Marc Andreessen [archival audio]: So, I decided to read my way out in both directions, both all the way out to the left, all the way to Lenin and Marx and communism on the one hand, and then all the way out to the right on the other hand, and see if I could at least reconstruct a worldview for at least some sense of context for what’s happening today.
Lauren Goode: At that time, this is 2022, when he did this Upstream interview, he says he’s somewhere in the middle. He acknowledges that he’s a prime beneficiary of globalization, says he also works in an industry that’s been incredibly enriched by immigration, but you can also get a sense from this podcast at this time that he’s starting to get tired of some of the messaging and the social demands of the left.
Zoë Schiffer: I feel like we’re going to get trolled for talking a lot about other podcasts on our podcast, but let me just say that it is journalism to listen to these extremely long interviews. Oh, my gosh, we’re not just looking at the clips.
Lauren Goode: I know. Can I just say, I used to really enjoy my walks along Ocean Beach and now I’m just like, well, let me pull up another three-hour podcast.
Michael Calore: Honestly, if you’re going to get inside of the mind of somebody like Marc Andreessen who is constantly thinking about 18 different things at once, then listening to him talk for a couple of hours is a good way to get a very complete picture of where his mind is at.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, absolutely, or at least as complete of a picture as we’re likely to get.
Michael Calore: So, through the Biden administration, Marc Andreessen was meeting with the White House in his capacity as a venture capitalist in order to help steer government regulation into territory that would be more favorable to his investments, and things really started to shift with his relationship with Biden. Were there specific issues that they weren’t seeing eye to eye on?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, for sure, but one thing that has really stuck out to me when we’ve been listening to Marc Andreessen talk about these meetings and the issues that they were fighting over is, I guess it’s obvious that billionaires meet with high-ranking government officials, but every time I hear it, I’m like, oh, wow, I guess that is how the world works. They’re just sitting down talking about their grievances. They get the direct line to the White House.
Lauren Goode: They’re talking about memecoins, basically.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, that’s what they do. Literally though, Lauren, that seems to be what’s happening. So yeah, the three areas that the Biden administration and the Marc Andreessens of the world seemingly really do not see eye to eye on are content moderation, crypto, and AI. So, with content moderation, Mark Zuckerberg has talked about this a lot recently, but there’s this sense that the Biden administration is calling tech companies, putting pressure on them, this is actually called job owning, to take down posts or suppress certain narratives. Marc Andreessen, he’s implied that he’s quite uncomfortable with this. Then with the crypto industry in particular, Marc says that the Biden administration starts a terror campaign against crypto, and this is obviously personal, because his venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has 7.6 billion in crypto assets, and Biden’s doing things like issuing executive orders, directing federal agencies to assess the risks of crypto. He appoints SEC chair Gary Gensler, who ramps up crypto enforcement actions pretty significantly, and then the real breaking point is with AI, so leading into the 2024 election between Biden and Trump, Marc Andreessen again has these closed-door meetings, he says, with the Biden administration, and they say that they’re going to get very involved in AI. They’re basically, according to Marc, not going to allow AI startups to flourish, they’re going to have just a few big tech companies that are doing AI, and the government will basically control them. Sam Altman has come out publicly and said this is not his view of those meetings, which he apparently maybe attended, but Marc is like, we cannot allow this to happen. We have to come out in full force for Donald Trump, and that is what he does.
