Marc Andreessen on Joe Rogan
woke is killing the tech bros
If you haven’t seen The Joe Rogan Experience #2234 - Marc Andreessen, you should (podscript). Andreessen, a big-time tech venture capitalist, has some terrifying things to say about where Democrat politics and government power stand against us today.
Debanking
There’s the current rage for debanking. Andreessen thinks it comes out of Liz Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
01:33:15 What does her agency do? Whatever she wants. What does it do though? Basically, terrorize financial institutions, prevent new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks. Really? Oh yeah, 100%.
01:33:28 How so? Just terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services. Can you give me an example? Oh, you know, debanking. This is where a lot of the debanking comes from, is these agencies. So debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system…
Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there's now a category called a politically exposed person, PEP. And if you are a PEP, you are required by financial regulators to kick them off, to kick them out of your bank.
Andressen reports that his partner has been debanked. What are the targets of debanking? Pot, crypto, guns. “We've had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years.”
War on Business Startups
Andressen talks about the Democrat change on business startups since Clinton-Gore.
(02:48:44) It was very different, but also they were much more, Clinton and Gore in particular, were much more understanding that you could act, you could, so there used to be this thing I called the deal with a capital D, and the deal was, you could be, and this is what I was, you could be a tech founder, you could start a private company, you could create a tech product…
And basically what happened is the last 15 years or so (02:49:27) Democrats culminating in this administration basically broke every part of that deal for people in my world. Like every single part of that was shattered, right? Where just like technology became presumptively evil, right? And like if you're a business person, you were presumptively a bad person. (02:49:40) And then technology was presumptively had bad effects and dot, dot, dot. And then they were going to regulate you and try to kill you and quash you. And then the kicker was philanthropy became evil. And this is a real culture change in the last five years that I hope will reverse now, which is philanthropy now is a dirty word on the left because it's the private person choosing to give away the money as opposed to the government choosing a way to give the money.
Killing the Drone Industry
There’s the idea that the FAA killed the US drone industry because they decided you needed a pilot’s license to fly a drone.
(02:39:09) So legally you cannot fly a drone in the US that is beyond line of sight if you don't have a pilot's license. Wow, which means if you're a US drone manufacturer, you have to build a system that enforces that regulation.
But no problem if you are a Chinese drone manufacturer.
Sheryl Sandberg and “Lean In”
A while back tech entrepreneur Sheryl Sandberg wrote Lean In, giving advice to women on how to succeed in business.
(02:52:07) She said the women should lean in. It became a metaphor for her for women should like lean in on their careers. They should like aggressively advocate for themselves to get like raises and promotions. Like men do. Like men do… And I read the draft of the book when she was writing it and I said, well, you know, you realize (02:52:57) you've written a right wing manifesto. Right? Right? Right. Right. And she looks at me like I've lost my mind, right? Cause she's a lifelong lefty. She's like, what do you mean?
(02:53:21) And so I said, I predicted when this book comes out, the right-wingers are gonna think it's great and you're gonna get it, like the left is gonna come at you. Because you're violating the fundamental principle of the left, which is anybody who does less well (02:53:35) is a victim. Which in that case is exactly what happened. By the way, the reviews were all by women. And they tore into her, like in every major publication, they just like completely ripped her.
And they end up talking about the victim thing, Rule One: “how can you deny a victim group?”
And by the time the book came out, it was already into the second Obama term heading it, right, and (02:54:56) then the woke stuff started and then at that point you could no longer say things like that. And everything got classified through this very hard-edged, us versus them, oppressor versus oppressed mindset.
It looks to me as though the tech bros have experienced a Come to Jesus moment. Used to be they were all good Democrats. Now they are coming out of the closet, because Elon went first.
(02:37:26) Do people hide these thoughts that this administration would be bad for business? I mean much less now than we used to. Yeah. Yeah. I mean look, you know, Elon really broke a lot of... Elon did two things that really opened a lot of this up. One is he bought Twitter, which really gave us a place to talk about this stuff, all of us. But then also he himself, of course, started to actually express himself. And so he gave a lot of the rest of us permission structure to be able to say these things. And then look, it's like a cascade where people are like, OK[.]
I must say, I feel encouraged that our Silicon Valley friends are starting to say: enough already.