Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future - Marc Andreessen

And of course, you know, the definition of the intolerant, you know, very rapidly goes from, you know, small people, the small set of people who are like truly antisocial to basically everybody who doesn't agree with every single thing on the, you know, thousand item checklist of what makes a good person. Right. And so, you know, it's, you know, put it this way. It's hard to win elections when your electoral strategy is to shrink your coalition as much as you possibly can by driving out as many people as possible by tagging them as racist or sexist or intolerant. like it just doesn't work it doesn't win elections it doesn't lead to a happy company it doesn't lead to a well-functioning university it doesn't lead to a well-functioning organization of any kind and i think i think a lot of leaders have have maybe finally figured that out yeah i think any group that's bound together of the mutual distaste of an out group not the mutual love of an in-group the only way that you can continue to bind that together is to scapegoat and shave off the people on the outside insufficiently pure continue to point the finger at them and say well at least we're not dot dot dot that thing over there uh but yeah i mean it's the reason i've had a bunch

of conversations with people on the left anna kasparian chenk yuga uh dave smith you're like people who varied political standings anna the fact that you can only move from left to right you can't go from right to left. So it's a one-way valve. It's a one-way street. And guess what happens? The street that allows you to move in one direction is going to be more welcoming and better populated. Yeah. And I don't know if you may know this, either because of age or nationality, you might not know this, but this happened before, actually, in my lifetime. So sort of the late 60s, the 1970s were, in many ways, a lot like what we just went through in the last decade.

um you know and sort of you know trump is that was that you know we the version of trump at that time was nixon um and uh you know the version of of things like um you know the iraq war was the vietnam war and so forth and so there were you know energy crises inflation all these all these you know hostages crisis all these crazy comparisons and um uh and and basically and what happened actually was you know jimmy carter lost in 1980 and then democrats didn't win another national election until 1992 um it took actually 12 years uh for the democrat party to get back on track. And really what had to happen was the party and the movement behind it had to go back to the center. And to your point, had to become a party of actual inclusivity, of actual inclusivity, of actual tolerance. You know, it is sort of the Democratic Party had to reconstruct its own big tent precisely for the reason you said, which is you have to be able to attract people back. Like you have to get people to be able to come back and feel like they're part of a broad-based coalition and not just part of a very narrow thing. Now, at that time, it took 12 years, Right. So, you know, they lost in 80, they lost in 84, they lost in 88. And then Bill Clinton and then a guy named Al Fromm, who ran this thing called the Democratic Leadership Council, and then Al Gore, you know, kind of put together this program to kind of bring the Democrats back to center.

And then that led to, you know, a boom, you know, for the Democratic Party with a much more, you say, sensible centrist, you know, set of policies and a much, much more, you know, kind of open minded and optimistic attitude, by the way, pro business, pro pro pro patriotism, you know, kind of pro, you know, kind of treating everybody well. And so, you know, I am cautiously optimistic that the current Democratic Party will be able to find its way back in less than 12 years. And I think that would be good for the country, right? I mean, I think even if you're a Republican, you should want there to be a healthy, vibrant, viable, centrist, sensible, responsible, you know, kind of even, you know, kind of stable, you know, configuration of an opposition party as opposed to, you know, as opposed to what we've seen recently.

And so I'm, I'm cautiously, you know, there's a democratic party, there's a, there's a civil war already, you know, kind of playing out the democratic party and, you know, there's, there's all these different arguments going back and forth already. And I'm, you know, but you're starting to see voices like Richie Torres and Ro Khanna and others who are standing up saying, you know, it's kind of time to go back to the center. Um, and, and I'm, again, I'm cautiously optimistic that that will happen. How big of a civil war do you think is unfolding at the moment? So it's really big. So, um, it's really quite something. So, um, a couple of things. So one is the, there was just a political story that was really good that talked about the first big kind of summit meeting that, that the Democrats have had, which was the DNC hosted a meeting of the state, uh, uh, democratic party, uh, leaders and, and, and it started with a full land acknowledgement, right. And then the, right. Which is step one. Okay. And then, and then, and then the current chairman of the party, you know, gave the STEM wanting speech about how the party absolutely, you know, needs to double down on, on identity politics. Um, right. Uh, so, you know,

sort of, you know, step two. And then, and then, you know, this, this horrific, you know, tragedy in New York with this CEO getting, you know, shot and killed, you know, there's now, you know, loud prominent voices on the, on the left, including in the press, you know, saying, you know, basically, you know, yay murder, which I think is, you know, step three is maybe, maybe not, like, these are not vectoring in the direction of like, let's just say a successful majority electoral, electoral path. But, but again, like the, the contrast is clear, like that, that is, that is a conceivable path. There are some people who want to go on that path. I mean, I think there are a much larger number of, you know, completely sensible people in the party and interested in the party and interested in rejoining the party who would like to, you know, who would like to see the exact opposite. So, but, but yeah, I mean, they're, they are going to.

you know, argue this and litigate this, I think, all the way out. I think they, you know, they really feel like they have to, um, they have to argue this. And you mentioned the folks you've talked to, like, you know, there, there are now some, you know, I think some, you know, some voices, including some, you know, folks that are pretty far left who are kind of saying, all right, let's, let's pause for a moment and make sure we're not going off the cliff. You work with a lot of founders, CEOs, tons of your friends will be in that position too. What do you make of the response to the Brian Thompson killing and the situation more broadly? Well, the killing, I mean, the killing itself was obviously an enormous shock. And I know people who knew him and had been with him recently. So, you know, he was a well-known figure in the healthcare industry. So, you know, very respected among, in the, in the, you know, sort of the business circles. So, yeah, I mean, enormous shock. And then of course, you know, at first you're just like, well, these things are either random or, you know, you know, or most murders are, you know, committed by, you know, you know, somebody in somebody's personal life. You know, the way this one seems to be unfolding,

you know is then I don't know anything that's not in the press but it seems to have a you know ideological motivation behind it and and so you know and then it's like okay is that just a one-off or you know is this the beginning of a pattern um and um you know I would say it you know a lot of people I talk to are very disconcerted by I would say the enthusiasm that a lot of people in the press are showing to yeah there have been a tremendous there have been a shockingly large number of stories of the line of you know of course murder is bad but we shouldn't laugh I shouldn't laugh. Right. Well, I mean, it is.

I mean, you have to laugh for your cry, right? So, and then it's like 3,000 words that come after the butt, right? And it's like, okay, like, you know, which is basically a long-winded, you know, sort of justification for murder. And so, you know, that is disconcerting. There are some comedians now, comedians, you know, that have gotten in the game. And so, you know, I would say this is fairly disconcerting. I mean, you know, we'll see what happens. The scary scenario, you know, I mentioned the 70s. You know, domestic terror actually got to be quite a thing in the 70s in the U.S., and there's this great book called Days of Rage that kind of chronicles basically this, like, very widespread pattern of domestic terror, ideologically motivated domestic terror in the 70s by, you know, many kind of, you know, sort of radical revolutionary groups, the Weather Underground and, you know, many others.

And, you know, what a lot of those domestic terrors had in common was sort of this very, you know, various kind of privileged backgrounds. You know, a lot of these were like, you know, Ivy League, you know, like the Weather Underground came out of Columbia University. And then domestic terrorists coming out of places like UC Berkeley, and then sort of very privileged, often very privileged backgrounds, very kind of elite, upper middle class people. And then ended up in some cases going on the lam for years being hunted by the FBI. And there were years in the 1970s when there were thousands of terror bombings a year.

And then there was a run of anti-corporate, basically murder and terrorism in Germany kind of through that period into the 80s with this thing called the Bader Meinhof Group and so forth. And so, you know, there's always been this kind of violent edge to kind of call it the anti-corporate, anti-business, anti-industrial, you know, kind of, and by the way, you know, a little bit of that, you know, some of that's on the left, some of that's on the right, you know, there's, there's different, you know, you can squint different ways. You know, Ted Kaczynski was on the right. This guy maybe appears to be a little bit more on the left.

And so, you know, this pattern has unfolded before, you know, I don't know that it's ever been effective at causing any of the change that its proponents seem to want. You know, it seems to, you know, these tactics, violent tactics usually backfire in our societies. but uh you know certain certainly uh certainly hope that this doesn't become a copycat situation and i and i do think it's striking i mean i think there are a lot of voices in american public life who are behaving quite irresponsibly right now what what did they think that they're doing that sometimes people that run health care organizations don't pay out when people should be paid out therefore it's okay to kill the person at the top yeah it's the thing well it's of course murder is bad, but, and then in the 3,000 words is basically what you said. So the whole healthcare situation is very, it's obviously very complicated and very emotional. This can become a very long But the sort of key fact that all Western countries are trying to kind of grapple with, and this is true of the U.S., but also Canada and the U.K. and the rest of Europe, basically there's two key facts.

So key fact number one is health care is at like a fifth of U.S. GDP in terms of spending. It's like a fifth of all national production per year goes to health care. And that number is rising. The health care is basically rising. And if you just chart this on a graph, it's just very clear what's happening is health care left unchecked is going to go from being a fifth economy to a fourth, to a third, to a half. And then, you know, someday in the future, you know, effectively all of it. And then and then nobody wants to pay for it. Right. Right. And so like nobody wants to pay. Everybody wants somebody else to pay for it.

And then just saying the government should pay for it, of course, doesn't answer the question because the government has to be funded by somebody. And so that means taxpayers have to pay for it. And so you get in all these questions. And of course, we live in a progressive taxation system in which people who make more money pay a higher percentage of taxes, and there's big political fights over that, and I'm kind of neutral on that. I don't really care. It's not one of my issues, but it's part of this big fight over who pays for it. So that's that's issue number one. And that's just going to, you know, it's going to bring out a lot of emotion to people because, of course, especially as you get closer to end of life or you get into these, you know, very bad chronic, you know, thing, you know, conditions that require a lot of money to take care of people.

It's this real challenge of how to how to pay for it. And then the other kind of key kind of fact is all these countries also are aging very rapidly. Right. The demographics are headed in the direction of, you know, increased average age. And the, you know, consequence of that is the, you know, a sharp reduction in the percentage of working age people versus, you know, older people, retirees. And the whole basis for every social welfare system in the world is that the current workers pay for the current retirees, right? That is the basis. There is no, you know, the Social Security Trust Fund doesn't exist.

The money that you pay in, you don't get later. You know, your money you pay in today gets paid out to old people today. And then when you're old, there need to be young workers in the system to be able to generate the money to pay you. And that's true for Social Security, it's true for Medicare, it's true for Medicaid, it's true for all of these kind of, it's true of any socialized health system. It'd be true of government-funded health system, it'd be the same thing, it just, you know, for taxpayers. Taxpayers are people who work. And so if the demographics go upside down and you have a country, you know, and you can see the future in places like Japan where you just have like way more old people than you have young people.

And then you just have this like fundamental mismatch and then you literally quite simply can't pay for it. And so like these two things kind of put this whole issue in a vice. Now, what we try to do, like in our line of work, which is, you know, tech and biotech in BC, what we try to do is figure out ways to kind of get out of that vice primarily through new technologies that at least, you know, in some cases will provide new kinds of healthcare, new kinds of drugs and new kinds of medical devices, but also things that are able to break that price curve and able to make healthcare much cheaper, right?

That, you know, that's the other way to solve it is you just, you make all this stuff much cheaper. And that's where, you know, we get excited about things like, for example, AI and healthcare, right? And, you know, maybe the prospect that instead of, you know, people having, you know, only having human doctors, maybe a lot of, you know, routine medical interactions are with AI doctors. And then, you know, you only consult with a human doctor when something gets, you know, really sensitive. And, you know, I think there's a reasonable chance in the next few years that we can figure out how to do that. So, so hopefully we can solve this with technology. It is weird, I will say, and it's coming out in this kind of current, you know, kind of debate and controversy, You see, it is weird that the same people who are the maddest about healthcare costs rising and not being able to pay for it are also the ones who hate technology the most.

Right? Yeah. And nuclear energy. And people who care most about climate, the people who care most about climate and carbon emissions hate nuclear energy the most, right? And it's like, all right, we are genuinely trying to help solve these. Those of us in tech are genuinely trying to help solve these problems. What do you think that is? Is it just some sort of generalized skepticism, generalized scrutiny over rich people that they don't have the best interests at heart of the common folk? Yeah, well, there's, you know, there's this, part of it's just like simple. Right. Moral intuitions. Right. And so you have these kind of moral intuitions that, and moral intuitions presumably evolved to be the way they are according to kind of historical conditions of how people lived. But, you know, historically people lived in these very small, you know, kind of communities.

You know, one way of describing, there's this great book called The Ancient City that goes back and reconstructs basically like pre, basically prehistoric civilization, like what it was like. And basically the conclusion of it is, you know, sort of pre, you know, go back 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 years and then further back, you know, basically we all lived in these very small tribes, you know, maxed out at a few hundred people. And then you could kind of describe the politics of the tribe being sort of a hybrid of like absolute fascism combined with absolute communism, right? at the same time, right? So it was like absolute fascism in that the father of the family or the leader of the tribe had the total power of life or death over all the members of the tribe and could kill them at any moment for whatever reason he wanted to. And then it was also pure communism in that there was no market economy. Everybody shared everything. And if you went out and killed an animal and brought it back and didn't share the food, they would kill it. You had to share the food. Everything had to be shared because it was how you were... Both of those forms of governance were basically how the tribe would survive. It needed total discipline and

total sharing right at the same time. And so we, we have all these moral intuitions that basically says, you know, maybe we don't want the fascism part, but we kind of want everything to be shared. We want everything to be equal. Having inequality is sort of intrinsically morally offensive to us. And so we naturally drive towards, you know, who can possibly argue against, you know, wouldn't it be desirable if everybody, you know, if everybody had the same, you know, how it's default unfair for some people to have more than others. And then of course, profit, you know, particularly drives people crazy, right. Cause profit feel, you know, profit in the capitalist system, if you have this moral intuition, it feels like it's unfair because it feels like it's money that's been extracted, that's not doing anything. I won't name names, but there was a congressman this morning who tweeted two back-to-back tweets. And he tweeted, he said, it's just completely absurd and outrageous that the American health insurance industry generates $1.4 trillion in profits per year. And he said, that's just so clearly unfair because presumptively that's $1.4 trillion being extracted, providing, you know, no value at all. And then like four hours

later, there was a second tweet, which he said, you know, actually, um, I, I learned that actually it's, um, $1.4 trillion in revenue, um, not profit. Um, and total profits are, you know, a very small fraction of what I thought it was. Right. You know, but still, but still equally absurd and unfair. Right. Going back to sort of where we're at at the moment. Um, I know that you've been heavily involved in a lot of meetings over the last month or so. How much, having been on every side of the fence and above it and inside of it, how much governmental efficiency is there to improve on, in your opinion?

Oh, like absolutely enormous. And it's actually interesting that this actually, historically, this is actually a bipartisan question. And I actually think that the Vivek and Elon are looking at it in a very bipartisan way. And you may have already seen, there are already some Democrats signing up for the Doge Congressional Caucus and, you know, coming out. Even Bernie Sanders, to his credit, came out and said he certainly agrees with Ilan and Vivek specifically on the topic of military spending, which is, of course, one of the big areas. And so that's a, you know, that's, you know, that's significant. So it historically is a bipartisan topic. When I was younger, you know, I mentioned the sort of Clinton-Gore comeback in 92. This was actually a big theme of the Clinton-Gore campaign in 92. And actually Al Gore, who I know, you know, I've known over the years, um el gore actually had a whole program like the doge actually at the time called rego r-e-g-o called reinventing government um and he he said he said many of the same things that that actually ilana bivak are saying today um and he had this famous he made it famous at the time you find it on youtube there's this famous thing he did to kind of visualize this which is he went on the

david letterman show at the time and he he took out um he took it was like the department of defense was like buying like 600 shatterproof ashtrays um and uh he he took them onto the letter. show with a chisel and safety glasses and, you know, gave it a big whack. And of course, it fractures just like any other, you know, ashtray. So like, anyway, so there was a whole program around that, you know, they made a little bit of progress. So anyway, I think, you know, I think everybody effectively agrees that there's, you know, who doesn't want, who doesn't want tax money to be spent efficiently? Who doesn't want to get results? You know, who doesn't want to eliminate waste and fraud? Like, you know, these are kind of, you know, these are, you know, those are hard things to argue against um in terms of methods you know the the the big change here is that we've never you know in the past these have been government officials trying to figure this out or you know commissions or whatever some may say the blind leading the blind some may some may say participants in the system attempting to reform the system from within let's say um and you know that and this of course what's starkly different here is to have you know people of the

caliber of ilana vivek you know who are you know tremendously accomplished entrepreneurs uh and founders and people who run businesses and people who understand how to do things that like, you know, and Elon, you know, Vivek's obviously very smart on all this, but Elon is legendary for being able to think, as he says, think from first principles on things like costs. And if you read the books about him there, you know, he's always focused on that. And so he's, he's going to bring a toolkit that has been, you know, very successfully deployed at some of the world's leading, you know, literally some of the world's leading companies like Tesla and SpaceX. And he's

specificity perspective but what else yeah so like so that's a lot that that is a lot of it and that's a, that's a topic that makes people really mad because, um, non-technical people really hate being told that they are not qualified to do something because they're not technical, but every now and then the technical details actually do matter. So there's, there's a whole domain there. And, you know, most managers, you know, it's like most people in government are lawyers, you know, most people in, in, in, in business and in senior levels are MBAs. Like, and so there, there's a, there's a, there's a, you know, most large companies are not run by engineers, right?

They're run by business, trained business people. And so there's a, or increasingly lawyer, are increasingly also lawyers. And so, you know, there is a real challenge there. And then I just think more generally, more generally, it's just the way that management is taught. And, you know, most classically in the form of something like a Harvard Business School or Stanford Business School, it's basically taught, it's basically management as it was sort of developed and implemented, I would say in like the 1950s, 60s, 70s, it was sort of the so-called scientific school of management. And so it's basically management as a generic skill that you can apply to any industry. And, you know, you can manage a soup company or you can manage a, you know, I don't know, whatever, whatever, whatever kind of company. And they're kind of all the same and it kind of doesn't matter what they do. And there's a common set of management practices and and it has, you know, is a lot to do. It's, you know, process. It's, you know, how do you structure, you know, the how do you manage the balance sheet? How do you set the review schedule for the meetings? How do you do compliance? How do you, you know, hire, you know, how do you manage,

a, you know, how do you hire and motivate executives? You know, how do you resolve interpersonal conflicts? Like all these like general business skills. And by the way, those general business skills are, you know, very useful in lots of contexts. It's just that training doesn't give you any of the information. That training gives you none of what you need to go do what Elon does. And then Elon, I would say, he pushes it as far as he can and not doing all the stuff that you're classically trained to do so that he can spend all of his time doing the things that only he can do which it turns out has this like just like incredible you know catalytic multiplicative effect where his companies are you know so just incredibly amazing elan just said this thing at the uh most recent tesla event um that blew my mind you know because his companies are famous they don't they don't actually have like marketing departments like like tesla doesn't spend any money on sales and marketing like they don't they don't sell the cars like every other car company in the world is like running all these ad campaigns all the time tv commercials and the you know newspaper flyers and the quarterly you know sales events and like all

this crazy stuff and promotions all these things like tesla doesn't do any of that it's just like it's the best it's the you know it's the best car and you just like show up and buy it or not it's up to you you're a moron if you don't right like my dad my dad went to go and test drive a model s maybe a couple of years ago and he's sort of an old school car guy and he's used to the the sort of banter back and forth the forecourt the discussion the say please sit down would you like a coffee would you like you know what is that and he said that he walked in and it felt like he got into an apple store and there was some as he called it teenager in a hoodie uh that came out and my dad started to do the whole like classic boomer parent negotiation thing and this guy was like the price is the price and i don't have any fucking coffee for you so he left he left feeling uh like this the new world and now he has a range rover so uh well that's the thing it's like do you want the best car in the world or not right like that's elon's mentality right and and it's working very well and then he at this event he just he took it to the next level and this broke my brain i'm still thinking about it he said if you think about it he said the best product in the world shouldn't

even need a logo like you shouldn't even have to have your name on the product people can just identify it from how good it is it's just obvious it's just obvious he did right it's just obvious everybody knows because it's the best product in the world everybody has it everybody uses it and like of course you don't need to put the name on it everybody knows right and so it's and for a minute i was like all right is this like a zen you know thing and then i was like no he's actually as usual with elon it's like no he's actually serious um the best products in the world would not need your name on it um and and so yeah anyway so it's just this like completely different It's just this completely different method.

And then on top of that, to have the guy who's on top of his game, you know, as you said, to kind of be working on the government challenge and then to be, you know, to have the new, you know, for whatever people think of the new president, pros and cons, like to have him fully, you know, fully signed up embracing, you know, Elon and encouraging him to do this is a really, I mean, this has not, you have to go back. Like literally the last time something like this happened in the United States government was literally like 1933. three this is the closest analogy to what what at least has started to happen is is is literally what happened under fdr which is just like a fundamental reinvention of how government works and like this massive influx of talent um from actually from the private sector that is able to just like do things that are unimagined and so it's you know it's it's a once in an 80 years thing i'm you know i'm doing everything i can to help and i hope it goes pouring some kerosene onto the fire as you are the uh i saw a clip of elon speaking i don't know whether it was a recent clip, but the clip only came up the other day. He's talking about his thoughts on being a CEO.

A lot of times people think that creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it's really not that fun. I mean, there are periods of fun and there are periods where it's just awful. And particularly if you're the CEO of the company, you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in a company. There's no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong. And there are things that are going wrong that other people can't take care of. So you have like the worst. You have a filter for the crappiest problems in the company, the most pernicious and painful problems. So I wouldn't say it's fun. You have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold.

And there's a friend of mine who says starting companies is like staring into the abyss and eating glass. And there's some truth to that. The staring into the abyss part is that you're constantly facing extermination for the company because most startups fail. 90%, 99% fail. That's the staring part. You're constantly staring. Okay. And saying, if I don't get this right, the company will die, quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you've got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. So you end up working on that. You really wish you weren't working on it. That's the eating glass part.

And it goes on for a long time. What's your assessment of his post-mortem on being a CEO? So the original form, number one, I agree with all of that. And I felt that myself. And that's one of the reasons I'm happy to be an investor right now and not a CEO of a company. But the original form of the quote, the eating glass quote, was actually Sean Parker. And the original form of the quote was, starting a company is like eating glass. Eventually, you start to like the taste of your own blood. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. And I love using that quote in front of an audience because it always gets the exact reaction you just gave me.

It always gets that moment of stunned silence followed by that look on the face. And everybody's like, oh, my God, that's horrifying. And I'm like, yes. Now you understand. Go for it. run your company. Now you understand what it's going to feel like. Yeah, no, look, and the serious thing I would say is, you know, it's a little bit less now, but there have been times when the idea of being an entrepreneur and, you know, tech entrepreneur has been like a romanticized concept. And, you know, there used to be TV shows talking about how much fun it was. Um, uh, uh, and, um, and, you know, I, I, I, you know, I have people ask questions like, well, how do we, how do we encourage more people to be entrepreneurs?

And my answer always was like, no, we shouldn't do that. Like people shouldn't be encouraged to do something that painful. Um, they should do it because they really want to do it. In fact, they should do it because they can't not do it. Right. And so it's, it's, I'm not a, I'm not an endurance athlete, but it would be a little bit like encouraging somebody to do a triathlon or an ultra marathon, right? Like, yeah, why don't you go out there and run 120 miles in the heat? Right. Like, no, like, that's bad. No, most people should not do that. But the people driven to do that should do that. And by the way, the people driven to do that will do that, right, for, you know, for their own reasons.

And so it really is like that. And, yeah, and then, look, it's tremendously painful. You know, most of the experience of being in business in a competitive, you know, setting, and a startup is sort of the peak version of that, is most of it consists of basically being told no, you know, by everybody. You know, you need all these things, right? You need employees and you need, you know, financing and you need customers. and, you know, you go around all day long asking people for those things and they tell you no. Or, you know, half the time they don't even respond. You know, they just go dark on you and ghost you.

And then, you know, just when you think you get it working and a new competitor emerges and just starts like, you know, punching you square in the face and, you know, the minute you think your product's working and there's a problem in it, you have to do a recall. And every, you know, it's just, yeah, it's just this constant, it's just kind of this constant rolling, you know, horror story. Given you're another agony ant to the people who are eating glass and learning to try and enjoy

Going back to the governmental efficiency thing, how much do you think the huge swaths, the platoons of useless middle management inside of the government are shitting themselves at the moment?

Yeah, so it's, you know, it's actually an interesting question. I actually, it's hard to say from the outside. The other thing is you have this, I would say, very interesting thing. You don't have a, you know, there's no homogenous, you know, the government employs whatever it is, you know, millions of people, multiple millions of people. So it's not, you know, it's far from a homogenous group. And I'll just give you some examples. There's a pretty large contingent, which is sort of the baby boom component of it, you know, because the government went on a massive hiring boom in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s.

There's a pretty big contingent that's close to retirement and, you know, was probably going to retire anyway in the near future. And so there's some prospect maybe there for kind of, let's say, mutually agreeable, accelerated retirement is one possible solution. Mutually agreeable, accelerated retirement, the most diplomatic way to say get the fuck out. No, no, this happens at companies. So in fairness, this happens at companies. And I'm not saying the Doge is going to do this. I'm not in charge of this. But I'll just give you the scenario that happens in companies. It's something called buyouts.

It's contrasted to layoffs. And it sounds like it's a clever way to do the same thing, but it's actually different, which is you basically – you offer retirement packages, right? And you let people voluntarily sign up for the retirement, and they don't have to sign up for it. It's a voluntary thing. But if they choose to, they can get accelerated retirement or an unusual level of retirement compensation. A way to think about this is the budget crisis that a business has when it gets in trouble or that the government has where we're $36 trillion in debt, the budget crisis is not the money that we might have to pay to have people retire this year.

You can afford almost anything to do that. It's the savings that you can have compounded over the next 20 years if you get your fiscal house in order, right? And so you can sometimes do things in the near term that cost more money in order to get the long-term savings, and that often makes sense. And so there's, and again, I'm not speaking for the Doge, so this is one option. Another option that they've already talked about in public is the remote work thing. You know, most federal workers are not actually at work. You know, most federal workplaces are empty today. You know, there are agencies where there are formal collective bargaining agreements where the employees are down to a day, a month in the office. Um, right. Um, and, and, you know, there's a huge controversy around remote work, um, you know, is how effective it is. And there are companies that make it work, but you know, if hypothetically you have a government agency with 10,000 people and nobody's literally coming to work, you might as a taxpayer have some questions about exactly what's going on. And then you have this situation where if you say, as they've said, if say people have, they, people have to come back to work, like part of the thing

of working for the government, working for the taxpayers is people have to come to work. Well, there are people who have literally left, you know, there are people who have moved to lower cost locations who are not going to come back to work. And so that's, that's another opportunity. And so there's, there's like, there's, there's a lot of this. And then I would, I would say the third thing that they've talked about, which is I think probably the part of it that is not well appreciated is that the government that we live under today, you know, we, we, Thank you. You know, remember that old guy, if you had, I don't know if you were, you probably didn't see this because you weren't maybe here at the time, but there's this cartoon that every American kid of a certain age saw in elementary school social studies, which was how a bill becomes a law.

Oh, it's this very bouncy, it's this very bouncy, like 1970s cartoon about the bill and, you know, the Congress, you know, so the White House proposes the bill and then the Congress agrees and then the Senate and then they reconcile and, you know, dance and the bills, it's a little cartoon, you know, bill wrapped in a little ribbon and it bounces up the thing and the president signs it and everybody's happy, right? Right. And so it's like, you know, legislation. Right. It's a legislative process. Most of what the government does and most of the rules that we all live under are not that. Right. Most of that, most of it's not legislation. Most of it is what's called regulation.

Right. Which is very different. And most of the rules that the government sort of exists in order to process and enforce are regulatory, not not not legislative. the government we live under today is the result of basically 60 to 80 years of agencies effectively putting out regulations entirely on their own so executive branch agencies just basically deciding that there are going to be hundreds of thousands of rules that we need to live under and then deciding that they need to staff themselves to be able to process and handle and enforce all those rules the supreme court recently ruled in a series of judgments a couple years ago ruled that regulations that were not authorized by legislation are not constitutional, right? And by the way, if you just read the U.S. Constitution, which is quite short and to the point, it makes it very clear that the legislature, the Congress exists to pass laws. The executive branch exists to enforce those laws. The executive branch does not get to issue its own laws, right? And so we've lived in a system where the executive branch has been issuing its own laws for a very long time.

And the Supreme Court now says that all of those regulations are now not constitutional. And so basically any activity in the government that relates to the staffing and enforcement and all of the processes and all the work around those regulations is no longer constitutional. And so there's a lot of government activity that actually is no longer constitutional. And the previous administration was completely uninterested in doing anything, bringing the executive branch into alignment with what the Supreme Court had ruled. But again, if you read the Constitution, the Supreme Court gets to make these decisions.

They've decided this is not constitutional. This new administration has an opportunity to bring the government more in compliance with the Supreme Court, which means the government will get smaller. What happens if Trump can't deliver change? He's got all of the things, House, Senate, popular vote, Elon, unlimited funds, blah, blah, blah. He doesn't even need to worry about being reelected. What's the implication for America and the West if he can't make sizable change? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, I start by saying I'm optimistic. Like, I think he's determined. I think that Elon's determined. I think Vivek is determined. I think that, you know, the team around the Doge, by the way, a lot of the key staffing positions, you know, there's a lot of controversy in the press, as usual, about the cabinet, you know, officials. And I think, you know, many of those are also very good. But a lot of the, a lot of the operational managers that are being brought in, like the deputy secretary level and the department heads are very, very strong people.

And so, you know, I think this is going to be one of the strongest, if not strongest, you know, execution competence capability administrations that we've had in a long time. Again, maybe arguably since the – I think a reasonable case that this will be the best staffed administration since the 1930s. And so, you know, I'm reasonably optimistic. And then, look, the president has this – you know, is in this sort of very interesting position where he doesn't ever have to run again, right, because he can't, right? Right. And so the, like a lot of what happens in a second term, if presidents choose to take advantage of it is they can do things that caught, you know, that basically might even put their reelection at peril. They can do more forceful things because they, you know, they can do the things that they actually think are important as compared to the things that they think they might need to do to get reelected. And that's something you can only do when you're going to get, when you're going to get termed out. And so, and then of course there's just, yeah, there's sort of, you know, all the things kind of behind Trump's level of determination this time, which I think is very high. So I, you know, I'm quite optimistic. I don't know. I mean,

you could paint various cynical pictures of the whole thing being gummed up. My guess is if it disappoints, it's going to disappoint in the sense of some of these things are going to get done, but not all of them. Um, and, and, and, and, and frankly, like, I think it'd be great, it'd be great to solve all of our problems at once. Um, but if we can't do that, if we can just basically, if, if this team can sort of give us a roadmap on how to do things properly and can kind of show us, you know, through examples, you know, if, if let's, let's say there's, you know, let's, let's say there's, you know, let's say there's a thousand versions of this problem that have to get solved and this team only gets to the first hundred, um, then we will have the recipe book right for how to solve the next 900 over the next two or three or four administrations that follows that.

And so that would be my optimistic failure case. And I think we will get at least that, if not a much more sweeping transformation. Talk to me about this Willow Google quantum computer thing. How big of a deal is it? Yeah. So first of all, I don't know. I just read the announcement. I haven't been face-to-face with the technology. So I don't, I don't know anything that's not public on that. Um, quantum computing historically has been one of those things that is theoretically very exciting and then just extremely hard to actually get working. Um, quantum computers don't act like regular computers in any way. Um, and so, and there's always this kind of thing where you in theory can kind of demonstrate something in a lab and that maybe it works and maybe it doesn't. It's often not completely clear even whether it worked. Um, and then, you know, could you ever get that to repeat? Could you get that to repeat across, you know, 10 or a hundred different, um, you know, kind of locations. Could you ever then apply that to these different problems? Like there, there's just all these like really, really fundamental questions. And so, um, it's one of these really enticing things, um, that, um, you know, everybody's hoping that we get to, um, I, I just, I'm not close enough to

know whether they got to the full breakthrough or not. The thing that I think would be the full breakthrough would be not only does it work in one lab, this is something where you could now stamp out 10 and then a hundred and then a thousand of these machines, and then you could do it repeatedly. The most enticing thing of what they said, which is one of these things where you think about it and then you decide you have to stop thinking about it because you'll never think about anything else again, is that in theory, the lab demonstration that they have is doing a computation that the entire universe that we live in, if it was converted entirely to just a giant computer. If every atom in our universe was turned into a giant computer, that computer could not solve that problem before the universe ultimately dies of heat death, right? And the implication of that is that the computation, therefore, must be spread out across many other parallel universes, which is therefore proof that there are many other parallel universes.

Oh, interesting. Right. In other words, if you weren't able to spread this computation out across many parallel universes, it could not have been done. Therefore, there must be many parallel universes. Therefore, we do actually live in a multiverse. And there are actually billions or uncountable numbers of parallel realities included. That we're using for our RAM. Yes. Yes. And we're, yeah, we basically have outsourcing to these other universes. I mean, you know, by the way, are we having any impact on them when we do that? I don't know. um yeah there's some there's some very glitchy 360p universe out there god damn it that guy from google yeah that guy from google's trying to work out if two plus two equals four again yes exactly and then of course are any of these other universes going to do it to us um so uh you know the the quantum people really do believe it's a you know we live in with many you know many many many different realities so um you know this may be one of those things from science fiction that we end up figuring out but um yeah this is it's the kind of thing you know So it's, you know, Einstein's famous reaction to quantum physics was, you know, this is impossible because the famous quote was, God doesn't play dice with the universe, right?

And, you know, this result is yet another evidence that, no, actually, God really likes playing dice with the universe. Seems like he is doing it. Between that, I mean, this last period, there's so much going on in tech. Sora AI as well. What's your post-mortem? I mean, they've closed now signups and stuff because it just went ballistic. So for the people that don't know, this is the video. equivalent of open ai's uh image creation service and now you can do video too although so many people signed up it's restricted to particular territories etc etc etc uh what what do you make of the way that that went yeah so um so this is yeah this is video

right? You know, you know, you know, it's now drones now fly themselves. Cars now, you know, cars now drive themselves. Right. So, you know, for people who haven't tried either the Waymo cars in places like San Francisco or the new Tesla, you know, the latest version of the Tesla software, they're both outstanding. And so cars now drive themselves. That's a big step forward. Drones now fly themselves. There are now companies making, you know, autonomous submarines um and um you know all kinds of you know fancy fancy things oddly enough the autonomous submarine just feels like one that you could have done earlier you know there's far there's far less traffic there's far fewer things to crash into yeah yeah probably probably um there's yeah we have a company that has a has a has a military submarine that is uh is uh it's literally it's literally it's an unpressurized uh shell uh sort of uh platform and you can basically customize it in many different ways, load many kinds of things on it. But in its, like, unpressurized form, it's able to, you know, go far deeper than, you know, than a sub that needs

to support human beings can go. You know, it's able to go down and, you know, be able to do all kinds of things. So, yeah, like, you know, the whole, as we're seeing, you know, on the military side, you know, there's a transformation of military, of military strategy, you know, that's underway right now, you know, kind of as these technologies hit that we're already seeing in Ukraine. So that's going to matter. But, you know, look, a lot of this stuff is just going to be stuff in our personal lives, in our daily lives. What do you think of the adoption of

i was in the uk uh last week i was there for a couple of weeks i went back home i had this live show thing give me your opinion on the sort of state of free speech and regulation on that side of the world we're talking about the excesses the overreaches that hopefully may be coming out of over here what's your opinion on the other side of the atlantic yeah so i'd say there's like three kind of worlds of speech right now three uh zones in the world there's like the chinese version which is we're gonna tell you explicitly what the rules are and you better not break them um but basically you know other than the things we tell you not to talk about which we're very

clear about you know you can go crazy and talk about whatever you want um so kind of the top down authoritarian you know kind of model um we have the american model which is we have free speech constitutionally guaranteed but there are a thousand unwritten rules um uh of society um like the world's worst version of curb your enthusiasm um where you know there's a thousand different ways to trip the pc police and if you if you trip any one of them you are you know your life gets vaporized um and so you might call that kind of bottoms up authoritarianism right like you know the government's not coming to get you they're not going to jail you for it but like you know boy you know just it's a shame that you got fired and your family now hates you and your friends have all left you and you can you can never work again right so that's like the distribute that's like the distributed bottoms up authoritarian unwritten version of what china has right so top down bottoms up and then there's europe which has decided to do both for for reasons i have to say i don't fully understand um but you know at least from an american perspective if you look at you know this the speech laws in um you know the uk or canada

they are horrifying um you know i would like to think that if those speech laws came to the u.s we would have a revolution um like they're just like completely unacceptable like of course you can't send police to somebody's house because they you know said something wrong on twitter Like, of course, you can't do that. But yet it happens. And then, yeah, you know, the rest of Europe, you know, they all have variations on that. And, you know, some obviously Germany has like very, you know, explicit, explicit versions of that on a lot of topics and other other countries do as well. So, yeah. But but then also Europe, Europe and the Anglosphere have also the you know, they have the top down version of the actual laws, hate speech laws and and so forth.

But then they also have the bottoms-up authoritarianism of all the implicit codes, which if you're a highly educated Ivy League graduate equivalent, your job is to track those codes as they evolve every day by faithfully reading the New York Times cover to cover every day. But if you don't and you fall out of step or you're a working-class person, you say the wrong thing. If you crack your knuckles in the wrong way outside of your truck cab, you get accused of being a white supremacist and you get fired, which is something that actually happened in the U.S. uh during the 2020 craziness um so um yeah so you're yeah europe europe right now is combining the worst of those worlds and you know i you know you may know more about it than i do they seem hell-bent to just get much much worse i don't know what's going on i i really you know i went back to the uk and i was quite disheartened by like a lot of this stuff i was spent my time in kensington um you know the diversity is our strength In the UK, which is a message that you're greeted by as you enter the country, I don't know whether there's such a thing as too much diversity, but it just didn't particularly feel that much like London. I'm aware that that just sounds like the most Brexit sentence that I could have ever said.

I was like, huh, this just doesn't feel very much like London. Maybe it should be a cosmopolitan place, so on and so forth. So that was kind of a little bit strange. It was just something that i hadn't noticed uh previously like that level of diversity um what else did i notice the level of service like every uber took 20 minutes to get to you it's like why is why is that happening that seems i was slap bang in the middle of the city every bit of service in every restaurant was either a long wait or there was some sort of a problem uh uber eats seem completely determined to just like destroy whatever food or coffee we actually started ordering twice the number of coffees that we needed to order in an attempt that we could maybe combine them together to have residual amounts of the right amount of coffee that we needed. And we still didn't get like just, and I don't know, you know, I mean, whether I can just whine on like the fucking opulent, like returning prodigal son or something, but it just, it really was quite, it was quite disappointing in many ways. And then on top of this, you know, this upside down world where Keir Starmer is saying that the immigration is too high and that this is a problem and that we

need to deal with and at the same time you've got these still unbelievably bizarre uh non-crime hate incidents that are being reported um it's odd and uh i feel bad about my old homeland i don't know whether europe's in the middle of a downfall or what at the moment but you know between all of the different parties that are going in this vote of no confidence that just happened recently it's like whatever the timeline is maybe this is actually what happens when we get used for the ram of another fucking universe this computation that they just start to speed up all of the drama that's the side effect i don't know um but yeah there's there's something happening and it's being expedited whatever it is yeah so i'll say a couple things so a friend of mine in private equity went and worked in he grew up in texas and worked in the u.s and then uh went over and lived in london and did private equity in europe for five years and he came back and i said you know what was it like and he said said europe it's like he said in europe it's like there are like five things that are more important than making money.

And nobody will tell you what they are. There are these goals and objectives, and they're loosely around ideas of societal fairness, and they're loosely around ideas of not having to work very hard, and they're loosely around retirement things and social services, and they're loosely around diversity, and they're loosely around immigration, but they don't seem crisply defined. And so maybe there's a bit of an identity crisis happening there. There's another thing, it's a famous line, that fascism and communism are always looming over the U S and landing in Europe. Right. Like the U S always like, there's always this threat of like the U S is going to go communist in the twenties or it's going to go fascist in the thirties or something.

And then what actually happens is, you know, you know, France actually goes communist and Germany actually goes fascist. Right. Like, so, you know, they're actually still, they're actually still communist parties in Europe. And so maybe Europe is downstream of American culture in a way that is maybe helpful in some ways but harmful in others but it's a little bit let's say a little bit a great example that with england is it's like okay like you know in the u.s we were all trained from birth of course to feel you know extremely bad about the fate of indigenous peoples on the north american continent um um you know chris pop pop question who are the indigenous people of england uh i don't know who are they whoever it was before the fucking normans came and no no no the answer is it's the english right okay okay like it's just the english it's just the english right like the english didn't display yeah it's like the normans it's like the saxons like whatever came together but there was no displacement right there it was it's like the indigenous people of england are just there's the english yet somehow the english feel just as bad about indigenous peoples as we do right like right well that's the other thing is like you know as you know england has like no history

england has no history of like you know every you know We'll be right back. Africans, you know, anyway, I'm not going to go into that topic, but yeah, the spectacle of BLM in England is really quite something. It's just, it's not historically, it's not very historically grounded, let's say. So yeah, so I, you know, maybe it's just America, maybe America's both functions and dysfunctions kind of ripple out to the rest of the world in a way that is helpful in some ways and harmful in others. And then, you know, maybe it's a, I mean, from the outside, it seems like it's a continent that is in a series of countries that are having just a massive identity crisis i think that's definitely i think that's certainly true looking for a direction looking for what your contribution is to the broader world you know it very much is uh a little bit of attention is being paid to russia most of the attention is being paid to the u.s and some attention gets paid to china and everybody else is playing second third fourth fifth string behind that and i wonder whether the the uk is feeling like a jilted lover at the moment where It's just like we used to be important.

We used to do a thing. I actually want you to bring this up.

fucking East India training company, but, uh, something, I don't know. You're right. The, the identity crisis in the direction is a big part, but then you layer on top. Um, I'm sure you've been seeing Dominic Cummings going full fucking scorched earth recently. Uh, he came on the show about six months ago and everything that he said, even like Rory Stewart, someone that you think of as, you know, being way less of a firebrand, Dominic Cummings. And he has this really like visceral description of the type of people that inhabit the halls, Whitehall and Westminster. And he describes the way that they smell and the way that they talk and the things that concern them. And he realized, you know, the governmental efficiency thing needs to be scaled

out beyond just the US. This is the sort of thing that really needs to be probably put everywhere. it. Yeah. So Dominic has this great, I'm glad you brought it, Dominic. He's a good friend of mine. So Dominic has this great line. He says, the people aren't running the system. The system is running the people. Right. And he uses that to describe the UK government, but you could also describe the US government and you could also describe the EU kind of the same way, which is like, in a sense, it's like, what happens when you get face-to-face with people in government is what you realize is, you know, there are actually a significant number of like very publicly spirited, very determined people who actually want to do good things. And there's And then there's people who are not like that, and they're just there for the job or whatever.

But there are people who legitimately are working hard and trying to figure things out. And what happens is, if you know them, what happens generally, they get ground down. They end up disappointed, and then they end up either becoming disillusioned or they end up leaving and going into the private sector. And so I think Dominic's explanation is a good one, which is the system is running the people, not the people running the system. um the bad news with that um is that um you know it would be it would be easier like if the solution was just to swap out the people in a sense that would be an easy answer to the question um whether you could do that or not as an open question but at least you would know what to do to reform the system as dominic talks about and others talk about and actually saw actually starmer is now talking about this too right um which is like okay how do we actually like redo the system is of course uh much harder um the other lens on this that i think about a lot is Curtis Yarvin, who's also a good friend of mine. And the way he describes the American system that's running the people, the way he describes it is we are living under FDR's personal monarchy 80 years later without FDR. And the reason he describes it, he says, look, before FDR,

the federal government was actually very small. The tax rates were super low. The federal government didn't do very much. The FDR dramatically, you know, orders of magnitude increased the size and scope of the federal government. He did that for two reasons. One was the New Deal, and then the other was World War II. And so the federal government that Franklin Roosevelt left behind in 1945 when he passed away was the government that he had built, which he had run the entire time from 1933 to 1945 himself, in which he had staffed himself and he had overseen himself and everything. And he built this, basically this giant structure. And as Curtis basically says, as long as you had FDR running that, it could run really well. And, you know, we won World War II and saved the free world and like it worked and pulled the U.S. out of depression, like the whole thing worked and it was great. But if you let an organization of that size and scope run without its founder CEO for 80 years, you end up with what we have now, which is just like basically an out of control bureaucracy, like an out of control system in which people can't even make positive change even if they want to. And again, that's why you could have in the U.S., you could have

FDR-like figure, but in reverse, right? You need somebody and a team of people around them who's actually willing to come in and take the thing by the throat and make the changes. By the way, make the changes that FDR would probably make if he were here to make them, but he's not, right? And so somebody else has to step up and do that. It has to be a president because nobody else conceivably has the power to do that. But we will see how much this president can do. a lot of what this administration plans to do. In the UK, look, the UK government maybe grew up in parallel with the US government. So maybe FDR is also partially responsible for it by inspiring the general modern Western style of governance. But also, of course, the English system grew up for many centuries before that. It may be time for an FDR style transformational leader to come in and really get a grip on it. Yeah, the path dependence. We always talk about the the wonderful heritage of the uk but you don't necessarily think about the einstelling effect that has got you beholden to all of this bullshit that came before i learned last year that the distance between the two front benches uh in the the house of commons is a broad sword held out at

arm's length from either side um which just tells you kind of everything that you need to know about what our current government and political institutions in the uk are inheriting like If you've got a country that's a thousand years old, a couple of thousand years old, you're like, bloody hell, there's a really lovely history there. And you say, yeah, but what else comes along for the ride? And sometimes it's stuff you want to get rid of. Mark, let's bring this one home. Dude, it's been a long time coming. You're so great. I'd love to bring you back on at some point soon. Where should people go?

They want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing. Oh, go to X. Go to X. P-M-A-R-C-A on X.com. Heck yeah. And also on Substack. Mark, I appreciate you. Thank you, mate. Good. Fantastic. Thank you, Chris.