How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms

ironchef · Jan 21, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-trump-silicon-valley.html

SunTrader · Jan 21, 2025

Everyone's entitled to their opinion, even a stuttering SiliconValley RightWingie splainin' how Dems did it.

VicBee · Jan 21, 2025

Behind paywall

ph1l · Jan 21, 2025

VicBee said:
Behind paywall
More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-trump-silicon-valley.html

How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms

Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism.

Jan. 17, 2025
Hosted by Ross Douthat
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How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism.
Listen · 1 hr 1 min
Below is a lightly edited transcript of an episode of “Matter of Opinion.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify,Amazon Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ross Douthat: I’m someone who follows politics primarily and Silicon Valley secondarily. And the alliance between the tech industry and the Democratic Party has always seemed like a solid fact of American politics. I could see the leaders of the tech industry souring on certain aspects of progressive politics, especially the parts that cast them as special villains. But I didn’t expect so many figures in Silicon Valley, starting with Elon Musk, to throw their support, money and social media clout behind Donald Trump in 2024.

My guest is one of those tech leaders, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. For decades he was, in his words, a “good” Democrat. But now he’s been spending time at Mar-a-Lago and advising on Trump’s transition.

Marc Andreessen, welcome to “Matter of Opinion.”

Marc Andreessen: Thank you, Ross. It’s great to be here.

Douthat: It’s great to have you. You’re a co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose portfolio includes Airbnb and over 100 A.I. companies.

A long time ago, you co-founded Netscape, the web browser that first brought many of us to the internet in the 1990s. And — just as a political matter — you supported Barack Obama for president, you voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then in 2024 you supported Donald Trump.

We’re going to talk about that evolution. But I wanted to start by going way back in time to the origins of your career, because you were present for the early days of the internet — not really the beginning of Silicon Valley itself but the beginning of Silicon Valley as a crucial influence in American life, I would say.

And since we’re talking about how the tech industry has changed and how it’s interacted with big shifts in American politics, I was hoping you could just talk a little bit about what it was like for you to go from the small town in Wisconsin where you grew up — New Lisbon, right? —

Andreessen: Yeah, that’s right.

Douthat: — to, let’s say, the point where you were involved in selling Netscape for billions of dollars in the late 1990s.

Andreessen: I’m happy to talk about all of that. I started out in rural Wisconsin and farming country — basically the polar cultural and political opposite of Silicon Valley in many ways, for a very long time. By the way, I didn’t discover until much later that I’m an archetype. Tom Wolfe wrote a famous profile of Robert Noyce — who was the original founder of Intel, the original C.E.O. and the father of the chip industry — and actually Noyce and I followed very similar paths. I never met him, and he was an earlier generation, but he grew up as an Iowa farm boy, and I grew up as a Wisconsin farm boy. A lot of other people like us over the years have made this trek.

And then basically I’m a product of the great land grant universities, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It was a huge leap to actually leave the state and go to a university that large where I came from. And they had this incredible influx of money at the time from the federal government for supercomputers and what turned out to be the internet.

Actually, by the way, that was led by Al Gore when he was in the Senate. I always thought he got unfairly treated by how people describe this later.

But he led the push —

Douthat: He took the lead on inventing the internet.

Andreessen: So the famous quote is, “I invented the internet.” He never said that, I’ll defend Al’s honor to the death. What he said is, “I took the lead in the Senate in creating the internet.”

What he meant is that he was the tip of the spear for funding four national supercomputing centers. They picked four college campuses, and Illinois was one of them.

So the Illinois campus, when I was there, was like living in the future. We had computers, which literally cost up to $30 million a pop, that basically were representative of what was to come. We just had them a decade before everybody else because of this program. I did early research work there that resulted in the Mosaic browser, which broke the concept of the internet and the web through to the mainstream. And then I came to Silicon Valley not because I was particularly enthusiastic about it at the time but because it was just the default thing to do. I figured at least I can get a job and work in the tech industry.

When I was in college from ’89 to ’94, there was a very severe recession and depression that felt like the end of the world. It felt like the end of the American tech industry in the late ’80s, early ’90s, which was sort of the peak of the ascendance of Japan in the global economy and in the tech industry. It felt like Silicon Valley was dying.

So when I came to Silicon Valley in 1994, I actually thought I had missed all the action. Then, through a couple of strokes of luck, I met my business partner at the time, Jim Clark, and he and I started Netscape. I bring it up because like I said, I thought I was in it at the very end, and then it turned out I was in it at the beginning of something new.

Douthat: So it’s the ’90s, and you’re essentially building the interfaces through which the mass public is going to enter the digital age. How would you characterize the Valley’s worldview and also your worldview at that point, as a young start-up founder?

Andreessen: I think the Valley before me, from the ’50s through the ’70s, was normie Republicans. They were businesspeople, C.E.O.s, investors, and they would have been, I assume at the time, big fans of Nixon, big fans of Reagan. That era was basically over by the time I arrived. I met a few of those guys, but when I got there in ’94, it was in the full swing of Clinton-Gore, the restoration of the Democratic Party and recovery of liberalism as a mainstream political force.

This goes back to the role of Al Gore, who I got to know quite well, and Bill. Basically it was the pro-business Democratic Party. It was the pro-tech Democratic Party. It was the pro-start-up Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore and their administration were incredibly enthusiastic about what we were doing. Al Gore was just thrilled. He’s like: Wow, this whole program that I funded in the Senate worked incredibly well. The internet worked, and now we’re going to have this giant economic boom. It’s going to be led by dynamic entrepreneurial capitalism. They celebrated it. They loved it. They embraced us. It was like a full-fledged love affair.

That was the foundation for the great entrepreneurial and economic growth boom of the 1990s. America’s back, and Japan, as it turned out, was not going to take over the world, while China was still off in the distance somewhere. So it was this incredible restoration of American economic and technological supremacy.

As a result of that, the most natural thing in the world for somebody like me was, “Oh, of course, I’m a normie Democrat. I’ll be a normie Democrat forever.”

Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood: You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.

Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro–gay rights, you’re pro-abortion, you’re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.

Then, of course, everybody knows Republicans are just knuckle-dragging racists. It was taken as given that there was going to be this great relationship. And of course, it worked so well for the Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore sailed to a re-election in ’96. And the Valley was locked in for 100 years to come to be straight-up conventional blue Democrat.

Douthat: I want to talk about the Deal for a minute because it certainly lasts culturally down into the Obama years. So by the time Barack Obama is running for president, it’s taken for granted that there’s going to be a ton of Silicon Valley money on his side. The incredible enthusiasm for the Obama candidacy is particularly strong, among tech-savvy young people. There’s a huge narrative with that campaign about how the Democratic Party is on the cutting edge of digital technology. They’re using the internet to defeat the stodgy Republicans — so stodgy, they can’t even use the internet to organize a campaign.

That narrative certainly persists. But through this whole period, the Democratic Party was still the party of higher tax rates and higher spending relative to the Republicans. So Silicon Valley was accepting at some level in this era that in supporting Democrats, you were going to get a slightly higher top marginal tax rate, a slightly higher corporate tax rate, a slightly higher tax rate on capital gains than if you went in for Republicans such as Bob Dole, George W. Bush and John McCain. Is that right? Was that understood that part of the Deal was you were on board with moderate, liberal, slightly higher taxes policies?

Andreessen: Yes, 100 percent. I would say even more than that. We all voluntarily live in California. We not only have the federal dimension of what you’re saying; we also live in these very high-tax cities — San Francisco, Palo Alto. And I think by paying higher taxes and not objecting to them, you prove you’re a good person. For that generation of enlightened centrist liberals, it was: Of course you pay higher taxes, because we’re the Democratic Party. As an agent of positive social change, of course you want to have a bigger safety net. Of course you want to fund all these programs, and you want to fund all these activist campaigns. Of course you want that.

The term “Camelot” was never used, but there was a Camelot feeling to it at the time that people must have felt in the early ’60s in the same way. Like, wow, yes, it’s all happening, and it’s all going to happen, and it’s going to be great. Yeah, they’re going to tax us, but it’s going to pay off. That was like a full-fledged part of the Deal.

Look, quite honestly, I am trying in none of this to claim moral high ground or moral sheen or anything, just to kind of take the edge off that, if that’s what I’ve come across.

Quite honestly, the tax rates didn’t really matter because when an internet company worked, it grew so fast and got so valuable that if you worked another three years, say, you’d make another 10 X. Another 5 percent higher tax rate washed out in the numbers. So we weren’t forced to really think that hard about it. It just seemed like this was the formula that would result in everything working.

Douthat: And then running through that, too, there was also a cultural assumption not just that it made sense to be liberal on social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion but also that liberalism was going to be the party of openness, free speech, free argument and a kind of utopian vision of human freedom. That obviously wasn’t always there in the institutional Democratic Party, but there’s this term I’m sure you’ve heard, that was coined, I think, by critics of Silicon Valley, called the Californian ideology, which they described as marrying the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the high-tech industries of Silicon Valley.

The Californian ideology promiscuously combines the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. Obviously they’re taking a dig, but I think that the spirit of the hippies is also important here, this sense that you’re on the side of this kind of cultural openness.

Andreessen: That description, by the way, is exactly right. The Californian ideology was real and correct, and the Valley had always incarnated a specific version of that.

So the two origin points for hippie culture, as we now understand it today, were basically Laurel Canyon in L.A., which we were not connected to, and the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, which was ground zero of tech also. We literally were one of the two inception points for the hippie revolution in the ’60s and ’70s and the whole general New Left.

Also, U.C. Berkeley is hugely important to the Valley. And of course, Berkeley is the birthplace of what they called the free speech movement. My business partner — Ben Horowitz’s father is David Horowitz. David is now a radical, right-wing political activist, but in the ’60s and ’70s, he was a radical left-wing political activist.

Douthat: Yes, everyone who is a young person on the political right in the 1990s and early 2000s, as I was, has had at least one encounter with David Horowitz of one kind or another. Sixties radicalism definitely lived on in his postradical phase, I think it’s fair to say.

Andreessen: Yeah, but he was literally on campus when the anti-Vietnam War sentiment was starting to crank up.

And that was all happening at the same time that Silicon Valley started to boot up, and there was lots of back and forth between that. The other side was more of the Bob Noyce side of things. You had these Midwestern farm boys showing up, who were squares, not hippies, and if you look at old photos of the Intel team when they were young, it’s literally, you know, short-sleeve white shirts with ties and tie clips. They look like the Michael Douglas character from “Falling Down.” They look like defense contractors.

What the Valley did, to its credit, was it fused those mentalities, and the fusion most specifically showed up in the form, ultimately, of Steve Jobs. He had all of the accouterments and all of the artistic judgment, and he had famously done LSD, and he had all these alternative beliefs. He had been to India. But he was also a ruthlessly competitive, industrialist. He fused both sides of that.

That fusion has been where a lot of the magic is that naturally brings in both left- and right-wing politics. That definitely takes us to the dynamic that’s happening today.

Douthat: When did you start to have doubts about the synthesis of Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party?

Andreessen: The breakdown was during the second Obama term. It took me by surprise. I think maybe the one person it didn’t take by surprise is our mutual friend Peter Thiel. As with a lot of things, I think he saw it coming earlier than I did. But it definitely took me by surprise.

And just to give full context there: I had met Obama in, I think, ’06 or ’07, when he was a new senator. And he seemed great. It’s the perfect package. It’s literally everything that you could possibly dream for in a president. He has all the right social views, and he seems like an inheritor of Clinton-Gore. He says all the right things about capitalism at the time and about entrepreneurship. He’s clearly in love with tech.

You may recall the 2012 election. It was literally the story of social media saves democracy, like it was literally that Barack Obama, the good guy, uses advanced technology, including the internet and social media to save the country from the Nazi fascist Mitt Romney. And this was, like, wall-to-wall positive press coverage.

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This was also, by the way, in the wake of the Arab Spring, which at the time, you’ll recall, was, like, an unalloyed good. Obviously all these countries are going to be much better off. Obviously the fact that these protests were organized on social media sites run in the United States was a sign of how we were going to bring democracy to the world.

And then basically, in retrospect, what happened is after Obama’s re-election in 2012 through ultimately to 2016, things really started to change.

The way the story gets told a lot now is that basically Trump was a new arrival in ’15, and then basically lots of changes followed. But what I experienced was the changes started in 2012, 2013, 2014 and were snowballing hard, at least in the Valley, at least among kids. And I think, to some extent, Trump was actually a reaction to those changes.

Douthat: Those changes you’re talking about, are they fundamentally about policies being made by the Obama White House, or are they fundamentally about the big shift leftward among young people that clearly started in that era?

Andreessen: So I would say both, and the unifying thread here is, I believe it’s the children of the elites. The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.

They fan out into the professions, and our companies hire a lot of kids out of the top universities, of course. And then, by the way, a lot of them go into government, and so we’re not only talking about a wave of new arrivals into the tech companies.

We’re also talking about a wave of new arrivals into the congressional offices. And of course, they all know each other, and so all of a sudden you have this influx, this new cohort.

And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq. Throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard.

Douthat: But when you say they radicalized, what did that mean for Silicon Valley? What did they want? I mean, at this point, you’re a venture capitalist. You’re no longer a start-up guy. So you’re investing in a lot of different companies.

So you have a pretty, I assume, pretty wide view of the action. What was it that was desired from the new left-wing politics pre-Trump? We’ll get to post-Trump.

Andreessen: Revolution. What I now understand it to be historically is a rebirth of the New Left. So it’s very analogous. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to David Horowitz about this because he lived through it 40 years earlier.

It turned out to be a coalition of economic radicals, and this was the rise of Bernie Sanders, but the kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.”

And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. And there was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: “When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?” And that was the thing.

By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”

Douthat: But they’re working for you. These are people who are working for you.

Andreessen: Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won’t name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, “I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us.”

They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. “Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don’t you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we’re not emitting any carbon.”

So you just take the laundry list of fashionable kind of radical left-wing positions of that time, and they’re spending a huge amount of time at the company, basically organizing around that. And I will say, in fairness, I think in most of these companies this kind of person never got to be anywhere close to 100 percent of the work force.

But what happened is they became, like, 20 percent, maybe 30 percent. And then there’s this big middle of “go along, get along” people who generally also consider themselves Democrats. And they’re just trying to follow along with the trends.

So you take this activist core of 20 percent, you add 60 percent of “go along, get along” people, and all of a sudden the C.E.O. experiences, “Oh, my God, 80 percent of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda.” What people say from the outside is, “Well, you should just fire those people.”

But as a C.E.O., you can’t fire 80 percent of my team. And by the way, I have to go hire people to replace them. And the other people at the other companies are behaving the same way. And I can’t go hire kids out of college, because I’m just going to get more activists. And so that’s how these companies became captured.

Douthat: This is all happening by 2016, when Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, which we’ll treat as a decisive break toward whatever the next phase of Silicon Valley ideology is. But in 2016, the Democratic Party as an institution actually started putting sustained pressure on Silicon Valley. What you’re describing with radicalized employees is pressure, but it’s not Washington, D.C., getting involved. It’s only after the election that Silicon Valley is seen as responsible — through Facebook, through social media, through Russian disinformation, through allowing disinformation for getting Trump elected. That’s the point at which the Democratic Party in Washington starts putting pressure on tech companies. Does that seem fair?

Andreessen: That’s 100 percent true. That’s completely correct. I would just say that I went through the description of ’13 to ’16 because when the main Democratic machine kicked in and decided that we were to blame for Trump, the overwhelming response for basically everything, other than Peter, was just like, “Yep. You got us. We’re guilty. We did it.” Because, as you know, it’s, like, wall-to-wall coverage in the news. I’m reading The New York Times every day, and I’m watching MSNBC every night, and I’m like, “Oh, my God, what have we done?”

Douthat: Are you watching MSNBC every night at that point, Marc?

Andreessen: Yes, every night. Brian Williams. The last remaining honest news anchor in America. The guy you can really rely on, the guy you can really trust to tell you the truth. Eleven o’clock or eight o’clock out here, every night it was, “It is Day 167 of the Trump interregnum of having a Russian spy in the White House.”

And it was an hour of just “The world is ending.”

Douthat: Didn’t you have companies to invest in, though?

Andreessen: But the world is ending. I mean, you have to have dinner.

Douthat: I mean, every night?

Andreessen: You have to get ready for bed. We all have these fancy things called DVRs. We could do that.

Douthat: All right. You DVR’ed MSNBC? Oh, Marc. OK.

Andreessen: I’m a good responsible Democrat. I’m a good responsible citizen of America. I’m like, “I have to understand what’s happening. I have to be able to process reality.”

Douthat: I want to push on this a little bit. So do you think when Mark Zuckerberg gets hauled in front of Congress to be grilled about disinformation and things like that, do you think that he thought, “Yes, Facebook is deeply and profoundly responsible for Donald Trump getting elected and Vladimir Putin influencing American politics”? Because my perception in the Trump years was that a lot of the people at the top of Silicon Valley were essentially going along with these narratives because they were afraid of their employees and because they were afraid of Democrats in Washington.

I wrote a column about this at the time. I said that in any dispensation, businessmen have to ask themselves, “What am I required to do to make money unmolested by the government?” And so Zuckerberg is thinking, “Right now, what I’m required to do is run a sort of strict anti-disinformation fact-checking apparatus and say the right things in front of congressional committees.”

Andreessen: So I don’t want to speak specifically for Mark, but the —

Douthat: Right, no. People high up, generally.

Andreessen: I’ll speak for the group because there’s a lot of similarities between the different players here for the same pressures. I’ll just speak for the group.

First of all, let me disabuse you of something, if you haven’t already disabused yourself. The view of American C.E.O.s operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong.

That’s like, Goal No. 5 or something. There’s four goals that are way more important than that. And that’s not just true in the big tech companies. It’s true of the executive suite of basically everyone at the Fortune 500.

I would say Goal No. 1 is, “I’m a good person.” “I’m a good person,” is wildly more important than profit margins. Wildly. And this is why you saw these big companies all of a sudden go completely bananas in all their marketing. It’s why you saw them go bananas over D.E.I. It’s why you saw them all cooperating with all these social media boycotts. I mean, the level of lock step uniformity, unanimity in the thought process between the C.E.O.s of the Fortune 500 and what’s in the pages of The New York Times and in the Harvard classroom and in the Ford Foundation — they’re just locked together. Or at least they were through this entire period.

I find it’s funny, because the only true groups of people who think that corporate C.E.O.s are just profit-optimizing machines are people on the far left, who are full-on Marxists, who really believe that, and then people on the far right, who I think fear that the C.E.O.s are like that but also maybe hope that they are and then later realize that they’re not.

So the primary response from the Silicon Valley tech companies and the kinds of people that you’re talking about was not “Here’s what we need to do to make money and to live under a Democratic regime.” The primary thing was the complete exact kind of panic that you saw in the rest of corporate America and that you saw in the press.

Douthat: It’s interesting because what you are arguing for is basically what became the normie conservative take on Silicon Valley across the Trump years. Which was that there was a kind of emerging political cultural media establishment that had come into being fully in order to resist Trump.

Everyone was on the same page. Silicon Valley was, effectively, the information-policing entity. I always tended to think that there was this sort of profit-seeking mentality, where Silicon Valley was making political compromises to stay in business, the way you would make political compromises in a foreign country. But you’re saying, basically, the normie cons were right about how fully Silicon Valley bought into a kind of unified liberal establishment mentality.

Andreessen: Yeah. And I always say, the test of this is the dinner party and what’s being discussed at the dinner party. If the more radical right-wing view is that capitalists are making their cynical plans for how to optimize for money under the current regime, that would be one thing. Having been to many of those dinner parties, that’s not the topic. The topic is what’s in The New York Times today and what it means that we all need to do to be good people.

Douthat: Not my columns. Other people’s columns in The New York Times.

Andreessen: Everything other than the dark matter that is the Ross Douthat column. Here’s the reason: It’s the famous cliché “We live in a society.” These people aren’t robots. They’re just not. They’re members of a society. They’re members of an elite class. They either come from the top, most radical education institutions, or they are seeking as hard as they can to assimilate into that same class.

Then, by the way, you’re not just doing that yourself. You also have a family. And if your kids are in college, I mean, God help you, they’re coming for you. Then you’ve got your radicalized employee base, and you maybe could have nipped the radicalization five years earlier, but now you can’t, because it’s now 80 percent of your work force.

By the way, you also have your shareholders, and this is where things get really bananas. A big part of the tipping point was when the major shareholders turned and became political activists.

So you’re in this sandwich from all of your constituents, and then you’ve got the press coming at you. You’ve got the activists coming at you, and then you’ve got the [federal] government coming at you.

Douthat: But wait, the federal government is run by Donald Trump in this period, right?

Andreessen: Not really.

Douthat: I mean, this is the peculiar thing about the narrative, right? You’re saying everyone is possessed by all these fears, and I grant you, they’re powerful fears, but they are in an era when, officially, the Republican Party and Donald Trump are in the White House and have not complete but real power in Washington, D.C.

Andreessen: Well, did they? Like sitting here today, would you describe that Donald Trump ran the federal government between 2016 and 2020?

Douthat: Not entirely effectively. I wouldn’t say that. At the same time, it wasn’t the case that the Democratic Party in 2018 or 2019 was in a position to pass some sweeping new legislation, whether to raise taxes or regulate Silicon Valley in all kinds of ways.

The Democratic pressure was a mixture of bureaucratic power that, I agree, Trump did not actually control and congressional hearings and outside pressure. But it is still interesting that there were obvious things that you would expect a business community to be afraid of that the Democrats couldn’t do in 2018, 2019, 2020.

Andreessen: So things got much worse after 2020. So the part I would agree with is that things got much worse for tech, after they took formal control of the White House. For sure, that’s right.

Douthat: OK, so it’s 2020, 2021. Joe Biden is president. All of Silicon Valley, again, seems completely on the side for the defeat of Trump, the deplatforming of Trump, and we’re only four years removed from that. So how do we get from Biden being sworn in to here? And you can talk more about your own political evolution, too.

Andreessen: So maybe just the short thing I’ll tell you about 2016 to 2020, there were a series of additional 10-X-ing events — of radicalism and intensity of all the politics. And so it was Trump’s nomination, it was Trump’s election, and then it was Russiagate. It was like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

And then of course, Covid hits, which was a giant radicalizing moment. And at that point, we had lived through eight years of what was increasingly clearly a social revolution. Very clearly, companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution. The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees.

Things got really aggressive during that period. And so I go from watching Brian Williams every night and just being lied to 500 nights in a row to, basically, reading the Mueller report, reading the Horowitz I.G. report and being like, “Oh, my God, none of this is true.”

And then you try to explain to people, “This isn’t true.” And then they get really mad at you because how can you possibly have any sympathy for a fascist?

Douthat: So you are radicalizing in the late Trump years.

Andreessen: Yes, for sure. There were quite a few people like me. Now, none of us were sticking our heads up at that point because, to be clear, it was way too dangerous.

None of us were particularly moral heroes at that point. But there were lots and lots of underground peer-to-peer discussions from 2018 through to 2021 saying, “OK, things are off the rails.” And my point is, we were softened up for the Biden radicalization. Then when the Biden administration turned out to be far more radical than even we thought that they were going to be then that’s what generated the response that ultimately —

Douthat: So what, in concrete terms, does that mean? What are the policies that shocked or surprised you about the Biden administration?

Andreessen: They came for business in a very broad-based way. Everything that I’m going to describe also, it turns out, I found out later, it happened in the energy industry. And I think it happened in a bunch of other industries, but the C.E.O.s felt like they couldn’t talk about it.

The problem is the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation. It was increasing insertion into basic staffing. Government-mandated enforcement of D.E.I. in very destructive ways. Some of these agencies have their own in-house courts, which is bananas. Also just straight-up threats and bullying.

Mark Zuckerberg just talked about this on “Rogan.” Direct phone calls from senior members of the administration. Screaming executives ordering them to do things. Just full-on “[Expletive] you. We own you. We control you. You’re going to do what we want or we’re going to destroy you.”

Then they just came after crypto. Absolutely tried to kill us.

They just ran this incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto. Then they were ramping up a similar campaign to try to kill A.I. That’s really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics. The crypto attack was so weird that we didn’t know what to make of it. We were just hoping it would pass, which it didn’t. But it was when they threatened to do the same thing to A.I. that we realized we had to get involved in politics. Then we were up against what looked like the absolutely terrifying prospect of a second term.

Douthat: Just to zero in: When you say, “kill A.I.,” what does that mean? Because the Biden administration obviously would not say that it intends to kill A.I. It would say that it wants to make America the world leader in A.I. while regulating it in a way that prevents our enemies around the world from obtaining potentially world-altering technology.

That would be the narrative, right? So why is that wrong?

Andreessen: [Laughs.] What you just said would be great compared to what we actually got. So again, the precondition we got with crypto was to just flat out try to kill it. This whole debanking thing — they just debanked an entire generation of founders.

They debank their families. They really destroyed people’s lives. They just killed companies left, right and center, just debanking, destroying companies.

They did regulation through enforcement. They would never define what the rules were. They would just arbitrarily sue people when they didn’t think they could sue people and win, then they’d issue these things called Wells notices, which is basically a public announcement that the government is going to sue you in the future, which is basically a death sentence for a company, right?

So we saw this exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power levied against crypto. Basically we saw the beginnings of what we thought was going to be applied to A.I.

So A.I. needs to be very carefully controlled by the government or by adjuncts of the government to make sure that there’s no hate speech or misinformation, which is to say it has to be completely politically controlled. We were trying to keep our heads down, just trying to build start-ups. Then Ben and I went to Washington in May of 2024. We couldn’t meet with Biden because, as it turns out, at the time, nobody could meet with Biden.

We were able to meet with senior staff. So we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core.

We basically relayed our concerns about A.I., and their response to us was, “Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet — those days are over. That’s not happening.”

We were shocked that it was even worse than we thought. We said, “Well, that seems really radical.” We said, “Honestly, we don’t understand how you’re going to control and ban open-source A.I., because it’s just math and code on the internet. How are you possibly going to control it?” And the response was, “We classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War. If we need to do that for math or A.I. going forward, we’ll do that, too.”

Douthat: But that is a national security argument. That is an argument about China, right?

Andreessen: Yeah, but national security is also the death of democracy. Maybe I’ll give the devil his due here. I believe, in their view, they really think they’re defending democracy. I mean, they’re trying to strangle it to death in the name of defending it, but I think they literally believe it when they say Trump is Hitler.

By the way, it appears Obama doesn’t believe Trump is Hitler anymore, because he was joking around with him at Jimmy Carter’s funeral.

A lot of these guys, the fire’s in the eyes. And look, it’s not even just the U.S. It’s the rise of UKIP. Brexit was an equally shocking, alarming thing. The rise of Nigel Farage. The German party AfD, it’s obviously the Nazi Party 2.0. And so this superheated rhetoric and actions between 2021 and 2024 just went completely bananas.

So we came in on May ’24, at the very height of that, and we said, “Oh, my God, they’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill our companies. They’re going to kill open source.” By the way if you kill open-source A.I., you also kill all academic research, so the universities are going to be completely cut out of the loop.

Douthat: I feel like we would have to do a separate show about the future and risks of A.I., but my perception is there is a large constituency not just in Washington, D.C., but in Silicon Valley as well that regards some form of A.I. as potentially dangerous to human civilization or U.S. national defense as nuclear weapons. And during the Cold War, we obviously did not allow random start-ups to manufacture nuclear weapons in the nuclear corridor in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Andreessen: Not only did we ban them from making nuclear weapons; we also banned them from making nuclear power, which we now regret. But anyway —

Douthat: No, absolutely. No, I’m by no means arguing that this theory is correct. I’m just saying my sense is that there is presumably some version of A.I. that you would wish to see regulated by the federal government, right?

Andreessen: It depends. This is a longer conversation we need to have. But I would just tell you the national security part was not the motivator here. And by the way, the national security stuff, those arguments are still going to play out. Those arguments aren’t over. That’s still going to play out.

The political dimension of it, overwhelmingly. I mean, it was just crystal clear. You can see it in the eyes. You can see it in the words. You can hear it in the words. You can see it in the behavior. We have a lot of Democratic friends of good standing who are major donors in both the Biden campaign and even the Kamala Harris campaign. They came back with the same reports. It’s completely consistent, which is that social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons.

Because it is literally killing democracy and literally leading to the rearrival of Hitler. And A.I. is going to be even worse, and we need to take it right now. This is why I took you through the long preamble earlier, because at this point, we are no longer dealing with rational people. We’re no longer dealing with people we can deal with.

And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, “Yep, we’re for Trump.”

Douthat: This is the moment when you can start to talk about a tech right. It’s not just Peter Thiel, and it’s not just Elon. It is you and a larger number of people who came out in support of Trump. Now there is very clearly — again, through Elon Musk but not just through him — there’s been reporting that the Trump administration is hiring people from your own company for positions in the administration.

So the tech right has gone from basically not existing in some way a year ago to helping to staff a new administration. So what does it want?

Andreessen: I mean, look, let’s start by saying one of the things I now firmly believe is I can’t predict politics. I feel like I failed to predict most of the important things that happened in the last decade on anything political or at the national level, so I will try very hard to not make any predictions.

I can tell you what they say. And by the way, what they say in private is exactly what they say in public. I have not picked up on any disconnect at all.

I actually think that they’re incredibly transparent and the president’s incredibly transparent in what he says. The high-level thing they say with respect to anything involving tech or business is, “We want America to win.” And what that means is: “We want America to be the pre-eminent country in the world. We want America to be the global economic leader. We want America to be the global technology leader. We want America to be the global military leader. We 100 percent want to beat China. We want to make sure that American technology proliferates globally and not Chinese technology. It’s a shame in the past that so many of you guys were against us, because all we wanted was to help you guys win.”

Douthat: In practical terms, that means that the Trump administration is not going to do the things that the Biden administration was doing that you regard as a mortal threat to A.I., crypto, other industries. What else? Besides not doing things, what is the functional pro-business agenda? What would you like to see?

Andreessen: Just to start with, I would say, “Don’t kill us.” For myself, and my partner, Ben, and our firm, it’s primarily the negative, which is, “Don’t kill us.”

We’re not in there lobbying for subsidies. We don’t need grants. We don’t need government investment. We don’t need monopoly or cartel status for our companies, and I’m not even claiming any moral heroism here.

It’s just that that kind of thing is not really relevant to start-ups. Like, a federal research grant or the famous one is the R. and D. tax credit. The thing about the R. and D. tax credit is it only works for big companies that generate a lot of profits and are no longer innovating anything. That’s No. 1.

No. 2 is — look, we would like our companies to be able to succeed globally. We think it’s in the best interest of the United States and all Americans for that to happen. Because if it’s not American companies winning globally, it’s Chinese companies winning globally. Even the Americans who hate America the most presumably are not in favor of the Chinese Communist Party winning instead.

And as you know, many foreign governments are now much more hostile to American tech than they were 20 years ago. We face enormous challenges in Europe. Enormous challenges even in the U.K. There’s just these extremely draconian anti-tech, anti-business, anti-American policies.

The E.U. is, as you know, regulating itself to death. And they’re damaging themselves mostly, but what they’re also doing is damaging our companies. And so we would like to work with the administration to help global markets open up and for American companies to win.

And the third is we have shared interests on a lot of the other underlying issues. The big obvious one right now is energy. And my friend Doug Burgum has been appointed national energy czar. He’s a very successful business tech guy, and he’s been given the charter to blow the doors off American energy and really open it up. Of course, that will be hugely beneficial to the country and obviously to A.I., which soaks up lots of energy.

And then maybe I’ll just give you one final thing: We need the censorship pressure to end. We need the debanking pressure to end. We need this kind of random terrorism coming out of the federal government to end. These agencies running wild. That stuff needs to be brought to heel. And the new administration has been very vocal about how they intend to fix all of that.

Douthat: So where do you think DOGE, the Elon Musk-run Department of Governmental Efficiency, which is promising trillions of dollars of savings. Where does that fit into a tech-right agenda?

Andreessen: Yeah, I should say I’m helping DOGE on this. But I’m not speaking for Elon, not speaking for the administration.

Douthat: Yes, that’s clear.

Andreessen: So look, I talked about Al Gore a lot earlier. You may remember Al Gore had this whole initiative in the ’90s called Reinventing Government, which was DOGE 1.0.

Douthat: Yes, I remember it well.

Andreessen: At the time it was a normie Democrat thing. Of course you want government efficiency. Of course you want a balanced budget. And ideally you want a government surplus, right?

And in fact, you’ll recall that they actually got there. In the late ’90s the U.S. government actually went into surplus. It actually worked. And it used to be just assumed that of course if you’re a Democrat, you want the government programs to be efficient, because you want them to sustain, and you want whatever social support programs to sustain, and you want Social Security to sustain. So of course you want efficiency, and of course you want cost cutting wherever you can get it, and of course you want to eliminate fraud and abuse and all these things.

And somehow now that’s turned into “Oh, my God, it’s fascism.” So it’s another one of these crazy inversions that’s taken place —

Douthat: Well, no, I don’t think the compelling question about DOGE is whether it’s fascism. I think the compelling question is whether it’s a kind of trap for, if not the whole tech right, at least for Elon Musk, right?

Which is to say you’re giving him a portfolio over a set of issues that are the most intractable in Washington, D.C. And yes, they were more tractable in the 1990s, but we were in a completely different demographic landscape then. It’s much easier to make your Social Security and Medicare payments in the world of 1996 than the world of today.

You have a commission of some sort that can make recommendations but doesn’t fundamentally have legislative power. Personally I would like Elon Musk to succeed in things like going to Mars. I’m less convinced that he’s capable of succeeding in rationalizing the entitlement system, and I feel like it’s quite plausible that he at least — maybe not the whole tech right — could get lost in this setup.

Andreessen: It’s possible. I’ll just say a couple of things. It’s been very deliberately set up so it’s not actually a department of the government, notwithstanding the name. The formal power will get exercised through the executive branch and through the White House, like everything else.

I will say there is a lot of support from the administration for the program and if you look at the people being put into positions, like O.M.B. and O.P.M., they’re very aligned with it. So at the very least, it’s starting out with a lot of coordination and shared ideas.

And just so we know what DOGE is: There are actually three kinds of threads that they’re pulling on. There’s the money side, but there’s also the head count and staffing side, which is related but not exactly the same to the money side, and then there’s the regulation side. They have plans on each of those three threads.

They have plans on how to do it that are, I would just say, light-years beyond anything I’ve ever heard of before. And so he and his team and Vivek Ramaswamy are bringing —

Douthat: In terms of their understanding of the federal bureaucracy? Their understanding of American politics? How are they “light-years beyond”?

Andreessen: Look, you have the smartest entrepreneur of our entire generation, who’s, like, the conceptual genius of our time across multiple domains, who has put all of his intellect into this.

They have plans where when people see them, I think people are going to be like, “Oh, I didn’t realize that that is a way that you could think about this, and I didn’t realize that that’s the way that you could go about this.”

They have original thinking on all three of those threads and in the weeks to come that will become more public. There’s more underlying thought process here than I think people give them credit for.

And I’ll just add one more thing to your point about comparing to prior eras. The prior attempts to do this all happened under the old top-down media machine, and everything that happens now is going to happen in the full light of social media. And say what you will about social media, but one of the things that it is really good at is when somebody like Elon or somebody like Trump wants to take a message directly to the people.

And Elon’s already doing this. The administration’s already doing this. There’s an ability here to take this directly to the population and shine a light on what’s actually going on. I’ll just give you the most obvious example they’ve already talked about in public, which is the occupancy of a federal building in Washington, D.C., now is, like, 25 percent. A very large percentage of the federal work force literally never came back to work.

And ask any big company C.E.O. in America, and they will tell you people working at home are not working.

Douthat: I can imagine a remarkable new plan for making the federal government in various ways much more efficient. I can totally imagine that. I am skeptical that such a plan would, in the end make a big dent in the federal government’s costs.

Let’s say you have tons of dead wood in a particular federal agency. Well, you’re going to get rid of that dead wood. But in fact, you’re going to need to hire better people to replace those people. And you’re going to need to pay those people appropriately and so on. And all of this is in the shadow of Social Security, Medicare and a range of federal commitments.

There is no magical argument on social media that will suddenly make cutting those commitments popular. But this is, of course, the traditional, institutional, cynical Washington view.

Andreessen: I was going to say, but this is the traditional, institutional, cynical Washington view. And the way that reads to a normal person is absolute contempt for the taxpayer. Absolute contempt for the taxpayer by saying, “We can sit here in Washington, and we can ladle out $50 billion here and $100 billion there, and when we’re challenged on it, the answer is, ‘Eh, it’s a rounding error.’” Right?

Douthat: No, no. The answer when we’re challenged on it is: The actual spending that the federal government does is either big-ticket things that the average taxpayer supports or smaller things like funding for students with disabilities across public school districts or something that if the average taxpayer doesn’t support it, at least a very vocal and influential constituency supports it.

Those are the two groups. It’s not dripping with contempt for the taxpayer. It’s the taxpayer that because of their desire for large amounts of federal spending tends to support.

Andreessen: I will just tell you that what you just said comes across as total contempt for the taxpayer. Just absolute contempt. This will be part of the —

Douthat: But who is the taxpayer? I wrote many, many columns in support of various versions of Paul Ryan’s plan to cut Medicare or reform Medicare and reform Social Security. And the reason those plans went down to defeat was not that federal bureaucrats had contempt for the American taxpayer. It was that the American taxpayer, in election after election, likes and supports and votes in favor of Medicare and Social Security.

Andreessen: They’re not exposed to it. This is a big part of the bet. And look, maybe it’ll work, and maybe it won’t. But this is a big part of the bet, which is that the American taxpayer doesn’t experience it that way because they don’t actually have the insight into it.

Take what you would think would be a bulletproof program, like child disability in schools. It’s far from clear to me that the median taxpayer would support that if they really knew what that was. As you and I both know, what that has become is basically a medicalized mental illness. To the point where students in schools now are basically using fake diagnoses of mental illness in order to get drugs and in order to get extra time on tests. That whole program has run completely out of control, and everybody with kids knows that, but it’s not a discrete thing that people can wrap their heads around and understand. And it’s not a thing that gets exposed in the bright light of day.

That’s precisely the kind of thing where I think it’s if it’s aired in public, I think you might find that there’s a lot less support for it than people think. We’ll see.

Douthat: Let’s get to the last crucial question. Setting aside the opinions of the median voter and the opinions of the American taxpayer, what about the opinions of other factions in the Republican coalition? Because basically you have become a faction. Congratulations.

[Laughs.]

Welcome to life as a faction on the American right. And there are obviously other factions on the American right that have already begun to clash with the tech perspective. There was a big blowup just over Christmas over H-1B visas and the extent to which Silicon Valley tends to support the maximal recruitment of high-skilled immigrants.

A big part of Donald Trump’s coalition does not support maximal recruitment of high-skilled immigrants. It thinks that “America First” as a strategy includes Americans first when it comes to hiring in greater San Francisco.

That’s a small example, but you’ve already got Steve Bannon promising to get Elon Musk out of government immediately — which is clearly not going to happen — but what’s your sense of those conflicts and their likelihood? Because of everything that we just spent this whole interview talking about, there’s a really big constituency on the right that maybe trusts Elon Musk but doesn’t trust Silicon Valley at all.

They have supported, in different ways, right-wing ideas for regulating and doing antitrust regulation in Silicon Valley. That constituency is still there. What do you make of those challenges?

Andreessen: I’d just start by saying when a coalition wins, then the very next step is fights inside the coalition. That’s sort of obvious, right?

I have no doubt that there are and there are going to continue to be debates inside the coalition. I frankly don’t even really have anything to say on that because, as you know, we have a leader of the coalition, and his name is Donald Trump, and he is extremely good at navigating this aspect of it.

And he’s extremely good at bringing together all the threads and then having it come out into the positions that he advocates to support. And obviously he has this magical —

Douthat: Sorry. This is Donald Trump?

Andreessen: Yeah.

Douthat: But the last time we mentioned Donald Trump in this interview, you and I were agreeing that he was not actually in command of the federal government in his first term, right?

Andreessen: So this is a big part —

Douthat: Presumably there is some space for factional conflict under his benevolent rule. [Laughs.]

Andreessen: One hundred percent. No question. I will just tell you if you talk to Trump people, what they will tell you is in the first term, No. 1, we didn’t think we were going to win. We were outsiders. We were insurgents. We didn’t have a reservoir of people that we could draw on. A very large percentage of the Republican staffing base had declared itself Never Trump, and they were not available to work with us.

We didn’t have a team that we could bring in. We were coming into Washington for the first time from the outside. We didn’t know how the levers of power worked. We didn’t know how to turn the lights on in the White House on the first day. We just didn’t know how to do these things.

And then we got this incredible withering assault on Day 1 and for the next three years of Russian spy, Russiagate, attacks, every possible form of slander and attack. We were not ready to command the federal government in the way that maybe somebody who’d been in Washington for 30 years would be in a position to do.

And then they have spent the last four years building the plan and building the team and building the machine to actually do it.

It’s this really bizarre thing — I think it happened once before in American history — where you have an incumbent where there’s a gap and then and then there’s a second term. And I will tell you the team around him has used that second term to plan and prepare.

And if you look at the staffing that’s taking place, it’s a much better team the second time. It’s not even a critique of the people in the first term. It’s just that there’s a cohort of people who are ready to go who are experts in all these areas and who have lived through the last four years, and they’re all on board with the thing. They’re ready to go in and bring all of their expertise, and we could sit here, and we could probably name two dozen people who are at the deputy or assistant secretary level in these key agencies who are off-the-charts good.

And by the way, much better than the people that they’re replacing in virtually every case. They are as well positioned to take this thing over and run it as anything I’ve seen in my life. Obviously we’re very, very enthusiastically pulling for them.

Douthat: I guess my fundamental question is: Are there deal breakers for you in the new alliance that you forged? I’m curious, when you look at the Republican Party — that you in your own narrative spent a long period of your life regarding as the great enemy — are there things you can imagine happening that would make you walk away from this coalition?

Andreessen: After what I’ve been through in the last decade, could it get worse than it’s been? Anything is possible. How bad would it have to be for it to be worse than it’s been? Pretty bad. The last decade has been highly educational. Extremely educational. And we have put a lot of thought into this and a lot of work into this.

The other thing is a lot has changed: There has been significant migration of both sides on a lot of different issues over the course of the last 10 or 15 years. We live in a very different political environment than we did 20 years ago, and so I think there’s this natural shifting, where the animating energies of 20 years ago are not the animating issues today.

I’ll give you an example. Gay marriage 20 years ago was a very potent political issue in the Valley. But that issue is done, and now I have all these gay friends who are super pro-Trump, because that issue is done.

The other thing is the neocon thing. Like 20 years ago, Iraq was a giant motivating thing. The one thing we know — at least God willing, we’d hope that we know — is we’re not going to do that again. And it’s just no longer an issue.

Douthat: But, lots of different people have had versions of the narrative that we’ve talked about throughout this conversation, where they have become alienated from whatever the liberal establishment was or what it became over the course of the last 10 or 15 years.

But those people are themselves widely divergent. And they range from people on foreign policy who have very hawkish views to people who have more isolationist views. They range on tech policy from people who have your views to people on the right who have very anti-Silicon Valley views.

Or take health policy. You mentioned the second-tier appointees being very talented and impressive in this Trump White House. I think that’s right. But there may be some differences of opinion between some of the second-tier appointees in, for instance, the Department of Health and Human Services and their boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Certainly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk have quite different views on public health and the role of science.

I don’t foretell the future particularly well [laughs], but I think that the Trump administration has succeeded in part by bringing together a lot of different factions that share a common sort of recoil from where we’ve been over the last 10 years but have fairly different views about where we’re going to go.

Andreessen: I’m sure those fights are going to happen. And I’m just telling you I’m fine with it on everything that you just described. I’m fine with it. Like, whatever.

I’m fine with it because what’s the difference between the left and the right? The left wants revolution, and the right wants not the left.

Douthat: But some people would say that that’s been a big problem for the right over the last couple hundred years. [Laughs.]

Andreessen: Of course, that’s true. You could say over the last 200 years, the left, over time, has won most of the fights or even all the fights. I’m just telling you, notwithstanding, for the day-to-day reality that I live in and for the time horizon I can deal with, which is a decade at a time. This last decade? No more of that. What happened in this last decade and this last five years, with everything that we talked about — this is not going to happen again.

There are a gazillion issues on the right that people are going to argue with. And they can argue, and most of them we’re not even going to be involved in.

Even on the ones where we have a dog in the hunt, whatever trade-off is made, whatever the president decides, I’m 100 percent certain it’s going to be better than what we’ve been dealing with.

There’s another part to it, though, which is, as you know, the Democratic Party has a set of decisions to make. And they’ve descended into their version of a civil war to try to figure that out.

I hope, aspirationally, I would like them to come back to the middle. I don’t know if that’s where that party’s going to come, but I think they have a big opportunity to do it. I think they should. It would make them more likely to win. So I guess I would say my sincere hope is that they find their way back to what I would describe as some level of normality and that they themselves decide they look back on this last decade and determine that things just went too far.

Douthat: We started this conversation talking about the beginning of your career in a very different Silicon Valley in the 1990s, and part of what made the period that you talk about — where the Democratic Party could be four-square for everything Silicon Valley was doing — part of what made that possible was that Silicon Valley was not yet the decisive, most powerful and influential force in American life, and now it is.

I think it’s totally plausible that the Democratic Party will moderate on issues, especially cultural issues, that have been sort of significant over the last 10 years. I don’t think we’re ever going to a world where the companies that you are investing in are not zones of political contestation.

Crypto, whatever you think of regulation, is going to be a zone of contestation. A.I., absolutely a zone of contestation. And that wasn’t true in the 1990s because you guys hadn’t won. And now you guys have won, and that’s it. Welcome to politics.

Do you see things that way, to some extent?

Andreessen: The metaphor that I use here is we’re the dog that caught the bus, and we got the tailpipe firmly between our jaws, and the bus is dragging us down the street.

Douthat: It’s dragging you across the bridge to the 21st century.

Andreessen: It is. Well, and then some people think we’re driving the bus.

So I agree with everything you said.

Our conclusion is we have to stay involved in the political and policy process for the next — God willing — 30, 40 years we get to do this. Because I think there’s no going back. And there are some really fundamental and critical issues that need to be thought through. We need to be in those conversations, and we need to have a voice. We have a role to play. And so our plan is, from here on out, we’re permanently in.

Douthat: Maybe you can be back on this podcast to talk about some of those issues in the future.

Andreessen: Yes, I would love to.

Douthat: For now, thank you, Marc Andreessen, so much for taking the time.

Andreessen: Thank you, Ross.
More...

maxinger · Jan 21, 2025

VicBee · Jan 22, 2025

Dems lost for simple reasons:

1. Constant attacks from the likes of E. Warren and the socialist Left against the tech industry

2. Dems defense of the indefensible trans minority asserting their place in competitive sports and women only places.

3. Dems inability to articulate a viable solution to illegal immigration

4. Dems inability to counter Trump's appeal to the white union blue collar labor force with tariff walls and the expulsion of competitive labor force.

SunTrader · Jan 22, 2025

Wrong.

El OchoCinco · Jan 22, 2025

If Dems won you dont think Silicon valley would have crawled to the WH to lobby for their benefits and projects?

VicBee · Jan 22, 2025

El OchoCinco said:
If Dems won you dont think Silicon valley would have crawled to the WH to lobby for their benefits and projects?
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I think Silicon Valley does what's best for Silicon Valley. CEOs have a fiduciary duty to do what's best for their business and threats to break them up, threats to force unions in, threats of heavy fines for not monitoring content grey areas, threats of heavy fines for not meeting employment diversity rules, etc. eventually led many to question their allegiance to the Democratic party. Does it mean they support Trump? No, but in a 2 party system if it's not one, it's the other.

El OchoCinco · Jan 22, 2025

VicBee said:
I think Silicon Valley does what's best for Silicon Valley. CEOs have a fiduciary duty to do what's best for their business and threats to break them up, threats to force unions in, threats of heavy fines for not monitoring content grey areas, threats of heavy fines for not meeting employment diversity rules, etc. eventually led many to question their allegiance to the Democratic party. Does it mean they support Trump? No, but in a 2 party system if it's not one, it's the other.
More...

Again... if Kammie won, Bezos and Fuckerberg would be visiting her in the WH to lobby and give money.... what you said does not say otherwise...