Author: Li Xiaoyin, Wall Street News
On December 13th local time, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz and billionaire, was interviewed by Free Press reporter Bari Weiss, confirming that he is working with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and sharing his feelings about working with US President-elect Trump in the interview.
Andreessen said that technological innovation is the cornerstone of U.S. economic prosperity and national security, and maintaining technological leadership is vital to the United States. The policies of the current administration (Biden administration) suppress technological innovation. Andreessen expressed appreciation for the Trump administration's technology policies.
During the interview, Andreessen stated that he was an "unpaid volunteer" for DOGE and that DOGE had two main goals: cutting spending and reducing regulation.
Andreessen also said that he has spent "probably half of his time" at Mar-a-Lago since the election and has participated in some interviews with cabinet officials, with his contributions mainly focused on the following areas: technology policy, business, the economy and national health. But he also said:
“I’m not saying I’m involved in all the decisions, but I’ve been trying to help in as many ways as I can.”
In response to a question about whether talent is hesitant to join the Trump administration because of the controversies of his last term, Andresen said he has observed the opposite trend:
“I think the flow of qualified talent from outside the system is actually stronger now.”
The core ideas are as follows:
- The current government (Biden administration) lacks understanding of the technology industry and is overly conservative and even hostile in formulating policies; while the Trump administration is supportive of technological innovation and is more friendly to the cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries.
- Under the Biden administration, the United States is in a state of "soft authoritarianism" where the government controls society through strict censorship and "debanking" (closing the bank accounts of certain individuals or businesses on the grounds of political stance). He is concerned about this kind of state power and believes that the next government should legislate to protect citizens from such behavior.
- The traditional elite class originally had a set of "protocols", that is, to pursue wealth in the business field and donate their wealth to charity after retirement, so as to wash away their "original sin" and gain social recognition. However, in recent years, this "protocol" has been broken, and the traditional elite class has lost its social status and voice.
- The elite class, which was originally composed of business oligarchs and the media, has become corrupt and is being replaced by a "new anti-elite" force. Trump's election is a manifestation of this trend. Andreessen himself is both a "rebel" member of the traditional elite class and a representative of the emerging "anti-elite" force.
- It is inevitable that there will always be "sycophants" around the power center. But he believes that the core figures of the emerging "anti-elite" forces, such as Elon Musk, can maintain independent thinking and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
- Andreessen supports a comprehensive review of government spending and regulation to improve efficiency and reduce waste.
- The tech industry is politically divided, with founders of large companies leaning left and startup founders leaning more right, but overall left-wing thinking dominates, especially in consumer-facing areas.
- Government investment and support are crucial to technological development, but the government should also avoid excessive intervention and allow the market to play its role.
- Artificial intelligence is key to future development, but Andreessen also worries that artificial intelligence may become a tool for government control and censorship in the future.
- Technological progress will inevitably change social structure and power distribution, but humans also need to think about the ethical and social issues brought about by technological development.
The following is a transcript of the conversation:
Weiss : Andreessen, welcome to the show, it's my great pleasure. I have to say, I've never seen you more animated in public in the last four weeks, I guess because Donald Trump won the election.
I think every listener wants to know, what fundamentally does Trump’s victory mean to you and to the United States?
The trend shift behind Trump's victory in the election
Andreessen : I would first say that it's morning in America, so I'm really happy. And first of all, it's not just because of Trump, but his victory is part of it, but I think there are two other things besides that.
First, there was a dramatic "right turn" in this election. Including places like California and San Francisco (Democratic strongholds), many areas have "turned red" this time. The second biggest change is the votes of young people, who are changing.
I would say these changes transcend political partisanship because the last decade has been a period of emotional darkness, and you've written a lot about this, where industries like Silicon Valley have been suppressed by soft authoritarianism, and that has had real negative effects on the tech industry across the country and the world.
So I think there's a whole generation of young people changing that's important, and I'm in venture capital, so I get all this breakdown from people in different industries about what's changing.
There are a lot of little changes that are giving hope: people are now writing a book that they never thought would actually be published; comedians are starting to tell jokes that they couldn’t tell before… These little sparks are going off everywhere, and people are basically peeking out of the frozen tundra of culture and starting to smile and play and have fun. It’s actually a sense of pride in the country.
Weiss: You have a number of people around you, I think most notably Elon Musk, who reiterated over and over again in the weeks leading up to the election that if Donald Trump doesn't win the election, if the right wing doesn't come to power, this will be the last American election. Do you agree with that?
Andreessen : To be honest I don't know, maybe I have a little more confidence in this system.
I don't think that the world we're in right now is going to be one of sudden, drastic change. You know, history is full of these incredible times, and I don't think that's the world we live in.
For example, people are ready to go out and kill in the streets at any time. This can be found in the history of the United States, the West, and the East. Now, the battlefield will move online. This is a virtual cold war rather than a physical hot war. For example, people beat each other up on X or Facebook to vent their anger.
Look, this is why I say this is kind of like soft authoritarianism, we don't live in a world with mobs, but if we lived in a world where if you said something inappropriate, you would be completely wiped out reputationally and financially, and your friends and family would lose you.
It's a very tense situation. American politics and culture will continue to be intense, a soft form of authoritarianism and repression, rather than a dramatic physical historical break. I don't think it's possible to put some meat on the bones of this soft authoritarianism, soft extreme authoritarianism that you describe.
Weiss: Why is this worldview so popular, and why has it been able to conquer so many territories and institutions so widely and effectively?
Andreessen : I think there are two reasons. One is the basic impulse, you might say the political and cultural left, which is basic, by the way, that society is inherently unfair and unequal.
Another reason is that it's a bit like a ring of power. Just like if you have the power to destroy a person, you can say he's a racist, a sexist, or accuse him of a lot of other thought crimes. We can be sure that power corrupts people.
This is the worldview that I've observed, and this worldview that we've described, operates in an authoritarian way. I've seen the effects that it has on me and the people I love. For me, I want to be as far away from that as possible.
That's why we have a middle layer of Congress and the Senate, because every experiment in direct democracy in world history has ended in disaster, and any form of democracy will have an elite class in charge of running it.
This will be a structural reality. This elite class in power is either good, beneficial, and has the best interests of the people in mind, or they are just pretending that they were just randomly voted in and that the people being in power is a myth.
Do we live in a democracy or an oligarchy in the United States, anyway? We always live in an oligarchy. Every society in history has been an oligarchy of some kind.
In that context, the November 5 election was a bit like a vote of the American public, or at least a huge rejection of the old elites, the old guard, the old oligarchy, and perhaps the introduction of a new oligarchy.
Weiss : You supported Clinton in 1996, Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, Obama in 2008, Hillary in 2016, and Donald Trump in this election.
Do you represent a shift: people who see the corruption of the old elite and decide to convert to a new anti-elite?
Andreessen : Yes. Politically, socially, culturally, I am a child of the 1990s. It was a very good time for a tech founder like me to get an education at an American university, benefit from everything from federal research funding to student loan programs, and have the opportunity to start a successful tech company.
Basically someone like me can start a company, make money through extensive press coverage, pay taxes. Then at the end of your career, you'll be left with a ton of money, and you'll give it to charity. That washes away all your sins, and you go from being a shady business tycoon to an ethical philanthropist.
Then you get invited to all the fabulous parties, you go to the World Economic Forum, you get honorary degrees from all the colleges, you sit with the New York Times editorial board.
Basically everything I've said here, over the past decade, is now considered relatively evil. Some people have greater access to economic outcomes than others, which is inherently evil. Tech companies are considered presumptively evil, tech people are considered an evil class, and anyone who is wealthy is considered evil.
There have been a lot of people over the last few years who felt like they couldn’t risk, for the sake of their companies, their financial interests, their reputation interests, even for their kids to get into the right schools, who felt like they couldn’t risk being publicly socially supportive of Trump, but who felt like they were either professionally Trump or were disappointed enough that they wouldn’t vote for Kamala.
However, on July 13, the day Trump was shot, I heard from WhatsApp groups and Signal groups privately that they were curious about Trump, but publicly, they behaved very differently. Suddenly, we started forwarding the iconic image of Trump with blood on his ear and a raised fist.
So I think even at the elite level, most people don't have these super strong specific views. If the momentum of society as a whole is going in one direction, then it's the most natural thing in the world to follow it. And then when that preference loosens, it might correlate strongly in the other direction.
Going back to the Trump assassination, it was very difficult for a man to see someone shot in the head, bleeding and not realizing the severity of the injury. And that iconic photo was amazing, it just happened to have the red, white and blue colors, with the American flag in the background. At that time, we knew he was going to get more support.
Another important thing was that Musk stood up and said, I support him, that was a big moment for the entire industry.
The current government's crackdown on the tech industry is the main reason Andreessen supports Trump
Andreessen : The Biden administration is really bad. They despise the American tech industry and want to do everything they can to destroy it as much as possible.
The current administration has an unenforceable binary of a president who seems reasonable, moderate, centrist, thoughtful and a pillar of the old democratic system. They specifically targeted us in three areas that led us to support Trump.
One is cryptocurrency, which they just declared war on and are trying to kill the entire industry and drive it overseas. The second is AI, which I was very scared about earlier this year that they were going to do the same thing to AI as they did to cryptocurrency. And then the third one seems like an esoteric topic, but I think it's very important, which is the concept of unrealized capital gains tax. Taxing private companies means basically destroying the ability of small businesses to have home ownership and tech startups through this change in the tax structure called unrealized capital gains.
We just went through that crypto war where we were on the defensive for four years. It was incredibly brutal, incredibly destructive AI. A bunch of us had a meeting in Washington in May to talk about this, and it was so scary that we basically decided we had to support Trump.
They actually said to us directly, don't start a business, don't do an AI startup, don't fund an AI startup. We're not going to allow that to happen. They're basically saying that AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government, and we're basically going to wrap them in a government cocoon. We're going to protect them from competition, we're going to control them, we're going to dominate them.
And then I was like, I don't understand how you can keep it so tightly sealed off because the principles of AI are out there, everywhere. And they said, during the Cold War, we categorized all of these areas of physics and stripped them from the research field, like whole branches of physics were basically thrown into darkness and couldn't be studied anymore. And if we decided to do that, we would do the same thing with the math under AI. And I said, I just learned two very important things, because I didn't know the former existed, and I didn't know you were going to do the same thing with the latter. So they basically said, we're going to go find out, and we're going to completely control the whole thing.
Weiss: What are the specific ideas here?
Andreessen : There are several levels to this, and I will do my best to "change the concept".
One, if you compare AI and autonomous weapons to the new things that determine the outcome of war, then these things are military-related, and they are. So you can make an analogy that during the Cold War, it was nuclear power, it was the atomic bomb, and the federal government wouldn't let startups build the atomic bomb, right? According to them, they had it down to the level of mathematics, and they controlled everything. This determined the shape of the world to a large extent.
The second part is the social control aspect, and the trial stuff, we've been going to trials with social media about how AI is fundamentally weaponized, and how governments are entangled with social media censorship, which has been one of the real scandals of the last decade. These people have been using social media trials against their political enemies. These people have been de-banking their political enemies. They basically, I think they want to do, they want to use AI in the same way.
The third is that I think this generation of Democrats, under the Biden White House, they've become very anti-capitalist, they want to go back to a more centralized, controlled, planned economy. You see that in many aspects of their policies. But frankly, I think the idea that they think outside the system has a significant role is not high on their list of priorities. They generally believe that corporations are bad, capitalism is bad, entrepreneurs are bad. They say it a thousand different ways. They demonize entrepreneurs as much as they can, and propose tax policies that will only undermine the process of private company creation and undermine venture capital.
I would say I'm cautiously optimistic that smart, moderate Democrats will realize these are unnecessary fights. It's like there's no reason to take this approach. It has nothing to do with the historical base of the party, with what people think they're voting for, with the ability to take care of the poor, with progressive social policies. It's like extreme anti-business, anti-tech hostility, and they should let it go, reestablish the historically strong connection, and move on. I hope they come to the right conclusion.
One of the things that the Biden administration has done is they're aggressively hitting Google, Amazon, and Meta on these antitrust laws. Across the political spectrum, there's growing discontent with so-called Big Tech.
Weiss: Incoming Vice President Vance supports a massive tech antitrust crackdown. Where do you agree or disagree with him? In other words, where should we rein in these big tech companies and protect consumers? Where, in your view, is this excessive?
Andreessen : So we distinguish between what we call big tech and what we call small tech. The big tech companies have been successful and have a certain degree of market power, at least people accuse them of being terrible monopolies, meaning very large market power, and that's big tech. And if you're a big tech company, you're a household name.
And then we go back to defining what we mean by small tech and small tech for startups, right? So new companies have aspirations to become big companies. It has kind of an interesting life cycle where all the small companies want to become big companies, right? What is the goal of small tech? It's going to become big tech companies, right?
So there's this cycle, and this is how the tech industry has behaved for 80 years, you have the incumbent bank tech companies, and then you have these small tech startups. Most fail, but when they succeed, they become large tech companies. And basically the cycle repeats. And the role of VCs is to fund each new generation of small tech companies, right? So you end up, basically what we end up doing, like most of our day-to-day work, is funding companies that are trying to grow to knock out the incumbent large tech companies and replace them.
I would say that over the last decade, both sides of the political spectrum have really decided that they hate big tech companies, but I would say in a lot of ways, for diametrically opposed reasons. So the left hates big tech companies for a couple of reasons. First of all, they just hate capitalism, they hate corporations, they hate external economic success. And then in a way, they blame tech for the oblivion of Trump's election, they blame tech for fueling the rise of populist right-wing politics.
This has come up in many ways over the last 10 years. But if we didn't have these big tech companies, these big social networks, we wouldn't have Trump. And, you know, therefore, these are considered evil.
I think it has to do with electoral politics, frankly, which is that the union vote has really started to shift. So I think there are some on the right who think that if they push harder in the big corporations, they'll be able to get more union votes, which, by the way, is probably true. It's like the new hue.
But I think a lot of it is anger at big tech and anger about censorship and debanking.
Weiss : Let me ask you another question about the relationship between government and technology. The government invested in the original internet, which made your career possible. They funded GPS, they loaned Tesla money to keep Tesla afloat, they funded the California public university system, which essentially provided you with employees and founders to invest in. They kind of built or at least cultivated the soil, creating a very rich environment that allowed all of these companies to grow. And now a lot of people are turning around and saying: Government out.
How do you respond to this criticism?
Andreessen : In this view, the government created the seed bed for those companies and also created the overall success of the American experiment, that whole complex of government and private action made America successful.
However, when these companies become too big and out of control, there will be problems no matter what. But in general, the success of American industry, the success of American business, the success of American technology are seen by both sides as good for the United States. This is a very sharp anti-capitalist new phenomenon.
About what the new administration will do. There's a controversy online, and a lot of people from the first Trump administration have told me that they've been through this themselves, so they couldn't get various insurances, home loans or other things after the first Trump administration, and then over the last decade, this has happened to many of their friends and allies. I would say, number one, discovering what's actually going on, what's going on in the shadows of Washington is always not easy to see from the outside, but they can now go and discover it. And then number two, if they think there's a case, they certainly have the ability to bring a lawsuit.
Andreessen plays a "volunteer" role in the new government
Weiss : Speaking of the next administration and government, some have reported that you are considering running.
Andreessen : I am an unpaid volunteer and an unpaid intern for the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Weiss: What do you think it will do?
Andreessen : There are basically two important parts. One is that they're going to do a comprehensive review of government spending and cut costs wherever they can. They have a whole theory and strategy for this. And then related to that, they're going to do the same thing with regulations. So they're basically going to do a top-to-bottom review of regulation, what we call the regulatory state and the connective tissue that they don't talk about in public, which I think is actually very important.
The president, by law, has to spend every dollar that Congress allocates, whether he thinks it's a good idea or not. But the Constitution doesn't actually say that, the Constitution says the president needs to get money from Congress, it doesn't say he has to spend it. So it's kind of a constitutional issue. It's like we've been living under a regime where a lot of things that are taken for granted may not be constitutional. So that's one of the things that I'm sure will be watched.
Weiss: Just because you're great in one area doesn't mean you're great in another. You know, like I, I think of certain people right now who are obviously really great in tech and entrepreneurship, who have the dumbest ideas about foreign policy that I've ever heard in my life. What makes you believe that this is the right role for these two men and their various unpaid interns?
Andreessen : Absolutely. I think the first question is how good do you think the experts are?
Weiss : Very bad.
Andreessen : Yeah. So, I think the American people would agree with that. Yeah, exactly. So if you can't rely on the expert class to do good things, to have good judgment or to run these things, I think it's clear now that you can't like.
Weiss: You can agree that experts are bad, but believe that you still need experts. In other words, I think the current elite is bad, but I will still be skeptical of anti-elites. Would you disagree?
Andreessen : Obviously the general point is correct. Obviously this will always be a question worth paying attention to. You could even say it has nothing to do with different types of experts. It's just that these are complex systems with huge implications for decision making.
That's how the government that we have today was constructed. The government that we have today was constructed in the 1930s, and Roosevelt just like revolutionized government. It's like a small part of the 1920s. A small part of what it became. That's the discontinuous step function. If you remember what Roosevelt did, which was widely acclaimed and felt at the time, he called on basically every bright young person in the country to raise their hands and become volunteers.
But I think there's an argument that can be made that just like you would expect Elon Musk to pick up rockets with chopsticks, you would expect him to build electric cars. So he concluded that he had to do that. I would say that Elon was involved in this long before he was officially involved in any political affairs, Elon was already a vital part of the national defense system and our allied defense system.
Weiss: I want to go back briefly to your reference to having dinner with Trump a few days before he was shot, before you endorsed him, and you said it was a wonderful dinner. Tell us about the things you heard there that comforted you, even excited you, and enthusiastic about you, and also, have you been to Lake Sea Club since the election?
Andreessen : I've been there almost half the time since the election. I'll state below that I'm not at the center of all the decisions, but I'm helping in as many ways as I can. So, I want to say up front, as we discussed, Trump stirs up a lot of emotions in a lot of people, and they have very strong opinions. I'm not Mr. Foreign Policy, Mr. Abortion Policy, Mr. Gun Policy, my opinions are around technology policy, business economics, the health of the country, the success of the country.
He was an incredible host, no matter what people think, he was an incredible host, you know, he ran his own private world. We had a lot of fun. He loved being surrounded by his friends, his family, his grandkids, the members of his various clubs, and that was a really fun way to watch him do his job, and he treated everybody the same and talked to everybody. I think that was one of his really underappreciated qualities that people didn't realize for a long time, which was that he would happily talk to visitors, like, you know, who the vice president should be, and then he would ask questions, just like he really talked to regular people a lot. There were a lot of stories about him on the campaign trail, like spending a lot of time with the police and everywhere he went and so on.
His take on us was basically: I don't know a lot about tech, but I don't need to, because you guys know a lot. You guys are supposed to build tech companies. You're the American tech companies that are supposed to win. American tech companies are supposed to be winners. We're supposed to beat China. We're supposed to export. We're supposed to make products that the world wants.
Weiss : You spend half your time in or around Lake Sea Manor, what are the types of meetings you attend, participate in, or facilitate?
Andreessen : I've been involved in the interview process for some of the officers, and the caliber of a lot of the people that I've met is very high. A lot of the job openings that have come down in the last two weeks, you know, the next level of hires, I think are very impressive people. I think the flow of talent seems to be very strong.
Weiss: Is there this widespread concern that everyone who is qualified is wary of working for Trump?
Andreessen : I think the opposite is happening, and I think the influx of qualified people from outside the system is actually much stronger now. This is all in preparation for the actual inauguration on January 20th. So we still have a long way to go, but they will certainly move quickly on Inauguration Day.
AI could become a “regulatory machine” across all systems
Weiss: One of the things I've been wanting to ask you about is this battle over AI regulation.
Andreessen : I think what’s happening is that social media has been following the arc that I described from 2013 to today as a censorship machine. AI has entered a super-accelerated version of that arc. It’s basically happening in front. It took time for social media to become a censorship machine. It’s happening with AI from the beginning. They’re going to happen with AI from the beginning because AI companies have learned from the experience of social media companies and they’re just saying, well, if we’re going to end up building a censorship machine in a decade, we might as well do it upfront.
My concern, and this goes back to censorship and political control by AI, is a thousand times more dangerous than censorship and political control by social media. Social media censorship and political control is very dangerous. But at least it's only happening when people are talking to each other and communicating. And the thing about AI is, I think AI is going to be the control layer for everything in the future, so I think AI is going to be the control layer for how the healthcare system operates. I think it's going to be the control layer for how the education system operates, it's going to be the control layer for how the government operates, so in the future, when you're dealing with a healthcare system, an education system, or a government, you're going to be dealing with an AI.
This goes directly to Elan's argument, and this is the core of this argument, that what you do is you train the AI. Like if you wanted to create the ultimate dystopian world, you would have a world where everything is controlled by an AI that is programmed to lie.
Put bluntly, technology changes society, and this goes back to the invention of fire and everything that followed. There is a long history of this, and many great books have been written about it. Technology simultaneously rearranges power and status in society, it changes the way society works. It always does this, changing the way things are done, changing society.
