Marc Andreessen on AI, Tech, Censorship, and Dining with Trump

The Free Press, Bari Weiss, December 10th, 2024

The billionaire on the left’s war on Silicon Valley, why AI censorship is “a million times more dangerous” than social media censorship, and why he’s optimistic about the future.

Democrats once seemed to have a monopoly on Silicon Valley. Perhaps you remember when Elon Musk bought Twitter and posted pictures of cabinets at the old office filled with “#StayWoke” T-shirts.

But just as the country is realigning itself along new ideological and political lines, so is the tech capital of the world. In 2024, many of the Valley’s biggest tech titans came out with their unabashed support for Donald Trump. There was, of course, Elon Musk. . . but also WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum; Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who run the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini; VCs such as Shaun Maguire, David Sacks, and Chamath Palihapitiya; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey; hedge fund manager Bill Ackman; and today’s Honestly guest, one of the world’s most influential investors and the man responsible for bringing the internet to the masses—Marc Andreessen.

Marc’s history with politics is a long one—but it was always with the Democrats. He supported Democrats including Bill Clinton in 1996, Al Gore in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and then Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But over the summer, he announced that he was going to endorse and donate to Trump. Public records show that Marc donated at least $4.5 million to pro-Trump super PACs. Why? Because he believed that the Biden administration had, as he tells us in this conversation, “seething contempt” for tech, and that this election was existential for AI, crypto, and start-ups in America.

Marc got his start as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, which is said to have launched the internet boom. He then co-founded Netscape, which became the most popular web browser in the ’90s, and sold it to AOL in 1999 for $4.2 billion.

He later became an angel investor and board member at Facebook. And in 2006, when everyone told Mark Zuckerberg to sell Facebook to Yahoo for $1 billion, Marc was the only voice saying: don’t. (Today, Facebook has a market cap of $1.4 trillion.)

He now runs a venture capital firm with Ben Horowitz, where they invest in small start-ups that they think have potential to become billion-dollar unicorns. And their track record is pretty spot-on: They invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Instagram, Instacart, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, Lyft, and Oculus—to name a few of the unicorns. (And for full disclosure: Marc and his wife Laura were small, seed investors in The Free Press.)

Marc has built a reputation as someone who can recognize “the next big thing” in tech and, more broadly, in our lives. He has been called the “chief ideologist of the Silicon Valley elite,” a “cultural tastemaker,” and even “Silicon Valley’s resident philosopher-king.”

Today, Bari and Marc discuss his reasons for supporting Trump—and the vibe shift in Silicon Valley; why he thinks we’ve been living under soft authoritarianism over the last decade and why it’s finally cracking; why he’s so confident in Elon Musk and his band of counter-elites; how President Biden tried to kill tech and control AI; why he thinks AI censorship is “a million times more dangerous” than social media censorship; why technologists are the ones to restore American greatness; what Trump serves for dinner; why Marc has spent about half his time at Mar-a-Lago since November 5; and why he thinks it’s morning in America.

Click below to listen to the podcast or watch the video, or scroll down for an edited transcript of our conversation.

Bari Weiss: I have never seen you with more of a pep in your step and more of a perma-smile on your face than I have over the last four weeks. What about Trump’s win felt so fundamentally important to you for America?

Marc Andreesen: It’s morning in America, so I’m very happy. I think the analogy for what’s happening right now is 1980—the transition from the ’70s to the ’80s and the Carter-Reagan race.

In this election, there was a dramatic shift to the right across broad swaths of the population, including in California. Even in places like San Francisco. And then the youth vote—the kids are changing. The new kids are not the same as the kids 10 years ago.

But even beyond the partisan politics of it, it feels like the last decade has been a very emotionally dark and repressive time. And Silicon Valley was on the vanguard of what you might call a soft authoritarian social revolution starting about 10 or 12 years ago. And that soft repressive authoritarianism had a real negative impact on my whole world—the tech industry, the country, and I think an entire generation of young people. It certainly feels like that’s cracked.

People are finally poking their heads out of the frozen tundra of the culture and realizing that it’s actually okay to build things, hire on merit, celebrate success, and fundamentally be proud of the country and be patriotic.

On his personal political transformation:

BW: When did you start to update your mental model of politics and what was going on in the country?

MA: I was completely shocked that Trump got nominated in 2015 and I didn’t understand it at all. I was completely shocked times 10 when he won the general election in 2016. And I felt very disoriented.

I grew up in rural Wisconsin, which is staunch Trump country, but I had lost touch with the culture and didn’t understand what was happening in that part of the world. I was a fully assimilated Californian and I no longer understood what was happening.

I spent 2015–2020 basically confused. I tried deliberately to reset my own psychology. I was just like, I need to go think about this hard, and I need to read a lot and I need to go back in history. I had to basically completely rebuild my worldview. And that took six years.

James Burnham was super helpful on these topics. He was one of the smartest political scientists, philosophers of the twentieth century on American politics. He was a full-on communist revolutionary activist and a personal friend of Leon Trotsky in the 1920s and ’30s, and then he broke from communism in the ’40s, and he went hard to the right. And he helped found the National Review with William F. Buckley.

He wrote these two books in the 1940s, when the heart of the big three-way battle between communism, fascism, and liberalism was raging in the world. One’s called The Managerial Revolution. And it basically says, these movements have real differences, but there is something in common, which he called “managerialism,” which is the establishment of an expert class. The expert technocrats, who are assumed to be able to steer society in healthy and beneficial ways, and then often lead you in very bad directions.

He wrote this other book called The Machiavellians, and he looks at politics structurally as opposed to ideologically, and one of the ideas is what he calls the “iron law of oligarchy.” Which says: Democracy is never actually a thing. There’s no actual system of democracy. Because you always end up with a small minority in charge of a large majority in basically every society in human history. And the reason is because small elites can organize and large majorities cannot.

It doesn’t matter what you think democracy should be. Any form of democracy is going to have an elite class that is going to be running things. And that elite class is either going to be good and beneficial and have the best interests of the population in mind, or it’s not. But to pretend that they’re voted in and out and that the people are in charge is just a myth.

BW: So are we living in a democracy in America or an oligarchy?

MA: An oligarchy. Every society in history has been an oligarchy.

BW: You supported Clinton in 1996, Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, Obama in 2008, Hillary in 2016, and then, of course, in this election, Donald Trump. Are you a turncoat or are you someone who saw the corruption of the old elite—the old oligarchy—and decided to switch into a new counter-elite, a new oligarchy?

MA: Both.

BW: Explain what causes someone to turn. Because only some of your class has.

MA: So there is something that was never written down, but everybody understood, which I call “The Deal.”

The Deal was that somebody like me could start a company. You can invent a new technology. In this case, web browsers and all the other things that Netscape did. We got glowing press coverage. Everybody loved us. And then you could go public. You could make a lot of money if the business worked. You would pay your taxes. Then at the end of your career, you would be left with this giant pot of money. And then you donate it to philanthropy, to good social causes. And then that squared the circle. That washes away all of your sins and reclassifies you from a sort of suspect business mogul to a virtuous philanthropist. And then that’s that. That’s the arc.

But the people in charge of all this broke The Deal in every way that you possibly can. Every single thing I just said has now been held to be presumptively evil. Technology is held to be presumptively evil. Tech companies are held to be presumptively evil. Tech people are held to be this evil class. Anybody who’s rich is evil.

The capstone for me was when I realized that philanthropy was being redefined as evil. My friend Mark Zuckerberg and his wife committed 99 percent of their ownership in Facebook to philanthropic causes. (Nonpolitical philanthropic causes, by the way. The big mission is to cure all disease in the next 100 years.) And they just got hammered with criticism and attacks. The line of argument was they’re just slimy rich people, and they’re only doing it for the tax break.

What I realized is there’s this real sentiment now that philanthropy is evil because the morally correct thing to do is for the government to do all this. The government should take the money, and then the government should allocate the money. And that’s a level of statism, bordering on communism, that has unfortunately infected the culture right now.

On the big reason that made him endorse Trump—tech policy:

MA: When we endorsed Trump, we only did so on the basis of tech policy. You have this incredible dichotomy between what seems like a reasonable, moderate, centrist, thoughtful president who’s been a senator forever and pillar of the old Democratic establishment. And then you have this radicalized set of policies with this young staff that is out for blood on all these different fronts.

They adopted these very radical positions on tech, aimed squarely at damaging us as much as they possibly could. One was crypto, where they declared war and tried to kill the entire industry and drive it offshore.

Number two was AI, where I became very scared earlier this year that they were going to do the same thing to AI that they did to crypto. We had meetings in D.C. in May where we talked to them about this and the meetings were absolutely horrifying and we came out basically deciding we had to endorse Trump.

BW: Add a little color to “absolutely horrifying.” What did you hear in those meetings?

MA: They said, AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a start-up thing. They actually said flat out to us, “Don’t do AI start-ups. Don’t fund AI start-ups.” They’re not going to be allowed to exist. There’s no point. They said, “AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. And we’re going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We’re going to protect them from competition. We’re going to control them and we’re going to dictate what they do.”

And then I said, “I don’t understand how you’re going to lock this down so much because the math for AI is out there and it’s being taught everywhere.”

And they said, “Well, during the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn’t proceed. And that if we decide we need to, we’re gonna do the same thing to the math underneath AI.”

BW: Wow. What was their argument? Why were they doing that?

MA: This gets into all these debates around AI safety and AI policy. I’ll do my best to steelman it. The extent that this stuff is relevant to the military, which it is, if you draw an analogy between AI and autonomous weapons being the new thing that’s going to determine who wins and loses wars, in the Cold War that was nuclear energy, nuclear power, and the atomic bomb.

The federal government didn’t let start-ups go out and build atomic bombs. You had the Manhattan Project and everything was classified. And at least according to them, they classified down to the level of actual mathematics.

Part two is there’s the social control aspect to it.

Which is where the censorship stuff comes right back and is the exact same dynamic we’ve had with social media censorship. That is happening at hyper speed in AI.

I think the third is that this generation of Democrats, the ones in the White House under Biden, became very anti-capitalist. They wanted to go back to much more of a centralized, controlled, planned economy. And they think companies are bad and capitalism is bad, and entrepreneurs are bad.

I don’t think there’s been an administration this radical on economic and tech policy, like, ever. Communists a hundred years ago loved technology. They loved industrialization. Communists a hundred years ago wanted industrialization because they knew that industrialization and technological advance made everybody’s lives better. They just wanted to seize it all once it was built. These people didn’t even want it to get built.

On the vibe shift in Silicon Valley:

BW: On July 13, the day Trump got shot, I remember scrolling through X and seeing all of these people suddenly reposting this iconic image of Trump, bloodied on his ear with the raised fist, endorsing him. Explain to me the preference cascade that we saw on that day. How much was going on just beneath the surface over the past few years of people who felt that they couldn’t risk socially going public with their Trump support, but felt either pro-Trump or disenchanted enough that they weren’t gonna vote for Kamala? And were you surprised by what you saw in the mass coming out of the closet on the thirteenth?

MA: The easy version of the story is there were some number of true believers on the blue side, and then there were some number of true believers on the red side. But the true believers on the red side were lying in public about what they believe because of the threat of social sanction and career obliteration and losing their friends and family and everything else.

I think there’s a darker truth though, which is that I think there are a lot of people who just don’t have strong beliefs. They may think they do, but they’re basically just in a social context where everybody around them either believes the same thing or is saying that they believe the same thing. I think a lot of people just didn’t have to put a lot of thought into it.

Even in the elite classes, most people don’t have these superstrong concrete views. And so if the entire momentum of society is heading in one direction, it’s just the most natural thing in the world to go along with it. And then when this preference unwind happens, and the cascade tilts in the other direction, then it may cascade hard.

So Trump getting shot—by the way, there may be a gender thing here, but I think it was hard for any man to see somebody get shot in the head, bleeding, not knowing how badly he’s been injured, the shots are still coming in, the Secret Service comes in, shoves you to the ground, is dragging you off the stage, and your response is to break free of the Secret Service and stand up and expose yourself to ongoing gunfire, with literally people being shot in the bleachers right behind you, and to actually expose yourself to that level of physical danger and put your fist up in the air and say, “Fight, fight, fight.” We don’t see physical bravery like that. I’m sure you see it in wartime. But we don’t see that in our lives.

So I think it was one of those positively shocking moments. If we’re not going to stand up for that, what are we all doing? And so I think that definitely made a big impact.

Of course, that’s also the moment when Elon stepped up and said, yep, I’m for him. And that was the big moment in our industry where the most important iconic figure in tech, by far, did that. And so that was the real shift.

BW: This is part of the bigger political realignment, but I wonder if that’s a bit overstated, because the average worker at Meta or Google, I imagine, has not changed their mind post–November 5. These are still extraordinarily progressive people who are dominating the biggest behemoths in the tech industry, right?

MA: Yeah. Silicon Valley, my entire career—I got here in the ’90s—is overwhelmingly just straight-up Democrat. And you see that if you look at the voting and the donations. You have companies where literally the donations are like 99 to 1. If you took the top 200 executives at these big companies, that’s roughly how it would break down. There are big tech companies where for 10 years, I’d bet there has not been a single out Republican.

Silicon Valley is a progressive bubble in the same way that New York and Manhattan and Washington, D.C., are. Overwhelmingly, the elites in Silicon Valley and California are still exactly where they were. They haven’t changed. The vast majority of the CEOs, executives, founders of the big tech companies are still exactly where they were. The vast majority of the employee base is still very left-wing.

But you also, at this moment, have a bunch of people who are pretty clearly evolving their views.

All of a sudden, there’s safety. There’s an unwind in the other direction. You have this elite monoculture that’s very comfortably in power. And then you have this counter-elite that is, starting with Elon, now coming in on top.

And at some point, the counter-elite becomes even better, even more accomplished, even higher-status elites, and they come in and say, this is not right. This is not how this should work. This has gone corrupt.

On the counter-elite avoiding the same fate as the old elite:

BW: How does that group of counter-elite avoid the same dittohead behavior of the prior elite? I’m sure you’ve noticed, there’s such sycophantic behavior going on right now toward particular members at the vanguard of that counter-elite. Of people just really brownnosing and trying to get in good. . . 

MA: There has been so much brownnosing in the other direction for my entire life!

BW: But how do you not replicate the same mirror image behavior on the other side, or is that unavoidable? Who in their right mind would criticize Elon Musk right now? How do you create an anti-fragile counter-elite?

MA: I think part of the answer is you don’t. There’s now a universe of power. Do you know what happens when people get around power or they think they can get proximity to power? There’s always a court. There’s always a king. There’s always a power center. And people are always going to try to get to it. That’s a permanent state of affairs.

I think my main reaction to what you’re asking is that it’s still so strong in the other direction. It’s still the case that 90-plus percent of the people in tech, Fortune 500, universities, experts, bureaucrats, are on the other side. D.C. voted 93–6 Harris versus Trump.

By the way, billionaires overwhelmingly went for Harris over Trump, too—like 100 to 1. So I’m not worried about that right now.

On Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy running DOGE:

BW: Just because you’re brilliant in one area doesn’t mean you’re brilliant in another. What makes you confident that this is the right role for these two men and their various unpaid interns?

MA: Well, I mean, how good do you think the experts are?

BW: Bad. But just to push back: You can agree that the experts are bad, but believe that you still need experts. In other words, I think the current elite is bad, but I’m still going to be skeptical of the counter-elite. Do you disagree with that?

MA: Well, obviously the point in general terms is correct.

BW: You can agree Fauci abused his power and still believe that we need public health officials that deserve our trust. And that we don’t want to live in a country where there is no coherent public health authority, right?

MA: One hundred percent.

BW: And I think there’s an argument to be made that you want Elon Musk building electric cars. But do we want him meeting with foreign leaders of adversary nations and freelancing on that front? It seems like a boundaryless situation right now.

MA: Well, I’m not speaking for Elon, but Elon decided that he had to do this because if not, he wasn’t going to be able to launch rockets. What was happening was the FAA was trying to prevent him from launching rockets. And it was taking longer to get the paperwork approved to launch a rocket than it was taking to build the rocket. That clearly should not be the case. And so he concluded that he had to do it.

Before any of the political stuff, Elon was already an integral part of both the national defense system and the allied defense system. The Ukrainian military runs on Starlink. Starlink is the only communication system that the Ukrainian military can run on. And by the way, SpaceX has been in a pitched battle with the Russian cybersecurity offensive operators who keep trying to take Starlink down precisely because it’s what the Ukrainian military is running on.

He’s been a vendor to the U.S. national security state for a very long time. So he was already in the middle of it. He’s just in the middle of it in a more direct way now.

On advising Trump and the incoming administration:

BW: Have you been down to Mar-a-Lago since the election?

MA: A fair amount, yeah. I’ve spent maybe half of my time down there since the election. In and around there. I’m not claiming to be in the middle of all the decision-making, but I’ve been trying to help in as many ways as I can.

Everybody says this who meets with him, but Trump is an incredible host. He treats everybody the same and he talks to everybody. This is one of his real unappreciated strengths. He will happily talk to distinguished visitors about who the vice president should be, and then he’ll ask the caddy. And it’s been painted in a negative way, but there’s a real strength to it—he really talks to regular people a lot. And so he’s in that mode all the time—talking to everybody.

His thing with us basically was that he said, “I just want America to win. I don’t know much about tech, but I don’t need to because you guys know a lot about it. You guys should go build tech companies. American tech companies should be the winning companies. We should beat China. Our economy should be growing a lot faster. We should be creating a lot more jobs. Everybody in America who wants a good job should have one. And that will be the result of American companies succeeding. And I want America to win.” And so most of the discussion was just around that.

BW: Feels like a honeymoon stage right now. How do you anticipate Donald Trump or the Trump administration breaking your heart?

MA: The American government is complicated and things are going to happen that I cannot predict. But what we had in the last four years could not continue.

On witnessing tech’s slide into censorship:

MA: One side went super hardcore on censorship over the last 15 years. I saw it happen right up front. I was in the meeting at Facebook where we defined the terms hate speech and misinformation for the first time.

BW: When was that, and why was it defined?

MA: In 2013. Let me back up all the way. No social media company can function without having some level of censorship. And the reason is because of terrorist recruitment, incitement to violence, child pornography, frauds, and scams, and you cannot have those things. They’re illegal. They’re not covered under the First Amendment.

So you’re always going to need some censorship function. These companies all had functions to do that. And from there, it’s like, okay, well, you can’t have the n-word. All right, fair enough. But then it’s straight down the slippery slope, and before you know it, you’re censoring the claims that Covid was a lab leak.

So I was in the meetings at a bunch of these companies, including Facebook, where we need to define hate speech. We need to define misinformation.

And hate speech gets defined as statements that make people uncomfortable. And, of course, my immediate objection is, “Well, the concept of hate speech makes me uncomfortable!”

BW: Did you say that in the meeting?

MA: Of course I did. Obviously, this is going to get blown completely out of proportion, because this could now apply to everybody. We are now going to empower a commissar class of professional activists who are going to be able to apply this to fight all their political battles. And in America, the way we experience politics is as moral issues. We heard this at these companies starting around this time: “This isn’t a political issue. This is a moral issue.”

And the minute you have a moral trump card and then the ability to censor people based on morality, of course it’s going to get used for everything under the sun.

On hyper-accelerated censorship in AI:

MA: Social media went on this arc that I’ve described from 2013 to today where it became a censorship machine. AI has gone on a hyper-accelerated version of that arc. It took time for social media to become a censorship machine. It happened with AI right from the beginning.

BW: Are you saying it’s intentional or it’s just learning off of information?

MA: At these big companies, there’s been absolute intentionality. That’s how you get black George Washington at Google. Because there’s an override in the system that basically says, everybody has to be black. Boom.

There are large sets of people in these companies that determine these policies and write them down and encode them into these systems. So overwhelmingly, what people experience is intentional. There’s just no question about that. These companies were born woke. They were born as censorship machines.

My concern is that the censorship and political control of AI is a thousand times more dangerous than censorship and political control of social media—maybe a million times more dangerous. Social media censorship and political control is very dangerous, but at least it’s only people talking to each other and communicating.

The thing with AI is I think AI is going to be the control layer for everything in the future—how the healthcare system works, how the education system works, how the government works.

So if that AI is woke, biased, censored, politically controlled, you are in a hyper-Orwellian, China-style, social credit system nightmare. This hasn’t rolled all the way out yet because AI is still new and it’s not in charge yet. But this is where things are headed.

It’s vitally important that this does not happen. My hope is that the culture changes and this all gets peeled back and thrown out into the sunlight and people come to understand this and don’t stand for it. But this has to be fought. This will happen by default unless people fight it.

On despair, hope, and sparks from the future:

BW: The first ever piece I wrote for The Free Press was called “The Great Unraveling.” It was about whether or not I would be able to build a new journalistic institution at the height of what felt like this soft totalitarianism that had certainly been enforced in the press. And in it, I reference a bigwig in Silicon Valley, which is you. And I basically say to you, how is it possible to build something new that isn’t vulnerable to being purged or compromised or otherwise demolished by the forces of Facebook and Twitter and Apple and Google and Amazon? And the thing you texted back to me was “used mimeograph machines.”

At the time, you were also urging people to buy hard copies of encyclopedias and books we cared about, not on the assumption that it’s very nice to have a library, but on the assumption that online, they were all going to get reedited to suit the political tastes of wokeness.

On the one hand, that’s a very bleak diagnosis. You’re basically saying that building on the internet would mean submitting to this kind of political ideology and bending a knee to it. And yet, you’re the guy that wrote the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, this 5,000-word essay, arguing that technological progress is the key to solving humanity’s greatest challenges from poverty to climate change, and that we should prioritize it at all costs.

Which is it? Some days it seems like you wake up on one side of the bed and take what people on the internet call the black pill, the pill of nihilism and despair. And other days you wake up and it’s hope, it’s “All good things lie ahead.” And I’m sure in your mind these things are not an obvious contradiction, but maybe somehow fit together. So I’d love it if you can explain how they fit together.

MA: I felt everything got increasingly repressive from 2013 through 2022. And it feels like in the last two years, a countermovement has been building, culminating in this election. It feels like a new spirit is alive, at least right now, which I hope will continue.

Part of what I feel is just my exposure to kids. My day job is meeting with really sharp 22-year-olds. These are kids who got the full blast of woke for 12 years straight. And I’ve started to see this new generation of kids coming out and they’re just not having it anymore.

I have a friend who has a teenage son who’s 15 going on 16. He’s a wonderful kid. His father is Jewish and his mom is Japanese. And so he is just screwed. Imagine him applying for college. He has every possible strike against him. And every day at school is just constant: “You’re an evil person.” And his reaction to that is he has read every piece of dissident right-wing literature out there. He’s just not having it. He’s leaving that world behind. He’s gonna build his own world. And I don’t know what he’s gonna do, but he’s gonna build something amazing. And there are a lot of kids like him. And so I started meeting kids like that in this period, and you could kind of feel people getting exhausted.

That’s the white pill, which is that the time has come for a very different outlook.

BW: But the used mimeograph machine still feels relevant. . . 

MA: Yeah, that’s right. The big institutions are still fully under control. And Elon demonstrated how hard it is to break them out of control, which is what he did at Twitter, which nobody else has done. So that illustrates the level of control that these things are under. The mimeograph thing was always half a joke, half serious. But the censorship machine continues to run. Is the machine going to unwind or not? I don’t know.

But again, there have been these little sparks. I’ll give you one little spark. The Covid lab leak hypothesis was “misinformation” and broadly censored on social media. But there was a moment where all of a sudden you were allowed to talk about that. And it was the moment when Jon Stewart went on the Colbert show, and he did this eight- minute segment where he pointed out that it literally cannot be a coincidence that you have the Wuhan Institute of viral bat viruses—

BW: I remember it well—

MA: Anyway, the point is, I was in a discussion at one of the big internet companies, where the discussion was like, “Did you see the Jon Stewart thing? Ha ha. That was really funny. Okay. I guess we should stop censoring the lab leak theory now. Ha ha.” And literally, they stop censoring it that day.

BW: Is that supposed to make me feel good?

MA: Well, on the one hand, you’re horrified. You’re in your mimeograph machine territory because you’re like, my God, they were censoring it up until that point. On the other hand, the minute it became socially permissible to not have it be censored, which is the one really amazing thing Jon Stewart has done in the last decade, all of a sudden it’s a spark from the future. All of a sudden it’s de-censoring.

If the cultural shift continues, then maybe things really loosen up.

On “techno-optimism”:

BW: You probably love tech more than any other person I’ve ever spoken to in my life. What are your blind spots? Because I think that tech and progress devoid or unmoored from a deeper moral worldview, or maybe you want to call that God, can quickly sort of devolve into what I think of as idol worship. A worship of intelligence in a way that I think can dip into something very scary. How do you think about that problem?

MA: Technology changes society. It always has, and this goes all the way back to everything from the invention of fire. Technology reorders power and status in society and changes how society operates.

There are two critiques of technology that kind of flow from that observation. One is what I would call the left-wing critique, which is interesting for a little bit and then rapidly becomes uninteresting. And that’s basically that technology drives inequality, inequality is bad, therefore the need for communism. It’s an economic power, zero-sum, communist, neo-Marxist kind of argument.

And then there’s what I would call the right-wing critiques of technology. I think yours was an example of that. What the right-wing critiques all have in common is they all get to fundamental questions of the human spirit and humanity and tradition and social organization and cultural change and losing important things. And I find those critiques much more interesting. And quite frankly, they’re harder to answer.

I think they’re very valid critiques. My claim that I wrote in my manifesto is that these are all important and valid questions, but I don’t know that they ever get solved. And are we likely to do a better job figuring those things out in a world in which we have higher levels of material prosperity or lower levels of material prosperity? The problem with the Luddite argument is you’re deliberately pulling yourself back from economic growth, from growth of standards of living, material prosperity. So now we’re in a better position to answer deep questions of the human soul because we’re poorer? I think that’s unlikely to be the case.

I would be more optimistic that as we get to higher levels of material welfare, we actually have more time and a larger opportunity to address these deeper underlying questions. And so that’s the claim I would make.

Lightning round with Marc Andreessen:

BW: Best thing about the creation of the internet?

MA: The explosion of culture. Creativity.

BW: Worst thing about the creation of the internet?

MA: The extent to which it drives monoculture and groupthink, but I think that’s not the main thing that it does.

BW: Best bet that you’ve made as a VC?

MA: I will not know for 30 years.

BW: You have fuck-you money, Marc Andreessen. How are you spending it?

MA: You don’t, nobody actually has that because you end up responsible for other people. So the concept doesn’t work. But how do I spend money? Mostly to buy time.

BW: Elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter. Was that a good use of funds?

MA: Well, we’re in it. We’re part of the syndicate. And I would say we have confidence that in the long run, that will prove to be a great investment.

BW: Do you think that his decision to buy Twitter determined the election in some key way?

MA: Probably, yeah.

BW: Can California be saved?

MA: It’s up to California.

BW: Signal or WhatsApp?

MA: Equal opportunity, both.

BW: Is there any Democrat you would vote for?

MA: Sure, I voted for many Democrats. A current favorite is Ritchie Torres, who I think is a new leader of his party.

BW: Do you believe in God?

MA: I’m not sure.

BW: What did Trump serve at dinner at Bedminster?

MA: He said, “What do you guys want to eat?” And I’m like, “Meat.” And so he literally ordered every meat dish. By the way, he ordered every meat dish and nothing else.

BW: There were no sides?

MA: There were no sides. It was all meat and it was glorious.

BW: Were there drinks or no alcohol?

MA: There was Diet Coke. He mainlines Diet Coke and I was mainlining it right next to him.

BW: Who do you think the Democrats will run in 2028?

MA: I hope it’s a Ritchie Torres or somebody like that.

BW: In 1996, Ben Horowitz, your business partner, criticized an interview you gave, and you quipped back this: “Next time do the fucking interview yourself, fuck you.” But the relationship endured, and you guys are still running the company together. What’s your advice for partnerships in business?

MA: Find somebody who can tolerate a lot of your bullshit.

BW: Your son is now eight years old. He’s too young, arguably, to be on social media. But will you let him when he’s older?

MA: To be decided. Having said that, there is so much that he is already learning from online resources. You have to, I think, have a very nuanced view of this.

BW: What’s something you believe that most people disagree with?

MA: There’s tremendous reason for optimism. America’s best days are ahead of us. The world is going to get much better. Kids coming out of school now are much sharper and more capable than my generation. There is no reason that this can’t be a golden age.