Marc Andreessen: Why the world needs more Elon Musks
Channel: ReasonTV
Date: 2023-02-08

The venture capitalist and prognosticator Marc Andreessen on his hopes for the future and his fears about the present.

https://reason.com/video/2023/02/08/marc-andreessen-on-a-i-crypto-nietzsche-and-why-we-need-more-elon-musks/
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Marc Andreessen has helped a lot of people get rich—including Marc Andreessen. And he's made millions of people's lives more fun, more efficient, or just a little weirder. 

He is the co-creator of the first widely used web browser. He's the co-founder of the venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz. Though he hates the industry term unicorn for a private tech firm valued at more than a billion dollars, he's a famously successful unicorn wrangler—he was an early investor in Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Lyft, and more. 

Andreessen is also aggressively quotable, whether it's his classic 2011 pronouncement that "software is eating the world" or his more recent "There are no bad ideas, only early ones." And in 2014 he said, "In 20 years, we'll be talking about Bitcoin the way we talk about the Internet today." A born bull, Andreessen is an optimist who places his hope for the future squarely in the hands of "the 19-year-olds and the startups that no one's heard of." 

As splashy artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT and DALL-E begin to permeate our daily lives and the predictable panic revs up, Reason sat down with Andreessen to talk about what the future will look like, whether it's still going to emerge from Silicon Valley, the role of government in fostering or destroying innovation, and what you should read on your next beach vacation.

00:00 Introduction
1:23 Artificial intelligence
15:12 China vs. the United States
21:00 'Corrupt and capture' in business and regulation
37:47 Unintended consequences of good intentions
45:15 Blockchain is as important as the internet
51:11 Can technology solve crashing fertility rates?
1:02:40 The problem of the missing Elons
1:13:30 Book recommendations
1:21:36 The future of crypto
1:28:10 'Try new stuff'

Produced by Katherine-Mangu-Ward; Edited by Adam Czarnecki and Danielle Thompson; Sound editing by Ian Keyser

Photo Credits: Tim Wagner/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Tim Wagner/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Kris Tripplaar/Sipa USA/Newscom; Gado Images/Smith Collection/Gado/Sipa USA/Newscom; Kris Tripplaar/Sipa USA/Newscom; Brigitte Stelzer/Splash News/Newscom