← "Upstream" with Erik Torenberg
"Upstream" with Erik Torenberg
E100: Marc Andreessen: How 2016 Broke My Mental Model of the World
01:55:24
Following Marc Andreessen's great conversation with Joe Rogan that introduced millions to his philosophical and political thinking, we wanted to share our in-depth discussion with Marc on Upstream from late 2022. This interview goes deeper into his intellectual evolution and quest to understand how the world really works, covering everything from how 2016 broke his mental model of politics, to his analysis of how billionaires get captured by elite institutions.
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- [00:00]
Eric Tornberg
Following Marc Andreessen's great conversation with Joe Rogan that introduced millions to his philosophical and political thinking, we wanted to share our in depth discussion with Mark on upstream from late 2022. This interview goes deeper into his intellectual evolution and quest to understand how the world really works, covering everything from how 2016 broke his mental model of politics to his analysis of how billionaires get captured by elite institutions. Please enjoy. Foreign welcome to the show.
- [00:42]
Marc Andreessen
Hey, Eric, great to be here.
- [00:44]
Eric Tornberg
Great. You, you recently tweeted about how 2015 shook your concept of how the world works. And you tweeted about a reading journey that you went on to understand what had changed. So we're going to get into some of those books that you read, but first I want to summarize so that the audience understands what exactly changed. Is a fair summary, something like that. Some of our major institutions, whether it was schools, media, government institutions, Fortune 500, kind of all went hard left in unison and kind of indoctrinating a new morality and censoring people who disagreed. Is that a fair summary or what would be your edit or summary of what really changed? Because this is before Trump, right? What really changed 2015?
- [01:32]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So, you know, the hardest thing with this kind of question always is, right? How much does the world change versus how much do you change? Right? And so you always kind of wonder, it's like, okay, if I were the person I was today and I relived, you know, 1980 again or 1996 again, or, you know, 2008 again or whatever, would I have a totally different view on things? And I think that's, you know, that's an individual question. It's also very interesting societal question, right? Because, you know, we live in a specific kind of media environment today. I often wonder, like, what would it have been like to live through the Bay of Pigs or the Cuban Missile Crisis, right. Or Iran Contra or, you know, you know, the FDR administration or whatever, or World War II. You know, imagine living through World War II with modern social media, right? And the level, and the level of second guessing that would have taken place, you know, every, every step of the way, right? Would the United States have ever entered World War II in an era of social media? Like if you read the history of World War II, a very large percentage of the country was opposed to entering World War II, you know, up through the late 30s, so basically up until Pearl harbor. And like, you know, would we, would we have ever gotten involved? I don't know. And so anyway, so it's really hard to you know, it's really hard to kind of reconstruct, I think, these things historically. You know, my lived experience, as the kids say, is that, you know, things started changing pretty dramatically from at least the way I understood how the world worked. Probably in 2012, just a lot of people in authority started saying things that just didn't make any sense to me. And people started acting in ways that I didn't think were, that I certainly didn't predict and didn't think would happen. And then, look, I think that I live the same sequence of events as everybody else, but I think Trump winning the. I think there have been basically four big events. It's like Trump winning the nomination in 2015 and then winning the general election in 2016. And then there was Charlottesville, and then there was the George Floyd moment, and then there was January 6th. There was like three, four or five, six things in there that kind of caused, I think, both sides of the political spectrum, both halves of the American population, to really start to act in really fundamentally different ways than at least I was used to. And so anyway, basically I lost all faith in my own ability to understand what was going on and just realized that basically all of my assumptions around how people behave, at least in politics and current events and social dynamics basically are just wrong. And so when people react to that sort of soul shattering moment in different ways, I suppose my approach to deal with it is to try to then kind of go back and kind of trace the ideas back and try to figure out kind of where I went wrong. And that led me on this journey that you're referring to that basically the way I do that is I basically read my way back and I sort of read my way back in time and try to figure out when things actually started. And then that, that led me to kind of do that. So there's a big historical kind of aspect of that. And then it also caused me to kind of. I basically decided that I didn't understand either the left or the right. Like, I didn't understand how Democrats were acting, I didn't understand how Republicans were acting. And so I decided to kind of read my way out in both directions. Both all the way out, all the way out to the left, all the way to like Lenin and Marx and communism on the one hand, and then all the way out to the right on the other hand and see if I could at least reconstruct a worldview for, you know, at least some sense of context for what's happening today.
- [04:47]
Eric Tornberg
I, I heard there was this kind of critique of the, of the left, which is, hey, you, you can read your, your way back. But actually it's really just excuses for people want stuff. And you know, we have this debate with Richard Hinenia about, hey, you know, how much do ideas matter versus, versus just group, you know, groups of people in tribalism and, and, and of course the left and right changes their ideas over time too. What's your, what's your reaction and take on that?
- [05:17]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so the cynical. Well, a couple kind of things in there. So yeah, so I mean there's a big overall kind of question of sort of theory of mind, right, which is how well does the right ever understand the left? How well does the right, the left ever understand the right? You know, there is some evidence, if you like read political science, there's some evidence that people on the right tend to understand people on the left better than vice versa. And the theory there basically is like a lot of right wing people used to be left wing people. Yeah, right. People tend to move right. As they go through their lives. And so, you know, you maybe have a memory like a lot of neoconservatives were former Marxist, Marxists as an example. And so they actually fully understood Marxism inside out. We'll talk about James Burnham, who's like a classic example of this, who actually was a very active Marxist in the 20s and 30s communist. So anyway, there's always kind of that question, the question of whether ideas matter. You know, this is, this is one of the things I've been trying to kind of figure out and understand, which is like you've got this kind of, you know, a lot of this happened around Shrupp, which is you, you've kind of got, you've kind of got two things that kind of seem to run a parallel and seem to kind of affect each other, but it's not clear which is the dog and which is the tail. So one is like these sort of big mass movements of basically broad based popular opinion. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but like when broad based popular opinion moves, it's usually not the result of some sort of detailed intellectual argument. Right. It's not that you have 300 million people who read a journal article, you know, an academic journal article, and then, you know, decide to change their mind on things like it, it's, it's, it's basically like it's, you know, it's a big, it's an emotional surge. Yeah, right. Of some form. It's a Prius, it's a Primal thing. It's, it's, you know, it's not, it's not particularly logical or rational, but, but it's very deeply felt and very deeply believed and, you know, and by the way, maybe very real. And then there's this second channel which is like the intellectuals, right? And sort of then there's like the intellectual superstructure on top of the movement. And for communism, that was obviously Marx and then Lenin, all of their writings. And then there's corresponding stuff on the right where people have written very important books over time. And then there's always this question like, okay, is it the intellectuals, is it the intellectual elite basically driving the popular change? Because basically the population is responding to ideas or is it the other way around? It's like, no, the people move. And then intellectuals are like, well, the people are moving. I am their leader. I must therefore get ahead of them. I must basically articulate a story as to why they're moving so people down the road will think that it was I who caused it. Eric Hoffer talks about this. Eric Hoffer, the sociologist, in his book the True Believer, he talks a lot about this. And so the true believer is about this sort of mass movement of crowds. And so Hoffer's argument is interesting. 1. Hoffer argues that basically that the driver is mass popular sentiment. That mass popular sentiment moves kind of as a beast in and of itself. And he, he uses the term the true believer to kind of refer to somebody who's become part of a crowd, part of a mob, you know, part of a, part of a mass movement, you know, on either side. By the way, this is true of communism, true of fascism and so forth. So it's not a political observation, it's a psychological observation. And then what, what Hoffer says is basically whenever there's a big surge in popular movement, there's always sort of the evolution or development of a set of intellectual ideas on top of that that basically serve to describe what's happened and sort of rationalize it and try to put it into an intellectual framework. And he said the reason you get those ideas is, the reason that happens is because the movement needs to recruit the intellectuals. And so to recruit the intellectuals, you need to have ideas. And so you've got this thin layer of intellectual content on the top that serves to recruit the intellectuals in the movement. And then you've got the demagoguery and kind of the mass movement underneath that's sort of non rational and more emotional. Maybe that's the case. I think Richard, if he were here, would probably agree with this. Richard's general take, as I understand it, is that basically people respond to interests more than ideas. And so if people in crowd think that they're going to be better off as a result of Action X, or if their enemies are going to suffer because of Action X, that's a direct incentive and they respond to that. And the ideas are kind of these abstractions that intellectuals just kind of chase their tails on. Maybe that's the best explanation. Having said that, look, like Marx wrote. Marx wrote these things, right? I mean, Marx wrote Dan's Capital and the Communist Manifesto and so forth. And he wrote those 150 years ago and China still uses them today. Right. And Xi Jinping still talks about them all the time. And so, you know, Xi Jinping, presumably at this stage, wouldn't have to talk about that stuff if it wasn't important. And yet he does. And, you know, boy, like, it certainly seems like Merck's had a big impact on the world. And by the way, those same materials are taught in, you know, university colleges and universities today and are, you know, it would seem like they're having a pretty big impact on the world. And so, you know, that's a pretty strong argument that they're a driver. So, you know, truth probably somewhere in the middle.
- [10:02]
Eric Tornberg
Totally. Yeah. Oppressor and oppressed language still, still, still lives on today for sure.
- [10:07]
Marc Andreessen
Big time.
- [10:08]
Eric Tornberg
The. So you read a few dozen books about understanding the left, understanding the right, what sort of mental model on either side kind of filled in the gap or helped you get a better sense for, you know, either what's happened or what's likely to happen in either. In either movement.
- [10:27]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So, I mean, look, I have this to say. I'm not, I'm hardly an expert on this, but I'll just kind of give my kind of composite sense and maybe some people down the road, they can, they can think about for themselves. So I think the, the sort of over, like, if you go far back enough in history, basically, if you go back and far back, if you go far back enough in history, basically everybody was like super right wing as compared to today. And I used to joke that, you know, this is sort of like different things. If you go back 2500 years, everybody was super right wing compared to today, you know, to the Greeks. If you go back to the Romans, if you go back to, you know, the, you know, Florence in the 1500s, it was like super right wing. By the way, if you go back to 2015, it was super right wing as compared to today. And in fact, there are things that two weeks ago, you know, would strike us as super right wing. And so, you know, generally speaking, everything in the past was much more further to the right than it is today. You know, basically why is that? You know, why is that is because sort of the long run kind of foundation of human civilization has been hierarchy and order. And if you go back to sort of any previous society, they all have some conception of natural order, they have some conception of rulers and ruled, they have some conception of aristocracy and proletariat or so forth. And hierarchy and order are sort of inherently right wing ideas. And then if you believe that, then basically the left is a reaction to the right. So the sort of right is the original thing. And then the left sort of emerged over time in a reaction to it. And starting with maybe Call of Duty and Christianity and then sort of flowing forward into kind of liberal democracy and then ultimately socialism and communism, there's sort of all these sort of left wing movements over the last 2000 years have this sort of critique. And it's a critique of the right and it's a critique of hierarchy, it's a critique of unfairness. Right. It's a critique of some people have more than other people, some people have more power than other people, some people have more money than other people. And that there's an unfairness to that. And there's some altruism, instinct in the human spirit that doesn't like that. And so as a consequence, you know, the left basically says the existing order, the existing hierarchy is unfair. And so therefore we are going to tear it down and replace it with something that's more egalitarian, something that has more, more fair outcomes. You know, Christianity did that from a morality standpoint. And then, you know, and then, you know, socialism basically attempted to do that from, from an economic standpoint. And we, we kind of live in the shadow, you know, maybe of those two great movements.
- [12:52]
Eric Tornberg
We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. And there's a certain kind of person who says, hey, yes, this movement, you know, starting 2015, let's say it's gone too far, but it has good intentions and there's been some, some good things that have come from it. And, and it's an important kind of, it's, it's an important direction and history has a direction and you want to be on the right. Right side of history. Is the counter to that, that, you know, hey, good intentions have led to some horrible things or that it doesn't Even, you know, help the people it aims to help. Like, because that's a very common position, let's say even, Even in tech, right?
- [13:29]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So there's a bunch of things. So one is like, it's a good intent. Right. There's a cliche for a reason, which is the, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Right. And so that, and this again is like a reading of history thing. Like if, if you, you know, if you read accounts of like, even really horrible people in history, like, they, I think they thought they were doing the right thing. Yeah, right. You know, another cliche that I'll use a lot is, you know, everybody's the hero of their own story. And so, like, you know, I have a worldview and psychologists will tell you this. Like, everybody's really good at manufacturing an internal narrative for why they're the good guy and everybody else is the bad guy. And so I have an internal narrative that says, I'm doing the right thing for my people. I'm doing the right thing for all of humanity. Right. I mean, I mean, you see it playing out today in the sort of FTX thing. Like I'm, you know, I say I'm doing, you know, the right thing for the future of humanity. Right. Like, you know, it's, it's, it's the thing like the, you know, these horrible people who, they thought they were doing the right thing, like in their framework of morality, as they, as inside their head, as they understood it, their motivating force, their feeling, I think more often than not was they were doing the right thing. So clear. So clearly it's not, it's not enough. Right. For somebody to feel that way. Yeah. Then there's the unintended side effects, you know, kind of aspect to it, which is, you know, it's just, it's really hard to establish cause and effect. I am going to change society the following ways. It is going to generate deterministically the good outcomes that I hope for, and it is not going to demonstrate the unintentional bad consequences that I would have been horrified about had I found out about them ahead of time. And just in general, a big problem with social engineering, broadly is that it's very easy to both kind of blow it on the positive side and then also have a lot of negative consequences. And history is full of those. Look, and then maybe I take the question all the way back. So the picture that Nietzsche tells, the story that Nietzsche tells, I think is pretty, pretty, pretty good on this. So the, the term Nietzsche uses Sort we're talking about is sort of. He's. Nietzsche says there are two kinds of morality fundamentally. There's sort of master morality and slave morality. And when he says that, he doesn't mean, you know, there's a form of that. It's like literally morality of the masters, morality of the slaves. But he actually means, when he uses those terms, he actually means the concept more broadly. He means the morality of the masters as taken by people who aren't even literal slave masters, but like people generally who have sort of inherited the morality of the master, even if they don't literally have slaves. And then similarly, he says slave morality is the morality of the slave carried forward by people who are no longer slaves. And so he says the original form of order, this is true. The original form of social order was masters and slaves. That is kind of how everything was structured. You go back 4,000 years. That's how everything worked. And so that sort of set this sort of fundamental world battle in place. Master morality is very unnatural for those of us in a Christian, Judeo Christian world, because Judeo Christian world, according to Nietzsche, is the world of slave morality. You know, Nietzsche asked us, you know, to sort of imagine that we lived in the, you know, pre Christian times. You know, we lived in a much more difficult world in which, you know, basic survival was at stake. You know, basically every day. You know, what he basically says is in the pre Christian world, morality basically was strong equals good. And so if you were strong, if you were in charge, if you won, right? If you were the victor, that was good. And if you were weak, if you were the slave, if you lost, right? If your people got destroyed, that was bad. And so that's the mass morality framework. We moderns don't accept that. We have a totally different view, which Nietzsche refers to as slave morality, which is basically, no, most people in life are not masters. Most people, if it's a choice between master and slave, most people are slaves. Historically, most people were slaves. And actually, you know, the majority of people are slaves. They're abused by the masters, and we should be on the side of the slaves. And that, you know, that is basically the Judeo Christian ethic. We should be on the side of the weak, the downtrodden, the disadvantaged, right. The, you know, the marginalized, right. You know, you hear, you hear these exact same concepts, you know, playing, playing out today. You know, look, if you, you know, if you object to living in the world that we live in, and you're like, wow, I wish I could go back to the Roman Empire or go back to the Greek empire or go back to, you know, the Egyptians or whatever. It's like, well, boy, like, life really sucked for then too, right? Like, that was, you know, you definitely did not want to be a slave in Roman times. Like, that was bad. And so it's hard to kind of say, like, go all the way back to Roman times. At the same time, you do have to ask the question of, like, okay, do you want to live in a world of like, pure slave morality? You know, do you. Do you want to reach the point where basically all you're venerating is weakness, right? Where basically all you're doing is basically trying to achieve, you know, full equality about come full egalitarianism. And you're trying to basically, you know, basically rank the weak all the way up the totem pole and rank the strong all the way down on the other end. And historically, that's where communism goes wrong. Communism is sort of slave morality fully realized as a system. And of course that leads to catastrophe. And so I think you kind of want to say the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. You probably want some blend. You probably want basically, on the one hand, respect for merit and achievement and success on the one hand, but you also want some sense of fairness and sharing on the other hand. And maybe the right way to have a society is to kind of balance those two. Do they balance? Are they like in thermostatic equilibrium? And do they kind of swing back and forth, but they kind of come around as some sort of middle ground? Or do they go pathological? And a society that tries to reclaim master morality ends up being the Nazis, and a society that goes all the way to slave morality ends up being the Soviet Union, and they aren't actually thermostatic. And you actually have to make a choice at the end of the day which one is worse, and you have to steer society in the other direction? And, you know, I don't know the answer. I think the question is a very live question because there are a lot of forces at work, at least in the west right now, that want to push us much harder in the direction of slave morality. And, you know, like I said, we've. We've like, generally that experiment ends poorly. We seem determined to repeat it.
- [19:28]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, if we're trying to reconcile the two, it seems that we have strong brake pedals or a strong immunity on the. On the master morality side, you know, ability to hold back strong men or ability to, you know, take care of them. Whereas we have less immunity on people kind of, you know, be being manipulative on the, on the slave morality side to get what they want. Because we do care about compassion and kindness, good intentions, so, so much. And you know, it. You mentioned it's a live question. I mean, earlier today, Elon just tweeted that, you know, wokeness is a, is a, is a mind virus and it's the, it's the most important problem. And obviously we can't speak real, but if I was to parse that or Steel man, that I would say it's like it's almost this meta problem by which you can't solve other problems. You know, if you have kind of excess slave morality, making our institutions dysfunctional, making us turn on each other, etc.
- [20:28]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, it's like, you know, can you ever be too fair? Right? Can you ever be too fair? Can you ever be too nice? Can you ever be too nice, you know, to the downtrodden? Can you ever be, you know, too determined to address injustice? Like, is that possible? And a lot of people would say, no, you can't. You, you can always do more. You can always be more fair. You can always, you know, have more equality. You know, again, you know, that, that, that was the story of the communists. Like, that was the proposition of communism in the economic realm. And you know, like, we, you know, we saw how that ended. I just, by the way, if you saw, I just, I just asked. Running experiments with chat chat GDP, sorry, chat GPT, the OpenAI thing, the chatbot. And you know, it actually does, actually gives a pretty fair up description. You ask it about fascism and it actually does kind of a really good description of fascism and, you know, kind of notes that it like, doesn't end well. Yeah. And then you ask it to describe communism and it does this very interesting thing where it describes communism and then it says at the end, it says. And then it says, now in fairness, communism has been implemented to varying levels of success. It's like, well, you know, like, okay, you know, and of course, what's. That's. What that's reflecting is like, you know, you know, nobody knows. OpenAI decided that that would be the answer. I don't think, you know, what happened was OpenAI is trained on the corpus of written human knowledge. And generally speaking, a lot of people written about politics over the last hundred years have been a little bit soft on communism. And that kind of reflects its way through the training data. So, yeah, so look, the book that had the biggest impact, you mentioned the Elon thing. I'd abstract that out a little bit. The book that had the biggest impact for this question on me, this question of, like, can you have sort of this sort of the slave morality or the sort of a morality of compassion, let's say a morality of compassion and redressing injustice and achieving equality. Like, let's, you know, it's called, you know, sort of egalitarianism as an ethic. You know, whether it's. It's. It's, you know, religious in the form of Christianity or whether it's economic in the form of, you know, let's call progressivism, you know, does that always become pathological? So, you know, the strong argument that that becomes pathological is James. James Burnham, who will talk about it probably a fair amount. But James Burnham wrote three, you know, I think, really important books. The third book he wrote, which has a very aggressive title called Suicide of the west, which kind of gives away. His answer is basically a full undressing of. Call it liberalism and progressivism, you know, sort of as. Use sort of as pseudonyms or synonyms. And, you know, he makes a strong argument. He wrote this, the book, in 1964. He wrote the book having been a such a committed communist in the 20s and 30s that he actually was a personal friend of Leon Trotsky and worked with Trotsky for years and, like, argued with Trotsky at great length for a very long time. So. So he's a guy who definitely knew the left and new Communism and socialism really well. And he wrote this book in 64 when he was the chair of the NYU philosophy department, which it's basically inconceivable that a character like this would be in a position like that anymore. But he was at the time. And of course, he wrote the book in 64, which is right before the big social upheavals of the 1960s that resulted in the world we live in today. And what he basically said in the book was he said, actually the left has a fatal flaw. And the fatal flaw, exactly to your point, the fatal flaw is there's no governor right there. There. There's no limiter on how much compassion you can have. There's no limiter to how much, you know, you can try to achieve equality. There's no limiter to how much, you know, you can try to overthrow hierarchy in order and get to, you know, full egalitarianism. And so. And so he basically says in the book, as a consequence, liberalism will always become progressivism, progressivism will always become socialism. Socialism will Always become communism and you will always end up, you know, basically, you know, in pursuit of utopia, you will always create, you know, hell on earth, you know, you know, the 20th century, like, you know, there's, I don't know what it was like 80 societies or whatever the course of the 20th century tried different versions of communism and kind of all got the same result notwithstanding OpenAI or chat GPT, you know, you know, the counterargument, the steel man counterargument would be, you know, look, most European economies today in the American system are, you know, they're left wing in a lot of ways, you know, from a historical standpoint. But, you know, they're hardly, you know, we're not, we're not, in fact, the Soviet Union, it's not full communism. And so at least over the last, since he read the book, that hasn't literally played out in the West. Yeah, there are people in national office who definitely seem to have that vision. So I would say the jury's still up.
- [24:46]
Eric Tornberg
If Eric Weinstein or Sam Harris or Yashamon were here, they would say, hey, no, Post World War II, we had this golden era of liberalism where we were able to keep things in check. And, and we just need to get back to that. And if Peter Thiel were here, he would say that's like, you know, the communists saying, you know, real liberalism, real communism has never been tried and it's a, it's a pipe dream. Is that time period an anomaly or how do we, how do we make. Make sense of it? Why is, why is, you know, going back a. A pipe dream or is it.
- [25:21]
Marc Andreessen
Well, I think any modern leftist would say that was also the era of peak, you know, racism, sexism, homophobia. Right. Like, you know, that was the Mad Men era. Right. And so that era in which like, you know, basically white men were running around doing whatever they wanted and, you know, women were oppressed and gay people were oppressed and black people were oppressed and you know, you know, all these, all these things. So, you know, it. I always find it interesting whenever anybody in the left argues that we should go back to the 1950s, 1960s, because that does not seem to be a prevailing view on the, on the left. You know, then there's the economic explanation of the sort of American kind of, you know, ascendance in the second half of the 20th century. And I think the economic explanation is very simple, which is, you know, World War II, you know, the. Every other industrialized society on the face of the planet was bombed into rubble, right? In World War II, either, you know, because they, you know, started a war that they shouldn't have, like the Germans, or because they, you know, were on the receiving end of it, like the Brits and the French and. And, you know, then the Japanese, you know, as well, you know. And so, you know, these societies got like, you know, Germany just got, you know, very nearly, you know, physically obliterated Japan. You know, not only did we set up nukes in Japan, like, we firebombed all the cities and burned them to the ground. Right. So, like, there really was very little, like, industrial capacity in the west, you know, as of, you know, circa 1945. Now, you know, Germany and Japan and other countries rebuilt and started doing, you know, really well again in the 1970s, 1980s, but like, it was like a 30, 40 year journey to get those countries really back up on their feet as modern industrial economies. And so the U.S. you know, we. We had a, you know, say, you know, almost trained in tech or trained and never used the word monopoly, but, you know, instead we just say robust market share. We had a, you know, the US Had a robust market share of like global manufacturing. I, I think in large part because there just were not alternatives at the time. And so, you know, look, we had very high rates of economic growth during that period. We had very high rates of productivity growth. You know, growth covers up a lot of sins. You know, maybe we got away with a lot of dysfunction because we were just growing so fast economically. Yeah, I don't know. Nobody really. I mean, you. You mentioned a handful of people who might pine for the 50s and 60s. I mean, almost nobody does. Right. They either pine for like the thir. Right. You know, they want to go back to the full New Deal, right. Or they, you know, pine foreign or even earlier era. People on the right, you know, will sometimes pine for an earlier era of free enterprise. Right? Like free. Enter. Like the heyday of free enterprise in America was probably, right, you know, probably something like 1870-19, you know, 29, probably so 1870s, 1880s through the 1920s. It was the. What's called now, the second. The second industrial revolution. So it was the sort of incredibly transformative time in technology with the creation of everything, the electric power and all modern communication networks, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, automobiles, airplanes. And so it was this incredibly fertile time in terms of technological development. And then it was pre New Deal, which means the national economic system was much more laissez faire. And this is sort of the hate. This is sort of the fully realized kind of heyday of classical liberalism kind of in its full glory, you know, free, free market. Like libertarians would like to go back to that era, you know, most, most modern Americans, you know, would not.
- [28:32]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe Yasha would maybe want to go back to the 90s or something. We're having a lot of social progress, but it, there's, you know, still free speech is popular and there's a question as to whether you can take the, the good without the excess, you know.
- [28:47]
Marc Andreessen
Well then there's the other kicker on that, on that exact kind of argument, which is. Yeah, but the 90s got you, you know, the 90s got you everything that followed the 90s. Right. Like, so if everything was so great in the 90s, why did everything go so wrong in the 2000s and 2010s? Right. It's the same question. Maybe go further back. If everything was so great in the 50s and 60s, why did you get the 70s and 80s? Yeah, right. And so, so apparently like these prior. And look, the, the, the glory of America is its dynamism, right? It, you know, we, we change as a society and culture, like way more, way more than most. And so that's, that's the strength. But like, you know, every preceding historical period apparently was on very shaky footing because it didn't last very long, right? And in fact, it was not very long until there were lots and lots of people who thought it. Actually, in retrospect, whatever happened 20 years earlier was like very deeply evil. And so whatever preconditions, whatever conditions created, whatever golden age you want to hold out there, they didn't last. Right. And in fact, they presumably sparked reactions and changes that led to the worst environment we're in today. So I think it's hard to find stable, it's hard to find stable ground. And because it's hard to find stable ground, it's also hard to have that much faith in the sort of so called thermostat static model. It's hard to have, you know, because what a lot of people will say is, oh, find a good. And there's these constant arguments and right, left and this and that, and interventionist and isolationist, and there's all these kinds of polls, right, nationalist and globalist and so forth. There's all these kind of different axes of politics and social change, you know, merit slash equality of, you know, opportunity versus quality of outcome and so forth. So you can, you can kind of imagine like a graph that has all these different axes and then basically the pendulum kind of swings all around the graph but always comes back to the center somehow. And it's like, well, maybe. Or maybe what we're just talking about is massive survivorship bias. 100 other societies in the last 200 years went badly off track in horrible ways. We're the one that didn't. The dice came up in the right order for us. Congratulations. Great. We wound up through let table 30 times in a row. The 31st spin of the dials coming up, or what's it? Nassim Taleb. It's like it's the guy who drowns in the. How do you drown in a lake that is unanswered average four, four feet deep. Right. Well, it's because, you know, if most of the lake is 3.95ft deep and then there's one part that's 100ft deep and you get stuck in that part, you're in real trouble. Right. And so, you know, maybe we're always about to wander into the, into that trench and, you know, fall out of view and die. I don't know. I think it's a really big, important question. Like, it's, it's. I think people could get too blase about where things go because, like, I don't. You know, I don't. And again, the sweep of history. Right. It's just like there are so many societies that thought they had things figured out and then everything went horribly wrong. I think it's hard to just assume that everything will be okay just because it has been so far.
- [31:24]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah, you, you mentioned Burnham. Let's get into Burnham. You mentioned the Suicide of the West. Let's talk about his other book, the Managerial Revolution, because it's, it's related, you know, to what's happening right now. There's been this kind of, you know, underground idea for a while. You know, some. I think Eric Weinstein calls it the gated institution complex or something like that. You know, some people call it the cathedral, this idea that sort of the government, academia, media, some corporations work together in a decentralized way to achieve a certain political goal. So how do we make sense of this?
- [32:02]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So Burnham has a couple, two books that bear directly on this, that provide at least an explanation that's made a lot of sense to me since I read these books. I feel like I understand the two examples you're talking about, kind of why they play out the way that they do and see if this resonates with people. So the first book is called the Managerial Revolution, and it was written in the early 40. It was written in 1940. And it's actually interesting because it was written a couple things historically about it. So one is it was written shortly after Burnham had been an actual communist, and so he was trying to actually still work his way out of communism at that point. It was also written at the height of World War II, and it was actually written when it actually wasn't clear who was going to win. And so there's a bunch of sections in the book that are like, well, if America wins X and if Germany wins, boy, they'll need a totally different set of things. So it's a good kind of recreation of what it must have been like when the answer to that actually was not clear. So his thesis in the book basically is as follows. Which basically what he says is, look, world systems like governments and industries and human affairs basically up through the 19th century were basically small scale. By my understandings, they were small scale. It's just like population levels were low, states were small and businesses were small. And even if you had a car company or whatever, it just wasn't that big. When Henry Ford had Ford Motor Company, they just make that many cars. There weren't that many people who could afford cars. And so you sort of had this world of preceding forms of social order, which was like monarchies or aristocracies or bourgeois capitalism, free market capitalism or whatever, where basically there was always a principal in charge, right? So the king is in charge, or Henry Ford, the owner of the company is in charge. The idea of a business is a sole proprietorship, like the owner of the corner store owns the corner store, the owner of the car company owns the car company, company runs the car company. So sort of basically all in all of human history, you like, had basically people in charge, Tilap would say, like people with skin in the game. Like people who had like direct, like responsibility, authority, authority and accountability kind of all wrapped up in one. And then what Burnham says basically is in the 20th century, as a result actually of the second industrial revolution, basically the 20th century is a century of scale. And so all of a sudden the countries get really big, the populations get really big, the, the companies get really big, the industries get really big, the technologies get really complicated, right? And he wrote right at the beginning of computerization, which of course was going to accelerate all these trends. And what he said basically is like the era of just a Henry Ford running his car company is basically over. And he said instead, what happens is all big companies are going to get run not by the owner of the company, but by a professional class of Managers. And the literal form of that is literally people who have gone to management school and gotten MBAs or more broadly in his definition, it's basically people with advanced technical skills, sort of technical managerial skills, people who are administrators who are capable of running large institutions. And so he says basically all the companies are going to get run by these managers. All governments are going to get run by managers. And this was the heyday. He saw this happening because this is the heyday of the New Deal. FDR enormously expanded the scope of the federal government, for better or for worse, and then brought in this new class of person to kind of run the federal government which were Burnham's managers. And then Burnham said, look, you've got World War II is this three way fight basically between the three big political systems of the 20th century, which basically is fascism in the form of Germany and Italy and Japan, Communism in the form of the Soviet Union, which was our ally, even though Stalin, you think, was actually kind of a bad guy. And then liberal democracy and sort of its full flowering and sort of its progressive form under fdr. And he said basically those three systems obviously have big differences, but they have one big thing in common. They're, they're all managerial in nature, right? The Communists, the Soviet central planners are going to run the entire country from Moscow. The, you know, Nazi central planners are going to run, you know, the entire country, the entire economy, you know, from, from the, you know, from Berlin and then in the U.S. you know, FDR is going to run America right, with his, with, with his managers. But the kicker he put on this, he said, look, this is not either, you know, you could say this is good or bad. It doesn't, it doesn't even matter if it's good or bad. He says it's necessary. He says the reality is all these systems are too big to be run by, you know, the older models of the Henry Ford. The owner or whatever. These systems are all gigantic. They are all gigantic. All countries from here on out are going to be huge. All industries are going to be complicated, all businesses are going to be complicated. And so it's going to be a world of managers from here on out. And then he basically identifies what today we would call the principal agent problem, which is basically what this means is, and you see this with companies which is basically if the owner of the company is not running the company, then there's a separation of ownership and control, a separation of ownership and management. And then you're going to have basically the creation of what he called the managerial Class, which will be the people who are basically going to be actually running the company. And then as a consequence of this, ownership will tend to then get dispersed and ownership will become very weak. And that's what's happening. Think of any public company today. How many owners are there? Take any of these companies, take General Motors. How many owners of General Motors are there? There are millions of owners who are General Motors because there are millions of people who own General Motors stock. How many managers are there? General Motors? There's the top 10 executives that run the, there's the CEO of the top 10 executives. The top 200 managers in that company run the company. Who's more in charge of General Motors, the owners or the managers? And the answer is clearly the managers. By the way, same thing politically. Who runs the United States? Who runs the United States government? Is it the voters or is it Congress and the White House? You know, the voters are dispersed. There's, you know, whenever 300 million of us were dispersed, we individually, none of us have any basic influence or control at all. And so the handful of people who are our representatives basically, you know, run everything. And this leads to this incredibly weird results where like, you know, Congress polls at like 10% overall, but like 90% of us like our congressperson. Right? It's like you get these paradoxical kind of side effects of this. Anyway, so the creationist managerial class and then basically the principle, so therefore what he says, he doesn't use this term, I don't think. But, but the result is like basically the principal agent problem becomes dominant in everything. Right? And so it doesn't matter how like well intentioned people are, whatever. It's like the, the, the principal agent thing. The principal agent problem is, right, the people, you know, the principal who owns something delegates, you know, running it to somebody else. Those people have very different interests. And if your principals, your owners are dispersed and your managers are concentrated, then the managers are going to end up with all the power. And, and that's, and that's, and that, that's basically what, what's happened. Let me pause there and we'll, we'll keep going on this thread.
- [38:36]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah, well, one thing I want to follow up is this, this question of, you know, a decade ago or you know, a period of a time ago, you could have, you know, Republicans bought sneakers too, so to speak of you know, these elites who control these institutions catered to both sides and, and they maybe had a bit more, you know, political or intellectual diversity within them. But, but something happened where first off, you could Also be apolitical. There was a certain time, but politics kind of invested every area of life, life. And now it's less about catering to both sides and more about catering to one specific side. And so I'm curious, what changed there?
- [39:17]
Marc Andreessen
So Burnham would say two things. So the first, to build on managerialism. What Burnham would say basically is the managers get to decide the politics of the company because they can, right? Like because the managers have all the control, even though they don't own the company, because they have all the control, if they decide they want to take the company in one political direction and against another political direction, they can just do that. That. Because who's going to stop them? Right, right. Principal Asian problem, if you like pulled all the owners, right, and said, do you want the company to do this? The owners would probably say, no, this is a bad idea because to your point, like, we're going to cut off half the market, right? We're going to sell less sneakers as a result. The managers are like, I don't care. Like why would the managers care? They don't care. The owners can't remove them. You know, the owners are too dispersed. And so, so basically the managers can get away with, you know, essentially exploiting the position that they've been put in for their own ideological or political ends. And they can just get away with it and they can just do it because they can do it. And then the company example of this is very interesting because what you actually have the problem is even worse than we've been describing because the problem is you have the principal agent problem playing out at the level of the management of the company. You have the exact same problem playing out at the level of the actual ownership of the company in the sense of the big money management firms and in particular the big index fund months, so the BlackRock and its competitors. And so what you have with the Fortune 500 today, just structurally is you have generally these sort of woke left wing management teams basically exploiting the principal agent problem to their benefit. And then you've got these woke progressive investment firms that are aggregating up huge amounts of money from millions of dispersed shareholders. And then it's actually really funny, right, because it's like these index firms, their entire business is predicated on the idea that they do not have the competence to pick which companies to invest in. And so therefore they're going to take your money as a future retiree and they're going to invest it in the entire index companies. But yet somehow the managers at the index firm are so enlightened that they're completely qualified to re engineer society, to have a set of political views that may have nothing to do with your political views as an investor, but they are qualified to figure out how to re engineer society. And this has led to esp, fee and, and all these other things. And, and so you've got basically these two actual classes of managers. You've got the corporate executives on the one hand and you've got the professional investors on the other hand, you know, who essentially are, have, have both basically just taken power from their dispersed owners just because they can. And you know that, you know that basically. Well, I, you know, I think that basically just continues as long as it continues. Like, I, I don't know what, what stops that?
- [41:52]
Eric Tornberg
Well, yeah, maybe, maybe Elon stops that or, or.
- [41:55]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so then there's the Elon thing, right, so, yeah, so, so, so basically. Okay, so of described as sort of. Again, back, back to Burnham who described sort of capitalism post 1940 or something like. Basically what Burnham basically says is there are two kind. What Burnham says in the book, there are two kinds of capitalism. Everybody thinks it's the same. They're not. There's two very different kinds. There's what he called bourgeois capitalism, which was the Henry Ford kind, which is the owner of the company runs the company. That's sort of the classic. Right. And then there's managerial capitalism, which is this thing where the principal agent problem kicks in and managers run the company, even against the wishes of the owners. I view what we do in Silicon Valley with startups, with venture, by the way, same private equity. Also we could talk about basically what venture capital and private equity are, is they're sort of the return of bourgeois capitalism into an economic system that's almost entirely managerial. And the reason it makes sense to have venture capital and startups in Burnham's framework to bring back some level of bourgeois capitalism is basically that managerial capitalism, it has its advantages. Like, you know, remember Burnout's point, Like it is necessary like you do need like highly trained professional, technical, you know, managers to run these giant enterprises. Right. But you know, it has its problems. We've identified one of the problems which is this sort of political thing that happens. Another problem, managerial capitalism, I would argue, is it doesn't innovate very well. Right? And it doesn't innovate, you know, the companies run by professional managers don't, don't tend to innovate very well. Why don't they innovate very well? Well, the kinds of People who become professional managers are not innovators because if they were, they wouldn't do that. They would be off inventing products and starting their own companies. Right? And so basically the way I think about it is venture capital and private equity are sort of the older model of capitalism, that first model of bourgeois capitalism, sort of coming back in the modern era and sort of harvesting this arbitrage opportunity that's created by the fact that the managerial companies can no longer invent new things. And so, you know, we do that, you know, we do that every day. You've done that in your career, you know, where, you know, our, what do our companies all have in common? You know, it's basically there's somebody, you know, there's a person or a very small founding team of people who own, you know, when, on day one, 100% of the business. But even, even after they, you know, get it fully financed, they still own a lot of the business. They often actually have, you know, voting control of the business. And, you know, they have direct, you know, again, they have bundled accountability, responsibility, authority. In the old model, like Henry Ford, you know, if you brought Henry Ford back, you know, if you, if you were able to teleport Henry Ford into our era, he would look at a modern high tech startup and he would say, that's just like Ford Motor Company was when I ran it. Like, that's the model, model. And then he would look at modern, you know, Ford Motor Company, he'd say, holy Lord, Like, I can't believe, like, what, what happened, right? Like I, I, you know, and Ford Motor Company maybe a very well run managerial company, but it's not run anywhere close to how Henry Ford, right, would, would have run it. So anyway, yeah, so that takes us to Elon, of course. What Elon is, is, he is, he is the fully realized, you know, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, right. You know, one of these kind of, you know, peak bourgeois capitalists. You know, he, he is, you know, he's, you know, he is the best, you know, the best, you know, kind of example of this bourgeois capital that had in our society for, I think, decades. And you see it playing out with Twitter. He's just like, I own it. It's like I bought the entire company. I own it. I am completely in charge. I am going to completely harvest the payoff from my success if I make it work. And I'm going to lose all the money of my own money if it doesn't work. I am attaching my money to it. I'm attaching my reputation to it. I'm putting my time into it. Like, I'm not delegating. Like, there's no professional class of managers at Twitter. Like, he's like, he's running, he's running the company himself, right? And so it's this. It's bringing back, it's bringing back his old model. It's bringing back into a world in which the companies he's competing with and many other companies, like, generally just like, don't run like that anymore. So, yeah, I think it's great. Like, I think we should bring back as much bourgeois capitalism as we can now. Burn him would argue, fine, Mark, that's great. But you're just going to recreate the problem, right? Which is because you're going to, you're going to birth all these companies. They're going to be run by the founders for a while, and then some point, guess what, they're going to get big and complicated and the professional manager is going to take over and you're going to just recreate the problem. And I'm like, okay. My answer would be, okay, fine, but like, that's a problem for 20 years from now.
- [46:07]
Eric Tornberg
Better than we have now.
- [46:08]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, let's, let's do it. Let's do what we can for now.
- [46:11]
Eric Tornberg
I see Elon running a few experiments. You know, more experiments in the past few weeks have been started than maybe in the past few years. Some, you know, some of them include, you know, Elon showing that you, as a company owner, you don't have to be kind of bullied or pressured by sort of activists within your company. You can actually fight back and, and, and maybe win. And that is showing a model to, to CEOs of, of, of what's possible. I think he's presenting a model of. You don't have to be externally bullied either. I think we had an era in tech, you know, companies like Uber or other companies that kind of didn't necessarily apologize, or I guess they did apologize and kind of conceded the moral high ground. Whereas Elon is fighting back on, on a more on moral terms, actually saying, no, we are more pure than the people who are attacking us and, and winning to, to some extent. I also think he's presenting a model of institutional reform. Whereas there, there's been been this idea that you, these institutions that have been captured, you can't reform them. You just have to start, start new ones. And maybe the situation is so bad actually that you have, you, if you fight, you kind of empower the winners anyways and you have to. Let's just wait until it's a better time to push back. And Elon's not waiting, obviously. And so we're going to learn so much from these experiments.
- [47:27]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So I won't talk too much about Twitter specifically because we're involved in it, and I shouldn't. But. Yeah, no, I think, look, he is doing all that, by the way. He's done all that in 45 days. Yeah. And again, this is the thing. I don't know if you ever probably have these. It's like the parlor game thing, which is like, what would you do if you owned Company X? And it's always this hypothetical kind of parlor game thing from a question I always ask, because I'm trying to get to like, what, what substantively is the right thing to be done? You know, in Elon's case, he's just like, you know, screw, I. I am literally actually going to own it. Right. And then I'm actually going to do all those things. So. And, you know, look, there's a lot say. I say this. You know, every other CEO who's at least, you know, conscious in the industry is looking at, you know, is watching Elon very carefully right now. I was just, I just got a. I just got an investor relations readout from a company that I won't name. But it's just, it's. It's simply a. Bring it up. Because it's a readout of feedback from their. It's a public company, and so it's feedback from their investors. And there's. There's a section in the readout, and this is just a reflection of what their investors are saying to them. It's a section of the readout called the Elon Effect. Right, right. And it's exactly what you think is. It's like, okay, this guy seems to be able to run this company on like 20% of the headcount. Right. And so basically, what are you going to do? Right. And again, the significance here is, you know, that was. That data is a little bit stale now. So that was probably 30 days in that they, you know, that they, that they had those meetings where somebody said, you know, the Elon effect. And so the shareholders. Right, the shareholders are all watching. And so, yeah, there. A lot of people are watching. You know, I think, honestly, I mean, at least in private conversations, a lot of both CEOs and investors I talk to, you know, are very, you know, much hoping that everything plays out great because they're hoping that he's presenting a new playbook for how to run these companies. Totally. Yeah. And again, what Burnon would say is, yeah, you're, you're, you have, you know, congratulations, you have rediscovered the virtues of bourgeois capitalism. Like, yes, this is how things used to work. This is a way that it can be done. It, you know, it, it, it does rely on having somebody actually having that level of power. Right. Who is in that level of control. And, you know, if he was having, you know, he, he hasn't, you know, he. And look, he's, you know, dealing with all the different constituents he's dealing with. But like, at least he's not dealing with like public, you know, you know, he's not arguing with BlackRock. Yeah, right. Like, you know, there's a whole set of people he normally would have to deal with. Kind of the CEOs normally have to deal with who he just doesn't have to deal with because he literally owns the company. And so, yeah, look, maybe it's a model. Like, maybe if, you know, maybe if this, maybe this, maybe if this works, you know, the way that, you know, he clearly intends it to work, you know, maybe a lot more people literally do what he's doing, which is, to your point, they buy these companies and reboot them and re. Kind of reform them and that would be a big change. And then, you know, maybe just on the margin, maybe this changes how public companies are run. Right. Maybe this is a little bit of the reinvention, you know, maybe this is a little bit of the rediscovery of this. If we bring back some of the spirit of bourgeois capitalism while still retaining, you know, some of the advantages of managerial realism. Yeah. You know, aspirationally, you could, you know, say maybe. Maybe that's a possibility.
- [50:25]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah, the. Well, it's interesting. I remember Stripe laid off like 13% of its workforce. You described as credible company, of course, and then a number of companies followed suit with kind of exactly the same amount of the workforce. So it's just, yeah, you need one example and then. And then others.
- [50:41]
Marc Andreessen
13%. This is not cracking on Stripe, just the general trend that I've observed. Yeah. So the third, it's always this funny thing. It's like 13. Why is it 13? Why is it. Well, because it feels like it should be at least 10%, but like, boy, 15% sounds painful. Yeah. But we do want to show that we're serious and so, and we want to meet in the middle. And so it's probably going to be either 12 or 13%. And if, you know, 12% might sound a little weak. So let's do 13%.
- [51:06]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah, exactly.
- [51:07]
Marc Andreessen
So, Right. Whereas, you know, Elon's like. Yeah, 80%.
- [51:10]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah, exactly right.
- [51:12]
Marc Andreessen
Like the difference in magnitude between 13. I mean, you know this, but like 13% to 80%, like there's spread.
- [51:18]
Eric Tornberg
Yes, yes. And yeah, I know it all too well, unfortunately, moving away from, from Twitter, but still on Elon for a second, because he also presents a new model for how to be a billionaire. You know, it's. Common question we'll get is over the past decade, you know, during some of the most excesses of, of what's been going on, people say, where have the billionaires been? Why haven't they stepped up to, to stop profit? And as it turns out, maybe some of them have been implicitly or explicitly supporting it. And it feels like there's this kind of monoculture for, for how billionaires are supposed to act and, and the views they're supposed to have and the work they're supposed to do and the way their organizations are supposed to set up and what they're supposed to do. You know, these are your, your peer set. Talk a little bit, even in the abstract about kind of the pressure that, that face this class and, and why, you know, Elon or something like Teal is just so different from, from how this group all, all acts. Why isn't there more diversity among this class?
- [52:21]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So this goes to Burnham's third book.
- [52:22]
Eric Tornberg
So.
- [52:23]
Marc Andreessen
Well, now we'll go to the third book, which is the Machiavellians, which is probably the, you know, the, the most important of the bunch. So, you know, the Machiavellians is a book all about kind of this. It's about the structure of politics and society. So it's, it's not, you know, and it's not partisan. It's not really arguing right versus left. It's a structural argument. And we could have, we'll maybe have a long discussion about this, but one of the key concepts that sort of pops right out of the Machiavellians is this sort of concept of oligarchy. Right. Just to give a quick thumbnail sketch, basically what Burnham and his predecessors, the Machiavellians, he talks about a lot of prior political thinkers, including Machiavelli, but a bunch of others. And he basically says, look, basically there are fundamentally three forms of power. There are three forms of sort of political power power. There's rule of one, there's rule of the few, and then there's rule of the many. And then what Machiavelli said actually is there's a good and a bad version of both of those. And so the good version, in Machiavelli's formulation, the good form of the rule of the one, the good form, is monarchy. The bad form is tyranny. For rule of the few, the good form is aristocracy. The bad form is oligarchy. And then for rule of the many, the good form is democracy, and the bad form is anarchy. And this is sort of a general framework for political system. Then historically, if you read, like Machiavelli, historically, political systems basically go through this rotation. They actually rotate through the six, and then they go back to the beginning. So they start out with monarchies. The king goes bad, that becomes a tyranny. The king is overthrown by the aristocracy. The aristocracy basically goes to seed because the oligarchy, the people ultimately decide to hate the oligarchy. They take over. They assert democracy. Democracy doesn't work because the people can't rule because they're dispersed. That then turns into anarchy. And then, therefore, that's where you a king. And so there's this sort of theory of sort of this timeless cycle of politics that plays out. If you kind of read this book and take it seriously, then you kind of say, okay, what is our political system? Like, what political system do we live under? And so you can kind of run a process of elimination and you can kind of say, well, it's clearly not rule of the One anymore because, like, there's no more kings, right? So it's not monarchy or tyranny, hopefully, it's not anarchy. So that sort of brings it down to sort of aristocracy, oligarchy or democracy. Democracy. And then what you want to say, right, is that it's oligarchy, it's democracy, right? We've all been trained from childhood to say is it's democracy. But of course, a, it's technically not democracy because it's representative democracy, which is not the same thing as democracy, right? So we're not like, voting on every single issue. We're electing 435 congresspeople and 100 senators and so forth and a single president to figure this stuff out for us. So it's representative democracy. So it's basically rule of the three, few. And then is it arist. And then if it's rule of the few, is it aristocracy or oligarchy? And I think the short answer to that is it was aristocracy basically up through about the 1960s. And that was sort of the heyday of the WASP aristocracy. And then these sort of super elite assimilated, you know, Catholic aristocrats, Jewish aristocrats, you know, kind of with the, with the sort of dominant Protestant aristocratic class at the time that kind of ran the country. I mean, you know, FDR himself was like a peak wasp, you know, Roosevelt, like a peak WASP aristocracy aristocrat, you know, kind of of his era. And then basically since the 1960s, you know, basically the aristocracy basically, for a variety of reasons, either you know, had power taken from it or just decided to give up power. And then within our modern political form is, is oligarchy. And, and, and, and then there's this big difference between aristocracy and oligarchy. Aristocracy consists of what Machiavelli called lions, which are people who basically rule through basically force and basically assertion of command.
- [56:04]
Eric Tornberg
Mast. Master morality.
- [56:07]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, master morality, yeah. Well, so the classical aristocratic rule is why am I in charge? Because I'm in charge. Like I'm the aristocrat, I'm from the right family, I own the land, screw you, like do what I tell you, what he calls the lion and then the oligarchy. Right, exactly. So the aristocrat is sort of representing the last vestiges of master morality. The oligarch who competes with the aristocrat basically says, oh, actually I'm ruling on behalf of the people. So he's what Machiavelli calls the foxes. And basically the foxes rule through deceit, manipulation and consciousness, cunning. And their form of deceit, manipulation and cunning is to claim that they are acting on behalf of the people, when of course they're actually acting primarily for themselves, because lo and behold, they are self interested just like everybody else. And so anyway, Burnham and Machiavelli and Cicero and all these guys. Aristotle would say we're living in a classic oligarchy. Like that's the actual structure that we're in. And so basically our ruling class is an oligarchy. It's an oligarchic elite. And elite here is a term out of this book as well. Well, and then basically, so anyway, long winded way of getting to your question, which is, okay, what happens to a high tech founder, right? Regardless of background, maybe they come from another country, maybe they come from here, maybe they come, you know, I come from the rural Midwest and they start a tech company and it works and they become successful and they become rich, right? And they become like high status all of a sudden. What happens? And the question of what happens is they get invited into the oligarchy, right? And literally what happens is you start getting invitations, right? And so you get invited to Davos, and you get invited to Aspen, and you get invited to, you know, it' you know, Nantucket. And you get invited to, you know, and before you know it, you are spending your time with. And. And by the way, you show up, right to these things. You know, you show up to the Aspen Institute for the first time or whatever, and you're just like, oh, my God, like, I've arrived. There's Prince Harry. Yeah, there's Prince Harry. And there's, you know, Mike Bloomberg, and there's, you know, all these. Like, there's all these. And they're, you know, the movie stars and, like, you know, TV stars and politicians and, you know, there's Cory Booker and there's Kamala Harris, and, like, it's just like. It's like, wow. Like, I am in. Like, I am in. I am in the in crowd, right? And you're invited in. And by the way, they're as nice as can be. Like, they're incredibly sweet. They're incredibly nice. They're so happy to see you. It's so great to have you there. And, you know, dinners are great and the parties are great, and it's all just so fantastic. And then at some point, they're like, well, we have this project that we're raising funding for. And you're like, oh, wow, I would love to support your program to whatever reform, you know, whatever school, you know, and then all of a sudden, you find yourself writing the checks. And then it's like, well, you know, actually, I'm running for president next year, and, boy, I'd love to. And you're like, wow, you're my friend. I'd love to support. Support you. Like, this is all great. And so what is it? It's a social circle, right? It's a political network. It's a patronage network. It's a fundraising network. It's a PR campaign. It's all of those things. It's a power. It's a governance structure. These are the people who staff the senior positions at all the big important institutions in the country. University presidents and people who run media companies and editors and newspapers. They say the bold face names, like, the people who are. When they're written about the newspaper, their names in bold because everybody knows who. Who they are. And it's just like, wow, I'm like, in, right? And if you're not paying attention to it, what you realize is, it's not. What you're not getting in that group is you're not getting some broad representation of different Political views and different walks of life. What you're getting is basically this basically abstracted elite oligarchic class where it actually turns out their politics are all just identical. They all believe exactly the same set of things. If they have arguments about anything, it's only on the margin. And primarily it's an influence operation. There's a lot of what's called log rolling. I support you, you support me. And by the way it's distributed, there's no central node, there's nobody in charge, there's no wizard behind the curtain. There's no secret boss who's organizing the whole thing. It's happened. These are literally conferences with 400 people where somehow they all end up thinking the same thing. That is. And so anyway, what Burnham describes this process in the book and he calls, it's the technical term for it, it's called the circulation of elites. And so basically what if you read the Machiavellians, what you learn basically is because of the political structure stuff I was talking about, any modern society is going to be an oligarchy. Basically, that oligarchy is going to have a ruling elite at the top. The only way that that oligarchic elite can ever be displaced is with another elite taking its place. Right? Which for reasons we could talk about like populism is a total dead end. It would have to be replacement by a different category of elite. And then basically it's like, okay, if you were a self optimizing oligarchic elite collective, like how would you make sure that no new elite gets formed? The way that you would do that is you would recruit all of the new, high capacity, high merit, high achieving people who rise up in the system. You would make sure to recruit them into your elite, right? Which is exactly the process. You would invite them in and then you, and then they become one of you. And so anyway, that's the, that's literally what happens. That's what happened. And by the way, and by the way, like I've been in all, you know, I've been to all these places, I've been all these conferences, like, you know, I know all these, these people and it's great, it's just like an incredibly exciting, it's an incredible adventure. It's like the culmination of your life's work that you're like in this network. It's just like, okay, it's all great as long as that's the political system that you think should rule the country for the next hundred years. As long as These are the people who should be in charge. As long as you agree with all their policies. It's all absolutely fantastic. And this is the irony of it is the people who. Most people who become billionaires in our society or become very successful, like, you know, in business, they're like, super contrarian, right? So they've got like a thousand different. You know, every. Every entrepreneur we know has been highly successful. Like, they're these super disagreeable people who've got all these really contrary ideas on how to run companies and how to do things, which is why they're successful entrepreneurs. But they get. They get pulled into this world, and all of a sudden they become, like, incredibly conformist, right? And they. They just. They. They no longer have any unique opinions on anything involving politics or social policy or the structure of society or anything. They just. They just adopt this sort of. This sort of oligarchic elite view kind of wholesale. Wholesale with exceptions. And then basically to your question, what happens is every once in a while, you get an exception. You get somebody who's basically like, look, I could go do that. I could be part of that, but I'm not going to do it. The guy I think, who actually unlocked this in our era is actually not actually originally Elon. Surprisingly, I actually think it was Larry Page. And I don't know if you recall, this is like a decade ago now. Larry. There was all this pressure at the time. There was the Billionaire Pledge. So Buffett and Gates, who are kind of charter members versus this elite that we're talking about, they created this Billionaire Pledge, which again, is another form of this elite assimilation thing to try to get everybody to kind of sign up for the whole program. And they're always trying to get Larry Page to sign it. Larry's like, look. He's like, I don't think that I should. I don't think the right thing to do with all the money that I have from Google is to just give it away. Because who knows these nonprofits, who knows what they do? He's like, I think what I should do if I get hit by a truck, I think my money should just go to Elon Musk and he should just build more companies, right? If you remember at the time, the reporters were all just, like, completely horrified because, like, oh, my God, that's not. You're not on the program. How can you not be on the program? Like, everybody knows what to do. Why don't you know what to do? And Larry's like, well, I just think that Elon Building companies is having a bigger impact on the world than the Ford Foundation. Like as contrarian an idea as that was at the time.
- [63:09]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah.
- [63:09]
Marc Andreessen
And so Larry actually kind of hung that out there. And then to your point, like, Elon's been living it, Peter lives it. And the fact that there's like Elon and Peter and Larry and others who are little bit more kind of off the beaten path now on some of these things, I think is opening up the aperture for the next generation.
- [63:26]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah. Well, a few observations first. It, it, what's interesting is that the, it's not like there's a new elite and an old elite and it's a generational divide as much because like SBF is 30 years old and yet he's a Davos elite. You know, as a Davos as they come. Perhaps.
- [63:41]
Marc Andreessen
Full on. Yeah, full on went from, you know, Stanford math kid to MIT math kid to like full charter member of the oligarchic elite that rules the world in like three years. I mean, it was incredible, by the way, apparent. And by the way, apparently he's still in it because they all keep defending him. So, like, apparently, like, apparently it worked.
- [64:00]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah. Well, let's actually talk about that for a second. Effective altruism, you know, your, your, your partner, you know, your wife is in, in philanthropy. And, and you guys talked about results driven philanthropy of who wouldn't be, you know, supportive of result driven philanthropy. What's the sort of blind spot of, you know, effective altruism?
- [64:18]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so my wife teaches for People don't know. So my wife has taught for many years actually at Stanford. Actually she taught philanthropy as she sort of helped develop one of the main people who developed philanthropy as an academic field. And she taught philanthropy at Stanford Business School, which she used to describe as sort of trying to divert the sharks out of the for profit tank into the nonprofit tank. So. And her whole thrust was what she called strategic philanthropy, which basically you could, you could think about it. I would think about it loosely as like a grounded version version of effective altruism, which is. And so her critique. And she's given talks and she wrote a book. She wrote a book called Giving 2.0 where she talks about this, if you want to read it. But what she says is, look, there's a critique of philanthropy that she believes that, by the way, Sam would also agree with, which is basically most philanthropy is emotional. Right. Like I or somebody I love goes through a health scare. I then donate money for that particular condition. Right. Or I go on a trip, you know, I go and I don't know, I go to Hawaii or something, and I discover the plight of the dolphins, and I start to donate money to that, you know, because it tugs at my heartstrings, right? Or I see a TV commercial and there's some poor thing, you know, some poor person, and I don't have money. So. So. So most philanthropy is. Is emotional. And then you get this sort of massive reallocation of resources, like assuming that you actually have, like, let's assume everybody here has pure intent. They're trying to make the world better, you know? So this, like in medical research, for example, it's. It's like there are certain conditions that just get, like, dramatically overfunded, and there are certain other conditions that are even more serious that get dramatically underfunded just because of, like, who happens to get what conditions. The classic example is actually the age effect of medical research. So the stuff that old people suffer from gets much more funny than the stuff that young people suffer from. And of course, the reason is because young people who suffer from something don't have any money to donate yet. Whereas when you're old and you get sick, you maybe have some money and then you make your decision based on that. So, anyway, so my wife basically says, look, you should basically think of philanthropy. You should evaluate philanthropic, basically gifts the same way you evaluate business investments. Like, you should think hard and try terms of the actual effect that things are going to have, and you should try to quantify it and so forth. And so anyway, look, we've done that in our private philanthropy. So as an example, one of our big pushes for years now has been Stanford Hospital, and in particular the ER department of Stanford Hospital. And a big reason for that is just any given day, I want to basically understand what impact our philanthropy is having. I can go sit in the waiting room at Stanford ER and I can see the patients come in, and I can see them get treated like it's a very tactical, tangible practice, kind of deterministic thing. So there's that effective altruism, basically, you could say, takes that idea and then scales it way up and basically says, okay, you should apply that same attitude and that same methodology to basically all of humanity. And you should basically fully implement the philosophy of utilitarianism, which is to say the greater good. And you should basically be able to mathematically model. And you should say, okay, if I do XYZ today, then it's going to have this impact, not just next year, five years from now, but 10 years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years years ago, 100 years from now, by the way, maybe the entire future of civilization, right? Maybe I'm going to make an investment today that's going to result in humanity reaching the stars or humanity curing all diseases or humanity achieving whatever desired result 100 years from now. You know, the critique of that has always been the same as the critique of utilitarianism, which is like, you get into a level of abstraction where you basically start to play God, right? And you start to think that you can put things in a spreadsheet that extrapolate out 100 years in the future with huge numbers of various variables. You start to think that you can re. Engineer society, right? You start to think that you can kind of play this, like, really big game, right? Will you ever actually be able to prove any of your assertions? Will you ever actually see the results of your work? Will you ever actually. Will there ever be a feedback loop back to what you're doing so that you can correct? Like, probably not, because you're now dealing at a level of abstraction and time horizon that's just like, way beyond any, any, any individual human's ability to do anything. And so anyway, this is my, My critique of it is like, it's just, it. It leads you into this, like, playing God, social engine course. If you ask, well, what kinds of political movements support playing God and doing social engineering, I think we'd agree on the answers. And so it leads you down this kind of ideological path that has a shocking number of overlaps to other ideological paths that have ended very badly for reasons we've discussed already. So.
- [68:30]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah, makes sense.
- [68:32]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And there's an interpretation, right? There's an interpretation. I don't know if it's true, Right. But there was a famous. One of the famous Sam Bankman fried interviews was an interview with Tyler Cowan where Tyler asked him, you know, because they're talking about all this stuff that the math involved in effective altruism and utilitarianism and, and probabilities and so forth. And, and Tyler's like, you know, suppose you had a. You could, you know, with a roll of the dice, you could roll the DICE and with 50%, with 51% odds, you would get another Earth. Like, you would literally get another earth with like, another 8 billion people and like another, like, an entire, like, ecosystem. And you'd like, basically you double the footprint of humanity in the cosmos, but with 49% probability, you would lose the one earth that you have, right? And do you roll the dice? And Sam's like, oh, of course, right. Because the expected value, like expected, quote, unquote, expected value, you're more, you know, da, da, da. Right. And then of course, Tyler's next question is, do you roll the dice more than once? Right. Like, suppose you win. The first time it comes up, it comes up heads and you get your two earths and you then get to make the same bet again, double or nothing, Right? And Sam's argument, you keep actually making that argument over and over again. Because if you get it right 10 times in a row, then you've got a thousand earths and that would be so much better than what we have today. How could you not take that chance? Anyway, one of the theories about what happened at FTX was he applied that philosophy to running a financial services firm. He kept rolling the dice, kept rolling the dice, and the dice came up positive a bunch of times in a row. And it got him into incredible position. And so he just kept rolling the dice and, you know, and so, so there's a theory that basically, like, what he was fundamentally doing was trying to optimize the future of all humanity by trying to roll the dice so that he would end up with a trillion dollars so that he would end up being able to solve all the, all the problems. Now there's an issue with that theory, which is he gave that interview to the reporter for Vox where he basically said, yeah, I was lying, all lying about all this stuff.
- [70:25]
Eric Tornberg
It's a dumb game woke westerners play to make people like us.
- [70:29]
Marc Andreessen
Exactly. So he undermined his own defense there a little bit. But, you know, who knows?
- [70:35]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah, I mean, another couple observations. One is Elon is acting as a lion, to use the language you mentioned, but he's a meritocratic lion. Not I rule because I'm the best, not because of my family. And what's interesting, Bobo's in paradise. Dave Brooks book chronicles how we moved from an aristocratic elite to a meritocratic elite. But that same meritocratic elite also became most critical of meritocracy itself or most, you know, and, and maybe as a way to deflect or, you know, or maybe just kind of reconcile sort of this, this, this idea that, hey, you know, there are inherited advantages to if you have better, we don't actually have equality of opportunity and if you have better. And so anyways, that's one interesting observation. The other observation I'll mention is, you know, we mentioned how these billionaires who've been so successful so contrarian in their private company lives, you know, when it comes to the Davos elite. They have a lot of weird views, a lot of weird views about how people should live in their, you know, personal lives. But then also, you know, kind of this global government kind of, kind of ethos. And I'm curious how you kind of reconcile, you know, you're, you're a fan of immigration, you're a fan of trade, you're a fan of globally clarified the work, you know, world. But, but you don't want global governance. What is sort of the right framing of think thinking about that.
- [72:01]
Marc Andreessen
So a couple a bunch of big questions in there. So let's start with, remind me the.
- [72:05]
Eric Tornberg
First, the first thing, the meritocratic elite that.
- [72:09]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, yeah.
- [72:09]
Eric Tornberg
Denies meritocracy.
- [72:11]
Marc Andreessen
Let's talk about that for a. So, so there's this guy. So there's a guy I kind of, you can kind of trace this progression. So there's this guy, James Conant, C O N A M T. And so he was a, by the way, he was an American. He was an American, you know, WASP elite, you know, out of central casting, is a very important figure in 20th century American history. So he became very, he was a chemist actually by background and actually worked on like chemical weapons and World War I as like one of these like really advanced kind of science guys. And then he, he was famously in the early 20th century. He was the, for a long time he was the president of Harvard, right. Which, you know, then and now Harvard was like the, you know, kind of the peak, you know, the highest status educational institution in the country. You know, kind of the, you know, Harvard, Harvard, you know, Harvard and a couple other places like you know, create, you know, give us all the Supreme Court justices, right? And you know, typically all the presidents and so forth. And so Conant ran Harvard and actually at Harvard, I bring him up because he did exactly what you're describing, right? He came out of a system of actually inherited aristocracy, which was kind of the traditional American WASP aristocracy. And basically he was very explicit about this. He used Harvard as a vehicle to basically replace the inherited aristocracy with basically an aristocracy of merit or an oligarchy of merit, which we'll come to, but a sort of a class of merit. And he's the guy who basically over opened up admissions at Harvard. And he basically says we're not just going to have, it's not going to be all legacies and all people with the right last name and all people with families in the social register and their families came over the May Flower and all that stuff. It's going to be the best of the brightest. And we're going to basically scour the country and we're going to basically go find the best of the brightest and we're going to recruit them in and then we're going to basically have this aristocratic elite class of merit. And he actually did that, by the way. He did that, by the way. As a consequence of that, every other university basically did that. That led to the creation of, for example, the sat. The act like merit testing sort of emerged out of that. And so the goal literally was like, go scour the country every year, get the smartest kids from wherever they happen to be and bring. And basically. And by the way, again, circulation of elites. Invite them in. Invite them in. Congratulations. It doesn't matter where you came from. Now you're at Harvard. Now you're a Harvard graduate, now you're in the Harvard network. We're going to jump you up to this ability where you can have this giant impact on the world. But you're here because of merit. Funny thing happened. It did not result in equal representation by group. And so they ran this process for 20 or 30 years. And let's just say there were some disparities and there were some population groups that were extremely unhappy and there were some other population groups that wanted to speak for the previous population groups and assert their moral superiority and say that these are bad outcomes. And so he came under sort of increasingly intense criticism later in his career. And by the 1960s he was basically campaigning canceled for saying bad things because he made comments at the time on race that basically even the 1960s would get you canceled. And so I bring him up because his career basically spanned all three phases. It spanned the original, basically the inherited concept of aristocracy when he started, and he was a product of that himself, he then implemented and essentially co created the idea of an aristocracy of merit and fully implemented, implemented it. And then he ended his career basically on the other side, which was the birth of the modern system, right? The modern system of civil rights, affirmative action and modern university admissions. It's all coming full circle because the Harvard case is now in front of the Supreme Court. It seems like Supreme Court is highly likely to use the Harvard case to strike down affirmative action in university admissions, which the Supreme Court's intent, if they do that would be to return Harvard back to where it was when James Conant was running it in the 1930s, 1940s, probably. That's not what would actually happen. Anyway. This is all still a giant live issue anyway. So he lived all three phases of this. And all three phases of this actually played out quite quickly. It all played out in the span of one man's career. So this is a little bit of the thing that you and I were talking about earlier, which is like, okay, if there was this moment, let's say there was this moment when James Conant was running Harvard, and let's say it's probably 1940 is a good midpoint for this or something where, like, they truly weren't admitting purely on the basis of merit. And again, you could many different criticisms as to whether they were different advantages and all that stuff you could talk about, but let's just say they were doing it straight on the basis of SAT scores. And so it doesn't matter where you grew up, it doesn't matter whatever ethnic background, immigration status, none of that matters. It's just, how do you score on the sat? They actually did that for a while, and then that became, for whatever set of reasons, good or bad, that became untenable starting in the 1960s. And they have been basically evolving in a very different direction every sense. So apparently, at least in our culture in our era, like, that's not actually a stable. That's not a stable state like it is for people who would like that to be how these things work, like, sorry, like Harvard's not going to do it, right? So if anybody's going to do that, it's going to be some sort of new institution. Like, it's going to be. Have to. It's going to have to be somebody else anyway. I don't even mean to actually reach a conclusion based on that. It's just that you can actually see this whole thing playing out. And I actually think the, the kind of flow of events as people argue this stuff out. It's, it's. These situations have unfolded often enough now where you can see the pattern and kind of predict where they go.
- [77:30]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah, and the. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, people like Michael Shallenberger, people like Thomas Soul, there are a number of people who've, you know, shown that there's a certain set of policies that people, the. The foxes are promote that actually don't help the, the people that they're aiming to help. And they recommend alternative policies, but those alternative policies kind of break a fundamental assumption that, you know, all people are equal or, or some fundamental assumption that people are uncomfortable with. And so they would rather have. They would rather keep the fundamental assumption that kind of, they think, respects people's dignity or something than. Than get maybe the outcomes that they want. And it feels like that, that fundamental assumption. Assumption is so core to so many things.
- [78:18]
Marc Andreessen
Well, this goes to. But then this goes to also your. I think, sort of the same question earlier, which is sometimes this oligarchic elite seems to end up with these somewhat crazy ideas, like, you will own nothing and be happy or you will eat bugs.
- [78:30]
Eric Tornberg
Yes, right, exactly.
- [78:33]
Marc Andreessen
You will eat bugs. You will sleep in the pod. Well, look, so again, what Burnham would say here. What Burnham would say is very straightforward, which is this oligarchic elite has become a very disconnected class. Right? So it's become a very disconnected set of people. It's a very small set of people. They are sort of a whole bunch of things. So first of all, they are actually often very high merit. They often actually are, like, quite smart. It's not that they're dumb. They have been educated at a relatively small number of institutions. Generally, you see a very high correlation to a certain small number of Ivy League universities and their international equivalents. They associate primarily with each other. Part of what you get when you join the oligarchic elite is you get a set of friends. And your new set of friends are, like, much cooler than your old set of friends. And so they associate with each other. They kind of, by definition, don't invite people in who don't fit. Right. And so if you show up and you're like, wow, I really like that Tucker Carlson character. Right? Isn't he great? You don't get invited to Aspen next year, right? So they kind of box out. This is even before they classified all oppositional speech as hate speech and misinformation. Like, even before that, it was like, look, you're going to have a certain set of points of view here if you want to fit in. It's a social dynamic. It's a social dynamic. It's a social, social club. Like any social club, people are expected to kind of all agree on things and to not. Not really argue about things and certainly not do anything that would offend or horrify anybody. And so it's like, I don't know, it's like the opposite. It's like, what's the joke? It's a marketplace of idea. Yeah. There's no real dispute that happens. Right. There's no truth seeking exercise. It's like we're all going to basically agree on the same thing. And so. And then they just. They live in rarefied air. And then you're, you know, a lot of them, you know, they're. They're either rich or they have a lot of rich friends. And so, you know, they tend to live behind highways, walls. You know, they tend to be guarded by men with guns. You know, they tend to not be subject to violent street crime. By the way, you know, another irony, and Seoul and others have pointed this out, the other irony is they actually follow very bourgeois traditional life scripts on average. Like most, you know, the most of them, you know, if they have kids, it's generally they're, you know, if, if they have kids, it's generally they're married, they're, you know, they're raising their kids in, in, in, in two parent households. You know, they have very kind of stable family situations and you know, they, they, they prize education, they teach their kids to work, work hard. You know, they, they follow a very kind of traditional, even aristocratic, by the way, mating. Like they have very strong opinions on who their kids should like marry and, and reproduce with. One of the, you know, enormous. One of the reasons why there's so much focus on getting kids into these top colleges is because that's the, you know, that's the marriage pool. You know, that's where the good people to marry are. So there's like a, there's like a, you know, a reproductive kind of component to it. And so they live in this like rarefied, you know, it's like anything, it's like the, you know, it's like the courtiers at Versailles or something. Like they just, they live in this rarefied world. And so you know, when something happens in the real world that is not as they predict it, like they, you know, again to lab, they don't have skin in the game. Like they're not subject to the consequences. So let's just take a hypothetical example. If they decide that the correct social policy to achieve true equality is to let all the criminals out of jail hypothetically. And the result is like a massive surge in street crime that is victimizing like huge numbers of, you know, poor and disadvantaged people. They are completely insulated from that. Right? They have no risk. Actually. No, I mean I won't, I won't name names as tempting as it is. But like I know people who are like, you know, big funders of all of the pro crime districts, district attorneys, and they really believe that they're going to like heal the nation and heal the world and achieve racial harmony if they let all the criminals out of jail and you know, they are in my view responsible for like just this massive violent crime wave that's happening right now. And they are, then they Literally have like SEAL teams protecting them. Yeah, right. So there's no like, you know, crackhead homeless person who's going to come get past your SEAL Team six security guy. Right. Like you're, you're out. Like you're out like you're ruling a society, but with no accountability whatsoever for, you know, for the results. And so, yeah, so it's extremely easy. In fact, it would be shocking if people in those circumstances did not get like radically disengaged and disconnected from reality. And again, if you go back to your Machiavelli, that's where it's like the oligarchy. At some point, at some point the people are just like, you know what? Screw this. This. Screw these people. And at some point they show up with pitchforks and just kind of take care of the problem.
- [82:44]
Eric Tornberg
To finish the analogy around or sort of the tension between nationalism and globalism, in some ways this is supposed to be the era of the sovereign individual. And yet it seems like as we see saw during COVID governments are adopting some of those technological advancements to control its people in tightening and increasingly tightening ways. And it seems like this idea of global governance, global coordination to solve, whether it's climate problems and nuclear proliferation or, you know, what's going to happen with AI God for, you know, it feels like that's, that's becoming more and more vogue. And yet, you know, for people who are, as you are excited about trade, excited about immigration, excited about global coordination, how do you kind of like reconcile those tensions? Or say, hey, you know, stop here.
- [83:28]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so there's this idea that you've alluded to that's like very deeply seated and call it, you know, you could call it modern global governance, as they sometimes call it. It's, you know, it's like if you go to the World Economic Forum, like, they'll teach you this, or if you, you know, if you go to these, you go to these parties, there's sort of this through line which basically says. And it actually, and it actually, in a lot of ways, I mean, some ways it's like tightly, it's baked into Judeo Christianity generally. But like Hegel was the philosopher who kind of, you know, kind of fully articulated this in sort of modern philosophic terms. And then his thinking was carried forward by Marx and, and, and others. And so the, the sort of, or, or the intellectual origin of this kind of through line of thinking is, is kind of, it's sort of in Hegel and his successors, which basically is like, look like the progress of human Society is a progress. And by the way, this sounds great, and there's certainly some truth to it. The sort of flow of history is basically confronting problems and solving problems. And so everything, you know, life used to be nasty, brutish and short, and everybody used to die of disease and everybody was hungry and da da, da, everybody's slaves, like all these problems. And then basically there's what they call the sort of historical process, right? And the historical process plays out. And the way the historical process plays out is what Hegel called the diagnosis dialectic. And the dialectic basically is you've got basically one theory for how things should work. Boy, they don't seem like they're working very well. You've got another theory about things you should do about it. You argue about that and then you come up sort of thesis antithesis, and then you come up with synthesis and you kind of get to the answer, right? And then basically you play out that answer. And by the way, if it works, that's great. If it doesn't work, you repeat the process until you figure out the answer. But at some point, you figure out the answer, right? At some point, the right set of smart people, whether they're philosopher kings or democratic rulers or scientific experts, at some point they're going to run the experiments on how to optimize society such that they will ultimately, at some point, figure out the right answers. Now imagine that you ran that process for hundreds of years and you ultimately figured out the right set of answers. And maybe at one point you thought that that was Stalinism. Maybe at one point you thought that whatever, whatever. But you've arrived at a point where it's like, okay, this is the end of history thing, the Fukuyama in liberal democracy. We figured it out. We figured it out. We've solved all the answers. We have the playbook, we have have it. The Davos version of this is whatever global democracy thing that they have. If you really have all the answers, then you have the ultimate moral imperative to impose those answers on the entire world. Because of course you do. Because you have all the answers. You can solve all the problems if you had all the answers, let's suppose you had all the answers to not organized society. How could you not impose those answers on the entire world? It's the only morally correct thing to do. Because if you don't do it, all these poor people are going to be suffering in all these completely unnecessary ways. And so therefore I have the answers, therefore I must impress oppose them. And so, you know, look, and this this was everything. I just. This is the intellectual foundation underneath communism. Like, this was the story at the time. This is the story behind the current Chinese form of communism. Like this, this is like a thing. This is, like this, this, this, this idea has had a big impact on history, and the strong forms of it are not doing as well right now. But the sort of, this sort of softer form of it, you know, it's less of a. Of a, Of a. Of a hammer and a little bit more of a, I don't know, velvet fist or something. But, but this impulse is very strong, and this is the impulse of all these. This is the impulse of the oligarchic elite. We have the answers. We have figured out the answers. And by the way, we just saw it playing out in Covid. The answers are super obvious. We're going to have lockdowns, we're going to have this, we're going to have that. And we are not open. We have already figured out there's no more reason to discuss this. We have the answers. Anybody opposing us is clearly opposing us in bad faith because we are the, you know, this is the thing where these guys will get up there and they'll say things like, you know, to challenge me is to challenge. Challenge science. Right? Like, I have the answers, like, stop bothering me and just do what I say. Right? Yeah. And so anyway, like, this is a very deeply seated, deeply rooted thing. And these, by the way, these people, like, fully believe that they're doing the right thing like that. In fact, it's necessary to prosecute this kind of campaign, which is, like, they're completely convinced that they have, that they have the answers. And if they don't impose them, they are actually, they're actually committing a great moral crime by not impressed. Opposing them. Anyway, like, this is very deeply rooted in, in, in. In the system. And then, yeah, look, people who oppose that, right? It's, you know, you, you know what they're called, right? You know, they're called nationalists, right? Because they don't want the, quote, unquote, global governance that, you know, they're called, you know, fascists because they don't want, you know. Right. You know, so you got all the kind of, the kind of dirty words. Yoram Hazoni wrote a book a couple years ago called the Virtue the Virtues of Nationalism, which is a very kind of, you know, kind of very provocative title in the, in the current environment. And he was actually blocked from advertising the book on certain social media platforms because it sounded like it must be a fascist manifesto. Now he's Israeli, it's a bit much to accuse him of being a Nazi, although people have. And so he makes this argument in the book that you'll enjoy and it's the kind of argument that never really works, but it is a fun argument to hear, which is he's like, actually this global, sort of Hegelian global governance, world state kind of thing is anti diversity. Because he's like, look, the advantage of having many, the way Sony puts it is the advantage of having many countries is you have many different systems of organizing society and then you are actually able and you therefore have diversity of the forms of society. And so therefore you can actually have real life experiments play out as to which things are better, which ones aren't. If everything is just globalist and everything is just a single global, ultimately a single global state, which was like the Hegelian and kind of Marxist extreme, you will eliminate all forms of diversity of social organization and philosophic ideas. And so basically you will not achieve utopia, you will achieve dystopia because you will no longer have a process of evolutionary involvement of thinking. And so he says in the book, if you are pro diversity, you should therefore be pro nationalism. You should be pro the existence of many separate states. Of course, this argument does not work at all, which is just because the same people who want universal world government also say they want diversity does not mean that they're going to buy his argument that you should therefore be nationalist.
- [89:24]
Eric Tornberg
Just like they want the argument that if you're pro diversity, you should have, you know, political diversity as well.
- [89:30]
Marc Andreessen
Exactly. Yes, that's the. Yes, we, we, we, we, yes, we, we can definitely not hate anybody from a different kind of ethnic background, but we can definitely hate the people on the other side of the political aisle with the theory of a thousand signs and tell our kids that they are definitely not allowed to marry any of those people. Yeah, because, yeah, that's, because that, that, that, that form of hate is, is, is, is just fine now. Yeah, and so, but, but anyway, I, I, I go through all that because like that, to your question, like that, that is a massive, like, that is a massive, massive kind of underlying question underneath a lot of this, which is like, do we want the entire world to run the same way? And if we really have all the answers, yes, we do. If we believe that it is actually impossible for anybody to have all the answers and that it actually is a very terrible assumption to ever believe that and that reality is actually like super messy and that people actually deserve the freedom to not only try to figure out a better way to live, but actually the freedom also to make mistakes. Mistakes, then this track that a lot of people are on is actually a very dystopian, leads to potentially hellish outcomes. Thomas Sowell, if he were on this, he would say, yeah, this was precisely the debate around communism. The same debate exists today, just under different names, and people are basically making the same mistakes they were making then. Yeah. Anyway, so what am I? I don't know, somewhere in the middle, I'm sort of prime. I'm a prime benefit. I'm a prime beneficiary of globalism. You know, you and I work in a field in which there's no question, like, our field is like, spectacularly enriched, you know, by the just enormous amounts of immigration that have happened in the US over the last 50 years. We work with people who are, you know, I feel like I work with the United nations every day. Like, I work with people from all these different backgrounds. It's just absolutely spectacular. I would not want to live in a system that would somehow decide that was a bad idea and send them all back to wherever that, you know, that would be horrible. Like, that would be awful. You know, look, at the same time, do I think it's a good idea to have a single system of global governance where there's a set of experts that, like, determine everything and, like, everything is equal and everything is the same? Like, no, that sounds like hell.
- [91:25]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah.
- [91:25]
Marc Andreessen
So what.
- [91:27]
Eric Tornberg
What if they're experts and fact checkers?
- [91:31]
Marc Andreessen
It's. Yes, the missing link is the fact checkers because they can make sure the experts are on the straight and narrow.
- [91:36]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah, exactly. Checks and balances. Let's. Let's get into this. This counter elite. We alluded to it earlier that, you know, populism is a bit of a dead end. We alluded to, you know, Peter Thiel in, you know, 2016, when you address Trump, was a bit of a pariah, and now he's, you know, there's been more of a movement around. There's been more diversity within tech. And it seems like this, this counter lead is forming. You know, Elon, obviously, is potentially accelerating it massive, massively. And that's on a macro level, on the billionaire level, but then also, like on a micro level, a lot of tech people are kind of politically homeless. They don't want to be on either side. They don't want to be in the far left. You know, policies that sound good but don't work or dysfunction within organization, but they don't want to be on the far right. They don't watch Fox News. They're, you know, they don't, they're pro choice. They. So they don't want to be Republicans. They don't be conservative. They want to be, you know, a centrist. But that, that won't hold for maybe reasons we, we've discussed. So, so you know, on kind of that level. But on the billionaire like what's play place out the counter elite sort of new moral, new philosophy among, among people who've been homeless politically.
- [92:41]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So let's, I'm going to focus, you know, more on the structural kind of aspect. I'm trying to be a little bit less on the partisan side, but on the structural slide. So back to our Burnham. So what Burnham was. I did the throwaway comment saying populism is a dead end. And so it's worth for a moment kind of addressing why that's the case. Even if you think the current elite is terrible, let's even assume you're a full on whatever. Let's assume you fully believe the current elite is evil and they must be torn down and must be replaced by a true democracy. What Burnham would explain to you is that's not actually possible. And it's the exact same point that we discussed earlier on management materialism or another version of it is what Burnham calls the iron law of oligarchy, which basically is in every human system. No matter. By the way, this also was true in communism. True in the Soviet Union. Communism. It's true in China today. Under communism, every human system always. There's always a minority of people ruling the majority of people. That's basically permanent. There's never actually democracy. It's always basically some minority ruling some majority. And you see this play out over thousands of years across majority, many different kinds of societies. And the reason for that is it's mechanical. The argument has no bearing on how they rule. It's just that there will be an elite that rules. And it's a mechanical argument. And it's because the elite is concentrated whereas the majority is dispersed. Right. And so if you have 100 people who are highly concentrated and are organized up against 10,000 people who are a rabble, right. And a mob and just are just like a populist, that's just like out there doing their own thing every day and they're just not organized like the organized elite is always going to end up in power over the disorganized masses. And this just happens over and over and over again. Again, the American system. Why do we not have a pure democracy? We do not have a pure democracy because our founding fathers were well aware that. I mean, just imagine the horror show that would result if citizens got to vote on every individual issue as it came up. Which, by the way, that's what happens in California. California is so screwed up now, right? We have direct democracy in California. It's obvious to everybody it doesn't work, of course, we will continue it forever. But representative democracy is an expression of the fact that even in a system that was intended to be very egalitarian and very democratic, you're still going to have this organized elite in the form of literally Congress and the executive branch and the nine justices of the Supreme Court who are fundamentally going to run the country on behalf of the people. So anyway, this is what's called the iron law of oligarchy. There will always be a small number of people in charge of the large number of people. That small number of people is referred to in this framework as the elite, the oligarchic elite. And, and you know, and again, we talked about it before, like, how do they rule? They, they, they rule by telling a story that legitimizes their rule. That story is the story. That story in our era is the story of egalitarianism. They are not ruling for themselves. They are ruling on behalf of the people. And you know, and, and, and, you know, they, they, they tell that story. They have policies that are intended to deliver on that maybe a little bit in some ways, you know, sometimes maybe not other ways, but that's the story that they tell. And then as a consequence of that, they are the elite. They set the narrative. They have the dominant part. They have the sort of moral high ground in society. And then they have these reinforcement mechanisms. They have the credentialing system, and they have their recruitment system to bring in, assimilate in the new people and so forth. And then think about what else they have. By the way, they don't necessarily have all the money, but they have the power. Power. And then they have, they have the ability to perpetuate. And then they have. Oh, they have the sort of status high ground. So sort of status, prestige, fashion. Like, these are the fancy people. Like these are the people that when they do things and they say things like people care, right? And so anyway, if you read a Burnham, what, what, what, what he will tell you is basically like, if the people were to actually rise up, like, suppose that people woke up one day and literally took pitchforks and, you know, and torches and went and stormed you know, diamonds and aspen and kill the oligarchic elite. The result would be anarchy. The result would be hell, right? It would just be a spiral into hell. It would be like Black Hawk down territory of just madness and chaos. And so that's not a route. So what you need is if you want to replace the elite that you have today, what you need to do is you need to have a better elite. There's the only one way out. If you don't like the current oligarchic elite that doesn't result in just mass death. The only way out is a superior elite. So then you're at thought experiment territory, which is, okay, what would be a superior elite to the elite that we have today? Well, a bunch of things. So one is they would presumably have a set of ideas that would be better ideas because that would presumably be the whole point of doing this. They would then need a story that is a superior story, so sometimes called a political myth, which is they would need a moral claim that was able to achieve buy in, that was able to legitimately their rule. They would need fashion, status, prestige, right? They would, they would, they would need, they would need legitimately to be able to project. If you belong to our elite, you are a higher status, higher prestige person than if you belong to that elite, right? And then, and then they would, and then they would need to build the kind of all, all these other things, the perpetuation method, the recruitment method fund. You know, they would need funding, right? They would need, you know, they would need, they would need an education system like, you know, they, they would need, they would need media organs, right? They would need the ability to get their mask message out for people who want to change the system. That is the way to do it now. So the good news is there's a roadmap. There's an answer to the question, there's a way to do this. It's been done before and it could be done again. Having said that, it's the world's biggest challenge because whatever you think of the current oligarchic elite, they are very powerful, they are very in charge, they have many resources, they are very cool people, and they're not so easy to just simply replace.
- [98:20]
Eric Tornberg
So, yeah, and you know, to a smaller extent, Thiel has done this with the Thiel Fellowship, you know, is higher status in some circles or many circles than, than even getting into Harvard or Stanford. That's one example of an organ. If people are pursuing this in earnest, like on the, on the ideas and myth level, you Know, let's brainstorm if you're open to it. You know, one track could be competence. Hey, hey, this, you know, as we saw during COVID et cetera, this past elite has, has been incompetent. And putting intentions aside, you know, we're just a much more competent elite. You know, we're, we're going to get rid of these or like we're going to focus on unifying instead of dividing being these cultural. But I don't know, I'm just kind of riffing here. But what ideas and myth do you think are potentially compelling that you know, a counter elite could, could get behind, could advocate and, and might resonate?
- [99:09]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so I think let's, let's build on those two to start with. Yeah, so yeah, one is just like, yeah, competence. Like, you know, look, would you like your 8 year old to be able to walk to school without getting mugged or assaulted at some point? There are some very basic competence questions. How did you feel about being locked up for three years and you got Covid anyway? Oh, that's interesting. I think there's that and there's always this question of when do people finally get fed up. A city level version of this was crime in New York city in the 1970s. And then at some point they did elect on anti crime mayor and then at some point he did bring crime to down. So like, you know, this, this does play out at a micro level for sure. And so, you know, maybe there's some larger version of it now and again like you, you'd have to like a couple things on that. Like you'd have to be real, right? Like, because, you know, because if you were, if you didn't deliver, like, you know, people get very upset, the same thing would happen to you. So you know, it would have to be real and then you'd have to be able to recruit, right? You have a chicken and egg problem. You'd have to be able to recruit in the people who are actually capable of executing on it right before they're actually in power. Right. So the key question, you know, the key question always is like the way to think about this is like suppose you have an existing corrupt elite. Like let's suppose hypothetically you have an existing corrupt, rotten, incompetent, oligarchic elite and you have a new, fresh, competent, fired up, you know, meritocratic elite. And then put yourself in the shoes of like an aggressive, ambitious young person right out of school who's like on the make and like wants to like optimize Their position in society and wants, like status and power and money. Right. And it's. So you have to have a recruitment. Like, your story has to be really good and you have to have like a critical mass, the ability to recruit those people, because otherwise the existing elite is just going to get constantly reinforced by having, you know, new people kind of take it over and carry it forward. So. Yeah, so that could be a really big one. What was your second one?
- [100:57]
Eric Tornberg
Oh, we're going to focus on unifying people instead of doing unifying.
- [101:03]
Marc Andreessen
That's a good example. Okay, so that's another thing. Yeah, so you might, yeah. For example, you might observe hypothesis. Even our current elite seems to be doing an awful lot of demonization of the other side. You know, interestingly, the other side is, you know, basically it's, you know, arguably it's a sort of, you know, in our modern politics, it's class and race demarcated. Right. And so it's this, you know, there's nobody. Like, it's really fun. Like, our current oligarchic elite is like, heavily dominated by like, you know, heavily dominated by white people. And, you know, there's nothing more than they hate that they hate them, you know, than poorer white people than them. Right. And so, you know. Yeah, I mean, they're, they, they sell, you know, that you, you could argue, they sell a story of division and, you know, the deplorables. Right. And, and, and yeah, you could, you could have a, you know, you could, you could have more of a sort of a Julius Caesar kind of thing where you'd say, look, like, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna rule on behalf of 51% of the country versus 49%. I'm going to rule on behalf of the entire country. Right. I'm going to invite everybody in, you know, and we're gonna lift. We're gonna lift. We're gonna lift the whole thing. Now, now you are denying people the ability then to hate, which is a huge attraction of the current system. You're taking a big motivator away. You're replacing it with something that I think probably a lot of people would find more attractive. And then look, I think part of it would have to be, look like these people have made you promises that they can't deliver. They've had time. This is what you always expect would happen in all these cities, which is, it's like, okay, if the single party governance of all these cities is going so well, why is the crime rates are so high? Like, you know, at Some point, it's like, okay, they're not delivering. Yeah. So, you know, there's that. You, you know, look, you'd have to challenge some sacred cows, right? You'd have to say, look, like, you know, maybe we should not, you know, maybe we should not be trying to do the level of social engineering that's happening. Right. Maybe it's a bad idea to have, you know, maybe it's a bad idea to have differential, you know, you know, standards for different groups of people. You know, the, you know, what the Supreme Court's about to do in the Harvard case. Like, you know, maybe you'd have to revisit some of those things. Maybe people are ready for that, maybe they're not. Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, it's. This is the. This is like the big macro. You know, historically, this is like the big. You know, this is like the biggest game of all. It's the. It's the creation of basically a new political story. Right. It's a. You know, it's the creation of a rationale to rule, you know, that actually results in the support necessary to actually get the position where you actually are ruling. Yeah. You know, people have done it recently.
- [103:17]
Eric Tornberg
You. You've been tweeting out a series of. Of white pills and this, you know, reasons to be excited. Um, and, you know, this is me projecting a little bit, but it. I feel like the last few years for. For you and others have been a bit more, you know, pessimistic times. And. And so I'm curious for what's inspiring the recent optimism and weight pills. And maybe we can end with sort of the. The pessimistic case and the optimistic case. You know, some people have described the pessimistic case as like a very slow decay, you know, 100 years. Brazil iFoodation, I think some people call it. And I'm curious for what.
- [103:54]
Marc Andreessen
What the.
- [103:54]
Eric Tornberg
What the optimistic case is.
- [103:56]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, I think the optimistic case. I mean, it's. It's. I kind of worded negatively, but it's like one. One of my white pills is, you know, the. The current elite is actually really bad at specifically being an elite.
- [104:06]
Eric Tornberg
Yeah.
- [104:07]
Marc Andreessen
Like, who really. Like, honestly, like, who. Who really wants to look up to some of the. I mean, maybe some of these people people look up to, but like, some of them, it's just like a hard. It's a hard sell. Like, I mean, God, like, it's difficult. And by the way, again, this is not even a partisan. I would say this is not even a partisan. You just look at a Lot of the sort of national level people, and it's just like, ooh, like I'm supposed to get excited about that person. That seems like a stretch. And then, you know, look, the results are, like, not great. Like, you know, you know, you can. Like I said, you know, economic growth covers up a lot of. A lot of. A lot of sins. You know, the US Economy, you know, generally works pretty well, but, you know, you get into situations like we've been in, you know, repeatedly for the last 20 years, where you get in these weird, you know, foreign policy situations or these weird, you know, economic sort of downturns. You get these weird, you know, public health things or whatever, and you're just like, wow, wow. Like, these people really don't seem to. I mean, it's like COVID policy. I mean, look, COVID policy, right? Like, it's like, you know, two weeks to crush the curve, right? Okay, two weeks to crush the curve became two months, became two years, right? And nobody, at any point, at least that I saw, ever like, articulated. Well, wait a minute. Why did we ever think two weeks was ever going to do anything? Did we know that two weeks was like, did we. Did we do two weeks knowing it was going to fail and it was going to be two months? So did you lie to us or were you incompetent? Right? And so just like, every element of this, I mean, the mask. The mask thing alone, we could do like a whole podcast just on mask, but the whole mask thing alone, it's like the exact same people who, in February of 2020 were saying there was no reason at all for any, you know, any normal civilian ever be wearing a mask, you know, who, you know, within two months had it be basically the new, you know, holy face, you know, covering for all right, thinking people. Like, and then they were onto, like, oh, maybe we should all double mask and triple mask. And then here we sit three years later, and there are still, you know, schools that are forced masking their kids. Like, it's like, okay, like, whatever this is, like, whatever these people think they're doing, like, it's not. And everybody gets Covid anyway, right? So, like, apparently, like, these people do not actually know what they're doing. They're not actually good at. Good at their jobs there, you know, there seems to be zero accountability. Like, they seem to never get fired. Right? Like, whoever gets, you know, it's just like all these things, like Afghanistan, you know, Afghanistan. So we.
- [106:09]
Eric Tornberg
Afghanistan, they say that we should forgive them.
- [106:14]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, right. Like, you know, right, because, you know, Right. It's like morality, because good intent. Right. Covers. Covers, you know, sort of explains everything. But, like, Afghanistan, like, whoever got fired for Afghanistan, right. Like 20 years of, like, rule and leadership. Right. Of the whole Afghanistan campaign. And, like, you know, we saw how it ended and the, you know, now we're countries back in, you know, it's like we were never there. And this massive exercise and thousands of Americans dead and, like, lots of other people dead and all this, like, chaos and blood and the whole thing. And stranded the interpreters and like, the whole thing. And who, you know, who got fired. Like, yeah, you know, so, yeah. So anyway, so not to get specifically on these issues, but, yeah. So anyway, like. But this way, like, if they're going to be the elites, they got to be good at being elites. Like, they got to at least be good at being elites, Right? And at some point, it's like, if they're not even good at that, like, what are they actually good at? Yeah. And so, you know, at some point, like I said, at some point, I think people just kind of get fed up and then, look, the Internet, you know, it's become very fashionable. And of course, nobody does this more than our current elites, but, like, it's very fashionable to dump on the Internet for creating division and dissension and this and that, misinformation and kind of on and on and on. And the people who tell that story the most forcefully are our current elites who just absolutely hate being challenged. And like, you know, look, the Internet is, you know, as you well know, like, the Internet is subject to constant censorship, censorship, pressure at a level that would make Orwell blush. And notwithstanding that, information is still more widely available today than it was before the Internet, like, by far right. By far right. And so, you know, even the, you know, if the sensors have had a good, you know, eight years to do everything they can and, you know, information is still flowing. It's not flowing as free as I would like it to flow, but it's flowing a lot more free than it used to. Yeah. And so anyway, yeah, I. It's. Yeah, I don't want to. Yeah, I never want to get myself in a frame of mind that says the situation is hopeless. And I think there's. Yeah, there's at least cracks. There's at least cracks in the system that are encouraging to close.
- [108:02]
Eric Tornberg
Maybe that white pill relates to your tweet recently in terms of the theme of our era is uncashed checks suddenly popping up, absurd pretensions, wistful fantasies and pretty ugly lies. Called by, called by reality.
- [108:14]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, it's like, look, if you're in power and you've got this story, right, and you can like sell these propositions and you can implement these policies, like at some point the results come in and you know, the longer conversation we could have about this another time, but like, you know, there are, I mean, look, just, just since the 1960s, 1970s, like there were a set of policies put in place in the 1960s, 1970s that made very specific promises and the results are in, we're 50 years later. And like not only did it not work, they were, you know, catastrophic in many ways. And so like at some point the bill arrives. You know, it does feel like an awful lot of, you know, bills are arriving. A lot, a lot of checks are, a lot of people are trying to cash a lot of these checks. They're not, they're not. I mean, we could have a long conversation about education. But I mean even, even the, you know, even the, even the Gates foundation, right, did this big report last year where they did, they did a retrospective study of 40 year, 40 years of philanthropic attempts to improve education in the US and the result of the report is nothing worked. Yeah, right. Like 40 years of promises, nothing worked. Budget per, you know, per student budget of education in the US K through 12 rose 3x over the last 40 years and real dollars results didn't budge. Right. And so like the data's there, like the data's in, it doesn't work. The people running the system are terrible, you know, and for all the reasons that people already understand. I mean, it's become so obvious now, right, with some of the people in charge of these systems. And so, yeah, I mean, the bill comes due now. It's like anything, people have to care about the results, right? They have to, have to care about the results more than they care about the story. And it's always a question of like, will they are people. People are, it's always the thing. Are people more enamored by their belief in the story and in their sort of social affiliations based on the story than they are in the actual tangible reality? On the other end, you mentioned Thomas Sowell. I'll just recommend for anybody who hasn't read his books, you want to definitely read all of Thomas Sowell's books because maybe more than anybody else in the last 50 years, what he does is he tackles all of these societal level questions directly and he does it from the position of it's very high level of moral authority. But then he's one of the world class economists. And so he actually goes of the data and he addresses the data and he's just like, okay, this doesn't work, this doesn't work, this doesn't work, this doesn't work. And you come out the other end being like, oh my God, we're ruled by people who have no idea what they're doing. Yeah. So it's a very. I find his books to be very inspiring. Other people find them to be very, very depressing.
- [110:28]
Eric Tornberg
Let's wrap on that inspiring. Note the bit the bill is coming due. Mark, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [110:33]
Marc Andreessen
Good. Awesome Eric. Great to be with you.
- [110:39]
Eric Tornberg
Upstream with Eric Eric Tornberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Hey everyone. Eric Here at Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts to shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors and influencers like Econ102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week and we're looking for industry leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me at Erica Turpentine Co. That's E R I K at Terpene Turpentine Co and let's partner together.