We listened to Marc Andreessen’s 3-hour Joe Rogan podcast so you don’t have to

It’s venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s third time on the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” — and his first as a full-blown member of the MAGA movement. 

In his longest discussion yet — north of three hours — the tech billionaire continued the kind of stream-of-conscious philosophizing he’s become known for in Silicon Valley. Topics ranged from Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” (maybe a backdoor “Gladiator 2” promo) to how high-fructose corn syrup seeped its way into the U.S. food system. 

Politics, of course, was also a major topic of the conversation. Apparently, Andreessen has added big banks, BlueSky, and the Biden administration to his enemy list.

The podcast clocked more than a million views on YouTube in just over 24 hours. You can listen or watch here. But in case you’d rather spend time with your family or zone out on football, we put together a highlights package. 

For his first question, Rogan asked Andreessen if he was happy about the outcome of the presidential election. “Very happy,” replied Andreessen, who donated $2.5 million to the pro-Trump Right for America PAC. “[It’s] morning in America.” Andreessen and his business partner, Ben Horowitz, announced their support for the president-elect on their podcast “The Ben and Marc Show” in July (that one clocked in at just 90 minutes), saying Donald Trump would be better on crypto and AI. Andreessen told Rogan that Trump displayed “the most conspicuous display of physical bravery I’ve ever seen” amid the July assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. If the attempt had been successful, “it could have gone horrifically badly for the entire world,” he added. “That other timeline is out there somewhere, and I don’t wanna visit it.” 

Over the course of the conversation, Rogan and Andreessen returned several times to the state of political journalism and the role of censorship in the election. The duo batted around theories about government and higher-education-led media censorship, and Andreessen debuted a Trumpian nickname for BlueSky, the decentralized social media platform that many are fleeing to from X in the wake of the election and issues with disinformation. “The new name for it, of course, is BlueCry,” Andreessen said, adding that he thinks BlueSky is a marketplace of one idea, while X is a marketplace of ideas.

Andreessen said Trump’s election in 2016 was a wake-up call that forced him to interrogate himself as a “fully assimilated Californian” and reevaluate his political views. His political shift from coastal elite to Trump world happened because “the Biden administration just, like, flat-out tried to kill us,” he told Rogan. “They came straight at our founders, and they tried to kill crypto, and they were on their way to trying to kill AI.” Andreessen added that in the Biden administration, “technology became presumptively evil … and then, the kicker was, philanthropy became evil.”

Andreessen ticked through a laundry list of moments that pushed him toward his current political status. They included:

• Talking after the 2016 election to a Latino waiter at a Palo Alto restaurant who told Andreessen and his “depressed” dinner group that his father was an immigrant who thought Trump was “fantastic.”

• Attending a speech at Stanford by Hillary Clinton, who blamed Russian hacking of Facebook for her election loss, leaving him thinking, “I know for an absolute fact that that’s not true.” 

• Reading a transcript of Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In,” which he argued was a “right-wing manifesto.” “On the left, what people believe is that women are only always and ever victims,” he explained.

Like many other Silicon Valley MAGA bros, Andreessen is excited about Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, to be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. “It is time to carve this government back in size and scope,” he said. According to Andreessen, the more than 400 federal government agencies need to be pared back — chief among them, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent agency created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The agency was proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was a Harvard Law professor at the time. Andreessen said it’s “Elizabeth Warren’s personal agency that she gets to control.” 

There are now two kinds of dinner parties in Silicon Valley, according to Andreessen: “They’ve fractured cleanly in half.” One includes those who believe “every single thing that was in the New York Times that day”; the other includes venture capitalists like David Sacks and a “growing universe” of people who want to “get together and talk about things and have fun.” He states that he no longer gets invited to the former type of event, nor does he want to.