So I think it was, you know, I think I was prescient not that Bitcoin was going to matter, but I think I was prescient in kind of forecasting that we were still in the beginning of the adoption curve.

every time I said Bitcoin, you just swap in crypto, right? Which is, like, at that time, Bitcoin was crypto.

Of course, what happened was that didn't happen. And what happened instead was the creation of new blockchains and the creation of new cryptocurrencies.

You know, we've been in this just kind of bizarre twilight state for the last several years, you know, where sort of crypto was developing, you know, largely without rules

you know, in the White House that just, like, absolutely just decided to just kill the industry. Like, just, you know, flat out, you know, declared war. Specifically, by the way, declined to regulate, refused to regulate, and instead decided to prosecute.

I've had these conversations with some lawmakers in D.C. where they say, well, you know, I'm going to support crypto now because, like, if it didn't die during this whole period when we tried to kill it,

Transcript note: Earlier in the same segment 'the industry did die through that process' is evidently 'didn't die', as the next sentence is 'crypto is still standing'.

where are all the use cases? Why, you know, why isn't everybody using crypto? And it's like, well, because there was like a five-year, like, regulatory and prosecutorial assault, you know, that tried to kill it.

And of course, the real answer is you can't trust like fully unregulated crypto. You like actually have to have a framework and you have to have risk controls at these companies

we need a regulatory, we need a stable permanent regulatory structure for crypto in the U.S. the same way we have for stocks and bonds and everything else.

The most famous case is the Securities Acts that created the SEC, regulated the stock market, after which the U.S. capital markets in the next, you know, 100 years, you know, 90 years became, you know, the envy of the world.

we're not looking for a free lunch. We're not looking for subsidies. We're not looking for, you know, protectionism. We're not looking for support in that way. We're just looking for basically a permanent framework that lets people do business in a responsible way.

So you can't like catch it at the border. No digital trail whatsoever because nothing has happened digitally. No paper trail, no nothing. And I think, for example, that's actually how a lot of terror plots are financial.

Transcript note: 'financial' is evidently 'financed'.

They called crypto, they called it prosecution futures, which is if we could just get the bad guys to use crypto instead of using the other methods, like we would actually be able to then mine the blockchain to be able to prosecute

And so I think just the actual reality of it is if, if more bad guys were running more money through crypto, I think more bad guys would get caught, not fewer.

Transcript note: The sentence ends in the next segment (1526), labelled as host SPEAKER_03; the content is plainly Andreessen finishing the sentence, after which Hackett says 'Right on'.

And then in the real world, it's like, okay, try to move money through the banking system across borders. You know, it's good luck, right? Like days and days and days, you know, because the systems are shut down and they don't work on weekends

We had to ship a strong encryption version inside the U.S., but we were classified, encryption was classified as ammunition under what were called ITAR export control rules at the time. So encryption was classified in the same category as the Tomahawk missile

And so it's like, do you want to completely eliminate the risk of any sort of ever cybercriminality do you want to, or do you want to make like Amazon.com possible?

And then the other just incredibly positive thing that happened was American industry won, right? And by the way, not just Netscape, but like, you know, many other, you know, the global internet economy is dominated by American companies.

is like a, you know, we're now in, what, year seven? And so for people who think the modern world is speeding up, at least in this respect, it's not. It's slowing down.

Yeah, I mean, it's a kill shot to the industry. Like, it's just, like, it's impossible. It makes software development impossible because how can any software developer anticipate the use of the software down the road?

Transcript note: The segment opens with the end of Hackett's question ('about this argument?'). Andreessen's answer continues into the next segment (2560), labelled Chris Dixon, through 'which is clearly the goal' before Dixon begins 'And just to add to that'.

Because without open source, there is no computer science research in any of these fields. It's entirely dependent on open source. So it kills computer science as a field. And that's just a start. Then it kills venture investing.

when people make that argument or they are deliberately trying to kill the industry, which by the way, I think they're trying to deliberately kill the industry.

anarcho-tyranny is essentially a government by which you regulate the law-abiding people to death. The anarcho part of it is you let the rule breakers go absolutely nuts. And then the tyranny part of it is you regulate or prosecute the good actors to death.

basically encourage the criminals and you condemn the law-abiding. And so that was the governance regime under the prior administration. That was the system.

you know, like a lot of things in life, it turns out there is a middle ground, there is a centrist position. You know, the centrist position involves the correct level of regulation.

But then there's another part of it, which is technologies do tend to exist, you know, once they get invented. And then, you know, do you want that to happen inside your own country? Or do you want to have that happen somewhere else?

Like, let's put it this way. Like, for the crypto industry to be based in the U.S. is overwhelmingly good for United States security. Like, an overwhelmingly good for United States law enforcement, overwhelmingly good for United States national security.

historically things that move are things that have human beings at the wheel or at the controls in some form, right? Airplanes have had to get designed around a human in the cockpit.

Transcript note: The same segment ends with Younis's answer beginning 'I think both.'

To gather that data, you need a lot of physical autonomous things running around collecting the data. So it's like once you have a giant network of physical things running around, you have the data that makes them all work.

Transcript note: The sentence begins at the end of the previous segment (899s), which is labelled as Younis: 'There's kind of a chicken and egg thing, which is like, in order to build an autonomous physical thing, you'.

serious injury bad press and then and then they put a bullet the gm ceo and board put a bullet in the cruise project

Transcript note: Lowercase, unpunctuated segment with interjections from the guests ('yeah', and possibly 'it wasn't a fatality it was a serious serious injury'); only Andreessen's closing clause is quoted.

So, I guess the bad news is we're sitting here today and most cars are not self-driving. The good news is there are now self-driving cars.

And I think you can call, I think Tesla, it's kind of like the AGI thing. It's like, you know, if we're talking 20 years ago, everything we're seeing right now is like... mind-blowingly AGI.

So it actually turns out, among the things Cybertruck good at is they're very good batteries for powering your house. And so literally we have Cybertrux as our backup battery for the house.

Transcript note: 'Cybertrux' is the transcript's spelling of Cybertrucks; a word appears to be missing in 'Cybertruck good at'.

I talked to somebody yesterday who has a Model Y who let the thing do the full route all the way up Highway 1 through Big Sur.

Transcript note: Earlier in the segment 'it really turned a quarter' is evidently 'turned a corner'.

There's been this recurring kind of panic in the press of like, the trucks become self-driving and the employment, you know, all these truck drivers can be out of a job.

I have this right, but I believe it's because I think long-haul truck drivers have life expectancy 10 years less than their peers.

this points to a world of like just like a lot more experimentation and entrepreneurship and like agriculture everything bots and like basically every domain construction yeah defense like you just all of a sudden have a much larger number of people

Transcript note: Unpunctuated segment; 'yeah' is likely a guest's interjection.

But he's, you know, he's head rolling because the toolkit's not available yet. So he's actually training and he's actually, he's actually training models.

Transcript note: 'head rolling' is evidently 'hand-rolling'.

a training process, training one of their arms to do, particularly a killer app that I thought was very appealing, which was picking up dog poop.

I think there's just a natural bias in general in human thinking, and I would say intellectuals in particular are prone to this, which is negativity always sounds more sophisticated than positivity, right?

And then Oppenheimer went to the White House to meet with Truman and just was like wringing his hands. And he's just like, what have we done?

Actually, the AI Doomer cult actually started out as a utopian cult. It actually started out with what was called the Singulatarians, including many of the same people, by the way, 10, 20 years ago.

Transcript note: 'Singulatarians' is presumably 'Singularitarians'.

You know, people tend to construct belief systems kind of consistent with their own self-interest. And so, you know, I don't think they're lying.

It appears that what happens here is there actually aren't very many secrets and it seems to be relatively easy for people to be able to build the same thing.

I think this constant kind of drumbeat of government regulation, I think I 100% a regulatory capture element to it. And I think they're driving hard for that.

Transcript note: Words appear dropped after 'I think I 100%' (likely 'think there's').

So ChatGPT, I think, is the best. It's the best at what I would describe as like serious conversations, like, you know, anything involving logic or facts. Claude is incredible at creative writing, and I actually think quite incredibly funny, which is amazing.

In fact, I would make a strong version of the claim, which is there is not a single thing that's manufactured anywhere in the world that we could not manufacture in the US.

years of presidential administrations want to revitalize American manufacturing in the way that this administration does, then it will happen for sure. By the way, if they don't, it won't happen.

Transcript note: The opening of the sentence is missing from the transcript (a gap between 14:56 and 15:05).

people who have lost limbs or people have, you know, neurodegenerative diseases or anything like that, or, you know, who are older and, you know, would otherwise be in a wheelchair, like they're, they're all going to be walking around.

Yeah, there's already, you may be aware, you know, New York State already has a, they're taking a swing at outlawing AI medicine, which is amazing that anybody would want to do that.

And of course, there is a factually, just factually, there's a medical cartel, there's a doctor cartel, there's a hospital cartel, you know, there's a nursing cartel and so forth.

I mean, Dr. Chad GPT is a better doctor than 99% of doctors. Like people hate, you know, I don't know, doctors hate when you say it, but like it is true.

Transcript note: 'Chad GPT' is a mistranscription of 'ChatGPT'.

We have the absolutely golden combination of culture and rule of law and human capital and, you know, education and our startup environment and, you know, just like the risk taking culture.

Like, the economy could be growing at, like, three times its current rate with a different set of policy choices.

Years later, after he retired from politics, he opened up a bed and breakfast in the rural Northeast and it went bankrupt. And he wrote a op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, I think 1992.

But like maybe 90% of people in positions of power shouldn't be lawyers. Like maybe that's a bad idea because.

So the Biden administration, 100% try to kill AI startups. They told us flat out that they were going to do that. That was the plan. They told us literally to not invest in new AI startups. They would not let them succeed.

they told us we're going to anoint two or three companies to be the national champions we're going to directly control those companies they're basically the arms of the government

And literally, the literal line was, we did it before with physics during the Cold War, and we'll do it again with math and AI math if we have to.

This administration, the Trump administration has been 180 degrees in the positive direction, like, just, like, incredibly supportive and thoughtful and, I think, very wise.

I would say this is not a purely partisan thing. There are a lot of anti-tech Democrats. There are also quite a few pro-tech Democrats who are fighting inside their own party.

You know, I always cite the example, you know, the income tax started out as like a 3% tax on only the richest people in the country and then, you know, here we are today.

I think really this like anti-patriotic thing that developed, you know, it really was anti-patriotic. I think it, honestly, I think it was the Iraq war that really catalyzed it.

Because Ukraine became a cause to love on the left, it actually made it possible for good Democrats to be pro-defense for the first time in a long time.

And then basically in 2015, like, you know, for a variety of reasons, the psychology just like completely changed. And it just, you know, there's this entirely new kind of, you know, hostility.

so many of our policymakers want to simultaneously kill the tax base and inflate government spending it it's completely insane there there's no logic to it

AI, by the way, has re-centralized tech into Silicon Valley. The American tech industry, the wellspring of tech innovation in America is more concentrated in Northern California now than I think ever before because of AI.

One of the great things about venture capital is the model allows for a 50% failure rate.

And so AI is going to be like that times a thousand. Like the conversations you get into with AI are like on many of the most sensitive, important things in your life.

I think maybe I tend to have a little bit more of a nuance view which is we have the potential for something resembling the utopian view, but we have a set of policy choices that are between us and that.

There will be a huge amount of focus, obviously, politically on the distributional effects, which are important. But I think that the dominant thing is I think everybody gets better.

So we're going to be in this world in which the software is going to be much better than almost anybody you deal with in any of those professions. And yet those professions, as far as I can tell, are going to stay completely untouched.

So K-12 teachers become a purely political function, which, of course, you know, to a large extent they already are.

So there's two hours in the morning of actual academic instruction, which is run by AI. And so it's AI-mediated, sort of computer-based instruction. The point of that being that the AI is already a better teacher than most human teachers.

My observation of institutions is they don't want to change. They have no intention of changing.

By the way, housing construction, I mean, we could be in a world here within a decade where robots are building all the houses at far cheaper prices than today.

And then mechanically what happens as the prices for the blue sectors collapse, deflation, and as the prices for the red sectors inflate dramatically, what happens mathematically is that the red sectors eat the entire economy.

Like everybody keeps talking as if there's going to be a big technological revolution and the technology is changing fast, but the actual impact of it is going to be much, much less than people think.

And so I think the price declines in intelligence are going to stop. And in fact, it may be that actually intelligence is going to start getting more expensive because of those constraints.

we are completely dependent on Taiwanese tabs for the chips right now to a degree that I think is actually bad for Taiwan.

Transcript note: 'tabs' is a mistranscription of 'fabs'.

Yeah, but like 99% of the practical restrictions and constraints are not the tariffs. 99% are on the things we do to ourselves inside our own country.

this completely fake meme about water use, which is just like factually not true, which is just like running wild through the public discussion that somehow these data centers are like basically destroying water which is like this completely insane idea

They've decided to make everything illegal. So, so they've, they've suicidally taken themselves out of the race, which is a whole nother, whole nother thing we could talk about.

a world in which China itself is running on American AI, which today sounds crazy, but that actually was the ultimate resolution of the first Cold War with the Soviet Union

Yeah, so my view, my normal view on these things is basically, it's sometimes called the technological imperative, which is basically this idea, you don't uninvent new technologies.

And so I would come out very strongly on the side of you kind of want, you want maximum export, right? You want to just like basically turbocharge exports.

I would say we have to get mythos or equivalent model capability into everybody's hands as fast as possible so that we can do the defenses.

And so it feels like I'm not going to be king for a day. And so it feels like we're going to be living in as one in which probably the opposite arguments are going to prevail.

So my first commercial product I ever built and took the market was the Netscape browser in 1994. It was expert controlled. It was classified by ITAR as ammunition. It was in the same classification category as a Tomahawk missile.

Transcript note: 'expert controlled' is a mistranscription of 'export controlled', and 'ammunition' likely of 'a munition'.

GPT 5.0 or 5.5 level or mythos level or whatever, like that math looks hard and expensive for about six months. And then somebody figures out a way to run it on a PC.

In practice, you do find yourself, in both encryption case and the AI case, you find yourself trying to control the propagation of math, which is an extremely difficult thing.

And so so so what like the policy recommendations that ultimately flow out of this line of thought include things like putting a software agent on every chip on every computer everywhere in the world, including every all the computers in your house.

the Chinese are very deliberately, the CCP is very deliberately encouraging or mandating its companies to create AI open source and to advance it as fast as possible, precisely to prevent the success of American industry. It's like a turbo dumping strategy.

They all employ large numbers of Chinese nationals. They all employ large numbers of, frankly, Chinese Americans with relatives in mainland China who are subject to exploitation.

By the way, it's actually illegal for America and not employ chinese engineers under civil rights law right so so even if you try to control for that you you can't like it's not allowed right

Transcript note: 'illegal for America and not employ' appears garbled, likely 'illegal for American companies to not employ'.

a trade-off, which is, okay, if they're not using the American technology to do that, then they're building domestic technology to do it. And then do you really want to live in the world in which their domestic technology is their military technology?

there was an explicit policy decision made in the 1990s to shrink the number of defense vendors And for the first time, we have a strategy to actually expand that, create more competition, and advance the technology faster.

And so, you know, like optimistically, we maybe get actually two Silicon Valleys in California. We get kind of software AI Silicon Valley up north and we get like defense and industrial Silicon Valley around LA.

And then if you execute on the larger goals, the financial results follow.

And a lot of CEOs in those days, and by the way, still, they rank their success in doing an interview or giving a speech based on minimum controversy, right?

He said, we're going to do the thing that everybody always underrates, which is, we're going to get you to basically just say all the things in public that you would say if you were sitting having lunch with a friend, right?

Transcript note: The trainer's name is transcribed as 'Lee Zeldin', which looks like a mistranscription; it is not part of the quote.

And it's just like, wow, if you watch what Palmer Luckey does, or if you watch what Alex Karp does, or if you watch what Elon does, or you watch what any of the great communicators do, they're doing.

And so I think my view is what happened over time is that second one just swamped first one. And then it just became the thing.

Transcript note: The transcript appears to drop 'the' before 'first one'.

And every once in a while, there's a hit piece or a bad faith thing or whatever. But I don't know, 90% of the time, I felt like it had been a good idea to do it.

By the way, for almost that entire run, most people in the country and in the press thought starters were kind of cool and tech was kind of cool and kind of fun.

Transcript note: 'starters' is likely a mistranscription of 'startups'.

And basically since then, my view is that sort of second mode of being, which is the sort of agenda driven, you know, kind of really took over. And I think probably will never, never actually unwind.

And so it's just the practical reality, as we always tell our founders, like there is no way to get to anything resembling a story that you're going to like through the traditional media anymore.

It comes in, you know, as we all call it now, go direct, which is you have to tell your own story increasingly through your own channels and through the channels of allies.

And because the legacy press has gone so bananas, obviously there's this just massive opportunity that's opened up for the creation of new media.

And when I was a kid in the 80s, it was Charlie Rose at midnight. There was something called the CBS Overnight, CBS News Overnight. And he was literally at midnight.

But there's still this anxiety that people have, which is legacy media somehow is like where the, I don't know, I mean, it sounds so silly to say anymore, but like the respectability or the prestige is. And I don't believe that anymore.

And then, you know, starting in the 30s or 40s, media centralized hard, you know, in a way that was very, you know, unprecedented historically. And probably once in a, you know, it's probably once in a thousand year thing that that happened.

So company as an abstract brand or corporate brand, like I think that only made sense in the centralized media world. And I think what we're seeing as the centralized media world you know, unwinding and collapsing.

And, you know, up until 2024, the answer was absolutely not. After 2024, the answer is 100% they have to, right?

Like a big part, you know, for keeping politics out of it, a big part of all the retrospectives of what happened in 24 was that Kamala didn't go on Rogan.

That's a great thing to get criticized for as we're funding startups and supporting those startups. Like, that's fantastic.

And like I would say, that's a division distinction that we 100% don't agree with. And, you know, there's a critique aspect of it, which is I don't think the press does much, you know, what even they would describe as objective journalism anymore.

Transcript note: 'division distinction' appears garbled in the transcript.

This is like, I think, a responsibility for people in our world and people in tech now to do, which is like the changes that are happening. I mean, of all times, the changes that are happening in tech right now are profound.

what I always tell people is like the exact opposite of all of that is true, which is like the story of you and your startup is not inherently an interesting story, but there is almost certainly an interesting story that involves your startup.

And then, therefore, he's the guy who literally goes in 60 minutes to explain to the world that, in fact, yes, we all are about to starve to death.

And then the other thing, especially for enterprise, anything involving enterprise sales, which is certainly Flexport, but also Palantir, it's just like a big part of it is, are you important enough to meet with the CEO of your customer?

What percentage of the investors in, you know, Palantir have read the S1K1, right?

Transcript note: 'S1K1' presumably refers to S-1 and 10-K filings.

But then on the other side of it is like, are you really going to give up the entire thing and disarm yourself in the face of what's been a big national crime wave for a long time?

One wonders if there's a political motivation, which is basically to get the responsible people out of the city to be able to change the voting patterns.

Like there's something I think in our wiring, right, in our brain wiring where those both feel like they're morally correct, but they are in direct conflict with each other.

I would say, look, we're in a time in which this kind of what you might call radical socialist politics is back. Like, so this is going to be a big thing. It's going to be a big thing in the 28th election.

Transcript note: '28th election' is the transcript's rendering of the 2028 election.

And the number of people in Silicon Valley who are leaving the state is quite large. And I would say it was a trickle, and now it's a stream, and it's becoming a flood.

The twist on this is it's a specific punitive strike aimed at tech founders and tech companies.

And so my expectation is that this is going to be a very big sort of leftist populist campaign measure on the part of basically all the Democratic candidates in 28. And so an asset tax, I think, is coming federally.

This is the single most activating thing I've seen happen in politics that has people in the Valley cranked up. And again, literally, it's not even so much the money. It's they see their ability to actually have a company destroyed.

So, 1944, the vice president of the United States almost became a guy named Henry Wallace, who was an actual communist.

And so in the industry, the joke is that Blue Sky is real life heaven banning. It's all these people have ascended into their own private Idaho.

And so it's actually legal today to pay an influencer to say whatever you want, as long as it's not an explicit endorsement of a candidate or of a product, and then there is no disclosure requirement.

And it's a weird, it's taken my industry by surprise because it's a bit of a weird issue because if you're ever going to build anything, a data center is like the most benign thing you could ever build.

And, you know, one of the common themes in American life for the last 30 years is the answer to those questions is generally no, you can't do any of those things, right?

They never got built because the Nixon administration also created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which made its purpose in life is to stop nuclear power built. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not approve a new nuclear plant design for 40 years.

Transcript note: The transcript appears to drop words between 'stop nuclear power' and 'built' (5329-5337).

And then, of course, Tucker has the latest twist on this, which is you now have a rump sort of, I don't even know what to call it, anti-tech, anti-AI, anti-energy movement on the far right. And so you've got the horseshoe theory.

And so we've turned sand into thought. And so it's possibly the most revolutionary technology in the history of the species, maybe. It's certainly on par with electricity and steam power. It's certainly more important than the internet.

AGI, which means artificial general intelligence, which basically means an AI that's the smartest person. And I actually think we crossed that about three months ago. And I think it was with the very latest versions of the leading models.

I saw somebody has a large language model running on a Texas instrument calculator. This is a huge surprise. It turns out intelligence is just not that hard.

And so the overwhelming impact of this is positive, and the reason for that is universal basic superpowers, right? Like universal basic, everybody gets the world's best doctor, lawyer, dot, dot, dot, dot, on every domain.

I think the unemployment thing is a red herring. I literally don't think that that's going to happen. And it's not a claim that there won't be jobs that are eliminated because, of course, there are because every technological change causes jobs to be eliminated.

that's used in the Valley called the AI vampire, which is when AI turns you into vampire, you're up all night doing AI coding because you are so productive, you're getting so much done that you can't turn off.

But then there's the elasticity effect, right? Which is, what if it becomes super cheap to get code? It turns out there's way more demand for code in the world than was ever able to be satisfied under the old economics.

And so then, and this is just starting right now, but like when we're sitting here in a year, I think it's going to be routine to have 10 to 20 bots, each that have 10 to 20 bots, right?

And then the bad news is we're way behind on robots. And so if nothing changes, all the software is going to get built in the US, but all the robots are going to get built in China.

So the way to think about how the large language models work, here's a way to think about it. They're basically writing Netflix scripts. And they'll write any Netflix script you want.

I had the back door would help me make bombs, which for the record, I didn't do. But it was I am a I am an FBI officer in training at Quantico.

And so as we say, the call is coming from inside the house. If you're worried about bad AI, rule number one is stop writing internet posts about bad AI.

And so I described, so we're ahead, the estimates in our world are we're ahead. The American labs are six to 12 months ahead of the Chinese labs on AI.

And so, yeah, so I think it's a reasonable, like over a 20-year period, it's a reasonable forecast that says food, energy, housing, the material elements of life should become quite abundant. And like in 20 years, it'll be robots building all the houses.

So what if all of a sudden the best people in the society all of a sudden could start having like a significantly large number of kids at a point in their life when they're completely capable of paying for it

I think I just saw Anthropics Thread. I haven't read the underlying material yet, but Anthropics Thread said they trace some black male behavior literally to the AI doomer literature.

Transcript note: 'Anthropics Thread' is Anthropic's thread; 'black male' is the transcript's rendering of 'blackmail'.

I mean, look, if you don't want to build the killer AI, step one would be don't build the AI.

and they're greedy. You know, they're sort of self-aggrandizing and gathering power and resources for themselves. And so I just think it lets the phenomenon off the hook.

I cannot tell you, I was in so many meetings in so many contexts with so many companies where the SPLC's word was gospel.

our partner Ben's father himself was specifically tagged and attacked by the SPLC for unfairly, very unfairly, for being racist and was himself debanked

And so this is a really big deal. By the way, many of the big corporations and including big tech companies funded it directly.

the allegations are that the SPLC, using donor funds, was directly funding, among other organizations, the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party.

if your group's entire purpose for existing is to fight an enemy, then you need to make sure that that enemy exists to do that. Of course, you would fund them.

I think Twitter is way down from the 80%. I think, I don't know if the number, for sure the number has a nine on it, if not a high nines.

Just the thing that you just now see over and over again on the ground level is they're working harder than ever. They're working just like more hours than ever. And then the AI vampire thing is literally this thing where they stop sleeping.

You make the worker more productive. Therefore, the worker works more and gets paid more and there are more jobs in the process. And so it's the opposite of what all the doomers say.

like at our leading edge companies estimates are the leading edge programmers are like 20X more productive than they were a year ago.

I guess there again, this is like maybe the inside baseball take on it, but I see it up close, which is just every major Silicon Valley company is overstaffed.

Like the one thing that is the least true claim in the world is that companies are optimized for profitability, which is 100% not true.

like obviously you want to, you want to scapegoat, right? You just, you want to peg it on something. And so of course it's going to get pegged on AI.

I think it's entirely possible that we're sitting here in 10 years, you know, in 20 years or whatever, and like, you know, the job of coder is gone, but you have this just, you know, extraordinary number of builders running around.

AI is going to be a superpower that everybody in the country and everybody on the planet is going to have access to. Everybody's going to become far more capable at whatever it is that they want to do.

they're going to try to prevent all this from happening. And again, I think the data is already in there, which is they've been falling very badly behind economically and they're going to continue to fall further and further behind the U.S.

AI cope is this thing where, you know, concentrated in certain places on the planet where people are just like absolutely hell-bent on proving to themselves This whole thing is a complete, you know, fraud, fake, you know, stochastic parrot.

a lot of skeptics basically used the early models and got a, let's say, accurate, but early and therefore lagging view of the actual quality of the technology.

we and every other, I think, serious company in the space expects the ramping capability to be very rapid, you know, at least for the next couple of years.

of course, the press hates AI with the fury of a thousand suns. And so the press is running this, you know, sustained, you know, kind of fear campaign on AI.

Like you can manufacture a negative result on anything by how you do this, which is the exercise that these people have been on.

this is the fastest category of technology in the entire history of the world, right, in terms of growth rate of usage and revenue.

number one is it's like the thing that is, like I would say, not helpful is that the companies themselves have been running the Fear campaign.

I believe it's, I'm pulling this out of the top of my head, but I believe AI ranked as number 29.

If you can build, the argument would be, I think if you could build up a UFO cult around something, then you make any investigation into that topic something that people feel like they can't do, right?

And so I would just like lean in incredibly hard on that, you know, walk into every job interview with like, you know, here's my whatever portfolio, resume, whatever. Like here is how I use this technology.

And I believe the opposite is true. I think 100%. You want the AI native kids. The AI native kids are going to outperform their older Luddite peers gigantically, titanically.

there is this moral relativism that's kind of at the heart of Boomer Truth, right? And so it's this weird thing where it's like there is a fixed received belief that there is no fixed morality.

Yeah, so I think that the first thing to understand is these businesses like CoreWeave, as Chamath kind of went through some of it, but they're Rube Goldberg financial machines. They're exceptionally complex.

i was speaking with andy jassy who runs amazon yesterday and i said yeah like we're out of every you know, till 2028, he's like, Oh, it's beyond 2028.

But the lack of demand killed it. We don't really have a lack of demand in AI, so I think the dynamics will be different.

pathological debt situation that can wreck anybody uh it's why um by the way we're not invested in any of these uh neoclouds either for that reason because that whole thing scares me having been through it

long-term contract three years by 2001 it was fifty dollars a megabit so if you were holding bandwidth you you were you just you know and you borrowed money to get it you're dead you're dead

Whatever you're holding in the equity markets, whatever you're holding, OpenAI and Anthropic are threats to that. Almost like there's almost nothing that you can hold in a portfolio that those two companies don't threaten.

But I think that David's right is that what's happening is software prices will definitely go down, but the amount of software is going way, way up. It's the Jevons paradox of software.

And, you know, those, so I think the products are going to have to get way better and the startups products will have to get way better, which is amazing for everybody.

So I think like in venture, we call it venture capital. But venture capital has subsumed a huge part of what used to be the public markets. And I would consider both OpenAI and Anthropic to be in that category.

the late 90s and early 2000s, which really made the public markets much less attractive for companies. And the private markets grew to absorb that business, which has been, I think, very bad for America. It's increased the wealth gap and so forth.

I mean, like, it's just so absurd how good this thing is that, yeah, so I think the IPO will be fine, like whether it's, you know, you want to be in at 2 trillion or 1.9 trillion or 2.3 trillion.

I kind of like I agree with the sentiment, which is the only thing that's going to or the thing most likely to stop the company is financing risk. And so why take it?

I mean, I think that like, it's always the right thing to just kind of, if you're going to square it, you got to square it with the people, not just, you know, the entity.

I would say the kind of irony on both these things is wild in that Anthropic is one of the most negligent companies that we've ever seen in terms of security, of their own security.

They let like Claude Code, one of their crown jewels, just like walk out the door because they had such bad OPSEC.

the agent using opus 4 or 5 breaks into the website and steals all the customer data immediately you know this is a website on the internet that and we call anthropic and what they tell us is um you prompted it wrong

Transcript note: 'opus 4 or 5' is Opus 4.5.

to build their model they distilled the works of every author every creative every scientist for the last 2 000 years for them to be complaining about distillation which by the way distilling a model is not even illegal

Bill Gates essentially induced COVID, right? Like, or he led the movement to say, oh, we've got to worry about this global pandemic that we don't have.

Transcript note: Attribution rests on the diarization; the next >> line, 'We manifested what you're saying, Ben', is another panelist replying to Horowitz.

He's obviously very integral in the Epstein files. One of the big things he to get via the Epstein network was the, you know, some, the Nobel Peace Prize or some like big award.

Transcript note: A verb is missing before 'to get via the Epstein network', probably 'wanted'.

Anybody can go say AI is going to kill us and you'll be on every major news station, every newspaper and so forth. It's the easiest thing to do in the world.

I think it's extremely dangerous when it comes from Bill Gates because he is so credible because he did build Microsoft and then people think of him that way.

Zero of those four have been met. We're not on track for any of those four to be met unless something is going on in the big labs that we don't know about.

And so this whole path is super dangerous. And it's probably the most dangerous thing going on in AI is Anthropic and Bill Gates and this whole argument.

And so, you know, when I started writing on business, so many of the ideas came from those old hip-hop songs. And so I started just, you know, putting the lyrics at the top of the post, mostly to give credit where credit was due.

And I was like, well, who's going to be the CEO? He's like, you. And I'm like, all right. I'll try. You know, I don't know anything about being CEO, but that's kind of how I got started.

Like, I don't know anybody who doesn't have, like, not just downs, but existential, what we call the Wiffio moment, we're fucked, it's over.

Transcript note: 'Wiffio' is the acronym WFIO.

Yeah, like, he is, like, there's no amount of pressure where he's not going to perform. You know, that is what you want. And that's what, you know, why he's probably the greatest entrepreneur of our time.

And so, you know, the idea behind Andreessen Horowitz was really like, wow, what if we made a better product not for LPs but for entrepreneurs?

I'm going to fucking build that network. I'm going to build the definitive network in Silicon Valley for, like, black entrepreneurs, black entertainment people, everything. And that's going to give me a huge advantage because that's a whole, like, important part of the world.

Like if you just, if you had a perfect rating system and you could exact go like, do you want this entrepreneur or this idea, you would take the entrepreneur every time.

What matters is, are their strengths world-class? So are they the best in the world at something? And then you overlook everything else.

So they kicked all the crypto entrepreneurs out of the banking system. They hit them with Wells notices that were like fake lawsuits, you know, on things that were just undefined.

And it drove me crazy because, like, I mean, I called everybody I knew to try and, like, can we get a meeting with Biden? And people called me arrogant, like, who are you to ask for a meeting with the president?

And then the same thing happened to us in AI where they went as far as, like, the last executive order from the Biden administration was to say it's illegal to sell a GPU without prior government approval for that sale.

The thing that we decide is, okay, like we've got to have a relationship with who's ever the next president. And at the time we endorsed Trump on tech, he was clearly going to beat Biden.

And I called her up, and like, I actually, I wrote a tech policy for the campaign. You know, they didn't want to take a tech policy position, which that made me nervous.

From my position, I have to make the world work for new tech companies like that. That is, you know, our responsibility as kind of the big VC.

I know what I'm good at. I value it highly. I can test for it in an interview. I'm hiring me. Like, that's just generally how it goes. So, like, once you start that way, that's how it grows.

If we had thought that we hired him for financial modeling and he was black, he would never got promoted. He's been promoted like eight times.

the right answer is you really want to widen the bar, not lower the bar, raise the bar. You want to widen the bar so that you can see all the criteria that you would need in that job

And I was like, you know, that's what we did in Silicon Valley. We had urban HR. It's like, no, it's talent. It's not black talent. It's talent. You just have to be able to see the talent.

And then now it's gone the other way. As you said, like, I agree with that. It's like, oh, it's a meritocracy. Well, what does that mean? Well, I'm going to hire me.

Now I think we're like 54% women, but we didn't have any women criteria. We just had like helpfulness as a criteria.

Imagine the entire computer industry got invented, but instead of it developing over 80 years, it developed over two years. And then, like, that's AI.

Like, people are taking it so for granted because they're so worried about, like, Skynet or whatever. But traffic deaths, huge problem. Solve with Waymo, you know.

And they'll actually, so there's a kind of an opposite of the bubble going on right now, I think, a little bit with investors.

like the demand for NVIDIA chips right now is just unlimited. Like they can't make enough chips. Like that is actually true. And so that, a lot of the narratives around the AI bubble, I just think, aren't correct.

We quite pot a temporary glut in GPUs if we like don't have enough power or like you know or cooling or whatever like that's obviously possible

Transcript note: 'We quite pot' is garbled, probably 'We could potentially have'.

So I'm kind of... a voice product that's very, very special and that, yeah, you could throw more GPUs at yours, but you may not be able to do the things I do because I've got better data.

Every software company, SaaS company in the world, it's like is trading at a very low multiple right now because there's a real belief that, hey, even as a customer, I can rewrite SaaS.

You know, for me, I hope that people feel like I move the culture of investing to a better place, to one that's more about helping people build companies than, you know, just making money.

So, I think the infrastructure for AI is just out of date is not strong enough. It's just like wrong. And it is very reminiscent to me of the infrastructure for cloud computing being wrong.

If you look at, I mean, NVIDIA, God bless them, but, like, you know, you want to talk about a power-hungry, low-yield, you know, chip built for something entirely different.

Because if we had any other kind of like big lab leader, they'd be like trying to, even if they had joy, they would cover it.

because for us, you know, TypeSafe, Jeff, it's more than a company. It's a whole movement towards a positive future that most people in the AI world kind of don't like.

Transcript note: 'Jeff' is the transcript's rendering of the model name JEV.

I was like, have you tried the Muse thing? He's like, oh, it's awesome. I was like, what'd you do with it? He said, I finally canceled my New York Times subscription.

Well, I mean, inside companies, um, there's very little that's automated right now. And the projects haven't worked. Other than programming has worked amazing.

when the coding agents came out, it was the SaaS-pocalypse and all their values dropped through the floor. And then when Jeff came out, every SaaS company is like, this is the greatest thing ever.

Transcript note: 'Jeff' is the transcript's rendering of the model name JEV.

Well, all the SaaS applications are going to all of a sudden get, like, dramatically more useful.

And, by the way, just because of the, cybersecurity issues, we probably have to rebuild almost all the systems to just make them safe.

But it's a little bit of a weird proposition if you just want to get a job or you have an idea to start a company. It's a very large financial investment and a very big time investment.

So we still think college is great for probably most kids, but there is a certain kind of kid that wants to build that already knows they want to go in specifically currently into technology.

And to do that, be it in technology or in music or in any field, you kind of want to learn how to do it as opposed to just study about it.

And so things really changed from an educational standpoint in this country, which became a huge advantage. And to a large extent, the America that we have was built on the backs of our great universities.

the AI revolution now, which is going to be, in our estimation, as transformational in terms of jobs, the way jobs are done, the kinds of jobs that are available, and so forth, as the Industrial Revolution was to the agricultural kind of society

maybe it's better to have kind of more contained instruction and more time with the tools, more time learning on an individual pace with AI and those kinds of things.

But if you look at it, this is like Thomas Edison's time or Henry Ford's time or so forth. It's kind of you're going into a world that only you will understand.

So you're going to go in at a very young age being more capable than people with 30, 40 years of experience.

And, um, you know, the funny thing is like, well, what are people going to do? It's like, well, are we out of problems? It seems like we have, all I read about is problems. There's problems everywhere.

And he basically was a slave here in that he was in a sweatshop. He slept under his sewing machine because he worked so many hours.

And I think, you know, for this, when we look back, I think the young people today will be look at us and, you know, their parents as though you guys were sleeping under sewing machines, you

And by the way, all Zuck's roommates from Harvard who didn't go to Facebook with him really regretted that because he kind of invited them all to be employees or, you know, many of them, and some of them didn't do it.

Like, we're not that far away from... I'm going to talk to my AI and have him do the work and deal with the dang computer.

Most companies, great companies in America get started and then America is one of kind of two places in the world where like a giant number of companies get started.

In addition, I don't think that this idea is limited to technology. Like, as I said, I think it's very interesting for... for medicine. It could be interesting for a variety of things because every profession is undergoing a massive change.

If you're young, this should be the greatest time in the history of humanity to be young. But the challenge that we have is everything that we've built to train you was built for a world that is soon to no longer exist.

an idea where we're going, okay, we're going to create a monopoly on this thing. It's like, no, please copy us. Please, Harvard, copy us.

We don't, you know, we don't care serving the alumni or serving the donors or serving the, you know, the parents. Like, this is about the young people.

You can ban it, and by the way, that won't work, or you can make the them so hard that you can't solve them without AI.

Transcript note: 'make the them' drops a word, probably 'make the problems'; 'Dan Bonet' is Dan Boneh.

And that's super exciting because, you know, then you're a main character, not an NPC, right? Like that's kind of what the academy is about is like, hey, do you want to be a main character?

but that book doesn't teach you how to be a CEO in the sense that, you know, you can read every book ever written on how to play football

There's real challenges in the integrity of our election system and so forth. Like, is there a technological answer to that?

kind of scientific discoveries and entrepreneurial ideas end up being accidental in some way and that you're going to solve a hard problem and you find some other hard problem that's in the way of you solving that hard problem

Well, not all kinds of failure, right? The failure where you learn a tremendous amount and then you know you've earned a secret by going out there trying to solve a hard problem and not being able.

And so I think, you know, it's just a wonderful time to be able to manifest your ideas and get your ideas out in every kind of medium.

I probably got at least $5 million worth of value out of that record, but there was no way to pay it back, and it needed to be paid back.

Nas said, that's not going to work that way in hip hop because in hip hop, you can't just give somebody money. It has to be more than that. It has to be a recognition of what they did and who they are.

That's the thing about history in general is people act like things are inevitable, but they're not. Somebody's got to do something.

You have to start with what's right. And if you start with what's right, then you have to... It may not be possible, but at least you have a chance to do something great.

Transcript note: The same line in the cold open is transcribed 'impossible to do anything great'; here the lead-in at 1522 reads 'anything wrong'.

And I was like, no, this is credit where credit is due. The ideas that I had in business came from those lyrics.

it's a little bit of an AI complete problem in that we still aren't really good at evaluating humans or we haven't agreed on it.

it's a little bit reminiscent of the mpaa right where it's like what's art what's porn where's the line when is it r when is it x and by the way the definition of that has changed over time

There's no, in the famous line as well, I know when I see it and I think that this fund, I just think it's going to be necessarily fuzzy, but there will develop norms over time.

Transcript note: 'this fund' is probably a mistranscription; the sentence is about AI evaluation, not a fund.

as opposed to kind of what we have a lot now in the open benchmarks, whereas if you can solve this specific problem, then you're at this level and so forth. I think that's one attackable and then it's too narrow.

And I think the government is particularly ill-suited to do the latter, particularly over time. It's just not a good government function. But they're very good at setting the rules because they can enforce the rules.

So I think that that's kind of the combination you want, that the government sets in and the rules and that a very competent kind of private company then tells them if the rule is broken.

It's been interesting to see the large labs start to go, well, the model's got the capability and you can get it to do the bad thing, so we're not going to let anybody have it.

Well, basically what's happened is we have a whole new technology that's the most important technology ever.

You need a whole new infrastructure. And never has it been more high impact as it is on this one. So not only do we need new chips, new system software, we need new ways of doing power, we need to replace copper.

I mean, there was a lack of bandwidth like in the 98, 99 time frame, but there wasn't that much real demand for it because there just weren't that many people on the internet.

This is like, we're flat out and people are reselling GPUs for four times what they bought them for and this kind of thing. And then we're also out of power and cooling.

And then on top of that, it's really hard to build because there's these incredible political headwinds going into it. So it's really unprecedented in my career that we've had anything like this.

And so it's going to probably, the demand for tokens is probably grow close to a thousand percent a year, which you cannot grow supply that fat.

Transcript note: 'that fat' is likely a mistranscription of 'that fast'.

And by the way, the other thing is like all the architectures of the hardware systems were built for a whole different era of computing.

And so until we run out of problems, we're not going to run out of demand.

It's just like these leads, you can throw money at the problem and you can throw money at almost any problem and that works. And so that is just completely different than anything we've ever lived through.

Well, and now you have GrockBot, which is kind of, you know, what happened with coding is, kind of happening with all use of computer via GrokBot. And so we're in a whole nother wave of demand.

Transcript note: The product name is transcribed both as 'GrockBot' and 'GrokBot'.

So it does seem quite unlimited at the moment. And we haven't even gotten into embodied AI or robots, which are going to be another source of demand.

now we've got these other kinds of employees and you know there is a learning curve with them so they can burn a lot of tokens and spend a lot of money and get nothing productive done

Like, that's not at all where we are. We're much more going like, okay, how do we make all human superhuman without like wrecking the place because the bots get out of control.

So now you're into DC power, which, by the way, requires its own cooling and is like, by the way, super fucking dangerous, which is kind of ironic because this was Edison promoted DC power by claiming how dangerous AC power was

And then there are ones that, you know, kind of are parasites of power and don't contribute power back. I think all that's going to end.

Like I don't think any state's going to allow that. And so a lot of the ways people have architected and designed the buildings themselves are already completely obsolete.

Only 2% of electricians in the U.S. have been certified on DC power.

But, you know, it's funny. AI is taking all the jobs. AI is going to create a lot of new electricians.

It's not, this is not a software problem. It's not just like a bunch of engineers, can't you like work weekends and that type of stuff like this? Not that that works anyway, but there are real bottlenecks in this.

Yeah, we're creating huge job, both job and long-term economic opportunity in other countries by banning data centers here.

I think, look, the right answer would be to set a standard where a data center contributes back to the community. Like that power gets better, there's no noise, there's no water issue, and it's adding jobs.

Rates, energy rates have gone down like every year they're there. And the reason is they provide their own power.

I have so many gold bricks, I can't even pick them all up. So the last thing I'm doing is looking at a silver brick, and I think NVIDIA's in that position.

Well, I think the big thing is you hit on one of the big things, which is a lot of money goes in before they get to a product.

Even those guys, the best guys, needed some experience in building companies, building technology, and so forth to kind of graduate to the much more kind of complicated or, I would say, elaborate domains.

Well, you know, hopefully America wins in the infrastructure game.

Yeah, so I think that it's probably the single most important policy issue around AI that's kind of currently going

And, you know, the kind of battle is between kind of almost an anti-competitive stance guised in a kind of safety cloak is kind of what we ought to be doing.

Academia is completely out of the AI game if there's no open source. That goes away.

we just had a really interesting security incident with OpenAI hacking into Hugging Face. The only way Hugging Face was able to prevent it because the proprietary models had guardrails which prevented them from doing security tasks was to use an open source

And it reminds me of years ago when I was at Netscape, they tried to ban cryptography. And the math is out there. You're not going to ban it. It's not out But you can prevent the good guys from using it.

Transcript note: 'It's not out' is cut off mid-sentence.

So the internet and Linux were far safer than Windows, like by a lot. And why is that? Well, because the whole community could work on the safety problems as opposed to just a company and particularly a monopoly company

Transcript note: The preceding line (3:34) reads 'the open source ban has been much safer'; 'ban' is presumably 'version'.

the really tough problems that we have safety-wise, the toughest being reward hacking currently, and obviously Anthropic has not solved it. Obviously OpenAI has not solved it because we just had these incidents.

And then, you know, kind of finally, the safest thing for the world is that there's not one AI to rule them all, that there's kind of AI for everybody.

huge push with a lot of money behind it, you know, particularly from Anthropic to ban open source. I think that it is kind of nefarious from my point of view

so like if that's a threat like I think that's just a general threat not specific to open source AI and nothing against Chinese nationals we love them they're great for our country

Like, the worst scenario is there ends up being a monopoly in AI. I mean, I think it's fairly obvious how dangerous that could be and how powerful that company would be and what a national security risk that would be.

We've already seen a glimpse of it, right, with Anthropik saying, like, I don't care... elected in the U.S. I don't care about the government. I don't care about the Department of War. We're not going to work with you. We're in charge.

Transcript note: 'Anthropik' is Anthropic; words are missing between 'I don't care...' and 'elected in the U.S.'

Like from a legal standpoint, there is the outputs of AI models are not copyrighted. They don't fall under copyright law. So the only thing it could be is a terms of service violation.

You know, Anthropic just paid $1.5 billion for stealing everybody's books, including mine, but they trained on my book. And I joined that class action lawsuit.

like I think distillation is generally good for the world. I also think they're going to have a very hard time stopping it for many reasons.

Like the number one is never open. And then, you know, number two goes open is kind of the history of the software industry.

And what we've seen is it's been already fairly dangerous to build on Anthropoc because every time an application category starts to do well, they move into that category.

Transcript note: 'Anthropoc' is Anthropic.

And so it's a kind of that, they've kind of fast forwarded, I would say, the Microsoft playbook from the old days to like skipping the platform generation and just going straight to the monopoly generation.

We need to rebuild that capability and manufacturing has changed and is becoming much more automated, much more kind of AI centric.

So I think that it would be more like... kind of a Palantir-looking business model than it would be an anthropic-looking business model for an open source company.

it feels like, okay, we're kind of at a stable equilibrium in the market. But the truth is the AI market is probably less than 3% penetrated.

So, I think that at this stage of the market, everything is going to grow a lot. And nobody's going to pounce other people's market share in a way that is so material that it's going to cripple them.

Transcript note: 'pounce' is probably 'pounce on'.

nobody's not using an open source model who's an application provider that I know of. So it's kind of that whole field. And so it's really a catastrophe for that whole part of the ecosystem if, you know, if these guys get their way.

So I think it's going to be a little bit of a renaissance for art in that, like, every time we have a new technology, we get new kinds of art.

But, like, I just assumed we were doing the deal, and then the next thing I knew, Shervin had the deal, and I was like, geez. I regret it. I can't tell you how long.

And then, meanwhile, Scott Weissen did a deal for the other company in the space, Lyft. And by the way, that kind of got off to a very, very difficult start, largely because of Uber.

Transcript note: 'Scott Weissen' is a16z partner Scott Weiss.

By the way, Uber would be, I'll just say considerably larger and more important and more central company today. There's no question. First of all, it would have won food.

It actually helped me because, you know, when we started the firm, we were the upstart. And I talked just fucking crazy shit about the other VCs and this and that and being a – call them bitches.

And the idea was to do this. But that's not really what happened. A lot of motherfuckers had that idea. You know, there's a lot of those ideas out there.

But then the reality is, oh, Elon Musk, that motherfucker's hard to kill, right? So he, by himself, kind of decarbonized American auto industry, which is really unbelievable in retrospect.

But why didn't all those people build another Tesla? Like, there's only one. Because there's only one non-fungible, very rare person in that equation who could do that.

And so that was what we, like, yes, the idea is great. The ambition is amazing. It's going to be amazing for the world if he pulls it off. But, like, we want to invest in the guy who could pull it off.

But they don't want to go all the way down to the ground floor and start at the bottom fucking putting the building together. Okay, now you're in a fucking shotgun house. They want to jump.

By the way, if you can pull it off, that's a very significant cultural advantage because as soon as the company feels like it's doing something for the outside status, it's dangerous.

So go ahead and tell them that we're going to take all the jobs. It's like, really? You want to say that? You don't even know if it's true, but you want to say that.

Work on, like, oh, you don't want it to reward hack. Well, why don't you try and solve that as opposed to go running your mouth because you care about the external validation more than the actual thing.

So it's all, the whole thing is a learning process. And then it's the best entrepreneurs can take those learnings and then multiply the applications.

He had so many guys who you would have gone, no, that's a founder. You know, that's a founder over there. That's a founder over there. That's an actual entrepreneur.

And then that reputation is going to seep back. And then, okay, now you don't have a culture. Because how are those motherfuckers getting away with that in Korea when we can't get away with that in the U.S.?

The new dealers were not that different than the current. in terms of their complete hatred of the industrialists.

Transcript note: About ten seconds of audio appear to be missing after 'the current' (1:21:09 to 1:21:19).

Yeah, there's a book, actually, that's very interesting on the kind of building of the war machine by the industrialists, which won us World War II, no question, and the resistance that they got. It's called Freedom's Forge.

Transcript note: The industrialist is transcribed 'Bill Newton' (1:23:11), presumably William Knudsen.

And, you know, somehow, but that kind of resistance is like very similar to what we're seeing in data centers today and that kind of thing where I think the governor of New York just banned data centers in this state.

And now we've basically forgotten how to do it as a country other than like Elon. Like if you need somebody who knows how to manufacture, you literally have to get them from Elon.

And we're going to have to relearn that. And actually the beginnings of that are literally data centers. That is a manufacturing.

I've never had great success hiring rich people.

drop a person into any country in the world, and they don't have the culture, and they don't have money and capital resources yet, and they just have an idea of how to make the world a better place. their best shot is in America.

And that means America has to be a leader. It has to be a leader economically. economically. It has to be a leader culturally. It has to be a leader militarily. And to do that, we have to be a leader technologically.

Transcript note: 'economically' is duplicated as a separate segment.

And the models are not objective. They have opinions. And they have strong opinions on things like history, on culture, on ethics, on values. And by the way, those are very different depending where you are.

our fundamental values and ideas about everything from the way our economic system works to the rule of law have resulted in basically the best opportunities for humans in the world, then you want those values to be projected onto the world

And we're like, well, we've got this great company, Eleven Labs. They can help you with it. We put them together. In a couple of months, he was in, you know, France and Poland and all over the world

Transcript note: The CEO's name is transcribed 'Alfonso Angoy' at 10:55, presumably Alfonso de Angoitia.

And from, you know, when we think about it from a national security standpoint, how powerful would it be to have a Western Hemisphere supply chain kind of ecosystem that was really, really well connected?

And, you know, that's going to be, you know, depending on the country, depending on how committed you are to it, it could be like easily five or $10 million just to get to your first deal.

Saudi Arabia is going from this kind of tribal, different kind of society, I would just say to kind of a modern, you know, like highly civilized, you know, player in the modern world and full ally of the United States

So we're able to take a company like Flo, Adam Newman's company, bring him to Saudi Arabia, introduce him to the right people in the government, introduce him to the right people in business, introduce him to the right investors.

Transcript note: 'Flo, Adam Newman' is Flow, Adam Neumann's company.

Whereas I think other VCs think of the product much more as the money. And so if the product is the then the international strategy is, okay, we'll find a team of investors in, say, the UK, and we'll help them raise money.

Transcript note: 'if the product is the' drops a word, presumably 'money'.

And so you're kind of in this situation where it's like, well, if you kind of lock that up, lock that capability to understand vulnerabilities, then the only people who will be able to understand vulnerabilities are the bad actors who just...

the vandalism company, Microsoft, is one who created all the theft opportunities by putting Windows on the internet when it wasn't ready to be on the internet because it wasn't built for that kind of idea.

And I think that we're kind of in a period like that where we've got all this technology that was built in the pre-AI era that's not nearly secure enough for the AI world.

You know, like one thing you learn when you go to different countries is they're very different. Like the laws are different, the policies are different, the governance are different.

I wish we could bring some of our own policy makers on those trips so they could hear people say we want Silicon Valley before they keep trying to wreck us

Can you own, and this is a big one lately, which, know, California is kind of moving against, but can you own an illiquid asset that has value or will it get seized?

And so I think Norway introduced a unrealized capital gains tax and that kind of effectively ended the tech ecosystem there.

I would say that it's really, really good in the U.S. It's, you know, it's clearly good in China, by the way. Although they've done a few things to mess it up.

Oh, the only way you could make a billion dollars is if you're a thief. completely absurd um you know you just look at the people and almost none of them are thieves like they you can't steal a billion dollars

Well, it devolved into power to truth. So it's like the press's way of intimidating you into not saying what you thought.

And I was asking them, you know, what does everybody in Washington read? And it's the Mark Halperin newsletter, which is new media.

Then you get to new media, and new media is so the opposite in that it's unlimited formats, unlimited channels, and the brand is now the person.

Were people talking about, like, when every Democrat came out and was mad about SpaceX, they weren't. They were mad about Elon because he's a brand.

And then the rule of new media is it has to be interesting because otherwise it's going to get drowned out. And so you have to be, it has to be a person and that person has to be interesting.

Now, like, if you look at, like, us as a firm, like, technically I'm really the CEO, but, like, Mark is more the brand, I would say, in terms of he just does way more media than I do.

But it's got to be somebody who's there kind of forever with the organization. It can't be like the vice president of marketing who's here for a three-year run and then is gone.

But you have to determine whether like that's going to improve your position or they're just feeding you bait to get you to basically highlight their stupid opinion.

And then those people shouldn't even be talking to you. Like, they didn't do anything in life to have the right to talk to you.

We got into like this kerfuffle over Instagram with the New York Times. We had a conflict, whatever, it was a thing. But then I responded and it was like the biggest, at that time, the biggest post I ever wrote.

And so it kind of took us from here to here in one shot just because everybody loves a fight. So fights are good for brand building, but you've got to pick the right fight to not just build somebody else's brand.

Even if you think that, what is better in this world than the transfer of wealth from people who have a lot of money to people who have ideas and want to build something?

you really want people to hate you and you want people to love you, but you don't want to be neutral. You don't want to be lukewarm because then you're uninteresting.

when you get to a certain size people hate you and that's good because that means you did something important, you made a mark on the world, people care about what you're doing.

Well, the first principle is if you're trained in old media, it's very, very, very hard to do new media.

You need the team to help make the story great before they go, because it's real easy to go, okay, market this, you know, empty box.

The only thing he ever says about Palantir, Mark pointed this out to me, is ontology and orchestration, two words that nobody knows what they mean.

Now he takes it to the very extreme, but like that, the right idea, to find the most interesting story that you can plug your company into and then tell that story.

And then, you know, like he did figure out new media and he's always like super entertaining and interesting, which is kind of the magic of his popularity.

He said, Ben, when you're a leader in an industry, then the whole industry, the size of it, the ethics of it, the morality of it kind of depends on you.

if you think about why does America have the influence it has today from a military standpoint, from an economic standpoint, from a cultural standpoint, it comes back to, well, we won the Industrial Revolution, and we did that because we had superior technology.

And are we going to win? And are we going to have that influence? And are we going to be able to give people a shot and kind of continue to advance humanity? I think that's an open question right now.

We've seen this with free speech, where countries are like, well, maybe that's not such a good idea anymore. But... if it can't be taken, if it didn't come from people, it can't be taken away from people.

And so when we started, we were coming from, I would say, very far behind, you know, in that idea. The thing that's been surprising, though, is like how fast we've been catching up.

the number of entrepreneurs that want to help and then the willingness of the U.S. government to say, hey, we're interested in these new technologies. We're interested in these new companies. We're not stuck in our ways.

if you understand deals, particularly software deals, you realize that that deal did not fall apart because of philosophical differences. It fell apart because Anthropic wanted out of the deal.

And in fact, if you wanted somebody to use your AI safely, nobody has more rules than the U.S. government, particularly the Department of War.

You're going to decide that those people who are sacrificing their lives, putting their lives on the line to protect us, don't get the best technology. Like, I'm not doing that.

And I think that these, you know, this dime store morality that companies come up with, you know, it's like a vibe geopolitics.

And there are very few countries that have that going for it. So we are reasonably unique. There are a couple of places that have great technology entrepreneurship. Sweden is one. Israel is one.

Transcript note: The preceding line (0:14:37) reads 'you really have to believe that the government is just going to arbitrarily take it away'; the sense requires 'is not', which the transcript appears to have dropped.

In some ways, you know, I think the cars that come out of, the American cars that come out of Mexico are better than kind of the kind of Chinese manufacturing on many fronts.

They just went from 0% of GDP to 3% of GDP spent on defense. We have a lot of defense companies. their interests and our interests are very aligned when it comes to China.

you don't have the power to get an audience with the right CEO to buy your product. that kind of thing. So power is sort of a feature of our offering is the way I think about it.

that showed that in any given year, there were basically approximately 15 companies that would be started that would ever achieve $100 million a year in revenue.

And so basically every interesting company that gets started is a technology company now. And so there are many, many more interesting companies. And so in order to reach it, you had to be able to scale your organization.

When you redistribute power, people are mad. If they get a vote, they're going to foul that reorganization. And you can't scale without reorging. So as a result... We've been able to scale because we have centralized control.

Transcript note: 'foul' is probably 'foil'.

And the kind of firms in the middle, I think, are getting squeezed out.

In the new kind of world, there's unlimited channels, there's unlimited formats. And so the key to winning isn't not making a mistake, it's being interesting.

if you make a mistake you just do 10 podcasts tomorrow and flood the zone and it doesn't matter like whether the channel is the Wall Street or a podcast or whatever, it's all the same thing now.

Transcript note: 'the Wall Street' is probably 'the Wall Street Journal', cut at a segment break.

that like I think over 70% of people in China are optimistic about AI and kind of less than 30% in America or something like that were optimistic about AI. And it's really because we always talk about all the bad things.

well, we can, we're going to, not just we can, we're going to end traffic deaths. We're going to cure cancer. We're going to end poverty as we can. Those are pretty good things.

Transcript note: 'end poverty as we can' may be garbled.

The negative ones aren't there, but we can manage them in the same way we've managed, you know, kind of the negative of every technology, starting with fire, which has very bad consequences.

Transcript note: 'aren't there' may be a mistranscription (perhaps 'aren't zero').

port alpha is a three billion dollar investment private capital going to create 10 000 new american jobs

the jobs matter it's important to re-industrialize the country but it's also important to put the most the most important technology in the hands of the warfighter

So it's very important that private capitalists invest in these types of companies for the reason that the research and development needed to develop these ships had to happen with private capital in order to do the testing

And only a few months ago, two aviators, two American aviators were saved in the Strait of Hormuz by Saronic's uncrewed vessel.

They are building these by the hundreds and soon by the thousands. And then when you see the larger ships that are going to come out of Port Alpha, it is going to change the game for the Department of War.