Marc Andreessen on His Intellectual Journey

Understanding the Left vs Right, How Billionaires Become Woke, Building a New Elite

Housekeeping: We just released a new podcast, Modern Relationships, with our first guests Delian and Nadia Asparouhova.

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I interviewed Marc Andreessen the other day and plan to release it tomorrow on Moment of Zen. I wanted to share our previous interview with Marc which is a prequel to it. This interview recounts his intellectual evolution and his quest to discover how the world works from 2016 onwards. The interview coming out tomorrow gets into what’s next, but it’s important to understand Marc’s evolution to fully appreciate it.

This has been edited for shortness and, at times, paraphrased. Any errors are mine! If you prefer to listen to the full interview—YouTube, Apple, Spotify.

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How 2016 Broke Marc’s Mental Model of Politics

Erik Torenberg: You tweeted about how 2016 shook your concept of how the world works, and you went on a reading journey to understand what had changed. What changed in 2016 that shook your understanding of how the world works?

Marc Andreessen: The hardest question is: How much does the world change versus how much do you change? We live in a specific kind of media environment today. I often wonder what it would have been like to live through the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Iran Contra, or World War II with modern social media and the level of second-guessing that would have taken place. Would the United States have ever entered World War II in an era of social media? [If you read the history, a very large percentage of the country was opposed to entering World War II up through the late 30s and basically up until Pearl Harbor.]

My lived experience is that things started changing dramatically from how I understood the world, probably in 2012. A lot of people in authority started saying things that just didn't make any sense to me. And people started acting in ways that I didn't predict and didn't think would happen.

I think it was basically four or five big events—Trump winning the nomination in 2015, winning the general election in 2016, Charlottesville, the George Floyd moment, and January 6th—that caused both sides of the political spectrum to really start acting in fundamentally different ways than I was used to.

I basically lost all faith in my own ability to understand what was going on and realized that all of my assumptions about how people behave, at least in politics and current events and social dynamics, were basically just wrong. My approach to dealing with that soul-shattering moment was to try to go back and trace the ideas to figure out where I went wrong. I basically read my way back in time and tried to figure out when things actually started.

I realized that I didn't understand either the left or the right—I didn't understand how Democrats were acting, I didn't understand how Republicans were acting. So I decided to read my way out in both directions, all the way to Lenin and Marx and communism on the one hand, and then all the way out to the right on the other hand, to see if I could reconstruct a worldview for some sense of context for what's happening today.

It was really hard to reconstruct these things historically. You always kind of wonder: if I were the person I am today and I relived 1980 again, or 1996 again, or 2008 again, would I have a totally different view on things? I think that's an individual question, but it's also very interesting as a scientific question because we live in such a specific media environment today.

The result of this journey was trying to understand why these institutions and people in authority were behaving in ways that seemed increasingly disconnected from how I thought the world worked and to build a new framework for making sense of these radical changes in our social and political landscape.

How Much Do Ideas Matter?

Erik Torenberg: There’s this critique of the left, which is — you can read your way back, but actually, it's really just an excuse for “people want stuff.” We have this debate with Richard Hanania about how much ideas matter versus just group interests. What’s your take?

Marc Andreessen: Well, a couple of things there. There’s a big overall question of theory of mind: How well does the right ever understand the left? How well does the left ever understand the right? There’s some evidence that people on the right tend to understand people on the left better than vice versa because a lot of right-wing people used to be left-wing. People tend to move right as they go through their lives. Like a lot of neoconservatives were former Marxists, for example.

Then there’s this broader question around to what extent ideas influence the world. This is something I’ve been trying to figure out as it relates to Trump, which is you’ve got two things that seem to run in parallel and affect each other, but it's not clear which is the dog and which is the tail. I don't know if you've noticed this, but when broad-based popular opinion moves, it's usually not the result of some sort of detailed intellectual argument, right? It's not that you have 300 million people who read a journal article and then decided to change your mind about things. It's basically an emotional surge of some form—it's a primal thing, not particularly logical or rational, but very deeply felt and deeply believed.

Then there's this second channel: the intellectuals and the intellectual superstructure on top of the movement. For communism, that was Marx and Lenin and all their writings, and there's corresponding stuff on the right.

Then there's always a question: Is it the intellectual elite driving the popular change because the population is responding to ideas, or is it the other way around—the people move, and then intellectuals say, "Well, the people are moving, I am their leader, I must therefore get ahead of them?"

Eric Hoffer talks about this mass movement of crowds in his book "The True Believer." Hoffer's argument is that the driver is a mass popular sentiment. Mass popular sentiment moves kind of as a beast in and of itself. He uses the term "true believer" to refer to somebody who's become part of a crowd, part of a mob, part of a mass movement on either side. This is true of communism and fascism—it's not a political observation but a psychological one.

Hoffer says that whenever there's a big surge in the popular movement, there's always the evolution of a set of intellectual ideas on top that basically serve to describe what's happened and rationalize it. He said the reason you get those ideas is because the movement needs to recruit the intellectuals. To recruit the intellectuals, you need to have ideas. So you've got this thin layer of intellectual content on the top that serves to recruit the intellectuals to the movement.

Richard's general take, as I understand it, is that, basically, people respond to interests more than ideas. If people in the crowd think that they're going to be better off as a result of Action X, or if their enemies are going to suffer because of Action X, that's a direct incentive, and they respond to that. The ideas are these abstractions that intellectuals just chase their tails on.

Having said that, Marx wrote these things 150 years ago, and China still uses them today, and Xi Jinping still talks about them all the time. Xi Jinping presumably wouldn't have to talk about that stuff if it wasn't important. And yet he does. Those same materials are taught in universities today and seem to be having a pretty big impact on the world. That's a pretty strong argument that they're a driver. So, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Understanding The Left and The Right

Erik Torenberg: Oppressor and oppressed language still lives on today for sure….

So you’ve read a few dozen books about understanding the left and the right - How do you understand the historical evolution of left and right political forces, and how might that help us understand their future directions?

Marc Andreessen: If you go far back enough in history, basically everybody was super right-wing compared to today. The long-run foundation of human civilization has been hierarchy and order. If you go back to the Greeks, the Romans, Florence in the 1500s, and even 2015—it was all super right-wing compared to today. Every previous society had some conception of natural order, rulers and ruled, aristocracy and proletariat. Hierarchy and order are inherently right-wing ideas.

The left basically emerged as a reaction to the right, starting with Judaism and Christianity and flowing forward into liberal democracy and, ultimately, socialism and communism. All these left-wing movements over the last 2000 years have this critique of hierarchy and unfairness—some people have more power than other people, some people have more money than other people, and there's an altruism instinct in the human spirit that doesn't like that.

Erik Torenberg: And there's a certain kind of person who says, “Hey, yes, this woke movement, you know, starting 2015, let's say it's gone too far, but it has good intentions, and there have been some good things that have come from it. And it's an important direction, and history has a direction, and you want to be on the right side of history.”

Is the counter to that that good intentions have led to some horrible things or that it doesn't even help the people it aims to help? Because the above is a very common position, even in tech, right?

Marc Andreessen: A couple of things…Everybody's really good at manufacturing an internal narrative for why they're doing the right thing for all of humanity. Then there are the unintended side effects, which are just really hard to establish cause and effect, like “I am going to change society in the following ways. I hope it will generate good outcomes. And it is not going to demonstrate the unintentional bad consequences that I would have been horrified about had I found out about them ahead of time”. And just in general, a big problem with social engineering, broadly, is that it's very easy to both blow it on the positive side and then also have a lot of negative consequences. And history is full of those.

And then to take your question all the way back….Nietzsche is pretty good on this. He says there are fundamentally two kinds of morality: master morality and slave morality. He means the morality of the masters as taken by people who aren't even literal slave masters and the morality of the slave carried forward by people who are no longer slaves. The original form of social order was masters and slaves—that's how everything was structured 4,000 years ago.

Master morality is very unnatural for those of us in a Judeo-Christian world because, according to Nietzsche, the Judeo-Christian world is the world of slave morality. Nietzsche asked us to imagine that we lived in the pre-Christian times, a much more difficult world in which basic survival was at stake.

He says that in the pre-Christian world, morality was “strong equals good.” And so if you were strong, if you were in charge, if you won, right? If you were the victor, that was good. And if you were weak, if you were the slave, if you lost, right? If your people got destroyed, that was bad. And so that's the master morality framework.

We moderns don’t accept that. We have a totally different view, which Nietzsche refers to as slave morality, which is the idea that most people in life are not masters. Most people historically were slaves. They were abused by their masters, and that’s basically the Judeo-Christian ethic: we should be on the side of the slaves, the weak, the downtrodden, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized. You hear these exact same concepts playing out today.

You know, look, if you object to living in the world that we live in and you're like, wow, I wish I could go back to the Roman Empire, it’s like, well, boy, life really sucked for them too, right? You definitely did not want to be a slave in Roman times. Like, that was bad. And so it's hard to kind of say, like, go all the way back to Roman times.

At the same time, you have to ask the question of, like, okay, do you want to live in a world of, like, pure slave morality? Do you want to reach the point where basically all you're venerating is weakness? Where basically all you're doing is basically trying to achieve, full equality of outcome, full egalitarianism, and you're trying to rank the weak all the way up the totem pole and rank the strong all the way down on the other end. That leads to catastrophe. After all, slave morality fully realized as a political system is communism.

The truth is, it is probably somewhere in the middle, and you probably want some blend. You probably want respect for merit and achievement and success on the one hand. But you also want some sense of fairness and sharing. On the other hand, maybe the right way to have a society is to balance those two.

The key question becomes: Do these forces balance? Are they in thermostatic equilibrium, where they swing back and forth but come around to some middle ground? Or do they go pathological, and a society that tries to reclaim master morality ends up being the Nazis, and a society that goes all the way to slave morality ends up being the Soviet Union, and they aren't actually thermostatic, and you have to make a choice at the end of the day which one is worse, and you have to steer society in the other direction?

I don't know the answer. I think the question's a very live one because there are a lot of forces at work, at least in the West right now, that want to push us much harder in the direction of slave morality. And as I said, generally, that experiment ends poorly. We seem determined to repeat it.

Liberalism becomes Wokism?

Erik Torenberg: If we're trying to reconcile the two, it seems that we have strong break pedals or a strong immunity on the master morality side, whereas we have less immunity on people being manipulative on the slave morality side to get what they want. People have much stronger negative associations with fascism than communism, with Hitler than Stalin.

We’re sympathetic to communism because we care so much about compassion, kindness, and good intentions that perhaps we’re less likely to fight newer forms of it.

Maybe this is what Elon is referring to when he says that the woke mind virus is the world’s biggest threat. If I were to steelman the claim, I’d say that wokeness is a meta-problem by which you can't solve other problems—if you have excess slave morality making our institutions dysfunctional and you have no way to push back against excess victimhood.

Marc Andreessen: Yeah, it's like, can you ever be too fair? Can you ever be too nice to the downtrodden? Can you ever be too determined to address injustice? Like, is that possible? And a lot of people would say, no, you can't. You can always do more. You can always be more fair. You can always, you know, have more equality. The work is never done.

And then there’s this question of whether egalitarianism as an ethic, whether it’s religious in the form of Christianity or whether it's economical in the form of, let's call progressivism, does that always become pathological?

James Burnham makes a strong argument that it always becomes pathological in his book "Suicide of the West." He argues the left has a fatal flaw—there's no governor, no limiter on how much compassion you can have, no limiter to how much you can try to achieve equality or overthrow hierarchy to get to full egalitarianism.

He says liberalism will always become progressivism, progressivism will always become socialism, socialism will always become communism, and you will always end up basically in pursuit of utopia, creating hell on earth.

The steel-man counterargument would be that most European economies today are left-wing in a lot of ways, but they’re hardly the Soviet Union; it's not full communism. And so, at least over the last few years since he read the book, his claim hasn't literally played out in the West. However, some political leaders seem to have that vision. So, I would say the jury's still up.

How Billionaires Become Woke

Erik Torenberg: A common question we'd get over the past decade is, “Where have the billionaires been?” Why haven't they stepped up to stop it? And as it turns out, maybe some of them have been implicitly or explicitly supporting it. And it feels like there's this kind of monoculture for how billionaires are supposed to act and the views they're supposed to have and the work they're supposed to do and the way their organizations are supposed to set up and what they're supposed to do. This is your peer set. Talk a little bit, even in the abstract, about the pressures that this class faces and why Elon, or maybe something like Teal, is just so different from how this group all acts. Why isn't there more diversity in this class?

Marc Andreessen:

When high-tech founders become successful and rich, they get invited into the elite oligarchy. You start getting invitations to Davos, Aspen, and Nantucket. Before you know it, you're spending time with Prince Harry, Mike Bloomberg, movie stars, politicians. It's like, wow, I am in the in-crowd, I’ve made it, right? The dinners are great, and the parties are great, and it's all just so fantastic.

And then at some point, they're like, well, we have this project that we're raising funding for. And you're like, oh, wow, I would love to support your program. And then, all of a sudden, you find yourself writing the checks. And then it's like, well, you know, actually, I'm running for president next year, and you're like, wow, you're my friend. I'd love to support you.

Like, this is all great. And so what is it? It's a social circle. It's a political network. It's a patronage network. It's a fundraising network. It's a PR campaign. It's all of those things. It's a governance structure. These are the people who staff the senior positions at all the important institutions—university presidents, media executives, newspaper editors.

And if you're not paying attention, you realize you're not getting some broad representation of different political views. What you're getting is this abstracted elite oligarchic class where it turns out their politics are all just identical. They all believe exactly the same set of [progressive] things.

And primarily, it's an influence operation. There's a lot of what's called logrolling. I support you, and you support me. And by the way, it's distributed. There's no central node. There's nobody in charge. There's no wizard behind the curtain. There's no secret boss who's organizing the whole thing. These are literally conferences of 400 people where somehow they all end up thinking the same thing. If they have arguments about anything, it's only on the margins.

Anyway, what Burnham describes as this process is the circulation of elites. And then basically, it's like, okay, if you were a self-optimizing oligarchic elite collective, how would you make sure that no new elite gets formed? The way that you would do that is you would recruit all of the new high capacity, high merit, high achieving people who rise up in the system. You would make sure to recruit them into your elite, right? This is exactly the process you would use to invite them in, and then they become one of you. And so anyway, that's literally what happened.

And by the way, I've been to all these places, I've been to all these conferences, and I know all these people. And it's great—it's just like an incredibly exciting adventure. It's like the culmination of your life's work that you're in this network, as long as that's the political system you think should rule the country for the next hundred years. As long as these are the people who should be in charge. As long as you agree with all their policies, it's all absolutely fantastic.

The irony is that most people who become billionaires are super contrarian—that's why they succeeded as entrepreneurs. But they get pulled into this world and suddenly become incredibly conformist. They no longer have any unique opinions on anything involving politics or social policy. They just adopt this oligarchic elite view wholesale, with a few exceptions.

Every once in a while, you get an exception—somebody who says, "I could be part of that oligarchy, but I'm not going to do it." The guy who unlocked this in our era is actually not Elon, surprisingly, but I think it was Larry Page. There was all this pressure to give to the billionaire’s pledge and do the kind of giving that Gates and Buffet had done. Larry was like, “Look, I don't think that I should because who knows these nonprofits? Who knows what they do? I think my money should just go to Elon Musk, and he should build more companies.”

And the reporters were all just, like, completely horrified because, “Oh, my God, that's not on the program. How can you not be on the program? Like, everybody knows what to do. Why don't you know what to do? Right?” And Larry's like, “Well, I just think that Elon building companies is having a bigger impact on the world than the Ford Foundation, as contrarian as an idea as that was at the time [laughs].” And that opened the door for others like Elon and Peter Thiel and the next generation to chart different paths.

Erik Torenberg: Well, it’s interesting because it’s not entirely generational. Like SBF, who is 30 years old, yet he’s a Davos Elite. He’s as a Davos as they come.

Marc Andreessen: Full on. Sam went from a Stanford math kid to an MIT math kid to a full charter member of the oligarchic elite that rules the world in like three years. I mean, it was pretty incredible.

Marc’s Critique of Effective Altruism

Erik Torenberg: Let’s get into the ideology that inspired Sam, which now seems synergistic with this oligarchic elite, effective altruism. Your wife is in philanthropy, and you guys have promoted results-driven philanthropy—who wouldn't be supportive of results-driven philanthropy? What's the sort of blind spot of effective altruism?

Marc Andreessen: My wife has taught philanthropy at Stanford Business School and helped develop it as an academic field. Her critique is that most philanthropy is emotional—I go through a health scare and donate to that condition, or I see a TV commercial that tugs at my heartstrings. This leads to massive misallocation of resources. In medical research, certain conditions get dramatically overfunded, while more serious ones get underfunded just because of who happens to get what conditions. The age effect is a classic example—stuff that old people suffer from gets much more funding than what young people suffer from because young people who suffer don't have money to donate yet.

My wife says you should evaluate philanthropic gifts the same way you evaluate business investments—think hard about the actual effect things will have and try to quantify it. We've done that in our private philanthropy. With Stanford Hospital's ER department, I can sit in the waiting room any day and see patients come in and get treated. It's very tactical, tangible, practical.

Effective Altruism takes that idea and scales it way up, saying you should apply that methodology to all of humanity. You should fully implement utilitarianism—the greater good—and be able to mathematically model how if you do XYZ today, it will impact things not just next year but 50 or 100 years from now.

The critique of that has always been the same as the critique of utilitarianism—you get into a level of abstraction where you basically start to play God. You start to think you can put things in a spreadsheet that extrapolates 100 years in the future with huge numbers of variables. You start to think you can re-engineer society. But you're dealing at a level of abstraction and time horizon that's beyond any individual human's ability to verify or correct. It leads you down this ideological path that has shocking overlaps with other ideological paths that have ended very badly.

There's an interpretation of what happened with Sam Bankman-Fried that relates to this. In an interview with Tyler Cowen, they discussed a thought experiment: if you had a 51% chance of getting another Earth with 8 billion people versus a 49% chance of losing our current Earth, do you take that bet? Sam said yes, and you keep taking it if you win because if you get it right 10 times in a row, you've got 1,000 Earths. One theory is that he applied this philosophy to running FTX [laughs]—he kept rolling the dice, getting positive results and just kept going to optimize for the future of humanity. Though his later comments to Vox suggesting he was lying about all of it (“it’s a dumb game woke westerners play”) somewhat undermined this defense [laughs].

Globalization vs Nationalization

Erik Torenberg: This effective altruist utilitarian approach seems to lead to a lot of beliefs around centralization and thus seems synergistic with attempts to introduce global governance, whether on AI, nuclear, etc. You’re worried about these attempts, but you’re also excited about immigration, trade, and other aspects of globalization—how do you reconcile these tensions?

Marc Andreessen: There’s this philosophical idea that goes—the progress of human society is progress. Life used to be nasty, brutish, and short, and everybody used to die of disease, and everybody was hungry, and then basically, we had progressed.

And it’s what Hegel called the dialectic, which is this idea that you’ve got one theory for how things should work. Boy, they don’t seem like they're working very well. Then, you’ve got another theory on what to do about it. You argue about that, and then you come up with a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and you get to answer the right? And if it works, that’s great. If it doesn’t, you repeat the process until you figure out the answer. But you always figure out the answer. At some point, the right set of smart people, whether they're philosopher kings, democratic rulers, or scientific experts, are going to run experiments on how to optimize society such that they will ultimately figure out the right answers.

Now, imagine that you ran that process for hundreds of years. And that’s what many people think happened, leading to “The End of History”—Fukuyama's argument about liberal democracy being the final form of governance. And this is where you get the justification for global governance. If you really have all the answers, then you have the ultimate moral imperative to impose those answers on the entire world. Because, of course, you do because you have all the answers. You can solve all the problems if you have all the answers. Let's suppose you had all the answers to organize society. How could you not impose those answers on the entire world? It's the only morally correct thing to do because if you don't do it, all these poor people are going to be suffering in all these completely unnecessary ways.

And by the way, we just saw it playing out in Covid. “The answers are super obvious. We're going to have lockdowns. We’ve already figured out that there's no more reason to discuss this. Anybody opposing us is clearly opposing us in bad faith. To challenge me is to challenge science. I have the answers. Stop bothering me and just do what I say.”

Yoram Hazony makes this argument that no one ever buys, which is that this Hegelian global governance model is actually anti-diversity. The advantage of having many countries is you have many different systems of organizing society. Then you are actually able to have a diversity of forms of society. And so, therefore, you can actually have real-life experiments play out as to which things are better, and which ones aren't. If everything is just a global state, you will not achieve utopia, you will achieve dystopia, because you will no longer have a process of evolutionary involvement of thinking. And so he says, if you’re pro-diversity, you should be pro-nationalism. You should be pro the existence of many separate states. Of course, this argument does not work at all, which is just because the same people who want universal world government also say they want diversity, but that does not mean that they're going to buy his argument that you should, therefore, be nationalist.

So, I’m somewhere in the middle on this. I’m a prime beneficiary of globalization. Our field is specifically enriched by the enormous amounts of immigration that have happened in the US over the last 50 years. I would not want to live in a system that would somehow decide that was a bad idea. At the same time, do I think it's a good idea to have a single system of global governance where there's a set of experts that determine everything and like everything is equal and everything is the same? No, that sounds like hell.

Erik Torenberg: But what if they're experts and fact-checkers?

Marc Andreessen: [Laughs] Yes, the missing link is the fact checkers because they can make sure the experts are on the straight and narrow.

Building a New Elite

Erik Torenberg: Let's talk about this emerging counter-elite. Peter Thiel in 2016 was a pariah, and now there's more political diversity within tech. Elon has accelerated it massively. How can a true counter-elite form, and what might this counter-elite's new moral philosophy look like?

Marc Andreessen: To paraphrase Burnham, if you want to replace the elite you have today, you need to have a better elite. So then you're a thought experiment territory, which is, okay, what would be a superior elite to the elite we have today? Well, a bunch of things.

So, one is they would presumably have a set of ideas that would be better because that would presumably be the whole point of doing this. Then, they’d need a superior story, sometimes called a political myth. Then they’d need fashion, status, prestige, right? Hey, I would need legitimately to be able to do the project. If you belong to our elite, you are a higher status, higher prestige person than if you belong to that elite. Right? Then you’d need the perpetuation method, the recruitment method, funding, an education system, media organs, and the ability to get your message out.

The key question is: suppose you have an existing corrupt elite and a new, fresh, competent, meritocratic elite. Put yourself in the shoes of an aggressive, ambitious young person right out of school who wants to optimize their position in society. Your story has to be really good and you need critical mass to recruit those people, otherwise the existing elite just gets constantly reinforced. Because the existing elite isn’t going to let themselves simply be replaced easily.

Erik Torenberg: To some extent, Thiel has done this with the Thiel fellowship, which has a higher status than Stanford. That’s one example of an organ.

Let’s brainstorm others. What are examples of ideas or stories that a counter-elite could advocate for and win?

Marc Andreessen: One potential narrative is basic competence. Would you like your 8-year-old to be able to walk to school without getting mugged? How did you feel about being locked up for three years during COVID—and getting COVID anyway? It looks like these people have made you promises that they can't deliver. There's always this question of when do people finally get fed up. But you'd have to deliver real results because if you didn't, people would get very upset.

Another approach could be unifying people instead of dividing them. Our current oligarchic elite does an awful lot of demonization of the other side. You could have more of a Julius Caesar approach—"I'm not going to rule on behalf of 51% versus 49%. I'm going to rule on behalf of the entire country." You are denying people the ability to hate, which is a huge attraction of the current system, but you're replacing it with something that probably a lot of people would find more attractive.

You'd also have to challenge some sacred cows—maybe we should not be trying to do this level of social engineering. Maybe it's a bad idea to have differential standards for different groups. Maybe people are ready for that kind of message. Maybe they're not.

Reasons for Optimism ("White Pills")

Erik Torenberg: You tweeted a series of white pills and reasons to be excited. What's inspiring the recent optimism? Some people have described the pessimistic case as a very slow decay, 100 years of Brazilification. What's the optimistic case?

Marc Andreessen:

One of my white pills is that the current elite is actually really bad at being an elite. Who really wants to look up to some of these people? And this isn't even a partisan comment—you just look at a lot of the national level people and it's difficult to get excited about them.

The results are not great. You get in these situations like we've had repeatedly for the last 20 years—weird foreign policy situations, economic downturns, public health crises—and these people really don't seem competent. Look at the COVID policy: "Two weeks to crush the curve" became two years. Did they lie to us, or were they incompetent? The mask thing alone—the same people who in February 2020 were saying there was no reason for civilians to wear masks within two months had made it basically a holy requirement.

Look at Afghanistan—20 years of leadership, and we saw how it ended. Thousands of Americans dead, lots of other people dead, stranded interpreters, chaos and blood. And who got fired? Nobody. These people do not actually know what they're doing, they're not good at their jobs, and there seems to be zero accountability.

Even the Gates Foundation did this big report last year, where they studied 40 years of philanthropic attempts to improve education in the U.S., but nothing worked. The budget per student rose 3x in real dollars over 40 years, and results didn't budge. The data's in, the system doesn't work, and the people running it are terrible.

The Internet, despite becoming very fashionable to criticize, especially by our current elites who hate being challenged, is still allowing information to flow more freely than before. Even with eight years of constant censorship pressure at a level that would make Orwell blush, information is still flowing. It was not as free as I would have liked, but it was a lot freer than it used to be. But I never want to get myself in a frame of mind that says the situation is hopeless. There are at least cracks in the system that are encouraging.

We're seeing a lot of uncashed checks suddenly getting called—absurd pretensions, wistful fantasies, and pretty lies getting called by reality. Since the 1960s-70s, there were policies put in place that made very specific promises, and the results are in 50 years later. Not only did they not work, they were catastrophic in many ways.

You learn all of what we’ve been talking about and you come out the other end being like, oh my god, we’re ruled by people who have no idea what they're doing. At some point, the bill comes due.

But it’s like anything, people have to care about the results more than they care about the story. It's always a question of whether people are more enamored by their belief in the story and their social affiliations based on the story than they are in the actual tangible reality. But it does feel like an awful lot of bills are arriving, and a lot of people are trying to cash these checks that aren't clearing anymore.

Erik: Let’s wrap on that inspiring note. The bill is coming due. Marc, thank you so much for your time.

Marc: Good. Awesome. Erik, great to be with you.