But as a CEO, you can’t fire 80 percent of your team. By the way, you have to hire people to replace them. And people at other companies are doing the same. And you can’t hire kids out of college because that’s just going to create more activists. So these companies were captured.
Dowthat: All of this is happening in the lead up to 2016, when Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, but I’m going to treat this as a definitive break in whatever the next phase of Silicon Valley ideology is. . But in 2016, the Democratic Party as an organization actually began to put sustained pressure on Silicon Valley. What you’re describing with radicalized employees is pressure, but it doesn’t involve Washington DC. It is only after the election that Silicon Valley is held responsible, through Facebook, through social media, through Russian disinformation, and through the acceptance of disinformation to get Trump elected. It is at this point that Democrats in Washington begin to put pressure on technology companies. Do you think that’s fair?
Andreessen: That’s 100 percent true. That’s completely correct. Let’s just say that I looked at the portrayals from 2013 to 2016, and when the main Democratic machine sprung into action and decided that we were to blame for Trump, we had to look at basically everything except Peter. The overwhelming response was exactly like this: yes. You got us. we are guilty. we did it. ”You know, because it’s like wall-to-wall coverage on the news. I read the New York Times every day and I watch MSNBC every night and I’m thinking, “Oh my God, what have we done?”
Douzat: Are you watching MSNBC every night at that point, Mark?
Andreessen: Yes, every night. Brian Williams. The last honest newscaster left in America. Someone you can really trust, someone you can really trust to tell you the truth. Here every night at 11 o’clock or 8 o’clock, it was like, “It’s day 167 of Trump’s presidential interregnum, with Russian spies in the White House.”
And it was just an hour of “The World Ends.”
Douzat: But there were no companies to invest in?
