Marc Andreessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Are the roots of this stasis quite general and quite cultural? Because parents coddle their children much more, there are higher rates of mental illness amongst the young, young people — it seems — have less sex, along a lot of cultural variables — the percent of old music people listen to compared to new music. There seems to be a more general stagnation. How would you pinpoint our loss of self-confidence or dynamism? Where’s that coming from? Well, first of all, to be clear, we’re very much in favor of young people not dating because that’s very distracting from their work at our startups. [laughter] That works out fine. Unfortunately, in our industry, we have a long experience with not having dating lives when we’re young, so that works out well. [chuckles] It’s not all bad. It is really interesting. Look, Silicon Valley has all kinds of problems, and we’re a case study for a lot of it. Look, it’s not like you can build anything in Silicon Valley, right? Our politicians absolutely hate us. They don’t let us do anything if they can avoid it. We have our issues. The view from the Valley is, yes, a lot of kids are being brought up and trained to basically adopt a fundamentally pessimistic or, how to put it, stagnation-oriented, inert, have very low expectations. Basically, a lot of what passes for education now is teaching people how to complain, which they’re very good at. The complaining has reached operatic levels lately. There is a lot of that. Having said that, look, I’m also actually really optimistic. In particular, I’m actually quite optimistic about the new generation coming up. I think Gen Z, and then I think it’s Gen Alpha, and then it’s whatever an eight-year-old is. We’re seeing more and more kids that are coming up, and they’re being exposed to a full load of basically cultural programming education, programming that says you should be depressed about everything. You should be upset about everything. You should have low ambitions. You shouldn’t try to do these things. They’re coming out with a very radical hard shove in the other direction. They’re coming up with tremendous energy and tremendous enthusiasm to actually do things, which is very natural because kids rebel. If the system is teaching stagnation, then at least some kids will come up the other way and decide they really want to do things in the world. I think entrepreneurs in their 20s now are a lot better than certainly my generation. They’re frankly more aggressive than the generation that preceded them, and they’re more ambitious. Now, we’re dealing with a minority, not a majority, but I think there’s quite a bit — every hour I get that I can spend at 20-year-olds is actually very encouraging. One emotional sense I get from your walk-on music, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, is just that the stakes are remarkably high. Now, if we’re looking for indicators to keep track of whether, in essence, things are going your way — greater dynamism, freedom to build, willingness to build, American dynamism — what should we track? What should we look at? How do we know if things are going well?…

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