260 | Marc Andreessen on Everything: The Need to Build, Web3's Value, Political Realignments, Collapsing Trust, U.S. History, and More...

The Realignment
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Podcast Notes Key Takeaways The work that’s gone into building the internet and digital networks over the last 30 years is comparable to the work that went into building the physical networks, like the railroads and highways, during the second industrial revolution period of the 1880s to 1920sEvery historical achievement started as speculationToday, society is willing to take digital risks but has become extremely adverse to taking analog risks “Nuclear is by far the safest form of energy [for humans and the environment] that we know how to make.” But regulators in the U.S. won’t allow new nuclear plants to be built Starting in the 1970s, the U.S. has basically made it illegal to build real-world infrastructure in a very deliberate wayAmericans’ trust in large-scale institutions has declined over the last 50 years, and the primary question is whether social media caused the collapse of trust or simply exposed the rot that previously existedThe future of the internet could involve the creation of networks built from the bottom-up that are more participatory and effective at solving today’s problems, instead of the existing top-down, traditional, hierarchical institutions that are losing the trust of the people Today, managerial capitalism has overtaken bourgeois capitalism and largely become “capitalism” as we know itThe emergence of venture capital and private equity in the 1970s and 1980s is the “revenge” of bourgeois capitalism Many of the misconceptions in the crypto space are caused by people working backward from price, when they should be working forwards from fundamentalsIronically, the three most dysfunctional areas of our current society – housing, education, and healthcare – are also the most critical for achieving the American DreamThe current system has been wired in a way that makes ordinary people so frustrated that they resort to more radical politicsFixing housing, education, and healthcare would reduce political polarization 

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Marc Andreessen, cofounder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, cofounder of Netscape, and co-creator of the influential Mosaic web browser joins The Realignment to discuss how the second industrial revolution (1880s-1920s) shapes his view of America today, the consequences of the shift from a high to low institutional trust society, the response to Web3 skeptics, how crashes shape the tech industry, and why it's "time to build."