"- I mean, look, we're adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days right now, and it's now passing the size of the Defense Department budget, and it's compounding, and it's pretty soo..."

"All right, let's start with optimism. If you were to imagine the best possible 1 to 2 years, 2025, '26 for tech, for big tech and small tech, what would it be? What would it look like? Lay out your vi..."

"And I think that's a consequence of many factors, you know, some of which are lucky and some of which through hard work. And so the lucky part is just, you know, number one, you know, we just have lik..."

"Again, in part 'cause many of the best scientists and engineers in those fields, you know, come to the US. And so we have all of the preconditions for a just a monster boom. You know, I could see econ..."

"I think there's like an ethnographic, you know, way of it. There's a bunch of books on, like you said, the Scots-Irish, like all the different derivations of all the different ethnic groups that have ..."

"- And I just did a super long podcast on Milton Friedman with Jennifer Burns, who's this incredible professor at Stanford, and he was part of the Reagan. So there's a bunch of components to that, one ..."

"we have more of it than anybody else, but, you know, we have to choose to want it. The way I look at, it's like all of our problems are self-inflicted. Like, you know, decline is a choice. You know, a..."

"But what he does, and then they basically, from there came basically what we know as the Greeks and the Romans were kind of evolutions off of that. And so what he reconstructs a sort of what life was ..."

"And then it was all intricately tied into their religion. And their religion was, it was in two parts. It was veneration of ancestors and it was veneration of nature. And the veneration of ancestors i..."

"in some ways we have fallen far from the family tree, but in some cases, we're exactly the same. - You kind of described this progressive idea of wokeism and so on as worshiping ancestors. - Identity ..."

"So on the one hand, it's like, okay, there is like a deeply important role for tradition. And the way I think about that is the process of evolutionary learning, right? Which is what tradition ought t..."

"you know, that have happened. And so, you know, I think it probably, this is one of those things where extremists on either side is probably a bad idea, but this needs to be approached in a sophistica..."

"You know, and again, this is a replay of what happened in the '60s and '70s, which is, you know, for what started out looking like, you know, I'm sure good and virtuous purposes, you know, we ended up..."

"And the Biden administration reached kinda the full pinnacle of that in our time. They got really bad on many fronts at the same time. And so just like relieving that and getting kind of back to a rea..."

"And then I was with a group of Hollywood people about two weeks ago, and they were still, you know, people who at least vocally were still very anti-Trump, but I said, you know, "Has anything changed ..."

"with every aspect of just these crazed ideological positions. And, you know, he was coming in, he literally was like, had a aggregated together trillions of dollars of shareholdings that he did not, y..."

"a live goldfish and that- - Yeah. - And this was imposed, I mean, this was like so incredibly offensive to him that like, it was just absolutely appalling and I felt terrible for him. But the look in ..."

"- You know, I'm willing to do a lot for this company, but- (both laughing) - It's all about sacrifice for diversity. - Well, yeah. And then it's like, okay, like is there a test? - Right. - Right. You..."

"It's like some sort of collective hive mind thing. And I just go through that to say like, I don't think most people in my orbit, or you know, let's say the top 10,000 people in the Valley, or the top..."

"and then you've probably been through this, you have your network of thought criminals, and then they have their network of thought criminals, and then you have this like delicate mating dance as to w..."

"of samizdat, right? Anybody who grew up in the Soviet Union under, you know, communism, note, you know, they had the hard version of this, right? It is like, how do you know who you could talk to? And..."

"And I mean, quite frankly, this is one of those things, you know, quite frankly, even if I was opposed to what those, you know, what people are saying, and I'm sure I am in some cases, you know, I wou..."

"And it's written by a social science professor named Timur Kuran, at I think Duke, and his a definitive work on this. And so he has this concept, he calls preference falsification. And so preference f..."

"The other part of this is the distinction between the role of the elites and the masses. And here the best book is called "The True Believer," which is the Eric Hoffer book. And so the nuance you have..."

"Sometimes the rockets crash, like, you know, sometimes he's wrong. Yeah, he's human, he's like anybody else. He's not right all the time. But at least my through line with him both in what he says in ..."

"It is fascinating to me that we have been living through exactly this. We've been living through everything exactly what Timur Kuran describes, everything that Vaclav Havel described, (laughs) you kno..."

"- So one of the ways to avoid that in the future maybe, is to keep the delta between what's said in private and what's said in public small. - Yeah. It's like, well, this is sort of the siren song of ..."

"'Cause to your point, there's all this bottled up energy. Now, your question was like, what are the percentages? Like what's the breakdown? And so my rough guess, just based on what I've seen in my wo..."

"will basically see that what would happen if you withdrew those sources of federal taxpayer money, and then for the state schools, the state money, they all instantly go bankrupt. And then you could r..."

"And there's no way to replace them without letting them fail. And by the way, it's like everything in life. I mean, in a sense, this is like the most obvious conclusion of all time, which is what happ..."

"- I disagree with you on that. Maybe it's grounded in hope that I believe you can revolutionize the system from within because I do believe Stanford and MIT are important. - Oh, but that logic doesn't..."

"(Lex laughing) - [Lex] Yeah, yeah. - So you just proposed the underpants gnome- - Yeah. - Which is very common in politics. Oh, so the form of this in politics is we must do something. - Yeah. - This ..."

"I mean, I don't... Because there is already a framework of great institutions that's there, and the way they talk about what it means to be a great institution is aligned with this very idea that you'..."

"I'd love to see them come back to their spoken principles, I think that'd be great. I'd love to see the professors with tenure get bravery. I would love to see, I mean, it would be fantastic. You know..."

"What happens when you're put in charge of your bureaucracy where the thing that the bureaucracy knows is that they can outlast you? The thing that the tenured professors at all these places know is it..."

"for more than just terrorist recruitment and child pornography. You should use it for X, Y, Z." And basically that transition happened, call it 2012, 2013 is when there was this like very, very kind o..."

"So, you know, the ring of power is on one hand and not on the other hand. And then basically that began this slide where it ended up being that, you know, completely anodyne is the point Mark has been..."

"And inside these companies like that was the point where people for the first time, this is like what, three years ago for the first time they were like, and that was when it sunk in where it's just l..."

"And yeah, for people who don't recall what he did, and this was in the full-blown, like, you know, you absolutely must lock down for two years. You absolutely must keep all the schools closed. You abs..."

"And that was a moment. And I remember let's say a board meeting at one of these companies after that, where basically, you know, everybody looked around the table and was like, "All right, like, I gue..."

"you know, kind of Elon and Trump in the sense of the public and the private are now synchronized. I guess I'd say that. Like he said on that show what he really believes, he said all the same things t..."

"The other thing I guess I would just say is he talked on that show about something very important, which is when you're in a role where you're running a company like that, there are a set of decisions..."

"and he has taken many, many punches. So I would encourage people to have a level of sympathy for these are not kings, these are people who operate with like, I would say, extraordinary levels of exter..."

"and you end up not being able to like, keep up an exercise routine and all those things. And you know, you come under family stress 'cause you're working all the time. Or my partner Ben, you know, he ..."

"And that's what happens to inside companies. And so somebody like Mark is under like profound internal pressure and external pressure at the same time. Now he's been very good at maintaining the coher..."

"'cause it is maybe educating and deeply disturbing? You've spoken about it before, but we're speaking about again this government pressure. So you think they've crossed a line into essentially crimina..."

"- So I just start with is a lot of this now is in the public record, which is good 'cause it needs to be in the public record. And so there's three forms of things that are in the public record that p..."

"And there's like 2,000 pages worth of material on that. And that's essentially the Facebook version of the Twitter Files just arrived at with a different mechanism. And then third is Mark himself talk..."

"The Constitution very specifically does not say you only have the rights that it gives you. It says you have all the rights that have not been previously defined as being taken away from you. Right, a..."

"- So fundamentally, government should not do any kind of pressure, even soft pressure on companies to censor? - Can't. Not allowed. - It really is disturbing. I mean it probably started soft, lightly ..."

"they think about legislation, right? So when I was a kid, we got trained, how does government work? There was this famous animated short, the thing we got shown was just a cartoon of how a bill become..."

"So regulation is a big part of the way the power gets exercised. And then there's what's called just flat out administrative power, the term that you'll hear and administrative power is just literally..."

"and flat out threats were ultimately the most important. How do you fix it? Well, first of all, like you have to elect people who don't do it, right? So like as with all these things, ultimately the f..."

"- Yeah, it's truly disturbing. I don't think anybody wants this kind of overreach of power for government, including perhaps people that are participating in it. It's like this dark momentum of power ..."

"and that it will corrupt you. And yeah, I don't know whether any of these people feel any of this today. They should. I don't know if they do. But yeah. You go out five or 10 years later, you know, yo..."

"- Yeah, I think, yeah, that's clear. - You said that we always end up being ruled by the elite of some kind. Can you explain this law, this idea? - So this comes from a Italian political philosopher f..."

"And we could talk about that. But the other thing he did was he sought out the most democratic private organization in the world that he could find at that point, which he concluded was some basically..."

"Every single one. The Greeks and the Florentines had brief experiments in direct democracy, and they were total disasters. In Florence... I forget the name of it. It was called like The Workers' Revol..."

"among that elite- - Yes. - So it doesn't get out of hand. - And it was very clever. Right? And you know, some of this was based on earlier experiments. By the way, you know, these were very, very smar..."

"And so it's, yeah, one of the great all-time achievements. - Yeah, it's incredible. And we should say they were all pretty young relative to our current set of leaders. - They were. Many in their 20s ..."

"I don't know that I invented either one, but I popularized them. - Take credit and run with it. - [Marc] Yep. - If we can just linger on the Machiavellians. It's a study of power and power dynamics, l..."

"get a columnist fired. - Did anyone ever get fired from the Bill Ackman assault on journalism? (laughs) So Bill like really showed the bullshit that happens in journalism. - No, 'cause what happens is..."

"can he stand up to a full-scale assault, not only by his own reporters, but by every other journalism outlet who also now thinks he's the Antichrist? - And he is trying to exercise power by speaking o..."

"- Did you know of him before he started doing this in public? - I knew of Neri, his wife, who's a brilliant researcher and scientist. And so I admire her. Looked up to her and think she's amazing. - W..."

"And basically what happens is the effective analysts, a large amount of time, they end up taking over control of companies even though they never own more than like 5% of the stock. And so anyway, so ..."

"But I will tell you the other thing, which is his investors... I know this for a fact. His investors have been remarkably supportive of him doing that. 'Cause as it turns out, a lot of them actually a..."

"and then you have him coming back, right? And as you'll recall, there was a fair amount of controversy over the end of the first term. - Oh, yeah. - The specific concern was, you know, the first Trump..."

"Maybe they're more cynical now. Maybe they're not willing to go through the drama. By the way, a lot of people in the first term came under, like, you know, with their own withering legal assaults, an..."

"And actually one of the interesting things about the team that's forming up is it's remarkably young. Some of the cabinet members, and then many of the second and third level people are like in their ..."

"And I think you're in a good position to speak to the degree that's happening versus hiring based on merit and just getting great teams. - Yeah, so look, I just start by saying any leader at that leve..."

"You know, and then Marty Makary coming in to run FDA, exact same thing. The guy coming to run a CDC, exact same thing. I mean, I've been spending time with Dr. Oz, so, you know, and I'm not, like, aga..."

"you know, challenging the laws, we're actually complying with the Supreme Court decision that basically says we have to unwind a lot of this, and we have to unwind the regulations, which are no longer..."

"They can completely bypass the press, they can completely bypass the cynicism, they can expose any element of, you know, unconstitutional or, you know, silly government spending. They can run victory ..."

"- The transparency. I mean, Elon, just by who he is incentivized to be transparent and show the bullshit in the system and to celebrate the victories. So it's gonna be so exciting. I mean, honestly, i..."

"And so the idea that $30 billion program is not something that is like a very important thing to go after, is just like the level of contempt for the taxpayer- - Yeah. - Is just off the charts. And th..."

"It's super exciting. As long as there's no bureaucracy that slows you down or not huge amounts of bureaucracy that slows you down significantly. - Yeah. So here's the trick, this blew my mind 'cause I..."

"I am extremely encouraged what I've seen so far. - It seems like a lot of people will try to slow 'em down, but yeah- - For sure. - I hope they get far. - Yeah. - Another difficult topic, immigration...."

"than would've previously existed. And so you've got a, it's a positive, some flywheel thing where everybody wins. Like everybody wins, there are no trade-offs. It's all absolutely glorious in all dire..."

"Like, you know, very, unlike the underpants. No, it's like a very straightforward formula, right? - Yeah. - All right, that's all well and good, all right, but it gets a little bit more complicated be..."

"invent all these things. And then there's many, many, many, many stories in the history of American invention and innovation and capitalism where you had people who grew up in the middle of nowhere, P..."

"Or something else is happening. Would you care to guess on what else is happening? - You mean what, affirmative action? - Affirmative action. Okay. (laughs) This is very, think about this, this is ver..."

"By the way, we're coming up on the 25 years, right? It's a couple years away. The Supreme Court just had these cases is, it's a Harvard case and I think a University of North Carolina case. And what's..."

"I will tell you, I don't believe there's a single education institution in America that is conforming with the Supreme Court ruling. I think they're all flagrantly ignoring it. And we could talk about..."

"the Supreme Court rules the universities, right? Well, another example of that is, I think that every sitting member of the Supreme Court right now went to either Harvard or Yale, right? Like the leve..."

"And then it turns out it's also happening to Black people, and this is the thing that like blew my freaking mind when I found out about it. So I just assumed that like, this was great news for like Am..."

"the number was half of the Black admits into a place like Harvard were not American-born Blacks. They were foreign-born Blacks, specifically, Northern African off generally Nigerian or West Indian, ri..."

"you have a split between the sides that I've noticed, which is one side has all of the experts. - Right. - Right, and I'm using air quote for people listening to audio. I'm making quotes in the air wi..."

"And so there is a moment here to be able to look at this on both sides. Let add one more nuance to it that makes it even more complicated. - Yeah. - So the cliche is we're gonna brain drain the world,..."

"By the way, Russia, like we have brain drained a lot of really smart people outta Russia, a lot of them are here, right? Over the last, you know, 30 years. And so there's this thing, it's actually rea..."

"- Well, this is so deeply profound, actually. So what is the cost "winning" quote, unquote, if these countries are drained in terms of human capital, on the level of geopolitics, what does that lead t..."

"- Okay, so then you get this other... Okay, so then there's- - Come all the way around. (laughs) - There's another nuance. So there's another nuance, there's another nuance, which is mostly the valley..."

"in a way that we really can't. And then again, you get to the sort of underlying morality here, which is, it's like, well, you know, Amazon, like Amazon's a in like I love Amazon, but like they're a b..."

"- Let me guess, very few. Zero. - Zero. (laughs) - As you say it, that's brilliant, there should be that same level of scouting for talent internally. - Go get the smartest ones. I'll give you one mor..."

"And again, I would say this is like part of the generalized corruption that's taken place throughout this entire system where we have been heading in the reverse direction from wanting to actually go ..."

"Like what a crazy radical... Sorry, I don't mean to really get out over my skis here, but- - I think your profile on X states, "It's time to build." It feels like 2025 is a good year to build. So I wa..."

"And you know, all this, but like the thing with coding, like there's like open questions of whether AI can get better at like, I don't know, understanding philosophy or whatever, creative writing or w..."

"- That's actually a tricky one in terms of learning as a non-coder to build stuff. It's still, I feel like you still need to learn how to code, it becomes a superpower. It helps you be much more produ..."

"to code, AI, by the way, is as you know, spectacularly good at explaining code, right? And so, you know, the tools have these features now where you can talk to the code base and so you can like liter..."

"and then, you know, a big is, you know, a big part of coding is so-called glue, you know, it's interfacing into other systems. So it's interfacing into, you know, Stripe to take payments or something ..."

"that I've ever seen. - Yeah, there's, you know, the old meme with the bell curve, the people on both extremes say, "AI coding is the future." - Right. - It is very common. The programmers to say, you ..."

"And so, like overwhelmingly, you know, the amount of code that exists in the world is a fraction of even the ideas we have today. And then we come up with new ideas all the time. And so I think that l..."

"Now, having said that, I am looking forward to the day, I am waiting for the first company to walk in saying, yes, like the more radical form of it. So basically, the companies that we see are basical..."

"which is how you're getting all these products that have like the AI button up in the corner, right? The little sparkly button. - Yep. - Right? And all of a sudden Gmail is offering to summarize your ..."

"So I'm looking at, I'm waiting for the company where it's like, no, we're gonna have, like, you know, and the cliche, here's a thought experiment, right? The cliche would be we're gonna have like the ..."

"- And some of it is, as you know, with all the startups, this is the execution. The idea that you have a AI-first email client, seems like an obvious idea, but actually creating one, executing it, and..."

"And as you kind of just said, this is like a permanent state of affairs for large organizations. Like every once in a while, one breaks the pattern and actually does it. But for the most part, like th..."

"And look, the most obvious example of the flux is you know, sitting here less than three years ago, sitting here in December of '22, we would've said that OpenAI is just running away with everything. ..."

"And so the way that historically, the way that you do it is you start a for-profit and then you raise money with the for-profit to buy the assets of the nonprofit at fair market value. And, you know, ..."

"that's a trillion-dollar question right there as to whether that's true. But then there's question of like, okay, is that gonna work in the more general domain? Like, so for example, one possibility i..."

"So there's like massive open questions there about like what, you know, and by the way, like what morality of these things are gonna get trained on as a- - And that one we're cracking wide open with w..."

"So big questions. - Quick questions. So you're very active on X. A very unique character, flamboyant exciting bold. You post a lot. I think there's a meme, I don't remember it exactly, but that Elon p..."

"'Cause it's a programmable money, it's a very easy way to plug in and do that. And there's this transaction processing system that can do that. And so I think the crypto AI intersection, you know, is ..."

"- Yeah, he could be both right and wrong. First of all, I do agree with that. He's one of the most legit and rigorous and deep critics of the LLM path to AGI, you know, his basic notions that there ne..."

"- Staring at cursor. - Exactly. - As a small tangent, a quick shout out to an amazing interview you did with Bari Weiss and just to her in general, Bari Weiss of the Free Press. She has a podcast call..."

"or something. And then, you know, look, I mean just, you know, like Elon, it's just like, okay, the known universe is like very, you know, complicated and, you know, mystifying. I mean, every time I, ..."

"The other thing though, that's happened, and maybe the more practical answer to the question is I think I have a much better understanding now of the role that religion plays in society that I didn't ..."