Hello, and welcome to this week’s installation of The Future In Five Questions. This week I spoke with David Ulevitch, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz who leads the venture capital firm’s “American Dynamism” project aimed at boosting production and innovation in America, including aerospace, education, and housing. David and I spoke about why he thinks a national draft wouldn’t be such a bad idea, how China might potentially be overrated as a rival for geopolitical dominance, and the need to place “nerds” (his words) in policy and leadership positions in government. The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity: What’s one underrated big idea? One is a reintroduction of a national draft with a civil service option as a means of building shared national understanding across diverse groups of people. You want to get a rich kid from one area, maybe a poor white kid from one area, a poor African-American kid, the new immigrant from another area, put them all into a bunkhouse and make them do some like terrible un-fun job that generally has some public benefit. Or military service, which is basically that, and they can do that for a year before they go off to college. It would be an amazing idea for America to build a sense of shared unity and a sense of duty to their country, the lack of which causes divisiveness amongst people and a lack of understanding that on the margins we're all very different but generally we're all the same. I'd also talk about reimagining nuclear energy policy and focusing on a new generation of reactors, both small and modular reactors, and large reactors. We want to be the country that has an electric vehicle advantage, an artificial intelligence advantage, we love the cloud infrastructure that powers our interconnected lives, and energy is needed for those things to keep us in that advantageous place — but our energy grid is super-brittle. Nuclear is a baseload power, meaning it works 24/7, it's reliable and enduring, you don't need the wind to be blowing, you don't need the sun to be out, you don't need to be able to constantly refuel like a coal plant or something like that. Nuclear checks all the boxes if we want it to, and what prevents us from taking nuclear seriously is a lack of real leadership and initiative. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I'm a venture capitalist, so I don't like being a hater. But I do think that there are technologies out there that I'm personally skeptical of, whether it's due to a lack of perceived market or because I think better solutions exist, and one example is that I've never understood wind generation. There's a term called MTBF, the “mean time between failure,” a term that's used in the industrial space for machinery. The mean time between failure for many wind turbines is comically short. When it gets really, really windy, wind turbines have to shut down or they're going to blow out the turbine, or they have to feather the blades because it's too windy and it'll spin too fast. If you just think about it, it is so stupid: What kind of energy systems shut down when you get more of the input that you want in the first place? What book most shaped your conception of the future? There are many, but I recently just read Peter Zeihan’s “The End of the World Is Just the Beginning,” which I thought was just wildly fascinating. So many people are afraid of China, but if you read this book you come away with a pessimistic view of China's long-term prospects. He thinks they have a massive demographic cliff they're going to fall off, and as that demographic cliff steepens, they're going to lose their cheap labor force and their ability to produce raw materials cheaply, which will create a cascading collapse of systems. He's pessimistic about many things in the world: I mean, it's called “The End of the World Is Just the Beginning.” But he's particularly pessimistic about China, and that was a relatively new perspective for me that I had not heard recently. What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? We have no coherent technology roadmap for America. We've had some important pieces like the CHIPS Act, but there is no CTO for America. There's nobody who says “We're going to have AI radically improve our defense-industrial base, and this is how it's going to happen.” We have nobody saying “This is how we're going to use AI to improve how we teach our kids, and make sure they have more productive after-school activities and increase the safety of our communities.” We have no one saying “Here's how we're going to use technology to increase the safety of our borders, and here's how I'm going to do it in a way that's fair and equitable and that preserves civil liberties.” Candidly, we have not put enough nerds in charge of policy and in leadership roles in our country. Technology is a huge driving force for change, but instead of acknowledging that we argue about hypothetical AI robots killing us when we actually have real things killing us every day like fentanyl. Our minds are warped and wrapped around this idea that AI is an evil thing, when non-AI software is already killing people by administering incorrect dosages. We know from the Horizon scandal in the United Kingdom that non-AI software puts people in jail mistakenly. The government needs to get way more nerds in positions of authority and power. And, you know, hopefully they're the well-adjusted nerds. What has surprised you the most this year? Watching people realize how broken many elite institutions are. Academia in particular is one. Not all of academia, there are amazing people there and I’m constantly reading papers. But broadly, administrations and just the function of the business of the university has been pretty broken. They optimize for the wrong things, they promote the wrong things. They cover up bad research, there's the replication crisis. There's just this fraud upon fraud. They misuse funding. It's been surprising to me to see people open their eyes in a very public way and realize, hey, wait a minute, we might have amazing students and we might even have amazing professors but we might not have amazing administrators. Maybe these people are wildly incompetent and not qualified. It's time to re-imagine the priorities for these institutions and how we’re going to measure their goals. I think there's going to be a resetting of what their actual priorities are, and institutions' criteria for success.
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