Great interview. Andreessen was a Democrat who, one day, realized that he could get more by trading abortion, clean energy and trans rights for a seat at the Republican table. He didn’t like the terms for the equivalent chair among Democrats.<p>We’re beginning to see analyses talking about a reordering of social issues since the 2008 near-collapse. Andreessen cherry-picks when the cure is worse than the disease, so 2008 doesn’t come up in this at all.<p>One big inversion is the swamp. The DOGE is an unelected attendant government, bulging out of the frontier between executive and legislative branches. It could fail and need to be bailed out. It could succeed and deliver solutions to the mostly-social issues Andreessen feels personally attack him.<p>As long as I’ve been a Republican it’s mythological but well-supported that Democrats govern better, and the interviewer in this piece knows why. Andreessen is well-rehearsed in his faction’s talking points, much better than, say, JD Vance.<p>What I see is Andreessen basking in the afterglow of Trump doing a 180 on crypto. Not even the first issue 180. But he has a point: it’s too fashionably biased to choose a president based on principles.
<i>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.<p>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.</i><p>What bollocks. I'm a capitalist and believe corporate CEOs are all profit optimizing machines. Isn't their god Milton Friedman, the man who made every corporation feel it was their duty to maximize shareholder profits? Can't have it both ways Marc.<p>Can't stand this spineless man.<p>(Edit for italics)
<p><pre><code> 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.”
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Incredible hubris.