Erin Griffith
speaker
68 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Erin Griffith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely. And it's true that Silicon Valley has historically been very liberal. And there were plenty of very well-known investors and founders who backed President Biden's campaign and then Vice President Harris. But the thing that was different this time around was that some of the most prominent and influential people in the tech industry came out in support of Donald Trump.
And this includes big name venture capitalists like David Sachs. This includes Elon Musk. And this includes a lot of other people that are very famous in the tech industry, but maybe not household names across the country. And that has a little bit of a trickle down effect where in the past it may have been taboo or absolutely unpopular.
impossible to say that you supported Trump or even that you are a Republican now. It's kind of a lot more common. You encounter it a lot more frequently, and that's a huge change. And so once Trump won the election, we've seen the industry go even further than merely expressing support for him. They're making changes to their policies and their personnel.
Over the past week, Meta, which is Facebook's parent company, said it is pulling back on fact-checking and policing disinformation on its platforms. The company's also changing its board of directors. They added Dana White, who is the CEO of USC and a big ally of Trump's, to its board. We did a whole episode about him. Yeah.
So these are all moves that align with the incoming president and his base of support. And Mark Zuckerberg even came out and said directly that he was doing this in response to what he saw as a cultural tipping point that the election represented.
It's kind of both, in a way. It's partly a result of big tech becoming such a big and powerful industry. They're maturing. They're growing up. They are just like any other industry that needs to get in good with regulators and push back against regulation that they think will hinder their growth. But at the same time, I think it's also... kind of a cultural sea change for the tech industry.
And it's being pushed forward by some of these really loud and influential voices that have just been kind of fed up with the direction that our broader culture, but also specifically tech culture, has been moving for the last 15 years. And the tech leader who maybe embodies this transformation the most is a venture capital investor named Marc Andreessen.
Yeah, so he's really a titan of Silicon Valley. He is the founder of a venture capital firm called Andreessen Horowitz that manages $44 billion. He has invested in some of the most prominent and successful companies startups to come out of Silicon Valley, you know, Pinterest, Slack, Airbnb, Coinbase. He's on the board of Facebook.
But more than that, he's kind of just like a VC thought leader who states his opinions very passionately. And the industry really follows and is influenced by what he says. He's also called himself a, quote unquote, normie Democrat for most of his life. He supported all the way going back to Bill Clinton and He supported Gore, Kerry, Obama, Hillary Clinton.
And so it was, you know, a little bit of a surprise when in 2024, he came out in support of Trump pretty loudly, donated money to the campaign. And now that Trump's about to take office, he's been kind of a key advisor in the transition. He's been spending a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago. He's been recommending people from the tech industry to work for the new administration.
For Andreessen, it starts with this concept that he calls the deal. Mark Andreessen, welcome to Honestly.
I'm really happy to have you. And he's talked about this on a number of podcasts, including Barry Weiss's and Joe Rogan's.
The deal is that you could be a successful business person and you get celebrated for your innovations or your business success. You get celebrated for making lots of money. And then at the end, you give it all away and you are further celebrated for that success.
You know, the idea sort of is you will thank us.
And you will mostly leave us alone and let us innovate.
This is kind of the philosophy that his whole career has operated by. He found success at a really young age. He was the co-founder of this iconic early internet company called Netscape. He made a lot of money and went on to be a very successful venture capital investor after that. He was thinking like, this is great. I'm doing great things for the world and the world is going to thank me for it.
His political views kind of reflected that as well. He was a big fan of Obama. He even wrote an op-ed about his choice to support him. And part of it was that he personally liked Obama. He called him smart, normal, curious, not radical, post-boomer. He was a fan. But, you know, in his view, the deal kind of started to break down toward the end of the Obama years.
There's no doubt the sharing economy is disrupting traditional businesses. A little context that's kind of helpful for understanding this, you know, in the middle of the 2010s, tech as an industry was going from this kind of quirky niche thing that was happening to an extremely powerful and bigger than ever part of our lives and our economy.
Amazon is disrupting retail. Let's look at Airbnb for one. Startups are disrupting taxis and hotels. Taxi drivers angry and frustrated that Uber and Lyft drivers are taking their business while escaping the expensive regulations taxis face. There are these major changes happening, and the tech industry is kind of ascendant. But when that happens, you know, it brings a lot of criticism, too.
Showing 1–20 of 68 · page 1 of 4
Next →