then of course you also can't help noticing that the blank spot on the map the Midwest the South you've also just defined Trump country the Trump voter base right it's like oh that's interesting like how how did that happen right and so either you really really really have to believe the very very strong version of like the vvec thesis or something where you have to believe that like

that basically culture the whole sort of civilization in the middle of the country and the south of the country is so like deeply flawed either inherently flawed or culturally flawed such that for whatever reason they are not able to do the things that they're you know parents and Grandparents were able to do and that their peers are able to do or something else is happening would you care to guess on what else is happening mean what affirmative action affirmative action okay this is very think about this is very entertaining right what are the three things

that we know about affirmative action it is absolutely 100% necessary but however it cannot explain the success of any one individual right nor does it have any victims at all I they could explain maybe disproportionate but like it it surely doesn't explain why you're probably the only person in silon Valley from Wisconsin what educational institution the last 60 years has wanted Farm boys from Wisconsin but what institution rejected farmboys from Wisconsin all of them all of them of course okay so we know this we know this the reason we know this is because of the

Harvard and UNC Court Supreme Court cases so so this was like three years ago these were these were big court cases and you know that because the idea of affirmative action has been litigated for many many many years and through many court cases and the Supreme Court repeatedly in the past had upheld that it was a completely legitimate thing to do and a lot of these and there's basically two categories of affirmative action that like really matter right the one is um the admissions into educational institutions and then the other is jobs right getting hired

like those are the two biggest areas the education one is like super potent has been a super potent political issue for a very long time for all you know people have written and talked about this for many decades I don't I don't need to go through it there's many arguments for why it's important there's many arguments as to how it could backfire it's been this thing but the Supreme Court upheld it for a very long time um the most the most recent ruling I don't I'm not a lawyer I don't have the exact reference in

my head but there was a case in 2003 that said that um Senor deoc Conor famously wrote that um you know it although it had been 30 years of affirmative action and although it was not working remotely as it had had been intended um uh she said that you know well basically we need to try it for another 25 years but she said basically as a message to Future Supreme Court Justices if it hasn't resolved basic basically the issues it's intended to resolve within 25 years then we should probably call it off by the way

we're coming up on the 25 years let a couple years away uh the Supreme Court just uh had these cases it was a Harvard case and I think a University of North Carolina case and what's interesting about those cases is the the lawyers in those cases put a tremendous amount of evidence into the record of how the admissions decisions actually happen um at Harvard and happen at UNCC and it is like every bit as cartoonishly garish and racist as you could possibly imagine because it's a ring of power and if you're an admissions officer at

a private university or an administrator you have unlimited power to do what you want and you can justify any of it under any of these rules or systems um and up until these cases it had been a black box where you didn't have to explain yourself and show your work and and what the Harvard and USC cases did is they basically required showing the work and so they and there was like all kinds of like phenomenal detail I mean number one there were text messages in there that will just curl your hair of people of

students being spoken of and just like crude racial stereotypes that would just make you want to jump out the window it's horrible stuff but also um there was statistical information and of course the big statistical kicker to the whole thing is that at top institutions it's common for different different ethnic groups to have different cut offs for sat uh that are as wide as 400 points um right so different groups so so so a specifically Asians need to perform at 400 sat points higher than other ethnicities in order to actually get admitted into these I

mean this not even about I mean white people are a part of this but like Asians are like a very big part of this and actually the the Harvard case was actually brought by an activist on behalf of actually the Asian students who are being turned away um and it it's basically I mean it's the cliche now in in in the valley and in the medical community which is like if you want a Super Genius you hire an Asian from Harvard because they are guaranteed to be freaking Einstein because if they weren't they were never

getting admitted right almost all the qualified as get turned away um so they've been running this it's very very very explicit very very clear program um this of course has been a third rail of things that people are not supposed to discuss under any circumstances um the thing that has really changed the tenor on this is I think two things number one those Supreme Court cases the Supreme Court ruled that they can no longer do that I will tell you I don't believe there's a single education institution in America that is conforming with the Supreme

Court ruling um I think they're all flagrantly ignoring it and we could talk about that mostly giv a momentum probably or what they are trying to make the world a better place they are trying to solve all these social problems they are trying to have diverse student populations they are trying to live up to the expectations of their donors they are trying to make their faculty happy they are trying to um have their friends and family think that they're good people right they're trying to have the Press write nice things about them like it's nearly

impossible for them and and you know to be clear like nobody has been fired from an admissions office for you know 25 years of Prior what we now the Supreme Court now is rulle to be illegality um and so they're all the same people under the exact same pressures um and so um like I you know the numbers are moving a little bit but like I don't think I don't know anybody in the system who thinks that they're complying with the Supreme Court like who's in charge in the rank ordering of who rules who the

universities rule the Supreme Court way more than the Supreme Court rules the universities right well another example of that is I think it's is that every sitting member of the Supreme Court right now went to either Harvard or Yale right like the the level of incestuous here is like is any anyway so so there's that and so so this has been running for a very long time so one is the harbard and UNC cases kind of gave up the game number one or at least show showed what the mechanism was uh and then number two

the other thing is obviously the the aftermath of October 7th right um and what we discovered was happening with Jewish applicants um and what was happening at all the top institutions for Jewish applicants was they were being managed down they being actively managed down as a percentage of the of of the base um and um let's see I I've heard reports of like extremely explicit um basically plans to manage to manage the Jewish admissions down to their representative percentage of the US population which is 2% and you know there's a whole backstory here which is

100 years ago Jews were not admitted into a lot of these institutions and then there was a big campaign to get them in once they could get in they immediately became 30% of these institutions because there's so many smart talented Jews so it went from 0% to 30% and then the most recent generation of leadership has been trying to get it down to 2% and a lot of Jewish people at least a lot of Jewish people I know sort of they kind of knew this was happening but they discovered it the hard way uh after

October 7th right and so all of a sudden so so basically the the Supreme Court case meant that you could address this in terms of the Asian victims the October 7th meant that you could address it in terms of the Jewish victims and for sure both of those groups are being systematically excluded right and then of course um there's the thing that you basically can't talk about which is all the white people are being excluded and then it turns out it's also happening to black people and this is the thing that like blew my freaking

mind when I found out about it so um I just assumed that like this was great news for like American blacks because like you know obviously if you know whites Asians and Jews are being excluded then you know the whole point of this in the beginning was to get the black population up and so this must be great for American blacks so then I discovered this New York Times article from 2004 um called U blacks are being admitted into top schools at greater numbers but which ones uh oh and again by the way this is

in the New York Times this is not in like you know whatever National Review this is New York Times uh 2004 and the two authorities that were quoted in the story are Henry Lewis Gates who's the dean of the African-American studies you know community in the United States super brilliant guy and then lonni guir who was a she was a potential Supreme Court uh appointee under I think uh she was close friend of Hillary Clinton and there was for a long time she was on the short list for Supreme Court so one of the top

you know jurists lawyers in the country both both black um was sort of legendarily successful in their in their in the academic and legal worlds um and black um and they are quoted as the authorities in this story and the story that they tell it's actually very it's amazing um and by the way it's happening today in uh education institutions and it's happening in companies and you can see it all over the place and the government um which is um at least at that time the number was half of the black admits into a place

like Harvard were not American Born blacks they were foreign born blacks um specifically U uh Northern African of generally Nigerian um or West Indian um right um and by the way many Nigerians and Northern Africans have come to the US and have been very successful nigerian-americans is a group like way outperform they're you know just a super smart cohort of people and then West Indian blacks in the US are incredibly successful um most recently by the way kamla Harris as well as colen Powell like just two sort of examples of that and so basically what

Henry Lewis Gates and L guer said in the story is Harvard is basically struggling to either whatever it was identify a recruit make successful whatever it was American Born native blacks and so therefore they were using High skill immigra High skill immigration as an escape hatch to go get blacks from other countries um and then and then this was 2004 when you could discuss such things um obviously that is a topic that nobody has discussed since it has sailed on all of the Dei programs of the last 20 years have had this exact characteristic um

there's large numbers of black people in America who are fully aware of this and are like it's obviously not us that are getting these slots where we're obviously we're literally competing with people who are being imported and and you know if you believe in the basis formative action you were trying to make up for historical Injustice of American black slavery and so the idea that you import somebody from you know Nigeria that never experienced that um you know is like tremendously insulting to to to Black Americans anyway so you can see where I'm heading with

this we have been in a 60-year social engineer engineering experiment to exclude native born people from the educational slots and jobs that high skill immigration has been funing foreigners into right and so it turns out it's not a victim free thing there there's like 100% there's victims because why there's only so many for sure there's only so many education slots and then for sure there's only so many of these jobs right you know Google only hires so many you know whatever level seven Engineers right and so so so so that's the other side of it

right and so you're a farm boy in Wisconsin right or a you know black American whose ancestors arrived here you know on a slave ship 300 years ago in Louisiana or a you know Cambodian immigrant in you know the Bronx um and your kid or a Jewish immigrant or you know from very successful Jewish Family um and you know your entire you know for three generations you and your parents and grandparents went to Harvard and what all of those groups know is the system that has been created is not for them right it's designed specifically

to exclude them and then what happens is all of these tech people show up in public and say yeah let's bring in more foreigners right and so so anyway so the the the short version of it is you can't anymore I don't think just have the the the um the the the quote high skill immigration conversation for either education or for um uh or for employment without also having the Dei conversation um and then underneath and then Dei is just another word for formative action so it's it's the affirmative action conversation and you you need

to actually deal with this at substance and to see what's actually happening to people you needed to join these topics and and and I think it is much harder to make the moral claim for high school immigration given the the the extent to which Dei took over both the education hiring uh education process and the and the hiring process okay so first of all that was brilliantly laid out the Nuance of it so just to understand it's not so much a criticism of H1B High skilled immigration it's that there needs to be more people saying

yay we need more American Born hires so I spent the entire Christmas holiday reading every message on this and not saying anything and what I was which you know me well enough to know that's a serious level of yeah that very Zen yes thank you thank you no it wasn't there was tremendous rage on the other side of it but we I suppressed it so um I was waiting for the dog that didn't bark right and the dog that didn't bark was I did not and tell me if you saw one I did not see

a single example of somebody pounding the table for more High School immigration who was also pounding the table to go get more smart kids who are already here uh into these educational institutions and into these jobs I didn't see I didn't see a single one that's true I I I think I agree with that there's there really was a divide but it was like literally it was like the proponents of high skill immigr and again this was me for a very long time I mean I kind of took myself by surprise on this because I

was on you know I I I I had the much say simpler version of this story for very like I said I I've been in Washington many times under past presidents lobbing for this by the way never made any progress which we could talk about like it never actually worked um but um you know I I've been on the other side of this one but I was literally sitting there being like all right which of these like super Geniuses um who you know many of whom by the way are very you know successful High skill

immigrants or children of high skill immigrants you know which of these super Geniuses are going to like say actually we have this like incredible Talent Source here in the country which again to be clear I'm I'm not talking about white people I'm talking about native born Americans whites Asians Jews blacks for sure for sure for sure those four groups but also yes white people yeah and and also white people people that are making the case for American Born hires are usually not also supporting H1B this it's an extreme divide and those people that making that

case are often not making it in a way that's like uh making it in quite a radical way let's put it this but you have this interesting thing you have a split between the sides that I've noticed which is one side has all of the experts right right and and I'm using scare for people listening to audio I'm making quotes in the air with my fingers as vigorously as I can one side has all the certified experts the other side just has a bunch of people who are like they know that something is wrong and

they don't quite know how to explain it and what was so unusual about the Harvard UNCC cases by the way in front of Supreme Court is they actually had sophisticated lawyers for the first time in a long time actually put all this evidence together and actually put it in the public record they actually had experts which is just which is just really rare generally what you get is you get because if you don't have experts what do you have you know something is wrong and you have but you have primarily an emotional response you feel

it but can you put it you know can you put it in the words and tables and charts you know that that a certified expert can and no you can't like that's not you know that's not who you are that doesn't mean that you're wrong and it also doesn't mean that you have less of a moral stance um yeah and so it's just like all right now by the way look I think there's there I think there are ways to square the circle I think there's a way to have ourc can e it too like

I I think there'd be many ways to resolve this um I think again I think the way to do it is to look at these these these issues combined look at at Dei combined with um High School immigration it so happens the Dei um is under much more scrutiny today than it has been for probably 20 years affirmative action is um the Supreme Court did just rule that it is not legal um for universities to do that they are still doing it but they should stop um and then there are more and more you've seen

more companies now also dishing their Dei programs um in part that's happening for a bunch of reasons but it's happening in part because a lot of corporate lawyers will tell you that the Supreme Court rulings and education either already apply to businesses or it just is a clear foreshadowing the Supreme Court will rule on new cases that will ban in businesses and so so so there there is a moment here to be able to look at this um on both sides um let me add one more Nuance to it though that makes it even more

complicated yeah so the cliche is we're going to brain drain the world right you've heard that we're going to we're going to take all the smart people from all over the world we're going to bring them here we're going to educate them and we're going to keep them and then they're going to raise our families here create businesses here create jobs here right in the cliche that's a super positive thing yeah okay so what happens to the rest of the world they lose well how fungible are people how many highly ambitious highly conscientious highly energetic

High achieving high IQ super geniuses are there in the world and if there's a lot that's great but if there just aren't that many and they all come here and they all aren't where they would be otherwise what happens to all those other places so it's almost impossible for us here to have that conversation in part because we become incredibly uncomfortable as a society talking about the fact that people aren't just simply all the same um just a whole thing we could talk about but um also we we are purely the beneficiary of this effect

right we are brain draining the world not the other way around there's only four so if you look at the flow of high skill immigration over time there's only four permanent sinks of high skill immigration places people go it's the US Canada the UK and Australia it's the it's Australia it's the four it's four of the five five eyes it's the major anglosphere countries and so for those countries this there this seems like a no lose proposition it's all the other countries that basically what what we what we for countri has been doing is draining

all the smart people out it's actually much easier for people in Europe to talk about this I've discovered um because the euro is whatever you know 28 countries and within the Euro Zone the high skill people over time have been migrating to originally the UK but also specifically I think it's the Netherlands um Germany and France but specifically they've been migrating out of the peripheral Eurozone countries and the the the one where this really hit the fan was in Greece right so you know Greece falls into chaos disaster and then you know you're running the

government in Greece and you're trying to figure out how to put an economic development plan together all of your smart young kids have left like what are you going to do right um by the way this is a potential I know you care a lot about Ukraine this is a potential crisis for Ukraine not because in part because of this because we enthusiastically recruit ukrainians of course and so we've been drain brain draining Ukraine for a long time but also of course you know War does tend to cause people to to migrate out and so

you know when it comes time for Ukraine to rebuild as a peaceful country is it going to have the talent base even that it had five years ago is like a very big and important question by the way Russia like we have brainin a lot of really smart people out of Russia lot of them are here right over the last you know 30 years um and so there's this thing it's actually really funny if you think about it like the one thing that we know to be the height of absolute evil that the West ever

did was colonization and resource extraction right so we know the height of absolute evil was when the Portuguese and the English and you know everybody else went and had these colonies and then went in and we you know took all the oil or we took all the diamonds or we took all the whatever lithium or whatever it is right well for some reason we realize that that's a deeply evil thing to do when it's a physical resource when it's a non-conscious physical matter um for some reason we think it's completely morally acceptable to do it

with human capital in fact we think it's glorious and beautiful and wonderful and you know the great flowering of of of peace and Harmony and and moral justice of our time to do it and we don't think for one second what we're doing to the countries that we're pulling all these people out of and I I this is one of these things like I don't know like maybe we're just going to live in this delusional State forever and we'll just keep doing it and it'll keep benefiting us and we just won't care what happens but

like I I think there may come this is one of these this is like one of these submarines under 10t under the water line like I think it's just a matter of time until people suddenly realize oh my God what are we doing CU like we need the rest of the world to succeed too right like we need these other countries to like flourish like we don't want to be the only successful country in the middle of just like complete chaos and disaster and we just extract and we extract and we extract and we don't

think twice about it well this is so deeply profound actually so what is the cost of winning quote unquote if these countries are drained in terms of human capital on the on the level of geopolitics what does that lead to even if we talk about wars and conflict and all of this we actually want them to be strong in the way we understand strong not just in every way so that cooperation and competition Can Build a Better World for all of humanity it's interesting I I've been this is one of those uh truths where you

just speak and it resonates and I didn't even think about it yeah exactly so this is you were sitting in during the holiday season just boiling over so all that said yeah there's still to you some good to the H1B okay so then you get this other okay so then there's come all the way around there's another Nuance so there's another Nuance there's another Nuance which is mostly the valley we don't use H1 BS anymore mostly we use all ones so there's a se you may there's a separate class of V so and and the

o1 is like this it turns out that the 01 is the Super Genius Visa mhm so the o1 is the basically our our founder like when we have like a when we have somebody from anywhere in the world and they've like invented a breakr new technology and they want to come to the US to start a company they come in through an 01 Visa um and and and that actually is like a it's a fairly High bar it's a high acceptance rate but it's like a pretty high bar and they they do a lot of

work and they there's like a you have to put real work into it really really prove your case um mostly what's happened with the H1B Visa program um is that it has gone to basically two categories of employers one is the basically a small set of big tech companies that higher in volume which is exactly the companies that you would think um and then the other is it goes to these what they call kind of the Mills um the Consulting Mills right and so there's these set of companies with names I don't want to pick

on companies but you know names like cognizant that you know hire basically have in their business model uh is primarily Indian bring in primarily Indians um in in large numbers um and you know they often have you know offices next to company- Owned housing and they'll have you know organizations that are you know they'll have you know organizations that are literally thousands of Indians you know living and working in the US and they do basically um call it mid tier like uh IT consulting so you know these folks they're making good good good good wages

but they're making 60 or 80 or $100,000 a year not the you know 300,000 that you'd make in the valley um and so like in practice the startups basic like little Tech as we call it or the startup World mainly doesn't use h-1bs at this point and and mainly can't because the system is kind of rigged in a way that we really can't um and then and then and then again you get to the sort of under morality here which is it's like well you know Amazon like Amazon's a and like I love Amazon but

like they're a big powerful company you know they've got you know more money than God they've got resources they've got a long-term planning Horizon they do big you know profound things over you know decades at a time um you know they could you know or any of these other companies could launch massively effective programs to go recruit the best and brightest from all throughout the the country and you know you'll notice they don't do that you know they bring in you know 10,000 20,000 H bees a year um and so you've got a question there

um and then these Mills like there's lots of questions around them and whether they should you know whether that's even a ethical way you know I don't want to say they're unethical but there's questions around like exactly what what the trade-offs are there um and so you know this this yeah and this is like a Pandora's Box that really you know nobody really wanted to be opened um you know to to to play Devil's Advocate on all this in terms of like National immigration issues you know none of this is like a top end issue

just because the numbers are small um right and so you know I don't think you know the Administration has said like this is not like a priority of theirs for right now um but I guess what I would say is like there is actually a lot of complexity of nuance here um I have a lot of friend like I said I have a lot of friends and colleagues who are you know came over on h-1bs or1s green cards many are now citizens and you know every single one one of them was not every single one

a lot of them were enthusiastic to you know defend the honor of immigrants throughout this whole period and they said to me it's like well Mark how can we you know how can we how can we more clearly Express you know the importance of high school immigration to the US and I was like um I think you can do it by advocating for also developing ative porn Talent like do you want to inflame the issue or do you want to diffuse the issue MH right and I I think I think the answer is to diffuse

the issue uh let me give you one more positive scenario which and then I'll also beat up on the University some more um do you do you know about the National Merit Scholarship system have you heard about this um not really G so there's a system that was created during the Cold War um called the National Merit Scholars and um it is a basically um it was created I for in the 1950s or 60s when it was when people in government actually wanted to identify the best and the brightest as heretical an idea as that

sounds today um and so it's basically a national talent search for basically IQ um it its goal is to identify basically the top 0.5% of the IQ um uh in the country by the way completely regardless of other characteristics so there's no race gender any other aspect to it it's just going frustrated intelligence um it uses the first the pat um which is the Preparatory sat that you take um and then the SAT uh so it uses those scores that that is the scoring it's a straight Pat sat scoring system um so they use the

SAT as a proxy for IQ which it is um uh they run this every year they identify they they it's like a they get down to like 1% of the population of the kids 18y olds any given year who scor highest on the p and then they get down to they further qualify down to the 0.5% that also replicate on the SAT um and then it's like the scholarship amount is like $2500 right so it's like it was a lot of money 50 years ago not as much today but it's a national system being run

literally to find the best and the brightest how many of our great and powerful universities use this as a scouting system like our universities all have sports teams they all have National scouting uh they have full-time Scouts who go out and they go to Every high school and they try to find all the great basketball players and bring them into the NCAA into all these leagues um how many of our great and powerful and enlightened universities use the National Merit system to go do a talent search for the smartest kids and just bring them in

let me guess very few zero zero as you say it that's brilliant there should be that same level of scouting for talent internally go get the smartest ones give you one more kicker on this topic if you're not if I haven't beaten it to death um you know the SAT has changed um so the SAT used to be a highly accurate proxy for IQ um that caused a bunch of problems people really don't like the whole idea of IQ um and so the SAT has been actively managed over the last 50 years by the college

board that runs it and it has been essentially like everything else it's been dumb down um and so the the in in two ways um number one it's been dumbed down where uh an 800 from 40 years ago does not mean what an 800 means today um and 800 40 years ago it was almost impossible to get an 800 uh today there's today there's so many 800s that you could stock the entire ivy league with 800s right um and so so so so it's been deliberately dumbed down um and then two is they have they

have tried to pull out a lot of what's called The g- Loading and so they they've tried to detach it from being an IQ proxy because IQ is such an inflammatory concept and and the consequence of that is and this is sort of perverse they've made it more coachable right so the it the SAT 40 years ago coaching didn't really work and more recently it has really started to work and one of the things you see is that the Asian Spike you see this like giant leap upward in Asian performance over the last decade and

I I think looking at the data I think a lot of that is because it's more coachable now and and the Asians do the most coaching um so there's a bunch of issues with this and so the coaching thing is really difficult because the coaching thing is a subsidy then to the kids whose parents can afford coaching right and I don't know about you but where I grew up there was no sat coaching so there's like an issue there I didn't even know what the SAT was until the day I took it much less that

there was coaching much less that it could work so much less we could afford it so so number one there's issues there but the other issue there is think about what's happened by the dumbing down 800 no longer captures all the smart 800 is too crude of a it's like the AI benchmarking problem it's it's the same problem they have an AI benchmarking right now 800 is too low of a threshold there are too many kids scoring 800 because what you want is you want whatever if it's going to be 100,000 kids I don't know

what it is it's going to be 50,000 kids a year scoring 800 you also then want kids to be able to score 900 and 1,000 and 1100 and 1200 and you want to ultimately get to you know this you'd like to ident ultimately identify the top 100 kids and make sure that you get them in MIT and the resolution of the test has been reduced so that it actually is not useful for doing that and again I I would say this is like part of the generalized corruption that's taken place throughout this entire system where

we we we have been heading in the reverse direction from wanting to actually go get the best and brightest and actually put them in the places um where they should be and then just the final comment would be the great thing about standardized testing and the National Merit system is it's like I said it's completely race blind it's gender blind it's blind on every other characteristic it's only done on test scores you know and you can make an argument about whether that's good or bad but it is you know for sure um you know it's

the closest that we had to get to Merit um it was the thing that they did when they thought they needed Merit to win the Cold War and of course we could we could choose to do that anytime we want and and I just say I find it like incredibly striking um and an enormous moral indictment of the current system that there are no universities that do this today so back to the immigration thing just real quick it's like okay we aren't even trying to go get the smart kids out of the center and South

and and even if they think that they can get into these places they get turned down and the same thing for the smart Asians and the same thing for the smart Jews and the same thing for the smart black people and like it it just like it's just like I don't know how like I I don't know how that's moral like I I don't get it at all as you said about the 800 so I took the SAT and ACT many times and I've always gotten perfect on math 800 it's just and I'm not that

I'm not special like it it it it doesn't identify genius I think you want to search for genius and you want to create measures that find Genius of all different kinds speaking of diversity and I guess we should reiterate and say over and over and over uh defend immigrants yes but say we should hire more and more native born well you asked me in the beginning like what what would what what's the most optimistic forecast right that we could have and the most optimistic forecast would be my God what if we did both like so

that's the reasonable the rational the smart thing to say here in fact we don't have to have a war well it would diffuse it would diffuse the entire issue yeah if everybody in the center and the south of the country and every Jewish Family Asian family black family knew they were getting a fair shake like it would diffuse the issue like how about diffusing the issue like what a crazy radical sorry I don't mean to really get out of my skis here but I think your profile on X States it's time to build it feels

like 25 2025 is a good year to build so uh I wanted to ask your device and maybe uh for a device for anybody who's trying to build so who's trying to build something useful in the world maybe launch a startup or maybe just launch apps Services whatever ship software products so maybe by way of a device how do you actually get to shipping so I mean a big part of the answer I think is we're in the middle of a legit Revolution and I know you've been talking about this on your show but like

AI coding I mean this is the biggest earthquake to hit software in certainly My Life um maybe since the invention of software um and I'm sure you know we're involved in various of these companies but you know these these tools um you know from a variety of companies are um like absolutely revolutionary and and and they're getting better at Leaps and Bounds right every day and you you know all this but like the thing with coding like there there's like open questions of whether AI can get better at like I don't know understanding philosophy or

whatever creative writing or whatever but like for sure we can make it much better at coding right because you can validate the results of coding um and so you know there's all these methods of you know synthetic data and self trining and reinforcement learning that for sure you can do with with coding and so everybody I know who works in the field says AI coding is going to get to be phenomenally good and it's it's already great and you you can I mean anybody wants to see this just go on YouTube and look at AI

coding demos you know little little kids making apps in 10 minutes working with an AI coding system and so I think it's the golden I mean I think this is an area where it's clearly the Golden Age the tool set is extraordinary you know in in a day as as a coder for sure in a day you can retrain yourself um you know start using these things get a huge boost in productivity as a non- coder you can learn much more quickly than you could before that's that's actually a tricky one in terms of learning

as a non- coder to build stuff it's still I feel like you still need to learn how to code it it becomes a superpower it helps you be much more productive like you could legitimately be a oneperson uh company and get quite far I agree with that up to a point so the um I think for sure for quite a long time the people who are good at coding are going to be the best at actually having AI code things um because they're going to understand what I mean very basic they're going to understand what's

happening right and they're going to be be able to evaluate the work and they're going to be able to you know literally like manage AIS better um like even if they're not literally handwriting the code they're just going to have a much better sense of what's going on so I definitely think like 100% my 9-year-old is like doing all kinds of coding classes and he'll keep doing that for certainly through 18 after that um and so like for sure that's the case um but but look having said that one of the things you can do

with an AI is say teach me how to code right um and so and you know there's there's a whole bunch of um you know I'll name names you know khad like there's a whole bunch of whole bunch of work that they're doing at KH Academy for free and then you know we have this company repet uh which is was originally specifically built for kids for coding um that is has AI built in that's just absolutely extraordinary now um and then you know there's a variety of other of other systems like this um and uh

yeah that that mean the AI is going to be able to teach you to code the AI by the way is as you know spectacularly good at explaining code right um and so you know the tools have these features now where you can quote talk to the codebase and so you can like literally like ask the codebase questions about itself um and you can also just do the simple form which is you can copy and paste code into chat GPD and just ask it to explain it what's going on rewrite it improve it make recommendations

and so there there's yeah there's dozens of ways to to do this by the way you can also so I mean even more broadly than code like okay you want to make a video game okay now you can do AI art generation sound generation dialogue generation voice generation right and so all of a sudden like you don't need designers you know you don't need um you know voice actors you know so yeah so there's just like unlimited and and then you know big is you know big part of coding is so-called glue you know it's

it's interfacing into other systems so it's interfacing into you know stripe to take payments or something like that and you know AI is fantastic at writing gluc code um so really really good at making sure that you can plug everything together really good at helping you figure out how to deploy um you know it'll even write a business plan for you um so it's just this it's like everything happening with AI right now it's just it's like this latent superpower and there's this incredible spectrum of people who have really figured out massive performance increases productivity

increases with it already there's other people who aren't even aware it's happening and there's some gearing to whether you're a coder or not but I think there are lots of non-coders that are off the races and I think there are lots of professional coders who are still like you know the blacksmiths were not necessarily in favor of you know the car business um so uh there's the old William Gibson quote the future is here it's just not evenly distributed yet and this is maybe the most potent version of that that I've ever seen yeah there's

uh you know the old meme with the uh with the bell curve the the people on both extreme say AI coding is the future um it's very common the programmers to say know if you're any good of a programmer you're not going to be using it just that's just not true I consider myself reasonably good programmer and I my productivity has been just skyrocketed the joy of programming skyro rocketed is every aspect of programming is more efficient uh more productive more fun all that kind of stuff I would also say code is you know code

has code has of anything in like industrial society code is has the highest elasticity which is to say the easier it is to make it the more get get the more of it gets made like I think effectively there's unlimited demand for code like in other words like there's always some other idea for a thing that you can do a feature that you can add or a thing that you can optimize um and so and so like overwhelmingly you know the amount of code that exists in the world is a fraction of even the ideas

we have today and then we come up with new ideas all the time um and so I I think that like you know I was I was in late 80s early 90s when sort of automated coding systems started to come out expert systems big deal in those days and there were all these there was a famous book called The Decline and fall of the American programmer you know that predicted that these new coding systems were going to mean we wouldn't have programmers in the future and of course the number of programming jobs exploded by like

a factor of 100 like my guess will be we'll have more my guess is we'll have more coding jobs probably by like an order of magnitude 10 years from now that will be different there'll be different jobs they'll involve orchestrating AI um but um there will be we will be creating so much more software that that the whole industry will just explode in size are you seeing the size of companies decree grease in terms of startups what's the Landscapes of little Tech all we're seeing right now is the AI hiring boom of all time for

the big tech and and little Tech everybody's trying to hire as many Engineers as they can to build AI systems it's just it's 100% I mean there there's a handful of company you know there's a little bit there's there's customer service you know there we have some companies and others I think it's Clara that's publicizing a lot of this um in Europe um uh where um you know you know there are jobs that can be optimized um and jobs they can be automated but um like for engineering jobs like it's just an explosion of hiring

um that at least so far there's no trace of any sort of diminishing effect um now having said that I am looking forward to the day I I am waiting for the first company to walk in saying yes um like the more radical form of it but so basically the companies that we see are basically one of two kinds we we see the companies that are basically sometimes use weak form strong form so the the weak form companies sometimes use the term it's the the sixth bullet point um AI is the sixth bullet point on

whatever they're doing sure right in on the slide right so they've got the you know whatever dot dot dot do Dot and then AI the six thing and the reason AI the six thing is because they had already previously written the slide before the AI Revolution started and so they just added the six bullet point on the slide which is how you're getting all these products that have like the AI button up in the corner right the little sparkly button y right um and all of a sudden Gmail is offering to summarize your email which

I'm like I don't need that like I need I need you to answer my email not summarize it like what the hell okay so we see those and that's fine that's like I don't know putting sugar on the cake or something um but then we see the strong form which is the companies that are building from scratch for AI right and they're they're building it I actually just met with a company that is building literally an AI email system as an example so just oh nice I I can't wait yeah they're going to completely right

so the very obvious idea very smart team um you know it's going to be great you know and then you know notion just uh you know another not one of our companies but just came out with a product so so now companies are going to basically come through sweep through and they're going do basically AI first versions of basically everything and those are like companies built you know AI is the first bullet point it's the strong form of the argument yeah cursor is an example of that they basically said okay we're going to re rebuild

the thing with AI as the first citizen what if we knew from scratch that we could build on this and and and again this is like this is part of the Full Employment Act for startups and BCS is it just like if if a if a technology transformation is sufficiently powerful then you actually need to start the product development process over from scratch because you need to reconceptualize product and and then usually what that means is you need a new company because most incumbents just just won't do that um and so yeah so that that's

underway across many categories um what I'm waiting for is the company where it's like no our or chart is redesigned as a result of AI right so I'm looking I'm waiting for the company where it's like no we're going to have like you know and and the cliche Here's a thought experiment right the cliche would be we're going to have like the human executive team and then we're going to have the AIS be the workers right so we'll have a VP of engineering supervising 100 instances of of coding of coding agents right okay maybe right

by the way or maybe um maybe the VP of engineering should be the AI maybe supervising human coders who are supervising AIS right because one of the things that AI should be pretty good at is managing because it's like not you know it's like a process driven it's the kind of thing that AI is actually pretty good at right performance evaluation coaching um and so should it be an AI executive team um and then you know and then of course the ultimate question which is AI CEO right um and then you know and then there's

and then maybe the most futuristic version of it would be an actual AI agent that actually goes fully autonomous yeah what if you really set one of these things loose and let it let it basically build itself a business um and so I will say like we're not yet seeing those and I think there's a little bit of the systems aren't quite ready for that yet um and then I think it's a little bit of you really do need at that point like a Founder who's really willing to break all the rules um and really

willing to take the swing and and and those people exist and so I'm sure we'll see that and some of it is as as you know with all the startups this is the execution the the idea that you have a AI first email client this seems like an obvious idea but actually creating one executing and then taking on Gmail is really is really difficult I mean Gmail it's it's it's fascinating to see Google can't do it because because why because momentum because it's hard to re-engineer the entirety of the system feels like Google's perfectly positioned

to to do it same with like you have perplex uh which I love like Google could technically take on perplexity and do it much better but they haven't not yet so it's fascinating why that is for large companies I mean that that is an advantage for little Tech they can be agile yeah that's right they can move fast yeah little companies can break glass in a way big companies can't right this is sort of the big breakthrough that Klay Christians had had in the innovators dilemma which is sometimes when big companies don't do things it's

because they're screwing up and that certainly happens but a lot of times they don't do things because it would break too much class it would specifically it would it would it would interfere with their existing customers um and their existing businesses and they just simply won't do that and by the way responsibly they shouldn't do that um right um and so they just get this clay Christian this big thing is they they often don't adapt because they are well-run not because they're poorly run but they're optimizing machines they're they're they're optimizing against existing business and

and and and as as you kind of just said this is like a permanent State of Affairs for large organizations like every once in a while one breaks the pattern and actually does it but for the most part like this is a very predictable form of human behavior and this fundamentally is why startups exist it feels like 2025 is when the race for dominance and AI will uh see some winners like it's a big year so who do you think wins the race open AI meta Google xai who do you think wins the AI race

I would say I'm I'm not going to predict I'm going to say there's questions all over the place um and then we have we have this category question we call the trillion dollar question which is like literally depending on how it's answered people make or lose a trillion dollars and I think there's like I don't know five or six trillion dollar questions right now that are hanging out there which isn't an usually large number yeah and I just you know I'll just hit a few of them and we can talk about them so one is

Big models versus small models um another is open models versus closed models another is whether you can use synthetic data or Not Another is Chain of Thought how far can you push that and reinforcement learning and then another one is political trillion dollar questions um you policy questions which you know the US and the EU have both been flunking dramatically and the US hopefully is about to really succeed at um yeah and then there's probably another you know half dozen big important questions after that and so these are all just like say this is an

industry that's in flux in a way that I even more dramatic I think than the ones I've seen before um and look the most example most obvious example the flux is sitting here three sitting here in the summer you know sitting here less than three years ago sitting here in December of 22 we would have said that open AI is just running away with everything um and sitting here today it's like you know there's at least six you know worldclass God model companies and teams that are by the way generating remarkably similar results that's actually

been one of the most shocking things to me is like it turns out that once you know that it's possible to build one incredibly smart Turing test passing large language model which was a complete shock and surprise uh to the world um it turns out within you know a year you can have five more um there's also a money component thing to it which is um to get the money to scale one of these things into the billions of dollars there's basically Bally right now only two sources of money that will do that for you

one is um the hyperscalers giving you the money which you turn around and round trip back to them um or you know foreign sovereigns you know other you know country Sovereign Sovereign wealth funds which can be you know difficult in some cases to for companies to access um so there's a there's another this's maybe another trillion dollar question is the financing question here's one uh so Sam mman has been public about the fact that he wants to transition open AI from being a nonprofit to being a for-profit m um the way that that is legally

done is that um there is a way to do it there is a way in US law to do it um the IRS and and other legal entities uh government entities scrutinize this very carefully because the US takes Foundation nonprofit law very seriously because of the tax exemption um and so the way that historically the way that you do it is you start a for-profit and then you you raise money with the for-profit to buy the assets of the nonprofit at fair market value um and you know the last financing round at openai was you

know 150 some billion dollars and so logically the if if if the flip is going to happen the for-profit has to go raise $150 billion out of the shoot to buy the assets you know raising 150 billion is a challenge um so you know is that even possible if that is possible then open AI maybe is Off to the Races as a for-profit company if not you know you know I don't know and then you know obviously the Elon lawsuit so so just because they're the market leader today you know there's big important questions there

you know Microsoft has this kind of LoveHate relationship with them where does that go Apple's you know lagging badly behind but you know they're very good at catching up Amazon you know is primarily hyperskill but they now have their own models and then there's the other questions like you laid out brilliantly briefly and brilliantly open versus closed Big versus little models synthetic data that's a huge huge question and then test time compute with uh Chain of Thought the RO of that this fasc and these are I think it's fair to say trillion dollar questions yeah

these were big like look you know it's this it's like okay here's a trillion dollar question which is kind of embedded in that which is just hallucinations right like so if you are trying to use these tools creatively you're thrilled because they can draw new images and they can make new music and they can do all this incredible stuff right they're creative the flip side of that is if you need them to be correct they can't be creative and that's you know the term hallucination and these things do hallucinate and um you know there have

been you know court cases already where lawyers have submitted legal briefs that contain madeup Court citations case citations that the judge is like wait a minute this doesn't exist and the very next question is did you write this yourself and the lawyer goes uh I mean that's why Elon with grock uh yes looking for truth I mean that's a open technical question how close can you get to truth with llms yeah that's right and and I I my my sense U is this very contentious Topic at the industry my sense is if to the extent

that there is a domain in which there is a definitive and checkable improvable answer and you might say math satisfies that coding satisfies that and maybe some other fields then you should be able to generate synthetic data you should be able to do Chain of Thought reasoning you should be able to do reinforcement learning and you should be able to ultimately you know eliminate hallucinations um for but by the way that's a trillion dollar question right there as to whether that's true um but then but then there's question of like okay is that going to

work in the more General domain like so for example one possibility is these things are going to get be truly super human at like math and coding but at like discussing philosophy they're going to just they're basically as smart as they're ever going to be um and they're going to be kind of you know say midwit red student level um and and the theory there would just be they're already out of training data like they they they literally if you know you talk to these people like liter literally the big models the big models are

like within a factor of two acts of consuming all the human generated training data to the point that some of these big companies are literally hiring people like doctors and lawyers to sit and write your training data by hand and so does this mean that like you have to if you want your model better philosophy you have to go hire like a thousand philosophers and have them write new content then is anybody going to do that and so you know maybe maybe these things are topping out in certain ways and they're going to LEAP way

ahead in other ways and so anyway so we just don't you know I guess this this is maybe my main conclusion is I I don't any of these anybody tell you anybody telling you these big sweeping conclusions you know this whole super you know all of these abstract generalized super intelligence AGI stuff like it you know maybe it's the engineer in me but like no like that's not the that's not the that's too abstract like it it's got to actually work um and then by the way it has to actually have to be able to

pay for it um I mean this is a problem right now with you know the big models the big models that are like really good at coding a map they're like actually very expensive to run you know they're quite slow um another trillion dollar question future chips um which I know youve talked a lot about um another trillion dollar question um yeah I mean all the global issue oh another trillion dollar question censorship right like and and and and um and all the is they say all the human feedback training process exactly what are you

training these things to do what are they allowed to talk about how long do they give you these how how they give these incredibly preachy moral lectures how here's a here's a here's a good here's a trillion dollar question how many other countries want their country to run its education system Healthcare System news system political system on the basis of an AI that's been trained according to the most extreme leftwing California politics um right because that's kind of what they have on offer right now and I think the answer to that is not very many

so there's like massive open questions there about like what you know and by the way like what morality of these things going to get trained on as a and that one we're cracking wide open with uh what's been happening over the past few months censorship on every level of these companies and just the very idea what truth means and what it means to be expand the Overton window of llms or the Overton window of human discourse so what what I experienced you going back to how we started what I experienced was all right social media

censorship regime from Hell de banking right at like large L scale um and then the war on the crypto industry trying to kill it and then basically declared intent to do the same thing to AI um and to put AI under the same kind of censorship and control regime as as as social media and the banks and I and I think this election tipped in in America I think this election tipped us from a timeline in which things were going to get really bad on that front uh to a timeline in which I think things

are going to be quite good but look those same questions also apply outside the US and you know the EU is doing their thing they're being extremely draconian and they're trying to lock in a political censorship regime on AI right now that's so harsh that even American AI companies are not even willing to launch new products in the EU right now like that's not going to last but like what what happens there right and what what are the trade-offs you know what levels of censorship are American companies going to have to sign up for if

they want to operate in the EU or is the EU still capable of generating its own AI companies or have we brain drained them so that they can't so big questions uh quick question so you're very active on X a very unique character um flamboyant exciting bold uh you post a lot I think there's a meme I don't remember it exactly but that Elon posted something like uh inside Elon there are two wolves one is uh please be kind or more positive and the other one is I think uh you know doing the uh take

a big step back and fuck yourself in the face guy how many wolves are inside your mind when you're tweeting to be clear a reference from the comedy classic Tropic Thunder Tropic Thunder yeah legendary movie Yes um any Zoomers listening to this who haven't seen that movie go watch it immediately yeah there's nothing offensive about it nothing offensive about it at all um so Tom Cruz is greatest performance um so um yeah yeah no look should start by saying like I'm not supposed to be tweeting at all so oh yeah yes yes yes so but

you know so how do you approach that like how do you approach what to tweet I mean I don't I look so it's it's a it's a um it it I don't I don't well enough um it's mostly an exercise and frustration um look there's a glory to it and there's there's there's an issue with it and the glory of it is like you know instantaneous Global Communication you know x x in particular is like the you know the Town Square on all these you know social issues political issues everything else current events um but

I mean look there's no question the format the format of at least the original tweet is you know prone to be inflammatory you know I'm I'm I'm the guy who at one point the entire nation of India hated me um because I once tweeted something it turned out that is still politically sensitive um in the entire continent um I stayed up all night that night as as I became front page headline and leading television news in each time zone in India for a single tweet so like the single tweet out of context is a very

dangerous thing um obviously X now has the the middle ground where they you know they they now have the longer form essays um and so um you know probably the most productive thing I can do is is longer form um is is longer form things um you're not going to do it though are you I do I do from time to time I do I should I should do more of them and then yeah I mean look but and yeah and then obviously X is X is doing great and then uh like I said like

substack you know has become the center for a lot you know a lot of the I think the best kind of you know deeply thought through you know certainly intellectual content um you know tons of current events uh stuff there as well um and then um yeah so and then there's a bunch of other you know a bunch of new systems that are very exciting so I think one of the things we can look forward to in the next four years is number one just like a massive reinvigoration of social media as a consequence of

the changes that are happening right now U I'm very excited to see the con to see what's going to happen with that and then um I it's happened onx but it's now going to happen on other platforms and then um the other is um crypto's going to come you know crypto's going to come right back to life um and actually that's very exciting actually that's worth noting is that's another trillion dollar question on AI which is um in a world of pervasive Ai and especially in a world of AI agents in Imagine a world of

billions or trillions of AI agents running around they need an economy um and crypto in our view happens to be the ideal economic system for that right because it's a programmable money it's a very easy way to plug in and do that and there's this transaction processing system that can that can do that and so I think the crypto AI intersection you know is potentially very a very very big deal um and so when that was that was going to be impossible under the prior regime and I think under the new regime hopefully it'll be

something we can do uh almost for fun let me ask uh a friend of yours Yan laon what are your top 10 favorite things about Yan Lon he's uh I think he's a he's a brilliant guy I think he's important to the world I think you guys disagree on a lot of things U but I personally like vigorous disagreement I as a person in the stands like to watch the gladi go at it and no he's a super genius I mean look I would say we super close but you casual casual friends I worked with

him at meta you know he's the chief scientist at meta for a long time and is still you know works with us and and um you know and as obviously as a legendary figure in the field and one of the main people responsible for what's happening um my serious observation would be that it's it's it's the thing I keep I've talked to him about for a long time and I keep trying to read and follow everything he does is he's probably he is the I think see if you agree with this he is the smartest

and most credible critic of llms is the path RI um and um he's not you know there's certain I would say troll like characters who are just like crap on everything but like Ian has like very deeply thought through basically um theories as to why LMS are an evolutionary dead end um and um and I actually like um I I try to do this thing where I try to model you know I try to have a mental model of like the two different sides of a serious argument so I I've tried to like internalize that

argument as much as I can which is difficult because like we're investing it behind LMS as aggressively as we can and so if he's right like that could be a big problem but like we should also know that um and then I sort of use his ideas to challenge all the bullish people you know to really kind of test their level of knowledge so I like to kind of Grill people like I'm not like I'm not you know I'm I was not you know I was got my CS degree 35 years ago so I'm not

like deep in the technology but like if if to the extent I can understand Yan's points I can use them to um you know to really surface a lot of the questions for the people who are more bullish um and that's been I think very very productive um yeah so yeah just it's very striking that you have somebody who is like that Central in the space who is actually like a full-on a full-on skeptic and and you know and again as you this could go different ways he could end up being very wrong he could

end up being totally right or it could be that he will provoke the evolution of these systems to be much better than they would have been yeah he could be both right and wrong first of all I do I do agree with that he's one of the most legit and uh rigorous and deep critics of the llm path to AGI you know his basic Notions is that there needs AI needs to have some physical understanding of the physical world and that's very difficult to achieve with LM so there and that that is a really good

way to challenge the limitations of llms and so on he's also been a vocal and a huge proponent of Open Source which is a whole another which you have been as well which is very useful yeah and that's been just fascinating to watch and anti-er anti- dumer yeah yeah he's he's very anti he embodies he also has many wolves yes he does yes he does yes he does he does so it's been really really fun to watch the other two okay here's my other Wolf coming out yeah the other two of the three Godfathers of

AI are like radicals like like full-on left you know far left you know like they I would say like either marxists or borderline marxists um and they're like I think quite extreme in their social political views and I think that feeds into their Doris um and I think you know they they they are lobbying for like Draconian government I think what would be ruinously destructive government legislation um in regulation and so it's it's actually super helpful super super helpful to have y on as a Counterpoint to those two another fun question uh our mutual friend

Andrew huberman first maybe what do you love most about Andrew and second what score on a SC scale of 1 to 10 do you think he would give you on your approach to health oh three physical three you think you score that high huh okay exactly 10 that's good exactly well so he he did he convinced me to stop drinking alcohol um which was a big successfully well it was like my f other than my family it was my favorite thing in the world yeah and so it was a major major reduction like having like

a glass of scotch at night was like a major like it was like the thing I would do to relax and so he has profoundly negatively impacted my emotional health um I uh I blame him for making me much less happy as a person but much much much healthier yeah uh physically healthier so that that I I I credit him with that I'm glad I did that um but then his sleep stuff like yeah I'm not doing any of that yeah I have no interest in his sleep shit like no this whole light natural light

no we're not doing you're too hardcore for I don't see say I don't see any I don't see any natural light in here it's all covered it's all horrible and I'm very happy I would be very happy living and working here because I'm totally happy without natural light in darkness yes that must be a metaphor for something yes it's a test look it's a test of manhood as to whether you can have a blue screen in your face for three hours and then go right to sleep like I don't understand why you should want to

take shortcuts um I now understand what they mean by toxic masculinity all right so uh let's see you're exceptionally Successful by most measures but what to you is the definition of success I would probably say it is a combination of two things I think it is um contribution um so you know have you done something that mattered ultimately um and um and you know specifically matter to people um and then the other thing is I think happiness is either overrated or almost a complete myth um and in fact interesting Thomas Jefferson did not mean happiness

the way that we understand it when he said Pursuit of Happiness in the Declaration of Independence he meant it more of the the Greek meaning um which is closer to satisfaction U or fulfillment um and so I think happiness is so I think about happiness as the first the first ice cream cone makes you super happy the first mile of the walk in the park and during sunset makes you super happy the first kiss makes you super happy the thousandth ice cream cone not so much um the thousandth mile of the walk through the park

um the thousandth kiss can still be good but maybe just not right in a row um right and so happiness is this very fleeting concept um and the people who aner on happiness seem to go off the rails pretty often s of the deep sense of having been I know how to put it useful so that's a good place to arrive at in life yes I think so yeah I mean like can you sit can yeah you know who was it who said that all this the source of all the ills in the world is

man's inability to sit in a room by himself doing nothing um but like if you're sitting in room by yourself and you're like all right or you know 4 in the morning it's like all right have I like you know have I lived up to my expectation of myself like if you have you know the people I know who feel that way are are pretty centered um and um you know generally seem very um I don't know how to put it pleased with you know proud um calm at peace um the people who are um

you know sensation Seekers um you know some of the sensation by the way some you know there's there's certain entrepreneurs for example who are like in every form of EXT extreme sport and they get you know huge satisfaction out of that um or you know there sensation seeking in sort of useful and productive ways you know Larry Ellison was always like that Zuckerberg was like that and then you know there's a lot of entrepreneurs who end up you know drugs you know like sexual you know sexual escapades that seem like they'll be fun at first

and then backfire yeah but at the end of the day if you're able to be at peace by yourself in a room at 4:00 a.m. yeah and I would even say happy but I know I understand Thomas Jefferson didn't mean it the way the way maybe I mean it but I can be happy by myself at 4:00 a.m. with a blue screen that's good exactly staring at C sir exactly as a small tangent a quick shout out to an amazing interview you did with Barry Weiss and just to her in general Barry Weiss of uh

the Free Press she has a podcast called honestly with Barry Weiss she's great people should go listen you were asked if you believe in God one of the joys see we're talked about happiness one of the things that makes me happy is making you uncomfortable thank you so this this question is designed for many of the questions today have designed for that you were asked if you believe in God and you said after a pause you're not sure so it felt like the pause the uncertainty there was uh uh some kind of ongoing search for

wisdom and meaning uh are you in fact searching for wisdom and meaning I guess I put it this way there's a lot to just understand about people that I feel like I'm only starting to understand um and that certainly a simpler concept than God so um that's what I've spent a lot of the last you know 15 years trying to figure out I feel like I spent my first like whatever 30 years figuring out machines and then now I'm spending 30 years figuring out people which turns out to be quite a bit more complicated um

and then I don't know maybe Gods the last 30 years or something um uh and then you know look I mean just you know like like Elon is just like okay the known universe is like very you know complicated and you know mystifying I mean every time I you know pull up in astronomy you I get super in astronomy and it's like you know you know Daddy how many galaxies are there in the universe and you know what's how many galaxies are there in the universe 100 billion okay like how yeah like yeah like how

is that freaking possible like what like like it's just it's such a staggering concept that I I actually wanted to show you a tweet that blew my mind from Elon from a while back he said uh Elon said uh as a friend called it this is the ultimate skill tree this is a wall of galaxies a billion light years across yeah so these are all galaxies yeah like what the like how was it that big like how the hell and like you know I can read the textbook and this and that and the whatever 8

billion years and the big bang and the whole thing and then it's just like all right wow and then it's like all right the Big Bang all right like what was what was before the Big Bang you think we'll ever we humans will ever colonize like a Galaxy and maybe even go beyond sure I mean yeah I mean in the fullness of time yeah so you have that kind of optimism you have that kind of hope that extends across thousand in the fullness of time I mean yeah I mean yeah you know all the all

the problem all the challenges with it that I do but like yeah why not I mean again in the fullness of time it'll it'll take a long time you don't think we'll destroy ourselves no I doubt it I doubt it and you know fortunately we have Elon giving us giving us the the backup plan so so I don't know like I grew up you know Ro Midwest sort of just like conventionally kind of protestant Christian um it never made that much sense to me got trained as an engineer and a scientist I'm like oh that

definitely doesn't make sense I'm like I know I'll spend my life as an empirical you know rationalist and I'll figure everything out and then you know and then again you walk up against these things you know you you bump up against these things and you're just like all right I like okay I guess there's a scientific explanation for this but like wow um and then there's like all right where did that come from um right and then how how far back can you go on the causality Chain um yeah and then yeah I mean then

even even just you know experiences that we all have on Earth it's it's hard to it's hard to rationally explain at all and then you know so yeah I guess I just say I'm kind of radically open-minded um at peace with the fact that I'll probably never know um the other thing though that's happened and maybe the more more practical answer to the question is um I think I have a much better understanding now of the role that religion plays in society that I didn't have when I was younger um and my partner Ben has

a great I think he quotes his father on this he's like if if a man does not have a real religion he makes up a fake one uh um and the fake ones go very very badly um and so there's this CL it's actually really funny there's this class of intellectual there's this class of intellectual that has what appears to be a very patronizing point of view which is yes I am an atheist but it's very important that the people believe in something right U and Marx had like the negative view on that which is

religion is the op of the masses but there's a lot of like right-wing intellectuals who are themselves I think pretty atheist or agnostic that are like it's deeply important that the people be Christian or or something like that um and on the one hand it's like wow that's arrogant presumptive but on the other hand you know maybe it's right because you know what have we learned in the last 100 years is in the absence of a real religion people will make up fake ones um there's this writer this's this political philosopher who's super interesting on

this named Eric vogelin and he wrote this he wrote in the sort of mid mid part of the century mid late part of the 20th century he's like born in I think like 1900 and like died in like ' 85 so he saw the complete run of Communism and uh and Nazism um and himself you know fled the I think he fled Europe and and you know the whole thing um and um you know his his sort of big conclusion was basically that both communism and Nazism fascism were were basically religions were were but like

in the Deep Way of religions like they were you know we call them political religions but they they were like actual religions and you know they were the they were what n have forecasted when he said you know God is dead we've killed him and we won't wash the blood of our hands for a thousand years right um is we will come up with new religions that will just cause just mass murder and death um and like you read his stuff now and you're like yep that happened right and then of course as fully you

know Elite moderns of course we couldn't possibly be doing that for ourselves right now but of course we are and you know I would argue that Eric vogan for sure would argue that the last 10 years you know we have been in a religious frenzy you know that that woke has been a fullscale religious frenzy um and has had all of the characteristics of her religion including everything from patron saints to Holy texts to you know sin it said yeah wokness say that every aspect of a wokness say that every I think is that every

single aspect of an actual religion other than Redemption right which is maybe like the most dangerous religion you could ever come up with is the one where there's no forgiveness right and so I think if V and were alive I think he would have zeroed right in on that would have said that um and you know we just like sailed right off I mentioned earlier like we we somehow rediscovered the religions of the indo-europeans we all into identity politics and environmentalism like I don't think that's an accident so so anyway like there there's something very

deep going on in the human psyche um on religion that is not dismissible and needs to be taken seriously even if one struggles with the the um specifics of it I think I speak for a lot of people that it's been a real joy and for me an honor to get to watch you uh seek to understand the human psyche as you described you're in that 30-year part of your life life um and it's been an honor to talk with you today thank you Mark thank you Alex is that it that's only only how long

is that four hours with uh Mark Andrew it's like 40 hours of actual content so I I I'll accept being one of the short ones oh for for The Listener Mark looks like he's ready to go for 20 more hours and I need a nap thank you Mark thank you Lex thanks for listening to this conversation with Mark and dreon to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from thas Soul it takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance

thank you for listening and hope to see you next time