Marc Andreessen: It’s Morning Again In America

>> Peter Robinson: The New York Times calls him, arguably, the chief ideologist of the Silicon Valley elite. Marc Andreessen, on Uncommon Knowledge, now.

>> Peter Robinson: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson. After growing up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, which has a population, today, of 2,523, Marc Andreessen majored in computer science at the University of Illinois and then moved West.

In 1993, Mr. Andreessen co-founded Netscape, which made available the first widely used browser almost instantly, making him a major figure here in Silicon Valley. And he has remained a major figure ever since. In 2009, Mr. Andreessen and his investing colleague Ben Horowitz launched the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which today has more than $40 billion under management.

Here at Stanford, Mr. Andreessen participates in the Hoover Institution's Emerging Technology Review. Since the election last November, Mr. Andreessen has been spending only half his time here in Silicon Valley, spending the other half at Mar a Lago. Where he has been advising Donald Trump and his friends, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Mark Andreessen, thank you for joining me.

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

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, Mark, let's begin by taking a brief look at a video.

>> Ad: It's morning again in America.

>> Marc Andreessen: There we go.

>> Ad: And under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better.

Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?

>> Marc Andreessen: Makes the hair on the back of your neck go up.

>> Peter Robinson: It's still powerful.

>> Marc Andreessen: Sorry, was that '80? Is that '80.

>> Peter Robinson: That's '84, that's the reelection campaign. So, the 1970s, a decade of economic stagnation, the erosion of our position in the Cold War, the national humiliations of Vietnam and Watergate.

Then Reagan is elected, and by 1984, the economy has begun to expand. We'd begun to rebuild our military, there had been a rebirth of patriotism. And that video, although it may look sappy to us today, rang true enough to the American people that they gave Reagan 49 out of 50 states when they reelected him in 1984.

Serious question, a national renewal, can we do it again?

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

We have the people, we have everything. We have the people, we have the resources, we have the geographic security. I mean, we have all of these capabilities. I mean, it's actually amazing if you look right now, we are the major Western economy that's growing, right? So, the UK and Germany and Canada, they've stopped growing and they're probably shrinking, right?

And so, notwithstanding all of our many issues, we've continued to grow. We continue to be the beacon of capitalism and enterprise and entrepreneurship. The smartest people in the world definitely, 100% still wanna come here. We're now leading the world in AI. And then in energy, I mean, it's this running joke, it's like every time there's one of these doom headlines of the US is gonna run out of some rare Earth mineral and lithium or something.

It's like, the joke is some farmer in North Dakota stumbles over a new $2 trillion deposit in his backyard. We have apparently unlimited natural resources. We have overwhelmingly the dominant military machine in the world. For all of our issues, we have all the preconditions for a golden age.

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

>> Marc Andreessen: Hold on, I gotta hack Wikipedia.

>> Peter Robinson: Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump.

>> Marc Andreessen: A brief detour to Mitt Romney.

>> Peter Robinson: Brief detour to Mitt Romney, all right.

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

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, so from a very loyal Democrat to a MAGA Republican, how come? What happened?

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah, so things changed. So, the way I describe it-

>> Peter Robinson: You changed or things changed? What in your thinking changed and, I mean, there are plenty of people who say, I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.

Ronald Reagan used to say that. So, how does the environment and thinking, both of them, comment, would you please?

>> Marc Andreessen: By the way, it is amazing how many members of the key Trump team are former Democrats, right? Donald Trump is a former Democrat, Bobby Kennedy, you go right down the list, Tulsi Gabbard, there's a lot of these people.

So there's a broad-based phenomenon. But anyway, so we'll talk about that. So the way I describe it is, look, I came up in the 90s, I grew up in the Midwest. I have sort of, very firm kind of understanding memory of what it's like to kind of grow up in a, sort of the polar opposite environment of California.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Marc Andreessen: But I moved to California, I became a full blown Californian, fully assimilated, adapted. But the way I would describe it is, it was just sort of assumed that if you were in Silicon Valley, in high tech in the 90s, it was just assumed, Clinton gorb heyday.

It's just assumed that there was, what I now call the Deal, with a capital D. And nobody ever said it out loud, but it was just assumed. And the deal was, you can be a high tech entrepreneur, you can build all this amazing technology, you can build a successful company, you can create lots of jobs.

The technology makes the world a better place. It's great, you take the company public, you make a lot of money. At some point, you take the money and you donate it to philanthropy. And that's the total arc. And then when you die, in your obituary, it's like, he was an entrepreneur and a philanthropist, and all of his-

>> Peter Robinson: The Silicon Valley circle of life.

>> Marc Andreessen: The circle of life, and it's just like, it's great. It was a great deal cuz it's like, you get to do what you want, you get all the professional satisfaction out of executing in your field, you get all the material satisfaction out of financial success.

And then you get all the psychic, moral satisfaction out of-

>> Peter Robinson: And the government leaves you alone. You have more than enough scope to do what you need to do as an entrepreneur.

>> Marc Andreessen: That, and also, as you may recall, the Clinton-Gore administration was extremely enthusiastic about high tech.

And so, I have a thousand stories from those days, but one is, I was actually, one of my little claims to fame, I was the third wheel in the first presidential webcast. So Bill Clinton and I did the first presidential webcast, presidential Internet town hall, I think, in 1996.

And it was a big deal in those days to do that. And he called me afterwards and he was just completely thrilled by the whole thing. It was so fantastic. And of course, Al Gore, literally, he got a lot of flack later for-

>> Peter Robinson: Saying that he invented the Internet.

>> Marc Andreessen: But this is the thing, is he never actually, so here I'll defend Al Gore. He never said he invented the Internet, he said he took the lead in the Senate in helping to create the Internet, which is actually true. He was the creator, sponsor of the legislation in the 80s that created what was known as the NSFNET, National Science Foundation Network, which became the Internet.

That is the Internet backbone. And then also the National Supercomputer Centers. And I bring it up cuz that's how I was able to do the work that I did, which is, by the time I showed up at Illinois, we have the National Supercomputer Center and the NSFNET backbone that he had funded.

>> Peter Robinson: And it's very important to your work that those things already existed.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah, they had to. Those were the preconditions for everything that followed. And so, Al Gore, I think, deserves tremendous credit for what he did. But the point is, he was super enthusiastic about it and has always been a giant supporter of technology.

And so, these people just thought that it was just absolutely fantastic. And then, Democrats, all the way through the 2000s, as the Democratic Party started to clearly move left, Obama was still generally a big supporter of tech and American business. He liked what we were doing. And then, you may remember in 2012, I don't know if you remember in 2012, 2012, at the time Obama's reelection, the headlines were all, this was the first Internet election for a social media election.

And the headlines literally were social media saves democracy. Because social media is what caused Obama to be able to raise so much money online and to be able to beat the evil fascist Nazi, Mitt Romney, right? And so, literally, the press was glowing in support of social media.

Facebook was great for democracy, the whole thing. By the way, the Arab Spring also happened at the same time. And again, universal, positive press coverage. So up until 2012.

>> Peter Robinson: To your point, you remind me of something. I knew somebody who was a very close friend of Mitt Romney and who was an investor out here in Silicon Valley.

And Romney said, the Obama operation is killing us on tech, and in particular, particular campaign tech. Apparently, the Obama people had it all sorted out so that they could give volunteers a piece of software on their smartphones. They could go door to door and ask five questions. And they would know whether that person was already supporting Obama, so you don't spend more money on him.

Or committed to Romney, so you don't spend money on or a maybe in which you want resources. And the Romney people had nothing like that. And my buddy's job was to come out here to Silicon Valley and recruit engineers to build something for Romney. And engineers wouldn't work for the Republican.

>> Marc Andreessen: Right.

>> Peter Robinson: It was so uncool.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah, 100%.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes, no question, so-

>> Peter Robinson: You're not remotely surprised by that story.

>> Marc Andreessen: Well, this goes back, so the long arc here is Silicon Valley. There was a bit Republican contingent in Silicon Valley in the Chip Era, 50s, 60s, 70s.

So by the time I got here, there were these guys who were mostly retired at that point, who were kind of the-

>> Peter Robinson: David Packard worked for Richard Nixon as deputy Defense Secretary, as I recall.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah, so these guys were already in their 70s and 80s. I met some of them, but I didn't know a lot of them.

This is sort of the transition of Silicon Valley from chips to software, was kind of that handoff. By the time I got here, basically, everybody below the age of 50 was a Democrat, right? Which sort of foreshadowed the future of the state as the state was going through its transitions.

And so, yeah, and basically, everybody I knew bought into the deal. Essentially, everybody I knew, did this. And by the way, it's a tremendously heady thing to buy into, to become part of, cuz it's amazing. You're this incredibly lionized tech founder. You're getting invited to the White House.

Everybody loves you, by the way, the press loves you. It's all great, the philanthropy, they love you for that. The whole thing is just like this audit. And you get to Davos and Aspen and-

>> Peter Robinson: You get to get rich and have your vanity flatter.

>> Marc Andreessen: It's amazing.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay.

>> Marc Andreessen: And by the way, and the government is supporting you, right? And if you have a problem and there's a problem in a foreign country and they're coming at you on something, or there's some crazy tax or something, the US Government will actually go to bat for you.

Or if there's some weird trade war thing or whatever, your stuff gets seized at some port, the State Department will step in. And so the government's like, on the side of American business. And in retrospect, this was the trade that the Democrats made in the 90s, right, to become pro-business.

This is sort of a reflection of how Clinton brought the Democratic Party back from the craziness of the 60s and 70s, was to get them in a point where they were not literally fighting capitalism, right, every day. And so it worked great. The meshing was great, and the meshing, basically, worked right up until 2012.

And then, basically, it was after Obama's reelection. Really, what I picked up, my experience was, starting in 2013, is when things really started to unravel.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, and so how do you pick it up? Well, as I said, you've been a major figure in Silicon Valley, famous man, wealthy man, since the 90s.

How do you pick it up in 2013? You're investing and you discover your entrepreneurs are starting to run into difficulties they didn't used to run into. There's something more vague than that, there's a vibe. Describe what it felt like? What are you picking up in 2013?

>> Marc Andreessen: So, in retrospect, I was on the front end of picking up the change.

I didn't understand what was happening, but I was on the front end of picking up the change. I felt it, and the reason I felt it is cuz I was so involved in the consumer Internet companies of that era, and in particular, the social media companies. And so I was on the Facebook board.

I was an angel investor in Twitter, angel investor in LinkedIn. I was involved in basically, all of these companies, all these new social media companies. And I was super close. I knew YouTube inside out and so I sort of knew how all these things operated. I knew all the people and I was in the room for a lot of the conversations.

Basically, it was in 2013, is really when the employees started to activate. And so you started to get, basically, this employee activist movement. And that was a big thing. And of course, in retrospect, I know what happened, which is, you had a generation of radicalized college kids. So basically, if you back up further, it was basically some combination of 9/11, the Patriot Act and then the Iraq War and then the global financial crisis and then Occupy Wall Street.

Whatever happened during that sort of ten year period, radicalized the college kids before they moved into industry. But then they showed up and they were starting to populate these companies in 2012, 2013, 2014. And then they then activated a lot of their older contemporaries in those companies, the older cohort members who wanted to be cool and with it. And we know this-

>> Peter Robinson: It started with the kids then?

>> Marc Andreessen: It started with the kids. And the very specific thing that happened with the social media companies is that, that was the beginning of the whole thing with hate speech and misinformation. So that was the whole thing, cuz up until then, the Internet is a wild west.

We love it cuz because it's a wild west. It makes all these things possible. It's fantastic, it's great, it's working. It's pro-democracy, it's pro-free speech. The Obama State Department had this giant push to expand free speech, right, all through the rest of the world, right? At the same time that they discovered it would be a really good idea to censor American speech right, on social media, right?

So there was this amazing, do you remember net neutrality?

>> Peter Robinson: Yes.

>> Marc Andreessen: This big push from the left to make sure that big companies couldn't censor Internet speech. So there were years and years and years of anybody who was on the side of censoring Internet speech, was against net neutrality and was the Antichrist.

And then, literally, that flipped and became anybody who wasn't pro-Internet censorship was the Antichrist. And net neutrality vanished as an issue. The two issues that have vanished completely from the political stage are net neutrality and money in politics. They're just gone as mainstream left wing issues. It's money in politics is after Hillary outspent Donald Trump three to one and lost, that was it for the anti-money in politics issue.

So there's this term in Hollywood, retcon, where you do retroactive continuity, you go back and you sort of change a story so that it's all consistent later. And so there was the free speech retcon. There was the net neutrality retcon. There was the money in politics retcon. Anyway, so this all kicked off in 2013.

I was in the room at some of these companies for the original discussions on define hate speech, define misinformation. Of course, assurances were, everybody was completely confident that these were very straightforward, easy things to define. And of course, they wouldn't begin a long slide towards political censorship, which is precisely what happened.

But this is really important that, that slide started in 2013. That started before Trump, that started way before the primary process, that started way before the general election. It really kicked off then.

>> Peter Robinson: Got it, got it. So what did you make of Trump first time around?

>> Marc Andreessen: So this is the thing, is, I'm reading the New York Times, I'm watching MSNBC.

I'm like anybody else, in my class and station. And I'm just absolutely horrified and like, my God.

>> Peter Robinson: That man is an outrage.

>> Marc Andreessen: What about the norms, right, the whole thing. And, like I said, I supported Hillary in 2016. And frankly, my thought at that point was, traditional awful is better than radical awful.

So when push comes to shove and Hillary, look like Bill Clinton, I thought had been great, like I said, and for tech, he'd been super enthusiastic. And so I'm like, how presumably his wife is. And then, yeah, and then, basically, relatively quick. Well, not relatively quick, it took a few years.

But certainly by 2018, 2019, I was starting to really wonder what was going on cuz things started to get really weird, as you know, all through tech. And then, basically, after 2020, in the last four years, have been completely insane. And if I had not already figured out which way was up by 2018, 2019, certainly, the last four years did it.

>> Peter Robinson: You had enough?

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay?

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: Let's jump to the present DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. Your buddies, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are heading it. And you yourself are participating, as you've called yourself, an unpaid intern.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes, correct, yes.

>> Peter Robinson: You may go get me a glass of water at some point. Again, let's start with a very brief video. And this is a video that Elon Musk retweeted. To my surprise, it turns out to be a couple of minutes of an old interview I did with Milton Friedman.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: So here we go. 14 is a lot for television. So I wanna just go right down the list quickly and have you give me a thumbs up or thumbs down. Cabinet agencies, Department of Agriculture,

>> Milton Friedman: Abolished, gone.

>> Peter Robinson: Department of Commerce.

>> Milton Friedman: Abolished, gone.

>> Peter Robinson: Department of Defense.

>> Milton Friedman: Keep.

>> Peter Robinson: Keep it, from 14 departments down to four and a half-

>> Milton Friedman: Basic fundamental functions. What are its fundamental functions? Preserve the peace, defend the country, right? Provide a mechanism whereby individuals can adjudicate their disputes. That's the Justice Department. Protect individuals from being coerced by other individuals, the police function, right? And now, this is both the central government and the state and local governments.

The police function is primarily local and central, right? And those are the fundamental functions of government, in my opinion.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, so, as I said, there I sat with Milton Friedman in the 1990s and asked him to go through the cabinet departments, and he whittled them down from 14 to four and a half.

And Elon Musk retweeted that under the heading, the DOGE Agenda. Okay, now I'd like to ask about the DOGE Agenda, but let me let you in on a little secret. When Ronald Reagan ran in 1979, he called for the abolition of the Department of Education, which, by the way, only got up and running in 1979.

So it's not as if this thing was some storied inheritance from the gloried past in American history. It was a brand new federal bureaucracy. And when Ronald Reagan took office, Ed Meese, who is the person who told me this story, went up to Capitol Hill and encountered one Republican senator after another who said, you can't do that.

In just a year, they had already figured out how to use that cabinet department to give benefits to their constituents. And now they wanted to protect it, not eliminate it. All of which is to say, what do you boys think you can actually get done at DOGE? High spirits, huge intelligence is about to smack into practical politics.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah, and as you may know, you probably also know, there was a Clinton-Gore initiative called Reinventing Government. Do you remember this?

>> Peter Robinson: Dimly.

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

>> Al Gore: Which they call ash receivers tobacco desk type.

>> David Letterman: But this is a quality item.

>> Al Gore: Yeah.

>> Marc Andreessen: Right, the $3 ashtray that costs 600 bucks and it's shatterproof, so you can operate in military zones. And of course, he went on there with his safety glasses and hammer and proceeded it to shatter on Letterman's desk, right? And say, the game is up and we're gonna go cuddle this. And then of course.

>> Peter Robinson: Didn't happen.

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

>> Peter Robinson: Well, I can tell you a little bit about that. So Reagan, as you know, this is one of the things that we're gonna come to here in talking about DOGE. There is the discretionary budget.

That is the bit that the Congress gets to vote on every single year. The Pentagon is a big part of that. Reagan was able to hold. And these days, the discretionary budget is a little under one-third of the entire federal budget. So overwhelmingly, it's welfare programs, Medicare, Social Security is the big one.

Reagan was able to hold the discretionary budget to about 1% growth over eight years, which in real terms was a minor cut. But that was huffing and puffing and constant labor and what he could never get control of was the non discretionary budget. Which of course, had been legislated in years past and grew according to, neither he nor Congress had any control over that, which is going to be a problem for you boys, okay?

So there's that. There was also, I can remember this because I wrote speeches for it, Neil. There was also a government commission on waste, fraud and abuse. Peter Grace, J Peter Grace, a very distinguished, very lovely man, very distinguished New York banker of a kind that this generation is gone, just like David Packard, belonging to an earlier era.

And of course, he hired people and they went around and discovered all kinds of absurdities that the federal government was paying for themselves. There was some sort of national program for beekeepers or something, but it only was waste, fraud and abuse. If you looked at it the way Mr. Grace looked at it, which was as a businessman and a citizen. If you looked at it the way a politician running for reelection looked at it, it wasn't waste fraud or abuse, it was very effective in buying votes. And so that stuff went almost nowhere as well. So what you boys are up to now has been attempted, although I must say, not with quite this level of bravado.

>> Marc Andreessen: And not with Elon.

>> Peter Robinson: And not with Elon.

>> Marc Andreessen: So, I start by saying I'm not a spokesperson for the DOGE. So I'm not gonna.

>> Marc Andreessen: I just want to give you.

>> Marc Andreessen: I'm will give my views.

>> Peter Robinson: Elon Musk and Vivek are both very capable of speaking for themselves.

>> Marc Andreessen: Let them speak for DOGE. So look, number one is, yeah, people have taken swings at this in the past. That's certainly true, the factors you described are certainly true. Having said that, there are some differences. And so one is a whole bunch of things to talk about.

But one is there's sort of three. The way to think about it is there's like three thread here, there's headcount, there's spend, and those are related, but different separate threads and then there's regulations. And then there's an intertwining of the three of them that has become salient as a result of the recent Supreme Court decisions on executive authority and the so called Chevron deference.

So there's been a set of Supreme Court decisions recently in which the power of the executive branch to basically have agencies that promulgate their own regulatory regimes. And then staff and spend against those regulatory regimes without basically being expressly authorized by Congress to do that. Like the Supreme Court basically just made that decision that now is something that can be used to turn these things off. An argument-

>> Peter Robinson: In all the press, I haven't yet noticed that DOGE was paying attention to the end of Chevron deference.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes, correct.

>> Peter Robinson: That you guys have cottoned on to that and intend to make use of it.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: That decisions get made by Congress and the President of the United States and not by federal agencies.

That's huge, congratulations.

>> Marc Andreessen: Well-

>> Peter Robinson: In fact, let's end the show right now.

>> Marc Andreessen: So to start with, by the way, give Vivek a lot of credit on this. And so Vivek has talked about this publicly. And there's some excellent legal scholars who are around the donors who are contributing to this. 

So, an argument, and I think it's a very serious argument, an argument is if there is an agency that is either itself should not exist, which we'll come back to in a second. Or if there's activities at the agency that should not be happening, or there's regulations that the agency is enforcing.

There is a very strong argument to be made that it is actually necessary for the executive branch to stop doing those things in order to come into compliance with the Supreme Court rulings.

>> Peter Robinson: Excellent.

>> Marc Andreessen: Right?

>> Peter Robinson: Excellent.

>> Marc Andreessen: Which is the opposite.

>> Peter Robinson: Excellent.

>> Marc Andreessen: Which is the opposite valence of what everybody assumes.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes.

>> Marc Andreessen: You're making some radical, productive change. It's like we're doing what we're literally required to do.

>> Peter Robinson: Just flip the burden of evidence, burden of proof.

>> Marc Andreessen: Burden of proof exactly. And of course, these Supreme Court decisions have had no effect like that up until now.

But that's, of course, cuz this last administration has had no desire at all.

>> Peter Robinson: Right, they wanted a new Supreme Court.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah, exactly. And so, but this administration has the opportunity to do this differently. Pop quiz Peter, how many federal agencies are there?

>> Peter Robinson: Too many.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: 127 is some figure I read.

>> Marc Andreessen: No, it's like in the range of 450 to 500.

>> Peter Robinson: Are you serious?

>> Marc Andreessen: There is a claim going around-

>> Peter Robinson: And now 15 Cabinet departments, I looked that up after seeing this-

>> Marc Andreessen: Well, we now have this new innovation.

I don't know when it came out in the last decades, the concept of an independent agency.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes.

>> Marc Andreessen: And I've read the Constitution.

>> Peter Robinson: Independent of everything, including the Constitution of the United States, it's outrageous.

>> Marc Andreessen: I've read the Constitution, and there is no provision in there for an independent agency.

By the way, there are executive branch agencies that have their own internal courts.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes.

>> Marc Andreessen: They have their own judges. I've read the Constitution, that's nowhere in there.

>> Peter Robinson: Correct.

>> Marc Andreessen: Right, and so there's a rumor going around, I don't know if it's true, there's a rumor going around that nobody actually knows the number of federal agencies.

That there's no actual individual person who actually knows the answer. One is cuz there's just so many of them, and there's new ones created every year. But the other is we have all these fuzzy things now. The CFPB is the canonical example right now, we have these sort of-

>> Peter Robinson: CFPB is the Consumer-

>> Marc Andreessen: Consumer Finance Protection Board.

>> Peter Robinson: Established by Senator Elizabeth Warren.

>> Marc Andreessen: It's sort of considered Warren's agency, yeah, exactly. And it is nominal, I don't know the exact legal terminology, but it's nominally an independent agency under the supervision of the Federal Reserve.

>> Peter Robinson: Right, she wrote the legislation specifically so that no president of the United States could fire the director of the CF, whatever it's called CFPP, which is unconstitutional on the face of it.

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

>> Peter Robinson: Correct.

>> Marc Andreessen: The ability for the President.

>> Peter Robinson: You're good, really, okay.

>> Marc Andreessen: I'm not saying these are easy answers, but these are important questions, right?

>> Peter Robinson: Just asking the questions gets you a long way.

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

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Marc Andreessen: The Constitution is very clear, the president's the chief law officer of the United States, that there is no provision in there. So anyway, so there are all of these agencies and components of the government that have just sprawled out, basically.

A friend of mine, Curtis Yarvin, has this great line, he says, we are living under the 80 year evolution of FDR's personal monarchy, but without FDR, right? Cuz FDR of course, is the guy with the New Deal, and so he turned the federal government from basically this small overlay thing into this giant sprawling bureaucracy.

And then it basically has continued to expand and morph and mutate under its own power. And anyway, so we do seem to have a Supreme Court that wants to kinda pull this back in. So anyway, so yes, there's an opportunity to do this. The DOGE team has, I think, very clever ideas on all three of the threads that I described on spend, on headcount, and on regulation.

I'll just give you one example, headcount. Here's another pop quiz is how many people work for the federal government?

>> Peter Robinson: How many people work for the federal government? So as I recall, the Pentagon is a uniform force of about 2 million and another million and half civilians. And then the federal government, actually the headcount hasn't expanded that much for 20 or 30 years, as I recall. It's about 2.5 or 3 million in Washington DC, civilian bureaucrats, is that right?

>> Marc Andreessen: How many contractors?

>> Peter Robinson: No, okay.

>> Peter Robinson: Unknown, unknowable.

>> Marc Andreessen: Unknown, unknowable, there are estimates that are very high. I won't wing numbers off at the fly, but there are estimates of the numbers are much higher.

So yeah, so anyway, so then just sort of fun fact which is, what's the occupancy rate of federal buildings in Washington DC right now by people working in the office?

>> Peter Robinson: Something like 25%, isn't it?

>> Marc Andreessen: It's like 25% on average.

>> Peter Robinson: Lower than San Francisco.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes, it's basically that the Washington DC federal Building Complex is basically a ghost town.

The security agencies are still full time, the other agencies are not. In the extreme cases, you have certain agencies that are all the way down to a day, a month. And this is true, there were collective bargain, and some of the agents, this is the other thing is that some of the agencies employees are unionized at the federal level.

And there were collective bargaining agreements struck in some of these agencies where they literally, during COVID got the right to never come back to work. And one of the ones that I'm aware of, an agency I know well, they literally come back to work a day a month.

And so what the employees do is they come back a day, a month but they pair the days. And so they come back for two days every two months.

>> Peter Robinson: Wow.

>> Marc Andreessen: And so it's just like you ask any CEO in corporate America, how is this whole thing going, what are your employees doing?

And every CEO will tell you, what on earth is happening, are these people working? And so does the President of the United States have the legal authority to order people back to work? Does it count to be an employee of the federal government if you're not in the office?

>> Peter Robinson: All this is just beautiful.

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

>> Peter Robinson: All this is beautiful, really, truly beautiful. However, DOGE is an advisory commission.

>> Marc Andreessen: Sure.

>> Peter Robinson: I believe this is the way the President has set it up, is an advisory commission. It has its sunset date.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: It ends on July, or it goes out of business on July 4th, 2026.

>> Marc Andreessen: That's right.

>> Peter Robinson: I'm very happy, I like sunsetting. Anything to do with the federal government. But where do you and Elon and Vivek get the authority to make anybody do anything, including Congress to pass enabling legislation, including the President to write executive orders or.

Given what little background I have in Washington, which I Immediately. Before you can get John Thune, the leader of the majority leader in the Senate, to introduce legislation, he'll have political people looking at all the political ramifications. And there's gonna be some senators. I don't know that you stepped on the toes of my constituent here.

The politics is going to start at you guys.

>> Marc Andreessen: Right, so I'll give you one more-

>> Peter Robinson: How do you get stuff actually done?

>> Marc Andreessen: Can I give you one more first?

>> Peter Robinson: Please.

>> Marc Andreessen: So I forget the exact term, but there's a legal term. So Congress authorizes money for the executive branch to spend.

I forget, is it the recision? There's a legal term that basically means that the executive branch is also not allowed to spend less than Congress appropriates.

>> Peter Robinson: True, I have a recommendation, which is that you look at the 1974 legislation that removed from Richard Nixon, or it removed because of Richard Nixon.

The ability of the President, which at that point had been traditionally accepted, to impound funds.

>> Marc Andreessen: That's right, impoundment.

>> Peter Robinson: Impoundment, we want more impoundment. We wanna get back to impoundment, correct?

>> Marc Andreessen: Right, impoundment, yes, I forget which way it goes, but impoundment is the concept that the President legally is required to spend the money that's appropriated.

That the President is not allowed to save money. The president is not allowed to spend less money than Congress is appropriated. Once again, if you read the Constitution, it doesn't say that, this has been an issue of significant constitutional debate over the last 40 years, literally since that happen.

And there have been Wikipedias, but there's lots of arguments back and forth on this. I don't know if this is the kind of thing that the Supreme Court would look at. Might be a good idea, right?

>> Peter Robinson: But the President of the United States, I mean, you don't have to be a genius in political science to construct the argument.

Which is that there's only one man or woman, one person who faces the entire country in an election and therefore can be said to represent a national, as opposed to all these little parochial interests. A national interest in an overall ceiling on the federal budget. And that is the President of the United States, Correct?

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah, so that's the answer.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay.

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

>> Peter Robinson: Yes, yes, yes, but we're having fun, Mark, lots of details.

>> Marc Andreessen: Taking the Elon are running it, and then it itself is not getting set up as a permanent agency.

It doesn't have the authority to execute on everything we're talking about, but the White House does, the executive branch does, and the President does. And so it will be as it should be, it will be a decision of the President on what he wants to do with these recommendations.

The people being staffed into the positions, the new head of OMB has talked publicly about being very aligned with this. The new head of OPM is actually a partner of ours, is going in there. He's very aligned with this. And so the executive branch will have the execution capability to be able to do this, but it's as the President's deference, and we'll see what happens.

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

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah, he said so repeatedly. He was asked the other day, he always gets asked, do you still support Elon? And he's at least so far, 100% of the time, he's fully supportive.

And so, yeah, he's greenlit this. I mean, look, Elon has been living at Mar-A-Lago, right, so they're doing this, and so look, I have full deference to the president, he'll do what he wants, this is there. Let me give you one more thing on this, though, and this goes to what's happening more broadly in the environment.

And this is one of the reasons why you have all this panic now about the decentralship of the Internet, is that you'll recall. So I'm sure the Grace Commission tried to explain to the public what was happening with federal spending, I know Al Gore tried to, he went on Letterman and tried to articulate it.

Ross Perot at one point was trying to do it with the flip charts and all these things, but there's, we had a Senator Proxmire out of Wisconsin for a long time.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes, of course.

>> Marc Andreessen: He had the Golden Fleece Award, he would come out every year with the crazy spending things, but it was always like, when Proxmire used to do.

It was always like, it's just two minutes once a year on NBC News. Of course, what does Elon have and what does Vivek have, and what do the rest of us have now, is we now have the ability to actually ventilate this information in public, right? We have the ability to actually show and demonstrate this and actually expose this to the public view on both sides.

Number one, here's all the stupid stuff, here's all the stuff that clearly just like you're being taken for a ride on, right? And then the other side is, by the way, with corresponding cuts, here's the money that's being saved that's going back into the taxpayer pocket, and so, it's beyond PR.

It's not PR anymore, cuz PR kind of implies you're going through the press, those days are over, this is going to be direct interaction with the public.

>> Peter Robinson: Mark, we've just been through a decade now in which we were told again and again and again that Donald John Trump represents a danger to democracy.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: You are describing a renewal. Renewal of democracy.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes, 100%, clearly.

>> Peter Robinson: All right.

>> Marc Andreessen: 100%.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, I just wanted to check.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes, and this will be the key, I just, as an observer, I say this will ultimately be the key. The key ultimately is gonna be the direct relationship with the president, with the people.

That is ultimately gonna be the key, and if the people are on board of the president, you know this. If the people are on board of the president, the President has tremendous power that gives the President the ability to get a lot of what he wants done through Congress.

If the President doesn't have the support of the people, Congress can roll him arbitrarily. And so, Reagan knew this, by the way, FDR knew this. All the good presidents knew this, Trump 100% knows this, and he does this every day, and he's going to.

>> Peter Robinson: If you can bring the country with you, you can go anywhere.

>> Marc Andreessen: That's right.

>> Peter Robinson: 18 months ago, you published a 5,000-word essay called the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, let me quote you. We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything, but our civilization was built on technology. Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential, it is time once again to raise the technology flag.

Okay, apart from anything else, there are not a lot of people in Silicon Valley who write as well as that.

>> Marc Andreessen: There we go.

>> Peter Robinson: I'd like to ask how we raise the technology flag with regard to several specific issues, but first I just wanna circle back to the president elect, he's 78 years old.

He grew up in an old-fashioned borough of New York, Queens, he made his start in his career in bricks and mortar, this is a man who made his money by pouring concrete. Does he understand technology? Does he feel it the way you feel it, or, and it would be good enough if he simply said, there's something important here.

I may be not quite the right generation or quite the right background to get it, but I'll let Andreessen and Musk handle it for me.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah, so-

>> Peter Robinson: Where are we with this?

>> Marc Andreessen: I'd say the following, my analysis would be, he is world-class on real estate and on communications, and those are sort of his foundational skills.

And he's world-class on both, which is probably the first person in the world to be world-class in both of those things, right? The real estate industry is not historically known for its great communicators, here you've got somebody who does both of those things incredibly well. He, as a consequence of his knowledge of real estate, and by the way, his also involvement in the communications industry where he was one of the huge winners of the last 20 years with what he did with the Apprentice, which is a very large business.

He very, very deeply understands business, and as you know, one of the questions always in Washington is like, wow, there's a lot of lawyers running around. And wow, there are very few people here who have actually held a job in the private sector. And there are very few people here who have ever actually run a company or been responsible to investors, or had customers.

And so he is also one of the most successful business people of our time. So I would say those are like three very powerful skills, and then I think what you learn, especiall when you're good at real estate. And when you're generally good at business as he is, I think you learn how to do what we call systems thinking.

You have to, I mean these large real estate, my father-in-law was sort of a Trump kind of generational peer in real estate.

>> Peter Robinson: John Arrillaga.

>> Marc Andreessen: John Arrillaga, and talking to John, like when John put up one of these towers or one of these campuses or when Trump put up one of these giant hotels or whatever, like these are large-scale systems projects.

There's many, many dimensions, there's many things that can go wrong, there's a lot of things that have to line up, there's huge management complexity to it. By the way, there is technology change because you've got all these things coming at you and solar and all these new things coming in and all these requirements, and you got to like manage these.

One of the things these guys, my father-in-law always told me and Trump clearly was the same way is you got to manage these things hands-on because they can always go sideways. And any given day you're sitting there bleeding out money if people aren't doing the right thing, and so they're good, he's very good, I think world-class at thinking things through systematically.

And we were talking before about there's this video going around today of him talking about the water situation in California.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes, yes.

>> Marc Andreessen: On Joe Rogan, what was that six months ago or whatever?

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

>> Marc Andreessen: And at the time, waters one of those classic Trump things where at the time everybody's like, why is he going on and on about the water situation in California? And then of course in the last three days as we talk, Louisiana is burning down, and if you listen to what he talked about with the water situation in California, it's like, yeah, that's all correct.

He is exactly 100% correct, he did the same thing, by the way, if you remember in the first term when he diagnosed the German energy situation.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes.

>> Marc Andreessen: To the face of the German diplomatic corps at the United Nations.

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

>> Marc Andreessen: And it has been, and if you go back and you just, if you forget who did it or if you just read the transcript and you read it, you're just like, wow, that was a really good. It was an extremely precise and accurate 5 and very prescient 5 minute analysis of this system's problem, which is, where's the energy coming from?

How's it going, what's going to happen here, what happens if you turn off nuclear? Same thing in California, what happens to the water and this and that, the whole thing, and so he's like really good at wrapping his head around these things, I would say at energy. This is the other thing is he's now obviously been president for four years, and so he learned about things to enormous depth, and so I'm not an energy guy, but my energy conversation with him, he's extremely sophisticated.

The energy people I know know that he's sophisticated, so he wraps his head around these things, I think very quickly and easily. And so I don't expect of him that he's going to be coding large language models in his spare time, but I think he's extremely capable of being able to understand these things, and I think actually does quite well.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, so let's go, you mentioned energy several times there, let's go to raising the techno-technology flag on nuclear energy, quarter of a century ago, there were 104 nuclear plants operating in the United States. Today there are just 94, and the average age of a nuclear plant in the United States is 42 years, how does the technooptimist respond to that fact set?

>> Marc Andreessen: So this is the great tragedy of the domestic policies of the Nixon administration, right.

>> Peter Robinson: Of the Nixon administration.

>> Marc Andreessen: So Richard Nixon saw the energy crisis coming and it developed in his second term, started getting underway, and he announced something he called Project Independence. And he said, this is ridiculous, we can't be running on fossil fuels from the Middle East, this is crazy.

It's entangling us and all this crazy foreign stuff like we need to stop, we're the United States, we can power ourselves, and so.

>> Peter Robinson: On which he was correct.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes, of course, he's completely correct. He declared Project Independence. Project Independence was we're gonna build 1,000 new nuclear power plants in the United States by the year 2000 and go completely independent.

So we're gonna cut the entire grid over to nuclear production, electrical consumption, by the way, Corollary, electric cars and so. And by the way, green like Corollary, no more carbon emissions, right? We're gonna have 1,000 nuclear plants, no carbon emissions, completely green. Nuclear plants put out water with a small amount of easily contained waste, but we're gonna build those.

And we were building nuclear power plants, as you know, in the 50s, 60s, 70s. But by the 70s we started to have these new technologies like computers where you could see a way to build much more efficient and much safer plants. Right, so he announced that and then he created the Environmental Protection Agency and he created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

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

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes, and those agencies prevented Project Independence from happening.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, so, so can I, I think this is a brilliant stroke and that is because it occurred to me. My own little head in the middle of the night one night, I was tossing a turning and thought, hey, wait a minute. And here's the hey, wait a minute.

>> Peter Robinson: The first nuclear submarine was commissioned in 1955.

>> Marc Andreessen: Right.

>> Peter Robinson: Which means that the United States of America, which has nuclear powered vessels of all kinds, has been building and operating small nuclear reactors for six and seven decades. And has the systems down so well that these things can be operated by 19 year old kids who haven't even finish their high school degree.

And the technology is owned by the American taxpayers.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: Why aren't we using this?

>> Marc Andreessen: Where are they? So as you know-

>> Peter Robinson: And by the way, the military is exempt from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

>> Marc Andreessen: Right, so they just do it.

>> Peter Robinson: So is there not a huge opportunity there?

>> Marc Andreessen: And as you know, literally what they do is they take 19 year old kids and they train them on how to be nuclear engineers.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes.

>> Marc Andreessen: And then they send them out on six month whatever.

>> Peter Robinson: Underwater.

>> Marc Andreessen: Underwater.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes, and as far as I'm aware, there's never been a nuclear incident.

>> Marc Andreessen: That's my understanding.

>> Peter Robinson: Yeah.

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

>> Peter Robinson: Of course.

>> Marc Andreessen: Just imagine how amazing it is, given everything we know today, that you could actually do this without the enormous benefits of DEI. Imagine what you could do with DEI.

>> Peter Robinson: Now you're being subverse.

>> Marc Andreessen: Quite possibly. Anyway, so the more serious part in those days, as you know, because they knew they could do them in subs and so therefore they just assumed that they would also do them for airplanes, right? They're nuclear powered airplanes.

>> Peter Robinson: That I did not.

>> Marc Andreessen: You remember the Tom Swift novels?

>> Peter Robinson: That I remember, yes.

>> Marc Andreessen: I'm reading them with my 9 year old and it's the very first time there's multiple generations. Tom Swift boy inventor. And these novels basically for kids, they were like whatever, Harry Potter of the time or something.

But there's this great series from the 50s with the second generation Tom Swift, and they're great. And it's like Tom Swift invents this and that, he invents all these things and you get to. And then has adventures based on them. And so they're very exciting books. But the very first book is Tom Swift and his Flying Lab.

And of course the flying lab is a triple decker 747 thing with this vertical takeoff and landing powered by its own nuclear power plant. And you just assumed, of course, of course, of course you put a nuclear because. And if you put, by the way a nuclear plant in a plane, of course you could have a 747 that takes off vertically.

And by the way, in the book they literally take the thing up to like 30,000ft and they just park it and they just hang in midair and hover for three hours and have lunch.

>> Peter Robinson: Which you can do.

>> Marc Andreessen: Which you can do if you have unlimited power.

Yes, this is it. And by the way, this technology is for people concerned about carbon emissions. This technology is the silver bullet.

>> Peter Robinson: It is, is the general feeling, my general feeling, correct, that if we unleash technology, we use the free market, we use what the government has already discovered an intelligent.

That there are all kinds of problems we already know how to solve.

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

>> Peter Robinson: Yes.

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

But here's my way to get it done politically, which is we give Charles Koch contract. And the reason is because it accomplishes everybody's goals, he would do it-

>> Peter Robinson: You'd better give us two sentences on who Charles Koch.

>> Marc Andreessen: Charles Koch, people know the Koch brothers was always a misnomer, I mean, there were brothers, but really it was, when people think about the Koch brothers.

>> Peter Robinson: Charles Koch and the brothers.

>> Marc Andreessen: The genius of the family, and is the guy who still runs Koch Industries, which is one of the largest companies in the country, one of the largest private companies in the world.

>> Peter Robinson: He stands out in American business history, as I recall.

If I think, I think I have this correct, that Charles Koch and his brothers inherited a successful but modest company from their father and built it into a company which, last time I checked, had revenues of. Well, I don't know whether it was revenues or market. It's a company that's worth $100 billion.

I believe that that's correct as of a few years ago. And did it without ever borrowing a penny. They did it entirely on reinvesting profits.

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

>> Peter Robinson: Okay so why is he gonna be interested in-

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

>> Peter Robinson: Bigger than that.

>> Marc Andreessen: I think it's very large, very successful if it were to go public. But yeah, look, I mean, Charles is number one. Charles is one of the genius businessmen, industrialists of our time.

He also became, of course, a major force in politics. He and the Koch brothers got tarred with this, they're fascist Nazis. Even though, as you probably know, Charles is a libertarian, he's a libertarian, free market guy. He's a Milei, he and Milei, basically right, have sort of identical.

Milton Friedman, he's a libertarian.

>> Peter Robinson: I've interviewed him on this program.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah, and by the way, also just a wonderful human being, really warm and genuine, incredibly open, wonderful guy. So my idea is you give him the contract to do it cuz number one, he'd do a great job cuz it's one of the best industrials in the world.

So he would win cuz Koch industries would be rebuilding the power system for the US. And then the Democrats would win cuz they'd make Charles Koch care about climate change. And not just that, but actually solve it. And so everybody would get both what they most hate and most want.

Now, when I have floated this idea in Washington up until now, I haven't gotten a lot of takers, but maybe it's time to bring it up again.

>> Peter Robinson: Mark, I'm going to try to extend this theme of problems we already know how to solve if the techno optimists are permitted to address the problem.

And that is, now this is a flyer, I don't know that I'm right, that's the border.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: During the Biden administration, Customs Services recorded 11 million encounters, releasing about 2.5 million into the country to await processing. The government also admits, admits some 2 million gotaways. So that makes, by the government's own admission, at least 4.5 million illegal entries into the United States during the four years of the Biden administration.

Okay, on top of which I note, that as far as I can tell, Donald Trump, in his first term only built 80 original miles of border wall. He refurbished wall and straighten. But set all that aside. Don't we have ground sensors, drones we can put up? Of course it lies within the ken of the United States of America to control its own border using the technology that we already possess.

Am I wrong about this?

>> Marc Andreessen: Well, let me tell the story of this company called Anduril.

>> Peter Robinson: Anduril.

>> Marc Andreessen: Anduril.

>> Peter Robinson: Which you've invested in.

>> Marc Andreessen: Which we've invested in. Okay, so the founder of Anderil is this super genius, real life Tony Stark kinda character, the Howard Hughes of our time.

Real life Iron man named, Named Palmer Luckey.

>> Peter Robinson: Palmer Luckey.

>> Marc Andreessen: Who's this, super genius from Orange County. And we knew him really well because he was the founder of Oculus, which the VR company that then Metabolt. We were investors in that. And so, he's got two giant wins in a row here.

And basically he used the money from Oculus to basically start Anduril with a bunch of his partners, and they launched the company. When the Trump stuff in 2016 reached, white hot criticality, and everybody was going completely bananas. Palmer shows up and he's like, I know how to solve the border problem.

We do basically mesh networks with sensor towers on the border and then with drones doing oversight. And then we do what's called sensor fusion, where you have all these different dispersed sensors and then you bring them together on a single screen. And then you can tag individual people and you can watch them come across, and you can use it for.

>> Peter Robinson: If there's a problem, you can send in the personnel to solve them.

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

>> Peter Robinson: A drone?

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

>> Peter Robinson: Yes.

>> Marc Andreessen: And they're like, they're dying.

>> Peter Robinson: They're dying.

>> Marc Andreessen: Starvation and, like, thirst, haeat and so forth.

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

>> Marc Andreessen: And bring them water.

And bring them water, or by the way, the other problem is child trafficking. And so it's like, let's get eyes on a potential child trafficking if there's like two adults and 20 kids. Okay, let's get eyes on that so that we're ready so we can go get the kids, right?

And so obviously you want to know what's happening, bu this was like, right in the teeth of the build a wall kind of moment. And so Palmer comes in and pitches us and goes through the whole thing. And literally it's just like, my God, this is like the genius of all time.

We have to invest in this company. And his business plan is to use technology to hunt Mexicans on the southern border in 2016. And we're just like, God, we just basically have a heart attack. And to our discredit, we flinch and we don't make the investment. Anduril goes on, and actually, it's interesting.

Anduril was actually not very successful in that program under Trump because it turns out Trump being a real estate developer.

>> Peter Robinson: He wants awall.

>> Marc Andreessen: He actually wants a wal. And by the way, still does. And I think this time he's, by the way, this time he'll get it because now he knows how to do it.

But as you know, he ran into a lot of roadblocks in the first term. Still built quite a bit, but hit roadblocks anyway. So Palmer's like, all right, fine, whatever. And so what he started doing is he took that technology and he used it to start building defensive systems for the military.

And so, for example, you have a military base in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan or whatever, and you have all these potential threats coming at you, and you have the exact same problem. You have perimeter security problem. And so they started deploying sensor networks and sensor fusion and drones and all these things to be able to defend military bases.

And then one of the most amazing things I've ever seen happened, which is, and Palmer in the Valley, was like a pariah, right? He was excoriated. He was constantly being smeared and slandered for being a horrible fascist Nazi, being like the worst person imaginable, like, all this stuff.

And then this life's incredibly. And he couldn't get invited industry conferences and people just said all these horrible things. The day, Putin invaded Ukraine, the political valence went 180 degrees in a day. And Palmer became a hero of every liberal in Silicon Valley. Because now Anduril is going to like, there's two things that we know.

There's two things every good American liberal knows. We absolutely must not defend the American southern border, and we absolutely must defend the Ukrainian border.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes, yes, yes.

>> Marc Andreessen: We must, the whole Ukrainian border, right? And Anduril in that time had become a very successful company, and by the way, was doing increasingly sophisticated defensive military systems.

And by the way, now is actually doing offensive military systems. It's actually up to, and including full weapon systems. And so all of a sudden that technology became super relevant to the Ukraine situation. As you know, the Ukrainian battlefield has been a revolution in military technology with the drone stuff. And so all of Palmer's theories are coming true.

>> Peter Robinson: Ukrainian kids operating drones shut down the Russian navy in the Black Sea.

>> Marc Andreessen: That's right.

>> Peter Robinson: It is an astonishing achievement, okay.

>> Marc Andreessen: And they take out these main battle tanks.

>> Peter Robinson: Which brings me to, if I may.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: Just again, your feel for it. If I'm still with the techno-optimist manifesto. This notion of raising the technology flag, another problem, we may not have it. It's larger, it's more, but in this administrative, is Donald Trump, is Doge. Is somebody saying, get me a Palmer Lucky as Deputy Secretary of Defense, we have to.

Or here again, this is Robinson's little way of thinking of it. Extremely elementary, but it goes like this. The Chinese outnumber us and they always will. The Chinese have a big enough economy to spend what they want to on defense now. And by many counts, they've already got more surface vessels than we have.

They're working on submarines, on and on it goes. Our only sustainable advantage over the Chinese, our only sustainable advantage is going to be technological innovation. And so we have to have a Pentagon that knows how to move quickly on innovation and somehow or other is able to overcome the cultural divide between straight laced colonels who run the requisition programs and the Palmer Luckies of the world who build their companies wearing Hawaiian shirts in Converse sneakers.

But we ought to be able to do that.

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

>> Peter Robinson: I don't know.

>> Marc Andreessen: So Steve Feinberg was the longtime head of Cerberus Capital Management.

So he's one of the world's leading private companies.

>> Peter Robinson: So he's already on this.

>> Marc Andreessen: He's already on this. He's already on this, and then he ran actually the.

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

>> Marc Andreessen: He's great. He's great.

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

>> Peter Robinson: Okay.

>> Marc Andreessen: And Steve is like an incredible operator and very aware of these things and very steeped in this world. And he ran the Presidential Intelligence Advisor Board in the first Trump term and is kind of fully integrated in. And then I'll just tell you, like without naming names of people haven't been announced, but people, a lot of very smart people are putting up their hands and going in.

>> Peter Robinson: Excellent.

>> Marc Andreessen: And by the way, to your point, this is a great example. The issues are just starting, right? So the Ukrainian battlefield is a revolution. By the way, there's also like all kinds of unfortunately, Ukraine being the tragedy that it is, people are learning a lot.

The nature of war is changing, unfortunately, the same thing's happening with Israel and Gaza. There's a lot is being learned. This is what happened.

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

>> Marc Andreessen: So the military is one of these amazing things where in peacetime, they're training and they're preparing and they have all these theories, but they're not being tested.

They don't have customers. There's no mark to market. In peacetime, you don't know.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Marc Andreessen: When you know, unfortunately, is when you go to war. And that's when all the learning happens. And so there's learning happening there, learning happening in Ukraine, there's learning happening in Israel and Gaza.

And then, if something kicks off with China, there will be very rapid learning very fast. I would just pose to you a challenge into the system, for example. It's not clear sitting here today with what we know, it's not clear that, like, surface naval vessels are actually used.

>> Peter Robinson: Correct.

>> Marc Andreessen: Right, because-

>> Peter Robinson: Somebody has to figure this out.

>> Marc Andreessen: Exactly, and aircraft carriers are open. Tthere are entire military doctrines of not just us, but many other players.

>> Peter Robinson: I asked someone I probably shouldn't name because he doesn't. I don't know whether this was in confidence.

I asked a former admiral the other day, if shooting begins over Taiwan, how close can American aircraft carriers get? And he said, American aircraft carriers must stay 1,000 miles away from any hostile activity. The Chinese have already pushed the surface perimeter out 1,000 miles. Anyway, to your point-

>> Marc Andreessen: Hypersonics are coming and then drones are coming.

>> Peter Robinson: Exactly.

>> Marc Andreessen: And I just said, we're at the very beginning. This is why it's very important that these people be good, to your point that. The drone thing is just at the very beginning cuz the Ukraine stuff, there's a lot of hobbyist drones and there's these low end drones.

But the drones are gonna get very sophisticated and they're gonna get manufactured in much higher quantities. And so, every time you see a drone today, just think of that actually being 1,000 drones, right? So what does even a naval destroyer do against 1,000 incoming drones that are all armed with bombs big enough to blow a hole in the side of it?

You mentioned Ukraine. The Ukraine, I think has been weaponizing jet skis.

>> Peter Robinson: Jet skis?

>> Marc Andreessen: Jet skis, I think that was part of the attack they did on the Russian surface fleet. Was they turned commercial jet skis into drone bombs. And so, it's long conversation we had about, there's all kinds of ways to win here.

But these questions all have to be looked at, the entire system needs to get adapted. Being a democracy, we have trouble getting in front of these things.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, which brings me to a few sort of last questions for you, Mark. And for the first couple let me play devil's advocate.

You, Elon, Vivek, David Sacks, you guys are all acting from the highest motives, but I'm playing devil's advocate here. You're moving very fast, you're really moving fast. Those federal workers whose jobs we wanna eliminate, they all have mortgage payments, they all have families. All of this technology, there are winners and losers.

I mean, I'm perfectly open to the argument that over time, technology creates jobs. But when Uber came along, taxi drivers lost their jobs and now self driving vehicles are the next wave and Uber drivers are gonna be in trouble. Okay, so all that said, here's another brief video.

And this also comes from the interview I did all those years ago with Milton Friedman. Listen to Milton Friedman. Okay, Milton Friedman, if you are made dictator for one day, the next day the American government-

>> Milton Friedman: No, I don't wanna be made dictator.

>> Peter Robinson: You wouldn't.

>> Milton Friedman: I don't believe in dictators.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay.

>> Milton Friedman: I believe we wanna bring about change by the agreement for the citizens. I don't believe in arbitrary.

>> Peter Robinson: Let me put it this way then. You're proposal-

>> Milton Friedman: If we can't persuade the public that it's desirable to do these things, we have no right to impose them even if we had the power to do it.

>> Peter Robinson: If we cannot persuade our fellow citizens to support changes, we have no right to make those changes. Are you and Elon and Vivek and David Sacks, are the Doge boys down with the political program of engaging in persuasion and bringing your fellow citizens with you day by day by day as all of this goes forward?

>> Marc Andreessen: So I wanna check myself out of this a little bit.

>> Peter Robinson: You're an unpaid intern, I know.

>> Marc Andreessen: I appreciate you keep trying to rope me in a position of formal authority and power here, but again, I wanna stress both parts of that unpaid and intern.

>> Peter Robinson: All right.

>> Marc Andreessen: So I'm not signing up for what you're saying myself. I will say, look, I think Elon is a world class communicator, obviously. Vivek is a world class communicator, obviously, Trump is maybe the best communicator of our time. And so they'll do, I'm highly confident that the three of them, in whatever combination, whatever form that they decide they're gonna be able to do it.

Can I just go back to your thing though.

>> Peter Robinson: Of course.

>> Marc Andreessen: On technology change, unemployment, because this is the thing. So you probably know this, there is actually a way to measure the pace of technology change in the economy. There's a way to measure it and put a number on it.

With related to everything, both the positives and negatives of technology change, including job replacement. And.

>> Peter Robinson: This is Paul Romer's?

>> Marc Andreessen: Productivity growth.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay.

>> Marc Andreessen: Paul did a lot of work around this, but the basic economic concept is productivity growth.

>> Peter Robinson: All right.

>> Marc Andreessen: And productivity growth, it's the quantitative measure of technology change.

There's a few other things that lump in, but fundamentally it's about technology change. And really what it is is it's a metric for how quickly an economy, year over year, is able to produce more output with less input, right? And you can go either way on that, but fundamentally that's the lever.

And just the thought experiment, if technology can't be used to produce more output with less input, what's the point? Right, if it's not good at bringing down costs and increasing free spending power and increasing demand in the economy, then what's the point? Then it's just a game or something, right.

So productivity growth is the metric that captures the actual impact. And productivity growth, therefore, is the metric that captures, for example, the downstream impact on employment.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay.

>> Marc Andreessen: Either for good or for bad.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Marc Andreessen: Another pop quiz. If you look at the sweep of American history and history of capitalism, history of Western capitalism.

Have in the last 50 years, we've been Living in an era of high productivity growth, which is to say an area of furious technological change and future shock. And my God, look at all these amazing things and what an impact they're having. Or have we been living in an area actually of historically low productivity growth with very little progress?

>> Peter Robinson: Our friend Peter Thiel has persuaded me that it's the latter.

>> Marc Andreessen: It's the latter. Well, it's for sure-

>> Peter Robinson: It is the latter.

>> Marc Andreessen: It's for sure the latter because it's in the number, you can see it in the number.

>> Peter Robinson: It's demonstrable.

>> Marc Andreessen: It's demonstrable, and specifically what happened is basically between, there's a long backstory here.

But basically between in recent history, between, call it 1920, in 1970. That 50-year arc, productivity growth throughout the economy moved much faster, was two or three times higher. And then basically starting around the time I was born, right around 1971, basically it took a permanent downshift and it never recovered.

And it wobbles a little bit during recessions, it ticks up a little bit cuz people get more efficient, but it's been generationally low now for two generations.

>> Peter Robinson: So the whole game.

>> Marc Andreessen: Yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: Excuse me, this comes to a question I was about to ask. When Ronald Reagan, again of that morning, again in America, when Ronald Reagan took office, federal debt, the total federal debt as a proportion of GDP was about 32%.

Today, 126%, the whole game is going to be getting productivity growth up, correct?

>> Marc Andreessen: Exactly, so you have to get productivity growth up because that's where economic growth comes from. And productivity growth is what causes economic growth.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Marc Andreessen: The reason productivity growth causes economic growth is because if you can generate more with less, then you can take things today that cost $100 and then you can get them instead for $90, $80, $70, $60.

And then the consumer or the business has additional spending power that they can use to buy new things. That is the mechanism of economic growth.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Marc Andreessen: That is the actual mechanism for why economies grow or whether they don't grow. If productivity growth goes to zero, there is no economic growth.

If productivity growth is high, you will have lots of jobs transformations, you will have lots of jobs being created and destroyed, but you will have a growing economy. And you will have basically an economic heyday in which there's opportunity everywhere and people will look at it and you see there have been times like this.

The mid-90s had a little bit of this, the mid-80s, you remember when there's a surge of economic growth, everybody gets really cheerful. Well, that's as a consequence of productivity growth.

>> Peter Robinson: That morning again in America, what happened was that by 1983 the stock market started to recover and by '84 the economy itself is starting to grow and grow really briskly.

I think '84, '85, the number was up to 6% for something like eight months.

>> Marc Andreessen: So if you're careful-

>> Peter Robinson: People felt it.

>> Marc Andreessen: That's right, and so if you care about the country and if you care about the people of the country, what you want is growth.

You want economic growth, in order to get economic growth, you need productivity growth. Things are going to change, but you're going to have the growth such that people are optimistic and see lots of opportunity for themselves and for their children. The enemy is not technology-driven unemployment, the enemy is no growth.

The enemy is to end up where the UK and Germany and Canada have worked themselves into, which is no growth, cuz what happens? And then you think about the translation from economics to politics.

>> Peter Robinson: What happens in a- They start ripping their countries apart.

>> Marc Andreessen: Zero sum politics.

If you have zero sum economics with no growth, you have to have zero sum politics. Because the only way for anybody to get anything is to take it away from somebody else. In a high growth environment, you have positive sum economics, which means you have positive sum politics.

You have a sense of possibility and opportunity and awakening, and growth, and excitement, right? And people are, wow, this is fantastic, and I can't believe all the opportunities and I can't believe how fast my standard of living is advancing. And I can't believe the jobs are opening up to my kids.

And so if If we got, this is where the narrative on this goes so sideways, if we got what people think is the apocalyptic nightmare of rapid technological change, which is to say rapid productivity growth. We would have a boom economy like you've never seen and we would have people be the happiest they've ever been in their entire lives.

That is precisely what we should be going for. And by the way, anybody who's listening to this, who's concerned about either left wing populism or right wing populism, this is the answer. This is how you defame populism, the way you defame populism is you grow.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, so I'm gonna repeat the question that I asked at the very beginning, but this time a little more seriously.

As I said a moment ago, when Reagan took office and worked those changes, federal debt was only 26% of GDP, and now it's 122%. I correct myself, excuse me, I think it was 32%, now it's 122%. In 1980, our adversary was the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union was bad and dangerous.

It had nuclear weapons. But its economy was essentially negligible throughout the entire Cold War. I looked this up the other day, throughout almost the entire Cold War, the number of Soviets who studied in the United states was just 50,000. China, there are 250,000 students, Chinese nationals, studying in this country right now.

Your friend Elon Musk sold 650,000 Teslas in China last year. A single factory, it's really a city, a single factory produced almost all of the 218 million, if I recall, iPhones that Apple sold around the world last year. We can't live without China, in some way. People will attack me for putting it that baldly, but this is gonna be a trick.

In some ways, it's more formidable than the Soviet Union was. So I put it to you, we are in some ways in worse shape, more polarized as a country. The federal government has metastasized. As you said, we're deeper in debt. We're facing a more formidable opponent in China.

Do you really believe we can pull it off? Is there a chance for a national renewal?

>> Marc Andreessen: Well, let me say first, both those problems are even worse than you presented. So, as you're probably aware, the national debt is growing at a pace of a trillion dollars per 100 days.

And so this is one of the things, the problem has been building for a while, but these last four years, whatever governors were there before just got completely taken off. And so, we've been spending money like it's going out of fashion. So, a trillion dollars every hundred days, Thomas Massie, who's one of the only libertarian members of Congress, he's an MIT engineer, really brilliant guy.

And he made himself a lapel debt clock counter, right? And so, when you talk to, when you talk to Thomas, it's worrying, the increase in the national debt. Last time I talked to him, he said he needs to re engineer it because we're at, whatever, 37 trillion and we're adding another trillion every 100 days.

And the pace of adding, cuz of the compounding, the pace of adding is accelerating. So it's gonna be 90 days, 80 days, 70 days. And so he says-

>> Peter Robinson: Interest payments now exceed the Pentagon budget.

>> Marc Andreessen: Correct, exactly, and there's no upper bound on where they can go.

And of course, this is the classic cycle that you can get into, which is, the more that compounds, the higher rates rise, the more you're starving the real economy, right? And then you get in this cascade where, as various economies discover repeatedly in the world, and we've discovered in the past, you get in these spirals that are really bad on interest rates and inflation.

So Thomas's challenge, I think, over the holidays was to re-engineer this clock to add another digit so that it's gonna keep working when it hits 100 trillion. So that train is moving. And we could have a long conversation about the legislative process has really broken down with these giant omnibus kind of bills that get dumped on people's desk the day before they're supposed to leave.

1500 pages with 12 hours to read and process that you have to vote on or literally, they tell you you're killing sick children and all this stuff. And so, this is a very big, speaking of the DOGE, this is a very big problem. And then look, the China thing, the problem is compounding.

And I'll just tell you where I'm worried right now, where the problem is compounding. So you mentioned the, sort of, iPhone assembly, and that's a big deal. But basically, there's three industries that sort of follow phones that are kicking in right now. So, one is drones. And it's sort of in a bizarre turn of events, the Chinese basically own the global drone market for all, basically, the consumer drones, all the cheap drones.

Which by the way, numerically then are the drones that all the militarys also use in overwhelming numbers. And something over 90% of all drones used by the US military are made in China. And the thing is, it's not just a company, they're-

>> Peter Robinson: Could you get to the cheery part, please?

>> Marc Andreessen: No, no, it gets worse, it gets worse, it gets worse, it gets worse before it gets. So the drone thing is not just a company, it's an entire ecosystem. It's all of the componentry. We have a drone company that's been trying to compete with the Chinese company.

Number one, the Biden FAA has been trying to kill us this entire time, trying to do all kinds of things to make sure that American drone companies can't succeed as part of their war on tech. It's literally just another in the long list of ways that they've been just trying to absolutely kill us.

But two is, China has figured this out. And so, the US has been sanctioning AI chips going to China, China is now sanctioning, they sanction our drone company for the battery, cuz the battery is made in China, right? And so they have like significant leverage, not just for the drones, but for the entire supply chain.

>> Peter Robinson: They have cards to play.

>> Marc Andreessen: They have cards to play. By the way, the drone supply chain is very analogous to the car supply chain. A self driving electric car is very similar to a drone, or for that matter, to an iPhone. It's an electrical mechanical device, but it's a lot of the same kind of battery technology, chip technology, sensor technology.

So they now have their version of what the Germans used to have, which is sort of, the thousands of mid market companies that make all the parts that go into a car. But the German ecosystem is still making them for old internal combustion cars, the Chinese ecosystem is making them for electric cars and self driving cars.

And of course, that means the new Chinese cars that are coming out are really good and they have a giant advantage on cost. And they are starting to bring to market cars that are equivalent in quality to western cars at a third or a fourth of price. So that's coming.

And then the big one that follows phones, drones, and cars, logically, is robots. And so, we are on the verge of the actual robotics revolution that we've all seen in science fiction stories forever-

>> Peter Robinson: And the Chinese are ahead of us there?

>> Marc Andreessen: 100%, now, we have the leading, this is important, we have the leading software,like we have the leading R&D.

Like, we have the smartest, I'm convinced we have like the smartest robotics AI people. We have a bunch of companies-

>> Peter Robinson: We still have the best people?

>> Marc Andreessen: We have the best people, specifically for the design of the systems, but we don't have anything resembling the manufacturing capability at all.

And again, it's not just whether a company can build a robot, it's whether you have the thousands of companies that make all the components that go into robots. An example, you've seen these videos of the Boston Dynamics robot dog.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes.

>> Marc Andreessen: And you can, they're not a very aggressive company going to market, those are like $50,000 products.

You can go buy one. China has an equivalent product that, by the way, looks extremely similar and behaves extremely similar, and has, among its capabilities, it can climb stairs, it can do back flips. It can stand on its hind legs. It can climb and descend inclines. You can put wheels on it.

It can shoot at 30 miles an hour. It can lock the wheels and climb stairs with the wheels on. By the way, it also is hooked into a large language model, so it talks to you in a very nice, a very plummy voice. It will teach you quantum physics.

Full voice control. Price point, $1,500, right?

>> Peter Robinson: Cheer me up, cheer me up.

>> Marc Andreessen: So this is all coming. So step one is clarity, right? And then, by the way, everything we've just been talking about is also upstream from all the military applications, right? Cuz it's that same supply chain that then goes into everything we talked about in the military.

And so, I just say, this is a very fundamental thing that we have to confront. And having this very fragmented approach where we on Tuesdays hate the domestic American technology industry and are trying to kill it. And on Thursdays think we're gonna somehow develop some sort of, competitive response to China on cars or on weapons in the future, there has been no coherence.

One of my favorite questions to ask in Washington is, okay, what's the whole of government strategy on technology? Of course, zero. What's the whole of government strategy on China? Zero, right? It turns out the president matters. And so, yes, this is precisely why this all matters so much. This has to be directly confronted. We and our companies are enthusiastic at signing up to solve these problems.

>> Peter Robinson: And the president-

>> Marc Andreessen: We need a government that wants to work with us on this.

>> Peter Robinson: Donald John Trump is alive to all of this?

>> Marc Andreessen: Yes, 100%, no question.

He is, and then his people are. And they, yes, this stuff, they understand.

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

>> Marc Andreessen: Love to. We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The romance. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper, the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.

We believe in adventure. Undertaking the hero's journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community. We believe that we have been and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology. This is really key point today.

Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life, including in our relationship with technology, both unnecessary and self-defeating. We are not victims, we are conquerors. We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. Economic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength. A technologically strong America is a force for good in a dangerous world.

We believe in greatness.

>> Peter Robinson: Marc Andreessen, thank you very much.

>> Marc Andreessen: Peter, a pleasure.

>> Peter Robinson: For the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson. Thank you for joining us.