Tech’s Hard-Right Turn

Summary

Paul and Rich dive into Steven Levy’s cover story for WIRED’s politics issue, which examines how Silicon Valley’s biggest CEOs have embraced Trumpism. They trace the industry’s shift from its traditionally progressive, libertarian roots toward a hard-right, anti-regulation, hyper-masculine posture — with figures like Tim Cook, Jensen Huang, and Mark Zuckerberg all “bending the knee.” The conversation explores what drove this transformation and whether there’s any path back.

Rich presents a “bundt cake recipe” metaphor for understanding the ingredients that baked this political turn: (1) monopoly-scale companies desperate to avoid being broken up, (2) tech leaders whose feelings got hurt during the social justice reckoning of 2020, (3) CEO fiduciary duty that forces even reluctant executives to play ball with a transactional president, and (4) the crypto movement’s libertarian ideology that primed the industry for a right-wing alliance. Paul adds that the Biden administration’s aggressive posture toward crypto — especially after the FTX collapse — made the industry feel existentially threatened, pushing hundreds of millions into the Trump campaign.

The episode closes with both hosts expressing concern that the very innovation engine that made Silicon Valley great is now under threat — not from regulation, but from corruption and transactional politics. Rich remains cautiously optimistic about America’s self-corrective systems, while Paul worries about the severity of the current test.

Highlights

”Ethics Don’t Scale”

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“I have a little thing I say a lot which is like ethics don’t scale. But the reality is when you get to that size, you are such a nation state that anything that people think you are doing is the most evil thing you could possibly do. You’re also doing the other thing like massive.” — Paul Ford, 11:06

”These Are Nerds”

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“These are nerds. And when you tell like nerds who succeeded are still nerds and they’re still actually pretty insecure. Like Zuckerberg is still freaking awkward today.” — Paul Ford, 15:35

”The Cake Doesn’t Taste Good”

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“So much of what made American innovation and Silicon Valley what it is — this incredible explosion of value creation — designed in California, built in China. The premise for that getting created is entirely under threat.” — Rich Zottoli, 22:39

”They Were Worried Regulation Would Ruin Innovation, But What’s Going to Ruin It Is Corruption”

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“They were worried that regulation would ruin the innovation engine, but what’s going to ruin it is corruption.” — Paul Ford, 23:30

”You Can Literally Go to the White House with a Golden Loaf”

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“You can literally go to the White House with a golden loaf and they will not put 25% tariffs on your product. And the truth is that is not grounded in a value system that creates value and creates growth — it’s transactional.” — Paul Ford, 25:45

Key Points

• Steven Levy’s WIRED article (5:32) - Veteran tech journalist examines Silicon Valley’s hard turn toward Trumpism in WIRED’s politics issue, titled “Tech Went All-In, Now What?”
• Libertarian roots always existed (6:52) - Rich argues Levy underplays that the anti-regulation, libertarian streak has been in Silicon Valley from the beginning with figures like Peter Thiel
• Ingredient 1: Monopoly fear (10:50) - Tech companies reached scale where fear of antitrust action drives their political behavior
• Adobe-Figma blocked (11:54) - Biden administration blocking the acquisition struck at the heart of Silicon Valley’s exit strategy
• Ingredient 2: Cultural backlash (13:07) - During 2020, tech leaders felt vilified and judged no matter what they did, leading to an “enough is enough” reaction
• Nerds who succeeded are still nerds (15:35) - Paul’s psychologist take: billionaire tech founders are still fundamentally insecure people with no peers to process their experience
• Zuckerberg’s masculinity rebrand (16:12) - “Is The Rock on the podcast or is that Zuckerberg?” — Rich on the corny hyper-masculine pivot
• Ingredient 3: CEO fiduciary duty (17:00) - Tim Cook and Jensen Huang must protect shareholder value even if it means crawling to the White House
• Ingredient 4: Crypto ideology (18:15) - The crypto movement’s libertarian narrative of alternative markets and anti-government control seeped into mainstream Silicon Valley thinking
• VCs want to create markets (18:45) - Andreessen Horowitz went all-in on crypto because the real excitement is creating a marketplace, not just products
• Silicon Valley vs New York (19:30) - The Valley resents East Coast financial control — DC regulating them, Goldman taking their cut on IPOs
• FTX collapse colored the response (21:15) - The Bankman-Fried meltdown made the Biden administration treat crypto as fraudulent, which felt existential to the industry
• Innovation engine under threat (22:39) - The premise of “designed in California, built in China” that created Silicon Valley is entirely under threat
• Transactional politics loses the way (25:45) - When you reduce everything to transactions, you lose your value system and your way
• Bradley Tusk warning (24:00) - Hard-nosed political operative says “everything that made us what we are is under threat today”
• Hamburger Helper as economic indicator (30:00) - Sales are up because meat is getting expensive — a sign of economic strain

Mentions

Companies

• WIRED (0:28) - Published the politics issue with Steven Levy’s cover story on tech’s rightward turn
• Aboard (3:30) - Software generation platform, the hosts’ company
• Google (12:36) - Under scrutiny during Biden administration
• Adobe (11:54) - Attempted acquisition of Figma blocked by government
• Figma (11:54) - Acquisition by Adobe blocked as anti-competitive
• Andreessen Horowitz (18:45) - Went all-in on crypto, tried to create their own stock market
• Coinbase (19:30) - Mentioned in context of crypto markets
• Uber (24:00) - Client of political operative Bradley Tusk
• FanDuel (24:00) - Client of political operative Bradley Tusk
• Goldman Sachs (19:30) - Mentioned as example of East Coast financial gatekeeping

Products & Technologies

• Cryptocurrency/Blockchain (9:00) - Crypto culture as fourth ingredient in tech’s rightward turn
• FigJam (12:33) - Paul jokes Adobe should have spun it off to get the Figma deal through

People

• Steven Levy (0:36) - Tech journalist who wrote the WIRED cover story; has covered the industry for 40+ years
• Katie Drummond (0:28) - Editor of WIRED
• Donald Trump (6:10) - Central figure; transactional deal-maker who courted tech leaders
• Tim Cook (7:18) - Apple CEO “bending the knee” to protect against tariffs
• Jensen Huang (7:20) - Nvidia CEO “bending the knee”; described as “crawling like a worm”
• Mark Zuckerberg (7:25) - Said “masculinity needs to come back”; smoking meat; still “freaking awkward”
• Elon Musk (7:13) - Mentioned but set aside as obvious example
• Peter Thiel (7:06) - Valley staple with long-term hyper-libertarian ideology; author of “Zero to One”
• Marc Andreessen (13:36) - Described as looking like “the most midjourney-created human possible”
• Sam Bankman-Fried (21:15) - FTX meltdown colored Biden administration’s crypto posture
• Bradley Tusk (24:00) - Political operative who says everything that made tech great is under threat

Surprising Quotes

“Mark Andreessen, to be clear, looks like a villain. Like if I told me to draw a villain, he would look like that. He’s sort of the most LLM, like midjourney-created human possible.” — Paul Ford, 13:36

“Zuckerberg — so much money so soon. And who’s going to help him process that? Nobody. There’s nobody who has his experience. So basically the only message he has is whatever you want to be — whether it’s a new version of Julius Caesar or the world’s greatest philanthropist — go do it because it’s up to you.” — Paul Ford, 15:50

“If you go read Peter Thiel’s Zero to One book, it’s like one of the chilliest books. It’s like reading horror fiction because it’s supposed to be how to scale up a startup, but actually he’ll just occasionally drop these lines like, ‘Well, and if you look at this quadrant, China descends into cannibalism’ and then he just sort of goes on to the next thing.” — Paul Ford, 20:00

“I love this country. I was not born here. It gave me every opportunity and I’m going to have faith in its ability to ride through it and get to a better place.” — Rich Zottoli, 32:30

“An AI podcast is a politics podcast whether we want it to be or not.” — Paul Ford, 34:30

Transcript

0:00 Hi, I’m Paul Ford and I am Rich Zottoli and this is the Aboard podcast. It’s the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software and you know maybe more generally about the world of software. Today Rich, I woke up this morning and I saw a skeet I think they’re called on Blue Sky. Katie Drummond who’s the editor of WIRED was like we went all in on politics this issue and Steven Levy, truly a great tech journalist, kind of a legend, just has covered the industry for I guess 40 plus years now.

0:44 And real Silicon Valley sort of anchor just went “what is with all the fascism? Like what are you guys doing?” And so it’s a really good article and it’s a good subject. The title, thank you for asking, is “Tech Went All-In, Now What?” So let’s unpack that. You know what? First, we have to unpack that theme song.

1:31 Okay. You know, last night I got home because my piano teacher was playing a recital. He’s great. He did a good job. I mean he’s incredibly good and he is a very smooth trio. And then on Tuesday — jazz. Oh yeah. Like real avant-garde, a little Argentinian. On Tuesday, I’m going to go in and I’m going to play Air on a G-String by Bach really really slowly like a nine-year-old. So I don’t know how he gets through the day. But I was thinking about he’s been teaching probably for like 25 years. He’s taught 30,000 lessons.

2:44 So anyway, so that was nice. And I came home and my friend Pete was like literally on our porch with his dog. He sat down and he was immediately like “man you know the podcast doesn’t have enough banter, it’s missing too much marketing” so I want to start marketing our product right now and I want to just shout out to Pete. We’re going to talk about Aboard for one minute and then we will talk about the gradual overtaking of the tech industry by pseudofascist forces.

3:32 Uh, Richard, what is Aboard? Aboard is a software generation platform. You get to talk to a prompt. It asks you a bunch of really smart questions. Less technical, more substantive — what’s the product you need? And then it generates software. It’s that most mysterious thing — the product manager who can code. It’s different. It’s not vibe coding. It’s a tool that ships good, credible first cuts of software for companies, businesses, organizations, nonprofits.

4:59 What we’re doing is we’re riding the wave of what AI makes possible. We’re a little ahead of the curve but instead of pretending that humans don’t have to come back into the mix, we put them in the mix. We make sure that there are humans nearby if they need to be in the mix to get you your software.

5:20 Okay, Rich, I’m going to summarize this article in a minute. You ready? Marketing is done. Time for the substance. Steven Levy has been reporting on and really a deep analyst and thinker about the tech industry, especially the growth of the Silicon Valley tech industry for decades and decades. He is a legend in tech journalism. He has rightly identified the culture as very capitalist, free markets, libertarian, but let’s move culture forward, let’s move people forward, let’s empower humans.

6:05 Over the last couple of years he’s watched, especially adjacent to Donald Trump, as the industry has taken — I don’t want to be throwing out the word fascist, fascist is actually fuzzy with these people — but like a hard Trumpist turn away from issues around diversity or personal empowerment and into like a hard capitalist “don’t regulate us, we know what’s best for you” kind of ultraconservative move. The progressivism streak that usually existed and was part of the narrative at Silicon Valley has really receded.

6:52 To be clear and I think he underplays this a little bit in the article respectfully — that libertarian anti-regulation vibe has been there from the absolute beginning. Many of the people — your Peter Thiels and your Curtis Yarvins — these are valley staples. They just weren’t the mainstream. But now you’ve got Elon Musk, but even put him aside. You’ve got Tim Cook bending the knee and you’ve got Jensen Huang bending the knee and Mark Zuckerberg saying “I don’t really care anymore, and everybody needs to man up and I’m going to do MMA.”

7:44 And his rough thesis is that the drama of 2020 when these people just kind of got yelled at — they became sort of they stood in for capitalism. Their employees sort of turned on them. They were told that they just weren’t doing enough. And then they’re kind of in the wilderness and Trump was like, “Let’s do a deal.” And he makes you feel good. If you’re on his side, he makes you feel good. And then they kind of went all in.

8:44 I think that there’s two things missing. One is that hard libertarian streak has been there from the beginning. And two, I actually think that the culture around crypto set this turn up. And there’s a reason that Trump and crypto are strongly aligned. You just had two hyper-libertarian forces — this long-term Peter Thiel style “we should run the world, capitalism is the greatest good” and then this culture around crypto where it’s like “we should make our own markets, we know best.”

9:48 I don’t think it’s materialistic. The motivation — materialism is done for the wealthy. They can have the yacht, the second yacht. Unless the goal is to be the richest person in the world there’s nothing left for them to buy.

10:08 All right Paul, I want to bake you a cake. It’s a gold foiled stuffed gold cake. You cut open this bundt cake and gold oozes out of the center. That sounds incredibly harmful. And it’s terrible too. But here we are. Here are the ingredients to bake this cake. I think it’s a collection of things.

10:50 The first, let’s get the basics out of the way — these companies have become big enough to defend their turf as dominant players. We can argue whether they are actually monopolies in an antitrust sense but they’re huge and they’re scared of being broken up. Ethics don’t scale. When you get to that size, you are such a nation state that anything that people think you are doing is the most evil thing you could possibly do. You’re also doing the other thing massively.

11:54 Adobe made a move to acquire Figma a few years ago, and the government — under the Biden administration — stopped it as anti-competitive. You look at Silicon Valley and the idea of an acquisition not happening — that hurts. That really hurts. From VCs to investors to founders, it struck at the principle. Companies like Google which were under scrutiny during the Biden administration. These companies had reached scale and size where they were dominant. So they were starting to get nervous. That’s ingredient one — monopoly.

13:07 Number two is on a more individual personal level. As we closed out 2020 and the pandemic hits, social issues were at fever pitch. The platforms were amplifying only the loudest, most extreme positions. Everybody’s home. And people like Marc Andreessen — who to be clear looks like a villain, he’s sort of the most LLM, midjourney-created human possible — and it had gotten to a point where these people who were investors or founders or executives were in a constant state of vilification.

14:20 For these people who were like, “No matter what good deed I do, even if I talk about a donation to a foundation, I have been pegged as this successful white male billionaire.” The point was they woke up one day and they were like, “Enough.” They’re not going to get a bigger yacht. They’re going to take the mic back. “I got to be able to joke. I got to be able to compliment someone’s shoes. I have made a thousand millionaires, a few billionaires, and I can’t talk.”

15:35 Can I be a psychologist for a split second? These are nerds. Nerds who succeeded are still nerds and they’re still actually pretty insecure. Like Zuckerberg is still freaking awkward today. So much money so soon. And who’s going to help him process that? Nobody. There’s nobody who has his experience. So basically the only message he has is whatever you want to be — whether it’s a new version of Julius Caesar or the world’s greatest philanthropist — go do it because it’s up to you.

16:12 It’s corny. When he was like “masculinity needs to come back” — is The Rock on the podcast or is that Zuckerberg? It’s just corny. He was smoking meat. Remember that? It’s rough. And again, this is an ingredient. This is not the reason. When you decide that you can’t win, you’re just like, “Well, then I’ll just play a different game.”

17:00 Number three, and I hate to say it, it’s basic business 101. A CEO — if you zoom into the job description of Tim Cook, he’s got to keep the company stable, growing, improve margins, get more profits. And when he goes to the Oval Office, the market will reward everybody. When Trump says “I’m gonna do 25% tariffs on iPhones” — he’s got to go. He’s got to get on a plane and go. He’s not a politician. He has a fiduciary duty.

18:15 I’m going to toss the fourth one to you. In the Silicon Valley family is this weird skater dude called Crypto. The framing of crypto, the money at stake. I think the arguments that were made about alternative markets and alternative control and control away from government seeped into the rest of Silicon Valley. And I don’t know if we’re here without the crypto narrative.

18:45 There’s no way we’d be here. Crypto was really really attractive to Silicon Valley. People think that the function of VC is to create really amazing products. But the thing that excites Andreessen Horowitz — they went all in on crypto as far as you can go — is creating a market. You have buyers and sellers and you sit in the middle. They even created their own stock market. A classic market too. Like a NASDAQ.

19:30 There is this element where Silicon Valley hates New York City because we have all the money. We have tall buildings. Better restaurants. And we’re just better looking. In New York City we are the coolest, most diverse, best place on earth. They want to own and control the market. You got DC regulating you and New York City just like Goldman saying “Oh, we’ll take you public, but I need a little something for me.” And so “Why can’t I keep all that value?”

20:15 Then blockchain comes along. It’s decentralized. It’s got this strong libertarian vibe and it spins up a trillion dollars. Just spins it up out of cryptography. Nothing could feel better. It finally is the justification for all of your hard work. It’s the end of banks. It’s the end of fiat currency. It’s the end of government control around foreign exchange.

20:45 If you go read Peter Thiel’s Zero to One book, it’s like one of the chilliest books. It’s like reading horror fiction because it’s supposed to be how to scale up a startup, but actually he’ll just occasionally drop these lines like “if you look at this quadrant, China descends into cannibalism” and then he just sort of goes on to the next thing. And that’s just how he sees the world.

21:15 Biden shows up and starts regulating it aggressively. Nobody’s excited about crypto. And by the way, the Bankman-Fried meltdown — that made everyone pause and sit up straight like “oh wow it’s a bunch of fraudsters.” It colored the posture in that administration. He was a huge Democrat donor, so they got embarrassed. Even in its worst days, many billions were in the crypto markets and the Biden administration was essentially saying “this is all nonsense, wind it all down.”

22:10 So you have one cultural thing happening where everybody is like “you are what’s wrong with the world.” And at the same time, you have this other emerging ideology where you can spin up money out of nowhere and create the society you want. But it wasn’t an idea — it was already worth billions. And it was about to get deleted. So hundreds of millions was poured into the Trump campaign. “It’s not great, but it’s better than the other option.”

22:39 So much of what made American innovation and Silicon Valley what it is — this incredible explosion of value creation — designed in California, built in China. The premise for that getting created is entirely under threat. They were worried that regulation would ruin the innovation engine, but what’s going to ruin it is corruption.

23:30 Beyond corruption, even policies. You’re dealing with a transactional person who’s thinking about the base and the base wants no immigrants coming in. Whether you’re a line cook or a PhD in science. You cannot imagine a tech industry without a liberal immigration policy, especially around H-1Bs. He quotes Bradley Tusk who’s just this hard-nosed operative — helps Uber and FanDuel — and he’s like “everything that made us what we are is under threat today.”

25:45 You can literally go to the White House with a golden loaf and they will not put 25% tariffs on your product. And the truth is that is not grounded in a value system that creates value and creates growth. It’s transactional. When you reduce it to the transactional, you lose your way. And I think that’s what we’re in the middle of right now.

26:30 What do you think — what’s going to happen? Levy talks about this as well. “How do we get out of this?” Or maybe we don’t. I am noticing the “maybe we don’t” is getting more common out there. I think if you’re a realist, eventually these are all warning signs today but when it starts to actually break things — I’m not going to assume they’re going to wake up on the right side of the bed morally or ethically. I think the market will tank and that’s the only way.

28:00 I think the only way you get Americans to pay attention is when they go to their Betterment account or their ADP retirement. Applebee’s Friday nights are over for the family for a while. Hamburger Helper sales are up. Don’t go there. No, it’s a tell. People are doing it because meat’s more expensive.

30:30 We’re going to run this through an AI video generator and see what it comes up with. I’m an optimist, Paul. I think better days are ahead and I find that we do tend to reset ourselves. I love this country. I was not born here. It gave me every opportunity and I’m going to have faith in its ability to ride through it and get to a better place.

32:00 I don’t talk about it a lot because a lot of my very progressive friends — the default has always been to hate America. But I do love America. My father served in Korea. My brother was in the military. I love this country. It gets tested every so often. But this is a huge piece of it. They just gave a guy 50 grand in a Cava bag and he’s the guy who builds the jails for the kids. Like it’s very bad.

33:30 But I will say these self-corrective systems still exist. They are weakened. But they do still exist. An AI podcast is a politics podcast whether we want it to be or not. I don’t think there’s a separation at this point. AI is one of the giant bubble fuel things fueling a lot of this. It’s one of the nuggets of gold that people are going to fight over. They’re also just trying not to slow it down. They want to keep going real bad.

35:00 There’s an anti-regulation streak through all of it. All of it. Because it’s “mom, get out of my room.” So here we are. And I’m glad you’re optimistic. Man, I’m Lebanese. I’ve seen some things. I have a lot of faith in our ability to pull this out and to figure it out. I do think there’s a lot of smarts here. I’m really worried about us. I just hope to God we can do it without violence. Take care of each other. Talk to each other. Respect your neighbor and off we go. Go read the article. The whole WIRED issue is about politics. It rules.