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POLITICO Tech
Marc Andreesen bet on Trump. How it could pay off.
00:20:32
Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen made headlines for backing Donald Trump in the 2024 election, and now stands to gain new levels of influence with Trump’s return to the White House. In a recent interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Andreesen outlined his views on the changing political and media landscape, as well as his outlook for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. On POLITICO Tech, Digital Future Daily author Derek Robertson joins host Steven Overly to talk through the big takeaways and what they reveal about tech’s likely influence in Trump’s Washington.
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- [00:00]
Stephen Overly
Welcome to Nada Yada Island.
- [00:02]
Benny
We're back on the Narayatta Island Confessions Show. Benny is about to tell us how he found two loves. Go ahead.
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Stephen Overly
Yeah. Thanks to Metro, I found iPhone 12.
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Benny
And Apple Watch SE at Metro. Get the perfect match of both iPhone 12 with 5G and Apple Watch SE for only 99.99. You heard that right. Both for just 99.99 holidays with nada Yada yada. Only at Metro By T Mobile.
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Derek Robertson
For your number and id, sign up for Metro Flex plus and add a watch line. Not available if you're with T Mobile.
- [00:28]
Joe Rogan
Or ban with Metro in the past 180 days.
- [00:29]
Derek Robertson
Limit two per account.
- [00:32]
Stephen Overly
Hey, welcome back to Politico tech. Today's Wednesday, December 4th. I'm Stephen Overly. I wouldn't normally do a podcast about a podcast, but there was an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience last week.
- [00:48]
Marc Andreessen
Joe Rogan Podcast. Check it out.
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Benny
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- [00:52]
Stephen Overly
That's really worth diving into if you follow tech. The guest was Mark Andreessen, a big Silicon Valley investor who has backed just about every tech company you can think and who made headlines for backing Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
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Joe Rogan
Are you happy? Very happy. That was a weird one morning in America.
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Stephen Overly
That was one of the first times ever I felt hopeful after an election. Andreessen is among the tech heavyweights now trying to shape policy on everything from crypto and AI to government spending and the war in Ukraine. And he's among the Trump donors who are likely to have new levels of influence as Trump returns to the white. Now, for full transparency, I invited Andreessen on this podcast both before and after the election, and that offer still stands. But today I called up my Politico colleague, Derek Robertson. Derek writes the Digital Future daily newsletter and he recently dissected Andreessen's three hour interview with Joe Rogan. On the show. Today, we talk about the big takeaways and what they reveal about tech's likely influence in Trump's Washington. Here's our conversation. Hey, Derek, welcome back to Politico Tech.
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Marc Andreessen
Thank you, Steven.
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Stephen Overly
So let's just establish from the outset here why we care about Marc Andreessen's opinion. You know, he's an influential guy in tech now. He's building out a presence in Washington to shape policy. Why does he matter so much?
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Marc Andreessen
So, Marc Andreessen, I can go back and tell listeners a little bit of his origin story if they don't know he was a computer science student at the University of Illinois in the early 1990s and he developed a browser called Mosaic that became the number one sort of popular competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. This sets up a trend that you see Andreessen sort of build his entire career on, which is that he became a venture capitalist with the fortune that he made from Mosaic, one of the first big modern venture capital fortunes. And he founded the firm Andreessen Horowitz with his partner Ben Horowitz. This is a major, major Silicon Valley titan that has money in every. You name a Silicon Valley company from the past 20 years, and Andreessen Horowitz has probably been involved in it to some extent. And on the back of that fortune, Andreessen has built out what has become a pretty robust sort of policy and lobbying and public advocacy organization that is largely centered around advocating for what he pitches in a similar spirit to his own original project with Mosaic as these sort of small, dynamic, innovative companies. Fifteen years ago, 15, 10 years ago, you would think of these as the Ubers, the Facebooks, companies that the foundation of the app economy was built on. Today these are largely AI companies, crypto companies, even some defense startups. So these technologies all have significant overlap with the policy landscape. So that's why Washington listeners have probably heard his name a lot more in more recent years, and especially after he threw his lot in with Trump during the 2024 campaign.
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Stephen Overly
That's what I was going to say. His latest political investment was Trump giving a lot of money to the Trump campaign. In addition, his venture capital firm was a big investor in the crypto pack fair shake that gave a lot of money to candidates who support crypto policy. So he's definitely influential in political circles. Now he sat down with Joe Rogan for a three hour interview on Joe Rogan's podcast. I read through that transcript. The conversation was pretty sprawling. I'm curious what your big takeaway was.
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Marc Andreessen
My big takeaway was that I wrote about this in Digital Future Daily last week. Andreessen does a lot of maximalist bragging about his bet, paying off his big political bet on Donald Trump. But much of it is based in reality. In the aftermath of the election, a lot of the things that Democrats were doing a round of self recrimination about and wondering about whether they got wrong, whether that's the media landscape or how to engage with the tech sector or even with young people. Andreessen was sort of laying it all out on the table and saying, we saw how this electorate was going to respond to the pitch that the Trump campaign put forward and that the right leaning Part of the tech world put forward on Trump's behalf before anybody else did. And that was simply to meet people where they are in the information ecosystem. There's been a lot of great reporting from our colleagues at Politico about how the Harris campaign spent their money and how they invested very heavily in celebrity endorsements. Traditional. Did a sort of very traditional button down broadcast media strategy. Harris did go on the call your daddy podcast and a couple of other things, but this was a much more minor part of her media strategy compared to Trump. To me, the most striking thing was that he spoke with authority and confidence well earned. I think that they were right in how to reach and connect with the American people where they are.
- [06:09]
Stephen Overly
Yeah. His comments on this new media landscape around politics I thought were really interesting. You know, this idea that if you only read traditional media, you maybe had a very different view of the country and the American electorate than if you were on social media or listening to these personality podcasts.
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Joe Rogan
This is what's actually so interesting with these media bubbles is like the people in these media bubbles are not breaking out. Like, it's like they're getting deeper into the sort of collective psychosis that they indulge in. And part of it was getting excited about a candidate for which there was very little popular support for once you got outside of these, you know, heavily blue states.
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Stephen Overly
You know, I spoke on yesterday's show with journalist Nancy Scola about this sort of growing partisan divide on social media, especially if you think about, yeah, blue sky versus X, you know, Elon Musk's social media app. To me, it kind of raises this question that for those who think traditional media is an echo chamber, I'm not sure social media is all that better. In fact.
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Marc Andreessen
Yeah, I think that's largely right. And I think it means that people like, frankly, like myself, you know, I think that we can maintain our journalistic professionalism and say that we tend, and still say that we tend to be in a bubble that insulates us. I guess I can only speak for myself. That insulates us from, you know, I'm not watching. I'm not listening to the Nelk boys. I didn't know who the Nelk boys were until Donald Trump spoke with them. So I think what is happening here is that if you do read exclusively what we would call traditional media, that is news websites, you are simply not connecting with a huge chunk of the electorate and the way that they view politics. I think another thing that I wrote about in the newsletter last week was that I think the new York Times did a pretty good job of scratching at this by doing a sort of ongoing series of focus groups with undecided voters. And these would go. These focus groups would make the rounds among my media circles. And it would mostly just be people saying, like, what the expletive deleted are these people thinking? What are they talking about? These are completely incoherent or nonsensical views of the economy or policy positions, or they're contradicting themselves in terms or not paying close enough attention to the events in the news. But whether or not that is accurate, it reflected an authentic view of the electorate that I think most people did not see until votes were counted on election Day.
- [08:33]
Stephen Overly
Right. I agree with you. I think there's a lot of hubris in traditional media. Then we sort of need some self reflecting. I also though, listened to, for instance, the podcast between Joe Rogan and Marc Andreessen when there was just a lot of speculation around conspiracy theories without any actual facts to substantiate it. And I guess I question to some extent the value of that kind of information environment. It was interesting to me though, the comment that Marc Andreessen made about when candidates run in 2028 and sort of the way that they get their message out.
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Joe Rogan
If you're going to run in 28, like, I think there's like a fully Internet native way to run these campaigns that might literally involve like zero television advertising. And maybe you don't even need to raise that money. And maybe to your point, if you have the right message, maybe you just go straight direct.
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Stephen Overly
And he even said, you know, they may not need to raise money. Which was sort of funny to me, coming from a billionaire who donates to political campaigns. What did you make of kind of his longer view of politics and media?
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Marc Andreessen
It was interesting because he was kind of extrapolating to an absurd degree what the Trump campaign strategy was. There were many articles written during the 2024 presidential campaign about how, especially earlier in the cycle, I think this changed as we got close to the actual election and as Trump's legal cases sort of faded into the background. But people were saying Trump was not doing enough events, that kind of low energy, that he wasn't engaging with the enough. Why is he talking to Theo Vaughan? Not to circle back to what I was just talking about, but I say this merely to make the point that what Andreessen is talking about, this idea of a exclusively social media driven campaign that features little major donor money is a maximalist version of something that Trump kind of dipped his toe into during the 2024 campaign. Recall that the Harris campaign raised far more money than the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign had serious financial problems through much of the 202024 campaign and it didn't matter at all. He got his message out where he needed to. So I am very skeptical of Andreessen's view that these traditional institutions that mediate political life in America are going to just melt away instantly. I made the point in Digital Future Daily that Harris vastly overperformed the national swing right in the states where she most heavily invested in in person campaigning and broadcast ads. So those things do have but he does scratch at a trend that I think is real.
- [11:20]
Derek Robertson
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- [11:51]
Stephen Overly
There was another comment in his interview that to me was interesting coming from a Silicon Valley guy about censorship among big tech companies.
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Joe Rogan
This new administration is probably going to carve all this stuff open. But yeah, no, look, it was a pattern. And then, look, the companies bear a lot of responsibility and the people in the companies made a lot of, I think bad judgment calls. But the government, the Biden White House, was directly exerting censorship pressure on American companies to censor American citizens.
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Stephen Overly
This is something that we've heard President Elect Trump talk about. It's something we've heard other conservatives talk about. But he was essentially saying that he expects tech companies, social media companies to come under a lot more scrutiny now that Trump is coming back to the White House because of these accusations of censorship. Is that significant coming from like a big venture capital guy?
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Marc Andreessen
I don't know how confidently I can answer that question. I think to me when I heard him talking about that it was very, very redolent of there's been a growing consensus in right leaning tech circles that the dominant mode of moderation that social media platforms deployed from, I will say very roughly 201516 to 2022 where they were very aggressive about policing what they viewed as misinformation about limiting political speech. This especially ramped up, ramped up during COVID when, you know, Joe Rogan was censured heavily. I believe that his podcasts were removed from YouTube for spreading Covid misinformation and sort of warning labels were affixed to them on Spotify. There's a growing drumbeat of opposition to this in right leaning tech circles that social media platforms should not be in the business of policing speech on political grounds. Ultimately, social media companies have strong protected First Amendment rights and can sort of allow or disallow whatever they want on their platform. That's the status quo right now. I think what you're asking is, is it possible that that will change under a Trump administration that is heavily influenced by people like Andreessen Musk, who has also taken up this mantle and really essentially ceased to moderate X except in response to government requests, which is a whole other ball of wax. I think that it will. Yeah, they're most likely, if you destined to prognosticate, I think there will be a ramping up of that effort to kind of pressure social media platforms into loosening the reins on political moderation. That being said, I do think it is important to note that this is already happening. Social media platforms have, since 2022, have largely drawn back from this. And what you've seen is the splintering into sort of different ideological echo chambers as you've described before. X has a decidedly more kind of right wing flavor, veering into abusive hate speech very frequently on the platform. And that's why liberals have left it. And I think under the second Trump administration, you're going to see a vastly different social media landscape than we've seen during any presidential administration.
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Stephen Overly
Yeah, no, it's an interesting question in part because there's just a dissonance to me between folks who argue that the government engages in censorship by telling social media companies what they should flag or what they should take down, and those same people saying therefore the government should hammer social media companies about how they moderate their content in the other direction. But nevertheless, it's still the government telling social media companies what they should be doing. The other policy areas where Andreessen Horowitz, Mark Andreessen's firm, really seems most invested is artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. Both are big business for them and they seem to advocate for a light touch regulation. How would you kind of characterize his views here and any potential influence that might have under this new administration?
- [15:40]
Marc Andreessen
I think that Andreessen and people in his camp, they have a view of technology that is. I wrote about this a few months ago. It's a very kind of libertarian view of technology that glorifies the inventor, the creator, the person who invents these tools that give people access to institutional power that previously only small organizations had. We're having this whole conversation about social media. Social media platforms are publishing platforms. These rights were largely limited to big publishing houses, broadcast news companies, cable companies, et cetera, before the advent of the Internet. Now everybody has a publishing device in their pocket wherever they go. Essentially, I think that he views technologies like cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence as having a similar effect on the financial system or simply the basic sort of automated processes that underpin our digital lives. In the case of artificial intelligence, I would also say that beyond cutting through the lofty rhetoric around this, which I have no reason to believe is insincere, he is also supportive of a light regulatory touch toward these technologies, because these startups that he invests in and expects to make massive, massive, massive returns on all benefit from using them and not being bogged down by government regulation and oversight in the sense that they use them. So you have an overlap of Andreessen's political philosophy, which is very well documented, and his material interest, which is to have a sort of vibrant, multifarious, and completely unregulated startup environment.
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Stephen Overly
Totally. I mean, it's not hard to find kind of the financial incentives that underpin some of the thinking. And it's not just Andreessen I sort of want to end on. We've talked before about kind of this new right that has emerged in Silicon Valley. People who have made a lot of money in tech and now invest that money, but their worldview actually extends well beyond tech policy. Right. I mean, you have Elon Musk, for instance, leading this whole Department of Government efficiency effort to cut government spending. You have folks like venture capitalist David Sachs talking about the war in Ukraine and weighing in on geopolitical conflict. I mean, these guys and their influence, or I guess the influence they'd like to have, really does extend quite beyond tech.
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Marc Andreessen
That's correct. Yeah. I think it's. When I think about that, to me, it reflects the role that Silicon Valley plays in modern American life. The companies that make up what we refer to as Silicon Valley, the big tech companies, the startup ecosystem, these are the economic crown jewel of the United States of America. Not only that, they set the cultural and technological terms for modernity, for how societies develop and how they communicate with each other and how they form their political cultures. These people, rightly, maybe not rightly, but I should say correctly, view themselves as at the center of driving what it means to be a person in public life through the development and control that they have over these tools. That touches every part of life. Their philosophy tends to be very libertarian. So those are the politics that then filter down into Washington, in this case, in the sort of tech rights partnership with the Trump administration. But yes, you're right to note that these thinkers and lobbyists and advocates and investors, they are not limited to building a more congenial environment for investment in software. That is certainly obviously an important part of it. But it is not the end of that mission.
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Stephen Overly
Right. And it'll be interesting to see in the incoming administration how much influence they do wind up having and how far it extends. Listen, Derek, appreciate you being back here on Politico Tech.
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Marc Andreessen
Yeah, thanks as always, Steven. Appreciate it.
- [19:39]
Stephen Overly
That's all for today's Politico Tech. If you enjoy Politico Tech, be sure to subscribe. And for more tech news, subscribe to our newsletters, Digital Future Daily and Morning Tech. Our managing producer is Annie Rees. Our producer is Afraid Abdullah. I'm Stephen Overlay. See you back here tomorrow.