← Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms
01:01:16
The tech investor Marc Andreessen and his fellow Silicon Valley giant Elon Musk weren’t always the Donald Trump supporters they are today. In this episode, Ross asks Andreessen, a founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, about what led to Silicon Valley’s rightward shift and the new agenda of the tech-right faction.
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Marc Andreessen
From.
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Ross Douthat
New York Times Opinion. I'm Ross Douthit and this is Matter of Opinion. So listeners, you're going to be hearing more from me over the next couple of months because I'm going to be hosting some one on one conversations to help you and quite frankly me understand the factions and the players that are likely to shape the incoming Trump administration. And today we're going to start with Silicon Valley and the so called tech right. I'm someone who follows politics primarily and Silicon Valley secondarily, and to me, the alliance between that industry and the Democratic Party has always seemed like a pretty solid fact of American politics. I could definitely 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 really didn't expect so many figures in Silicon Valley, starting of course with Elon Musk, to throw their support and their money and their social media clout behind Donald Trump in 2024. My guest today is one of those tech leaders, 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 the Trump transition. Marc Andriessen, welcome to Matter of Opinion.
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Marc Andreessen
Thank you, Ross. It's great to be here.
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Ross Douthat
It's great to have you. So I'll start by introducing you. You're the co founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose portfolio includes Airbnb and over one. 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. And we're going to talk about that evolution. But I wanted to start by just 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, 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. Yes, right.
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Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that's right.
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Ross Douthat
Not a large population to, let's say, the point where you were involved in selling Netscape for billions of dollars in the late 1990s.
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Marc Andreessen
So I'm happy to talk about all of that. You know, I started out in rural Wisconsin and farming country, you know, kind of basically the polar cultural opposite of Silicon Valley in many ways, and the polar political opposite for a very long time, by the way. I didn't discover until much later that I'm an archetype. Tom Wolf wrote a famous profile of Robert Noyce, who was the original founder of intel, the original CEO 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. I grew up as a Wisconsin farm boy. And we and a lot of other people like us over the years have kind of made this trek. And then basically, I'm a product of the great land grant universities, right? So the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, which, from where I came from, was like a huge leap to, you know, actually leave the state and go to a university that large. And they had this incredible influx of money at the time from the federal government for, you know, for supercomputers, and then what turned out to be the Internet. Actually, by the way, full credit led by Al Gore when he was in the Senate. I always thought he got unfairly treated by. By how people describe this later, but.
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Ross Douthat
He led the push in inventing the Internet.
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Marc Andreessen
So this is actually the thing he gets knocked on. So the famous quote is, I invented the Internet. What? The actual quote, he never said that. I'll defend Al's honor to the death is he said, I took the lead in the Senate in creating the Internet. And what he meant by that is he was the tip of the spear for funding four national supercomputing centers. And so they picked four college campuses. Illinois was one of them. So we basically, Illinois campus, when I was there, it was like living in the future. We had computers that cost up to $30 million a pop that basically were representative of what was to come but we just had them a decade before everybody else because of this program. And then I did early research work there, basically that resulted in the Mosaic browser, which was kind of the browser that kind of broke the concept of the Internet and the web kind of through to the mainstream. And then I came to Silicon Valley, not because I was particularly enthusiastic about it at the. Because it was just the default thing to do. And I figured at least I can get a job and kind of work in the tech industry. When I was in college, from 89 to 94, I'm sure you probably remember, there was a very severe recession depression that felt like the end of the world. And it felt like the end of the American tech industry actually 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. And it felt like the Valley was dying. And so when I came to Silicon Valley in 1994, I actually thought I had missed all the action. And then through a couple of strokes of luck, met my business partner at the time, Jim Clark, and he and I started Netscape. But I just bring it up because, like I said, I thought I was in at the very end, and then it turned out I was in at the beginning of something new.
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Ross Douthat
Right. 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 kind of young startup founder?
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Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so I think the way to describe it is I think the Valley before me from like the 50s through the 70s was sort of they were normie Republicans, they were business people, CEOs, investors, and they would have been, I assume at the time, big fans of Nixon, big fans of Reagan, so forth. 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 the Clinton, Gore, kind of restoration of the Democratic Party, kind of recovery of liberalism as a mainstream political force. And this goes back again to Al Gore's role in this, 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 startup Democratic Party. And so Clinton and Gore and their administration was incredibly enthusiastic about what we were doing. I mean, Al Gore was just thrilled because 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. Right? Like they celebrated it, they loved it, they embraced us. It was like a full fledged love affair. And that was the sort of foundation for the great entrepreneurial and economic growth boom of the 1990s. And America's back. And Japan, as it turned out, was not going to take over the world. And China was still off in the distance somewhere. And so it was this incredible restoration of kind of American economic supremacy, technological supremacy. And so as a result of that, the most natural thing in the world for somebody like me was, oh, you know, of course I'm, I'm a normie Democrat. I'll be a normie Democrat forever. Normie is what I call, I call this the deal with a capital D. Like nobody ever wrote this down, but like it was just something everybody understood, which is, you know, you're me, you show up, you're an entrepreneur, you're a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company. 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 then you give the money away. And through that you absolve yourself of all of your sins. And then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And it's great. And then, by the way, you're a Democrat, you're pro gay rights, you're pro abortion, you're pro all the sort of fashionable and sort of appropriate social causes of the time. And literally it was like, there are no trade offs. This is the deal. And then of course, everybody knows Republicans are just like knuckle dragging racists. And it was just kind of taken as given that there was this going to be this great relationship. And of, of course it worked so well for the Democratic Party. And Clinton and Gore sailed to reelection in 96 and the valley was locked in for 100 years to come just to be straight up conventional blue Democrat.
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Ross 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 sort of 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 sort of 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. So 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 whatever the Republicans, from Bob Dole down to George W. Bush and John McCain were offering. Is that right? Was that sort of understood too? That part of the deal was you were on board with, again, sort of moderate, liberal, slightly higher taxes policies?
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Marc Andreessen
Yes. So a, yes, 100%, I would say. B, even more than that, we all voluntarily live in California.
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Ross Douthat
Right.
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Marc Andreessen
So we have the. We also, we not only have the federal dimension of what you're saying, we also live in these very high tax cities, you know, San Francisco, Palo Alto. And so, yeah, and I think, I think by paying higher taxes and not objecting to them that you prove you're a good person for that generation of enlightened, centrist, liberal. It was, of course we pay higher taxes because, you know, where the Democratic Party is an agent of positive social change. And you know, 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. And of course you want that. You know, 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, which is just like, wow, like, yes, it's all happening and it's all going to happen and it's going to be great. So, yeah, that was like a full fledged part of the deal. But then, look, quite honestly, I am trying and none of this to like claim moral high ground or moral sheen or anything, but just to kind of take that, take the edge off of that. If that's how 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, you know, you just, if you work like another three years, you'd make another 10x and so another 5% higher tax rate washed out of the numbers. And 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.
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Ross Douthat
And then running through that too, though there was also sort of 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 sort of openness, free speech, free argument, and a kind of utopian vision, I would say, of human freedom, which 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, I think this was in the 1990s, 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 the spirit of the hippies is also important here, this sense that you're on the side of this kind of cultural openness.
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Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that description, by the way, is exactly right. And the California ideology was real and correct. And the Valley had always incarnated a specific version of that. So, you know, the two origin points for hippie culture as we now, you know, understand it today were basically the Laurel Canyon in la, which we were not connected to, but the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, which was, you know, at ground zero of tech also. And so we literally were one of the two kind of inception points for the hippie revolution in the 60s and 70s and the whole general New left and all that stuff. By the way, Berkeley, also UC Berkeley, is hugely important to the Valley, and of course Berkeley, the birthplace of the time, what they called the Free Speech movement. My business partner Ben, my longtime partner, Ben's father, David Horowitz, who's now a radical right wing political activist in the 60s and 70s, was a radical left wing political activist.
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Ross Douthat
Yes. Everyone who was 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, in which, yeah, the spirit of 60s radicalism definitely lived on in his post radical phase, I think it's fair to say.
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Marc Andreessen
Yeah, but he was like literally on campus when anti Vietnam War was starting to crank up. And so 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 and the other side was more of the Bob Noyce side of things, you know, that I alluded to, which is you had these like literally Midwestern farm boys showing up who were squares, not hippies, very much square, you know, and if you look at like old photos of like the intel team when they were young, it's literally, you know, short sleeve white shirts with ties and tie clips and you know, looks like they look like the Michael Douglas character from Falling down, you know, they look like defense contractors. And 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 accoutrements and all of the artistic judgment and he had famously done LSD and he had all these alternatives, you know, beliefs. He had been to India, but he was also, you know, right, as we know, like a ruthlessly competitive industrialist. And so, you know, he kind of fused both sides of that. And that fusion has been where a lot of the magic is that naturally brings in both left and right wing politics. And then that definitely takes us to the dynamic that's happening today.
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Ross Douthat
So from your perspective, when did you start to have doubts about the synthesis of Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party?
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Marc Andreessen
Yeah, so the, the breakdown was during the second Obama term. And it took me by surprise, I think maybe the one. And it didn't take my surprise as, you know, our mutual friend Peter Thiel, you know, he as with a lot of things, I think saw it coming earlier than I did. But it definitely took me by surprise and you know, just to give full context there, like I had met Obama in I think 06 or 07 when he was a new senator. And you know, he seemed great. It's just like it's the perfect package that'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 the Clinton Gore. You know, he says all the right things about capitalism at the time and about entrepreneurship. He, he's clearly in love with tech. You May recall the 2012 election was literally the of social media saves democracy. 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. 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. Like obviously all these countries are going to be much better off. Obviously the fact that these protests were organized on social media sites running 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 reelect 2012 through ultimately to 16, things really started to change. The way the story gets told a lot now is that Trump was a new arrival in 15, and then basically lots of changes followed. What I experienced was the changes started in 2012, 2013, 2014, and were snowballing hard, at least in the valley and at least among kids. And I think to some extent, Trump was actually a reaction to those changes.
- [16:09]
Ross Douthat
And, well, and so those changes you're talking about, are they fundamentally about policies being made by the Obama White House, or are they fundamentally about sort of the big shift leftward among young people that clearly starts in that era?
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Marc Andreessen
So I would say both, because the unifying thread here is, I believe it's the children of the elites, right? The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions who teach them how to be like America hating communists. They fan out into the professions. 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 know each other. And so all of a sudden you have this basically this influx, this new cohort. And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids, in other words, the young children of privilege going to the top universities between 2008-2012, 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.
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Ross Douthat
But when you say they radicalized, what did that mean for Silicon Valley? What did they want? I mean, at this point, just so listen, to know you're a venture capitalist, you're no longer a startup guy, right? So you're in investing in a lot of different companies. So you have a pretty, I assume, pretty wide view of the action. Yeah. What was it that was desired from the new left wing politics pre Trump? Because we'll get to post Trump in a minute.
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Marc Andreessen
Revolution. I mean, what it was, what I now understand it to be historically, is a rebirth of the new left, right? So it's very analogous. I've spent a lot of time actually talking to David Horowitz about this because he lived through it 40 years earlier and it turned out to be a coalition of sort of economic radicals. So, and this was, you know, the rise of Bernie Sanders. But like, you know, the kids turned on capitalism like in a, in a very fundamental way. They came out as sort of, you know, some, some variation version on radical Marxist. And you know, the, 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, the great awokening and then those conjoined. And so, you know, there was a point where kind of the, the median. The newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was like 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 like that was the thing. By 2013, the media, newly arrived Harvard kid was like, fuck it, we're burning the system down. Like, you are all evil. White people are evil, Men are evil, capitalism is evil, tech is evil, but they're working for you.
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Ross Douthat
These are people who are working for you, of course.
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Marc Andreessen
So I had this moment with a senior executive who I won't name, but he said to me, they had this conversation 2014, and he said to me with kind of this sense of dawning horror, he's like, 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 destroy a company from the inside. All Hands meetings started to get very contentious where you'd get brigaded at an all hands meeting as a CEO where you'd have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about 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% of the workforce. But what happened is they became like 20%, maybe 30%. And then of course what happened was there's this big middle of, of go along, get along people who generally also consider themselves Democrats, and they're just kind of trying to follow along with the trends. And so you take this activist core of 20%, you add 60% of go along, get along people. And all of a sudden, as the CEO experiences, oh, my God, 80% of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda. People say from the outside as well, you should just fire those people. But as a CEO, you're like, I can't fire 80% 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 that's how these companies became captured anyway.
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Ross Douthat
All right, so this is all happening by 2016. Yes, Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, which we'll treat as sort of a decisive break towards whatever the next phase of Silicon Valley ideology is. But in 2016, the Democratic Party as an institution actually starts putting sustained pressure on Silicon Valley. Like 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. And that's the point at which the Democratic Party in Washington starts putting pressure on tech companies. Does that seem fair?
- [21:17]
Marc Andreessen
That's 100% true. That's completely correct. I would just say that I went through the long. 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, like, this is, as you know, it's like wall to wall coverage in the news. Like, and I'm, you know, and 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?
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Ross Douthat
Right, so are you watching MSNBC every night at that point, Marcus?
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Marc Andreessen
Yes, every night. Every night. Brian Williams, the last remaining honest news anchor in America, right? The guy you can really rely on, the guy you can really trust to tell you the truth. And 11:00 or 8:00 out here every night. It is day 167 of the Trump interregnum of having a Russian spy in the White House. And it was an hour of just.
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Ross Douthat
Didn't you have companies to invest in, though? I mean, every night the world is ending.
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Marc Andreessen
I mean, you gotta have dinner, you gotta get ready for bed. We all have these fancy things called DVRs. Right? We could do that.
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Ross Douthat
Wait, did you. You DVR'd MSNBC?
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Marc Andreessen
Of course. Oh, Mark Ross. I'm a good, responsible Democrat. I'm a good, responsible citizen of America. I'm like, I gotta understand what's happening. I gotta be able to process reality.
- [22:24]
Ross Douthat
But so I wanna push on this, though, a little bit. So do you think that when Mark Zuckerberg gets hauled in front of Congress to be grilled about disinformation and things like that, do you think that he thought to himself, 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 sort of 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 basically 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 to himself 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.
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Marc Andreessen
So I don't want to speak specifically for Mark.
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Ross Douthat
Right.
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Marc Andreessen
People high up generally, but I'll speak for the group because there's a lot of similarities between the different players here for the same pressures. So I'll just speak for the group, would say that, first of all, let me disabuse you of something, if you haven't already disabused yourself, which is the view of American CEOs operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong. That's goal number five 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 in the executive suite of basically everyone at the Fortune 500. And I would say goal number one is I'm a good person. I'm a good person is wildly more important than profit margin. 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 dei. It's why you saw them all. They're all cooperating with all these social media boycotts. I mean, the level of lockstep, uniformity, unanimity and the thought process between the CEOs 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. And I find it's actually funny because the only true groups of people who think that corporate CEOs 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 kind of fear that the CEOs 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 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.
- [25:07]
Ross Douthat
So this is, it's interesting because what you are arguing for is basically the normie conservative take on Silicon Valley across the Trump years, right? Which was that there was a kind of emerging political, cultural media establishment that had sort of come into being fully in order to resist Trump. Everyone was on the same page. Silicon Valley was effectively the information policing entity. And I always tended to think that there was this sort of profit seeking mentality where Silicon Valley was kind of 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 Khans were right about how fully Silicon Valley bought into a kind of unified liberal establishment mentality.
- [25:58]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. And I always say, look, the test of this is the dinner party and what's being discussed at the dinner party. And so if the sort of more radical right wing view is the capitalists 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.
- [26:16]
Ross Douthat
Not my columns, other people's columns.
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Marc Andreessen
Everything other than your column. Yes, exactly. Everything other than the dark matter that is the rostout, that column. And so, no, it's literally. And here's the reason, it's the famous cliche 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 come from the top. And most radical education institutions, or they are seeking as hard as they can to assimilate into that same class. And then, by the way, you're not just doing that yourself. You also have family. And if your kids are in college, I mean, God help you, they're coming for you. And then, by the way, you've got this radicalized employee base, and you maybe could have nipped the radicalization five years earlier, but now you can't because now you think it's 80% of your workforce. By the way, you also have your shareholders. And this is where things got really bananas. A big part of the tipping point. What happened here, it 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 government coming at you. And of course, the federal government radicalized hard under Hillary, and then even, sorry, the federal government, we talk about that more.
- [27:24]
Ross Douthat
But wait, the federal government is run by Donald Trump?
- [27:28]
Marc Andreessen
Not really during this period.
- [27:29]
Ross Douthat
Right. So this is the peculiar thing about, about the narrative, right? You were 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.
- [27:47]
Marc Andreessen
D.C. well, did they, sitting here today? Would you describe that Donald Trump ran the federal government between 2016 and 2020?
- [27:54]
Ross 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.
- [28:36]
Marc Andreessen
So things got much worse after 2020. So the part I would agree with is things got much worse for tech after they took formal control of the White House. So for sure that that's right.
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Ross Douthat
All right, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.
- [29:10]
Wealthfront
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- [29:45]
New York Times
Okay, I'm opening the New York Times app.
- [29:48]
Marc Andreessen
The app has so much more than you might expect. The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections, it's just easier to navigate that way.
- [29:57]
Ross Douthat
There is something for everyone. When I open the YouTube I get.
- [30:01]
Marc Andreessen
A short list of articles that are more related to me. 10 stories picked for you every day. You're able to add sections that interest you. That's really handy. There are some individuals I can add. Paul Krugman or Jamal Bouie. I like him.
- [30:13]
Ross Douthat
The lifestyle tab.
- [30:15]
Marc Andreessen
The photos are just phenomenal. It's kind of like a collage.
- [30:18]
Ross Douthat
I go to games, always scroll over.
- [30:20]
Marc Andreessen
To the games page, play Wordle or.
- [30:23]
Wealthfront
Connections and then swipe over to read today's headlines.
- [30:26]
Ross Douthat
There's an article next to a recipe.
- [30:29]
Marc Andreessen
Next to games and it's just easy to get everything in one place.
- [30:32]
Ross Douthat
And before you know it, you're gonna be late to work.
- [30:35]
Marc Andreessen
The New York Times app. All of the times all in one place. Download it now@nytimes.com app.
- [30:48]
Ross Douthat
Okay, so it's 2020 to 2021. Biden is president. All of Silicon Valley is again seems completely onside for the defeat of Trump, the deplatforming of Trump and we're only four years removed from that. That. So how do we get from Biden being sworn in to here? And you can talk more about your own political evolution too. I'm asking you to sort of describe Marc Andreessen's perspective specifically.
- [31:17]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. So maybe just the short thing I tell you about 16 to 20 was there were a series of additional 10 Xing events. 10 Xing of radicalism and intensity of all the politics. And it was the Trump's nomination, it was Trump's election and then it was Russiagate and then it was like bam Bam, bam, bam, bam. And then of course, Covid hit. So Covid was a giant radicalizing moment. And then by that point, we had lived through eight years of what was sort of increasingly clearly a social revolution. Very clearly. Companies basically being hijacked to be engines of social change. Social revolution. The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era, there were multiple companies, I know, that 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. 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 IG report, and just 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 anyway?
- [32:18]
Ross Douthat
So that's happening to you?
- [32:20]
Marc Andreessen
Yes.
- [32:21]
Ross Douthat
So you are radicalizing in the late Trump years.
- [32:24]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, for sure. And people like me, there were quite a few people like me. Now, none of us were sticking our heads up at that point because it was, to be clear, way too dangerous. None of us were, I don't think, particularly moral heroes in that point. But there were lots and lots of underground peer to peer discussions, kind of from, call it 2018 through to 2018, 2021, saying, okay, things are off the rails anyways. So my point is we were already softened up for the Biden sort of radicalization. And 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.
- [32:55]
Ross Douthat
So what in concrete terms does that mean? What are the policies that shocked or surprised about the Biden administration?
- [33:02]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, they came for tech and they came for business in a very broad based way. And everything that I'm going to describe also, it turns out, I found out later, happened in the energy industry, and I think it happened in a bunch of other industries. But the CEO felt like they couldn't talk about it. But the problem is the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation, and then the raw arbitrary, not just enforcement of that regulation, promulgation of that regulation. It was increasing insertion into basic staffing, mandated enforcement of DEI in very destructive ways. Some of these agencies have their own in house courts, which is bananas, but 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 at executives, ordering them to do things just like full on, fuck you, we own you, we control you. You're going to do what we want, we're going to destroy you. And then they just came after crypto absolutely tried to kill us. I mean, they just ran this incredible, basically terror campaign to try to kill crypto and then they were ramping into a similar campaign to try to kill AI. And 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 and we were just hoping it would pass, which it didn't. But it was when they threatened to do the same thing to AI that we realized we had to get involved in politics. And then we were up what look like the absolutely terrifying prospect of a.
- [34:17]
Ross Douthat
Second term just to zero in. When you say kill AI, what does that mean? Because the Biden administration obviously would not say that it intends to kill AI. It would say that it wants to make America the world leader in AI 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?
- [34:42]
Marc Andreessen
That would be great. What you just said would be great compared to what we actually got. So again, the precondition here, what we got with crypto was they just flat out tried to kill it. This whole debanking thing. They just debanked an entire generation of founders, they debanked their families, they really destroyed people's lives. They just killed companies left, right and center. 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, they would do this thing where 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. So we saw this exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power, power levied against crypto. And then basically we saw the beginnings of what we thought was going to be that apply to AI. And so it's like AI 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. And we were trying to keep our heads down, just trying to build startups. And then Ben and I went to Washington in May of 24 and we couldn't meet with Biden because as a trade turns out, at the time, nobody could meet with Biden, but we were able to meet with senior staff. And so we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core, and we basically relayed our concerns about AI. And their response to us was, yes, the national agenda on AI, as we will implement in the Biden administration and in the second term is we are going to make sure that AI is going to be only a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no startups. 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. And we were shocked that this was even worse than we thought. And so we said, well, that seems really radical. And we said, honestly, we don't understand how you're going to control and ban open source AI because it's just math and code on the Internet and how are you possibly going to control it? And the response was we classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War, and if we need to do that for math, for AI going forward, we'll do that too.
- [36:41]
Ross Douthat
But that is a national security argument. That is an argument, right, that it's about China, basically.
- [36:46]
Marc Andreessen
National security is also the death of democracy. And 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 when they say Trump is Hitler. By the way, it appears Obama doesn't believe Trump is Hitler anymore because he's joking around with him at the funeral. But a lot of these guys, the fire's in the eyes, right? And look, it's not Even just the U.S. right. It's like, you know, it's the rise of, you know, ukip, you know, Brexit was an equally, you know, shocking, alarming thing. The rise of Farage. It's obviously the German party, AFB, it's obviously that's, you know, the Nazi party 2.0. And so this like super heated rhetoric and actions between 2021 and 2024 just like went like completely bananas. And so we came in, like I said, in May 24 at the very height of that, and we were like, oh my God, like they're going to kill us, like they're going to kill our companies. They're going to kill open source. By the way, if you kill open source AI you also kill all academic research research. So the universities are going to be completely cut out of the loop.
- [37:42]
Ross Douthat
I feel like we would have to do a separate show about the future and risks of AI. 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 AI as potentially dangerous to human civilization or US national defense as nuclear weapons. And during the Cold War, we obviously did not allow, you know, random startups to manufacture nuclear weapons in, you know, the nuclear corridor in Poughkeepsie, New York. Right. I mean, that is important to the thinking.
- [38:18]
Marc Andreessen
Not only did we ban them making nuclear weapons, we also banned them from making nuclear power, which we now regret. But anyway, absolutely.
- [38:24]
Ross Douthat
No, no, I'm not. 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 AI that you would wish to see regulated by the federal government. Right.
- [38:36]
Marc Andreessen
It depends. This is a longer conversation we need to have. I would just tell you the national security part was not the motivator here. And by the way, the national security stuff, like 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 hear it in the words, you can see it in the behavior. We have a lot of Democratic friends in good standing who are major donors into both the Biden campaign and even the Kamala campaign. They came back with the same reports, is completely consistent, which is this is. Social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons because it is literally killing democracy and literally leading to the re arrival of Hitler. And AI is going to be even worse. And we need to take it right now anyway. And this is why I took you through the long preamble earlier, because at this point, it's like, okay, 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 we stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and know took one look at each other and we're like, yep, we're for Trump.
- [39:32]
Ross Douthat
All right, let's take a break there and when we come back, we'll talk about what the tech right wants from the Trump era.
- [39:52]
Wealthfront
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- [40:25]
New York Times
Hi, I'm Josh Haner and I'm a staff photographer at the New York Times covering climate change. For years, we've sort of imagined this picture of a polar bear floating on a piece of ice. Those have been the images associated with climate change. My challenge is to find stories that show you how climate change is affecting our world. Right. If you want to support the kind of journalism that we're working on here on the climate and environment desk at the New York Times, please subscribe on our website or our app.
- [40:59]
Ross Douthat
So this is sort of the moment when you can start to talk about attack, right?
- [41:03]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that's right.
- [41:04]
Ross Douthat
It's not just Peter Thiel and it's not just Elon. It is you and a larger number of people who sort of came out in support of Trump. And now 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?
- [41:34]
Marc 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 fail to predict most of the important things that happen 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. And 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 preeminent 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. Right. We 100% want to beat China. We want to make sure that American technology proliferates globally and not Chinese technology. And it's a shame in the past that, you know, so many of you Guys were against us because all we wanted was to help you guys win.
- [42:29]
Ross Douthat
But so that means, okay, Trump administration is not going to do the things that the Biden administration was doing that you regard as a mortal threat to AI crypto, other industries, what else besides not doing things? What is the functional pro business agenda? I mean, I'm not asking you to make a prediction. I'm saying what would you like to see?
- [42:53]
Marc Andreessen
Sure. Well, just to start with, I would say primarily, don't kill us for myself and my partner Ben and our firm. It's primarily the negative, which is don't kill us. And I say that because 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 again, I'm not claiming any moral heroism here. It's just that kind of thing is not really relevant to startups. So that's number one. Number two is, look, we would like our companies to be able to succeed globally. We think it's in the best interests 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. And even the Americans who hate America the most presumably are not in favor of the Chinese Communist Party winning instead, then, as you know, many foreign governments are now much more hostile to American tech than they were 20 years ago. And we face enormous challenges in Europe, enormous challenges even in the uk, Just these extremely draconian anti tech, anti business, anti American kind of policies. The eu, as you know, is regulating itself to death, and they're damaging themselves mostly, but what they're also doing is really 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 then. Look, third is we have shared interests on a lot of the other underlying issues. And I'll just give you the big obvious one right now, which is energy. Right? Like when this administration, you know, my, my friend Doug Burgum is the National Energy czar and he's a very successful business tech guy and he's been given the charter to blow the doors off of American energy and really open it up. And of course that will be hugely beneficial to the country and to, and obviously to AI, which, you know, soaks up lots of energy. And so, you know, there's a whole bunch of things like that. And then maybe I'll just give you one final thing, which is 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, you know, just these agencies kind of running wild. That stuff just needs to be brought to heel. And the new administration's been very vocal about how they intend to fix all that. So that maybe would be the final thing.
- [44:48]
Ross Douthat
So where do you think Doge, the Elon Musk run Department of Governmental Efficiency, which is promising some number trillions of dollars of savings. Where does that fit into a tech right agenda?
- [45:01]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, and I should say I'm helping Doge on this, but I'm not speaking for Elon. Yeah, just to be clear, not speaking for Elon, not speaking for the administration. That's clear. Yeah, look. Yeah, look, so when, you know, I talked about Al Gore a lot earlier, you may remember Al Gore had this whole initiative in the 90s called reinventing government.
- [45:16]
Ross Douthat
Yes, I remember it well.
- [45:17]
Marc Andreessen
Which was Doge 1.0 at the time. It was a normal Democrat thing, which is, 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, right, in the late 90s, the US government actually went into surplus. Like it actually worked. And this used to be just assumed. It's like, of course, if you're a Democrat, you want government programs to be efficient because you want them to sustain, Right. And you want whatever Social support programs or whatever you want sustain. You want Social Security to sustain. And 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 then somehow now that's turned into, oh my God, it's fascism. Right? So it's another one of these crazy inversions that's taken place that.
- [45:57]
Ross 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, 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. So you have a commission of some sort that can make recommendations, but doesn't fundamentally have legislative power. And personally. Right. 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 again, maybe not the whole tech. Right. Whatever it may be, but he at least could get lost in this setup.
- [46:57]
Marc Andreessen
It's possible. I mean, look, I just say it's a couple things. So one, what you said, 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. But 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 OMB and OPM and so forth, they're very aligned with it. So at the very least is starting out with a lot of coordination and shared ideas. And then I guess I'd say look, a couple things. So one is just so we know what DOGE is, there's actually three kind of threads that they're pulling on. There's the money side, but there's also the headcount staffing side which is related but not exactly the same to the money side. And then there's the regulation side. And they have plans on each of those three threads on the money and on the staffing and on the regulation, they have plans on how to do it that are, I would just say light years beyond anything I've ever heard.
- [47:46]
Ross Douthat
Of before in terms of their understanding of the federal bureaucracy, their understanding of American politics, which how are they light years beyond?
- [47:56]
Marc Andreessen
I mean, look, you just have the smartest entrepreneur of our entire generation who's like the conceptual genius of our time across multiple domains. And, and they have plans where I think when people see them, I think people are going to be like, oh, I didn't realize that that's the way that you could go about this. And so they have original thinking on all three of those and over the weeks to come that'll become more public. But I think there's more underlying thought process here than I think people give them credit for. And then I'll just add one more thing to your point. In comparing to prior eras, the prior attempts to do this all happened under the old top down media machine, right? And everything that happens now is going to happen in the full light of social media. And say what you will about social media media, one of the things it's really good at is when somebody like Elon or somebody like Trump wants to take a message direct to the people. And I say this because this has already begun. 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 across a lot of the government. And I'll just give you the most obvious one they've already talked about in public, which is just the occupancy of a federal building in Washington D.C. now is like 25%. A very large percentage of the federal workforce literally never came back back to work. And ask any big company CEO in America, they will tell you people working at home are not working.
- [49:06]
Ross Douthat
I mean, I guess my view would be 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, not least because 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, you know, to pay those people appropriately and so on. And all of this is just sort of in the shadow of Social Security, Medicare and a range of federal commitments that there is no magical argument on social media that will suddenly make cutting those commitments popular, I think. But this is of course, the cynical, you know, the cynical Washington D.C. view.
- [49:53]
Marc Andreessen
This is the traditional institutional, cynical Washington view. And the way that reads to a normal person is absolute contempt for the taxpayer. Like, absolute contempt for the taxpayer of like, 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?
- [50:13]
Ross Douthat
No, no, no, no. This is all this is the answer when we're challenged on it is this is the actual spending that the federal government does is either big ticket things that the average taxpayer supports or smaller bore 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, you know, because of their desire for large amounts of federal spending, tends to support.
- [50:51]
Marc Andreessen
But I just say, look, I just say what you just said comes across as total contempt for the taxpayer. Like just absolute contempt. And so this will be part of.
- [50:59]
Ross Douthat
The taxpayer, does the taxpayer not? I mean, Mark, having, you know, 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, taxpayer in election after election, likes and supports and votes in favor of Medicare and Social Security.
- [51:27]
Marc Andreessen
They're not exposed to it. So this is the difference. This is a big part of the bet. And look, maybe it'll work and maybe it won't. This is a big part of the bet, which is they don't actually. 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. And as you and I both know, what that has become is that it's become basically 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. And 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. And that's precisely the kind of thing where I think if it's aired in public, I think you might find that there's a lot less support for it than people think. So we'll see.
- [52:14]
Ross Douthat
So let's get to the last crucial question, right? Which is, 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, right? Congratulations. 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 sort of blow up just over Christmas over H1B visas and the extent to which Silicon Valley tends to support sort of maximal recruitment of high skilled immigrants. A big part of Donald Trump's coalition does not support maximal recruitment of high skilled immigrants that thinks that America first includes Americans first when it comes to hiring. In greater San Francisco. We'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 kind of conflicts? And also because of everything that we just spent this whole interview talking about, there's a really big constituency on the right that maybe they trust Elon Musk. They don'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 all of that, those challenges?
- [53:42]
Marc Andreessen
Well, so look, I just start by saying, look, when a coalition wins, then of course the very next step is internal fights inside the coalition. Right. I mean, I think that's sort of obvious. Right. So look, I have no doubt that there are, and they're going to continue to be debates inside the coalition. I would just say, look, I frankly don't even really have anything to say on that, just because I would say that 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 has, have a case of support. And obviously, as you know, he has this, you know, magical.
- [54:13]
Ross Douthat
This is, sorry, this is, this is. You mean Donald Trump?
- [54:16]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [54:17]
Ross 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.
- [54:24]
Marc Andreessen
So this is a big part. Yes.
- [54:26]
Ross Douthat
Presumably there is some space for, you know, factional conflict under his benevolent rule.
- [54:33]
Marc Andreessen
100%, no question. I will just tell you, though, I mean, I'll just tell you from, from my exposure to it and from everybody I've talked to, if you talk to the Trump people, what they will tell you is in the first term, number one, we didn't think we were going to win. We were outsiders, we were insurgents. We didn't have a staff, we didn't have a reservoir of people that we could draw on. You know, 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, we. So 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 just incredible withering assault on day one. And for the, for the next three years of Russian spy, russiagate attacks, every possible form of, like, slander and attack. And so, like, we just, we were not ready to command the federal government in the way that, you know, maybe somebody who'd been in Washington for 30 years, you know, 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, to actually do it. And so it's this really bizarre thing. It's only, I think, happened once before in America history where you have an incumbent who. Then there's a gap and then there's. There's a second term. And I will tell you, the team around him has used that second term to plan and prepare. And then I would just say, if you look at the staffing that's taking place, you know, another thing people said was, well, in the second Trump term, it's going to be an even worse team because of blah, blah, blah. The reality, I think, turns out, is obviously the opposite. It's a much better team the second time, the caliber of people going in. And again, it's not even a critique of the people in the first term. It's just there's a cohort of people who are, you know, primed and ready to go, who are experts in all these areas who have lived through the last four years, and they're all on board with the thing, and they're ready to go in and bring all of their expertise. And, you know, we could sit here and we could probably name, you know, two dozen people who are at, like, the deputy or assistant secretary level in these key agencies who are just, like, off the charts good and, by the way, much better than the people that they're replacing in virtually every case. And so, anyway, they are as well positioned to take this thing over and run it as anything I've seen in my life. I, you know, obviously, we're. We are very, very enthusiastically pulling for them.
- [56:35]
Ross Douthat
Right. I guess my fundamental question is just, well, maybe put it this way, are there deal breakers for you in the new alliance that you forged? I guess I'm curious. When you look at the Republican Party that you yourself, 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 want away from this coalition?
- [57:04]
Marc Andreessen
I mean, 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 how it's been? Pretty bad. I would just say this. 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, by the way. The other thing is, look, you know this, but like a lot of this has changed. There has been significant migration on both sides on a lot of different issues over the course the last 10 or 15 years. As you know, 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 issues of 20 years ago are not the animating issues today. I just give you one example. Gay marriage 20 years ago was like a very potent political issue in the Valley, but that issue's done. Right. And by the way, now I have all these gay friends who are like super pro Trump because that issue's done and Trump's not going to. That's finished. The other thing is the neocon thing. Like 20 years ago, Iraq was a giant motivating thing. It's like, well, 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 so it's just no longer an issue.
- [58:08]
Ross Douthat
But part of what's happened is again, 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. 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 I'm very familiar with people on the right who have very anti Silicon Valley views or just to take in health policy. Right. You mentioned the second tier appointees being very, very talented and impressive in this Trump White House. I think 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. Right. Certainly Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And Elon Musk have quite different views on public health, the role of science and these kind of things. So I'm not making a, you know, I don't foretell the future particularly well. I think that's certainly the case. But I think that the Trump administration has succeeded in part by bring. There are 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.
- [59:42]
Marc Andreessen
I understand and 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. Whatever. I'm fine with it because this is the old thing. It's like, what's the difference between the left and the right? The left wants revolution, the right wants not the left. So like, well, that.
- [60:01]
Ross Douthat
But some people would say that that's been a big problem for the right, of course, the last couple hundred years.
- [60:07]
Marc Andreessen
Of course that's true. And of course, look, and over the, you could say over the last 200 years, the left over the, over time has won most of the fights or even all the fights. I'm just telling you for the day to day reality that I live in and for the time horizon I can deal with, which is like, you know, call it a decade at a time. Like, I just, yeah, this last decade. Like, no, no more of that. Like, no, what happened this last decade, in this last five years, like everything that we talked about in this thing, like, no, we're not, like, this is not going to. And there are a gazillion issues on the right that people are going to argue with and they can argue and most of them, like, we're not even going to be involved in. And even on the ones where we have a dog in the hunt, like whatever trade off is made, whatever the president decides, I'm 100% certain is 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 as you know, like 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 because it would make them more likely to win. And so I guess I would say my sincere hope for them 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 they're like, yeah, things just went too far.
- [61:16]
Ross Douthat
I guess my last question for you then though is do you to some extent, since we started this conversation talking about the beginning of your career in a very different Silicon Valley in the 1990s. And from my perspective, part of what made the period that you talk about where the Democratic Party could be foursquare 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. And I think it's totally plausible that the Democratic Party will moderate on issues, especially cultural issues that have been 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. Right.
- [62:07]
Marc Andreessen
I agree.
- [62:07]
Ross Douthat
Crypto, whatever you think of regulation, is going to be a zone of contestation. AI absolutely. A zone of contestation. And that wasn't true in the 1990s because you guys hadn't won. And now you guys one. And that's it. Welcome to politics. Right, Right. I mean, do you see things that way to some extent? Yeah.
- [62:25]
Marc Andreessen
Yeah. We're. 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. And then some people think we're driving the bus.
- [62:36]
Ross Douthat
Dragging. That's dragging you across the bridge to the 21st century.
- [62:40]
Marc Andreessen
It is. Well, and then. And then some people think we're driving the bus. Right. And we're like, no, no, no, we're being dragged by. Anyway, so I agree with everything I say. I agree with everything you said. Look, our conclusion is we have to stay involved in the political and the policy process for the next whatever, God willing, 30, 40 years, we get to do this because, yeah, I think there's no going back on that. And look, there are some really fundamental and critical issues that need to be thought through, and we need to be in those conversations, and we need to have a voice. We need to have a role to play. And so our plan is to, like, from here on out, we're permanently in.
- [63:09]
Ross Douthat
All right, well, maybe you can be back on this podcast to talk about some of those issues in the future.
- [63:14]
Marc Andreessen
We'd love to.
- [63:15]
Ross Douthat
But for now, thank you, Marc Andreessen, so much for taking the time.
- [63:19]
Marc Andreessen
Thank you, Ross.
- [63:23]
Ross Douthat
And thank you, listeners. I'll be back with Carlos and Michelle after Donald Trump's inauguration next week. This episode was produced by Sofia Alvarez Boyd and Andrea Batan. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Epheme Shapiro, Carol Sabaro and Pat McCusker mixing by Pat McCusker audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie Rose Strasser Sa.