The World According to Marc Andreessen

it wasn’t that long ago that one of Silicon Valley‘s most prominent and influential venture capitalists, Marc Andreessen, was a major supporter of the Democratic Party. So how did he, in such a short time, transform into a top advisor to the Trump administration? This week, we retrace Andreesen’s steps–from his early days at Netscape to his current role of “unpaid intern” at DOGE.

You can follow Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, and Zoë Schiffer on Threads @reporterzoe. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Michael Calore: So, true or false? Silicon Valley is a liberal bastion.

Lauren Goode: Formerly true, currently false.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I would say the same. I feel like it’s different whether you’re talking to the really, really rich people in Silicon Valley or the rank-and-file workers, but there’s definitely been, as New York Magazine would say, a vibe shift.

Michael Calore: A big vibe shift, and obviously, a big part of that is the leaders of Silicon Valley, some of the CEOs and the billionaires we’ve been talking about on the show, and we’re going to talk about another one of them today.

Lauren Goode: Let’s do it.

Michael Calore: This is WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. I’m Michael Calore, Director of Consumer Tech and Culture here at Wired.

Zoë Schiffer: I’m Zoe Schiffer, WIRED’s director of Business and Industry.

Lauren Goode: I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a Senior Writer at WIRED.

Michael Calore: Today, we’re talking about Marc Andreessen. He is one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists. He’s also the co-founder of the early web browser company Netscape and until not that long ago, he was a top democratic donor, but in recent years, Andreessen has fully changed his political stripes. These days, he is an advisor to the Trump administration and has been helping recruit people from Silicon Valley to bring ideas into Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. He’s even called himself the unpaid intern of DOGE.

Lauren Goode: How is he eating at night?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I feel like that’s such a thing that’s someone who’s never been an unpaid intern would say, like, “Ha, ha, ha.”

Michael Calore: Picture Andreessen eating a lot of ramen noodles, and I think you can get there. Now, Andreessen isn’t just somebody with a long and successful career in tech. He’s also a godfather-like figure in the industry who’s known for setting the tone for the culture in Silicon Valley. So, how does Andreessen end up making a sharp turn toward the right in his fifties? How did he go from formerly supporting the Clintons/Gore, Kerry/Obama, to being an essential part of Donald Trump’s transition back into the Oval Office? Zoe, let’s start this conversation with you. I want to ask you to tell us about Mark Andreessen’s worldview.

Zoë Schiffer: Happily, and I will just say that we’re going to slap a big “allegedly” onto every single comment that we make on this podcast, because in this here political climate, we should do that. Okay, so I want to start by telling you about something that Mark Andreessen calls the deal. Have either of you heard about this?

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: Do you know what I’m talking about?

Lauren Goode: Enlighten us, please.

Zoë Schiffer: Okay, so the deal is a concept that Mark Andreessen has talked about on a number of podcasts, including Honestly with Bari Weiss Back in December.

Marc Andreessen [Archival audio]: The deal was somebody like me basically could start a company. You could invent a new technology, in this case, web browsers and all the other things that Netscape did. Everybody would think that that was great.

Zoë Schiffer: He says it’s basically an unspoken agreement wherein if you’re an entrepreneur and you make a company and that company does really, really well and you make a lot of money, and eventually you give all that money away, you are seen as an impressive figure in society and you enjoy a sterling reputation.

Marc Andreessen [Archival audio]: And then at the end of your career, you would be left with this giant pot of money, and then what you would do is donate it to philanthropy. That washes away all of your sins, reclassifies you as from a sort of suspect business mogul to a virtuous philanthropist, and that’s the arc, and it’s all great and wonderful.

Zoë Schiffer: And also, part of the deal is that you’re a Democrat and you support democratic causes. You accept the fact that you are going to be taxed at a pretty high rate, but it’s kind of all worth it because again, you’re enjoying enormous wealth and people look up to you.

Michael Calore: Yeah, and he talks often about the fact that you’re just making so much money that you’re not even really thinking about taxes and you’re not even really thinking about the last chapter of your life. You’re just collecting 10X profits on everything.

Lauren Goode: Is the idea that you have this sterling reputation predicated on the fact that you are giving your money away? What happens if you’re just a billionaire who hoards it?

Zoë Schiffer: I think that in his mind, it’s like society treats entrepreneurship as a good. Capitalism isn’t seen as an evil, and so you’re already kind of an impressive figure in society, but then the fact that you’re giving some of this money away kind of ensures that when you die, everyone’s like, look at what an incredible person that was.

Lauren Goode: Got it. Okay.

Zoë Schiffer: Except he says that during Obama’s second term, this starts to break down a little bit. Marc takes pains to say that he actually supported and voted for Obama. He really liked him during his first term. You guys will remember that Obama’s campaign had used social media pretty effectively to bring him to the White House, and this was also around the time of the Arab Spring. So, the tech industry was getting a lot of positive coverage for its perceived influence on democratic revolutions around the world, but suddenly, the vibe inside the tech companies, and particularly some of the companies that Marc invested in and was really involved in starts to shift because employees are coming in and they’re asking really pointed questions to the executive team. They’re getting really mad about the tech companies working with the government on AI projects, and drones, and things that they feel like run counter to the liberal ethos of Silicon Valley. Marc starts to feel, along with a lot of other tech elites, that there’s this sense that suddenly they’re not seen as the good guys. If you’re a white man, a capitalist, those are evil words and he feels like everyone’s essentially turning on him.

Lauren Goode: So, is the deal referring to this time period that includes Obama’s first term in the early 2010s?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I think the deal is the unspoken agreement that used to be in place for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and then the deal broke down and there was this big vibe shift where it was like you doing all of the things that a successful entrepreneur was supposed to do were suddenly seen as bad things.

Marc Andreessen [Archival audio]: Then the thing that really shook me was when I realized that the philanthropy was being redefined as evil.

Zoë Schiffer: Then he actually cites the fact that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan were going to give away 99% of their wealth, a fact that they would’ve been lauded for historically, but suddenly they’re being criticized.

Marc Andreessen [Archival audio]: They just got hammered with criticism and attacks on that, and the line of argument was literally, oh, they’re just slimy rich people and they’re only doing it for the tax break.

Zoë Schiffer: To Marc Andreessen, he’s like, whoa, the deal has completely broken down, and so this is what started to change his worldview.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, completely.

Zoë Schiffer: When Trump is elected in 2016, there is this kind of major reckoning in Silicon Valley. The public people in Washington and tech employees felt like social media was to blame for Trump’s rise specifically because these companies hadn’t done enough to combat disinformation and foreign influence. Honestly, the research I’ve looked at suggests that just isn’t really true. Those things are just less influential than people previously believed, and Marc Andreessen and others definitely didn’t buy it at the time either. Andreessen starts to feel like he was lied to by the media. His views really start to shift.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, it’s interesting, Zoe, that you say that. I think we all thought that social media was definitely to blame for that time period. I happened to listen to the Upstream podcast when we were preparing for this episode, and Andreessen went on that podcast a couple of years ago to talk about how that time period around 2015, 2016, how it, I’m quoting, “broke his mental model of the world”. He says that things started to change for him as far back as 2012 when he says that people in authority started saying things that just didn’t make sense to him. Then with Trump winning the nomination and the general election in 2016, also he mentions Charlottesville, the George Floyd moment, January 6th, 2021, basically, a whole bunch of events in society that changed the political spectrum. He does say, “Look, as you get older, you don’t know if it’s the world changing or you are changing”, but basically, he lost all faith in his ability to understand politics. It’s funny because I think we talked about this in the Sam Altman episode too. He did what rich men with some extra time do, which is he went on a reading journey.

Marc Andreessen [Archival audio]: So, I decided to read my way out in both directions, both all the 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 meme coins, basically.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, that’s what they do. Literally though, Lauren, that seems to be what’s happening. Okay. 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.

Michael Calore: Another one of Marc Andreessen’s keywords is “debanking”. He talks about this a lot when we hear him on podcasts and he blogs about it. What is debanking? What’s he talking about?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, so debanking, this is the process wherein if you’re a crypto company or an entrepreneur, you’re cut off from the US banking system. So, literally, you’ll have a bank account and then the bank will close that account. You might have to go to a cash economy, and sometimes the banks will literally say, according to Marc, that they’re facing regulatory pressure from the US government, and so they need to cut off business. Of course, from the bank’s perspective, they’ll say that crypto has a track record of scams and fraud, and working with these companies exposes you to a lot of risks that could harm the bank and other customers, but it’s a pretty personal issue for Marc Andreessen and his friends, obviously, and he says it’s ruined people’s lives, people that he knows specifically. He cites 30 founders backed by Andreessen Horowitz who have been debanked.

Lauren Goode: So, it sounds like what’s really changed Marc Andreessen’s worldview, to bring it back to Mike’s original question, over the past several years… A couple things, and one is this reaction from society collectively to the incredible power and wealth of some of these tech folks and this shifting idea around tech entrepreneurs as rock stars. That’s one thing, and then the second part is he just really, really doesn’t like some of the regulatory efforts of this most recent administration in particular around crypto and AI.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, exactly.

Michael Calore: All right. So, now we’re up to speed on where Marc Andreessen’s mind is in 2025. Let’s take a break, and when we come back, we’ll go back in time and examine how he got into his position of power in Silicon Valley. You’re listening to Uncanny Valley. So, let’s back up and talk about what Marc Andreessen was like at the dawn of his career. Lauren, I would like to ask you to chart the early Marc Andreessen years for us.

Lauren Goode: Well, first I’m going to start off by saying that I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts now with Marc Andreessen and a signature of listening to Marc Andreessen podcasts is that you’re constantly checking to see if you accidentally hit the 2X button because he talks-

Zoë Schiffer: So real.

Lauren Goode: … so fast. He says a lot and he says it quickly. Okay. Just for some context, Marc Andreessen was born in 1971. He grew up in Wisconsin. He went to the University of Illinois to study electrical engineering. He ended up switching to computer science, which was really more of his jam. He has said that basically, his timing in life has a lot to do with his success. He said in early interviews there were a couple of federally funded programs happening around the time that he went to college that really supported what became the consumer internet. One of those was the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET and his university, University of Illinois, was receiving funding through that. So, he really was sort of in the right place at the right time.

Zoë Schiffer: Seems like a uniquely humble stance for a Silicon Valley billionaire to admit.

Lauren Goode: Easy to say when you’re just swimming through your billions every day. You look like that guy from Breaking Bad, just sleeping on the pile of money, and then you’re like, yes, I owe my success to the NSFNET grant.

Zoë Schiffer: That’s big, magnanimous.

Lauren Goode: So, it’s while he’s at the University of Illinois that he and some other people develop Mosaic. Mosaic was a web browser, and we all know what a web browser is now, but at the time, Mosaic was doing something really different. It was different from the super nerdy text-based internet systems like BBS or bulletin board systems, and it was different from the closed portals or stove-pipes, as Andreessen himself has called them, like AOL, or Prodigy, or CompuServe. Mosaic was a graphical user-friendly portal to the open web, and this really was a huge innovation at the time. This actually ends up playing into Andreessen’s ideas around Little Tech, which I think we’re going to talk about, because at the time, he really was the Little Tech. He has said that if Apple or Microsoft had developed the browser first, we would probably be even more entrenched in what we think of as Big Tech today because they were Big Tech at the time and what he was trying to do was Little Tech.

Zoë Schiffer: Mike, do you remember using Mosaic?

Michael Calore: I do. It actually came out while I was in college. Marc Andreessen is a few years older than me, so around the time he was leaving college, I was entering college. I remember being in school and within a matter of months, everybody went from checking their email in Pine, a text-based interface, and that’s all they were using the computer for, to all of a sudden hanging out for hours, and reading news, and checking the weather, and visiting the libraries of other universities around the world who were putting their hypertext pages into this interface that you could just click and you were just using your mouse all the time to click around instead of just typing commands into a keyboard. There was also graphics in Mosaic, so you could go to a page and click on something, see an image. It sounds really rote and basic now, but this was the birth of the web and it was kind of astonishing how quickly it just flowed in, and I think it’s because Mosaic was free. It was easy to get. Everybody sort of, “Oh, do you have the browser? You go here, you download it, you install it.” Everybody was kind of helping each other out to get onto this new system.

Zoë Schiffer: Feels like a nice era of the internet and also the beginning of the end for us. People used to just live their actual lives, and then we all started spending a shit-ton of time online and look where we are now.

Michael Calore: They did, and I think it’s hard to overstate the importance of a piece of software like the first few web browsers because it was really an empowering technology. So, for me, in the early part of the web, Marc Andreessen was this amazing figure who brought us this wonderful gift. So, after the success of Mosaic, where did he go from there? What did he go on to do?

Lauren Goode: Well, Mosaic was built within the University of Illinois, and he really wanted to commercialize the browser. So, he ended up moving away from the Mosaic project to co-found Netscape and then called that browser the Netscape Navigator because the university owned the rights to the Mosaic name, and he ends up selling Netscape. It gets acquired by AOL. He and Jim Clark sell it for 10 billion dollars. I think the time the deal was announced in 1998, it was a 4.2 billion dollar deal, and by the time it went through a year later, it somehow became 10 billion dollars. So, I guess never just take the first offer, folks. I don’t know what you’re supposed to take away from that, just billions of dollars in difference. So, they become very rich. I think Jim Clark was more rich, but Andreessen certainly made his millions too, and then a few years later, this is a big moment. He becomes an early investor in Facebook and he joins the board. There’s one point in Facebook’s history where Facebook is considering getting acquired, and Andreessen talks Zuckerberg away from this. He tells him to keep growing the company. This is quite literally where Andreessen makes billions of dollars.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, that seems like a good decision for Mark Zuckerberg.

Lauren Goode: Right, and Marc Andreessen. Good decision for all the Marks.

Michael Calore: So, the Facebook investment is around the time that he starts getting serious about becoming a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. So, what happens next?

Lauren Goode: So, in 2009, he and Ben Horowitz start a venture capital firm and they call it Andreessen Horowitz. A lot of people refer to this as a16z. That’s what the firm calls itself because it’s the letter a, 16 letters, and the letter z. a16z is interesting because it is absolutely one of the premier firms of Silicon Valley. It sets a lot of the culture of the valley. It has tens of billions of dollars invested across all kinds of companies, but it also really set new standards for how VCs interact with startup founders. I was talking with a friend recently about… We were talking broadly about workplaces where people feel supported and workplaces where there tend to be these misaligned structures, and we ended up talking about a16z and the fact that early on what they did in the Valley was create this kind of support system for founders. The partners at the firm there get really involved with some of their investments for better or worse, because sometimes founders don’t want all that meddling, but that really kind of compelled other VC firms to start thinking about these wrappers of support that they can provide when they’re also giving money to a startup. Guys, this firm has everything. They have invested in every possible company you can think of, not just Facebook and Twitter, but Airbnb, Slack, Instacart, Oculus, Databricks, Lyft, Roblox, Pinterest, GitHub, OpenAI. It is crazy. They also, as Zoe mentioned earlier, have funds dedicated to crypto investments. They’re very big on crypto.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, the BeamPro founder feels like a real hallmark of Andreessen Horowitz because I feel like previously, or maybe it’s just other VC firms, they’ll invest in a founder that they really believe in, but then they’ll bring in a professional CEO at a certain point. I feel like Andreessen Horowitz is very big on the founder is the person with the vision, and we should support them and help them grow.

Lauren Goode: Right. They might recommend a COO or a CFO that’s going to take them public at some point, but yes, they really do invest in and believe in their founders. I think in some ways they all want them to feel like they’re the micro celebrity of their company world, and Andreessen’s own celebrity has only grown through this firm. He has a really, really strong personality. He says a lot. Like I said earlier, he talks really fast. Let me just say what Zoe said earlier too. He allegedly gives off feral vibes on the internet.

Zoë Schiffer: Exactly. It’s my personal view.

Lauren Goode: He talks in podcasts about how he learned some things about management and how to handle sticky situations as he got older, but he also has gotten edgier. He tweets a lot.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: We should talk about Twitter.

Michael Calore: Yeah. He’s PMARCA on Twitter and everywhere else and he loves Twitter because he loves stirring the pot, so to speak.

Lauren Goode: Is he actually still tweeting today because I haven’t gone on Twitter in so long.

Zoë Schiffer: We can’t know because one of the core parts of his Twitter usage is that he blocks journalists with abandon.

Lauren Goode: He’s tweeting sporadically now it appears. All I can see is November 7th, 2024, November 12th, December 20th, and then another one on January 19th. So, wait, we have an update. Our producer just jumped in to say that she can see a lot more tweets, so we’re not going to say her name because then Marc Andreessen is going to go block her, but apparently, I am still blocked and I can’t see all the tweets. So, to me, it looks like he’s tweeting sporadically, but he is still a very prolific tweeter, this guy, and for some reason that we have never quite fully understood, he started blocking journalists. Do you guys know why he blocked you?

Michael Calore: I think just in general, Marc Andreessen is hostile towards the media. He doesn’t really like to sit for interviews with people that he doesn’t consider already ideologically aligned with him. From the outside looking in, that’s what it looks like.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I agree with that. He really does seem to have this view that a lot of Silicon Valley now has that the idea that you would invest all of this time and money in a startup and then one New York Times article could tank it is completely uncomfortable and unacceptable. For me personally, my old beat was labor in Silicon Valley, so I think that that was probably a no-go for me and Marc’s relationship.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, I’m not quite sure of the moment when I was blocked. Obviously, he’s entitled to do what he wants, but it is funny to think of him as this… He is a godfather figure in Silicon Valley to a lot of people, and we write about these companies and the culture of Silicon Valley where you have people like his pal, Mark Zuckerberg, who kind of ironically now leans so heavily on the idea of free speech and opening up communication. Meanwhile, Andreessen is someone whose tweets we as journalists can’t even really access directly. We see them posted elsewhere and we sort of have a sense of where he’s coming from, but that direct access to journalists is cut off in some cases.

Michael Calore: Andreessen Horowitz famously likes to go direct, as they say. He’s tweeting constantly. He is making his ideas known. He also blogs a lot. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has its own blog platform. The founders and other partners often seed op-eds at other publications. There are three key memos that Marc Andreessen has made. I want to call them blog posts, but really they’re memos that I think we should talk about.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. On a side note, I think it’s really funny that they’re very anti the mainstream media, but then when they want to write on op-ed, the mainstream media is not the enemy anymore.

Lauren Goode: Well, I think the most famous one was in the Wall Street Journal, and that’s the one that people cite all the time now. Software is eating the world. Mike, tell us about this one.

Michael Calore: Yes. So, in 2011, Marc Andreessen published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. It is called Why Software Is Eating the World, and if you don’t have a Wall Street Journal subscription, you can just read this on the Andreessen Horowitz website because it’s also published there. It was written in 2011 at a time that is really an interesting time for Silicon Valley because it’s a few years after the financial crisis. It’s also a few years after the launch of the iPhone, but it is before many of the big technological revolutions that we know happened in the 2010s. What he posits is that we’re at a point now where technology has reached the point where you can run a big company completely online, and all of the next big companies are going to maintain their dominant positions in the marketplace through software. So, the world is moving from the physical world of business into software as a service, and he says this is going to create a fundamental shift in the world economy because all of these big companies are going to be doing their business online. They’re all going to be using cloud computing, and it’s going to just change the structure of how business works in the world. It’s kind of fascinating to read it now 14, 15 years later because he was right. If you look at what happened after that memo came out, Netflix basically ate Blockbuster, and then it completely changed the way that we consume content through our televisions. Airbnb ate the hotel industry. Uber ate the taxi service and car service industry, and you can just look at a lot of examples that software did actually take over a complete sector of the business.

Lauren Goode: Mike, when you were going back and reading this and acknowledging that he was right, did it change the way you thought about Marc Andreessen from a decade ago? Because we’re obviously coming into this today talking about this very particular political moment, but going back to Netscape, and Mosaic, and early Facebook investment, and software is eating the world, he is right about a lot of things.

Michael Calore: Yes, absolutely. I would say there are a lot of things that he says on podcasts, and in his memos, and on social media that I just do not agree with. He has this view of who CEOs are as people, that they’re really just trying to be better people and that they’re not really as concerned about profit as everybody seems to think they are. The idea that if you have any disagreements with how venture capital works and how capitalism works, that you are a Marxist and you are a far left individual. There are all these things that I’m just like, no, that’s not the way the world works, man. He sees things as very black and white and he sees things from his point of view, and I don’t share those views, and I certainly don’t look at the world the same way that he does. However, he’s very smart. He completely understands how technology works in business, and he was right about a great many things. So, Marc Andreessen intends to come along at these times of crisis in the country and in the world and put out these missives about how we should move forward. Lauren, I want to tee you up for this next part because I know that you want to talk about it’s time to build.

Lauren Goode: It’s time to build. Yeah, so this was the early pandemic era, and the whole world is in this position of being caught flat-footed by it. In the US, you all remember, we’re in this place of scarcity. Where’s the toilet paper, but also more critically, where are extra hospital beds and ventilators, and where are the vaccines, and also the stimulus checks and bailouts to help American enterprise and the American people? Andreessen uses these examples as framing for why America just has to build more in general, like schools and housing. He critiques the ideologies of both the left and right in this manifesto, but ultimately, he’s a staunch capitalist. He says if the left can prove that the public sector can build things faster, sure, have at it, but he really believes that more solutions are going to come from the private sector. This does resonate with some people and not a year later, a lot of the stuff he was crowing about in this April 2020 essay is no longer as much of a critical problem. America did in fact race to find solutions, particularly around the vaccines, but really these solutions were only short term, but it is also clear from this manifesto that he still has this kind of romantic notion of capitalism, this idea that capitalism is how we take care of the people we don’t know. I could see how you believe that to be true when you are this innovator directly responsible for creating jobs for millions of people you’ll never actually meet, but I think we also have to acknowledge some of the societal imbalances that come from pure capitalism. But once again, this essay lands at a moment. He’s really good at hitting that moment with these manifestos.

Zoë Schiffer: You know, that one sounds a lot like the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which I really hope that I never have to talk about publicly again, but this was his most recent blog post where he talks about the idea that growth is progress and technology is a primary driver of economic and social advancement and basically pits people who are negative about technology, and growth, and capitalism against people who are positive about it. Techno-optimists like Marc Andreessen believe in Free Markets, and he says in this blog that they, meaning techno-optimists, have a lot of enemies. He says, “Our enemies are not bad people. They are bad ideas.” The ideas that he views negatively in this are things like ESG, so environmental, social, and governance, social responsibility, tech ethics, trust, and safety. So, content moderation is kind of said quietly here, and he ends the manifesto by saying, “It’s time to be a techno-optimist and it’s time to build.”

Lauren Goode: Oh, so he says, “It’s time to build” in this one too?

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Well, it’s almost like he needs an editor just to point out there’s some redundancies there.

Zoë Schiffer: No, no, no.

Michael Calore: There’s an echo. Lauren, to your point, here’s a memo, a manifesto that is filled with a lot of interesting and good ideas, but that just feels misguided because the things that he’s telling us to stay away from are the things that I think are a net positive for society, and he feels are a net negative for society. I think a lot of people sort of felt that way when they read this. They were like, what is this guy talking about? It felt kind of unhinged because it felt like, but you’re talking about tearing down these things that we’ve set up to protect people.

Zoë Schiffer: It doesn’t seem to me like he’s gotten less smart. He’s obviously a very smart dude, but in my reading, it definitely feels like he’s become a little less tethered to the reality that regular people live in because he’s not going to be impacted by Meta rolling back its commitment to trust and safety and content moderation the way other people are.

Michael Calore: Okay. I think we have a pretty clear picture of his worldview, and for anybody who wants to read more, you can follow the show notes to read all of those manifestos. Clear off a couple of days on your calendar, because you will need it. Let’s take another break and we’ll come back with more Uncanny Valley. So, before we end, we have to look forward. Marc Andreessen has his thumb on the scale in Washington. What is his relationship like with the Trump administration and how is that going to change our future?

Zoë Schiffer: I think we’re still kind of seeing how it’s going to shape up. As we said at the beginning of the show, he’s a close advisor to now President Trump, and he’s really working to reshape the US government to be optimistic about tech, to be a techno-optimist, if you will. He’s focused on deregulation, specifically with crypto and AI, and efficiency, which is a huge tenet of DOGE, Elon Musk’s government project. I think on a more subtle level, although I don’t know if you could call it subtle, he’s resetting the culture so that being a rich capitalist is once again seen as a good thing, not a bad thing, except I don’t see them giving away their money this time around. What about you guys?

Lauren Goode: It is my personal opinion that Marc Andreessen is very allegedly going to have huge influence over this administration’s policies. Hot take.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Based on his unpermanent residence at Mar-a-Lago.

Michael Calore: Lauren, I agree with you because as we’ve talked about and as history has shown, his ideas definitely do shape the way that technology and business and government all work together, and I don’t see that changing, especially now that he has such a large platform.

Lauren Goode: I just think for guys like Marc Andreessen, there’s probably no amount of power, or land, or money that’s ever really enough. It’s hard to say exactly what the outcome of his influence on the current administration is going to be. We’re probably going to see a lot of pro-tech policies and regulations, or lack thereof I should say, that really support the tech industry. It feels like what a lot of these rich and powerful guys are very good at and have gotten very rich from is world building, and the world that they’re building right now is probably great for them, but like Zoe said earlier, not really applicable to the rest of us.

Michael Calore: Yeah. Our country has just rolled back a bunch of green energy initiatives and gone hard into fossil fuels again in order to create boom times for the energy industry. That’s also going to be boom times for crypto and for AI, which require a lot of computing resources. So, you can see the influence that these tech leaders, not just Marc Andreessen, but all of them who are crowding around the White House right now are having on policy, and you can see them sort of shaping the world that is going to be very beneficial towards them and their investments, to state the obvious.

Lauren Goode: Well, I don’t know, Mike. How much do you have in crypto right now? Because I got to tell you, I’m going to open my Robinhood app and look at the… Did you know that you guys can also trade the Trump coin now on Robinhood?

Michael Calore: Oh, gosh. Okay. So, here’s the real question that we need to answer. Is he ever going to unblock us?

Zoë Schiffer: No.

Lauren Goode: No. Don’t hold your breath.

Zoë Schiffer: It depends on how many positive profiles you write about his founders I think.

Michael Calore: Probably. I can say that I’ll never know because I’m not on X anymore, and I know that’s where he primarily hangs out because that’s his crowd. I hang out on the platform that he loves to make fun of, which is Bluesky. He says it’s the place where all the libs go. It’s the blue zone.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, we’re happily in our respective echo chambers now.

Lauren Goode: Yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: We won’t have to interact.

Michael Calore: And may it forever be thus. All right, that is our show for this week. Thank you for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. One more time for Mr. Marc Andreessen, that is Uncannyvalley@wired.com. Today’s show is produced by Gianna Palmer and Kyana Moghadam. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Conde Nast’s Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon.