Marc Andreessen on Trump, Biden, Musk and Why Silicon Valley Moved Right

0:00 [Music] from New York Times opinion I'm Ross doit and this is matter of [Music] opinion so listeners you're going to be hearing more from me over the next couple of months because I'm going to be hosting some one-on-one conversations to help you and quite frankly me understand the factions and the players that are likely to shape the incoming Trump Administration and today we're going to start with Silicon Valley and the so-called Tech right I'm someone who follows politics primarily and Silicon Valley secondarily and to me the alliance between that industry and the

0:47 Democratic party has always seemed like a pretty solid fact of American politics I could definitely see the leaders of the tech industry souring on certain aspects of progressive politics especially the parts that cast them as special villains but I really didn't expect so many figures in Silicon Valley starting of course with Elon Musk to throw their support and their money and their social media clout behind Donald Trump in 20124 my guest today is one of those Tech leaders venture capitalist Mark andreon for decades he was in his words a good Democrat but now he's been spending time at Mar logo and Advising on the Trump

1:32 transition Mark andrees welcome to matter of opinion thank you Ross it's great to be here it's great to have you so I'll start by introducing you you're the co-founder of the Venture Capital firm andreon Horwitz whose portfolio includes Airbnb and over 100 AI companies a long time ago you co-founded Netscape the web browser that first brought many of us to the internet in the 1990s and just as a political matter you supported Barack Obama for president uh you voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then in 2024 you supported Donald Trump and we're going to talk about that Evolution but I wanted to start by just going way back in time to

2:19 the origins of your career because you were present for the early days of the internet not really the beginning of Silicon Valley itself but the beginning of Silicon Valley as a cre cral influence in American life I would say and since we're talking about how the tech industry has changed how it's interacted with big shifts in American politics I was hoping you could just talk a little bit about what it was like for you to go from the small town in Wisconsin where you grew up New Lisbon yes right yeah that's right not a large population to let's say the point where you were involved in selling Netscape for billions of dollars in the late 1990s so I'm happy to talk about all of that you know I started out in Royal Wisconsin and farming country you know kind of basically the polar cultural

3:05 opposite of of Silicon Valley in many ways and the polar political opposite you know for a very long time by the way I didn't discover until much later that I'm an archetype um Tom Wolf wrote a famous profile of Robert noise who was the original founder of Intel the original CEO and the father of the chip industry and actually noise and I followed very similar paths I I never met him and he was an earlier generation but you know he grew up as an Iowa farm boy I grew up as a Wisconsin farm boy and um we and a lot of other people like us over the years have kind of made this Trek and then basically I'm a product of the great land grant universities right so the University of Illinois Urbana champagne which from where I came from was like a huge leap to you know actually leave the state um and go to a university that large and they had this incredible influx of money at the time from the federal government for um you know for supercomputers and then what turned out to be the internet actually

3:50 by the way full credit led by Al Gore when he was in the Senate uh I always thought he got unfairly treated by by how people describe this later but he he led the push in inventing the internet so this is actually the thing he he gets knocked on so the the the famous quote is I invented the Internet with the ash quot he never said that I'll defend Al's honor to the death is he said I took the lead in the senate in creating the internet and what he meant by that is he was the tip of the spear for funding uh four National supercomputing centers and so they picked four college campuses Illinois was one of them so we basically Illinois campus when I was there it was like living in the future we had computers that cost up to $30 million of pop that basically were representative of what was to come but we we just had them a decade before everybody else because of this program um and then I did early you know research work there basically that resulted in the the Mosaic browser which was kind of the the browser that kind of broke the the

4:37 concept of the internet and the web kind of through to the to the mainstream and then I came to Silicon Valley not because I was particularly enthusiastic about it at the time because it was just the default thing to do and I figured at least I can get a job and you know kind of work in the tech industry and it it and when I was in college from ' 89 to 994 sure you probably remember there was a very severe recession depression that felt like the end of the world and it felt like the end of the American tech industry actually in the late ' 80s early 990s which was sort of the peak of the ascendence of Japan in the global economy and and in the tech industry and it it it felt like the valley was dying and so when I when I came to Silicon Valley in 1994 I actually thought I had missed all the action and then you know through a couple of Strokes of luck met my business partner at the time Jim Clark and uh he and I started ncape but I just bring it up because like I said I I thought I was in at the very end and then it turned out I was I was in at the

5:22 beginning of something new right so it's the '90s and you're essentially building the interfaces through which the mass public is going to enter the digital age how would you characterize the valley's worldview and also your worldview at that point as a kind of young startup founder yeah so I think the way to describe it is I think the valley before me from like the 50s through the 70s was sort of they were normally Republicans you know they were business people CEOs investors um and they they would have been you know I assume at the time big fans of Nixon big fans of rigan so forth that era was basically over by the time I arrived I I met a few of those guys but when I got there in 94 it was in the full swing of the Clinton Gore kind of you know restoration of the democratic party um you know kind of recovery of liberalism as a mainstream political force and this goes back again to to Al

6:09 Gore's role in this who you know who I got to know quite well and Bill you know basically it was the pro business Democratic party it was the prot tech Democratic party it was the pro startup Democratic party and so Clinton and Gore and their Administration was incredibly enthusiastic about what we were doing I mean Al gar was just thrilled because he's like wow this whole program that I funded in the Senate worked incredibly well the internet worked and now we're going to have this giant economic boom is going to be led by Dynamic entrepreneurial capitalism right like they celebrated it they loved it they embraced us um you know it's like a full-fledged love affair and that was the sort of foundation for the the great entrepreneurial and economic growth boom of the 1990s and America's back and you know Japan as it turned out was not going to take over the world and China was still you know off in the distance somewhere and so is this incredible restoration of kind of American economic Supremacy technological Supremacy and so

6:56 as a result of that the most natural thing in the world for somebody like was oh you know of course I'm I'm a norm Democrat I'll be a norm Democrat forever Norm Dem is what I call I call this the deal with a with a capital D like and nobody ever wrote this down but like it was just something everybody understood which is you know you're me you show up you're an entrepreneur you're a capitalist you start a company you grow a company um if it works you make a lot of money and then the company itself is good because it's bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place but then you make a lot of money and then you you give the money away right and through that you you know absolve yourself of all of your sins and then in your obituary it talks about what an incredible person you were both in your business career and in your philanthropic career and it's great and then by the way you're a Democrat you're Pro gay rights you're Pro abortion you're Pro all the all the sort of fashionable you know sort of appropriate

7:42 social causes of the time and and literally it was like there are no trade-offs like this is the deal and then of course everybody knows Republicans are just like knuckle dragging racists and you know it was just kind of taken as given that there was this going to be this great relationship and of course it worked so well for the Democratic party and Clinton and Gore you know sailed a re-election in '96 and the valley was locked in for you know 100 years to come just to be straight up conventional blue Democrat I want to talk about the deal for a minute because it certainly lasts culturally down into the Obama years right so by the time Barack Obama is running for president it's sort of taken for granted that there's going to be a ton of Silicon Valley money on his side the incredible enthusiasm for the Obama candidacy is particularly strong among sort of techsavvy young people there's a

8:28 huge narrative with that campaign about how the Democratic party is on The Cutting Edge of digital technology you know they're using the internet to defeat the sty Republicans right so sty they can't even use the internet to organize a campaign right so that that narrative certainly persists but through this whole period the Democratic party was still the party of higher tax rates and higher spending relative to the Republicans so Silicon Valley was accepting at some level in this era that in supporting Democrats you were going to get a slightly higher top marginal tax rate a slightly higher corporate tax rate a slightly higher tax rate on capital gains than if you went in for you know whatever the Republicans from Bob Dole down to George W bush and John

9:16 McCain were offering um is that right was that sort of understood too that part of the deal was you were on board with again sort of moderate liberal slightly higher taxes policy yes so a yes 100% I would say B even more than that we all voluntarily live in California right we have the we also we not only have the federal dimension of what you're saying we also live in these very high tax cities you know San Francisco paloalto um and so yeah and and I think I think by paying higher taxes and not objecting to them that you prove you're a good person like for that generation of enlightened cous liberal it was of course we pay higher taxes cuz you know we're the Democratic party is an agent of positive social change and you know of course you want to have a bigger safety net of course you want to fund all these programs and

10:02 you want to fund all these activist campaigns and of course you want that you know the term Camelot was never used but there was there was a Camelot feeling to it at the time that people must have faed in the early 60s in the same way which is just like wow like yes it's all happening and it's all going to happen and it's going to be great so yeah that was that was like a full-fledged part of the deal but then look quite honestly I I am trying in none of this to like claim moral High ground or Moral Moral Sheen or anything but just to kind of take the take the edge off of that if that's I've come across quite honestly the tax R didn't really matter because when an internet company worked it grew so fast and got so valuable that you know you just if if you worked like another 3 years you'd make another 10x and so another 5% higher tax rate washed out in the numbers and so we we weren't forced to really think that hard about it it it just seemed like this was the formula that would result in in everything working and then running through that too though there was also sort of a

10:48 cultural assumption not just that it made sense to be liberal on social issues like samesex marriage and abortion but also that liberalism was going to be the party of sort of openness Free Speech free argument and a kind of um utopian Vision I would say of human Freedom which obviously wasn't always there in the institutional Democratic party but there's this term I'm sure you've heard um that was coined I think by critics of Silicon Valley called the Californian ideology right which they they described I think this was in the 1990s as marrying the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the high Tech Industries of Silicon Valley the Californian ideology promiscuously combines the freewheeling

11:35 spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial Zeal of the yappies obviously they're taking a dig but I think that the spirit of the hippies is also important here this sense that you're on the side of this kind of cultural openness yeah that description by the way is exactly right and um the California ideology was real and correct and the valley had always incarnated a specific version of that so you know the two Origin points for hippie culture as we now you know understand it today were basically that Laurel Canyon and la which we were not connected to but the hate Ashbury in San Francisco which is you know at Ground Zero of tech also and so you know we literally were one of the two kind of inception points for the hippie revolution in the 60s and 70s and the whole general you know new left and like all that stuff by the way Berkeley also right you see Berkeley is hugely important to the valley and of course Berkeley you know the birthplace of the

12:22 the time what they call the Free Speech movement you know my uh my business partner Ben um my longtime partner Ben's father David Horwitz who's now a radical you know right-wing political activist in the 60s and 70s was a radical leftwing political activist yes everyone who was a young person on the political right in the 1990s and early 2000s as I was has had at least one encounter with David Horn of one kind or another in which yeah the spirit of 60s radicalism definitely lived on in his post- radical phase I think it's fair to say yeah but he was like literally on campus when anti- Vietnam War it was starting to crank up and so like that was all happening at the same time that Silicon Valley started to boot up and there was lots of back and forth between that and the other side was the more of the Bob noise side of things you know that I alluded to which is you had these like

13:08 literally Midwestern Farm boys showing up who were squares not hippies uh very much square you know and if you look at like old photos of like the Intel team when they were young it's literally you know short sleeve white shirts with ties and tie clips and you know looks like they look like the Michael Douglas character from falling down um you know they look like defense contractors and what the valley did to its credit was it fused those mentalities and and the f most specifically showed up in the form ultimately of Steve Jobs he had all of the accs and all of the artistic judgment and he had famously done LSD and he had all these alternative you know beliefs he had been to India but he was also you right as we know like a ruthlessly competitive industrialist and so you know he he he kind of fused both sides of that and that Fusion has been where a lot of the magic is that naturally brings in both left and right-wing politics um and then that

13:54 definitely takes us to the dynamic that's happening today so from your perspective when did you start have doubts about the synthesis of Silicon Valley and the Democratic party yeah so the the breakdown was during the second Obama term and it took me by surprise um I think maybe the one person it didn't didn't take by surprise is you know our mutual friend Peter teal um you know he he as with a lot of things I think saw it coming earlier than I did but it definitely took me by surprise um and you know just to give full context there like I had met Obama in I think 06 or 07 when he was a new Senator and um you know he seemed great it's just like it's the perfect package it's literally everything that you could Poss dream forign a president he has all the right social views and he seems like an inheritor of the Clinton Gore you know he says all the right things about capitalism at the time and about entrepreneurship he he's clearly in love with tech you may recall the 2012

14:40 election was literally the story of social media saves democracy like it was literally that Barack Obama the good guy uses advanced technology including the internet and social media to save the country from the Nazi fascist Mitt Romney right like this was like wall to--all positive press coverage this was also by the way in the wake of the Arab Spring which at the time you'll recall was like an unalloyed good like obviously all these countries are going to be much better off obviously the fact that these protests were organized on social media sites running the United States was a sign of how we were going to bring democracy to the world um and then basically in retrospect what happened is after Obama's re-election in 2012 through ultimately to 16 things really started to change the way the story gets told a lot now is that Trump was a new arrival in 15 and then basically lots of changes followed what I experienced was the changes started in 2012 2013 2014 and we snowballing hard

15:27 uh at least in the valley um and at least among kids and I think to some extent Trump was actually a reaction to those changes and well and so those changes you're talking about are they fundamentally about policies being made by the Obama white house or are they fundamentally about sort of the big shift leftward among young people that clearly starts in that era so I would say both because and the unifying thread here is I I believe it's the children of the elites right the most privileged people in society the most successful send their kids to the most politically radical institutions who you know teach them how to be like America hating communists um then they fan out into the professions our companies hire a lot of kids out of the top universities of course um and then by the way a lot of them go into government and so we're not only talking about a wave of new arrivals into the tech companies we're also talking about a wave of new arrivals into the Congressional offices

16:14 and of course they all know each other and so all of a sudden you have this basically this influx this new cohort and my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids in other words the young children of privilege going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012 they basically radicalized hard at the universities I think primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq throw that in there also but for whatever reason they radicalized hard but when you say they radicalized what did that mean for Silicon Valley what did they want I mean at this point just just so listen to know you're a venture capitalist you're no longer a startup guy right so you're in investing in a lot of different companies so you have a pretty I assume pretty wide view of the action yeah what was it that was desired from the New

17:00 leftwing Politics pre-trump because we'll get to post Trump in a minute Revolution I mean what it was what I Now understand it to be historically is is a rebirth of the new Left Right so it's it's very analogous I've spent a lot of time actually talking to David Horwitz about this because he lived through it 40 years earlier um and and it turned out to be a coalition of sort of economic radicals so and this was you know the rise of Bernie Sanders but like you know the kids turned on capitalism like in in a very fundamental way they came out as sort of you know some some variation version on on radical Marxist and you know the the fundamental veillance went from capitalism is good and an enabler of the good Society to capitalism is evil and should be torn down and then the other part was social Revolution and the social revolution of course was the great awokening and then those conjoined and so you know there was a point where kind of the the median newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was

17:47 like a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was when do I get promoted and how much do I get paid and when do I end up running the company and like that was the thing by 2013 the media newly arrived Harvard kid was like it we're burning the system down like you are all evil white people are evil men are evil capitalism is evil Tech is evil but they working they're working for you these These are people who are working for you of course well I had this moment with a senior executive who I won't name but he said to me you know this conversation 2014 and he said said to me with kind of this sense of dawning horror he's like I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us like they're professional activists in their own minds first and foremost and it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now most effectively is To Go destroy a company from the inside like you know allance meetings started to get very contentious

18:34 where you you'd get like brigaded at an allance meeting as a as a CEO where you know you'd have these extremely angry employees show up and they were like just completely Furious about like there's way too many white men on the management team why are we a for-profit corporation um don't you know all the downstream horrible effects this technology is having we need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we're not emitting any carbon so you you you you just take the lry list of fashionable kind of radical leftwing positions of that time and they're spending a huge amount of time at the company basically organizing around that and and I will say In fairness I think in most of these companies um the this kind of person never got to be you know anywhere close to 100% of the workforce but what happened is they became like 20% maybe 30% and then of course what happened was there's this big middle right of sort of goal get along people who generally also consider themselves Democrats and they're just kind of

19:19 trying to follow along with the trends um and so you you you take this activist core of 20% you add 60% of goong galong people and all of a sudden it's the CEO experiences oh my God God 80% of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda people say from the outside is well you should just fire those people but as a CEO you're like I can't fire 80% of my team and by the way I have to go hire people to replace them and the other people at the other companies are behaving the same way and I can't go hire kids out of college because I'm just going to get more activists and and that's how these companies became captured anyway so so then all right so this is all Happening by 2016 right Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee which will treat as sort of a decisive break towards whatever the the next phase of Silicon Valley ideology is but in 2016 the Democratic party as an institution

20:06 actually starts putting sustained pressure on Silicon Valley like what you're describing with you know radicalized employees is pressure but it's not Washington DC getting involved it's only after the election that Silicon Valley is seen as you know responsible through Facebook through social media through Russian disinformation through allowing disinformation for getting Trump elected and that's the point at which the Democratic party in Washington starts putting pressure on tech companies does that seem fair that's 100% true that's completely correct I would just say that I went through the long I went through the description of 13 to 16 because when the main Democratic machine kicked in and decided that we were to blame for Trump the the overwhelming response for

20:52 basically everything other than Peter was just like yep you got us we're guilty we did it cuz like this is as you know it's like wall toall coverage in the news like and I'm you know and I'm reading the New York Times every day and I'm watching MSNBC every night and I'm like oh my god what have we done right are you are you so are you watching MSNBC every night at that point mark yes every night every night Brian Williams the last remaining honest news anchor in America right the guy you can really rely on the guy you can really trust to tell you the truth and you know 11:00 or 8:00 uh you know out here every night it was you know it is day 167 of the Trump internum of having a Russian spy in the white house um and it was an hour didn't you have companies to invest in though I mean every night the world is ending I mean you got to have dinner like you got to like get ready for bed you know we we we all have these fancy things called DVRs right we you know we could do that

21:37 you wait did you you DVR msnb of course Mark I'm a good Ross I'm a good responsible Democrat I'm a good responsible citizen of America I'm like I got to understand what's happening I got to I got to be able to process reality but so I want to push on this though a little bit so do you think that when Mark Zuckerberg gets hauled in front of Congress to be grilled about disinformation and things like that do you think that he thought to himself yes Facebook is deeply and profoundly responsible for Donald Trump getting elected and Vladimir Putin influencing American politics because my my perception in the Trump years was that a lot of the people at the top of Silicon Valley were sort of essentially going along with these narratives because they

22:22 were afraid of their employees and because they were afraid of Democrats in Washington I I mean I wrote a column about this at the time I said basically that you know in any dispensation businessmen have to ask themselves what am I required to do to make money unmolested by the government and so Zuckerberg is thinking to himself right now what I'm required to do is run a sort of strict anti-d disinformation factchecking apparatus and say the right things in front of congressional committies so I don't want to speak specifically for Mark right no people high up generally I'll speak for the the group because there a lot of similarities between the different players here for the same pressures um so I'll just speak for the group and so I would say that first of all let me disabuse you of something um if you haven't already disabused yourself which

23:08 is the view of American CEOs operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong like that's like goal number five or something like there's like four goals that are like way more important than that um and and that's not just true in the big tech companies it's true in the Executive Suite of basically every one of the Fortune 500 and I would say you know goal number one is I'm a good person I'm a good person is like wildly more important than like profit margins wildly right um and so and and this is why you saw these big companies all of a sudden go like completely bananas in all their marketing it's why you saw them go bananas over Dei it's why you saw them all you know they're all cooperating with all these social media boycotts I mean the the the level of lock step uniformity unity and the thought process between the CEOs of the Fortune 500 and what's in the pages of the New York Times and in the Harvard classroom and

23:54 in the Ford Foundation they're just like locked together or at least they they were through this entire period And I find it's actually funny because the only true groups of people who think that corporate CEOs are just profit optimizing machines are people on the far left who are fullon marxists who really believe that and then people on the far right you know who I think kind of fear that the CEOs are like that but also maybe hope that they are and then you know later realize that they're not so the primary response from the Silicon Valley Tech companies and the kinds of people that you're talking about was not here's what we need to do to make money and to live under Democratic regime the primary thing was the complete exact kind of panic that you saw in the rest of corporate America and that you saw in the Press so this is it's interesting because what you are arguing for is basically the Normy conservative take on Silicon Valley across the Trump PE right which

24:41 was that there was a kind of emerging political cultural media establishment that had sort of come into being fully in order to resist Trump everyone was on the same page Silicon Valley was effectively the the information policing entity and I always tended to think that there was this sort of profit seeking mentality where Silicon Valley was kind of making political compromises to stay in business the way you would make political compromises in a foreign country um but you're saying basically the Normie cons were right about how fully Silicon Valley bought into a kind of unified liberal establishment mentality yeah and I always say look the test of this is the dinner party and what's being discussed at the dinner

25:26 party and so if the sort of more radical rightwing View is the capitalists you know making their cynical plans for how to optimize for money under the current regime that would be one thing um having been to many of those dinner parties that's not that's not the topic the topic is what's in the New York Times today and what it means that we all need to do to be good people not not my columns other other people's columns in New York Times everything other than everything other than your column yes exactly everything other than the dark matter that is the the r out that column and so um no it's it's it's literally it and and here's the reason is it's it's you know the famous cliche we live in a society these people aren't robots they're they're just not they're members of a society they're members of an elite class either come from the top and most radical education institutions or they are seeking as hard as they can to assimilate into that same class and then by the way you're not just doing that yourself you also have family and if

26:11 your kids are in college I mean God help you you know they're they're coming for you um and then by the way you've got this radicalized employee base and you you maybe could have nipped the radicalization 5 years earlier but now you can't because it's now you think it's 80% of your Workforce and by the way you also have your shareholders and this is where things get really bananas a big part of The Tipping Point what happened here it was when the major shareholders turned and became political activists so you're in this sandwich from from all of your constituents and then you've got the Press coming at you you've got the activists coming at you and then you've got the government coming at you and of course the the Federal Government radicalized hard under Hillary and and then even even or sorry the federal government we talk about that more but wait the federal government is run by is run by Donald Trump not really in this period right so this is I mean this is the peculiar thing about about the narrative right

26:58 you saying everyone is possessed by all these fears and I grant you their powerful fears but they are in an era when officially the Republican party and Donald Trump are in the White House and have not complete but real power in Washington DC well did they like sitting here today would you describe that Donald Trump ran the federal government between 2016 and 2020 not not entirely effectively I wouldn't I wouldn't say that at the same time it wasn't the case that the Democratic party in 2018 or 2019 was in a position to pass some sweeping new legislation whether to raise taxes or regulate Silicon Valley and all kinds of ways right the the Democratic pressure was a mixture of bureaucratic power that I agree Trump did not actually control and

27:44 Congressional hearings and outside pressure but it is still interesting that there were obvious things that you would expect a business Community to be afraid of that the Democrats couldn't do in you know 2018 2019 2020 so things got much worse after 2020 so the part I would agree with is things got much worse for Tech um after after they took formal control in the white house so for sure that that's right all right let's take a quick break and we'll be right back [Music]

28:37 [Music] okay so it's 2020 it's 2021 Biden is President all the Silicon Valley is again seems completely on side for the defeat of trump the deplatforming of trump and you know we're only four years removed from that so how do we get from from Biden being sworn in to here and you can talk more about your own political Evolution too I'm asking you to sort of describe Mark Andre's perspective specifically yeah so maybe just the short thing I tell you about 16 to 20 was there were a series of additional 10 Xing events 10 Xing of like radicalism and intensity of all the politics and so and it was the Trump's nomination it was Trump's election and then it was Russia gate and then it was you know it was like Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam

29:23 and then of course Co hits So Co was a giant radicalizing moment and then by that point we lived through 8 years of what was sort of increasingly clearly a a social Revolution like very clearly like companies basically being hijacked to be engines of social change social Revolution you know the employee base is going feral um you know there there were cases in the you know in the in the Trump here there were companies multiple companies I know that felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees like things got really aggressive um during that period so you know I go from watching Brian Williams every night um and just being lied to you know 500 nights in a row um you know to basically you know reading the Muller report Reading the horror wits IG report you know just being like Oh my God none of this is true and then you try to explain to people this isn't true and then they get really mad at you because how can you you know how can you possibly have any sympathy for a fascist

30:09 anyway so that's happening that's happening to you so you are radicalizing in the late Trump years yeah for sure and and people like me there there there were quite a few people like me now none of us were sticking our heads up at that point because it was like to be clear way too dangerous like none of us were like I don't think particularly moral heroes in that point but there were lots and lots of underground peer-to-peer discussions kind of from call it 2018 through to 2021 saying okay things are off the rails anyway so my point is like we were softened up for we were already softened up for the Biden sort of radicalization and then when the Biden Administration turned out to be far more radical than even we thought that they were going to be then that's what generated the response that so what what about so what in what in concrete terms does that mean what are the policies that I mean they came shocked or surprised you about the Biden Administration yeah they they came for

30:54 they came for Tech and they came for business in a very broad-based way and and everything that I'm going to describe also it turns out I found out later happened in the energy industry and I think it happened in a bunch of other Industries but the CEOs felt like they couldn't talk about it but the problem is like the raw application of the power of the administrative State um the raw application of of Regulation and then the raw arbitrary not just enforcement of that regulation promulgation of that regulation it was increasing insertion into basic Staffing you know mandated enforcement of Dei in very destructive ways you know some of these agencies have their own in-house courts which is bananas but also just like straight up threats and bullying Mark Zuckerberg just talked about this on Rogan like direct phone calls from senior members of the administration screaming Executives ordering them to do things just like fullon you we own you we control you you're going to do what we want we're going to destroy you

31:41 and then they just came after crypto absolutely tried to kill us I mean they just like ran this like incredible basically Terror campaign to try to kill crypto and then they were ramping into a similar campaign to try to kill Ai and and that's really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics is the the crypto attack was so weird that we didn't know what to make it and we were just hoping it would pass which it didn't but it was when they threatened to do the same thing to AI that we realized we had to get involved in politics and then we were up against what looked like the absolutely terrifying you know Prospect of a second term just just to zero in when you say kill AI yeah what does that mean because the Biden Administration obviously would not say that it intends to kill AI it would say that it wants to make America the world leader in AI while regulating it in a way that prevents our enemies

32:26 around the world from obtaining potentially World altering technology that would be the narrative right so why is that wrong that would be great what you just said would be great compared to what we actually got so again the precondition here what we got with crypto was they just flat out tried to kill it they this all the de banking thing like they just debanked an entire generation of Founders they de Bank their families they you know really destroyed people's lives they just killed companies left right and Center they did regulation through enforcement they they would never Define what the rules were they would just arbitrarily sue people when they didn't think they could sue people and win um they would would do this thing where they'd issue these things called Wells notices which is basically a public announcement that the government is going to sue you in the future which is basically a death sentence for a company so we saw this exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power levied against uh crypto and and then basically we saw the

33:13 beginnings of what we thought was going to be that applyed to Ai and so it's like you know AI needs to be you know very carefully controlled by the government or by adjuncts of the government to you know make sure that it there's no hate spech of misinformation which is to say it has to be like completely politically controlled and you know we were trying to keep our heads down just trying to build startups and then um Ben and I went to uh Washington in May of 24 and you know we couldn't meet with Biden because as it turns out at the time nobody could meet with Biden uh but we were able to meet with senior staff and so we we met with very senior people in the White House you know in the in the in core um and we basically relay our concerns about Ai and their response to us was yes the national agenda on AI as we will Implement in the B Administration and in the second term is we are going to make sure that AI is going to be only a

33:58 function of two or three large companies we will directly regulate and control those companies um there will be no startups this whole thing where you guys think you can just like start companies and write code and release code of the internet like those days are over that's not happening and we were shocked that it was you this was even worse than we thought and so we said well that that seems like really radical and and we said honestly we don't understand how like you're going to control and ban open source AI because it's just math and code on the internet and like how are you possibly going to control it and the response was we classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War and if we need to do that for math for AI going forward we'll do that too but that is a national security argument that is an argument right that that it's about yeah China basically National Security is also the death of democracy like I and maybe I I'll give the devil is Du here like I I believe in their view they

34:43 really think they're defending democracy I mean they're they're trying to strangle it to death in the name of Defending it but like I think they literally believe you know when they say like Trump is Hitler you know by way it appears Obama doesn't believe Trump is Hitler anymore because he's like joking around with them at the funeral but like a lot of these guys you know the fire is in the eyes right and look it's not even just the US right it's like you know it's the rise of you know ukip you know brexit was an equally you know shocking alarming thing the rise of farage it's obviously the German party afd it's obviously that's you know the Nazi party 2.0 and so this like super heated rhetoric and actions between 2021 and 2024 just like went like completely bananas and so we came in like I said in May 24 at the very height of that and we were like oh my God like they're they're going to kill us like they're going to kill our companies they're going to kill open by the way if you kill open source

35:29 AI you also kill all academic research so the universities are going to be completely cut out of the loop I feel like we would have to do a separate show about the future and risks of AI yeah but but it is I I my perception is there is a large constituency not just in Washington DC but in Silicon Valley as well that regards some form of AI as potentially dangerous to human civilization or US National Defense as nuclear weapons and during the Cold War we obviously did not allow you know random startups to manufacture nuclear weapons in you know the nuclear Corridor in pipy New York right that I mean that is important to the thinking not only did we ban them making nuclear weapons we also ban them from making nuclear power which we not regret but anyway

36:15 absolutely no no I'm not I'm by no means arguing that this theory is correct I'm just saying my sense is that there is presumably some version of AI that you would wish to see regulated by the federal government right uh it depends it this is a longer conversation we need to have I would just tell you the National Security part was not the motivator here and by the way the national security stuff like those arguments aren't over like that that's still going to play out the the political dimension of it overwhelmingly I mean it was just crystal clear you can see it in the eyes you can hear in the words you can see it in the behavior we have a lot of you know Democratic friends at good standing who are major donors in you know into both the Biden campaign and even the Comm campaign and they came back with the same reports you know is completely consistent which is this is social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons because it is literally killing democracy and literally leading to the rearrival of Hitler um and AI is going to be even

37:02 worse and we we need to take it right now and and so anyway and this is why I took you through the long Preamble earlier cuz like at this point it's like okay we are no longer dealing with rational people like we're no longer dealing with people we can deal with and you know that's the day we walked out and we you know stood in the parking lot of the westwing and um you know took one look at each other and we're like yep we're for Trump all right let's take a break there and when we come back we'll talk about what the Tech right wants from the Trump [Music] era so this is sort of the moment when

37:49 you can start to talk about attack right yeah so it's not just Peter teal and it's not just Elon it is you and a larger number of people who sort of came out in support of trump and now there's been you know reporting that uh you know the Trump Administration is uh hiring people from your own company for positions in the administration so the tech right has gone from basically not existing in some way right a year ago to helping to staff a new Administration um so what does it want I mean look we start by saying like one of the things I now firmly believe is I can't predict Poli like I I I feel like I failed to predict most of the important things that happened in the last decade on anything political or or you know at the national

38:34 level so I will try very hard to not make any predictions I I can tell you what they say and by the way what they say in private is exactly what they say in public like there's I have not picked up on any disconnect at all I actually think that they're incredibly transparent in and the president's incredibly transparent uh in what he says and and the high level thing they say with respect to anything involving techer businesses we want America to win and what that means is we want America to be the preeminent country in the world we want America to be the the global economic leader we want America to be the global technology leader we want America to be the global Military leader right we 100% want to beat China we want to make sure that American Technology proliferates globally and not Chinese technology and it's a shame in the past that you know so many of you guys were against us because all we wanted was to help you guys win but so that means okay Trump Administration is

39:21 not going to do the things that the Biden Administration was doing that you regard as a mortal threat to AI crypto other Industries what else besides not doing things what is the functional Pro bus agenda I mean I'm not asking you to make a prediction I'm saying like what would you like to see sure well just to start with I would say primarily primarily is don't kill us like for like myself and and my partner Ben and our firm like it's primarily the negative which is like don't kill us um and I say that because like we're not in there lobbying for subsidies we don't need grants we don't need government investment we don't need you know Monopoly or cartel status for companies and I'm not even again I'm not claiming any moral heroism here it's just that kind of thing is not really relevant to startups so that's number one number two is look we would

40:07 like our companies to be able to succeed globally uh we think it's in the best interest of the United States and all Americans for that to happen because if it's not American companies winning globally it's Chinese companies winning globally and even the Americans who hate America the most presumably are not in favor of the Chinese Communist Party winning instead then you know as you know like many foreign governments are now much more hostile to American Tech um you know than they were 20 years ago and you know we Face enormous challenges in Europe enormous challenges even in like the UK like just these extremely Draconian anti-tech anti- bus anti-American you know kind of policies the EU is you know as you know is regulating itself to death and that they're damaging themselves mostly but what they're also doing is really damaging our companies and so we we would like to work with the administration to help Global markets open up and for American companies to win and then look third is we have shared interests on a lot of the other

40:53 underlying issues and I'll just give you the big obvious one right now which is energy right like and this Administration you know my my friend Doug buram is the national energy Zar and he's a very successful business Tech guy and he's been given the charter to blow the doors off of American Energy and really open it up and of course that will be hugely beneficial to the country and to and obviously to AI which you know soaks up lots of energy um and so you know there's a whole bunch of things like that and then maybe I'll just give you one final thing which is we need the censorship pressure to end we need the de banking pressure to end we need this kind of random terrorism coming out of the federal government you know just these agencies kind of running wild that stuff just needs to be like brought to heal um and you know the new administration's been been very vocal about how they they intend to fix all that so that maybe would be the final thing so where where do you think Doge

41:38 the Elon Musk run Department of governmental efficiency which is promising some number trillions of dollars of savings where does that fit into a tech right agenda yeah so um and and I should say like I'm I'm helping Doge on this but I'm not speaking for Elon yeah just to be clear not speaking for Elon not speaking for the administration so clear so look yeah you know look so when you know I talked about Al Gore a lot earlier you may remember Al Gore had this whole initiative in the 90s called Reinventing government yes I remember which was Doge 1.0 uh at the time it was a Normy Democrat thing which is of course you want government efficiency of course you want a balanced budget and ideally you want a government surplus right um and in fact you'll recall that they actually got there right in the late 90s the US government actually went into Surplus like it it it actually worked and this used to be just assumed it's like of course if you're a Democrat you want the

42:25 government programs to be efficient because you want them to sustain right and you want you know whatever social support programs or whatever you want to sustain you want Social Security to sustain and so of course you want efficiency and of course you want cost cutting wherever you can get it and of course you want to eliminate you know Fraud and Abuse and all these things and then like somehow now that's turned into oh my God it's fascism right so it's it's another one of these like crazy inversions that's taking place that I I don't I don't think the compelling question about Doge is whether it's fascism I think the compelling question is whether it's a kind of trap for if not the whole Tech right at least for oh Elon Musk right which is to say you know you're giving him a portfolio over a set of issues that are the most intractable in Washington DC and yes they were more tractable in the 1990s but we were in a completely different demographic landscape then it's much easier to make

43:12 your Social Security and Medicare payments in the world of 1996 in the world of today so you have a commission of some sort that can make recommendations but doesn't fundamentally have legislative power and personally right I I would like Elon Musk to succe Ed in things like going to Mars I'm less convinced that he's capable of succeeding in rationalizing the entitlement system and I feel like it's quite plausible that he he at least again maybe not the whole Tech right whatever it may be but he at least could get lost in this setup it's possible I mean look like I just say a couple things so like look one one what you said it's been very deliberately set up so it's not actually Department of the government not withstanding the name the formal power will get exercised through the executive branch you know and through the White House like everything else but I will say you know there was a

43:59 lot of support from the administration for the program and if you look at the people being put into positions like om and and and OPM and so forth like they're they're very aligned with it so so the very least is starting out with a lot of coordination and shared ideas and then I guess I'd say look a couple things so one is just just so we know what doge is there's actually three kind of threads that they're pulling on um there's the money side but there's also the headcount Staffing side which is related but not exactly the same to the money side and then there's the regulation side and they have plans on each of those three threads on the money and on the Staffing and on the regulation they have plans on how to do it that are I would just say Lighty years beyond anything I've ever heard of before in terms in terms of their understanding of the federal bureaucracy their understanding of American politics which how are they light years Beyond I mean look you just have the smartest

44:45 entrepreneur of our entire generation who's like the conceptual Genius of our time across multiple domains and uh they have plans where I think when people see them I think people are going to be like oh I didn't realize that that's the way that you could go about this and so I I they have original thinking on all three of those and over the weeks to come that that'll become more more public but I think there's more underlying thought process here than than I think people give their credit for it and then and then I'll just add one more thing to your point in comparing to Prior eras the the prior attempts to do this all happen under the old top down you know media machine right and everything that happens now is going to happen in the full light of social media um and you know say what you will about social media one of the things it's really good at is like when somebody like Elon or somebody like Trump wants to take a message direct to the people and say this because this has already begun like you know elon's already doing this the administration's already doing this

45:31 there's an ability here to take this directly to the population and shine a light on what's actually going on um across a lot of the government and I'll just give you the the the most obvious one they've already talked about in public which is just you know the occupancy of a federal building in Washington DC now is like 25% like a very large percentage of the federal Workforce literally never came back to work and you know ask any big Company CEO in America they will tell you people working at home are not working I mean I guess my my view would be I can imagine a remarkable new plan for making the federal government in various ways much more efficient I can totally imagine that I am skeptical that such a plan would in the end make a big dent in the federal government's costs not least because you know let's say you have tons of dead wood in a particular Federal agency well you're going to get rid of that dead wood but in fact you're going

46:17 to need to hire better people to replace those people and you're going to need you know to pay those people appropriately and so on and all of this is just sort of in the shadow of Social Security Medicare and a range of federal commitments that there is no magical argument on social media that will suddenly make cutting those commitments popular I think but this is of course the cynical you know the cynical Washington DC view this is the traditional institutional cynical Washington View and the way that reads to a normal person is absolute contempt for the taxpayer like absolute contempt for the taxpayer of like we can sit here in Washington and we can Ladle out $50 billion here and $100 billion there and when we're challenged on it the answer is it's a rounding error right like no no no no this is all this is the answer

47:03 when we're challenged on it is this is the the actual spending that the federal government does is either Big Ticket things that the average taxpayer supports or smaller bore things like funding for students with disabilities across public school districts or something that if the average taxpayer doesn't support it at least a very vocal and influential constituency it those are the two groups it's not dripping with contempt for the taxpayer it's the taxpayer that you know because of their desire for large amounts of federal spending tends to support but I just say look I just tell you what you just said comes across as total contempt for the taxpayer like just just absolute contempt and so this will be this will be part of the this tax the tax does the taxpayer not I

47:50 mean Mark having you know I wrote many many columns in support of various versions of Paul Ryan's plan to cut Medicare or reform Medicare and reform Social Security and the reason those plans went down to defeat was not that Federal bureaucrats had contempt for the American taxpayer it was that the American taxpayer in election after election likes and supports and votes in favor of Medicare and Social Security they're not exposed to it so so this is the difference this is a big part of the BET and look maybe it'll work and maybe it won't this is a big part of the BET which is they they don't they don't actually see the American Tax paay doesn't experience it that way because they don't actually have the insight into it yeah take your what you would think would be a bullet program like child disability in schools like it's far from clear to me that the median taxpayer would support that if they really knew what that was and as you and I both know what that has become is that it's become basically medicalized mental

48:36 illness to the point where students in schools now are basically using fake diagnoses of mental illness in order to get drugs and in order to get like extra time on tests and that whole program has like run completely out of control and like everybody with kids knows that um but it's not like a discreet thing that people can like wrap their heads around and understand and it's not a thing that gets like exposed in the bright light of day right and that's precisely the kind of thing where I if it's AED in public I think you might find that there's a lot less support for it than people think so you know we'll see so let's get to the last crucial question right which is setting aside the opinions of the median voter and the opinions of the American taxpayer what about the opinions of other factions in the Republican Coalition because basically you you have become a faction right congratulations yes welcome welcome to life Welcome To Life as a faction on the

49:22 American right and there are obviously other factions on the American right that have already begun to clash um with the tech perspective there was a big sort of blow up just over Christmas over H1B visas and the extent to which Silicon Valley tends to support sort of maximal recruitment of high-skilled immigrants a big part of Donald Trump's Coalition does not support maximal recruitment of high-skilled immigrants that thinks that America First includes Americans first when it comes to you know hiring in Greater San Francisco right already got Steve Bannon promising to you know get Elon Musk out of government immediately which is clearly not going to happen but what's your sense of of those kind of conflicts and also like

50:09 because of everything that we just spent this whole interview talking about there's a really big constituency on the right that maybe they trust Elon Musk they don't trust Silicon Valley at all they have supported in different ways right-wing ideas for regulating and you know doing antitrust regulation in Silicon Valley that constituent is still there what do you make of all of those challenges well so look I I just start by saying look when when a coalition wins then of course the very next step is internal fights inside the Coalition right I mean I think that's sort of obvious right um so look I I have no doubt that there you know there are and they're going to continue to be debates inside the Coalition um I would just say look I I I frankly don't even really have anything to say on that just because I would say that we have a leader of the Coalition and his name is Donald Trump and he is extremely good at navigating this aspect of it and he's extremely good at you know bringing

50:54 together all the threads and then having it you know come out into the positions that he Advocates of support and obviously as you know he has this you know magical this is sorry this is this is you mean Donald Trump yeah yeah yeah yeah but the last time we mentioned Donald Trump in this interview you and I were agreeing that um he was not actually in command of the federal government in his first term right so this is a big part there is some presumably there is some space for um you know factional conflict under his benevolent rule 100% no question I I will just tell you though I mean I'll just tell you from from my exposure to it and from everybody I've talked to talk to Trump people what they will tell you is in the first term number one we didn't think we were going to win we were Outsiders we were insurgents we didn't have a St we didn't have a reservoir of people that we could draw on you know the very large percentage of the Republican Staffing base had

51:40 declared itself never Trump and they were not available to work with us we didn't we so we didn't have a a team that we could bring in we were coming into Washington for the first time from the outside we didn't know how the levers of power worked we didn't know how to turn the lights onto the White House in the first day we just didn't know how to do these things and then we got this just incredible withering assault on day one and for the for the next three years of Russian spy Russia gate attacks every possible form of like slandering attack and so like we just we

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