Marc Andreessen: It’s Morning Again In America

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
>> Peter Robinson (00:00):
The New York Times calls him, arguably,
the chief ideologist ofthe Silicon Valley elite.
Marc Andreessen,on Uncommon Knowledge, now.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson.

(00:22):
After growing up in New Lisbon,Wisconsin, which has a population,
today, of 2,523, Marc Andreessenmajored in computer science at
the University of Illinois andthen moved West.
In 1993, Mr.Andreessen co-founded Netscape,
which made available the first widelyused browser almost instantly,

(00:42):
making him a major figurehere in Silicon Valley.
And he has remaineda major figure ever since.
In 2009, Mr.
Andreessen and his investing colleagueBen Horowitz launched the venture capital
firm Andreessen Horowitz, which today hasmore than $40 billion under management.
Here at Stanford, Mr.
Andreessen participates in the HooverInstitution's Emerging Technology Review.

(01:05):
Since the election last November, Mr.Andreessen has been spending only
half his time here in Silicon Valley,spending the other half at Mar a Lago.
Where he has been advising Donald Trumpand his friends, Elon Musk and
Vivek Ramaswamy.
Mark Andreessen, thank you for joining me.

>> Marc Andreessen (01:23):
Thank you, Peter, it's great to be here.

Okay, Mark, let's begin by taking a brief look at a video.

[LAUGH] >> Ad
There we go.

>> Ad (01:34):
And under the leadership of President Reagan,
our country is prouder andstronger and better.
Why would we ever want to return to wherewe were less than four short years ago?
[MUSIC]

Makes the hair on the back of your neck go up.

It's still powerful.

Sorry, was that '80? Is that '80, [CROSSTALK].

That's '84, that's the reelection campaign.
So, the 1970s, a decade of economicstagnation, the erosion of our position in
the Cold War, the nationalhumiliations of Vietnam and Watergate.
Then Reagan is elected, and by 1984,the economy has begun to expand.
We'd begun to rebuild our military,there had been a rebirth of patriotism.
And that video,although it may look sappy to us today,

(02:19):
rang true enough to the Americanpeople that they gave Reagan 49 out of
50 states when they reelected him in 1984.
Serious question, a national renewal,can we do it again?

I mean, I see no reason why we can't.
We have to want to.
I was a kid since I was 13,when that came out, so
a vague awareness of what was going on.
But we certainly can, I mean, look,we have the preconditions for all of it.
We have the people, we have everything.
We have the people, we have the resources,we have the geographic security.

(02:54):
I mean, we have all of these capabilities.
I mean, it's actually amazingif you look right now,
we are the major Westerneconomy that's growing, right?
So, the UK and Germany and Canada,they've stopped growing and
they're probably shrinking, right?
And so, notwithstanding all of ourmany issues, we've continued to grow.
We continue to be the beacon of capitalismand enterprise and entrepreneurship.
The smartest people in the worlddefinitely, 100% still wanna come here.

(03:17):
We're now leading the world in AI.
And then in energy, I mean,it's this running joke,
it's like every time there's one of thesedoom headlines of the US is gonna run out
of some rare Earth mineral andlithium or something.
It's like, the joke is some farmer inNorth Dakota stumbles over a new $2
trillion deposit in his backyard.
We have apparently unlimitednatural resources.

(03:38):
We have overwhelmingly the dominantmilitary machine in the world.
For all of our issues, we have allthe preconditions for a golden age.

A golden age, all right, we'll come back to that.
In the meantime,you have some explaining to do.
The presidential candidatesMarc Andreessen has supported.
This is all public,I did a little research on you, Mark.
I mean, you may have tried to tidy thingsup, you being you, I doubt that you have,
but this is still very much on the record.

Hold on, I gotta hack Wikipedia.

[LAUGH] Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry,
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton,and Donald Trump.

A brief detour to Mitt Romney.

Brief detour to Mitt Romney, all right.

2012 [LAUGH] But yes, yeah,
that trajectory exactly from actually,I mean, I sort of entered business in '94,
but I knew Bill Clinton and Al Gorequite well and supported them in '96.
And then as you said, Gore in 2000,all the way up to Hillary in '16.

Okay, so from a very loyal Democrat
to a MAGA Republican, how come?
What happened?>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah, [LAUGH] so
things changed.
So, the way I describe it->> Peter Robinson: You changed or
things changed?
What in your thinking changed and, I mean,there are plenty of people who say,

(04:51):
I didn't leave the Democratic Party,the Democratic Party left me.
Ronald Reagan used to say that.
So, how does the environment and thinking,both of them, comment, would you please?

By the way, it is amazing how many members of
the key Trump team are former Democrats,right?
Donald Trump is a former Democrat,Bobby Kennedy,
you go right down the list, Tulsi Gabbard,there's a lot of these people.
So there's a broad-based phenomenon.
But anyway, so we'll talk about that.
So the way I describe it is, look, I cameup in the 90s, I grew up in the Midwest.
I have sort of, very firm kind ofunderstanding memory of what it's like to

(05:21):
kind of grow up in a, sort of the polaropposite environment of California.

Right.

But I moved to California,
I became a full blown Californian,fully assimilated, adapted.
But the way I would describe it is, it wasjust sort of assumed that if you were in
Silicon Valley, in high tech in the 90s,it was just assumed, Clinton gorb heyday.
It's just assumed that there was, whatI now call the Deal, with a capital D.
And nobody ever said it out loud,but it was just assumed.
And the deal was,you can be a high tech entrepreneur,

(05:47):
you can build all this amazing technology,you can build a successful company,
you can create lots of jobs.
The technology makesthe world a better place.
It's great, you take the company public,you make a lot of money.
At some point, you take the money andyou donate it to philanthropy.
And that's the total arc.
And then when you die, in your obituary,it's like, he was an entrepreneur
and a philanthropist, and all of his->> Peter Robinson: The Silicon Valley

(06:08):
circle of life.
The circle of life, and it's just like, it's great.
It was a great deal cuz it's like,you get to do what you want,
you get all the professional satisfactionout of executing in your field,
you get all the material satisfactionout of financial success.
And then you get all the psychic,
moral satisfaction out of->> Peter Robinson: And
the government leaves you alone.
You have more than enough scope to dowhat you need to do as an entrepreneur.

(06:28):
That, and also, as you may recall,
the Clinton-Gore administration wasextremely enthusiastic about high tech.
And so, I have a thousand storiesfrom those days, but one is,
I was actually,one of my little claims to fame,
I was the third wheel inthe first presidential webcast.
So Bill Clinton andI did the first presidential webcast,
presidential Internet town hall,I think, in 1996.

(06:49):
And it was a big deal inthose days to do that.
And he called me afterwards and
he was just completelythrilled by the whole thing.
It was so fantastic.
And of course, Al Gore, literally,
he got a lot of flack later for->> Peter Robinson: Saying that he invented
the Internet.
But this is the thing, is he never actually, so
here I'll defend Al Gore.
He never said he invented the Internet,he said he took the lead in the Senate in
helping to create the Internet,which is actually true.

(07:12):
He was the creator,
sponsor of the legislation in the 80s thatcreated what was known as the NSFNET,
National Science Foundation Network,which became the Internet.
That is the Internet backbone.
And then alsothe National Supercomputer Centers.
And I bring it up cuz that's how I wasable to do the work that I did, which is,
by the time I showed up at Illinois, wehave the National Supercomputer Center and

(07:32):
the NSFNET backbone that he had funded.

And it's very important to your work that those things
already existed.

Yeah, they had to.
Those were the preconditions foreverything that followed.
And so, Al Gore, I think, deservestremendous credit for what he did.
But the point is,he was super enthusiastic about it and
has always been a giantsupporter of technology.
And so, these people just thought thatit was just absolutely fantastic.
And then, Democrats,all the way through the 2000s,
as the Democratic Partystarted to clearly move left,
Obama was still generally a bigsupporter of tech and American business.

(07:57):
He liked what we were doing.
And then, you may remember in 2012, Idon't know if you remember in 2012, 2012,
at the time Obama's reelection,the headlines were all,
this was the first Internet election fora social media election.
And the headlines literally weresocial media saves democracy.
Because social media is what causedObama to be able to raise so
much money online and to be able to beatthe evil fascist Nazi, Mitt Romney, right?

(08:19):
And so, literally, the press wasglowing in support of social media.
Facebook was great fordemocracy, the whole thing.
By the way, the Arab Springalso happened at the same time.
And again, universal,positive press coverage.
So up until 2012, [CROSSTALK].

To your point, you remind me of something.
I knew somebody who was a veryclose friend of Mitt Romney and
who was an investor outhere in Silicon Valley.
And Romney said, the Obama operationis killing us on tech, and
in particular, particular campaign tech.
Apparently, the Obama peoplehad it all sorted out so
that they could give volunteers a pieceof software on their smartphones.

(08:52):
They could go door to door andask five questions.
And they would know whether that personwas already supporting Obama, so
you don't spend more money on him.
Or committed to Romney, soyou don't spend money on or
a maybe in which you want resources.
And the Romney peoplehad nothing like that.
And my buddy's job was to comeout here to Silicon Valley and
recruit engineers to build something forRomney.
And engineers wouldn't work forthe Republican.

Right. >> Peter Robinson
Yeah, 100%.

Okay. >> Marc Andreessen
You're not remotely
surprised by that story.

Well, this goes back, so the long arc here is Silicon Valley.
There was a bit Republican contingentin Silicon Valley in the Chip Era, 50s,
60s, 70s.
So by the time I got here, there werethese guys who were mostly retired at that
point, who were kind of the->> Peter Robinson: David Packard worked
for Richard Nixon as deputyDefense Secretary, as I recall.
Yeah, so these guys were already in their 70s and 80s.

(09:41):
I met some of them, butI didn't know a lot of them.
This is sort of the transition ofSilicon Valley from chips to software,
was kind of that handoff.
By the time I got here, basically,
everybody below the age of50 was a Democrat, right?
Which sort of foreshadowed the future ofthe state as the state was going through
its transitions.
And so, yeah, and basically,everybody I knew bought into the deal.
Essentially, everybody I knew, did this.

(10:02):
And by the way, it's a tremendously headything to buy into, to become part of,
cuz it's amazing.
You're this incrediblylionized tech founder.
You're getting invited to the White House.
Everybody loves you, by the way,the press loves you.
It's all great, the philanthropy,they love you for that.
The whole thing is just like this audit.
And you get to Davos and Aspen and->> Peter Robinson: You get to get rich and
have your vanity flatter.

(10:23):
It's amazing.

and the government is supporting you,right?
And if you have a problem andthere's a problem in a foreign country and
they're coming at you on something, orthere's some crazy tax or something,
the US Government willactually go to bat for you.
Or if there's some weirdtrade war thing or whatever,
your stuff gets seized at some port,the State Department will step in.
And so the government's like,on the side of American business.
And in retrospect, this was the tradethat the Democrats made in the 90s,

(10:46):
right, to become pro-business.
This is sort of a reflection of howClinton brought the Democratic Party back
from the craziness of the 60s and 70s, wasto get them in a point where they were not
literally fighting capitalism,right, every day.
And so it worked great.
The meshing was great, and the meshing,basically, worked right up until 2012.
And then, basically,it was after Obama's reelection.
Really, what I picked up,my experience was, starting in 2013,

(11:09):
is when things really started to unravel.
Okay, and so how do you pick it up?
Well, as I said, you've been a majorfigure in Silicon Valley, famous man,
wealthy man, since the 90s.
How do you pick it up in 2013?
You're investing and you discover yourentrepreneurs are starting to run into
difficulties they didn't used to run into.
There's something more vague than that,there's a vibe.

(11:32):
Describe what it felt like?
What are you picking up in 2013?

So, in retrospect,
I was on the front end ofpicking up the change.
I didn't understand what was happening,but
I was on the front end ofpicking up the change.
I felt it, and the reason I felt it is cuzI was so involved in the consumer Internet
companies of that era, and in particular,the social media companies.
And so I was on the Facebook board.
I was an angel investor in Twitter,angel investor in LinkedIn.
I was involved in basically,all of these companies,
all these new social media companies.

(11:56):
And I was super close.
I knew YouTube inside out and so I sortof knew how all these things operated.
I knew all the people and I was inthe room for a lot of the conversations.
Basically, it was in 2013, is reallywhen the employees started to activate.
And so you started to get, basically,this employee activist movement.
And that was a big thing.
And of course, in retrospect,I know what happened, which is,
you had a generation ofradicalized college kids.

(12:18):
So basically, if you back up further,it was basically some combination of 9/11,
the Patriot Act and then the Iraq War andthen the global financial crisis and
then Occupy Wall Street.
Whatever happened during thatsort of ten year period,
radicalized the college kidsbefore they moved into industry.
But then they showed up and
they were starting to populate thesecompanies in 2012, 2013, 2014.

(12:39):
And then they then activated a lot oftheir older contemporaries in those
companies, the older cohort memberswho wanted to be cool and with it.
And we know this->> Peter Robinson: It started with
the kids then?
It started with the kids.
And the very specific thing that happenedwith the social media companies is that,
that was the beginning of the whole thingwith hate speech and misinformation.
So that was the whole thing, cuz upuntil then, the Internet is a wild west.

(13:00):
We love it cuz because it's a wild west.
It makes all these things possible.
It's fantastic, it's great, it's working.
It's pro-democracy, it's pro-free speech.
The Obama State Department had thisgiant push to expand free speech, right,
all through the rest of the world, right?
At the same time that they discovered itwould be a really good idea to censor
American speech right,on social media, right?
So there was this amazing,do you remember net neutrality?

Yes.

This big push from the left to make sure that big companies
couldn't censor Internet speech [LAUGH].
So there were years and years and years ofanybody who was on the side of censoring
Internet speech, was against netneutrality and was the Antichrist.
And then, literally, that flipped and
became anybody who wasn't pro-Internetcensorship was the Antichrist.
And net neutrality vanished as an issue.
The two issues that have vanishedcompletely from the political

(13:40):
stage are net neutrality andmoney in politics.
They're just gone asmainstream left wing issues.
It's money in politics is after Hillaryoutspent Donald Trump three to one and
lost, that was it forthe anti-money in politics issue.
So there's this term in Hollywood, retcon,where you do retroactive continuity,
you go back and you sort of change a storyso that it's all consistent later.

(14:01):
And so there was the free speech retcon.
There was the net neutrality retcon.
There was the money in politics retcon.
Anyway, so this all kicked off in 2013.
I was in the room at someof these companies for
the original discussions on definehate speech, define misinformation.
Of course, assurances were, everybodywas completely confident that these were
very straightforward,easy things to define.

(14:22):
And of course, they wouldn't begin a longslide towards political censorship,
which is precisely what happened.
But this is really important that,that slide started in 2013.
That started before Trump, that startedway before the primary process,
that started way beforethe general election.
It really kicked off then.

Got it, got it.
So what did you make ofTrump first time around?

So this is the thing, is, I'm reading the New York Times,
I'm watching MSNBC.
I'm like anybody else,in my class and station.
And I'm just absolutely horrified andlike, my God.

That man is an outrage.

What about the norms, right, the whole thing.
And, like I said,I supported Hillary in 2016.
And frankly, my thought at that point was,
traditional awful is betterthan radical awful [LAUGH].
So when push comes to shove andHillary, look like Bill Clinton,
I thought had been great, like I said, andfor tech, he'd been super enthusiastic.
And so I'm like,how presumably his wife is.

(15:13):
And then, yeah, and then,basically, relatively quick.
Well, not relatively quick,it took a few years.
But certainly by 2018, 2019,I was starting to really wonder what was
going on cuz things started to get reallyweird, as you know, all through tech.
And then, basically, after 2020,in the last four years,
have been completely insane.
And if I had not already figured out whichway was up by 2018, 2019, certainly,

(15:36):
the last four years did it.

You had enough?

Yeah.

Okay? >> Marc Andreessen
Let's jump to the present DOGE,
the Department of Government Efficiency.
Your buddies, Elon Musk andVivek Ramaswamy are heading it.
And you yourself are participating, asyou've called yourself, an unpaid intern.

Yes, correct, yes.
[LAUGH]>> Peter Robinson: You may go get me
a glass of water at some point.
Again, let's start witha very brief video.
And this is a video thatElon Musk retweeted.
To my surprise, it turns out to bea couple of minutes of an old interview I
did with Milton Friedman.
Yes. >> Peter Robinson
14 is a lot for television.
So I wanna just go rightdown the list quickly and

(16:15):
have you give me a thumbs up orthumbs down.
[CROSSTALK] Cabinet agencies,Department of Agriculture,

>> Milton Friedman (16:21):
Abolished, gone.

Department of Commerce.

Abolished, gone.

Department of Defense.

Keep. >> Peter Robinson
departments down to four and a half->> Milton Friedman: Basic fundamental
functions.
What are its fundamental functions?
Preserve the peace,defend the country, right?
Provide a mechanism whereby individualscan adjudicate their disputes.
That's the Justice Department.
Protect individuals from beingcoerced by other individuals,

(16:51):
the police function, right?
And now,this is both the central government and
the state and local governments.
The police function is primarily local andcentral, right?
And those are the fundamental functionsof government, in my opinion.

Okay, so, as I said, there I sat with Milton Friedman in
the 1990s and asked him to gothrough the cabinet departments,
and he whittled them downfrom 14 to four and a half.
And Elon Musk retweeted that underthe heading, the DOGE Agenda.
Okay, now I'd like to askabout the DOGE Agenda, but

(17:28):
let me let you in on a little secret.
When Ronald Reagan ran in 1979, he calledfor the abolition of the Department
of Education, which, by the way,only got up and running in 1979.
So it's not as if this thing wassome storied inheritance from
the gloried past in American history.

(17:49):
It was a brand new federal bureaucracy.
And when Ronald Reagan took office,Ed Meese,
who is the person who told me this story,went up to Capitol Hill and
encountered one Republican senator afteranother who said, you can't do that.
In just a year, they had alreadyfigured out how to use that cabinet
department to give benefitsto their constituents.

(18:10):
And now they wanted to protect it,not eliminate it.
All of which is to say, what do you boysthink you can actually get done at DOGE?
High spirits, huge intelligence isabout to smack into practical politics.

Yeah, and as you may know, you probably also know,
there was a Clinton-Gore initiativecalled Reinventing Government.
Do you remember this?

Dimly.

There was a famous moment where Al Gore went on
David Letterman when he wasthe top late night talk show host.
And he went on with one of these famous,
he went on with the $600shatterproof Pentagon ashtray.

>> Al Gore (18:47):
Which they call ash receivers tobacco desk type.

>> David Letterman (18:50):
But this is a quality item.
>> [LAUGH]>> Al Gore: Yeah.

Right, the $3 ashtray that costs 600 bucks and
it's shatterproof, soyou can operate in military zones.
And of course, he went on there withhis safety glasses and hammer and
proceeded it to shatter onLetterman's desk, right?
And say, the game is up andwe're gonna go cuddle this.
And then of course.

Didn't happen.

Well, to give him a little credit, the budget did balance.
They did get to a balanced budget at some,they got in the surplus for
a brief period.
So maybe some stuff happened,Reagan did some stuff.
Although, correct me if I'm wrong,
I think the government wasbigger when Reagan left office.

Well, I can tell you a little bit about that.
So Reagan, as you know,
this is one of the things that we'regonna come to here in talking about DOGE.
There is the discretionary budget.
That is the bit that the Congressgets to vote on every single year.
The Pentagon is a big part of that.
Reagan was able to hold.
And these days,
the discretionary budget is a little underone-third of the entire federal budget.

(19:39):
So overwhelmingly, it's welfare programs,Medicare, Social Security is the big one.
Reagan was able to hold the discretionarybudget to about 1% growth
over eight years,which in real terms was a minor cut.
But that was huffing andpuffing and constant labor and
what he could never get control ofwas the non discretionary budget.

(20:01):
Which of course, had been legislatedin years past and grew according to,
neither he norCongress had any control over that,
which is going to be a problem foryou boys, okay?
So there's that.
There was also, I can remember thisbecause I wrote speeches for it, Neil.
There was also a governmentcommission on waste, fraud and abuse.
Peter Grace, J Peter Grace,a very distinguished, very lovely man,

(20:24):
very distinguished New York banker ofa kind that this generation is gone,
just like David Packard,belonging to an earlier era.
And of course, he hired people and theywent around and discovered all kinds of
absurdities that the federalgovernment was paying for themselves.
There was some sort of nationalprogram for beekeepers or something,
but it only was waste, fraud and abuse.

(20:44):
If you looked at it the way Mr.
Grace looked at it,which was as a businessman and a citizen.
If you looked at it the way a politicianrunning for reelection looked at it,
it wasn't waste fraud or abuse,it was very effective in buying votes.
And sothat stuff went almost nowhere as well.
So what you boys are up to now hasbeen attempted, although I must say,

(21:06):
not with quite this level of bravado.

And not with Elon.

And not with Elon.

So, I start by saying I'm not a spokesperson for the DOGE.
So I'm not gonna.
>> [CROSSTALK]>> Marc Andreessen: I just
want to give you.
>> [CROSSTALK]>> Marc Andreessen: I'm will
give my views.

Elon Musk and Vivek are both very capable of speaking for
themselves.

Let them speak for DOGE.
So look, number one is, yeah, peoplehave taken swings at this in the past.
That's certainly true, the factorsyou described are certainly true.
Having said that,there are some differences.
And so one is a whole bunchof things to talk about.
But one is there's sort of three.
The way to think about it is there's likethree thread here, there's headcount,
there's spend, and those are related,but different separate threads and

(21:44):
then there's regulations.
And then there's an intertwining ofthe three of them that has become
salient as a result of the recent SupremeCourt decisions on executive authority and
the so called Chevron deference.
So there's been a set of Supreme Courtdecisions recently in which the power
of the executive branch to basicallyhave agencies that promulgate their own

(22:05):
regulatory regimes.
And then staff and spend against thoseregulatory regimes without basically being
expressly authorized byCongress to do that.
Like the Supreme Court basicallyjust made that decision that now is
something that can be usedto turn these things off.
An argument->> Peter Robinson: In all the press,
I haven't yet noticed that DOGE was payingattention to the end of Chevron deference.

(22:27):
Yes, correct.

That you guys have cottoned on to that and
intend to make use of it.

Yeah. >> Peter Robinson
by Congress and the President of theUnited States and not by federal agencies.
That's huge, congratulations.
Well- >> Peter Robinson
let's end the show right now.
So to start with, by the way,
give Vivek a lot of credit on this.
And soVivek has talked about this publicly.
And there's some excellent legalscholars who are around the donors
who are contributing to this.
So, an argument, andI think it's a very serious argument,

(22:54):
an argument is if there is an agencythat is either itself should not exist,
which we'll come back to in a second.
Or if there's activities at the agencythat should not be happening, or
there's regulations thatthe agency is enforcing.
There is a very strong argument to bemade that it is actually necessary for
the executive branch to stop doing thosethings in order to come into compliance
with the Supreme Court rulings.

Excellent.

Right?

Excellent.

Which is the opposite.

Excellent. >> Marc Andreessen
valence of what everybody assumes.
Yes.

You're making some radical, productive change.
It's like we're doing whatwe're literally required to do.

Just flip the burden of evidence, burden of proof.

Burden of proof exactly.
And of course,
these Supreme Court decisions havehad no effect like that up until now.
But that's, of course, cuz this lastadministration has had no desire at all.

Right, they wanted a new Supreme Court.

Yeah, exactly.
And so, but this administration hasthe opportunity to do this differently.
Pop quiz Peter,how many federal agencies are there?

Too many.

Yes.

127 is some figure I read.

No, it's like in the range of 450 to 500.

Are you serious?

There is a claim
going around->> Peter Robinson: And
now 15 Cabinet departments,
I looked that up after seeing this->> Marc Andreessen: Well,
we now have this new innovation.
I don't know when it cameout in the last decades,
the concept of an independent agency.

Yes. >> Marc Andreessen
I've read the Constitution.
Independent of everything,
including the Constitution ofthe United States, it's outrageous.

I've read the Constitution,
and there is no provision in there foran independent agency.
By the way,
there are executive branch agenciesthat have their own internal courts.

their own judges.
I've read the Constitution,that's nowhere in there.
Correct.

Right, and so there's a rumor going around,
I don't know if it's true, there's a rumorgoing around that nobody actually knows
the number of federal agencies.
That there's no actual individualperson who actually knows the answer.
One is cuz there's just so many of them,and there's new ones created every year.
But the other is we haveall these fuzzy things now.
The CFPB is the canonical exampleright now, we have these sort of-

CFPB is the Consumer-

Consumer Finance
Protection Board.

Established by Senator Elizabeth Warren.

It's sort of considered Warren's agency, yeah, exactly.
And it is nominal, I don't knowthe exact legal terminology, but
it's nominally an independent agency underthe supervision of the Federal Reserve.

Right, she wrote the legislation specifically so
that no president of the United Statescould fire the director of the CF,
whatever it's called CFPP, which isunconstitutional on the face of it.

On the face of it.
Unambiguously, it's still a unit of that,I don't know if that happened,
I don't know the exact state of that, butit's the unit of the Federal Reserve.
The constitutionality ofFederal Reserve has always been
a very interesting question.

Correct.

The ability for the President.

You're good, really, okay.

I'm not saying these are easy answers,
but these are important questions, right?

Just asking the questions gets you a long way.

Yes, exactly.
These are the same issues thatcome up when people talk about,
like special prosecutors andall these things, which is just all right.
It may be a good idea in theory,it's literally not in the Constitution,
what are we doing?

Right. >> Marc Andreessen
very clear, the president's the chieflaw officer of the United States,
that there is no provision in there.
So anyway, sothere are all of these agencies and
components of the government thathave just sprawled out, basically.
A friend of mine, Curtis Yarvin, has thisgreat line, he says, we are living under
the 80 year evolution of FDR's personalmonarchy, but without FDR, right?

(26:03):
Cuz FDR of course,is the guy with the New Deal, and so
he turned the federal government frombasically this small overlay thing into
this giant sprawling bureaucracy.
And then it basically hascontinued to expand and morph and
mutate under its own power.
And anyway,
so we do seem to have a Supreme Courtthat wants to kinda pull this back in.
So anyway, so yes,there's an opportunity to do this.

(26:25):
The DOGE team has, I think, very cleverideas on all three of the threads that I
described on spend,on headcount, and on regulation.
I'll just give you one example, headcount.
Here's another pop quiz is how manypeople work for the federal government?
How many people work for the federal government?
So as I recall, the Pentagon isa uniform force of about 2 million and

(26:45):
another million and half civilians.
And then the federal government,
actually the headcount hasn't expandedthat much for 20 or 30 years, as I recall.
It's about 2.5 or 3 million in WashingtonDC, civilian bureaucrats, is that right?

How many contractors?

No, okay.

[LAUGH] >> Peter Robinson
Unknown, unknowable, there are estimates that are very high.
I won't wing numbers off at the fly, but
there are estimates ofthe numbers are much higher.
So yeah, so anyway, so then just sort offun fact which is, what's the occupancy
rate of federal buildings in Washington DCright now by people working in the office?

Something like 25%, isn't it?

It's like 25% on average.

Lower than San Francisco.

Yes, it's basically that the Washington DC
federal Building Complexis basically a ghost town.
The security agencies are still full time,the other agencies are not.
In the extreme cases,
you have certain agencies that are allthe way down to a day, a month.
And this is true, there were collectivebargain, and some of the agents,
this is the other thing is that some ofthe agencies employees are unionized at
the federal level.
And there were collective bargainingagreements struck in some of

(27:48):
these agencies where they literally,
during COVID got the rightto never come back to work.
And one of the ones that I'm aware of,an agency I know well,
they literally come backto work a day a month.
And so what the employees do isthey come back a day, a month but
they pair the days.
And so they come back fortwo days every two months.

Wow.

And so it's just like you ask any CEO in corporate America,
how is this whole thing going,what are your employees doing?
And every CEO will tell you, what on earthis happening, are these people working?
And so does the President of the UnitedStates have the legal authority to order
people back to work?
Does it count to be an employee ofthe federal government if you're not

(28:24):
in the office?

All this is just beautiful.

There's a ton of threads like that that they're
gonna plan to throw.

All this is beautiful, really, truly beautiful.
However, DOGE is an advisory commission.

Sure. >> Peter Robinson
the way the President has set it up,is an advisory commission.
It has its sunset date.
Yes. >> Peter Robinson
it goes out of business on July 4th, 2026.
That's right. >> Peter Robinson
I like sunsetting.
Anything to do withthe federal government.
But where do you and Elon and Vivek getthe authority to make anybody do anything,

(28:55):
including Congress to passenabling legislation,
including the President towrite executive orders or.
Given what little background I havein Washington, which I Immediately.
Before you can get John Thune, the leaderof the majority leader in the Senate,
to introduce legislation,
he'll have political people lookingat all the political ramifications.
And there's gonna be some senators.

(29:16):
I don't know that you stepped onthe toes of my constituent here.
The politics is goingto start at you guys.
Right, so
I'll give you one more->> Peter Robinson: How do you get stuff
actually done?
Can I give you one more first?

Please.

So I forget the exact term, but there's a legal term.
So Congress authorizes money forthe executive branch to spend.
I forget, is it the recision?
There's a legal term that basically meansthat the executive branch is also not
allowed to spend less thanCongress appropriates.

True, I have a recommendation, which is that you look at
the 1974 legislation thatremoved from Richard Nixon, or
it removed because of Richard Nixon.
The ability of the President,
which at that point had beentraditionally accepted, to impound funds.

That's right, impoundment.

Impoundment, we want more impoundment.
We wanna get back to impoundment, correct?

Right, impoundment, yes, I forget which way it goes, but
impoundment is the concept thatthe President legally is required to spend
the money that's appropriated.
That the President is notallowed to save money.
The president is not allowed to spendless money than Congress is appropriated.
Once again, if you read the Constitution,it doesn't say that, this has been
an issue of significant constitutionaldebate over the last 40 years,
literally since that happen.
And there have been Wikipedias, but

(30:26):
there's lots of arguments back andforth on this.
I don't know if this is the kind of thingthat the Supreme Court would look at.
Might be a good idea, right?

But the President of the United States, I mean,
you don't have to be a genius in politicalscience to construct the argument.
Which is that there's only one man orwoman, one person who faces the entire
country in an election and thereforecan be said to represent a national,
as opposed to all theselittle parochial interests.
A national interest in an overallceiling on the federal budget.
And that is the President ofthe United States, Correct?

Yeah, so that's the answer.

Okay.

So that's the answer.
And by the way, to be clear,I'm not DOGE, I'm an unpaid intern.

Yes, yes, yes, but we're having fun, Mark, lots of details.

Taking the Elon are running it, and
then it itself is not gettingset up as a permanent agency.
It doesn't have the authority to executeon everything we're talking about, but
the White House does, the executivebranch does, and the President does.
And so it will be as it should be, it willbe a decision of the President on what he
wants to do with these recommendations.
The people being staffedinto the positions,

(31:22):
the new head of OMB has talked publiclyabout being very aligned with this.
The new head of OPM is actuallya partner of ours, is going in there.
He's very aligned with this.
And so the executive branch will havethe execution capability to be able to
do this, but it's as the President'sdeference, and we'll see what happens.

But from what you have seen on your many visits to Mar-A-Lago,
this has the personal interest and
support of the President Electof the United States.

Yeah, he said so repeatedly.
He was asked the other day, he alwaysgets asked, do you still support Elon?
And he's at least so far,100% of the time, he's fully supportive.
And so, yeah, he's greenlit this.
I mean, look, Elon has been living atMar-A-Lago, right, so they're doing this,
and so look, I have full deference tothe president, he'll do what he wants,

(32:07):
this is there.
Let me give you one more thing on this,though, and
this goes to what's happeningmore broadly in the environment.
And this is one of the reasons whyyou have all this panic now about
the decentralship of the Internet,is that you'll recall.
So I'm sure the Grace Commission tried toexplain to the public what was happening
with federal spending, I know Al Goretried to, he went on Letterman and
tried to articulate it.
Ross Perot at one point was trying to doit with the flip charts and all these

(32:28):
things, but there's, we had a SenatorProxmire out of Wisconsin for a long time.

Yes, of course.

He had the Golden Fleece Award, he would come out every year
with the crazy spending things, but it wasalways like, when Proxmire used to do.
It was always like, it's just twominutes once a year on NBC News.
Of course, what does Elon have andwhat does Vivek have,
and what do the rest of us have now,is we now have the ability
to actually ventilate thisinformation in public, right?
We have the ability to actually show anddemonstrate this and

(32:55):
actually expose this tothe public view on both sides.
Number one, here's all the stupid stuff,here's all the stuff that clearly just
like you're being taken fora ride on, right?
And then the other side is,by the way, with corresponding cuts,
here's the money that's being saved that'sgoing back into the taxpayer pocket, and
so, it's beyond PR.
It's not PR anymore, cuz PR kind ofimplies you're going through the press,

(33:16):
those days are over, this is going tobe direct interaction with the public.

Mark, we've just been through a decade now in which we were told
again and again and again that Donald JohnTrump represents a danger to democracy.

Yes [LAUGH].

You are describing a renewal.
Renewal of democracy.

Yes, 100%, clearly.

All right.

100%.

Okay, I just wanted to check.

Yes, and this will be the key, I just, as an observer,
I say this will ultimately be the key.
The key ultimately is gonna be the directrelationship with the president,
with the people.
That is ultimately gonna be the key, and
if the people are on board ofthe president, you know this.
If the people are onboard of the president,
the President has tremendous power thatgives the President the ability to get
a lot of what he wantsdone through Congress.
If the President doesn't havethe support of the people,
Congress can roll him arbitrarily.

(34:01):
And so, Reagan knew this,by the way, FDR [LAUGH] knew this.
[LAUGH] All the good presidents knew this,Trump 100% knows this, and
he does this every day, and he's going to.

If you can bring the country with you, you can go anywhere.

That's right.

18 months ago, you published a 5,000-word essay called
the Techno-Optimist Manifesto,let me quote you.
We are told that technology takesour jobs, reduces our wages,
increases inequality, and is ever onthe verge of ruining everything, but
our civilization was built on technology.
Technology is the glory ofhuman ambition and achievement,

(34:38):
the spearhead of progress, andthe realization of our potential,
it is time once again toraise the technology flag.
Okay, apart from anything else,
there are not a lot of people inSilicon Valley who write as well as that.

There we go.

I'd like to ask how we raise the technology flag with regard to
several specific issues, but first I justwanna circle back to the president elect,
he's 78 years old.
He grew up in an old-fashionedborough of New York, Queens,
he made his start in hiscareer in bricks and mortar,
this is a man who made hismoney by pouring concrete.

(35:20):
Does he understand technology?
Does he feel it the way you feel it,or, and
it would be good enough if he simply said,there's something important here.
I may be not quite the right generation orquite the right background to get it, but
I'll let Andreessen andMusk handle it for me.

Yeah, so- >> Peter Robinson
I'd say the following, my analysis would be, he is world-class on
real estate and on communications, andthose are sort of his foundational skills.
And he's world-class on both,which is probably the first person
in the world to be world-classin both of those things, right?
The real estate industry isnot historically known for
its great communicators,
here you've got somebody who doesboth of those things incredibly well.

(36:00):
He, as a consequence of his knowledgeof real estate, and by the way,
his also involvement in the communicationsindustry where he was one of the huge
winners of the last 20 years withwhat he did with the Apprentice,
which is a very large business.
He very, very deeply understands business,and [LAUGH] as you know,
one of the questions alwaysin Washington is like, wow,
there's a lot of lawyers running around.

(36:20):
And wow,
there are very few people here who haveactually held a job in the private sector.
And there are very few people here whohave ever actually run a company or
been responsible to investors,or had customers.
And so he is also one of the mostsuccessful business people of our time.
So I would say those are likethree very powerful skills, and
then I think what you learn,especiall when you're good at real estate.

(36:41):
And when you're generallygood at business as he is,
I think you learn how to dowhat we call systems thinking.
You have to,I mean these large real estate,
my father-in-law was sort of a Trump kindof generational peer in real estate.

John Arrillaga.

John Arrillaga, and talking to John,
like when John put up one of thesetowers or one of these campuses or
when Trump put up one of thesegiant hotels or whatever,
like these are large-scalesystems projects.
There's many, many dimensions, there'smany things that can go wrong, there's
a lot of things that have to line up,there's huge management complexity to it.
By the way, there is technology changebecause you've got all these things coming
at you and solar and all these new thingscoming in and all these requirements, and

(37:18):
you got to like manage these.
One of the things these guys,my father-in-law always told me and
Trump clearly was the same way is you gotto manage these things hands-on because
they can always go sideways.
And any given day you're sitting therebleeding out money if people aren't doing
the right thing, and sothey're good, he's very good,
I think world-class at thinkingthings through systematically.
And we were talking before aboutthere's this video going around today
of him talking about the watersituation in California.

Yes, yes.

On Joe Rogan, what was that six months ago or whatever?

>> Donald Trump (37:44):
I said, why did he have no water because the water isn't allowed
to flow down?

And at the time,
waters one of those classic Trump thingswhere at the time everybody's like,
why is he going on and on aboutthe water situation in California?
And then of course in the last three daysas we talk, Louisiana is burning down, and
if you listen to what he talked aboutwith the water situation in California,
it's like, yeah,that's all correct [LAUGH].
He is exactly 100% correct,he did the same thing, by the way,
if you remember in the first term when hediagnosed the German energy situation.

Yes.

To the face of the German diplomatic corps
at the United Nations.

You people are going to become dependent on Russia, and
that will be a disaster for you,and it has been a disaster.

And it has been, and if you go back and you just,
if you forget who did it or if you justread the transcript and you read it,
you're just like, wow,that was a really good.
It was an extremely precise and accurate5 and very prescient 5 minute analysis of
this system's problem, which is,where's the energy coming from?
How's it going,what's going to happen here,
what happens if you turn off nuclear?
Same thing in California, what happensto the water and this and that,
the whole thing, and so he's like reallygood at wrapping his head around these

(38:42):
things, I would say at energy.
This is the other thing is he's nowobviously been president for four years,
and so he learned about things to enormousdepth, and so I'm not an energy guy, but
my energy conversation with him,he's extremely sophisticated.
The energy people I know knowthat he's sophisticated, so
he wraps his head around these things,I think very quickly and easily.
And so I don't expect of him that he'sgoing to be coding large language

(39:02):
models in his spare time, but I thinkhe's extremely capable of being able to
understand these things, andI think actually does quite well.

Okay, so let's go, you mentioned energy several times there,
let's go to raising the techno-technologyflag on nuclear energy, quarter of
a century ago, there were 104 nuclearplants operating in the United States.
Today there are just 94, and
the average age of a nuclear plantin the United States is 42 years,
how does the technooptimistrespond to that fact set?

So this is the great tragedy of the domestic policies of
the Nixon administration, right.

Of the Nixon administration.

So Richard Nixon saw the energy crisis coming and
it developed in his second term,started getting underway, and
he announced something hecalled Project Independence.
And he said, this is ridiculous,
we can't be running on fossil fuelsfrom the Middle East, this is crazy.
It's entangling us and all this crazyforeign stuff like we need to stop,
we're the United States,we can power ourselves, and so.

On which he was correct.

Yes, of course, he's completely correct.
He declared Project Independence.
Project Independence was we're gonnabuild 1,000 new nuclear power plants in
the United States by the year 2000 andgo completely independent.
So we're gonna cut the entiregrid over to nuclear production,
electrical consumption, by the way,Corollary, electric cars and so.
And by the way, green like Corollary,no more carbon emissions, right?
We're gonna have 1,000 nuclear plants,no carbon emissions, completely green.

(40:22):
Nuclear plants put out water with a smallamount of easily contained waste, but
we're gonna build those.
And we were building nuclear power plants,as you know, in the 50s, 60s, 70s.
But by the 70s we started to have thesenew technologies like computers where you
could see a way to build much moreefficient and much safer plants.
Right, so he announced that andthen he created
the Environmental Protection Agency and hecreated the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Which should shut down a project which had it gone forward,
would have changed everything.

Yes, and
those agencies preventedProject Independence from happening.

Okay, so, so can I, I think this is a brilliant stroke and
that is because it occurred to me.
My own little head in the middleof the night one night,
I was tossing a turning andthought, hey, wait a minute.
And here's the hey, wait a minute.
The first nuclear submarine was commissioned in 1955.

Right.

Which means that the United States of America,
which has nuclear powered vesselsof all kinds, has been building and
operating small nuclear reactors forsix and seven decades.
And has the systems down sowell that these things can be operated

(41:37):
by 19 year old kids who haven't evenfinish their high school degree.
And the technology is ownedby the American taxpayers.

Yes.

Why aren't we using this?

Where are they?
So as you know->> Peter Robinson: And by the way,
the military is exempt fromthe Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Right, so they just do it.

So is there not a huge opportunity there?

And as you know, literally what they do is they take 19
year old kids and they train themon how to be nuclear engineers.

then they send them outon six month whatever.
Underwater.

Underwater. >> Peter Robinson
as far as I'm aware,there's never been a nuclear incident.
That's my understanding.

Yeah.

Yeah, the other amazing thing about that, by the way,
it was pre-DEI.

Of course.

Just imagine how amazing it is,
given everything we know today,
that you could actually do thiswithout the enormous benefits of DEI.
Imagine what you could do with DEI.

Now you're being subverse.

[LAUGH] Quite possibly.
Anyway, so the more serious partin those days, as you know,
because they knew they coulddo them in subs and so
therefore they just assumed that theywould also do them for airplanes, right?
They're nuclear powered airplanes.

That I did not.

You remember the Tom Swift novels?

That I remember, yes.

I'm reading them with my 9 year old and
it's the very first timethere's multiple generations.
Tom Swift boy inventor.
And these novels basically forkids, they were like whatever,
Harry Potter of the time or something.
But there's this great series from the 50swith the second generation Tom Swift, and
they're great.
And it's like Tom Swift invents this andthat, he invents all these things and
you get to.
And then has adventures based on them.
And so they're very exciting books.

(43:03):
But the very first book is Tom Swift andhis Flying Lab.
And of course the flying lab isa triple decker 747 thing with
this vertical takeoff and landingpowered by its own nuclear power plant.
And you just assumed,of course, of course,
of course you put a nuclear because.
And if you put,by the way a nuclear plant in a plane,
of course you could have a 747that takes off vertically.

(43:23):
And by the way, in the book they literallytake the thing up to like 30,000ft and
they just park it and they just hangin midair and hover for three hours and
have lunch.

Which you can do.

Which you can do if you have unlimited power.
Yes, this is it.
And by the way, this technology is forpeople concerned about carbon emissions.
This technology is the silver bullet.

It is, is the general feeling, my general feeling, correct,
that if we unleash technology,we use the free market,
we use what the government hasalready discovered an intelligent.
That there are all kinds of problemswe already know how to solve.

We totally know how to do this.
And to your point, most of the nuclearplants that we have today are now 30, 40,
50, 60 years old.
We know how to build much better versions.

Yes.

We know how to build much more sophisticated versions of this,
and by the way, sodo the Japanese and others.
And so the new plants would bemuch better than the old plants,
they would be much safer.
We know exactly how to do this.
My devious plan is we shouldreincarnate Project Independence,
we should build a thousand new civilianplants, we should do the Nixon plan,
kind of everything over.

(44:29):
But here's my way to getit done politically,
which is we give Charles Koch contract.
And the reason is because it accomplisheseverybody's goals, he would do it-

You'd better give us
two sentences on who Charles Koch.

Charles Koch,
people know the Koch brothers was always amisnomer, I mean, there were brothers, but
really it was,when people think about the Koch brothers.

Charles Koch and the brothers.

The genius of the family, and
is the guy who still runs Koch Industries,which is one of the largest companies in
the country, one of the largestprivate companies in the world.

He stands out in American business history, as I recall.
If I think, I think I have this correct,that Charles Koch and
his brothers inherited a successful butmodest company from their father and
built it into a company which,last time I checked, had revenues of.
Well, I don't know whetherit was revenues or market.
It's a company that's worth $100 billion.
I believe that that's correctas of a few years ago.

(45:17):
And did it without ever borrowing a penny.
They did it entirely onreinvesting profits.

And they reinvest, by doctrine, under Charles's leadership,
they reinvest 90% of profits every year.

Okay so why is he gonna be interested in-

by the way,
I don't know what it's worth,but I suspect it's much-

Bigger than that.

I think it's very large,
very successful if it were to go public.
But yeah, look, I mean,Charles is number one.
Charles is one of the genius businessmen,industrialists of our time.
He also became, of course,a major force in politics.
He and the Koch brothers got tarredwith this, they're fascist Nazis.
Even though, as you probably know, Charlesis a libertarian, he's a libertarian,
free market guy.

(45:55):
He's a [INAUDIBLE] Milei, he and Milei,basically right, have sort of identical.
Milton Friedman, he's a libertarian.

I've interviewed him on this program.

Yeah, and by the way, also just a wonderful human being,
really warm and genuine,incredibly open, wonderful guy.
So my idea is you give himthe contract to do it cuz number one,
he'd do a great job cuz it's one ofthe best industrials in the world.
So he would win cuz Koch industries wouldbe rebuilding the power system for the US.
And then the Democrats would win cuzthey'd make Charles Koch care about

(46:22):
climate change.
And not just that, but actually solve it.
And so everybody would get bothwhat they most hate and most want.
Now, when I have floated thisidea in Washington up until now,
I haven't gotten a lot of takers, butmaybe it's time to bring it up again.

Mark, I'm going to try to extend this theme of problems
we already know how to solve if the technooptimists are permitted to address
the problem.
And that is, now this is a flyer, I don'tknow that I'm right, that's the border.

Yeah. >> Peter Robinson
administration, Customs Servicesrecorded 11 million encounters,
releasing about 2.5 million intothe country to await processing.
The government also admits,admits some 2 million gotaways.
So that makes, by the government's ownadmission, at least 4.5 million illegal
entries into the United States during thefour years of the Biden administration.

(47:14):
Okay, on top of which I note,that as far as I can tell, Donald Trump,
in his first term only built 80original miles of border wall.
He refurbished wall and straighten.
But set all that aside.
Don't we have ground sensors,drones we can put up?

(47:36):
Of course it lies within the kenof the United States of America to
control its own border usingthe technology that we already possess.
Am I wrong about this?
Well, let me tell the story of this company called Anduril.

Anduril. >> Marc Andreessen
Which you've invested in.

Which we've invested in.
Okay, so the founder ofAnderil is this super genius,
real life Tony Stark kinda character,the Howard Hughes of our time.
Real life Iron man named,Named Palmer Luckey.

Palmer Luckey.

Who's this, super genius from Orange County.
And we knew him really well becausehe was the founder of Oculus,
which the VR company that then Metabolt.
We were investors in that.
And so,he's got two giant wins in a row here.
And basically he used the money fromOculus to basically start Anduril
with a bunch of his partners,and they launched the company.

(48:24):
When the Trump stuff in 2016 reached,white hot criticality, and
everybody was going completely bananas.
Palmer shows up and he's like,I know how to solve the border problem.
We do basically mesh networks withsensor towers on the border and
then with drones doing oversight.
And then we do what's called sensorfusion, where you have all these different
dispersed sensors and then you bringthem together on a single screen.
And then you can tag individual people andyou can watch them come across, and

(48:47):
you can use it for.

If there's a problem,
you can send inthe personnel to solve them.

Yeah, exactly.
Or, by the way,you can send in a drone, right?

A drone?

And look like the border.
For anybody who works in the border,
what they'll tell you is, look, there'sone thing which is border enforcement, and
there's a lot of questionsabout what to do with that.
But the other is, like,people get in real trouble on the border.

Yes.

And they're like, they're dying.

They're dying.

Starvation and, like, thirst, haeat and so forth.

With a drone, you can find somebody who's in
trouble and help them.

And bring them water.
And bring them water, or by the way,the other problem is child trafficking.
And so it's like, let's get eyes ona potential child trafficking if there's
like two adults and 20 kids.
Okay, let's get eyes on that so that we'reready so we can go get the kids, right?
And so obviously you want to knowwhat's happening, bu this was like,
right in the teeth of the builda wall kind of moment.

(49:30):
And so Palmer comes in and pitches us andgoes through the whole thing.
And literally it's just like, my God,this is like the genius of all time.
We have to invest in this company.
And his business plan is to use technologyto hunt Mexicans on the southern border in
2016.
And we're just like, God,we just basically have a heart attack.
And to our discredit, we flinch andwe don't make the investment.

(49:51):
Anduril goes on, andactually, it's interesting.
Anduril was actually not very successfulin that program under Trump because it
turns out Trump beinga real estate developer.

He wants awall.

He actually wants a wal.
And by the way, still does.
And I think this time he's, by the way,
this time he'll get it becausenow he knows how to do it.
But as you know, he ran into a lotof roadblocks in the first term.
Still built quite a bit,but hit roadblocks anyway.
So Palmer's like,all right, fine, whatever.
And so what he started doingis he took that technology and
he used it to start buildingdefensive systems for the military.

(50:22):
And so, for example, you have a militarybase in the middle of nowhere in
Afghanistan or whatever, and you have allthese potential threats coming at you, and
you have the exact same problem.
You have perimeter security problem.
And so they started deploying sensornetworks and sensor fusion and drones and
all these things to be ableto defend military bases.
And then one of the most amazingthings I've ever seen happened,

(50:44):
which is, and Palmer in the Valley,was like a pariah, right?
He was excoriated.
He was constantly being smeared andslandered for being a horrible fascist
Nazi, being like the worst personimaginable, like, all this stuff.
And then this life's incredibly.
And he couldn't get invitedindustry conferences and
people just said allthese horrible things.
The day, [LAUGH] Putin invaded Ukraine,

(51:04):
the political valence went180 degrees in a day.
And Palmer became a hero ofevery liberal in Silicon Valley.
Because now Anduril is going to like,there's two things that we know.
There's two things everygood American liberal knows.
We absolutely must not defendthe American southern border, and
we absolutely must defendthe Ukrainian border.

Yes, yes, yes.

We must, [LAUGH] the whole Ukrainian border, right?
And Anduril in that time had becomea very successful company, and
by the way, was doing increasinglysophisticated defensive military systems.
And by the way, now is actuallydoing offensive military systems.
It's actually up to, andincluding full weapon systems.
And so all of a sudden thattechnology became super relevant to

(51:44):
the Ukraine situation.
As you know, the Ukrainian battlefield hasbeen a revolution in military technology
with the drone stuff.
And soall of Palmer's theories are coming true.

Ukrainian kids operating drones shut down the Russian
navy in the Black Sea.

That's right.

It is an astonishing achievement, okay.

And they take out these main battle tanks.

Which brings me to, if I may.

Yeah.

Just again, your feel for it.
If I'm still withthe techno-optimist manifesto.
This notion of raising the technologyflag, another problem, we may not have it.
It's larger, it's more, but in thisadministrative, is Donald Trump, is Doge.
Is somebody saying,
get me a Palmer Lucky asDeputy Secretary of Defense, we have to.

(52:30):
Or here again, this is Robinson'slittle way of thinking of it.
Extremely elementary,but it goes like this.
The Chinese outnumber us andthey always will.
The Chinese have a big enough economy tospend what they want to on defense now.
And by many counts, they've alreadygot more surface vessels than we have.
They're working on submarines,on and on it goes.
Our only sustainableadvantage over the Chinese,

(52:52):
our only sustainable advantage isgoing to be technological innovation.
And so we have to have a Pentagon thatknows how to move quickly on innovation
and somehow or other is able to overcomethe cultural divide between straight laced
colonels who run the requisition programsand the Palmer Luckies of the world
who build their companies wearingHawaiian shirts in Converse sneakers.

(53:17):
But we ought to be able to do that.

Yeah, so that you may know,
the guy going in isDeputy Secretary of Defense.
So number two,who's like the chief operating officer for
the Pentagon is Steve Feinberg.

I don't know.

So Steve Feinberg was the longtime head
of Cerberus Capital Management.
So he's one of the world'sleading private companies.

So he's already on this.

He's already on this. He's already on this, and
then he ran actually the.

This is the most good news I've had at this table in
a long time.

He's great.
He's great.So this is probably,
I think he is, I mean, look, andthey've had Cape Pole Ash Carter was a,
who passed away, was a friend of mine.
They've had good people in there.
But I think Steve is probably the bestperson in that role since actually
David Packard,who was in that role, I believe.

Steve is like an incredible operator andvery aware of these things and
very steeped in this world.
And he ran the Presidential IntelligenceAdvisor Board in the first Trump term and
is kind of fully integrated in.
And then I'll just tell you,
like without naming names of peoplehaven't been announced, but people,
a lot of very smart people are puttingup their hands and going in.
Excellent.

And by the way, to your point, this is a great example.
The issues are just starting, right?
So the Ukrainian battlefieldis a revolution.
By the way, there's also likeall kinds of unfortunately,
Ukraine being the tragedy that it is,people are learning a lot.
The nature of war is changing,
unfortunately, the same thing'shappening with Israel and Gaza.
There's a lot is being learned.

(54:34):
This is what happened.

Or some, I can't remember who was some famous general
said, war.
War is a test to see who can learn faster.

So the military is one of these amazing things where in
peacetime, they're training andthey're preparing and
they have all these theories,but they're not being tested.
They don't have customers.
[LAUGH] There's no mark to market.
In peacetime, you don't know.

Right.

When you know, unfortunately, is when you go to war.
And that's when all the learning happens.
And so there's learning happening there,learning happening in Ukraine,
there's learning happening in Israel andGaza.
And then,if something kicks off with China,
there will be very rapidlearning very fast.
I would just pose to you a challengeinto the system, for example.
It's not clear sitting here today withwhat we know, it's not clear that, like,
surface naval vessels are actually used.

Correct. >> Marc Andreessen
Somebody has to
figure this out.

Exactly, and aircraft carriers are open.
Tthere are entire military doctrinesof not just us, but many other players.

I asked someone I probably shouldn't
name because he doesn't.
I don't know whetherthis was in confidence.
I asked a former admiral the other day,if shooting begins over Taiwan,
how close can Americanaircraft carriers get?
And he said,American aircraft carriers must stay 1,000
miles away from any hostile activity.

(55:45):
The Chinese have already pushedthe surface perimeter out 1,000 miles.
Anyway, to your point->> Marc Andreessen: Hypersonics are coming
and then drones are coming.
Exactly.

And I just said, we're at the very beginning.
This is why it's very important thatthese people be good, to your point that.
The drone thing is just at the verybeginning cuz the Ukraine stuff,
there's a lot of hobbyist drones andthere's these low end drones.
But the drones are gonnaget very sophisticated and
they're gonna get manufacturedin much higher quantities.
And so, every time you see a drone today,
just think of that actuallybeing 1,000 drones, right?

(56:18):
So what does even a naval destroyerdo against 1,000 incoming drones
that are all armed with bombs big enoughto blow a hole in the side of it?
You mentioned Ukraine.
The Ukraine,I think has been weaponizing jet skis.

Jet skis?

Jet skis,
I think that was part of the attackthey did on the Russian surface fleet.
Was they turned commercialjet skis into drone bombs.
And so,it's long conversation we had about,
there's all kinds of ways to win here.
But these questions allhave to be looked at,
the entire system needs to get adapted.
Being a democracy, we have troublegetting in front of these things.

Okay, which brings me to a few sort of last questions for you,
Mark.
And for the first couple letme play devil's advocate.
You, Elon, Vivek, David Sacks,you guys are all acting from
the highest motives, butI'm playing devil's advocate here.
You're moving very fast,you're really moving fast.

(57:20):
Those federal workers whosejobs we wanna eliminate,
they all have mortgage payments,they all have families.
All of this technology,there are winners and losers.
I mean, I'm perfectly open to the argumentthat over time, technology creates jobs.
But when Uber came along, taxi driverslost their jobs and now self driving

(57:42):
vehicles are the next wave andUber drivers are gonna be in trouble.
Okay, so all that said,here's another brief video.
And this also comes from the interviewI did all those years ago with
Milton Friedman.
Listen to Milton Friedman.
Okay, Milton Friedman,if you are made dictator for one day,
the next day the American government->> Milton Friedman: No,

(58:04):
I don't wanna be made dictator.
You wouldn't. >> Milton Friedman
dictators.
Okay. >> Milton Friedman
bring about change by the agreement forthe citizens.
I don't believe in arbitrary [INAUDIBLE].
Let me put it this way then.
You're proposal->> Milton Friedman: If we can't persuade
the public that it'sdesirable to do these things,
we have no right to impose themeven if we had the power to do it.

(58:28):
If we cannot persuade our fellow citizens to support changes,
we have no right to make those changes.
Are you and Elon andVivek and David Sacks,
are the Doge boys down with the politicalprogram of engaging in persuasion and
bringing your fellow citizens with you dayby day by day as all of this goes forward?

So I wanna check myself out of this a little bit.

You're an unpaid intern, I know.

I appreciate you keep trying to rope me in a position
of formal authority andpower here, but again,
I wanna stress both partsof that unpaid and intern.

All right.

So I'm not signing up for what you're saying myself.
I will say, look, I think Elon isa world class communicator, obviously.
Vivek is a world class communicator,
obviously, Trump is maybe the bestcommunicator of our time.
And so they'll do, I'm highly confidentthat the three of them, in whatever
combination, whatever form that theydecide they're gonna be able to do it.
Can I just go back to your thing though.

Of course. >> Marc Andreessen
unemployment, because this is the thing.
So you probably know this,
there is actually a way to measure thepace of technology change in the economy.
There's a way to measure it andput a number on it.
With related to everything,both the positives and
negatives of technology change,including job replacement.
And.>> Peter Robinson: This is Paul Romer's?

Productivity growth.

work around this, but the basic economicconcept is productivity growth.
All right. >> Marc Andreessen
productivity growth, it's the quantitativemeasure of technology change.
There's a few other things that lump in,
but fundamentally it'sabout technology change.
And really what it is is it's a metric forhow quickly an economy,
year over year, is able to producemore output with less input, right?

(01:00:06):
And you can go either way on that,but fundamentally that's the lever.
And just the thought experiment,if technology can't be used
to produce more output with less input,what's the point?
Right, if it's not good at bringing downcosts and increasing free spending power
and increasing demand in the economy,then what's the point?
Then it's just a game or something, right.
So productivity growth is the metricthat captures the actual impact.

(01:00:26):
And productivity growth, therefore,is the metric that captures, for example,
the downstream impact on employment.
for good or for bad.
If you look at the sweep of Americanhistory and history of capitalism,
history of Western capitalism.
Have in the last 50 years, we've beenLiving in an era of high productivity
growth, which is to say an area of furioustechnological change and future shock.

(01:00:48):
And my God, look at all these amazingthings and what an impact they're having.
Or have we been living in an area actuallyof historically low productivity growth
with very little progress?
Our friend Peter Thiel has persuaded me that it's the latter.

>> Marc Andreessen (01:00:57):
It's the latter.
Well, it's for sure->> Peter Robinson: It is the latter.
It's for sure the latter because it's in the number,
you can see it in the number.

>> Peter Robinson (01:01:01):
It's demonstrable.

It's demonstrable, and
specifically what happened is basicallybetween, there's a long backstory here.
But basically between in recent history,between, call it 1920, in 1970.
That 50-year arc, productivity growththroughout the economy moved much faster,
was two or three times higher.
And then basically starting aroundthe time I was born, right around 1971,
basically it took a permanentdownshift and it never recovered.

(01:01:24):
And it wobbles a littlebit during recessions,
it ticks up a little bit cuzpeople get more efficient, but
it's been generationally low now fortwo generations.

So the whole game.

Yeah.

Excuse me, this comes to a question I was about to ask.
When Ronald Reagan, again of that morning,again in America, when Ronald Reagan took
office, federal debt, the total federaldebt as a proportion of GDP was about 32%.
Today, 126%, the whole game is going to begetting productivity growth up, correct?

Exactly, so you have to get productivity growth up because
that's where economic growth comes from.
And productivity growth iswhat causes economic growth.

productivity growth causeseconomic growth is because if
you can generate more with less, then youcan take things today that cost $100 and
then you can get them instead for$90, $80, $70, $60.
And then the consumer or
the business has additional spending powerthat they can use to buy new things.
That is the mechanism of economic growth.
mechanism for why economies grow orwhether they don't grow.

(01:02:23):
If productivity growth goes to zero,there is no economic growth.
If productivity growth is high, youwill have lots of jobs transformations,
you will have lots of jobs beingcreated and destroyed, but
you will have a growing economy.
And you will have basically an economicheyday in which there's opportunity
everywhere and people will look at it andyou see there have been times like this.
The mid-90s had a little bit of this, themid-80s, you remember when there's a surge

(01:02:45):
of economic growth,everybody gets really cheerful.
Well, that's as a consequenceof productivity growth.
That morning again in America,
what happened was that by 1983the stock market started to recover and
by '84 the economy itself is startingto grow and grow really briskly.
I think '84, '85, the number was up to6% for something like eight months.

So if you're careful- >> Peter Robinson
That's right, and so if you care about the country and
if you care about the people ofthe country, what you want is growth.
You want economic growth,in order to get economic growth,
you need productivity growth.
Things are going to change, but you'regoing to have the growth such that people
are optimistic and see lots of opportunityfor themselves and for their children.
The enemy is not technology-drivenunemployment, the enemy is no growth.

(01:03:23):
The enemy is to end up where the UK andGermany and
Canada have worked themselves into,which is no growth, cuz what happens?
And then you think about the translationfrom economics to politics.

What happens in a- They start ripping their countries apart.

Zero sum politics.
If you have zero sumeconomics with no growth,
you have to have zero sum politics.
Because the only way for
anybody to get anything is totake it away from somebody else.
In a high growth environment,you have positive sum economics,
which means you havepositive sum politics.
You have a sense of possibility andopportunity [LAUGH] and awakening, and
growth, and excitement, right?
And people are, wow, this is fantastic,and I can't believe all the opportunities

(01:03:54):
and I can't believe how fast mystandard of living is advancing.
And I can't believe the jobsare opening up to my kids.
And so if If we got, this is where thenarrative on this goes so sideways, if we
got what people think is the apocalypticnightmare of rapid technological change,
which is to say rapid productivity growth.
We would have a boom economylike you've never seen and
we would have people be the happiestthey've ever been in their entire lives.
That is precisely whatwe should be going for.

(01:04:15):
And by the way, anybody who's listeningto this, who's concerned about either
left wing populism orright wing populism, this is the answer.
This is how you defame populism,the way you defame populism is you grow.

Okay, so I'm gonna repeat the question that I asked
at the very beginning, butthis time a little more seriously.
As I said a moment ago, when Reagantook office and worked those changes,
federal debt was only 26% of GDP,and now it's 122%.
I correct myself, excuse me,I think it was 32%, now it's 122%.

(01:04:49):
In 1980,our adversary was the Soviet Union.
And the Soviet Union was bad anddangerous.
It had nuclear weapons.
But its economy was essentially negligiblethroughout the entire Cold War.
I looked this up the other day,throughout almost the entire Cold War,
the number of Soviets who studied inthe United states was just 50,000.

(01:05:10):
China, there are 250,000 students,
Chinese nationals,studying in this country right now.
Your friend Elon Musk sold 650,000Teslas in China last year.
A single factory, it's really a city,
a single factory producedalmost all of the 218 million,

(01:05:34):
if I recall, iPhones that Applesold around the world last year.
We can't live without China, in some way.
People will attack me for putting it thatbaldly, but this is gonna be a trick.
In some ways, it's more formidablethan the Soviet Union was.
So I put it to you, we are in some ways inworse shape, more polarized as a country.

(01:05:59):
The federal government has metastasized.
As you said, we're deeper in debt.
We're facing a moreformidable opponent in China.
Do you really believe we can pull it off?
Is there a chance for a national renewal?

Well, let me say first,
both those problems are evenworse [LAUGH] than you presented.
So, as you're probably aware,
the national debt is growing at a paceof a trillion dollars per 100 days.
And so this is one of the things, theproblem has been building for a while, but
these last four years,
whatever governors were there beforejust got completely taken off.
And so, we've been spending moneylike it's going out of fashion.

(01:06:38):
So, a trillion dollars every hundred days,Thomas Massie, who's one of the only
libertarian members of Congress, he'san MIT engineer, really brilliant guy.
And he made himself a lapeldebt clock counter, right?
And so, when you talk to,when you talk to Thomas, it's worrying,
the increase in the national debt.
Last time I talked to him, he said heneeds to re engineer it because we're at,

(01:06:59):
whatever, 37 trillion and we're addinganother trillion every 100 days.
And the pace of adding,cuz of the compounding,
the pace of adding is accelerating.
So it's gonna be 90 days,80 days, 70 days.
And so he says->> Peter Robinson: Interest payments now
exceed the Pentagon budget.
Correct, exactly, and
there's no upper boundon where they can go.
And of course, this is the classiccycle that you can get into,
which is, the more that compounds,the higher rates rise,

(01:07:19):
the more you're starving the real economy,right?
And then you get in this cascade where, asvarious economies discover repeatedly in
the world, andwe've discovered in the past,
you get in these spirals that are reallybad on interest rates and inflation.
So Thomas's challenge, I think, overthe holidays was to re-engineer this clock
to add another digit so that it's gonnakeep working when it hits 100 trillion.

(01:07:42):
So that train is moving.
And we could have a long conversationabout the legislative process has really
broken down with these giant omnibus kindof bills that get dumped on people's desk
the day before they're supposed to leave.
1500 pages with 12 hours to read andprocess that you have to vote on or
literally, they tell you you're killingsick children and all this stuff.

(01:08:02):
And so, this is a very big, speaking ofthe DOGE, this is a very big problem.
And then look, the China thing,the problem is compounding.
And I'll just tell you whereI'm worried right now,
where the problem is compounding.
So you mentioned the, sort of,iPhone assembly, and that's a big deal.
But basically, there's three industriesthat sort of follow phones that

(01:08:23):
are kicking in right now.
So, one is drones.
And it's sort of ina bizarre turn of events,
the Chinese basically own the globaldrone market for all, basically,
the consumer drones, all the cheap drones.
Which by the way, numerically then are thedrones that all the militarys also use in
overwhelming numbers.
And something over 90% of all drones usedby the US military are made in China.
And the thing is,it's not just a company, they're-

Could you get to
the cheery part, please?

No, no, it gets worse, it gets worse, it gets worse,
it gets worse before it gets.
So the drone thing is not just a company,it's an entire ecosystem.
It's all of the componentry.
We have a drone company that's been tryingto compete with the Chinese company.
Number one, the Biden FAA has beentrying to kill us this entire time,
trying to do all kinds of things to makesure that American drone companies can't
succeed as part of their war on tech.

(01:09:08):
It's literally just another in the longlist of ways that they've been just trying
to absolutely kill us.
But two is, China has figured this out.
And so, the US has been sanctioningAI chips going to China,
China is now sanctioning, they sanctionour drone company for the battery,
[LAUGH] cuz the battery is made in China,right?
And so they have like significantleverage, not just for the drones, but for
the entire supply chain.

They have cards to play.

They have cards to play.
By the way, the drone supply chain isvery analogous to the car supply chain.
A self driving electric car is verysimilar to a drone, or for that matter,
to an iPhone.
It's an electrical mechanical device, butit's a lot of the same kind of battery
technology, chip technology,sensor technology.
So they now have their version of what theGermans used to have, which is sort of,

(01:09:51):
the thousands of mid market companies thatmake all the parts that go into a car.
But the German ecosystem is still makingthem for old internal combustion cars,
the Chinese ecosystem is making them forelectric cars and self driving cars.
And of course, that means the new Chinesecars that are coming out are really good
and they have a giant advantage on cost.
And they are starting to bring to marketcars that are equivalent in quality to

(01:10:12):
western cars at a third ora fourth of price.
So that's coming.
And then the big one that follows phones,drones, and cars, logically, is robots.
And so, we are on the verge of the actualrobotics revolution that we've all seen in
science fiction stories forever->> Peter Robinson: And
the Chinese are ahead of us there?
100%, now, we have the leading, this is important,

(01:10:35):
we have the leading software,likewe have the leading R&D.
Like, we have the smartest,
I'm convinced we have likethe smartest robotics AI people.
We have a bunch of companies->> Peter Robinson: We still
have the best people?
We have the best people, specifically for
the design of the systems, but
we don't have anything resemblingthe manufacturing capability at all.
And again, it's not just whether a companycan build a robot, it's whether you have
the thousands of companies that makeall the components that go into robots.

(01:10:57):
An example, you've seen these videosof the Boston Dynamics robot dog.

Yes.

And you can, they're not a very aggressive company going to
market, those are like $50,000 products.
You can go buy one.
China has an equivalent product that,by the way,
looks extremely similar andbehaves extremely similar, and
has, among its capabilities,it can climb stairs, it can do back flips.
It can stand on its hind legs.
It can climb and descend inclines.

(01:11:25):
You can put wheels on it.
It can shoot at 30 miles an hour.
It can lock the wheels andclimb stairs with the wheels on.
By the way, it also is hookedinto a large language model, so
it talks to you in a very nice,a very plummy voice.
It will teach you quantum physics.
Full voice control.
Price point, $1,500, right?

Cheer me up, cheer me up.

So this is all coming.
So step one is clarity, [LAUGH] right?
And then, by the way, everything we'vejust been talking about is also upstream
from all the military applications, right?
Cuz it's that same supply chain that thengoes into everything we talked about in
the military.
And so, I just say,
this is a very fundamentalthing that we have to confront.
And having this very fragmented approachwhere we on Tuesdays hate the domestic

(01:12:09):
American technology industry andare trying to kill it.
And on Thursdays think we're gonnasomehow develop some sort of, competitive
response to China on cars or on weapons inthe future, there has been no coherence.
One of my favorite questionsto ask in Washington is, okay,
what's the whole of governmentstrategy on technology?
Of course, zero.
What's the whole ofgovernment strategy on China?

(01:12:30):
Zero, right?
It turns out the president matters.
And so, yes, this is preciselywhy this all matters so much.
This has to be directly confronted.
We and our companies are enthusiasticat signing up to solve these problems.

And the president- >> Marc Andreessen
need a government that wantsto work with us on this.
Donald John Trump is alive to all of this?

Yes, 100%, no question.
He is, and then his people are.
And they, yes, this stuff,they understand.

Mark, would you close our conversation by reading this excerpt
from your essay,the Techno Optimist Manifesto?

Love to.
We believe in the romance of technology,of industry.
The romance.
The eros of the train, the car,the electric light, the skyscraper,
the microchip, the neural network,the rocket, the split atom.
We believe in adventure.
Undertaking the hero's journey,rebelling against the status quo,
mapping uncharted territory,conquering dragons, and
bringing home the spoils forour community.

(01:13:22):
We believe that we have been andwill always be the masters of technology,
not mastered by technology.
This is really key point today.
Victim mentality is a curse in everydomain of life, including in our
relationship with technology,both unnecessary and self-defeating.
We are not victims, we are conquerors.
We believe America andher allies should be strong and not weak.
Economic, cultural, and military strengthflow from technological strength.

(01:13:43):
A technologically strong America isa force for good in a dangerous world.
We believe in greatness.

Marc Andreessen, thank you very much.

Peter, a pleasure.

For the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation,
I'm Peter Robinson.
Thank you for joining us.
[MUSIC]

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Marc Andreessen: It’s Morning Again In America

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

All Episodes

Marc Andreessen: It’s Morning Again In America

On Purpose with Jay Shetty