Fuck that guy.
He could have just saved himself a lot of keystrokes by typing, “I jumped ship because my personal greed outweighs my love for my country.”
Here is what he said later in the interview (about the Biden Administration):
“…
Then they just came after crypto. Absolutely tried to kill us.
They just ran this incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto. Then they were ramping up a similar campaign to try to kill A.I. That’s really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics. The crypto attack was so weird that we didn’t know what to make of it. We were just hoping it would pass, which it didn’t. But it was when they threatened to do the same thing to A.I. that we realized we had to get involved in politics. Then we were up against what looked like the absolutely terrifying prospect of a second term.
Douthat: Just to zero in: When you say, “kill A.I.,” what does that mean? Because the Biden administration obviously would not say that it intends to kill A.I. It would say that it wants to make America the world leader in A.I. while regulating it in a way that prevents our enemies around the world from obtaining potentially world-altering technology.
That would be the narrative, right? So why is that wrong?
Andreessen: [Laughs.] What you just said would be great compared to what we actually got. So again, the precondition we got with crypto was to just flat out try to kill it. This whole debanking thing — they just debanked an entire generation of founders.
They debank their families. They really destroyed people’s lives. They just killed companies left, right and center, just debanking, destroying companies.
They did regulation through enforcement. They would never define what the rules were. They would just arbitrarily sue people when they didn’t think they could sue people and win, then they’d issue these things called Wells notices, which is basically a public announcement that the government is going to sue you in the future, which is basically a death sentence for a company, right?
So we saw this exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power levied against crypto. Basically we saw the beginnings of what we thought was going to be applied to A.I.
So A.I. needs to be very carefully controlled by the government or by adjuncts of the government to make sure that there’s no hate speech or misinformation, which is to say it has to be completely politically controlled. We were trying to keep our heads down, just trying to build start-ups. Then Ben and I went to Washington in May of 2024. We couldn’t meet with Biden because, as it turns out, at the time, nobody could meet with Biden.
We were able to meet with senior staff. So we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core.
We basically relayed our concerns about A.I., and their response to us was, “Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet — those days are over. That’s not happening.”
We were shocked that it was even worse than we thought. We said, “Well, that seems really radical.” We said, “Honestly, we don’t understand how you’re going to control and ban open-source A.I., because it’s just math and code on the internet. How are you possibly going to control it?” And the response was, “We classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War. If we need to do that for math or A.I. going forward, we’ll do that, too.”
Douthat: But that is a national security argument. That is an argument about China, right?
Andreessen: Yeah, but national security is also the death of democracy. Maybe I’ll give the devil his due here. I believe, in their view, they really think they’re defending democracy. I mean, they’re trying to strangle it to death in the name of defending it, but I think they literally believe it when they say Trump is Hitler. …”
maxread.substack.com
” liberals out there, especially when it comes to messaging and politics.