Silicon Valley used to sell itself as the future. Today it often feels more like a funhouse mirror of the culture — loud, aggrieved, addicted to posting, increasingly divorced from any notion of social purpose. 

Billionaires trade memes, apps turn daily life into a casino, and venture capitalists treat cultural combat as a substitute for vision. Few figures capture that transformation better than Marc Andreessen — not because he caused it, but because he mirrors it with uncanny precision.

In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, Jeremiah Johnson, co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism and author of the Infinite Scroll podcast, begins by exploring how Andreessen — once a champion of world-improving innovation — became the avatar of a tech culture defined by irony, cynicism, and compulsive online performance. 

Johnson argues that real power in technology no longer lies with the mythic founder but with the venture capitalists who decide what gets built. Increasingly, those decisions reflect the sensibilities of people who spend more time in algorithmic combat than in sober reflection about the world they’re shaping.

From there, the conversation broadens: the collapse of the old hacker ethos; the rise of frictionless gambling across crypto, sports betting, and stock trading; and the way posting — pure attention-seeking — has become the strongest drug in American life, warping even the behavior of the most powerful. The result is a tech economy building bot farms, wagering platforms, and rage-bait startups while dismissing basic ethical questions as mere scolding.

Johnson also traces how social media and the smartphone rewired global politics, making populism less about ideology and more about the architecture of our attention. 

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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:15] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Sheckman. In an age where technology shapes every aspect of our lives, we should be asking ourselves fundamental questions about what we’re building and why. The promise of innovation has always been progress, but progress toward what? We celebrate founders as the heroes of Silicon Valley, the visionaries, the disruptors, the agents of change. But this misses where the real power lies. Venture capitalists decide what gets built. No money, no founders. No funding, no future. From the Kleiner Perkins era through Sequoia to today’s Andreessen Horowitz dominance, VCs have defined both the best and the worst of technology. Yet they’ve traditionally escaped the scrutiny that founders receive. Marc Andreessen may be the most visible venture capitalist of our era, and lately he’s become emblematic of something troubling. When the Pope posted a mild suggestion that technology developers should consider ethics and morality, Andreessen responded not with engagement, but with mockery. The same mocking meme posted dozens of times until he deleted everything in shame. It’s a small moment, but revealing, because when you look at what Andreessen Horowitz actually funds, the defensive reaction makes sense. Covert, which lets you gamble on your credit card charges. Cheddar, billing itself as the TikTok of sports wagering. Doublespeed, which promises you can never pay a human again by controlling thousands of AI bots. Cluly, which just raised $15 million to help people cheat on anything. Tests, interviews, blind dates, etc. This is the portfolio of someone who wrote an essay called It’s Time to Build, yet seems primarily interested in building casinos, bot farms, and technologies that undermine human trust. Andreessen champions growth and abundance, while personally appealing to his local government to block housing construction. He supports Donald Trump despite Trump’s policies killing American manufacturing and slashing scientific research, not for economic reasons, but cultural ones. He’s tired of being lectured, and in that exhaustion with progressive moralizing, he’s embraced a reflexive anti-moralism. Anything that pisses off the right people must be good. Consequences be damned. My guest, Jeremiah Johnson, has been tracking this drift. As co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism and host of their podcast, he’s carved out a unique position in our political discourse, advocating for growth, abundance, and technological optimism while refusing to abandon questions of purpose and morality. His recent piece on Andreessen crystallizes a troubling paradox. He should be on the same team as these tech leaders. He wants more building, more innovation, more abundance. But he can’t pretend that building casinos is the same as building vaccines, that controlling bot armies serves human flourishing, or that mocking calls for ethical consideration is somehow a defense of progress. Today we explore this era of capital power, why the tech world has embraced a particular brand of politics, why and how Marc Andreessen leads that embrace, and what happens when innovation becomes untethered from any vision of the good life, and whether we can reclaim a form of progress that actually serves humanity. It is my pleasure to welcome Jeremiah Johnson here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Jeremiah, thanks so much for joining us.

[00:03:46] Jeremiah Johnson: Certainly.

[00:03:47] Jeff Schechtman: Yeah. It’s great to have you here. Talk a little bit about who Marc Andreessen is and why you decided to write about him in this piece, first of all, for our listeners that may not know.

[00:03:58] Jeremiah Johnson: So Marc Andreessen is not really the cause of the problems that we’re probably going to be spending some time discussing here. He’s not the sole cause. He’s not responsible for the decay of society. But what I find interesting about him is that I think he’s very representative of the decay that I see. He exemplifies a lot of negative trends that are all happening all at once that have a lot to do with the venture capital ecosystem, certainly, but also with just the way that social media shapes our discourse and our politics, and the way that it makes kind of a permanent culture war part of how we deal with each other, how we speak to each other. I think that he is just the representative of a bunch of things going wrong all at once. It would be an exaggeration to say he is the single cause. So I don’t want to make Marc Andreessen out to be like, this is the devil. This is the guy who’s solely causing everything to go wrong in American society, because that’s not true. But he’s a good avatar for all of this, if it makes sense.

[00:05:20] Jeff Schechtman: Indeed. And in many ways, as you’ve talked about, he’s representative of technology that has become soulless, that there are those of us that are enthusiastic about technology that can be techno-optimists, but don’t see it in the same way that Andreessen and many of his colleagues do, which is a kind of soulless view of technology.

[00:05:42] Jeremiah Johnson: And there’s a really long history that we could get into here about the slow decline of idealism in Silicon Valley. Back in the 70s and 80s, when Silicon Valley was really just getting started, when it was really kind of picking up steam, there was still this kind of punk attitude of, we are changing the world, we’re revolutionizing the world, but we’re going to keep our values while we do it. A lot of these people had crazy philosophical commitments. Some of them were capitalists, sure, but some would be socialists, some would be anarchists, some would be cyberpunks. And a lot of them had just very idealistic views of the world and technology. Information deserves to be free. We’re going to do permissionless innovation. And a lot of that, I think, was really admirable. And now it feels like current day Silicon Valley is just less of that and more about the bottom line.

[00:06:49] Jeff Schechtman: In your view, how did it change? How did the shift happen?

[00:06:53] Jeremiah Johnson: Well, I mean, one thing that happens is whenever there’s an enormous amount of money at play, money tends to wind out over abstract principles. And the more money that is in play, the faster that happens. And look, I’m not going to sit around and tell people that chasing money is wrong, because I don’t think it is. I think it’s fine that people who make world-changing inventions are able to get very, very rich from those inventions. That seems perfectly fair to me. But at the same time, not to quote Spider-Man, but with great power comes great responsibility. And the incident that really set off me in terms of wanting to write about this was Mark Andreessen getting into a little spat with the Pope on Twitter, of all things. This is a statement about the modern world that you have billionaire venture capitalists fighting with the Pope on Twitter. And it was a very one-sided fight. The Pope was not responding. But the Pope just tweeted out a very generic message, to be honest, about technology can be used for great good and yada, yada, yada. But when you’re innovating new technologies, you have a moral obligation to consider how it will affect society. Something to that effect, right? He said it much more nicely than that. But Andreessen basically responded to that, mocking it with a very culture war meme, not to get into the history of the meme, but it was a Sidney Sweeney meme about kind of mocking the Pope as, oh, you’re just a woke, scold, lecturing people kind of thing. And surprisingly, people did not like that when going after the head of the Catholic Church. Even people deep inside technology world did not like that. Andreessen just kind of started to mock them too. Anybody who criticizes me is just a woke, scold lecturer. And as you said in that intro, you know, eventually everyone bullied him enough that he kind of deleted his posts in shame. But it’s very interesting that a generic message of, hey, you should just think about the impact your technology is going to have on the world, very, very anodyne message, which would have been ultra uncontroversial in the olden days of Silicon Valley, in the hacker ethos days. That message is now worthy of mockery and contempt to many venture capitalists, you know, because to them, I think it reads as, oh, you’re just one of those people who wants to lecture me. Well, I’ve been lectured before, and the era of woke politics is dead, so why don’t you go cry in a corner? That attitude might be an exaggeration, but it’s only a slight one. That is how a lot of people, you know, power brokers in Silicon Valley think these days.

[00:09:58] Jeff Schechtman: One of the other aspects, and we heard this said, and we see it continuously with respect to Elon Musk, and you talk about it with respect to Andreessen, is how much time they spend online, a huge amount of time, that they’re almost poisoned by how much time they spend scrolling.

[00:10:18] Jeremiah Johnson: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, so one of my theories of how the world works right now is that posting is the most powerful force in the world. It is the single most addictive drug that exists. People will ruin their lives to post, and we know this is true because we see it all the time. This goes for people who are famous. This goes for people who are not famous. You know, there was a guy a couple years back who is known as the Discord leaker, and he leaked a bunch of military state secrets onto this Discord. And after they caught him, they wondered, like, why had he done this? And it turns out the Discord that he leaked it to was not like, he wasn’t leaking it to some foreign government. He wasn’t leaking it to this big crowd of people. It was literally a Discord with, like, 20 people in it. And he just wanted to seem cool to them. He was working for the government, and they kind of didn’t believe that he had access to secret files. So he just posted it online to show his teen, like, literally, like, to show 16-year-olds that he was a cool, like, James Bond figure that had access to secret files. He threw his life away. He’s going to spend the next decade in prison so he could seem cool to some teenagers. And like, they asked the teenagers, like, was he trying to prove an ideological point? And they were like, no, he didn’t give a shit. He just thought it was cool. And you can look at it at, like, low-level stuff like that. You can look at it like Elon Musk, who at points, like, there have been points where people have, like, tried to tally all of his tweets. And he tweets, like, something like once every eight minutes, like, continuously for every hour he’s awake, just for a week straight. You know, he’ll go on these, like, hypomanic things where he just is continually tweeting all the time. He literally bought the website so that he could more effectively tweet and boost his own tweets. Posting is the most powerful force in the world. Billionaires are addicted to it the same way you and I are. And it eats your brain. It teaches you to think in terms of, you know, dunks. Oh, this guy disagrees with me, so I’m going to dunk on him and get my followers to yell at him. It teaches you to think in terms of memes rather than fully reasoned arguments. It makes it so that you’re constantly being outraged. It’s, you know, the algorithm is very good at feeding you things that will keep you outraged. Because if you’re outraged, that means you’re going to be engaged. You know, you’re going to up those engagement metrics. And so you just, your brain gets poisoned into thinking everything is all culture war fights all the time, where we just have to dunk on one another about whatever the stupid culture war slap fight of the moment is. And that is clearly true of Marc Andreessen, because the Pope puts out some generic statement about technology. And the only way that he knows how to deal with that, you know, he sees it, and it’s immediately slotted into the slot of some culture war fight that the Pope has probably never heard of, you know, is not even aware of. But it all comes back to, you know, how do I get a dunk on someone? And so, yeah, we’re all way too online. And posting is like, the best way to model social media sometimes is like an addictive drug.

[00:13:56] Jeff Schechtman: How much of it is also the need for attention, that it may have been cool to 16-year-olds, but it also got him attention, I mean, as it gets Andreessen attention and Musk and so many others, that there is this need for attention and a whole ethical framework that goes with it online today?

[00:14:17] Jeremiah Johnson: I think that’s definitely part of it. It’s part of the addictive nature of what’s happening when you’re posting, and you’re in the algorithm, and you start doing one thing, and it gets a bunch of people mad, but they’re paying attention to you, so you keep doing it. You know, you learn very quickly, like a rat in an experiment, that if you push a certain button, you’re going to get a certain reward, a certain amount of attention, a certain amount of likes, retweets, right? And that will probably be both negative and positive attention, in the sense that you say something controversial, and some people will yell at you, but other people will have your back. And then it turns into a tribal thing, it turns into an us versus them thing. But yeah, no, the algorithm is very good at doing that. And the attention thing is a really good point, because you look at the richest, most powerful people in the world, they all want to be media personalities. Even if they’re already billionaires, if they are unknown billionaires, then they’re still not satisfied. They want to be, you know, famous podcasters as well. If you’re a member of Congress, there’s so many members of Congress who are trying to start podcasts now, and it’s actually funny how few listeners they get. They have genuinely like pathetic numbers of listeners. But every member of Congress wants to start a podcast now, despite the fact that they are literally already in Congress. They already have all the power. They already have a platform, the only platform you really need, the ability to vote in Congress. And yet they all want to be podcasters. And you know, all the venture capitalists want to be podcasters, you know. And this is, I think it says something that not every media personality wants to start a tech company. But everyone who started a tech company wants to be a media personality.

[00:16:10] Jeff Schechtman: The broader question, and I know you’ve written a lot about this, is what all of this means in terms of what we have known in this society as kind of a social contract that existed and the way this is all breaking that down.

[00:16:27] Jeremiah Johnson: Yeah. So, I mean, the social contract is a very basic idea, right? Nobody’s going to be surprised, you know, when I say that, like, look, there are things that happen in society. There’s unwritten rules that we all live by, right? And some of these are actually just, they’re actual laws, but sometimes it’s just norms. It’s unspoken, commonly understood stuff. How should you act in a certain situation? What kind of business practices are ethical and unethical? Even if they might be legal, you know, you might get shunned if you do a certain kind of thing, you know, how much respect should you give someone in a private setting versus a public setting? And the social contract, look, it’s not perfect. You know, the social contract in, you know, 1870 would have said women can’t vote. And I’m glad we changed that. That seems like a good idea. But other parts of the social contract seem to be good. You know, they’re the glue that keeps society together. And they just seem to be breaking down. It’s just like, you know, in the case of Silicon Valley, it’s, you know, you mentioned some of these startups that, like, there’s a startup that wants to let you gamble on your credit card bill. So if you go out to get Chipotle, you know, it’ll let me gamble to see whether or not I have to pay that Chipotle or not. You know, there’s AI bot farms where, you know, people are not content that AI bot farms with tens of thousands of bots exist. They want to make it even more seamless. They want to make it so that you can just log into an app and push two buttons and have 10,000 AI bots at your command, you know, to go post whatever you want them to on social media. And that, it seems like a bad idea. And just, you know, it’s this kind of more broadly, it seems like this is just things are breaking down in a lot of ways, you know, political figures are being assassinated. The president is posting AI generated videos of him dumping shit on protesters. Like that’s, that’s a real thing that happened is that the current president of the United States posted a video on social media, where he’s flying a plane, and he dumps a load of shit onto American citizens from the plane. Like that, there was a social contract that when you’re the president, you don’t do that kind of thing. And now, now it seems like, oh, well, we just, we’re, nobody cares about that anymore. Because caring is lame, and caring is cringe. And why are you such a whiner, you know?

[00:19:28] Jeff Schechtman: And I guess the broader question is the way in which technological innovation has really led to, in many cases, this, this breakdown in social cohesion, that there are some of us that still are techno optimists and believe in the power of technology to solve problems. But when we look around, we see the degree to which so much technology has led to this, this breakdown.

[00:19:55] Jeremiah Johnson: Yeah, I find myself there in that space. Because despite everything, despite, you know, me thinking that Marc Andreessen is kind of acting like a ghoul here, I think that technology is wonderful. And I consider myself a techno optimist. And I really appreciate an essay that Marc Andreessen wrote many years ago called It’s Time to Build, where, you know, he bemoaned the fact that in America, it’s very difficult to build the things that we should be building, whether it’s new housing, or infrastructure, or new energy generation, or, you know, new drugs, new pharmaceuticals, new scientific inventions that all of this stuff gets bogged down in too much paperwork and process and, you know, things get vetoed, somebody yells about new house, you know, this housing is going to cause gentrification at a city council meeting, and so nothing ever gets built. And I’m very sympathetic to, to that idea that I think we do need to build things faster, we do need to be able to do the things that we need, like more housing, green energy, infrastructure, all of that should be happening way faster than it is. But, you know, it matters what you build, you know, building a bunch of renewable energy and developing new vaccines is different than developing another casino app. Like, building is not universally good in literally 100% of cases, it matters what you build. And so that’s what I find really disappointing about everything that we’re seeing from, I don’t know, from the venture capital industry right now. And I should be clear, look, like, the casino stuff is not the majority of venture capital spend, not even close. The majority of venture capital spend goes to very boring, kind of like, database software, you know, just normal business stuff, right? The majority of their businesses are pretty unobjectionable. But I’m worried that a growing share is what I would call like, almost rage bait, startups, they’re meant to enrage you in the same way that like, a social media post might be bad on purpose, so that you click on it, and you engage, and you yell at the person and that just the algorithm gets the sense that, oh, people like responding to this, so it shows it to everybody. In the same way that like, rage bait is a tactic for getting engagement on social media. There’s these startups now, you mentioned some of them like Cluely, like Covered, like Cheddar, that are basically like terrible rage bait startups. There was another one that just was announced literally yesterday, I think called Chad IDE, which is basically just a coding interface that lets you like, lets you browse TikTok and swipe on dating apps and play brain rot games while you’re coding. Like it’s just, it’s a weird thing to do. And this one was in Y Combinator. But I’m worried that those kind of like, just slop startups are an increasing focus of the industry, that they’re going to be a bigger and bigger share in the future. And I think that if you actually care about the direction technology takes, you should be concerned about that.

[00:23:44] Jeff Schechtman: They have even moved into the whole financial market area. We see sites like Robinhood now, which started out as a stock trading app, essentially, is now made a deal with PolyMarket, and you can do betting and stocks at the same time.

[00:24:03] Jeremiah Johnson: Well, Robinhood was always gambling. I mean, we should be very clear about that. But everything is, everything is gambling these days in the sense that gambling is gambling. And gambling is more legal than it’s ever been. You know, the DraftKings is all over ESPN, you can’t watch a sports event now, without it being sponsored by DraftKings or FanDuel or, you know, one of these ESPN actually was running their own sports gambling site, ESPN Bet. I think they’ve just shut it down in the wake of some betting scandals, because surprise, surprise, with the explosion of legal sports betting, there are NBA players who’ve been caught gambling on themselves. There are Major League Baseball players who’ve been caught gambling on themselves. One of the players who’s going to, he’s going to receive a lifetime ban was like an all-star level player who makes millions of dollars a year, still gambling on himself for like thousands of dollars, just to give some pocket change to his friends, basically, I think is probably what the story is going to end up being. But like, you see this all, like every kind of sports is just getting absolutely overrun by legal gambling. But cryptocurrency is basically gambling now. You know, the point of crypto is no longer, oh, well, I think the idea of Bitcoin is interesting. And I believe in the idea of Web 3.0, this, that, you know, no, the idea of crypto now is, you know, fart coin is funny, and I think people will buy it. So I’m going to buy it and hope that I can get out before they get out. You know, Dogecoin, and it’s all like meme coins, and it’s basically just a legal form of gambling. Crypto is gambling. You know, the stock market is now gambling. And you know, plenty of people invest in stocks in a responsible way. But a lot of people now just want to buy options on GameStop, you know, or AMC or whatever, you know, meme stocks. Meme stocks are this vast thing now. And most people aren’t actually content to just, you know, I’m going to buy GameStop and it’s going to go to the moon. Now they’re like taking triple levered bets on call options for GameStop. Robinhood will gladly let you do all of that. There’s prediction markets where now you can bet on the Oscars and the presidential race and just about anything really. So yeah, everything is gambling. And I think it’s probably not great for society that that’s the case. And I say this as somebody who has been a professional or semi professional gambler in the past. Like I was a big poker player back in the day when online poker experienced its first boom. And I paid for part of my college with poker winnings. But like it’s probably not great that like gambling is so seamless and so frictionless right now. It feels like there should be a little bit of friction if you want to gamble, you know.

[00:27:12] Jeff Schechtman: I mean, I guess part of the broader question is how much of the societal decay that we’re seeing in the breakdown of the social contract and what we’re seeing in our politics today is reflective of these kinds of technological things or whether the technology and the gambling and the deregulation and the lack of friction is really a function of the politics. Is it a chicken or the egg proposition? And if so, where does it begin?

[00:27:44] Jeremiah Johnson: I tend to think that the technology is really the root cause of a lot of things going on in society. I kind of have a smartphone theory of everything where you can use smartphone and modern social media interchangeably here, I think. But if you look at why around 2012 to 2015 did populism start to bubble up in like every single country in the world practically, it’s technology. It’s the fact that we all have smartphones and social media in our hands all the time. And this kind of technology on a very structural level encourages extremism and encourages the worst kind of populism. And you know, this is not just an American phenomenon. America is not the only country in the throes of a populist movement. This is happening like almost everywhere. It would be easier to list the places it’s not happening. And I think that really the way that technology has changed our politics is vastly underrated. And the way that we’re all on social media all the time and how that radicalizes people is really underrated.

[00:29:05] Jeff Schechtman: And I don’t think that there’s a complete acknowledgment of that in many quarters. The fact that politics really is downstream of culture and downstream of technology.

[00:29:16] Jeremiah Johnson: Yeah, I mean, people will try to explain the rise of populist politics with so many ways and so many factors. And the thing I always say is you’ve got to be able to explain why it’s happening everywhere. You can’t just say, well, it’s because of how, you know, women started coming into the workplace and the men got sick of the block. You know, some people will say that. And I’ll say, OK, why is it happening, though, in countries with wildly different gender dynamics? You know, wildly different gender politics still happening, all of them. You could talk about, oh, well, it’s because, you know, young people look at the economy and they feel like they’re hopeless and blah, blah, blah. Well, in places where the economy is good and in countries where the economy is bad, happening either way. Like there’s – whatever your favored explanation is for why the world seems to be going crazy, it needs to hit like basically all the countries at once. And the only thing I see that’s happened that way is the Internet and social media and what they’ve done to our political discourse and what they’ve done to how we relate to one another.

[00:30:28] Jeff Schechtman: So I guess the question then becomes, does this burn itself out at a certain point? Does AI change this, shift this in ways that are better or worse? And really where we go from here.

[00:30:40] Jeremiah Johnson: I mean, that’s a great question. I wish I knew where we go from here. You can look back historically, and I think there’s some precedent for all of this. You know, if you look at whenever we have a new dominant medium for communication, whether it’s the printing press being introduced in like the 1500s and 1600s throughout Europe, whether it’s radio kind of becoming dominant in the early 1900s, whether it’s the television. Whenever you have a new kind of media that becomes very dominant, I think it tends to introduce a level of populist politics and demagoguery that quickly sweeps through that medium. You know, the printing press, you know, set off like, this is a wildly oversimplistic view of history, but if you’ll forgive me, following the invention of the printing press, we had several hundred brutal, unrelenting, you know, years of war in Europe. Europe had like 200, 250 straight years of Catholics and Protestants trying to murder each other without end before they figured things out. You know, you can go look at like radio and Father Coughlin was like a very authoritarian priest who was the biggest star of radio and was this wildly populist demagogic character. And so I think that this is, you know, it doesn’t surprise me in the grand sweep of things that the invention of social media has led to a new kind of politics that is less healthy for us than the previous kind. How quickly we can adjust to this, how quickly we can get out of this cycle of everything is culture war screaming at each other all the time, I don’t know. We’ll have to see.

[00:32:46] Jeff Schechtman: The irony, which I think is important to keep in mind, is that when we think about the earliest days—and you touched on this a little while ago—the earliest days of social media and the conception of it was really about bringing people together, about uniting people, uniting the world in ways that were unique. And precisely the opposite has happened.

[00:33:10] Jeremiah Johnson: Well, yeah. Social media is not social anymore. The original social media sites were all about connecting with your friends, right? If you think about Facebook, everybody had their real name on Facebook, right? And the only thing you could do is friend your actual friends. And this is before there was even a timeline. You had friends and you would go manually to their profile pages, check out what they were up to. And this is also kind of how Myspace and Friendster, how they operated. But today, social media is basically television. It’s dominated by short-form vertical video. When you go on Instagram, something like 60% of all time on Instagram is just watching reels. And the reels that you watch are almost certainly not from your real-life friends. They are from professional content creators, right? When you go on TikTok, you are not doing social anything, even though we call it social media. You are watching professional content creators do their stuff. And maybe it’s stuff that you like. Maybe you find it valuable. Maybe you are into crochet. And so you have some crochet TikTokers that you follow who are real fun. But that’s their job. They are professional personalities in the crochet space. Or maybe you like to play Magic the Gathering and you follow Magic the Gathering YouTubers and TikTok accounts. But again, these are like professionals. This is what they do. You are watching professional content creators. It’s no different than sitting down in front of Netflix or ABC. It is no longer a social activity. It’s very much an isolating activity.

[00:34:58] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about how you see this in the context of our changing contemporary politics. But talk about it in the context also of what you’re doing with the Center for New Liberalism and what that’s about.

[00:35:11] Jeremiah Johnson: Well, the Center for New Liberalism is to some degree a reaction to this. But what we’re trying to do is represent a kind of politics that has not gone off the edge, that is aware of the internet and is able to kind of swim through those spaces without falling prey to kind of the extremist views on either side of the aisle, frankly. Because in my view, the Republican Party has become wildly extreme compared to what it used to be. I’m not a Republican, but I still long for the days when Mitt Romney was the standard bearer of the Republican Party. It was a better form of politics that we practiced back then. And so, you know, now the Republican Party is led by, frankly, an insane guy who hung around with Jeffrey Epstein. And all the congressional staffers in the Republican Party have Nazi group chats with each other. And it just seems like it’s all extremists all the time. And the Democrats have done a somewhat better job, I think, of locking out their extremists. But they haven’t done a perfect job. You know, there’s a lot of, you know, the rise of socialism in the Democratic Party is something that concerns me, because I’m not a socialist. I think capitalism is good. I think it’s good that America won the Cold War and not the Soviet Union. And so, you know, like I said, I don’t think that there’s an equivalence there. But I’m worried, you know, give the Democrats another 10 years, and who knows what might happen. So the Center for New Liberalism basically wants to reinvigorate America with liberal values, liberal values in the classic sense of that word that, you know, we believe in the equal rights for everyone. We believe in the rule of law. We believe that all men are created equal, that nobody is above the law, kind of the basic tenets of like political liberalism that stretch all the way back to John Locke and John Stuart Mill, some of my philosophical heroes. And that allow us to kind of come together on a common sense set of policies that would actually improve the country that, you know, we should be building more things, you know, we should be building more housing, more green energy. If there’s stuff that stops us from doing that, whether it’s regulations, whether it’s anything at all, we should sweep it out of the way. And yeah, we kind of come at it from a center-left perspective, and basically trying to use common sense politics to step back from the edge, to some extent.

[00:38:00] Jeff Schechtman: To what extent is this bringing back the notion, perhaps in a more modern way, in a more positive of what was referred to as neoliberalism for a long time?

[00:38:12] Jeremiah Johnson: Well, I think neoliberalism gets a bad rap. I agree with you. And, you know, it’s, regardless of what you want to call it, I think that the ideas of, say, that globalism is good, that the world is a better place when you have more international trade and more international connections, and, you know, that immigration is a positive thing. I think those ideas are very solid ideas that, you know, America has benefited from for a long time, that America benefited from being a nation of immigrants, that America has benefited from international trade, and that the world has benefited when America gets involved in big issues, when it gets involved in World War II, or when it, you know, when it stops the genocide in Serbia, and certainly America is not perfect. You can also point to a lot of foreign policy mistakes that America has made, and we’ve made many, but I fundamentally believe that America is a force for good in the world, and that we should be open to the world and not isolate ourselves in the way that Donald Trump seems to be very isolationist, and not economically isolate ourselves in the way that, you know, many on the kind of capital L left seem to want to stop international trade, and they view it as a big global capital conspiracy. And to me, that seems just silly. So I wouldn’t mind if you called me a neoliberal. You know, they called Hillary Clinton and Obama neoliberals. So if that’s what being, being a fan of Barack Obama’s presidency makes you a neoliberal, then sign me up, I guess.

[00:39:59] Jeff Schechtman: And finally, Jeremiah, talk about, I want to come back full circle, and the degree to which technology is going to be a key player, and certainly we’re just at the birth of the whole AI revolution, the degree to which technology will be a key player in changing and altering our politics going forward.

[00:40:22] Jeremiah Johnson: Yeah, it’s a, it’s an open question. Like I said, I think that a lot depends on what happens the next couple years. One of the great open questions in politics is what happens to Trumpism after Donald Trump, because Donald Trump tends to do very well in the elections that he’s actually running in. But the Republican Party has struggled every single time he’s not on the ballot, whether it’s midterm or off year elections. It’s an open question whether Trumpism without Trump can even exist. J.D. Vance is certainly going to give it a run. And to what degree technology will be able to help him do that. Like I said, we’re all figuring this out in real time. This is kind of like a beta test that we’re running on society without knowing what’s going to happen. I worry a lot about the future of Republican politics, even though I am not a Republican, because America really desperately needs two healthy political parties. We don’t live in a political system where one party just wins all the time. And like, look, some countries do have that. Some countries have one party that wins like 95% of the elections. Like Japan is like that to some extent. And they’re still a democracy, but just it’s, you know, one country wins almost every time there. One party, I should say. But in America, you know, the parties win about half the time each. And so we really need, even if you’re not a Republican, we need the Republican Party to be sane. And it really worries me that they’re not. It worries me that all of their young people seem to be Grapers and fans of anti-Semitic people like Nick Fuentes. And that is something that is only possible because of social media. You know, they, there used to be more of a firewall against that kind of influence. But the thing that social media does is it tears down all the barriers, and it makes communication more frictionless and more seamless, and it gives anyone a platform. And that includes some of the worst people in the world who have now amassed great followings and great influence. And so I’m concerned, you know.

[00:42:54] Jeff Schechtman: Jeremiah Johnson, he is the co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism and has the infinite scroll substack. Jeremiah, I thank you so much for spending time with us.

[00:43:05] Jeremiah Johnson: Thank you for having me. Thank you.

[00:43:06] Jeff Schechtman: And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.

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