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.
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Appearances
And the tech industry was not used to being criticized about privacy, about labor practices. They really didn't like it. And so one moment that really encapsulates that for him — is something that happened in 2015 with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, when they announced that they were going to donate most of their net worth to charity.
And in fact, this is, you know, political.
But instead of getting the praise and adoration that they expected, they actually got a lot of criticism for the structure that they chose to give the money away in, the way that they were doing it. People were kind of picking it apart.
To Andreessen and his telling, this really kind of encapsulated for him the beginning of his shift in perspective on basically everything.
Exactly. He has kind of described this as a little bit of a journey of him asking himself, like, what's happening here? And that was really compounded by the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
He talked about how it really took him by surprise and he realized he didn't understand what was happening in the country and he needed to go on his own kind of political awakening and figure out what was driving this.
Well, you know, after the 2016 election, the tech companies came under a lot of scrutiny from both sides. And so kind of while he's doing this inquiry, he's trying to kind of learn about what's actually going on in America. We have these allegations made by U.S. intelligence that Russia had basically hijacked platforms like Facebook and used them to meddle in the U.S. election.
So Andreessen has a front row seat to this. He's on Facebook's board.
And he felt like it didn't add up and that people were just scapegoating the tech companies.
Ultimately, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia did interfere by using social media platforms. And Facebook set up an oversight board to start monitoring this stuff.
Andreessen is still a little bit concerned about the direction that things are going. He views it as a slippery slope that, you know, tracking things like hate speech, moderating things is a road to censorship. And so he kind of concludes that the oversight is going a little bit too far.
And then Joe Biden gets elected, which in his mind accelerates all the problems that he saw already unfolding in the tech industry. How so? Well, especially during the pandemic, the Biden administration put a lot of pressure on Facebook to suppress things like the lab leak theory of how COVID started.
At one point, Biden accused the social media platforms of killing people by allowing disinformation on the vaccines to flourish.
Yeah. And just to add a little bit of context, Democrats have historically had a very tight relationship with the tech industry, and Joe Biden did not. And, you know, among the first things that Biden does is he appoints two people that the tech industry really does not like to key regulatory roles. That's Lena Kahn as the head of FTC, Gary Gensler at the SEC, and
You know, they're going after big tech for antitrust. That hurts mergers and acquisitions and the ability of some of Andreessen's portfolio companies to get bought. Gary Gensler is going after the crypto industry, and that hurts a lot of the companies that Andreessen Horowitz has invested in. They're one of the biggest crypto investors.
And so the Biden administration really takes this kind of antagonistic view toward tech. And a lot of people in the tech industry bristled at that.
Absolutely. And this all sort of culminates in this meeting that happened last May. Andreessen and a lot of other tech people met with Biden's people to talk about AI. And he basically comes away with the view that the Democrats are not just trying to control speech, but they're trying to control Silicon Valley. They're trying to control technology.
According to Andreessen, Biden's people basically came in and took a very antagonistic view of AI and how to regulate it.
They essentially said AI is going to be controlled by the government. Don't fund AI startups. This is his characterization. Other people who were there, including Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, disputes that characterization, says maybe it's a little exaggerated.
The overall takeaway from Andreessen was that this is going to be a hostile fight between government regulators who want to clamp down on the technology that he and the companies that he invests in want to build.
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