Ben Horowitz & Marc Andreessen: Why Silicon Valley Turned Against Defense (And How We’re Fixing It)

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a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2025

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Palmer Luckey got fired from Meta for backing the wrong candidate—now he's the hero saving American defense, and that shift tells you everything about how fast the ground moved beneath Silicon Valley's feet. For decades, tech and defense were allies, then came 15 years of hostility so visceral that Google employees revolted over a Pentagon AI contract, and when leadership caved, only three people showed up to hear what border security actually involves. But something broke: COVID exposed our inability to make things, Ukraine revealed wars now iterate in days not decades, and suddenly the Harvard dorm room generation realized the people building satellites and drones weren't just necessary—they were the future, while legacy defense contractors still operate on Soviet-style five-year plans that guarantee cost overruns and obsolescence. Now the question isn't whether Silicon Valley returns to its Cold War roots, but whether America wins by becoming more like China's centralized system or doubles down on the chaotic creativity that built nine of the world's ten most valuable companies in 25 years—and the founders flooding into defense, energy, mining, and manufacturing suggest the second American century is just getting started.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The capitalist approach is messy, but you have dynamism on your side.
0:03.9	Just come back to the big picture thing.
0:05.2	Is America an aggregate of force for good in the world?
0:07.6	Is it important for the world that America succeed?
0:09.5	Is it important that American values, Western values,
0:12.0	are the pre-eminent of the world, is it important?
0:14.0	It's the world not devolve into a complete Soviet communism everywhere.
0:17.2	The other direction is literally fighting everything about our culture, everything about our
0:23.1	history, everything about our system. And the fact that it has appeal is like a weird
0:28.2	psychological defect. Some people have. They just always want central control. They always think
0:34.6	it's better. And by the way, it routinely doesn't work. Like, routinely fails because the world is too dynamic and that's not nearly a fast enough
0:40.2	iteration cycle. The thing that people want is exactly what we named the category. How do we
0:45.3	build American dynamism? How do we build Silicon Valley in our own country? Geopolitically, we
0:50.5	entered a new era. We're at this exciting moment in time where both the need and the demand
0:55.8	for new technologies
0:57.3	is greater than it's ever been.
0:59.0	The creator of the concept of the five-year plan
1:00.8	was, of course, Joseph Stalin.
1:04.0	It was literally the Soviet Union run as five-year plans.
1:08.0	Altie the Ben a little bit.
1:08.8	He comes from the People's Republic of Berkeley.
1:11.3	The old model of World War II era, mass machinery and mass men to win wars like those days are long over.
	...

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