It is important that everyone either listens or reads the transcript below 👇
[Marc Andreessen]
We had meetings in D.C. in May where we talked to them about this, and the meetings were absolutely horrifying, and we came out basically deciding we had to endorse Trump.
[Bari Weiss]
Marc, add so little color to absolutely horrifying. What did you hear in those meetings?
[Marc Andreessen]
They said, look, AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They actually said flat out to us, don't do AI startups, like don't fund AI startups.
It's not something that we're going to allow to happen. They're not going to be allowed to exist. There's no point.
They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government, and we're going to basically wrap them in a, I'm paraphrasing, but we're going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're going to protect them from competition. We're going to control them, and we're going to dictate what they do.
And then I said, well, I said, I don't understand how you're going to lock this down so much because the math for AI is out there and it's being taught everywhere. They literally said, well, during the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community, and entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed, and that if we decide we need to, we're going to do the same thing to the math underneath AI. And I said, I've just learned two very important things, because I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were even conceiving of doing it to the latter.
And so they basically just said, yeah, we're going to look, we're going to take total control of the entire thing and just don't- And what was their, and Mark, what was Steel Manit for the listener?
[Bari Weiss]
What was their argument?
[Marc Andreessen]
Why would- Well, it's more, so this gets into this whole, all these debates around AI safety, AI policy. So there's sort of several dimensions on it, and I'll do my best to Steel Man it. So one is just to the extent that this stuff is relevant to the military, which it is, if you draw an analogy between AI and autonomous weapons being the new thing that's going to determine who wins and loses wars, then you draw an analogy to the, in the Cold War, that was nuclear energy, that was nuclear power, and that was the atomic bomb.
And the federal government, the Steel Man would be the federal government didn't let startups go out and build atomic bombs, right? You had the Manhattan Project and everything was classified, and at least according to them, they classified down to the level of actual mathematics, and they tightly controlled everything and that, and look, that determined a lot of the shape of the world, right? And so there's that, and then look, there's the other, that's part one, and then look, I think part two is there's the social control aspect to it, which is where the censorship stuff comes right back, which is the exact same dynamic we've had with social media censorship and how it's basically been weaponized and how the government became entwined with social media censorship, which was one of the real scandals of the last decade, and a real problem, like a real constitutional problem, like that is happening at like hyperspeed and AI. And these are the same people who have been using social media censorship against their political enemies.
These are the same people who have been doing debanking against their political enemies, and they basically, I think they want to use AI the same way. And then look, I think the third is, I think this generation of Democrats, the ones in the White House under Biden, they became very anti-capitalist, and they wanted to go back to much more of a centralized, controlled, planned economy, and you saw that in many aspects of their policy, but I think, quite frankly, they think that the idea that the private sector plays an important role is not high up on their priority list, and they think generally companies are bad and capitalism is bad, and entrepreneurs are bad, and they've said that a thousand different ways, and they demonize entrepreneurs as much as they can.
[Marc Andreessen]
We had meetings in D.C. in May where we talked to them about this, and the meetings were absolutely horrifying, and we came out basically deciding we had to endorse Trump.
[Bari Weiss]
Marc, add so little color to absolutely horrifying. What did you hear in those meetings?
[Marc Andreessen]
They said, look, AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They actually said flat out to us, don't do AI startups, like don't fund AI startups.
It's not something that we're going to allow to happen. They're not going to be allowed to exist. There's no point.
They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government, and we're going to basically wrap them in a, I'm paraphrasing, but we're going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're going to protect them from competition. We're going to control them, and we're going to dictate what they do.
And then I said, well, I said, I don't understand how you're going to lock this down so much because the math for AI is out there and it's being taught everywhere. They literally said, well, during the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community, and entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed, and that if we decide we need to, we're going to do the same thing to the math underneath AI. And I said, I've just learned two very important things, because I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were even conceiving of doing it to the latter.
And so they basically just said, yeah, we're going to look, we're going to take total control of the entire thing and just don't- And what was their, and Mark, what was Steel Manit for the listener?
[Bari Weiss]
What was their argument?
[Marc Andreessen]
Why would- Well, it's more, so this gets into this whole, all these debates around AI safety, AI policy. So there's sort of several dimensions on it, and I'll do my best to Steel Man it. So one is just to the extent that this stuff is relevant to the military, which it is, if you draw an analogy between AI and autonomous weapons being the new thing that's going to determine who wins and loses wars, then you draw an analogy to the, in the Cold War, that was nuclear energy, that was nuclear power, and that was the atomic bomb.
And the federal government, the Steel Man would be the federal government didn't let startups go out and build atomic bombs, right? You had the Manhattan Project and everything was classified, and at least according to them, they classified down to the level of actual mathematics, and they tightly controlled everything and that, and look, that determined a lot of the shape of the world, right? And so there's that, and then look, there's the other, that's part one, and then look, I think part two is there's the social control aspect to it, which is where the censorship stuff comes right back, which is the exact same dynamic we've had with social media censorship and how it's basically been weaponized and how the government became entwined with social media censorship, which was one of the real scandals of the last decade, and a real problem, like a real constitutional problem, like that is happening at like hyperspeed and AI. And these are the same people who have been using social media censorship against their political enemies.
These are the same people who have been doing debanking against their political enemies, and they basically, I think they want to use AI the same way. And then look, I think the third is, I think this generation of Democrats, the ones in the White House under Biden, they became very anti-capitalist, and they wanted to go back to much more of a centralized, controlled, planned economy, and you saw that in many aspects of their policy, but I think, quite frankly, they think that the idea that the private sector plays an important role is not high up on their priority list, and they think generally companies are bad and capitalism is bad, and entrepreneurs are bad, and they've said that a thousand different ways, and they demonize entrepreneurs as much as they can.
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