Ben Horowitz: evaluation

Transcript context

…It starts with, I think, my view of the US and its role in the world. My personal view is it's very, very, very important. Not for society to be completely fair because it's not going to be completely fair or completely equal because we've never had one that's been completely equal. But it's important that everybody have a chance at life, and particularly both culturally, but also just you can't advance the world if you can't tap into all of your resources. And so if you kind of take away motivation and these kinds of things, you get into trouble. And if you look at the kind of every country today, and this is by the way, so you want the right amount of decentralized power. You don't want it to be completely concentrated, concentrated power makes it very, very difficult for everybody to have a chance. This is the big lesson of communism over the last hundred years is it turned out right. And we still have politicians selling it this way today, it's like, "Oh, it's power to the people." No, no, no. It's power to you because you're removing all power from the private sector and installing it into the government, and then you're putting yourself in charge of the government. And so I become extremely powerful. And this is why it didn't matter if it was Mao or Pol Pot or Ceausescu or Stalin, everybody died because when you give anybody that much power, nobody has a chance. There is no incentive, there's no carrot, there's only stick. And so you use that stick, and that's just the nature. It's a system's problem. It's not a person problem. It's not Stalin was evil, Ceausescu is evil. It was that system is evil. And- It was evil. It was like that system is evil. And that's the saying with fascism. Be it Hitler or Mussolini, it doesn't matter. That level of power is evil. And the US does the best job. Systematically, it's the best system. It's got all kinds of issues, it's got problems. People always try to defeat it. But one of the things that if you look at the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, the language is very important. It's, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." What does that mean? It means it's not my rule, it's not the president's rule, it's God's rule. And so those rules are above the President, and then you work in that context and that distributes the power, because you're under the law, not under the person. We see that now even with Europe, where the leaders are going, "Well, I have a rule. It's you can't say certain things or I'll throw you in jail." And the kind of shield they hide behind as well, we have to keep the kids safe. But if you say something that I don't agree with and the kids hear it, they're not safe. So the kind of transited property of bullshit is going to override. And so it's really important that we have at least one society. And as flawed as we are, as flawed as the US is, it's still the best. o the kind of transited property of bullshit is going to override. And so it's really important that we have at least one society. And as flawed as we are, as flawed as the US is, it's still the best. And you can see it by the number of new company creations, the number of new ideas that come out of here and so forth. It's really, really important that the US stays important and powerful in the world. We know from the last century, if you look at the last century, who were the countries that had economic power, military power, cultural power? They were the ones that industrialized, and the ones that industrialized first and best. And the ones that did became Communists, like Russia, China. They were slow on industrialization and they fell into this very fucking dangerous system. Looking forward, that's going to happen again, but it's going to be AI. And so it is fundamentally important, not just to America, but to humanity, that America succeed at that. We don't have to be the one winner or this or that, but we do have to be in that tier. And as I go around the world and travel, I can't tell you, everybody ... and then everybody was getting, by the way, very, very worried about us earlier. And they say, "Look, we need you to succeed. Don't destroy the dollar. Don't fall behind in AI. Don't over-regulate it too early. Don't do these things, please, because we need you to win, because we're all counting on that." And I think it's the most important work that we do. It's why we're so involved in policy and so forth. I think this is also going to be very, very true with crypto, which ends up being an incredibly important networking technology that complements AI. That work is, I would say, beyond for the money. Although we will end up making a lot of money with the right policies, so I don't want to seem totally philanthropic on this, but it's more important than that. It's certainly more important than us succeeding or anything like that, that the country succeed. Speaking of philanthropic and other passions of yours, something that I don't think most people know about you, and I think will give them another insight into how interesting you are, you run an organization called Paid in Full, which is incredibly cool. Talk about what that's about, why this is so important to you.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.