Hey Upstream listeners, today we're releasing a conversation I had at the end of 2024 with Marc Andreessen for Turpentine's show Moment of Zen. This wide-ranging discussion covers the new administration, why San Francisco is the cultural center of the universe, why Elon Musk keeps winning, and much more. Please enjoy.
Marc, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining.
Hey Eric, it's great to be back.
So first question, Marc: are you tired of all the winning? You know, all the appointments, all the timeline splitting, the preference falsification, even the Democrats you talk to are secretly happy. Are you tired of winning?
I was told there would be so much winning that we would all get tired of winning, and I have to say, so far, I am not in fact tired of winning.
Amazing. I mean, if you compare it to — I remember the days of 2020 when every day we would say this is the craziest thing, you know, that we've ever seen. Every day is the new craziest thing we've ever seen, and just the constant black pilling. And now it's just white pill central. The unwind of this whole thing of this last four years is just spectacular, and you know, it's just getting started. But like, okay, so my favorite thing — my favorite thing that happened today —
Yeah, okay, so I like to say that every single day I see something that's just so crazy that I literally blank it out of my mind that I saw it and I forget about it. And then I'm scrolling Twitter, you know, I'm scrolling X like half an hour later and I see it again and I'm like, no, that can't be right. I forget about it again. And then like three hours later I'm scrolling again, I say, there it is. It's the third time that it sticks in my head. The Commerce Secretary of the Biden administration gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal published today in which she said she really believes that the key to beating China in the great geopolitical contest of the 21st century is to out-innovate them.
Okay, wow. This after four years of her administration did everything possible to do the exact opposite.
Yeah, it's — a cynic would say that she's looking for work. I, however, am very idealistic and I think she's being genuine in her sentiments.
Yeah, it's pretty funny. I met — Glaeser was talking about sort of a new agenda for the Democrats recently, and I remember David Sacks quote-tweeted him and was like, sounds like you're a Republican. These guys literally, as I say to you, there's a set of these guys, some of whom are friends of yours, who are all like, oh, like we have to stand for building things after 50 years of standing for the exact opposite. Yeah, but only Democrats can do it. It's some incredible — it's really some incredible stuff.
No, look, I mean, this is the — you tell me what you think of this. This is the most spectacular unwind of what we refer to as preference falsification that I've ever seen. Like, it just — it feels like every day in the last, you know, month now, or coming on six weeks, every day literally is like a whole block of people basically coming out and saying the exact opposite from what they've been saying for the preceding 10 years. And again, let's be generous — I genuinely believe they actually believe it. They just feel like they can say it now for the first time. And by the way, I think this process — there has been so much preference falsification in the last decade — I think this process, the unwind, is at the very beginning. I think we're like 1% of the way there, and I'm really, really interested to see how far this thing rips.
Yeah, so let's flesh this out a little bit. What has there been preference falsification about? So within tech there was a lot of the DEI stuff, the activism stuff, a lot of these sort of moral panics over the last few years that people had to sort of pay lip service to. There's a lot of the COVID stuff, there's a lot of just hiding sort of incompetence. Or flesh out what was really the preference falsification that is being sort of, you know, shifted now.
Yeah, well, you know, as you know, so there are two components to preference falsification. And for the people hearing this for the first time, this is the work of a professor named Kuran, who is really outstanding, very sharp, and wrote a book years ago called Private Truth, Public Lies, where he lays out basically this theory of preference falsification, which is basically what happens in a society in which people basically have to lie in public. But it actually — and this is the private truth, public lies, you know, kind of part — but it turns out there's two parts to the theory. There's the part where you think something and you're not allowed to say it, and then there's the part about how you don't think something but you must say it anyway. And so, you know, the classic example, Vaclav Havel, the great Czech statesman, anti-communist, wrote a similar book 40 years ago called The Power of the Powerless before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he talked about basically in totalitarian communist states the slogan was 'Workers of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.' And he writes this whole book about basically how everybody under a communist regime basically didn't believe any of that, right? Like, certainly by the 1970s, 1980s, they didn't believe any of the — workers of the world were not going to unite, they were not going to lose their chains, right? In fact, the chains were coming from a completely different source, which was the communist dictatorship. But Havel talks about — he talks a lot about the need for everybody to profess this. Like, everybody has to lie, everybody knows that everybody's lying, everybody knows that everybody knows is lying, and yet everybody is still lying, right? And actually what happens in the extreme is it becomes what you call a demoralization campaign, right? So it's a specific psychological method used by totalitarian societies to basically grind everybody's psychology into the ground. Like, what Havel talked about is you lose all of your self-respect, like you lose your humanity when you're put in a position like that. Now, of course, in our society we don't live under anything, you know, nearly as extreme as like Soviet communism, but nevertheless we have been living for the last decade under what I refer to as a soft authoritarian version of this, where the social dynamics are as intense, and then the penalty is not you get sent to the gulag, the penalty is you get canceled. And when you get canceled, you lose your livelihood, you lose your employment opportunities in many cases. We both know people who have lost friends, have lost family, and you know, some people who literally have like vanished off the face of the earth and not been heard from again. And then every once in a while somebody commits suicide. And so it's a soft version of a hard dictatorship, but it's nevertheless deeply authoritarian. And the nature of it is if you talk about it you get in trouble, right? And so — and this is the thing that's happening now, which is like, oh, you know, well, wait a minute, like, you know, what do you mean, like, who got canceled? It's like, well, you know, there was a decade of scalps nailed to the wall, and now we're just going to pretend it didn't happen. So that's the general thing. I think at this point simply saying that this is the regime that we've been living under, I think makes it crystal clear. I think everybody listening to this will have their own example — again, their own example either of something that they believed but couldn't say, or something that they didn't believe that they were forced to say. Both sides of that are incredibly pernicious. Maybe it's a tribute to the flexibility of an actual democratic society that this kind of pressure campaign can only stay on so long, but you know, boy, it certainly seems to be cracking now.
Yeah, and just one example — you tweeted about how you regretted not speaking up publicly for the former, I believe, CEO of Mozilla, Brendan Eich, who made a personal donation that was controversial at the time and got him fired. But the cost of speaking up and standing up for him might have, you know, yielded some controversy as well. And so it feels like a lot of people are sort of realizing, hey, there were these people who sort of got canceled, I should have spoke up for them. Now I can, now that it's a different — now that it's safe.
Yeah, so that was a really key moment. We should talk about that just because it was so key. And so this was one of the first, you know, kind of cancellation campaigns in tech. This was about 10 years ago, and in retrospect this kind of was the firing of the starting gun for a lot of what followed. But it was, I would say, just for myself, it was deeply confusing at the time what was happening. So basically what happened was this guy's name is Brendan Eich. He's a longtime friend of mine. He's a guy that we recruited to my first company, Netscape, in like 1994. He actually — this is true — single-handedly created JavaScript. Like, he literally sat down over the summer and like wrote it himself, which is now, you know, the most popular programming language on the planet. And so one of these incredible seminal figures in our industry, and also just like a wonderful human being, super nice guy, very community-oriented, family-oriented, super warm, always there for people. You know, everybody loved this guy. He was a key engineer at Netscape in the '90s, and then in the 2000s, after we sold Netscape to AOL, they at that point spun off the Mozilla Foundation to turn what had been the Netscape browser into open source, which created ultimately Firefox and a lot of the work that that team has done since. Brendan was one of two people who, you know, really led that spin-off, and at the time I was very happy to help him do that. You know, fast forward to — I think it was, Eric, you'll remember this, like 2013 or 2014, there was all of a sudden this like massive blow-up at the Mozilla Foundation, at his workplace, which he was the CEO at the time. And basically there was this kind of rediscovery that I think he had given a donation to a California ballot proposition that was in opposition to legalizing gay marriage in California. And just to set the stage for this, I was pro-gay marriage way before then. I actually supported Gavin Newsom in 2004 when he was mayor of San Francisco, which — because he was the early, you know, that was the first city in which gay marriage happened in the US. And so, you know, this at the time was not my politics, but Brendan did this in 2008. What's interesting about that is that the ballot proposition in 2008 that Brendan donated to was the exact same policy that every major Democrat at that time was also advocating for. And so the people who were anti-gay marriage in 2008, at the same time Brendan did this donation, included Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, a young woman soon to rise to prominence, Hillary Clinton, and even then elder statesman of the Democratic Party, Joe Biden, right, as well as like every major, you know, Democratic congressperson, senator. Like, basically there were effectively no Democrats other than Gavin who were pro at that time. And so for the crime of making a donation to a cause that exactly mirrored the Democratic Party at the time it was made, he was blown to smithereens, like just completely nuked, right? And it was one of these, you know, what the French used to call 'Year Zero' phenomena, which is, you know, as of 2014 everybody is all of a sudden greenlit to pretend that morality started in 2014, and that there was no history at any of these things and no backstory, and then therefore everybody is to be judged by the present moment, and nobody gets any grace, there's no hope of redemption, there's no hope of forgiveness, there's not even a chance to explain yourself. You're just like vaporized. And that happened to Brendan. Now, Brendan has since gone on to do many great things and has this incredible project, Brave, and has, you know, continues to be very successful, but he got blown right out of the organization that he had founded and was just like completely trashed at the time. And at the time it was just like this weird — it was this thing which is just like, you know, like in a movie where there's a sudden car crash and you're just like, what the just happened? And then your reaction afterwards is like, well, you know, okay, thank God that's over, right? You know, that was weird. Like, certainly that will never happen again. And that was the foreshadowing. And that's, you know, and I tweeted many years later, I said one of the things I most actually regret in my life, certainly my professional life and my life of being a friend, is not standing up publicly at that point, because in retrospect that was, you know, that was the very beginning of this wave that sort of metastasized throughout the industry. And hypothetically if a bunch of us had stood up at that time, maybe we could have held off a lot of what followed.
Yeah, and so — but you're optimistic now that this reign of soft authoritarianism, AKA sort of extreme wokeness, is over? Because there's a question of, hey, will it just come back again in four years? Or, you know, now that Trump will take power, will they sort of summon the resistance, you know, antibodies again? Or talk a little bit about your perspective on this.
Yeah, so I think that, you know, like 'wokeness is over' is a little bit too glib. And the main reason why that's the case, I think, you know, maybe is self-evident, which is basically the bureaucracies of corporate America and of the government and of nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, schools, universities, the media companies, the press — you know, basically the big bureaucracies, what we refer to as sort of the managerial class —
The cathedral, Curtis's term, or James Burnham's term, the managerial class, the managers who sort of run everything. And by everything being like basically all of the large incumbent institutions. Like basically, you know, wokeness has become standard policy, right? And in like every large organization in the country, like the mandate number one is be compliant, right? Like whatever is required to be compliant is like holy, right? Is like the thing that cannot be — you must be compliant, like you must check off all the compliance boxes. Like whether you win or not in the market is kind of optional, but you must be compliant. Whether you actually teach students anything is optional, but you must be compliant. And so, you know, wokeness has become part of the compliance regime. Also what they refer to wonderfully in this great Orwellian term as the risk management regime —
Incredible. The trust and safety regime.
Yeah, you know, just take all these words and reverse them. So, you know, this stuff has gotten wired very deeply. And then it's been well documented at this point that the foundation for a lot of what we call wokeness is actually baked deeply into the law, right? And a whole bunch of people have done — Sohrab Ahmari and Jeet Heer, great writer, and Christopher Caldwell and Wesley Yang — I have all done great work in kind of documenting kind of how deep this stuff is sort of embedded in the law, which is a whole another topic. And so there's an institutionalization that's taking place that's going to take, you know, optimistically 30 years to get out or something like that. And by the way, maybe never. Having said that, there's that. But then there's what we've been dealing with for the last decade, which is beyond that, which is sort of the idea of wokeness being like the cultural vanguard, and basically being the thing that's like the coolest, highest status, highest fashion thing you can possibly be, and the thing that you have to be if you want to aspire to rise in the hierarchy and rise among the managerial class and run things, and then if you want to get like really good press coverage, and if you want people to think that you're a moral person. So kind of that whole thing. And then there's the power component of it, and this I use the Tolkien metaphor here, the ring of power, which is the ability to call somebody a bad name under the wokeness regime and like instantly vaporize them and blow them out of their job and take their job. Like those second parts are like, I think, fading very fast. And in a lot of ways it's sort of inevitable that would happen, because it's just like in fashion, whatever is cool and trendy now looks dated five or 10 years later, and you wonder how people possibly could have worn bell bottoms or whatever. Like, you know, it's that kind of phenomenon. And there's no question, like the election basically punched a giant hole in the side of that balloon, and it's deflating incredibly quickly. And by the way, you see it in the reaction — you see it in the reaction of the election itself, which is there, you know, this is like the polar opposite reaction to 2016, which is just like complete deflation taking place. And I think wokeness is losing altitude quickly.
But let's come back to the legal part, because that's also — there are very interesting things that might happen there that we could also talk about.
Yeah, so more — what do you have in mind? Well, so if you wanted to pick like the most extreme possible attorney to put in charge of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to sort of reverse DEI, it would be this lawyer named Harmeet Dhillon, who's been a California lawyer who's been, you know, the scourge of woke corporations for the last decade. As it happens, she has just been appointed to run the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. And for the people who don't track this, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department is the federal government basically prosecutorial arm that basically enforces basically wokeness. They're the ones that basically have — for the last decade, that all these companies have all these crazy policies under penalty of being investigated, subpoenaed, ultimately prosecuted. And by the way, there have been lots of prosecutions, lots of court cases. The most famous case that the current head of the Civil Rights Division brought was the case against SpaceX for not hiring enough refugees, right? Notwithstanding that SpaceX is a military contractor and is not permitted to hire non-American citizens under a separate law. And so the person running that has been a true activist, as you'd expect from this last administration. And then Ms. Dhillon, who by the way I don't know, but I've been following for years and is clearly brilliant, you know, she's the exact opposite of that. And so every sort of signal is — I don't want to speak for this new administration, but every signal is being sent that they're going to basically do a 180 on all these things, and they are going to begin prosecuting companies for violations of civil rights laws in the form of reverse discrimination, which is to say discrimination against variously white people, Asians, Jews, and many other, as they say, unprotected classes. Yeah, right. And so signals are being sent by the appointments that there is going to be an assault that's going to be the reverse of the assault that companies have been under and universities have been under. And then of course the Supreme Court, you know, ruled not that long ago that private universities are not allowed to do race-based admissions. And it's actually really funny because there's some question as to whether — so, you know, the demographic shift of admissions in the last year was starkly different than the year before, as these institutions claim that they're coming in compliance with the Supreme Court. There's some question as to whether discovery would show that they're actually in compliance or whether they're still playing games. So that's another thing we may find out here. And then there's a very open question as to basically whether, essentially de facto, that decision already has been made or will be made for private companies as well. And there's a lot of private companies that have been trying to figure out quietly how to kind of dismount from DEI for actually both reasons, for legal reasons and for cultural reasons. And now there's another sort of very interesting thing that's kicking in, which is there I think are a lot of large companies where basically they were already basically done with DEI to start. They were done with DEI for their own reasons, which is, you know, it's backfired in many spectacular ways. But now any large company that wants to dismount from it now has the best reason in the world, which is we need to be compliant.
Yeah, because it's illegal. Because — and by the way, let me just say for the record, like I think every major corporation in the country is just in flagrant violation of actual current civil rights law. Like you just — you cannot have these hard quotas and basically all these racially and ethnically and religiously biased, you know, hiring. You just — it's just flat out illegal. And these companies basically got so extreme on this that they ended up in what I think is clearly mass illegality. And so as Ms. Dhillon kind of kicks in in her job, let's say — she's not going to lack for a shortage of targets. And so if you don't want to be a target, it is a great kind of, you know, get-out-of-jail-free card to just voluntarily shut all this stuff down. And my guess is starting pretty quickly here — I mean, we're already starting to see it, right? So Boeing and a bunch of other, you know, companies have already put a bullet in their programs, and even the University of Michigan, which kind of went like completely bananas for this stuff, you know, actually shut their whole thing down. So I think we're going to see — my guess is we're going to see a run of companies that are going to take, you know, quite dramatic action here.
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University of Michigan, my alma mater, was doing events that were called 'non-POC only' — like, it's just whites only, but they call it non-POC as a way to just — it's just hilariously ridiculous. Did they have their own drinking fountains? Yeah, old as new. How do you — literally, how do you end up resegregated in the name of racial — like, it's just the most extraordinary thing. It's just the most extraordinary thing ever. It's what the whole civil rights basically war of the — battle of the 1960s was about, was segregation, right, and non-discrimination. And then like, how do you end up thinking you're on the moral run and you do that? And how do you end up thinking you're not breaking the law? Like, again, this is part of this sort of mass insanity of the preference falsification. And look, there are many, many lawyers and HR people who have been implementing these policies who are fully aware that they've been breaking the law. And so it's going to be very interesting to see the unwind.
You know, there's the great Kurzweil idea that we sometimes talk about, the woke are more correct than the mainstream. And sort of an example of that is like, yeah, it turns out I guess we have been being systemically discriminatory or systemically racist, just not to who — not to the groups that we — just to Asians, you know, to groups that we didn't, you know, particularly sort of think that we were.
Systemic racism has been rather widespread.
Why do you think in 2024 there isn't as big of a response as there was in 2016 to Trump? Is it just the movement is gone? Is it just that because it's the second time? Like, because, you know, a bunch of people were saying, hey, if Trump wins, you're going to, you know, resummon the old sort of, you know, spirits of the crazy progressive left. But that's not — I don't — I hear actually the opposite. It seems like they're retreating or don't even exist anymore, or I guess, you know, sort of on their, you know, their own Gab and Parler, you know, social network ghettos. No disrespect to Gab, Parler, Blue Sky. Yeah, exactly. So why do you — are you surprised by this, or why do you think this is?
By the way, I can't resist — my friend Yann LeCun has got so exercised over Elon and X after the election that he bailed on X. Did this — he's one of the, you know, leaders and geniuses who — genius is in AI, but somebody today, you know, basically pulled up a slide, you know, it goes with this OpenAI o3 release, and pulled up a slide from Yann saying that this would never work, and basically was like, 'Yann, you coward, come back here and fight me,' you know, on X. And Yann literally responded by screenshotting it and responding on LinkedIn. I guess LinkedIn is now the other snowflake ghetto. If Blue Sky is too intense for you, you can return, you can retreat to LinkedIn.
So the summoning the gods of the old left is just gone, or what does it turn into?
So, I mean, you know, the political analysis is just the scope of the Republican victory this time, right, was not only winning, but it was also winning the popular vote and winning both the Senate and the House, and by the way also, you know, having the majority in the Supreme Court from before. So, you know, sort of all four of the formal branches of the government, you know, kind of being taken all at once. And so I think is a big shock. And then obviously, obviously just the arc of Trump coming back is a giant blow to a lot of the old psychology. And then I think — so I have kind of two thoughts on this, surface-level one and the deep one. So surface-level one is just like I think things just went too far, and I think kind of everybody knows that things went too far. A lot of people just know things went too far, and so people ended up with basically indefensible positions, like that there shouldn't be a border and, you know, criminals should be allowed to run wild. Like, it's just not — and people should be allowed to just, you know, be set fire to on the subway. Like, it's just not a — you know, I think a lot of people are trying to dismount from that. So that's one. And then the specific thing that's happened as a result of that is the Democratic Party over the last six weeks, immediately starting after the loss, has basically descended into what I think is accurately called a civil war, where they themselves are trying to figure out basically what the path forward is. And you have, you know, a lot of — you have the current chair of the DNC saying we need to go even harder left. You know, you have like Rahm Emanuel and Ritchie Torres and others saying no, quite the opposite, we have to come back to the center and come back to common sense. And so like I say, I would be suspicious that it's a plot and they're about to like jump out at the inauguration or something. But I think in reality, I think Democrats are having — certainly all of my friends who are Democrats are telling me that there's like a very sort of severe internal kind of fight that's happening. And by the way, this in American politics, this has happened before in my lifetime. This happened in 1980, which is when Jimmy Carter got beaten by Ronald Reagan, and the Democratic Party basically went into a paralyzed state where it tried to figure out whether to go, you know, even more extreme to the left than it had in the '60s and '70s or kind of come back to the center. And by the way, it took them 12 years to win another presidential election, which required coming back to the center, but it took them 12 years to do that. And I think a lot of my Democratic friends are basically trying to say like, how do we shortcut that process? So I think that's part of what's happening. But I think the other part of what's happening is it's actually — I really believe this — I think a lot of what's happening right now is basically the effects of all of the censorship. And so you have basically that, you know, sort of elites that we're talking about, this managerial class, the sort of, you know, people who have been in power for the last four years in particular, people who've been running large institutions, they got used to being on the side of censorship, and they got used to wielding censorship as a tool against their enemies in the form of these sort of things like, you know, again, Orwellian things, hate speech, misinformation, so forth. You know, there's basically — there's a big obvious problem with censorship, which is it's a violation of literally the American way of life. It's a violation of the principles of Western civilization, of everything that makes our society great, this idea you're going to basically prevent other people from speaking. So there's that. But I think there's actually another problem with it, which is it actually causes you — the way I describe it is it causes you to mount a denial-surface attack on your own epistemic ability to understand reality, right? Like if — in other words, basically if you have the ring of power that basically says you can define anything contrary to your current beliefs as hate speech or misinformation, then you will never receive valid counterarguments to your own views. And then sort of that's the sort of intellectual equivalent of taking a hose, hooking it up to the exhaust pipe of your car and jamming the other end straight into your mouth, right? Which is just like you're just going to breathe your own exhaust forever. And if you're only breathing your own exhaust, if you're only believing yourself, right, and people who are like you, and you're never listening to contrary information, right, because it's hate speech or misinformation, it's been censored, then there is no limit to how crazy you can get because there's no governor, right? You are not required to stay in contact with reality. And so I think the censorship regime worked for these people for quite a while, and then starting probably, I don't know, three or four years ago, it actually stopped working, and it's led them into a set of policies that are just bananas. And so a big thing that I think that they really have to do is rip off the Band-Aid and stop with all that and get back to being able to mark your beliefs to market, right, to reality, just like every business person has to. Will they do that? I don't know. But I would say they're, you know, they're in the beginning stages of that. I certainly hope they do it. It will be obviously much better for us as a country if they do it. I know a bunch of Democrats who are, I think, very smart and very strong and who are, you know, working on this very hard, and I hope they succeed.
Well, I even see AOC doing some listening and learning, you know, about what happened in the election, and, you know, going to have a kid and maybe she moderates a bit. At the same time, the pro-Luigi Mangione faction, you know, the pro-killer, that sort of sentiment doesn't make one excited about the future of the party.
Full socialism plus murder in the streets. I'm just going to put it out there, like it might not be the best electoral platform, right, for '26 and '28. I don't know. I don't know. You know, call me crazy, maybe I'm out of step with the mood. Plenty of people on X tell me I'm out of step with the mood of the people. But like, are the adults of any age going to step up and basically say, no, this is not who we are, this is not what we're going to do? And it's just — in many ways it would be the easiest and most obvious thing in the world to do. And then it's just this question of whether they can kind of reorient.
Yeah, well, and I just want to point out just how quick this vibe shift has happened. I mean, I remember a couple years ago there was this big debate in our circles about the Curtis Yarvin view and the Chris Rufo view. And the Curtis Yarvin view was, hey, you know, the conditions are not present — I'll let you edit the characterization, but basically it's don't fight back, you'll just lose and you'll empower them, you'll make them stronger by sort of being the sort of counter opposition or controlled opposition. Whereas the Chris Rufo view is like, you can just do things, you can change laws as it relates to, you know, what's happening in schools, as it relates to critical race theory, or as it relates to sort of the gender and sex education stuff. Like, you can have incremental gains and they will be meaningful. And Curtis is saying, no, they won't be meaningful, you'll just — they'll change the terms, they'll still have the same people in power and thus have the same views and make you think you won, but actually you're, you know, even further behind. Why don't you sort of edit that or the characterization of that debate and then, you know, talk about how that's evolved? Because my read, you can edit, is I thought you were more on the sort of Curtis side of that issue, of like more sort of skeptical of incrementalism, but then at some point shifted to more of the Rufo view of like, wow, things can actually change sooner than we think. Is that fair to say?
Yeah, so I think that's a great description. I think to give the strongest possible version of Curtis's view, which he calls the clear pill, I think the key kind of in there that you alluded to, but let's draw it out, is not just that if the conditions aren't right you will lose, it's that if you step up to be an opponent in a situation where you can't win, you're not just losing, you're becoming what I think he calls the agonist in a chemical reaction. You're becoming the fuel that the side you hate uses to burn even brighter. Right. And so you're becoming the bad — you're making yourself into the bad guy, right? And the sports metaphor is the Harlem Globetrotters, you know, spent 40 years winning. They won like, you know, 12,000 basketball games against their opposition team, the Washington Generals, which won zero. Actually, the Wikipedia page is really fantastic because it turns out the Washington Generals really — they accidentally won one game, and like just accidentally, like a ball went in the basket at the last minute that shouldn't have. And like Meadowlark Lemon, who was the star of the Harlem Globetrotters, like just apparently completely lost his — it was just like insanely angry because, right, of course, that's the thing that's like never supposed to happen. And he was like super mad and like threatening to fire all the Washington Generals. And so, you know, if you're up against the Harlem Globetrotters and they have institutional control, you don't want to be the Washington Generals. Like, you're wasting your time, you'll probably get vaporized, and you're going to make the opponent stronger. And so basically, don't do that, obviously. The Chris Rufo opposition to that is, okay, in that case you basically just are signing up to lose, and what the hell, right? How can you basically do that? Why don't you get out there and fight and figure out a way to win? And, you know, they — these are both incredibly brilliant guys, they fully articulated this. I would just say this: my partner and I went out on a limb to get involved in the political process, but a lot of that went well, by the way, including, by the way, candidates we supported in both parties, people in the sensible middle with the pro-tech agenda, pro-innovation agenda, which apparently now includes the former Commerce Secretary. Like, who knew? Miracles, miracles are happening every day.
I wonder where she's been.
Okay, exactly. We can talk more about that. We did that thing though, and I'm not — I'm going to say this, I'm going to just describe what's happening. I'm not going to claim that I'm some hero here or whatever, because I certainly don't think I am, and I think there's a lot that I could have done better in the last decade, a lot of ways I was ineffective. But I will say I have been in pitched arguments on some of the topics we're discussing tonight over the course of the last, you know, several years, in some cases with high degrees of intensity. And basically I had become the Washington Generals. I felt like the Washington Generals. I was just like — I got to the point even through this year where I just felt like I'm going to make the token argument, but like I'm just going to lose. And I lost over and over and over and over and over again in these discussions. And then basically after November 6th, all of a sudden, like a significant number of people basically are like, oh, okay, let's do it that way instead. I'm just like, what? Like my arguments haven't gotten any better, right? Like I'm not any more compelling. But, you know, people — it's what we talked about earlier, basically people are basically flipping. They're flipping on a lot of these issues really quickly. Of course, I give them credit for it, not myself, but it definitely feels like all of a sudden things are happening today. And I think we're going to see announcements, you know, from various companies in the next three months that I think are going to be, I think actually quite surprising. And so things are happening that are, I think, you know, put this under the strict YIMBY principle, that would not be happening. And so I think we need some other model of change, of which the preference falsification one is certainly the best one that I know of.
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Of course, Curtis himself, I don't think has accepted — you know, he's a hard person to get to change his views or has a high standard for what FDR 2.0 looks like. Like he wasn't impressed when Elon took over Twitter, he said, oh, it won't happen. And obviously he's very brilliant, but just interesting to — he wants, you know, to his credit, like he wants real victory. And so anything short of real victory is basically just giving your enemy a chance to retrench and come back at you.
And let me say also, like I at least don't think I know how it's going to play out. Like I have found my political predictive skills not that great over the last decade. So look, it's entirely possible that we're, you know, look, it's possible we're still the Washington Generals, and it's possible that basically everything that we've been fighting against comes roaring back. It's also possible that basically everything just moves on and there's some totally new set of issues. It's also possible, you know, who knows, right? And then by the way, if there's one thing that we've all learned, I think, in our lives and careers, it's, you know, X-factors matter a lot. Over the last 20 years, you know, there's been at least three like really profound reality-altering events that have taken place, which is 9/11, the global financial crisis, and COVID. And each of those was like a fundamental reset to a lot of assumptions. And so I've also learned to have a healthy regard for the unpredictability of the world we're going into. We do what we can.
And what seemed like the X-factor for the vibe shift was Elon buying Twitter, which almost didn't happen because he almost didn't go through with it. And if that didn't happen, then we'd all be sort of, you know, just in the group chats complaining.
Well, it's even better. It's actually — you recall this, but it's even better, which is not only did he almost not buy Twitter, they actually forced him to buy it.
