Nature of power

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 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 hyper-inflationary spiral and we become Argentina or Brazil. And ... The following is a conversation with Marc Andreessen, his second time on the podcast. Marc is a visionary tech leader and investor who fundamentally shaped the development of the internet and the tech industry in general over the past 30 years. He's the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and is one of the most influential voices in the tech world, including at the intersection of technology and politics. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Marc Andreessen.

All right, let's start with optimism. If you were to imagine the best possible 1 to 2 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.

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 by, if I could only pronounce the name, French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges. I don't know. That was amazing.

So the beautiful picture you painted of the roaring 20s, how can the Trump administration play a part in making that future happen? 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. And again, this is a replay of what happened in the 60s and 70s, which is for what started out looking like, I'm sure good and virtuous purposes, we ended up both then and now with this, what I describe as sort of a form of soft authoritarianism. The good news is it's not like a military dictatorship. It's not like you get thrown into Lubyanka. For the most part, [inaudible 00:20:28] 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 incredible suppressive blanket of regulation rules, this concept of a vetocracy. What's required to get anything done? You need to get 40 people to sign off on anything, any one of them can veto it. There's a lot of [inaudible 00:20:47] political system works.

So you mentioned the Hollywood folks, maybe people in Silicon Valley and the vibe shift. Maybe you can speak to preference falsification. What do they actually believe? How many of them actually hate Trump? What percent of them are feeling this vibe shift and are interested in creating the roaring 20s in the way they've described? So first we should maybe talk population. So there's all of Silicon Valley, and the way to just measure that is just look at voting records and what that shows consistently is Silicon Valley is just, at least historically, my entire time there has been overwhelmingly majority just straight up Democrat. The other way to look at that is political donation records. And again, the political donations in the Valley range from 90 to 99% to 1 side. And so I just bring it up because we'll see what happens with the voting and with donations going forward.

I mean, to push back, to come back to this idea that we're talking about, I do believe that people have beliefs and thoughts that are heretical, like a lot of people. I wonder what fraction of people have that? To me, the preference falsification is really interesting. What is the landscape of ideas that human civilization has in private as compared to what's out in public? Because the dynamical system that is the difference between those two is fascinating. Throughout history the fall of communism and multiple regimes throughout Europe is really interesting. Everybody was following the line until not. But for sure, privately, there was a huge number of boiling conversations happening, where this is 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. To me, the interesting question here is, what is the landscape of private thoughts and ideas and conversations that are happening under the surface of Americans? Especially, my question is how much dormant energy is there for this roaring twenties? What people are like, no more bullshit, let's get done.

If I could tell you a little personal story that breaks my heart a little bit, there's a professor, a historian, I won't say who, who I admire deeply, love his work. He's kind of a heretical thinker. And we were talking about having a podcast, on 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 asked, "Who are the particular figures in this guest list?" He said, "Trump." And the second one, he said, "That you announced your interest to talk to Vladimir Putin." So I just don't want the headache. Now, I fully believe it would surprise a lot of people if I said who it is. This is a person who's not bothered by the guest list. And I should also say that 80 plus percent of the guest list is left wing. Nevertheless, he just doesn't want the headache. And that speaks to the thing that you've kind of mentioned, that you just don't want the headache. You just want to just have a pleasant morning with some coffee and talk to your fellow professors. And I think a lot of people are feeling that in universities and in other contexts, in tech companies. And I wonder if that shifts, how quickly that shifts? And there, the percentages you mentioned, 20, 60, 20 matters, and the contents of the private groups matters, and the dynamics of how that shifts matters. Because it's very possible, nothing really changes in universities and in major tech companies. Where just, there's a kind of excitement right now for potential revolution and these new ideas, these new vibes, to reverberate through these companies and universities, but it's possible the wall will hold.

You've mentioned censorship a few times. Let us, if we can go deep into the darkness of the past and how censorship mechanism was used. So you are a good person to speak about the history of this because you were there on the ground floor in 2013-ish Facebook. I heard that you were there when they invented or maybe developed the term hate speech in the context of censorship on social media. So take me through that history if you can, the use of censorship. So I was there on the ground in 1993.

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

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

Can you just linger on that because it is maybe educating and deeply disturbing? You've spoken about it before, but we're speaking about again this government pressure. So you think they've crossed the line into essentially criminal levels of pressure? Flagrant criminality, felonies, like obvious felonies. And I can actually cite the laws, but yes, absolute criminality.

Take credit and run with it. If we can just linger on the Machiavellians. 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 continue to say about the dynamics of power, the jostling for power that happens inside these institutions? Yeah. A lot of it, we already talked about this a bit with the universities, which is you can apply a Machiavellian style lens to ... 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 the true answer is some combination of the three, of the four plus the donors. By the way, plus the government, plus the press, et cetera. And so there's a mechanical interpretation of that. Companies operate under the exact same set of questions. Who runs a company? The CEO, but the CEO EO 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 O to stay in the seat. If the management team revolts, it's very hard for the CEO to stay in the seat.

And just to stay on journalism for a second, we mentioned Bill Ackman. I just want to say put him in the category we mentioned before of a really courageous person. I don't think I've ever seen anybody so fearless in going after, in following what he believes in publicly. That's courage. Several things he's done publicly has been really inspiring. Just being courageous. What do you think is the most impressive example?

You've been spending a bunch of time in Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach helping the new administration in many ways, including interviewing people who might join. So what's your general sense about the talent, about the people who are coming into the new administration? So I should start by saying I'm not a member of the new administration. I'm not in the room when a lot of these people are being selected.

Yeah, the potential for change is certainly extremely high. Can you speak to DOGE? What's the most wildly successful next two years for DOGE, can you imagine? Maybe also can you think about the trajectory that's the most likely and what kind of challenges would it be facing? Yeah, so start by saying, again, disclaimer, I have to say, I'm not on DOGE, I'm not a member of DOGE.

It seems like a lot of people will try to slow them down, but yeah, I hope they get far. Another difficult topic, immigration. What's your take on the, let's say, heated H-1B visa debate that's going on online and legal immigration in general? I should start by saying I am not involved in any aspect of government policy on this. I'm not planning to be, this is not an issue that I'm working on or that I'm going to work on. This is not part of the agenda of what the firm is doing, my firm is doing. So I'm not 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 this as I have a complex or nuanced, hopefully nuanced view on this issue that's maybe a little bit different than what a lot of my peers have. And I thought about this, I didn't say anything about it all the way through the big debate over Christmas, but I thought about it a lot and read everything. I think what I realized is that I just have a very different perspective on some of these things, and the reason is because of the combination of where I came from and then where I ended up.

I think your profile on X states, it's time to build. It feels like 2025 is a good year to build. So, I wanted to ask your advice, and maybe for advice for anybody who's trying to build, who is trying to build something useful in the world. Maybe launch a startup, or maybe just launch apps, services, whatever, ship software products. So, maybe, by way of advice, how do you actually get to shipping? So, 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 AI coding, this is the biggest earthquake to hit software in certainly my life, maybe since the invention of software. And we're involved in various of these companies, but these tools, from a variety of companies, are absolutely revolutionary, and they're getting better by leaps and bounds every day. And you know all this. But the thing with coding, there's open questions of whether AI can get better at, I don't know, understanding philosophy, or whatever, creative writing or whatever, but for sure we can make it much better at coding, because you can validate the results of coding. And so, there's all these methods of synthetic data and self-training and reinforcement learning that, for sure, you can do with coding.

It feels like 2025 is when the race for dominance in AI will see some winners. It's a big year. So, who do you think wins the race? OpenAI, Meta, Google, xAI... Who do you think wins the AI race? I would say, I'm not going to predict, I'm going to say there's questions all over the place. And we have this category of question we call the trillion-dollar question, which is literally, depending on how it's answered, people make or lose a trillion dollars, and I think there's, I don't know, five or six trillion questions right now, that are hanging out there, which is an unusually large number. And I'll just hit a few of them and we can talk about them. So, one is big models versus small models, another is open models versus closed models, another...

Quick question. So you're very active on X. A very unique character: flamboyant, exciting, bold. You post a lot. I think there's a meme, I don't remember it exactly, but that Elon posted something like inside Elon, there are two wolves. One is please be kind or more positive. And the other one is, I think doing the, I 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.

Almost for fun. Let me ask a friend of yours, Yann LeCun, what are your top 10 favorite things about Yann LeCun? I think he's a brilliant guy. I think he's important to the world. I think you guys disagree on a lot of things, but I personally like vigorous disagreement, I, as a person in the stands, like to watch the gladiators go at it. And- No, he's a super genius. I mean, look, I wouldn't say we're super close, but casual friends. I worked with him at Meta. He was the chief scientist at Meta for a long time and still works with us. And obviously is a legendary figure in the field and one of the main people responsible for what's happening. My serious observation would be it's the thing 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 as the path for AI. And he's not, there's certain, I would say, troll-like characters who are just cropping everything but Yann has very deeply thought through, basically, theories as to why LLMs are an evolutionary dead end.

Another fun question, our mutual friend Andrew Huberman. First maybe, what do you love most about Andrew? And second, what score on a scale of one to 10 do you think he would give you on your approach to health? Oh, three.

I now understand what they mean by toxic masculinity. All right. So 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 contribution. So have you done something that mattered ultimately and specifically mattered to people? And then the other thing is, I think, happiness is either overrated or almost a complete myth. 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 Greek meaning, which is closer to satisfaction or fulfillment. So I think about happiness as the first ice cream cone makes you super happy. The first mile of the walk in the park during sunset makes super happy. The first kiss makes you super happy. The thousandth ice cream cone, not so much. The thousandth mile of the walk through the park. The thousandth kiss can still be good, but maybe just not right in a row. And so happiness is this very fleeting concept, and the people who anchor on happiness seem to go off the rails pretty often. So the deep sense of having been, I don't know how to put it, useful.

As a small tangent, a quick shout out to an amazing interview you did with Bari Weiss and just to her in general, Bari Weiss of the Free Press. She has a podcast called, Honestly, with Bari Weiss. She's great. People should go listen. You were asked if you believe in God. One of the joys ... See, we talked about happiness. One of the things that makes me happy is making you uncomfortable. Thank you.