Ending Woke, Why Elon Wins, and A Return to Innovation w/ Marc Andreessen

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today we're releasing a conversation I had at the end of 2024 with Marc Andreessen for Turpentine's show, Moment of Zen. This wide-ranging discussion covers the new administration, why San Francisco is the cultural center of the universe, why Elon Musk keeps winning, and much more. Please enjoy.

Mark, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining.

Hey, Erik, it's great to be back.

So first question, Mark, are you tired of all the winning? You know, all the appointments, all the timeline splitting, the preference falsification, even the Democrats you talk to are secretly happy. Are you tired of winning?

I was told there would be so much winning that we would all get tired of winning. And I have to say, so far, I am not in fact tired of winning.

Amazing. I mean, if you compare it to— I remember the days of 2020 when every day we would say this is the craziest thing, you know, that we've ever seen. Every day is a new craziest thing we've ever seen. And, uh, just the constant blackpilling. And now it's, it's just white pill central.

The unwind of this whole thing of this last 4 years is just spectacular. And, you know, it's just getting started. Like, okay, so my favorite thing, I'll just do my favorite thing that happened today. Yeah. Okay. So I like to say that every single day I see something that's just so crazy that I literally blank it out of my mind that I saw it and I forget about it.

Yeah.

And then I'm scrolling Twitter, you know, I'm scrolling X like half an hour later and I see it again and I'm like, no, that can't be right. And I forget about it again. And then like 3 hours later, I'm scrolling again. I'll say, there it is. It's the 3rd time that it sticks in my head. The Commerce Secretary of the Biden administration gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal published today in which she said she really believes that the key to beating China in the great geopolitical contest of the 21st century is to out-innovate them.

Okay. Wow.

This, after 4 years of her administration, did everything possible to do the exact opposite. Yeah, it's, um, a cynic would say that she's looking for work. Yeah, I, however, am very idealistic, and I think she's being genuine in her sentiments.

Yeah, it's, um, it's pretty funny. I remember Matt Yglesias was talking about sort of a new agenda for the Democrats recently, and I remember David Sacks quote tweeted him and was like, sounds like you're a Republican.

These guys literally, as I say, you know this, there's a set of these guys, some of whom are friends of yours.

Yes.

Um, who are all like, ooh, like we have to stand for building things after 50 years of standing for the exact opposite.

Yeah. Yeah. But only Democrats can do it. Yeah.

It's some incredible, it's really some incredible stuff. No, look, I mean, this is the, you tell me what you think of this. This is the most spectacular unwind of what we refer to as preference falsification that I've ever seen. Like it just, it feels like every day, um, in the last, you know, month now, or coming on 6 weeks, every day literally is like a whole block of people basically coming out and saying the exact opposite from what they've been saying for the preceding 10 years. And I, again, let's be generous. I genuinely believe that they actually believe it. They just feel like that they can say it now for the first time. And by the way, I think this process there, there has been so much preference falsification in the last decade. I think this process, the unwind is at the very beginning. I think we're like 1% of the way there. And I'm really, really interested to see how far this thing rips.

Yeah. So let's flesh this out a little bit. What has there been preference falsification about? So within tech, there was a lot of sort of the, the DEI stuff, the activism stuff, a lot of these sort of moral panics over the last few years that people had to sort of pay lip service to. There's a lot of the COVID stuff. There's a lot of just hiding sort of incompetence or flesh out what was really the preference falsification that as being sort of shifted now?

Yeah, well, as you know, so there are 2 components to preference falsification. And for the people hearing this for the first time, this is the work of a professor named Atimur Kuran, who is really outstanding, very sharp, and wrote a book years ago called Private Truths, Public Lies, where he lays out basically this theory of preference falsification, which is basically what happens in a society in which people basically have to lie in public. But it actually turns— and this is the private truths, public lies kind of part. But it turns out there's 2 parts to the theory. There's the part where you think something and you're not allowed to say it. And then there's the part about how you don't think something, but you must say it anyway.

Yeah.

And so, you know, the classic example of Václav Havel, the great Czech statesman, anti-communist, wrote a similar book 40 years ago called The Power of the Powerless before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And he talked about basically in totalitarian communist states, the slogan was workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. And he writes this whole book about basically how everybody under a communist regime basically didn't believe any of that, right? Like, certainly by the 1970s, 1980s, they didn't believe any of the workers of the world were not going to unite. They were not going to lose their chains, right? And in fact, the chains were coming from a completely different source, which was the communist dictatorship. But Timur Kuran talks about, he talks a lot about the need for everybody to profess this. Like, everybody has to lie. Everybody knows that everybody's lying. Everybody knows that everybody knows is lying. And yet everybody is still lying, right? And actually what happens in the extreme is it becomes a What you call a demoralization campaign, right? So it's a specific psychological method used by totalitarian societies to basically grind everybody's psychology into the ground. Like you, what Havel talked about is you lose all of your self-respect. Like you, you lose your humanity when you're put in a position like that. Now, of course, in our society, we don't live under anything, you know, nearly as extreme as like Soviet communism, but nevertheless, we have been living for the last decade under what I refer to as a soft authoritarian version of this, where the social dynamics are as intense. And then the penalty is not you get sent to the Gulag. The penalty is you get canceled. And when you get canceled, you lose your, you lose your livelihood, you lose your employment opportunities. In many cases that we both know people who've like lost friends, have lost family. And, you know, some people who literally have like vanished off the face of the earth and not been heard from again. And then every once in a while somebody commits suicide. And so it's, it's a soft version of a hard dictatorship, but it's nevertheless, it's deeply authoritarian. And then the nature of it is if you talk about it, you get in trouble.

Right.

Right. And so, and this is the thing that's happening now, which is like, oh, you know, well, wait a minute. Like, you know, what do you mean? Like, who got canceled? It's like, well, you know, there was a decade of scalps nailed to the wall. And now we're just going to pretend it didn't happen. So that's the general thing. I think at this point, simply saying that this is the regime that we've been living under, I think makes it crystal clear. I think everybody listening to this will have their own example. Again, their own example, either of something that they believed but couldn't say, or there's something that they didn't believe that they were forced to say. Both sides of that are incredibly pernicious. Maybe it's a tribute to the flexibility of an actual democratic society that this kind of pressure campaign can only stay on so long. But, you know, boy, it certainly seems to be cracking now.

Yeah. And just one example. You tweeted about how you regretted not speaking up publicly for the former, I believe, CEO of Mozilla, Brandon Eich, who made a personal donation that was controversial at the time and got him fired. But the cost of speaking up and standing up for him might have yielded some controversy as well. And so it feels like a lot of people are sort of realizing, hey, there were these people sort of canceled. I should have spoke up for them. Now I can, now that it's a different, now that it's safe.

Yeah. So that was a really key moment. We should talk about that just because it was so key. And so this was one of the first, you know, kind of cancellation campaigns in tech. This was about 10 years ago. And in retrospect, this kind of was the firing of the starting gun for a lot of what followed. But it was, I would say just for myself, it was deeply confusing at the time, you know, what was happening. And so basically what happened was this guy's name is Brendan Eich. He's a longtime friend of mine. He's the guy that we recruited to my first company Netscape in like 1994. He actually, this is true, single-handedly created JavaScript. Like he literally sat down over the summer and like wrote it himself, which is now, you know, the most popular programming language on the planet. And so one of these incredible seminal figures in our industry and also just like a wonderful human being, super nice guy, very community oriented, family oriented, super warm, always there for people. You know, everybody loved this guy. He was a key engineer at Netscape in the '90s. And then in the 2000s, after we sold Netscape to AOL, they at that point spun off the Mozilla Foundation to turn what had been the Netscape browser into open source, which created ultimately Firefox and a lot of the work that that team has done since. Brendan was one of 2 people who, um, you know, really led that spinoff. And at the time, I was very happy to help him do that. You know, fast forward to, I think it was, uh, Erik, you'll remember this, like 2013 or 2014. Um, this, there was all of a sudden this like massive blowup at the Mozilla Foundation at his workplace, which he was the CEO of at the time. And basically there was this kind of rediscovery that in, I think 2008, he had given a $1,000 donation to a California ballot proposition that was in opposition to legalizing gay marriage in California.

Yeah.

And just to set the stage for this, I was pro-gay marriage way before then. I actually supported Gavin Newsom in 2004 when he was mayor of San Francisco, which, because he was the earliest, you know, that was the first city in which gay marriage happened in the U.S. And so, you know, this at the time was not my politics, but Brendan did this in 2008. What's interesting about that is that the ballot proposition in 2008 that Brendan donated to was the exact same policy that every major Democrat at that time was also advocating for. And so the people who were anti-gay marriage in 2008, at the same time Brendan did this donation, included, included Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, a young woman soon to rise to prominence, Hillary Clinton, and even then elder statesman of the Democratic Party, Joe Biden. Right. As well as like every major, you know, Democratic congressperson, senator, like basically there were effectively no Democrats other than Gavin who were pro-gay marriage at that time. And so for the crime of making a $1,000 donation to a cause that exactly mirrored the Democratic Party at the time it was made, he was blown to smithereens, like just completely nuked. Right. And it was one of these, you know, what the Khmer Rouge used to call year zero phenomena, which is, you know, as of 2014, everybody is all of a sudden greenlit to pretend that morality started in 2014.

Yeah.

And that there was no history to any of these things and no backstory. And then therefore people, everybody is to be judged by the present moment and nobody gets any grace. There's no hope of redemption. There's no hope of forgiveness. There's not even a chance to explain yourself. You were just like vaporized. And that happened to Brendan. Now Brendan has since gone on to do many great things and has this incredible Project Brave and has, you know, continues to be very successful. But he got blown right out of the organization that he had founded and was just like completely trashed at the time. And at the time it was just like this weird It was this thing, which is just like, you know, like in a movie where there's a sudden car crash and you're just like, what the fuck just happened?

Yeah.

Right. And then, and then your reaction afterwards is like, well, you know, okay. Thank God that's over. Right. You know, that was weird. Like certainly that will never happen again. And that was the foreshadowing. And that's, you know, and I tweeted many years later, I said, one of the things I most actually regret in my life, certainly my professional life is, and my life of being a friend is not standing up publicly at that point. Because in retrospect, that was, you know, that was the very beginning of this wave that sort of metastasized throughout the industry and hyping Hypothetically, if a bunch of us had stood up at that time, maybe we could have held off a lot of what followed.

Yeah.

And so, but you're optimistic now that this reign of soft authoritarianism, aka sort of extreme wokeness, is over? Because there's a question of, hey, will it just come back again in 4 years? Or now that Trump will take power, will they sort of summon the resistance antibodies again? Or talk a little bit about your perspective on this.

Yeah, so I think that you know like wokeness is over is a little bit too glib, and the main reason why that's the case, I think you know maybe is self-evident, which is basically the bureaucracies of corporate America and of the government and of nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, schools, universities, the media companies, the press. You know, basically the big bureaucracies, what we refer to as sort of the managerial class, the sort of cathedral, the cathedral, the cathedral. Curtis's term, Curtis Jarvin's term, the cathedral, or James Burnham's term, the managerial class, the managers who sort of run everything, and by everything being like basically. basically all of the large incumbent institutions, basically the wokeness has become standard policy, right? And every large organization in the country, the mandate number one is be compliant, right? Whatever is required to be compliant is holy, right? It's like the thing that cannot be— you must be compliant. You must check off all the compliance boxes. Whether you win or not in the market is kind of optional, but you must be compliant.

Yeah.

Whether you actually teach students anything is optional, but you must be compliant. And so You know, wokeness has become part of the compliance regime. Also what they refer to wonderfully, these great Orwellian terms, the risk management regime. Incredible. The trust and safety regime. It's, you know, just take all these words and reverse them. So, you know, this stuff has gotten wired very deeply. And then it's been well documented at this point that the foundation for a lot of what we call wokeness is actually baked deeply into the law. Right. And a whole bunch of people have done Richard Hanania and Jeannie Sutton, great writer, and Christopher Caldwell and Wesley Yang have all done great work in kind of documenting kind of how deep this stuff is sort of embedded in the law, which is a whole nother topic. And so there's an institutionalization that's taken place that's going to take, you know, optimistically 30 years to get out or something like that. And by the way, maybe never. Having said that, there's that, but then there's what we've been dealing with for the last decade, which is beyond that, which is sort of the idea of wokeness being like the cultural vanguard.

Yeah.

And basically being the thing that's like the coolest, highest status, highest fashion thing you can possibly be. And the thing that you have to be if you want to aspire to rise in the hierarchy and rise among the managerial class and run things. And then if you want to get like really good press coverage and if you want people to think that you're a moral person. So kind of that whole thing. And then there's the power component of it. And this, I use the Tolkien metaphor here, the ring of power, which is the ability to call somebody a bad name under the wokeness regime and like instantly vaporize them and blow them out of their job and take their job. Like those second parts are like, I think fading very fast. And in a lot of ways it's sort of inevitable that would happen because it's just like in fashion, whatever is cool and trendy now looks dated 5 or 10 years later. And you wonder how people possibly could have worn bell bottoms or whatever. Like, you know, it's that kind of phenomenon. And there's no question, like, the election basically punched a giant hole in the side of that balloon and it's deflating incredibly quickly. And by the way, you see it in the reaction, you see it in the reaction to the election itself, which is there, you know, this is like the polar opposite reaction to 2016, which is just like there's like a complete deflation taking place. And I think wokeness is losing altitude quickly. But let's come back to the legal part because that, that's also, there's very interesting things that might happen there that we could also talk about.

Yeah. So say more. What do you have in mind?

Well, so if you wanted to pick like the most extreme possible, like attorney to put in charge of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to sort of reverse DEI, it would be this lawyer named Harmeet Dhillon, who's been a California lawyer who's been, you know, the scourge of woke corporations for the last decade. As it happens, she has just been appointed to run the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. And for the people who don't track this, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department is the federal government, basically prosecutorial arm that basically enforces Basically, wokeness. They're the ones that basically have made sure for the last decade that all these companies have all these crazy policies under penalty of being investigated, subpoenaed, ultimately prosecuted. And by the way, there have been lots of prosecutions, lots of court cases. The most famous case that the current head of the Civil Rights Division brought was the case against SpaceX for not hiring enough refugees, right? Notwithstanding that SpaceX is a military contractor and is not permitted to hire non-American citizens under a separate law. And so the person running that has been a true activist, as you'd expect from this last administration. And then, and then Ms. Dillon, who, by the way, I don't know, but I've been following for years and is clearly brilliant. You know, she's the exact opposite of that. And so every sort of signal is, I don't want to speak for this new administration, but every signal is being sent that they're going to basically do a 180 on all these things. And they are going to begin prosecuting companies for violations of civil rights laws in the form of reverse discrimination, which is to say discrimination against variously white people, Asians, Jews, and many other, the unprotected classes, as they say.

Yeah.

Right. And so signals are being sent by the appointments that there is going to be an assault that's going to be the reverse of the assault that companies have been under and universities have been under. And then of course the Supreme Court ruled not that long ago that universities, private universities, are not allowed to do race-based admissions. And it's actually really funny because there's some question, there's some question as to what it is. So, you know, the demographic shift of admissions in the last year was starkly different than the year before as these institutions claim that they're coming into compliance. Right. Supreme Court, there's some question as to whether discovery would show that they're actually in compliance or whether they're still playing games. So that's another thing we may find out here. And then there's a very open question as to basically whether essentially de facto that decision already has been made or will be made for private companies as well. And there's a lot of private companies that have been trying to figure out quietly how to kind of dismount from DEI for actually both reasons, for legal reasons and for cultural reasons. And now there's another sort of very interesting thing that's kicking in, which is that there, I think, are a lot of large companies where basically they were already basically done with DEI. to start, they were done with DEI for their own reasons, which is, you know, it's backfired in many spectacular ways. But now they have any large company that wants to dismount from it now has the best reason in the world, which is we need to be compliant. We, we, right. It's right.

Illegal. Yeah.

Because it's illegal. Because, and by the way, let me just state for the record, like, I think every major corporation in the country is just in flagrant violation of actual written civil rights law. Like you just, you cannot have these hard quotas and basically all these racially and ethnically and religiously biased, you know, hiring, you just, you It's just flat out illegal. And these companies basically all went so extreme on this that they ended up in what I think is clearly mass illegality. And so as Ms. Dillon kind of kicks in her job, we'll say she's not going to lack for a shortage of targets. And so if you don't want to be a target, it is a great kind of get out of jail free card to just voluntarily shut all this stuff down. And my guess is starting pretty quickly here. I mean, we're already starting to see it, right? So Boeing and a bunch of other companies have already put a bullet in their programs And even the University of Michigan, which kind of went like completely bananas for this stuff, you know, actually shut their whole thing down. So I think we're going to see, my guess is we're going to see a run of companies that are going to take, you know, quite dramatic action here.

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University of Michigan, my alma mater, was doing events that were called non-POC only. Like, it's just whites only, but they non-POC as a way to just— it's interesting. Hilariously ridiculous.

Did they have their own drinking fountains?

Yeah. What's old is new. Yeah.

How do you, like, literally, how do you end up resegregating in the name of racial justice? Like, it's just the most extraordinary thing. It's just, it's the most extraordinary thing ever. It's what the whole civil rights, basically, war of the 19— battle of the 1960s was about, was desegregation, right? And non-discrimination. And then, like, how do you end up thinking that you're on the moral high ground and you do that? And how do you end up thinking you're not breaking the law? Like, again, this is part of this sort of mass insanity of the preference falsification. And, and, and look, there are many, many lawyers and HR people who have been implementing these policies who are fully aware that they've been breaking the law. And so it's going to be very interesting to see the unwind.

You know, there's the great, uh, Covey Fainan, uh, idea that we sometimes talk about, the woke are more correct than the mainstream. And sort of, yeah, an example of that is like, yeah, it turns out, I guess we have been being systemically, uh, discriminatory or systemically racist, just not to who, uh, not to the groups that we, just Asians, you know, or to groups that, um, we didn't, you know, particularly sort of Think that we were.

Yes, systemic racism has been rather widespread. Yes. Yes.

Um, the— why do you think in 2024 there isn't as big of a response as there was in 2016? Is it just the movement is gone? Is it just that because it's the second time? Like, because, you know, a bunch of people were saying, hey, if Trump wins, you're gonna, you know, resummon the old, uh, Sort of spirits of the crazy progressive left. But that's not— I hear actually the opposite. It seems like they're retreating or don't even exist anymore or converting, or I guess sort of on their own Gab and Parler social networks ghettos. No disrespect to Gab and Parler.

Blue sky.

Yeah, exactly. What do you think? Are you surprised by this? Or why do you think this is?

By the way, I can't resist it. My friend Yann LeCun has got so exercised over Elon and X after the election that he bailed on X and did this big— he's one of the leaders and geniuses, super geniuses in AI. But somebody at X today basically pulled up a slide, you know, it goes with this OpenAI 03 release and pulled up a slide from Yann saying that this would never work. And basically it was like, Yann, you coward, come back here and fight me, you know, on X. And Yann literally responded by screenshotting it and responding on LinkedIn. I guess, I guess, I guess is now the other, the other, uh, snowflake, snowflake ghetto. If Blue Sky is too intense, uh, for you, you, you can return, you can retreat to LinkedIn.

So, um, the summoning the gods of the old left is, is just gone? Yeah. Or what does it turn into?

So, I mean, you know, the political analysis is just the scope of the Republican victory this time, right, was not only winning, but it was also winning the popular vote and winning both the Senate and the House. And by the way, also, you know, having the majority of the Supreme Court from before. So, you know, sort of all 4 of the formal branches of the government, you know, kind of being taken all at once. And so I think it's a big shock. And then obviously, obviously just the arc of Trump coming back is a giant blow to a lot of the old psychology. And then I think, so I have kind of 2 thoughts on this, a surface level one and a deep one. So surface level one is just like, I think things just went too far. And I think kind of everybody knows that things went too far. A lot of people just know things went too far. And so people ended up with basically indefensible positions like that basically there shouldn't be a border and that criminals should be allowed to run wild. Like it's just not, people should be allowed to just, be set fire to in the subway. Like, it's just not a, you know, I think a lot of people are trying to dismount from that. So that's one. And then the specific thing that's happened as a result of that is the Democratic Party over the last 6 weeks has immediately, starting after the loss, has basically descended into what I think is accurately called a civil war where they themselves are trying to figure out basically what the path forward is. And you have, you know, a lot of, you have the current chair of the DNC saying we need to go even harder left. You know, you have people like Rahm Emanuel and Richie Torres and others saying, no, quite the opposite. We have to come back to the center and come back to common sense. And so I, like I say, I would be suspicious that it's a plot and that they're about to like jump out at the inauguration or something. But I think in reality, I think Democrats are having it. Certainly all of my friends who are Democrats are telling me that there, there's like a very sort of severe internal kind of fight that's happening. And by the way, this in American politics, this has happened before in my lifetime. This happened in 1980, which is when Jimmy Carter got beaten by Ronald Reagan and the Democratic Party basically went into a paralyzed state where it tried to figure out whether to go you know, even more extreme to the left than it had in the '60s and '70s or kind of come back to the center. And by the way, it took them 12 years to win another presidential election, which required coming back to the center. But it took them 12 years to do that. And I think a lot of my Democratic friends are basically trying to say, like, how do we shortcut that process? So I think that's part of what's happening. But I think the other part of what's happening is it's actually— I really believe this. I think a lot of what's happening right now is basically the effects of all of the censorship. And so you have basically, you know, these sort of elites that we're talking about, this managerial class, The sort of you know people who have been in power for the last four years, in particular people who have been running large institutions. They got used to being on the side of censorship, and they got used to wielding censorship as a tool against their enemies in the form of these sort of things like you know again Orwellian things: hate speech, misinformation, so forth. You know there's basically there's a big obvious problem with censorship, which is it's a violation of literally the American way of life. It's a violation of the principles of Western civilization, of everything that makes our society great. This idea you're going to basically prevent other people from speaking. So there's that. But I think there's actually another problem with it, which is it actually causes you. The way I describe it is it causes you to mount a denial of service attack on your own epistemic ability to understand reality. Right? Like if, in other words, basically if you have the ring of power that basically says you can define anything contrary to your current beliefs as hate speech and misinformation, then you will never receive valid counterarguments to your own views.

Yeah.

And then sort of that's the sort of intellectual equivalent of taking a hose, hooking it up to the exhaust pipe of your car, and jamming the other end straight into your mouth. Right? Which is just like, you're just going to breathe your own exhaust forever. And if you're only breathing your own exhaust, if you're only believing yourself, Right? And people who are like you, and you're never listening to contrary information, right? Because it's hate speech or misinformation. It's been censored. Then there is no limit to how crazy you can get because there's no governor, right? You are not required to stay in contact with reality. And so I think the censorship basically regime worked for these people for quite a while. And then starting probably, I don't know, three or four years ago, it actually stopped working, and it's led them into a set of policies that are just bananas. And so a big thing that I think that they really have to do is rip off the bandaid and stop with all that and get back to being you know get back to being able to mark your beliefs. least to market, right? To, you know, to reality, just like every business person has to. Will they do that? I don't know. But I would say they're, you know, they're in the beginning stages of that. I certainly hope they do it. It will be obviously much better for us as a country if they do it. I know a bunch of Democrats who are, I think, very smart and very strong and who are, you know, working on this very hard. And I hope they succeed.

Well, I even see AOC doing some listening and learning to, you know, about what happened in the election and, you know, she's going to have a kid and maybe she moderates a bit. At the same time, the pro-Luigi Mangione faction, you know, the pro-killer that's sort of sentiment doesn't make one excited about the future of the party.

Full socialism plus murder in the streets. I'm just going to put it out there. Like, it might not be the best electoral platform, right, for '26 and '28. I don't know. I don't know. You know, call me crazy. Maybe I'm out of step with the mood of the— plenty of people on X tell me I'm out of step with the mood of the people, but like, are the adults of any age going to step up and basically say, no, this is not who we are. This is not what we're going to do. And it's just, it would, in many ways, it would be the easiest and most obvious thing in the world to do. And then it's just this question of whether they can kind of reorient.

Yeah. Well, and I just want to point out just how quick this vibe shift has happened. I mean, I remember a couple years ago there was this big debate in our circles about the Curtis Yarvin view and the Chris Rufo view. And the Curtis Yarvin view was, hey, you know, the conditions are not present. I'll let you edit the characterization, but basically it's don't fight back, you'll just lose and you'll empower them, you'll make them stronger. By sort of being the sort of counter-opposition or controlled opposition. Whereas the Chris Rufo view was like, you can just do things. You can change laws as it relates to, you know, what's happening in schools as it relates to critical race theory, or as it relates to sort of the gender and sex education stuff. Like, you can have incremental gains and they will be meaningful. And Kurz is saying, no, they won't be meaningful. You'll just— they'll change the terms, but they'll still have the same people in power and thus have the same views and make you think you've won. But actually, you're, you know, even further Why don't you sort of edit that, or the characterization of that debate, and then, you know, talk about how that's evolved? Because my read, you can edit, is I thought you were more on the sort of Curtis side of that issue of, of like more sort of skeptical of the innovation, but then at some point shifted to more of the Rufo view of like, wow, things can actually change sooner than we think. Is that fair to say?

Yeah. So I think that's a great description. I think to give the strongest possible version of Curtis's view, which he calls the clear pill, I think the key kind of in there that you alluded to, but let's draw it out, is Not just that if the conditions aren't right, you will lose. It's that if you are a, if you step up to be an opponent in a situation where you can't win, you're not just losing, you're becoming what, what I think he calls the agonist in a chemical reaction. You're becoming the fuel that the side you hate uses to burn even brighter. Yeah. Right. And so you're becoming, you're becoming the bad, you're making yourself into the bad guy. Right. And the sports metaphor is the Harlem Globetrotters, you know, spent 40 years winning. It went like, you know, 12,000 basketball games against their opposition team, the Washington Generals, which won zero.

Yeah.

Actually, the Wikipedia page is really fantastic because it turns out the Washington Generals really, they accidentally won one game and like just accidentally, like a ball went in the basket at the last minute that shouldn't have. And like Meadowlark Lemon, who was the star of the Harlem Globetrotters, like just apparently completely lost his shit and was just like insanely angry because, right, of course that's the thing that's like never supposed to happen. And it was like super mad and like threatening to fire all the Washington Generals. And so, you know, if you're up against the Harlem Globetrotters and they have institutional control, you don't want to be the Washington Generals. Like you're wasting your time, you'll probably get vaporized, and you're going to make the Opponent stronger, and so basically don't do that. Obviously, yeah, the Chris Rufo opposition to that is okay. In that case, you basically just are signing up to lose, and what the hell? Right? How how can you basically do that? Why don't you get out there and fight and figure out a way to win? And you know, they they you know these are both incredibly brilliant guys. They fully articulated this. I would just say this: My partner and I went out on a limb to get involved in the political process, but a lot of that went well, by the way, including by the way candidates we supported in both parties, people in the sensible middle with the pro-tech agenda, pro-innovation agenda. Which apparently now includes the former Commerce Secretary. Like, who knew? Miracles, miracles are happening every day. I wonder where she's been. Okay, exactly. We can talk more about that. We did that. The thing though, and I'm not, I'm going to say this, I'm going to just describe what's happened and I'm not going to claim that I'm some moral hero here or whatever, because I certainly don't think I am. And I think there's a lot that I could have done better in the last decade. A lot of ways I was ineffective, but I will say like, I have been in pitched arguments on some of the topics we're discussing tonight over the course of the last, you know, several years with, in some cases with high degrees of intensity. And basically I had become the Washington Generals. I felt like the Washington Generals. I was just like, I got to the point even through this year where I just felt like I'm going to make the token argument, but like it's, I'm just going to lose. I'm just going to lose. And I, and I lost over and over and over and over and over again in these discussions. And then basically after November 6th, all of a sudden, like a significant number of people basically are like, oh, okay, let's do it that way instead. I'm just like, What, like, my arguments haven't gotten any better, right? Like, I'm not any more compelling. Um, but, you know, people, it's what we talked about earlier, basically, people are basically flipping, they're flipping on a lot of these issues really quickly. Of course, I give them credit for it, not, not, not myself, but it definitely feels like all of a sudden things are happening today. And I think we're going to see announcements, you know, from various companies in the next 3 months that I think are going to be, I think, actually quite surprising. And so things are happening that are, I think, you know, put it this under, under the strict, uh, Jarvin principle, that would not be happening. And so I think we, we need some other model of change of which the preference We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

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Of course, Curtis himself, I don't think has accepted, uh, you know, he's a hard person to get to change his views, or has a high standard for what FDR 2.0 looks like. Like, he wasn't impressed when Elon took over Twitter. He said, oh, it won't happen enough. And obviously he's very brilliant, but just, yeah, interesting to—

Well, he wants, you know, to his credit, like, he wants real victory. And so anything short of real victory is basically just giving your enemy a chance to retrench and come back at you. And let me say also, like, at least I don't think I know how it's going to play out. Like, I have found my political predictive skills not that great over the last decade. So, look, it's entirely possible that we're, you know, look, it's possible we're still the Washington Generals and it's possible that basically everything that we've been fighting against comes roaring back. It's also possible that basically everything just moves on and there's some totally new set of issues. It's also possible, you know, who knows, right? And then, by the way, if there's one thing that we've all learned, I think, in our lives and careers, it's, you know, X factors matter a lot. Over the last 20 years, you know, there's been at least 3, like, really profound reality-altering events that have taken place, which is 9/11, the global financial crisis, and COVID. And each of those was like a fundamental reset to a lot of assumptions. And so I've also learned to have a healthy regard for the unpredictability of the world we're going into. We do what we can.

And it seems like the X factor for the vibe shift was Elon buying Twitter, which almost didn't happen because he almost didn't go through with it. And if that didn't happen, then we'd all be sort of, you know, just in the group chats complaining.

Well, it's even better. It's actually, you know, we're this, but it's even better, which is not only did he almost not buy Twitter, they actually forced him to buy it.

Oh my God. Yeah.

I don't know if you remember, but how, how angry basically everybody got that he was quote unquote trying to get out of the deal and how the judge basically in Delaware, sort of activist judge, basically, you know, demanded that he close the deal. Yeah. Uh, right. Like that's the part of it that like doesn't get told is like they absolutely demanded that he close the deal. And so anyway.

Yeah, that's really funny. The, um, So, yeah, Elon basically gave air cover to the vibe shift, both in terms of buying Twitter, but then also his own sort of evolution. And I think I'm curious, basically, if you could briefly touch on the role of group chats and how they played a role in the vibe shift over the past 5 years, because I sometimes see Elon tweeting stuff, whether it's about testosterone or crime or even Michael Brown, Stuff that I saw in the group chats years ago. He's sort of speedrun this education. And I know he talks to you. I know he talks to a bunch of other people as well. And so I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the role of these group chats in kind of the vibe shift, because what we see in public is the antagonism that Elon received from government officials. But it seemed like he got help in getting up to speed and educated on a lot of these and opening his eyes to a lot of these issues. What do you have to say there?

Yeah, so there's a really interesting backstory to this. So, you know, Elon for a long time was actually much like myself for a long time. He's what you just call a normie Democrat. Um, and in fact, the origin of Tesla, the sort of great mission of Tesla was, uh, carbon, solve carbon emissions, climate change, right? Shift to a carbon-free economy. And so anyways, he was not involved, you know, he was not involved in politics. He was building his companies, which were certainly plenty, plenty hard to be a full-time focus for him. And so he wasn't really involved in politics, but he had this, he was always very curious about culture and specifically he was always really curious about internet culture, right? And so he was always tweeting and memeing. I mean, the 2 people who were like tweeting and memeing like all the time, basically 10, 15 years ago when basically it didn't have any political salience at all, were of course Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Like literally, right? Like Trump's Twitter feed going back into the, like, you know, if you go back before 2013, which is when everything kind of activated politically on the internet, like Trump was tweeting away and Elon was tweeting away. And so Elon got, you know, super into internet culture. You know, the specific proximate event that caused him to actually pull the trigger on buying Twitter was actually not a partisan political thing. It was literally the Babylon Which was his favorite, you know, satire site getting deplatformed, right? So the way he thought about it at the time, I think, was it's striking at the thing that I love, the thing that I love. And he once said somebody finally figured this out and asked him in some interview, and he said, yeah, he's like, this is, you know, what do I do for fun? They'll be like, I work all the time. I spend time with my, you know, my family, my kids. And then basically I like when I have a spare 20 minutes, I tweet memes. And I remember thinking like, okay, wow. Like, you know, that's interesting. I should spend more time tweeting memes. And then I saw, and I had known Elon for a long time, but not, we had never worked closely together. And so I, but I had always followed him and was watching what he said. And he went one day, it came out on Twitter, he tweeted something to the effect that he has meme dealers, right? That there are like some number of people out there basically who are like arming him with memes. And that's how he's coming up with all these funny memes is he has meme dealers who are like dealing them to him.

Yeah.

And I was like, wow, that's interesting. I wonder if I could become one of Elon's meme dealers. And so I started sending him memes and he started tweeting them. And I was like, this is freaking amazing. This is just like absolutely outstanding. Because when he tweeted it, he would get 1,000 times the, you know, the likes that when I tweeted it. And so I was like, okay. And so he's been immersed in this culture. And as you said, like it's sort of a backchannel culture, right? Right. So basically for people who haven't tracked this, basically what's happened is as the sort of censorship and cancellation machine kind of kicked in a decade ago, basically what happened was that we all organically, you know, across many actually walks of life, many, many different kinds of people created basically the modern equivalent of what in the Soviet era they called Samozdat. And for those of you who don't know the history of Soviet totalitarianism, Samozdat was basically underground newspapers. Papers. And so there was harsh formal censorship from the central government. And so there were literally these, basically these mimeographed, mimeographed is the copying technology before photocopiers, mimeographed basically newsletters. And these dissident writers would basically write samizdat, distribute it. And if you got caught with samizdat, by the way, it was a big problem, right? And you could get arrested or jailed or killed. And so basically the modern version of samizdat is, oh, and by the way, here's how seriously they took that, just to give you a sense of how totalitarian regimes In the USSR through the 1980s, it was a capital crime to possess a mimeograph machine, right? So if you had a machine in your basement that was capable of running off copies of a piece of paper, you could get executed for it.

Wow.

And so they knew how important it was to maintain total control of content communications. And so the modern version of that is the WhatsApp, is basically the WhatsApp group or the Signal group. It started out being the text chain, but very quickly became the WhatsApp group or Signal group. And the reason it became the WhatsApp group or Signal group is disappearing messages, right? You know, God forbid you get caught with the mimeograph machine. God forbid you get caught with a WhatsApp group. group, right? And in fact, there are cases both in the U.S. and, and, and I know there's a bunch of cases in the U.K. where people have gotten really hung up legally for literally the contents of private WhatsApp groups, right? Like, this is not, again, it's the soft authoritarian version of what the Soviets had, but it's, you know, they, they, they do come at you if they find you have a secret WhatsApp group. And so that started developing, but then the, but then the running joke became basically therefore, as a consequence of this dynamic, the theme of every WhatsApp group was to basically send memes that were as edgy as possible, like right to the point where your friends literally would all like leave the group. But like not one step further, right? Yeah. Um, as sort of a form of social revolt, right? Against, against this increasing level of censoriousness in the, in the public sphere. So what's happened is this sort of archipelago of WhatsApp groups has lit up and now this is a universal thing. And in fact, like we, for example, it turned, we found out in the UK after, you know, they're, they had all these COVID hearings afterwards and it turned out basically the UK government for years now has been, been run on WhatsApp groups. Like, you know, this has become like a standard thing that people do, do a lot of business on. By the way, interestingly, this cuts directly into a key policy topic, which is the war on And, you know, the authorities both in the U.S. and in many other countries have been trying to prevent strong encryption from proliferating into the hands of normal people, you know, for basically my whole career for 30 years. I've been fighting it in various ways for 30 years. But there was a, you know, I would say there was one turning point moment where Signal implemented true end-to-end encryption. And then in the context of groups and with disappearing messages. And then there was another sort of seminal moment where actually WhatsApp, which is actually built on the Signal, I think it's built on the Signal encryption technology, but WhatsApp, Mark Zuckerberg made the policy decision to also implement those same features in WhatsApp. And this is like, I can tell you, and it's been publicly reported that there's been intense pressure from governments to not do that, right? There's like a tremendous aversion on the part of these centralized governments, these centralized authorities to basically make sure that citizens don't have the ability to communicate in private groups without being able to be, without being able to be surveilled. Um, and, and, you know, the Signal folks deserve, you know, the Medal of Freedom for carving the path on that. And then quite frankly, this is an area where I think Facebook has done, you know, 100% the right thing by holding the line on that against, you know, tremendous pressure. And so anyways, it just so happens that we actually have these digital technologies that actually make this possible now. And I, to your point, I think when the history of our time is written, it's going to turn out that these groups were actually very important. And then of course, people are going to like whine and complain because it's like, oh my God, like all these terrible people are having all these private conversations. It's like, well, no shit. Like they're having all the private conversations because they weren't allowed to have the public conversation, right? If it hadn't been for all the censorship, all these conversations would have just been had in public, which is, which would have been like much better, right? But they weren't allowed. And so they were all driven underground. And what did you think would happen? And I think that's sort of been a key mechanism for the unwind of the preference falsification.

Right. Yeah. I remember when one of our groups started in 2020, June 20th.

Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I just want to be clear, Erik. I don't know what groups. I'm not in any of these. I'm not. I just want to be clear. I am not in any of these groups.

We don't know each other. Yeah.

I have only heard about this from friends. I myself only communicate one-on-one and barely even that. So I just want I want to disclaim, just to be totally clear, I don't know you. I don't know your name. Exactly. I certainly don't have your phone number. Okay, go ahead.

Me and other friends, not you, June 2020, I was basically having activist uprisings in my company. I saw that 10,000 medical professionals said it was okay for people to protest during George Floyd but weren't allowed to go to their grandparents' funeral or whatever. And I had to say certain things on social media, and I could go to these group chats with maybe 5 or 10 people and just ask, hey, am I crazy? Or is this crazy? What's happening here? And not only could people tell me, no, you're not crazy, this is a crazy time, but also— and we could sort of laugh at all the crazy times that were to come. But also there was like an education happening. There were these antibodies being built. And then gradually the support for pushing back. I remember Mike Solana and Balaji as some of the earlier people that were able to push back. And then And this sort of preference falsification went from there.

Yeah, that's right. And yeah, I mean, it's a time-honored thing. It's basically, you need groups of people to be able to get together and actually have open discussion. You've always needed, in every society, you've always needed that. It's always the catalyst for change. If change is ever going to happen, it's how change happens. It's absolutely crucial. But by the way, like I've read the Constitution, like it's actually something we are allowed to do. Yes, exactly. We are, we are allowed to freely speak and associate. And that's why, right? I mean, that's the core fundamental reason why those Those rights are literally the First Amendment to our Constitution. And so it's been great. I think it's an incredible, unalloyed, positive, good news aspect of this new technology.

And then now those same chats that were 10 people are now hundreds of people. And now you're tweeting again, and now it's just glorious. It's glory in America, morning in America. Which, going back to 2024, imagine there's a Twitter Files for government, or imagine Elon does a Twitter File. Like, what do we expect to find?

Yeah. So first of all, again, I don't want to in any way speak for the new administration, but I would not be remotely surprised if that's exactly what happens. And of course, being the government, it will be spectacular. Like, if it happens, it will be amazing. Right. And then the reason is just, and the reason, if it happens, the reason it will be, the reason it'll be so spectacular is just the government just has so much power. It's actually been in a lot of ways, like in a lot of ways, there's a lot of things that happened in the last 10 years. And people of course have lots of different opinions on, But like, one of the things I think people should think about, I try to keep in mind, is just like, sometimes you actually need a civics lesson. Like, sometimes you actually need an applied lesson in civics. You know, it's all the stuff you were, if you grew up in the U.S., you, of a certain generation, you were in social studies class and they taught you how all this stuff is supposed to work. And then you go out in the real world and you're like, oh my God, it doesn't work like that at all. Right? Like, that's not even remotely what it works like. Um, but you know, that's what, that's what we were told in school and how a bill becomes a law and all these other things. And every now and then you need an applied lesson in social studies. Like you need to see how these things actually work. And I think what's happened is that the government, you know, for reasons that we could talk about at length, is just, you know, aggregated just enormous amounts of power and particularly enormous amounts of power when it chooses to, to implement this kind of soft authoritarianism and repression. And that the 2 most, you know, well, maybe 3 most vivid ways. Well, 4 that have played out over the last decade is, you know, just you tick them right off. It's censorship, it's debanking, and then it's, you know, DEI, and then it's the whole constellation of ESG. And just this like application of just like incredible force to mandate these things, often in the face of you know actual federal law, is amazing. And then my other thing is like I don't know what exists inside you know inside the you know the government files, but I do know what came out of the Twitter files, and I do have a pretty good sense of the kinds of things that exist in other companies. And I think the nature of these managerial organizations is people just can't help themselves but talk freely about these topics. They internally right? They lull themselves, I think, into a false sense of safety that they can you know basically freely talk about censoring their political opponents. Banking their political opponents, breaking civil rights law. They just start to think that these things are fine and then they need to implement the directives. And so they need to actually do all the work. And to do that, they need to communicate and they need to be compliant, which means they need to like document their decisions and then they need to do, you know, document retention. So they need to hold on to all the documents. Right. And so what we learned in the Twitter Files is that there's just, there was just like extensive written records of all of the bad behavior, like in, and not like sophisticated, like clever, like, oh my God, I can't believe how smart they were and how they did all this, you know, instead of the opposite. It's like the most cartoonishly malicious version of it that you could possibly imagine, right? Just like the dumbest possible things of whatever was in the New York Times that day was just believed absolutely uncritically and applied with just the greatest, just blunt force stupidity over and over and over and over and over again, and then documented. And so I suspect that, like, for example, the debanking files, if we get this new administration chooses to subpoena the bank banks and then also chooses to open up the files at the federal, at the many different federal banking regulators. There's, you know, there's at least 8, which is amazing in and of itself, but there's at least 8 involved in regulating federal agencies involved in regulating the banks. I think if we get all those internal files relative to debanking, I think we will be, I think it'll shock our shoes off. Number one, at the pervasiveness of the practice. And then number two, just the sheer like ham-handed idiocy of it. Like this is not going to be the sophisticated version. This is going to be just like, I cannot believe that these people like this crude in their own views were allowed to basically exercise their own personal biases with the full force of government power and the banking cartel power behind them.

Yeah. Let's paint more of a picture of what winning looks like over the next few years. If you could wave a wand and change and have the administration do anything, what are some examples of things that might look like? One just example for inspiration is, I think at one point you said something like, if a few hundred people, we could wholesale replace them that would, or get them out with generous retirement packages, et cetera, that might have a massive change. Why don't we just paint a picture of what winning could look like?

Well, I think there's, you know, 2 big steps, honestly. I mean, step one is just stop doing stupid shit, right? Like, just stop with the stupid stuff, right? And so if there's just like flat out relief, like, like in a lot of ways, it's always like, you know, it's always like this whole thing of like, why are you becoming involved in government? What do you want? It's like, I don't want anything. I like, I want the, I want the, I want the opposite of things, right? I want, I want the opposite of something happening. I want whatever has been happening to not happen. And like the default form, right, of change is like, just simply stop, like, for God's sake, just simply stop. Right. And so just stop this. Obviously there's a whole bunch of these things, this, all these different, you know, kind of crazy things have been happening that we've been talking about. And so that's one. And then, yeah, look, the other would be an, you know, an actual proactive, an actual, you know, positive, productive, proactive strategy, which, you know, clearly they're developing and And I think we'll put in place. I think they'll do both of these. But the simplest way to think about it is just what the president has always said and what he'll be saying a lot from here on in, which is his line. Well, I just want America to win. Like I just want us to win. I just like want us to be strong, and I want our enemies to fear us, and I want to not get like screwed with, and like I don't want people like taking hostages of our people or our allies, and I don't want wars, and I don't you know I just I don't want those things. But then I want America to win. I want America to be like the strongest economy, to be the strongest technologically, the strongest militarily. I want maximum freedom. I want people to be able to, be able to, you know, live and succeed in their lives. Like all these things. And so having a regime that is actually focused on the success and flourishing of the actual population of the country and not trying to solve, you know, every other problem in the world and not trying to manipulate and orchestrate every social outcome. It is this amazing alignment. I mean, one of the really remarkable things is, you know, there were people years ago, one of the sort of unusual things about what's happened politically in the last year is it's not the most obvious thing in the world that kind of the techno-libertarian faction would align with sort of a, you know, what you might call a nationalist populist And it actually turns out that, you know, the alignment's not 100%, but it's shockingly close because what those, what both of those perspectives have is basically, yeah, you know, let's go win. Yeah.

Do you think politics is downstream of culture or the other way around?

I think it's probably a little bit of both. You know, the argument, the Richard Hanani and others argument that basically laws also drive culture in particular, like, you know, there's politics, but then there's laws. And I think one of the things I've been trying to wrap my head around a lot, and as we've discussed, is kind of what have been the roles of actual laws kind of every step of the way here. So, and I think maybe for those of us who aren't lawyers, I think people like myself, like, I think maybe we just persistently underestimate the importance of the actual laws. And so that's one, but I mean, look, the argument for culture driving politics is, I think, very strong. As we talked about earlier, political views have a cultural social component like any other form of fashion and like any other cultural phenomenon. And, you know, they're just like music or anything else or clothing, like, you know, things go in and out of fashion. By the way, patterns repeat. I saw bell bottoms are coming back. Yeah. Right. But they repeat in a lag, like they repeat when everybody forgets why they didn't like them. Right. And then they kind of go through that cycle. Yeah. Same process of rediscovery. And then these trends, politics seem to play out on a generational timeframe in the same way that culture seems to play out in a generational timeframe. And you have this concept of eras that's never quite totally right, but like has a lot of substance to it. And so I think there's a lot to that. And then, you know, maybe the sort of smartest thing you could say about it is politics and culture very clearly are kind of combined at the point of the media, which means politics and culture very clearly are combining at the point of social media. And social media spreads culture and politics equally, and then in combination. I'm really struck. I'll give you an example. I'm really struck. Our friend, uh, Catherine Dee has this great, she's an analyst, she's an internet writer and thinker, and she's an analyst of, she started out being an analyst of what she calls fandoms. So fandoms is like, you know, Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom, right? And I remember when these actually first started on the internet, 'cause they first started actually in newsgroups. And so you'd have like alt.tv. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and then all the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans would get together and they'd have these flame wars and these big arguments and they'd have, you know, their fan sites and their, all this stuff. Yeah. Stuff. And if a character died, they'd all grieve and then they would be sending furious email campaigns to get the show uncanceled and all this stuff. And so this concept of a fandom. And then basically Katherine's kind of big thing is like, it turns out everything is, everything else is also now a fandom, right? And so the way we now relate to politicians is as fandoms in basically the exact same way. And we either like love that guy, right? And we cheer him on and we're part of his fan club or like, we hate that guy, like, and our fan club wants to take his down.

Right.

Right. And look, group formation, group psychology, group, even, you know, battles in the street are, you know, that's been the case of politics forever is kind of group formation. And then the group's fighting. And so there's some of that that's not new, but her point, which I think is very valid, which is on the internet, the similarity or the overlap with that and any idea of cultural formation, basically, they basically become the exact same thing. Right.

So I think basically from here on out, they're absolutely like inextricably And so for the people asking, how do we transcend that, et cetera, how do we get past that? Is that just missing the point or not even wrong or just naive?

That just means losing. I mean, that just means losing. It's like bipartisanship. What does bipartisanship mean? It means that you're signing up for your side to lose. Like, a bipartisan Republican is somebody who just does what Democrats want, which is why the press is constantly pushing for bipartisanship, right? In the eyes of the press, the ideal Republican is somebody who just does what Democrats want. That's like bipartisanship. It never, never goes in the other direction. And so, yeah, I don't want to be in that fight is equivalent to saying I'm fine with the outcome. Um, you know, and fair enough. I don't know that politics, I'm not certainly advocating politics should consume everybody's lives. And I certainly hope it doesn't consume mine, but opting out, like if there is a fight to be had, opting out is the same as losing.

Well, too late for you. I'm just kidding.

Correct.

The, uh, but you know, we're not interested in politics, but politics is interested in us, as they say. Um, I mean, to that point, if 2013 to 2024 was the sort sort of, sort of wokeness era. What's the next cultural renaissance? Is it patriotism? Is it meritocracy? Is it normalcy? Like, what do you think will define the next era culturally?

Yeah, I mean, clearly that's the new, the way I would describe it. Yeah. So the culture, you know, for the first like half of my life, the culture basically was the culture of the '50s kind of extending into the, you know, the '80s or '90s, which was the cliché, but the cliché of like, you know, it's kind of Nixonian social conservatism, traditional families, all these aversion to social change, you know, also all this, all the things that the sort of hippie movement and the new left and the social revolutions of the '60s and '70s did their best to tear to the ground. And so, do we have our hair super short and neat, or do we have our hair long and scraggly? And, you know, that's a statement of our political beliefs and our, what culture we belong in. And so that was sort of the culture counterculture, you know, kind of thing that I grew up in. I mean, I, of course, just always assumed the counterculture was the correct one, right? Because who would want to be part of the dominant thing? You obviously want to be a rebel. And then, you know, the other kind of thing you can always see, I think, in this culture counterculture kind of thing is the side that is winning is the one that uses censorship. Right. And so when I was growing up, it was the right that was using censorship, right, in the '80s. Right. And so these, all the censorship campaigns were right-wing and the left, which was the counterculture at the time, basically kept saying, no, censorship is anti-American. Right. And we need to be able to have free speech. And then the other, you know, kind of clue of like culture versus counterculture is who's funny. Right. And of course the culture is never funny, right? Because the culture is totally serious, right?

Right.

The culture is like absolutely the way things are and can never change and can Never, ever be the subject of a joke, right? Which is like the most threatening thing in the world to somebody in power is humor, is a joke, is being ridiculed and undermined. So the counterculture is the funny one, right? So therefore the phenomenon of a Saturday Night Live or something like that, which was all, you know, which is irreverent. It was irreverent and funny because it was challenging the dominant culture. And especially if you go back and watch the original Saturday Night Lives from like the 1975, I watched the very first one a while ago just to see it. I'd never seen it. And literally it's like a, it's like what they used to, it's like what they used to call it. What was it? Like a, they had these terms like sit-in and then I think they had like, I don't know, what was it like love-in? But it was literally like, it was like a, it was like a, it was like a circular thing. It was, everyone was just like all hippies. It was just like 100% hippies. And then they're basically sitting, it's this circular stage and they're literally all sitting around with their legs, sitting around with their legs crossed as these young kids come out with all these irreverent counterculture jokes. Of course, in our time, we could debate when the inversion happened, but it certainly happened by, by Obama and probably before that where, you know, it flipped and the counterculture became the Yeah.

Um, when Stephen Colbert stopped being funny or Jon Stewart stopped being funny.

Yeah. When that kind of comedy went from what, you know, there's actually a term when it went from laughter to what they call clapter, right? Actually, comedians talk about this. There's 2 responses. There's 2 responses to comedian on staging from the audience. One is you can get laughter and the other is you can get applause. And if you're a real comedian, you always want laughter and you're horrified if you ever get applause. Because if you see applause, it implies that you have said something that basically where you want approval from the audience. Right? Where you're appealing to the dominant norms and the audience is rewarding you for your compliance to the dominant norms.

Yeah.

And so like a real comedian is horrified when he gets applause. He just wants laughter. And of course, the thing that generates laughter is something true, right? The thing that generates laughter is something true. The thing that generates applause is something that everybody is required to agree with, right? Those are like the opposite concepts, right? And so, yeah, when late night comedy, such as it is, or what it used to be referred to, went from laughter to clapder, like the humor drained straight out of it. It became basically state media. Media. It basically became state media, right? It became basically reinforcing every night the set of the preference falsification, the set of things that you must believe, the set of things you must say even if you don't believe them. And then certainly attacking people who say things that should not be said. And so this incredible— they have become this incredible mechanism of cultural enforcement, you know, quite regime media. And it's amazing, by the way, it's amazing because it happened to literally all of them. Yeah. Right. It didn't happen to one of them. It happened to all of them. Right. At the exact same time, that's what all the newspapers turned into and all television news turned into. Right. And every University, right? At every foundation, like they just all went like straight into this lockstep. Anyway, so long-winded way of saying, now we're in a very interesting spot, right? Which is okay. What? So like I always think the question behind your question is like, okay, now for the next whatever period of time, what's culture and what's counterculture? I think it's going to be really interesting to see, like if the left gets really funny again, it's going to be a sign of, it's going to be a sign of a couple of things. One is this is going to mean that the right is ascendant, right? This is the right is becoming the culture again. And then the left is going to respond with humor. And so maybe, maybe that's the thing to look for is when left wing humor, when Saturday Night Live gets funny again, like that Right. Will be a significant turning point moment. So that's one. Is that going to happen? I don't know. I think there's going to be a, to your point, I think there's going to be a big swing here for a while of a much more, I mean, there is now already, obviously, patriotism, American flags, pride in the country, by the way, veneration of the military, by the way, veneration of the police, pride in law enforcement, pride in civil order. And then obviously coupling that with obviously pride in free speech, free association, Yeah. And not having to lie. And so there'll be a lot of that. What will that be balanced by? I'm not sure. By the way, will that go too far? Are we going to be sitting here in out of 5 or 10 or 15 years saying, oh my God, we've reverted back to 1982 or something. And it feels like this crippling monoculture in the other direction, kind of back to that. I don't know. I kind of doubt it. I think maybe the internet. Yeah, I kind of doubt it. I mean, number one is like, we kind of had that. You don't tend to get the exact same thing again. And then the other thing is like, look, the form of media itself has changed. And so the This is like a classic Marshall McLuhan, which is, you know, the culture is shaped not just by the content, but by the actual medium itself. And what we think of as like 1960s through 2000s culture was very determined by the specific form factor of television. And that's never going back in the box, like ever. Actually, somebody made an argument on X the other day that I thought was very striking. Forget who it was, but it was very bright and said, there's a case to be made that 2020 may have been the all-time peak of top-down authoritarian message control for the rest of time. Right. You mentioned like what that felt like, right? Like how it, right. How intense that felt. And we all lived through that. But the argument this person made was that was the point when number one, TV was actually still relevant. Like TV still mattered, which clearly is like collapsing right now. Like, but like TV was still hanging in there. And then the other was the internet censorship regime was still fully intact. Right. So this is pre-Elon buying X and it's when the government was just like doing their full-scale censorship campaigns and forcing the social media companies to censor. And so, and basically the argument goes that in the last 4 years, both of those basically preconditions for that level of sort of thought control have collapsed. TV is never going to recover. Like it's on its way to zero, right? It was, you see that very clearly now in the ratings. And then the internet is never going to get recentralized the way that it was before. It's always going there. It may come under more pressure in the future than it's under now. Like there may be more censorship in the future, but you know, at least the theory goes, certainly it's not going to get back to how crazy, you know, how ruthlessly effective the sort of crazy censorship was in 2020. So I don't know, maybe that's a white pill, which is whatever we're going to get. Yeah.

I remember we've been laughing about this sort of, I think it's a South Park clip, maybe it's a Netflix executive. They're sort of showing one of the shows that they're creating and then someone is saying, put a gay woman in it or put a Black woman in it. Just sort of a parody of kind of the sort of pandering that these networks have done. And we've talked about sort of the Silicon Valley vibe shift. I'm curious if there is or might be a vibe shift in Hollywood. And I know You're obsessed with Hollywood and enjoy, you know, sort of movies that portray how messed up, uh, sort of sanctimonious but hypocritical Hollywood has been. Do you see any sort of self-awareness there or, uh, just, you know, spiraling?

Yeah, no, I see a lot. So I just start by saying I actually have a lot of friends in that industry. And I say that because I'm going to refer to things that people have told me behind the scenes and I just don't want any specific person to get blamed for it. Yep. Um, so, so these are, I'll just give you the gestalt view, but I do talk to people in that world a fair amount. So one is, I think they went even more over the top on all this stuff than we did in tech. Like, I think it got even more extreme. And I think that you can see that in a whole bunch of ways, but the clearest way is the quota system. The DEI quotas got even more extreme. And so, you know, the major studios, if that's even possible, the major studios literally put out literally statements of like, literally like 50% quotas in all these jobs, both in front of the camera, behind the camera. And again, like I just, you know, just a surface reading of that is those are all completely illegal. But they didn't hesitate for a second when the fashion became to put them out. The quota systems and all that stuff became very extreme. And then obviously the content changed radically and became very kind of ideological and politically loaded. So that went very over the top behind the scenes, essentially, at least in the last 3 years. I think most of the people in positions of responsibility behind the scenes in private basically think it went like, it just all went way too far.

Yeah.

And they were saying that a while back. And I think part of that is just they were kind of aware of what had happened and they didn't like it. They didn't like the consequences on the product that they make. And then also part of that is things just started to fail. It's like one thing to make, you know, a bad movie or something. It's another thing to make a movie that loses money, right? In that system, legitimately so, because these things are expensive to make. And there have been a, there have been a long run now of high-profile projects that have tanked very badly for, you know, what certainly looked like reasons related to what we're talking about. And then you've also had these like anomalous successes. And the big one, of course, was the Top Gun sequel, which was just this like stratospheric home run, which is like basically as direct a 1980s throwback as you could possibly get. And just like a good old-fashioned unabashed pro- American, patriotic, pro-military, pro, like, you know, America's a source of a form of moral good in the world, like competence, merit, hyper-aggressive people being incredibly ambitious and doing great things. Like it just is sort of contra the current times as you can get. And it was this giant hit and everybody loved it. And so there's that. And so about a year and a half ago, the sort of word went out, maybe 2 years ago now, it's been a little bit, but the word went out that the code in Hollywood for the last couple of years has been dad shows. Or dad movies. And you've probably seen some of these. And so it's like the Reacher show on Amazon is like a, an example or the, or the other one is what, The Terminal List, the really dark Navy SEALs show, I think also on Amazon. And so dad shows has been like a double meaning. It's something that you can say, 'cause you're like, well, dads are a market segment. And so we, we, you know, we need to, as we, the streaming services start to appeal to all market segments. And so we need to go get the dads. But of course what it means underneath that is not woke.

Right.

Right. 'Cause the dads don't want like, you know, they don't want the lectures. They don't want the preaching. What they want is like to see like a guy going around around, like killing bad guys, like, you know, like good old-fashioned, good old-fashioned right-wing entertainment. So the call has been out for a while for that. And so, you know, it's like amazing because you have these, you have these projects where you're still seeing the trailers hit now for the projects that were like greenlit over the course of the last 5 years where the projects are coming out now. And you can just literally tell it's like, oh, 2019. Oh, 2022. You could just tell like exactly when the thing was written and pitched by the politics. But you're also going to see, I think, a lot Or just, you know, straight up entertainment. Uh, Bob Iger is obviously grappling with, you know, Disney's in crisis because of this. And this is Bob's public statement since he came back, which is, you know, we just need to be in the business of entertainment. We just need to like make shows that people want to watch, which is funny because like in Hollywood 2024, that's like a radical statement, right? That's like a heretical. And everybody, by the way, and that's code, right? For non-woke. And everybody knows that he can't actually say non-woke. Like he, he can't admit that the term woke even exists as far as I can tell. Like these guys can't, they can't actually talk about the thing, but they can use the code, right? They're like, you're 2 years behind us.

You know, we couldn't talk about it a few years ago, but yeah.

Yes, exactly. So yes, the Doppler effect is real. By the way, that's another thing that I think is, you mentioned cultural changes. That's the other thing I've been thinking a lot about the Hollywood thing as an example of, which is I, you know, this is going to sound very hubristic, but I think it might be true. And I hear this a lot from my friends overseas, which is I think it might be literally true that San Francisco is the cultural center of the universe. Like, I think like San Francisco was first in on everything that we're talking about. And I think San Francisco maybe is first out, right? And then Hollywood immediately followed and Hollywood was going to work their way out. And then the rest of the East Coast, it was then, you know, came in after that. It's going to take them longer to get out. And then whatever happened in the Southeast or whatever is going to be on a lag after that. And then the UK is going to happen 2 years after that, after that, and Canada and Australia, right? And then it's, you know, ultimately—

So you're bullish it's going to happen even there? Those places seem so hopeless and, uh, but on a lag.

So the strong form of the theory, the strong form of the theory is take any principle, you know, take any of these preference falsification things. Take any, anything that everybody was absolutely required to say despite, uh, knowing that it was not true and just identify the date at which everybody in San Francisco decided that they believed that and then establish that on a timeline. And then the date when that same belief was taken up in all these other locations as sort of the wave spread. Okay. And then you've got like a stack rank of like places over time. And so the prediction would be the unwind happens in the exact same form.

That's funny.

Right. And so there's going to be like, there's going to be be like schools in rural, I don't know, rural Louisiana, like 8 years from now that are going to get the memo and all of a sudden nobody's going to have purple hair anymore. It's just going to be like this incredible long reach lag depending on your cultural proximity to San Francisco. I don't know if this is all literally exactly right, but I'm very suspicious that this is how it's going to play out.

Fascinating.

Well, you see Elon just today, recently supporting some of the sort of similar movements in Europe. Like, he's not just trying to change what's happening in America, but also You know, similar movements around the world, which I guess was similar to what Bannon was doing maybe 8 years ago, or kind of, yeah, there's a similar sort of populism or whatever you want to call it. And it'll be interesting to see if there's enough momentum and energy in Europe for it to happen.

Yeah, there's a lot of, so talking to a lot of friends of mine in Europe, there's a lot of similarities. And so I do think like this Doppler effect, I was talking to a friend in Sweden actually. So a few years ago, actually it was after 20, yeah, no, it was after 2020, a friend in Sweden. And he said, yeah, it's weird. He's like, all of a sudden in Sweden, we only talk about American politics, right? It's like everybody's completely obsessed with the 2020 election. And he said, like, literally it never happened before. Like it was, this is not what they did in 2016 or 2012. Nobody had an opinion. Nobody in Sweden had an opinion on Mitt Romney. You know, they probably thought he was a perfectly nice guy. It just wasn't, they were focused on Swedish politics. Right. Right. And he said something happened, something changed around 2020 where basically the narrative throughout Europe became, became, became American politics. And so this is, you know, the theory of these sort of cultural bow waves. And so, yeah, I think that there's a lot to that. Now, the circumstances are different. There's a bunch of ways that we could talk about the differences that are important, but I think there's some, some similarities to it. And then I would say, like, with respect to what Elon is doing or work that we might do as we get involved in policy issues outside the U.S., the other just very practical thing is the U.S. is not an island. And many other countries actually, I mean, first of all, many American companies are multinationals. And so if you're an American company, if you're an American car company, you are selling cars in Germany. And like what happens in Germany actually matters, right, for your business. And they may do things that are very destructive that you have to try to influence. Having said that, there is also something that has become, I think, an even more pernicious pattern that has actually, I think, developed into a real problem, which is that other countries in this specifically is the UK and then the major countries in Europe and the EU. They now fully think that they can regulate the US companies.

Directly.

Directly, right? And so they now think that they can pass these laws and they can enforce these laws in a way that it will force global change on the part of the US companies. And they do that for, you know, a lot of tech policy, these AI laws. I mean, it's almost impossible to believe, but literally the people who rule Europe came out a couple of years ago and said, you know, we now recognize that Europe cannot become the innovation leader in AI. So we therefore are going to become the regulation leader, right? Right. Which, which at first you're like, okay, that's clearly insane. Because like, if you don't, if you don't have any AI and if you pass laws to drive it out of Europe, which is what they've done, anybody who's any good at AI, with only a few exceptions, people who are any good at AI in Europe are leaving and coming to the US, um, because it's just the AI Act just made it impossible to function there. On the one hand, it's like, okay, you might view that as self-destructive, but they, they do have a point, which is they, they do say global leader, which is like, okay, if you, if you're an American company and you want access to Europe, like you have to enforce these policies. And, and, and first of all, companies are not necessarily going to enforce different policies by country. They often end up just doing lowest common denominator. And then 2 is Europe increasingly just asserts that they have the ability to regulate for the world. And a great example of that is, uh, um, antitrust. Trust mergers and acquisitions, which is to if you're trying to do a tech merger of any size right now in the U.S., you also need sign-off from the U.K. competition regulators, and you need sign-off from the EU competition regulators. And so you have three primary regulators. By the way, any one of them can veto an acquisition, which is one of the reasons why acquisitions have all but stopped in tech. Is like even if the U.S. regime doesn't do it, one of the one of these other ones will, and they are like fully activated to punish American tech. I mean, they're extremely angry that the tech companies are all. in the U.S. And they've just, you know, over the last several years, just really been out for blood. So anyway, point being, like, because the critique Elon's already getting is how arrogant slash inappropriate for an American like Elon to get involved in German politics. It's like, well, that's one way of looking at it. The other is Germany and the EU chose to become involved in American politics and are, and have chosen to do things that are relevant to all of Elon's companies, no question. And if they don't want people like Elon showing up in Germany, maybe they should reconsider that.

Yeah. Just while we're on the AI topic, that was a segue Do you think OpenAI should be allowed to be a for-profit?

So this is one of those things where you kind of always wonder if you're, there's sort of 2 realities. There's 2 Earths and you wonder which Earth you're on. Because like on Earth 1, there are very clear laws on this. And this has to do with federal tax law and among other legal regimes. And there are a lot of different ways in which somebody can inappropriately sort of cross the line with what they do with the economic value of a nonprofit. And, you know, historically, Historically, in the U.S., when you cross those lines, you go to jail. Somebody who has cons with or hijacks or misappropriates or inappropriately leverages nonprofit for personal wealth—that's like an absolute. Like, put it this way: you or I do it, we're going to jail. Yeah, right. Like I hope our friends visit us; we're going to be in jail. Then on Earth Two, it's like maybe you can do whatever you want, right? And like you know YOLO, right? And like you know why not? And if you don't like your this or that. or whatever, you just go ahead and do it and who knows what happens. And like, I think this is one of those. Right. So, you know, I'll just give you the very specific thing and not just, I'm trying not to get too specific on OpenAI, but just in general to your question, like the idea of a nonprofit becoming a for-profit, there actually is a legal regime in the US through which that can happen. It does occasionally happen. The usual scenario, by the way, historically is hospitals where they start out as nonprofits and then at some point they become for-profits. And the way that happens is is you have to create a new for-profit company de novo from scratch, and then you have to raise money to buy the assets in the nonprofit at their fair market value. Right. And so if the nonprofit owns a hospital that's worth $100 million, then to take, turn that hospital for profit, you have to create a for-profit. You have to raise $100 million and buy the hospital. And then at least in theory that you're now clean when you do that. By the way, the people involved in the nonprofit very much cannot be the recipient of the money on the other side, because that would be again a sort of absconding, you know, with corporate resources, with resources in nonprofit, but you can do that so that those transitions can happen. But, you know, hypothetically, if you had a nonprofit that was worth $150 billion, it raises this interesting question, which is number one, do you need to do any of this or can you just YOLO it? But like, if you're going to try to do it by the book, do you basically create a new for profit? And then do you go raise $150 billion in cash, right? To, to, to buy that thing out. Right. Or, you know, do you try to figure out some theory under which it's actually not worth $150 billion, even though, you know, dot, dot, dot, like what's it worth? And then again, you're right back in tax law territory. And then again, you know, the third rail is 100% that you can't, you know, that none of that money can go to you. And so this is a really good test. It's going to be a good test for the IRS. By the way, the California State Attorney General has oversight over this. There's a variety of, this is a potent enough topic area with enough just nonprofits. There's always government scrutiny on nonprofits because there's all kinds of ways that people try to siphon money out and they get the tax break. And so they're actually quite sensitive to this and a bunch of different branches of state and federal government get focused on this. Then there's the other thing, which is whatever happens here will be a precedent. And the precedent is actually quite interesting because if, let's just say hypothetically, there's a YOLO and the YOLO works, it will set a very interesting precedent because, and again, just think basic incentives. If we could, if Andreessen Horowitz could instead, because we fund all of our companies, it's actually really funny. We call them unintentional nonprofits. When they don't make profit. Yeah. They're Delaware C corporations. They just, you know, I mean, they're not technically, you understand they don't make money, but anyway, you get what I'm saying. They are legally for profits and we invest in them as a for profit. And, you know, we invest in them using taxable money and the returns that come out of it are taxable and so forth. If in the alternate scenario, if we live on Earth 2 instead, what we would do is we would not do that. What we would do is all startups would start out as 501s, right? And so you'd basically, and the reason for that is the funding then would come in and it would be tax deductible. And so you would start a foundation that would basically make these things on a tax deductible basis. basis, you get the tax credit for it, which would be much more capital efficient. And then if they don't work, you just, it's just a charitable deduction that you've gotten the tax credit on. And if they do work, you YOLO and you flip it into being a for-profit and off and away you go. The precedent that is going to be set here is going to determine like, you know, potentially a lot of how basically startup formation happens and a lot of what people like us do. And, you know, I would just, let me hypothesize that I don't think there are very many elements of the political system that want people like me to be able to just like nakedly evade federal tax law.

And so I suspect that some of these things are not maybe going to be quite as easy as And normally when you have an aggrieved funder who gave money to such a thing but didn't get upside, you would just settle and give him a chunk of equity or something. But when that person happens to be the wealthiest person in the world and also has started a different company in the space, perhaps there's no amount of equity or nothing that can be given that would inspire such a settlement. So it'll be interesting to see what happens.

But again, I think that's all right. But again, there might be an even deeper problem. And I'm not a lawyer, so don't take this for granted. I would say double Double-check this with Claude before you make any before you make any legal decisions. But through Claude Esquire, but like I'm not sure that in I'm not sure they can just I'm not sure that a nonprofit that has taken a non a tax deductible donation can turn around and settle with a chunk of equity in a for-profit. Right. Like I think that in and of itself might actually not I I would be surprised if that were even permissible.

And again, like we're in the YOLO world where it's who whom and you know just yeah yeah yeah maybe that's maybe that's a YOLO right maybe every time.

I donate to a nonprofit now, I can hope that in the future some chunk of for-profit equity comes back to me. Like, yeah, why not? So, yeah, my mental model of the IRS is that they'll never permit this to happen, and the California AG will never permit this to happen. But, you know, it's like I said, maybe we need a good civics lesson now and then. And so we'll see who's minding the store.

Going back to the vibe shift, one group perhaps that's either had the biggest vibe shift or perhaps even responsible for the vibe shift in some ways, I'm thinking about Bill Ackman and his work on universities, is Jews post-Occupy October 7th. And a lot of Jews, but not as many as I would have thought, became, you know, started to support Republican administration for the positive work that they've done towards Israel when Trump was in office and also in opposition to some of the negative work that the Democrats had done empowering Iran and other things. But we also had this conversation a while ago, I believe even before October 7th, where it's not just about which party is supporting, but also there's this that some Jewish people are perhaps who, and Jews tend to skew, I think, more, more left-wing, at least in America, are perhaps confused because the very idea of Israel, to the extent that they're pro-Israel, the idea of a nation, you know, for people is perhaps antithetical to the left. And I thought that was an interesting argument for Jews who are kind of wondering how to think of themselves politically. Do you want to comment on it?

Sure. So to start with, just for clarification, I am not myself Jewish. Yes, I may be the least Jewish person in the world.

You're you're a Jewophile.

You're I am I am I have a great deal of affinity. Yes, and many many friends. I occasionally indulge in a little speculation and hope that my Jewish friends will be very forgiving and will cross check me when I get things wrong. So um there's just been this incredible pattern. A lot of people have seen this, but there's just been an incredible pattern among the Jewish people I know. And just start by saying American Jewish people I know, which is I think you know like see. Significant number of Jewish people I know after October 7th were absolutely shocked and horrified, obviously first by the attack in Israel, but then after that, shocked and horrified to discover the people they thought were their allies in the U.S. actually were not. And that played out maybe most visibly on the college campuses, but it also played out inside a lot of companies. And there was kind of this, you know, sudden discovery that, you know, kind of DEI as a movement is inherently anti-Jewish. In essence, by definition, it has to be for reasons we can talk about. And it turns out that it is. And it turns out a lot of the kind of DEI proponents are not shy about expressing that and making that clear. So basically, if people haven't been tracking this, whatever you saw, what, you know, if you watch what happened in universities about a year ago, just assume that's been happening in a lot of other, a lot of other settings too. And so that, that's been a, you know, very, I think, rude awakening to a lot of people. We've talked about this as a debate that has actually happened inside kind of Jewish, let's say, intellectual and political society for a very long time. There's this famous Jewish intellectual policy guy, really brilliant guy named Norman Podhoretz. And he actually wrote a book like 20 years ago with this incredible title, Why Are Jews Liberal? You know, this predates all of everything we've been talking about. And he kind of went, he actually went through this question and this argument basically in that book and basically predicted that it was just a matter of time until American Jews, but, and then also Israel discovered that basically the people who they thought were their friends were probably not. And the people who they thought were their enemies might well be their best friends. By the way, the other chart that gets passed around in some of the WhatsApp groups is Pew Research did this incredible incredible Pew Research did, you know, it's just normally kind of super woke, but they, every once in a while they do a piece of research that's like really revealing. And it's always never quite clear if they understand how revealing it is. They did this incredible survey. We should post a link to this. They did this incredible survey. They did a survey of religious groups in America about their opinions of other religious groups in America. And so, I mean, this is like, I don't know, whatever, the ultimate Dave Chappelle skit or something where it's just literally, they segmented Americans by religion and then they asked them what they think of all the other religions, right? And it's just, you know, it's just like, wow, that would be amazing. And so they did this and part of the humor of it, what happened is they had to be like very careful which religions they could include. So like, there's all these like weird gaps, you know, cause there's all these like differences. Cause I don't know, I'm not even going to speculate as to why they made the choices. It's, it's a subset of the, of the choices because they, they wanted to do a 2 by 2 grid and maybe there were some more inflammatory topics in there, but they did the 2 by 2 grid and then they did, they expressed it with a numerically as positive or negative sentiment. You know, basically what does group X think of group Y? What does group Y think of group X? Positive or negative, you know, 0 is the baseline. And then, you know, positive 10 means favorable by 10 points, negative 10, negative by 10 points. And so it turns out that the one that's just like, I just, I cannot stop. I laugh so hard I start crying is it's Jews and evangelical Protestants. And so, well, so there's 2 funny ones. So one is the Mormons just love everybody. The funniest one is the Mormons are literally positive on every other group. And then the other groups are like, not so sure. But it's just validation that the Mormons are like the warmest hearted people in the world because they're positive on every other group. groups. Maybe so. That's why I love all my Mormon friends so much. But the other thing is the XY comparison of Jews and evangelical Christians. And the funny thing is Jews in America, according to this survey, Jews in America have a negative 40 view of evangelical Christians and evangelical Christians have a positive 40 view of Jews.

So it's, uh, it's one, wow, that's hilarious.

It's like the most polarized, and it's by far, these are like the most polarized numbers on the chart. Like it's like an 80-point spread, right, in the 2 directions. And so literally, and I'm just going to cliché, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to cliché here for a second. You've literally got, you know, I don't know, Woody Allen in New York imagining there's some redneck in Arkansas who just thinks that like Jews are terrible. And the redneck in Arkansas is like, I freaking love Jews. There's no way. There's no way. Like if you could get them all in a room together, I mean, you know, I'm sure if you could get them all in a room together, they would all love each There's so much. The numbers would all go to 100, but it's just this weird, it's just this thing, right? And so anyway, so this is, this is one of the, I think, great discoveries a lot of my Jewish friends have made, which is like, they're actually their best allies in American politics, both for life in America and also to the extent that they care about it, which many do, the sort of future of Israel. Their main ally is actually like straight up just a stereotypical Trump voter. Like by far, right? Like if they drove through the Deep South, everybody would love them.

Yeah, right. No Nick Fuentes in the Deep South. There's maybe some online, you know, antisemites, but it's like a tiny fraction of the population.

None. I was actually, I mean, I'll tell you another version of the story, more serious version of the story. I was at a, and this again, it breaks your brain in terms of what you've been told all these years, but I was actually at, I was a guest speaker at the last Republican House offsite at the Greenbrier in North Carolina. So this is all of the Republican House members that go offsite and it's a closed thing. There's no press. And so it's literally Republican House members, it's their spouses. And then it's, it just happened to be, I was a speaker. So there were 2 speakers back to back. There were only 2 non-House members in the room or spouses, which was me. And then the other speaker, which, who turned out to be the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. And we were, because we were both speakers, we're sitting at the front table. So I met him and talked to him for a bit. And so I got to see him give his talk in front of the House Republicans. And it was, this is probably 9 months ago. So this is, you know, obviously post-October 7th, but when, and everything is still tense, but, you know, everything was like super tense back then. as well. And he gave this incredible talk on what's happening in Israel. And it was the most palpable display of like uniform, unanimous love. Like, I think I've ever been in a room, like the congressmen and their spouses and one after the other got up and spoke and they just like, this is tremendous outpouring of like, we love you all so much and we're behind you and we support you and we'll do whatever you need and tell us what you like. It was just this incredible level of like love and support. Obviously it's not, obviously there are a lot of Democrats who are also very pro-Israel, but like this actually happened at the same time the university stuff was happening. And So it was, it was such a stark kind of illustrative difference. And so I don't know, maybe this has always been the case. I don't know. Maybe things are, you know, tectonic plates are shifting. Maybe the whole DEI thing just got so intense that it kind of knocked this stuff off kilter. Another theory is, you know, it's now been the last Holocaust survivors are passing away now. You know, they're, they're like literally in their 90s. And the last World War II veterans are passing away. And so, you know, maybe there's a generational thing here, which is just the memory of World War II and the Holocaust is fading. And everybody's just naturally going to recalibrate what they think on things because they're not going to have that as sort of the foundational kind of memory of the creation of the state of Israel. So like, this all seems very open now. You know, you, as you said, like we have a lot of friends who, you know, like Jewish friends who are, it's not like that all of a sudden they're like hardcore Trump supporters or something, but, um, but yeah. And let me also say, like, this goes back to what we talked about earlier. Like, there are certainly some Jewish Americans who were not Trump supporters who are or something like that. But also, you know, I think it'd be great for the country. I think it'd be great if, you know, if a fairly, you know, if a fairly large number of American Jews also stay in the Democratic Party and help the Democratic Party kind of get back, back to sense. And so maybe, maybe that's the other thing that will happen. Right. And by the way, and I don't want to speak for any of these guys, but I think the, you mentioned Bill Ackman, but also Mark Rowan.

Yeah.

And these guys who became these sort of board members and major donors to these universities, we started to see the amount of, you know, we saw what it meant when guys who are that respected and are that significant to those institutions have the real power of moral weight behind them, right? They can really start to change things. And so we'll, you know, we'll see what happens, but maybe that continues.

Yeah. And it's interesting. I mean, another perhaps diagnosis of why this was the way that it was is that, you know, sometimes the people who are your friends aren't the people who you want to be your friends. So to use the Woody Allen example, like, yeah, maybe the redneck likes him, but he doesn't want his love. He wants the love of Hollywood. And, you know, even if they're sort of, you know, less pro-Israel or in that way. So maybe as the culture changes in the way that we were talking earlier about what's cool, what's high status, maybe that will influence things as well and make it easier to switch. One thing I also just want to comment, we talked about in our last interview a year ago how SBF in a famous Tyler Cowen interview talked about how because he's a utilitarian, he would keep doubling, taking the odds double or nothing of, do you bet the world and even risk it all if there's a positive EV? It feels like in his own way, Elon has done his own version of going all in multiple times. Of course, when he started his companies, going into debt and taking immense risk on all of his previous gains, but also most recently in the election, there was that interview with Tucker Carlson where he was joking, if Trump doesn't win, am I ever going to see my kids again? Or what's going to happen? What's going to happen to me? Are they going to try to take me to jail? Just was he taking a massive risk? And what do you make of this, of his behavior? To just keep going all in and just keep betting.

Yeah. So, you know, the joke online has been that this is obviously not his first time through the sim.

Exactly.

Right. This is like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day having like, you know, there are all these calculations online for how long Bill Murray was, it was repeating days in Groundhog Day and online. And it's like the consensus, it's like, if you add it all up, it's like 30,000 years. And he's just been like running every experiment every day to kind of see what works best. And so it looks like he's doing it effortlessly and Elon's kind of the same thing, which is just like, at least for the last several years, it's just like he just touched everything he touches works. It's been an extraordinary run. You know how it started. I mean, he, Peter Thiel talks about how, who worked with them at PayPal, talks about how when Peter said he was going to write a book at one point about the PayPal experience. And he said the chapter about Elon would be called the man who knew no risk, right? He's just like flat out, just like missing the risk gene. Like, I don't know though. I really struggle with that because there's this real question around like taking risk, you know, cause it's like you take risk every time you like step out into this across the street, it's like, take risk. This is sort of conventional view is we roll the dice and maybe it goes one way or maybe it goes the other. Like what the great founders tend to do, and you're like that, and I'm like that. And I think everybody we know is like, is like, yeah, when you start a company or try to do a new thing, like there, there is risk, but what you spend all of your actual time doing is trying to take the risk out.

Right.

Right. And so you are trying as hard as you possibly can to figure out all the different things that can go wrong and all the things that are inadequate, you know, for the challenge ahead. And you're trying to like get in front of those things and fix those things before the risk kills you, right? You're trying to take the risk out. And I often, Andy Ratcliffe taught me years ago this idea that I call the onion theory of risk. This is his idea, but I can't remember if he came up with the name, but it's sort of the idea basically is you can think of a company as like on day one, it has every possible risk, right?

Right.

And so it has team risk and product risk and market risk and pricing risk and margin risk and competitive risk and regulatory risk. And then basically what you're trying to do as a founder, like one of the ways, the conventional way of thinking about what you do as a founder is you're trying to like get things done and hit milestones. But the other way of thinking about it is those things, if you're doing it right, they're Peeling layers of risk off the onion, and basically success in a startup. One way to think about it is when you've eliminated all the risk, right? You figured out something to do that solves every single one of those risks. And so, and we often you know we often analyze companies this way. And so, you know, one of one of the things that Elon is really really good at is doing that. You know, he's really really good at you know he identifies stuff for team risk. Okay, I'm just going to go hire all the smartest people in the world. It's like okay, you know, can we ship the product? Well, I'm just going to hammer you know I'm just going to be involved every step of the way every week in. Make sure that we ship the product. So is the product going to be good? Well, I'm going to be the guy who beta tests the self-driving thing. And it's, you know, the new software patches are going to download to my Tesla first. And right, every single thing. Or, you know, the government is threatening to regulate me out of existence. Oh, I know, I'll go, you know, I'll go do what I'm doing, you know, with, with the new government. And so, you know, a way to think about it is it's the reverse is he's actually reducing risk every step of the way. And I think that a plausible telling of the Elon story in fullness of time is that, you know, each of the things that he does over time with his companies and now more broadly is everything about it is taking away layers of risk from the ultimate goal. And by the way, the arc there is particularly compelling since the ultimate goal is quite literally Mars.

Yeah.

Um, right. And so the way to think about it is what if, you know, think about the arc as basically the goal is to get to Mars, to get to Mars is every, I mean, it's every possible risk in the world for doing anything, right? Getting to Mars. And so how do you strip away all all those risks, right? And so how do you, you know, okay, we're going to need to like build a lot of stuff on Mars. How do you do that? Well, we need robots. Okay, we're going to do that. How do you need, like, what's going to control the robots? We need AI. It's just step after step after step after step, you're taking risk out. And so I think ironically, he might be one of the greatest risk reducers at this point in history.

I love the tweet about how it would make more sense for John Galt to take over the government rather than just concede it and go to some other country.

So, so Atlas Shrugged, which by the way, so Atlas Shrugged is this incredible, so Atlas Shrugged, to start with, I actually didn't read Atlas Shrugged until like 4 years ago. Interesting. It was weird. When I was a kid, this is the truth. When I was a kid, I read The Fountainhead and I was like, all right, it didn't resonate with me at all. 'Cause it's all about like artistic integrity and like hard work. It's like basically pissy over artistic compromises and like burns down his own buildings or tears down his own buildings. And I'm like, well, that's absurd. Like, no, that's not. So that didn't resonate. And then I always heard about Atlas Shrugged. I never read it. And then my friends kept telling me, no, no, no, no, you, like, you need to read it because we're literally living in it right now. I was like, all right, fine. And so I started the audiobook and I was like, I literally would just sit for hours and just, it's just like, it's so incredibly vivid, you know, the story that it tells. And now I understand the negative reaction that it gets, right? Which is it is just absolutely unabashedly pro, it's to start with, it's pro-America, right? Which is of course enough to, enough to get it critically condemned forever, but it's unabashedly pro-capitalism. It's pro-enterprise. It's pro-industrialism. industrialism, it's pro-energy, it's pro-building things, it's pro— it's like pro— it's pro-merit, it's pro-trade, you know, it's pro-all the things that the, you know, modern academy literary establishment is against. And it's just an incredible painting of that. And then the other thing that's just like utterly shocking is the degree to which the villains are all real.

Yeah.

Right. And I'm sure you've done this, like you can just go down the Wikipedia entry of like the villains and you're like, oh yeah, I know that. I know, I know Ellsworth. I know Ellsworth Toohey. And by the way, I know, you know, Ellsworth Toohey also. We don't have to say who it is, but we both have the same name in our, in our heads.

Exactly.

And so I know these people. And then the 2 most amazing, you know, the sort of equipoise of the whole thing, the 2 characters ultimately, you know, one is John Galt, who's the, for people who haven't read it, he's the great industrial genius who basically essentially goes on strike. He goes on strike. He literally goes on strike and creates a whole separate, I'm going to spoil it. He creates this whole separate, you know, world isolated out from the rest of the world called Galt's Gulch. And he sort of takes all the world's geniuses and pulls them out of society. society. And then, so that's one character. But the other character is the, do you remember this, Erik? The other character is the character of the United States president. And the character of the United States president, I might get the name wrong, is it was a deliberately vague name, but it's like Mr. Johnson.

Yeah.

And the thing with the character of Mr. Johnson is because all of the characters in that novel are like incredibly vividly drawn, all the good ones and all the bad ones. Like they have these incredible personalities. They're larger than life. They're like these superhero-like figures. The one exception is the president of the United States is Mr. Johnson, who's deliberately painted basically as a nonentity. Like he barely even exists. And like, he's basically just a figurehead of this, just like totally screwed up system, you know, this government that's completely out of control. It's like crushing private enterprise, just, you know, trying to impose socialism, doing all the worst things it could possibly do. But the guy in charge is like the exact opposite of like a Lex Luthor. He's just like a complete nobody, completely interchangeable. And anybody else could be in that job. Mr. Smith could be in that job. It wouldn't matter. At all. And every time he's in the novel, it's like he's not even a character. He's just like this complete zero. Right now, I don't know, just like hypothetically, this would never happen, of course, in our world for real, but just hypothetically imagine that someday we had a president where literally it's like he doesn't even exist. Like, is he awake? Is he asleep? Is he alive? Is he wandering around the West Wing in his bunny slippers? Like, Like, who knows? Now, that would never happen in real life.

No, no, no, of course not.

No, but if it ever did, it would be this character in this novel, right? Um, and so, like, her novels are so unrealistic, right? That would never happen.

Yeah, exactly.

Um, and so I can't even finish a sentence. Um, and everybody just lies about it.

Oh God.

So anyway, both of those characters, like, you know, maybe those characters There's, you know, like, okay, but like, that's not like the, the, the president character might be real, but like the actual John Galt would not do what John Galt did. The actual John Galt would do what Elon's doing, right? The exact opposite of the John Galt plan. And for, I'm going to spoil the novel, like in the end of the novel, I'm going to spoil it. And it's actually very poignant, which is basically all the geniuses basically just go to Galt's Gulch and they basically go into seclusion and they basically wait for industrial civilization to collapse. And for the rotten system that rules it to basically cave in under the theory that then they'll be able to like come back out and sort of fix it properly. And basically, you know, basically prove to to the normal man that he actually needs, you know, these sort of industrial super geniuses. And so it ends very poignantly with like literally the lights going out, right? Like literally the lights of New York, like to start to blink out, right? Yeah. And again, it's like, okay, like you could say like, that's like really unrealistic, of course, except that's like literally what's happening in Europe. Right? Like the prices of energy and your price of energy, what is it in the, is it price of energy in Scandinavia is like up like 20x this week. It's like you get these crazy things. And then the price of energy is so high in the UK and in Germany now that they're both in, literally Germany is due industrializing, right? The price of energy in Germany is so high that literally they're shutting, they're literally shutting down the factories, right? And if this keeps going, if the trends continue, they, they will end up in rolling blackouts. And by the way, California, we have our version of that. We've been through, you know, phases where we have our own rolling blackouts, which is remarkable. But it's like, okay, that's one option if you're John Galt. But the other option is no, you just go do what needs to be done. And there's actually a character in Atlas Shrugged that actually does that or tries to do that, which is the Dagny Taggart character. And in the end, she's ultimately convinced by John Galt that she should actually actually also give up. Um, but Elon's like the John Galt character that decided the opposite of giving up. He just decided to take on the bigger, bigger challenge to make sure the problem gets fixed. And I don't know, it's like, the old line used to be like, the thing with Ayn Rand's novels is the heroes are fake, but the villains are real. And, you know, that might be wrong. Like, we might actually every once in a while get a Randian hero.

And to that point, maybe a couple points, or a couple more questions while you get out of here. But this idea of, some people have said something like, oh, you know, The Silicon Valley vibe shift is so hypocritical because a few years ago they were saying, get out of politics, and now everybody's in politics. And I think the easy response to that is, well, a few years ago, sort of all this activism in our companies were destroying our companies. And now, or this past administration, all these sort of crazy, capricious, arbitrary, overbearing regulations were killing our companies. And so we're doing this sort of self— from the company company's perspective, company best interest thing of, hey, it was, let's get that, get rid of politics in our companies a few years ago, but let's get more involved in the political system as a way to protect our companies.

Yeah. So look, I think you mentioned earlier, I've been quoting, there's an old Russian joke proverb, Soviet era, which is that you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. And so look, I was in and out of politics in sort of the traditional light fashion, mostly as a Democrat from 1994 through to whatever, 2016. 2016. I won't do the long version. I just kind of assume you just have, you're just a, you're just kind of a good person. You're a good Democrat. You make money, you give it away. It's, everything's great. You know, so I was around it, but like never really centrally involved in it. And frankly, it didn't really matter. Like it didn't, your point, like it didn't really impinge on our companies that much. Like, no, no, there was never a government policy about the router, like, or the database, right? Oracle never had, there were never hearings on Capitol Hill at Oracle saying, what data is being stored in your database, Mr. Ellison? Like that. It wasn't politically salient in that way. You know, it just, it, we all are, at least I just thought you could take it for granted that You could kind of be tangentially involved if you wanted to be or wanted to argue about immigration or something, but you didn't, you certainly didn't have to. And you could spend your entire life being blissfully removed from it. And it was totally fine. And then, yeah, like to your 2 points, like basically like, no, it turns out politics is interested in us. And yeah, that, that took 2 forms. One is it took the form of this very specific kind of activism inside these companies that started to really wreak havoc. And then it took the form of an administration that just decided to be like extremely destructive. Like they just woke up one morning and they just decided to be destructive and they just decided to do everything they could to try to wreck American tech and American startups, and I understand like I try to channel the other guy's thought process, and I understand the sort of this sort of extreme kind of anti-markets, anti-tech, anti-free speech kind of ideology that got all consumed all these people. But like they really acted on it, and they ended up with a lot of power, and they caused a lot of damage. Yeah. And so this very much is like a war that was brought to us, and I don't want to speak for Elon, but I'm certain he you know feels the exact same way. Yeah. I'm certain this is the last thing that he ever wanted to do. He'd be much happier if he could spend all this time working on Mars. But it turns out the road to Mars requires. Yeah. Well, and actually, it's actually really interesting. The Mars thing is actually really funny. It's very interesting, which is it turns out to actually get to Mars, there's only specific windows because of the rotation. The planets have to be in alignment. They have to be close enough where you can actually get there. And there's only a launch, according to Elon, there's only a launch window like every 2 years. And so a bad administration with bad policy can basically set Mars back 4 years very easily by just preventing those, you know, 2 launch windows. And so it turns out the road to Mars, you know, requires going through the U.S. government. It turns out the road to flying cars requires going through Twitter, right?

Right.

You know, flying cars, this last administration, you know, basically outlawed the American drone industry and guaranteed that China would win, right? This kind of administration that we've been living with is certainly never going to legalize flying cars. I mean, not a chance in the world. And so it turns out if you want flying cars, you also need an administration that's actually also pro-tech. And so it turns out, yes, it turns out they promised us flying cars and we needed to get 140 characters before we could get to fly cars. It just is what it is.

Yeah. Or to quote you from 15 years ago or so, software ate the world. It started with all the parts that we could do digitally in the world of bits. But then once we approached the world of atoms, and of course some fintech too, we faced regulatory headwinds that we weren't used to. And so in order to actually build our companies, we had to get much more involved.

Yeah. What shocked me so much over the last 4 years, which is Peter Thiel and I have had this long-running debate about his thesis on innovation. And we actually kind of agree for the most part, or I would say I've come around to his point of view on most things. But I think what he would say that I would agree with is innovation in atoms has basically been made illegal over the last 60 years. Innovation in bits, good news, it was allowed to continue, but that's not enough. Like just to say this is not enough. I always tried to make the argument you could get more done with bits than he thought in thinking in the future about things like AI. But then, you know, and then I just sort of assumed, and again, this is based on everything I had seen over 25 years or whatever of exposure to the government. I just assumed that the status quo of, all right, atoms are illegal, but at least bits are legal, would just continue. And then these people decided to try to make bits illegal. And like, you know, and again, they just like voluntarily one, one, one morning woke up and decided to do that. And they came at bits in the form of crypto and in the form of fintech and in the form of AI. And then they were coming for the very foundation of even the software business model in the form of unrealized capital gains taxes. And so, yeah. And at that point, if they're able to eliminate, having eliminated innovation at atoms, if they're, if they were able to also eliminate innovation at bits, like where done. Like, we're done. Economic growth stops, right? Society goes into decline. The economy, certainly stagnant growth will lead to negative growth. All politics for the rest of our lives are zero sum. The country becomes an incredibly impoverished, bitter place and the lights start going out. And you need to, like, you just, like you said, step by step by step, you can just project this forward. It's just crystal clear what'll happen. And it's literally happening in Europe. You can actually see it happening in Europe. And like, so like The, like, policy development for the United States has become very simple. It's do the opposite of what Europe does. Right. It's just shocking. It's like Europe is like a giant Jim Cramer, right? It's just like, it's like, just do the opposite.

Scott Galloway.

Yeah. Scott Galloway. Paul Krugman. Just do the opposite. Just do the opposite. And so anyway, maybe I missed all the drama of the last year. Maybe just that central fact is becoming clearer. Maybe that's the turning point.

Well, maybe the last point I'll leave it with. One is a question, which is first a reflection, which is in the Bari Weiss interview with Peter Thiel. She says, hey, there's a lot of people who think that Trump has exhausted the A-team from the last administration. What's left is sort of the C-team and the D-team. Is that true? And then Peter says, not at all, which is both a reflection of what he thinks of the past administration, but also the type of talent that's coming into office right now. And also added questions to that, which is FDR The best analogy for what's possible, or what is the best analogy of what's possible?

Yeah, this has been a giant upside surprise. I assumed that the appointments would be good, but like, in the last like 6 weeks, I've just been shocked at how good they are. Like, absolutely shocked, including by the way today, a whole round of appointments today that are just like fantastically good.

It's like half the group chat.

Yeah, exactly. And a bunch of people we wish were in the group chat. Yeah. So look, I think a couple of things. So I think one is to the credit of the Trump team, they're There were actually a, there were a lot of young people in the first term between 16, first Trump term, second 16 to 20, second term starting now. In the first term, there were a lot of young people in there who kind of got educated, maybe the hard way, like under enormous pressure. And many of those people are now, maybe they were in their early 30s, now they're in their 40s. They're very spun up. You know, they know what to do. They've been through the process. They understand how to get things done. They understand the kinds of ways people are going to try to stop them. And then they have 10 years of maturity and they're ready to go. And many of those people are in there. And they're really good. And then, by the way, there's another set of young people. There's another set of young people in their 20s and 30s, volunteers who've come in who I've met who are just extremely good, very sharp. Then there's, Erik, what you were alluding to, which is the people from the outside who are coming in. I, pound for pound, like, it's the best, it's the best staffing I've ever seen. It's like light years. I mean, number one, it's like a million times better than the last 4 years.

Right.

But it's like better. It's clearly better than the administrations that, you know, my first exposure was in the beginning of the Clinton administration. I've kind of been exposed to it since, and this is clearly Clearly the best team by leaps and bounds. I think you have to go back to the 1930s, FDR, when FDR put out the bat signal and all these incredibly talented young people showed up and created and ran all these departments. Or maybe you have to go back, and I mean this seriously, maybe you have to go back to Lincoln with the team of rivals with these incredibly capable people. But even just today, 2 of my partners who, you know, Sri Ramakrishnan and Scott Cooper, who are both amazing. And then who else was announced today? Michael Kretzios is amazing. Emil Michael, to defense. Steve Feinberg, by the way, one of the legends of private equity and an incredibly capable person going in to be Deputy Secretary of Defense. I forget who, there was like 3 other just incredible people today. Um, and then over the course of the last like month, you know, the people, Jay Bhattacharya going in to run NIH and Marty Makary for FDA and Jim—

Jacob Helberg.

Jacob Helberg. You see, I got, I'm so excited. Ken, so Ken Howery, um, uh, Ken Howery is the new ambassador to Denmark. I think. Yeah. And his specific assignment is to buy Greenland. So, so, so the joke online, Trump, you know, variously has said we should buy Greenland, we should reclaim the Panama Canal, and then we should make Canada the 51st state. And the joke online today was, no, no, people are misinterpreting it. He doesn't actually mean that. This is just the art of the deal. This is just his, this is his rope-a-dope because what he actually just wants is to buy England.

So good.

Which, by the way, he just appointed, this is another thing. I think this is a genius move. He appointed a guy I actually know, Mark Burnett, who is literally the creator of reality television and literally the producer of The Apprentice is going to be the U.S. special envoy to the U.K. Mark being a Brit by background, long since Americanized, but, you know, one of the great things and whatever people think about reality, like one of the great thinkers of business and media. And it's just like an incredibly brilliant polymath, incredibly Capable guy. Just like, it's like a Mark Burnett is just at a level of firepower, just like way beyond the kinds of people who normally get pulled into these things. And then even people in the prior administration who are in these special roles, Rick Grenell, I think is the special, special envoy, I think to Ukraine, I believe, or maybe like to like the trouble spots. He's amazing. Who else is in there? It's just like, it's just this, it's just this list. And then there's a bunch more that are in process. And if they land, they're equally good. And so it's, yeah, Michael Anton into the State Department.

Yeah.

David Sacks into the White House. And then who else into the State Department? Oh, this guy, Bridge Colby, into the State Department today, who's one of the best foreign policy thinkers of our time. Incredibly brilliant guy. Yeah. And so it's just like pound for pound, these people are just off the charts. So yeah, I no longer believe I can predict politics, but I cannot imagine a better team than this. And it's extremely exciting.

Yeah. Well, the note of optimism is a great one to end on. Mark, as always, it's been a fantastic conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Good. Awesome. Fantastic. Fantastic. Thank you, Erik.

Upstream with Erik Thornberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Hey everyone, Erik here. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by Tech People. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts to shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors, and influencers, like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week, and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me. erik@turpentine.co. That's E-R-I-K at turpentine.co, and let's partner together.