Marc Andreessen: belief

Transcript context

…Was that a metaphor or … Okay Exactly. No, but it’s exactly the thing, and everybody instantly knows what … Everybody watching that instantly starts laughing because you know what it means, which it’s exactly this. I think there’s an ethnographic way of it. There’s a bunch of books on, like you said, the Scots-Irish, like all the different derivations of all the different ethnic groups that have come to the US over the course of the last 400 years. But what we have is this sort of amalgamation of the Northeast Yankees who are super tough and hardcore. Yeah, the Scots-Irish are super aggressive. We’ve got the Southerners and the Texans and the whole blended kind of Anglo-Hispanic thing, super, incredibly tough, strong, driven, capable characters. The Texas Rangers, we’ve got the California, we’ve got the wild, we’ve got the incredibly inventive hippies, but we also have the hardcore engineers. We’ve got the best rocket scientists in the world. We’ve got the best artists in the world, creative professionals, the best movies. So yeah, I would say all of our problems, I think are basically, in my view, to some extent, attempts to basically sand all that off and make everything basically boring and mediocre. But there is something in the national spirit that basically keeps bouncing back. And basically what we discover over time is we basically just need people to stand up at a certain point and say, “It’s time to build, it’s time to grow, it’s time to do things.” And there’s something in the American spirit that just roars right back to life. And I’ve seen it before. I saw it as a kid here in the early 80s because the 70s were horribly depressing in the US. They were a nightmare on many fronts. And in a lot of ways, the last decade to me has felt a lot like the 70s just being mired in misery and just this self-defeating negative attitude and everybody’s upset about everything. And then by the way, energy crisis and hostage crisis and foreign wars and just demoralization. The low point in the 70s was Jimmy Carter who just passed away, he went on TV and he gave this speech known as the Malaise Speech, and it was like the weakest possible, trying to rouse people back to a sense of passion, completely failed. And we had the hostages in Iran for I think 440 days. And every night on the nightly news, it was lines around the block, energy crisis, depression, inflation. And then Reagan came in and Reagan was a very controversial character at the time. And he came in and he’s like, “Yep, nope, it’s morning in America and we’re the shining city on the hill, and we’re going to do it.” And he did it, and we did it. And the national spirit came roaring back and roared really hard for a full decade. I think that’s exactly what … I think we’ll see, but I think that’s what could happen here. And I just did a super long podcast on Milton Friedman with Jennifer Burns, who’s this incredible professor at Stanford, and he was part of the Reagan … So there’s a bunch of components to that, one of which is economic, and one of which maybe you can put a word on it of not to be romantic or anything, but freedom, individual freedom, economic freedom, political freedom, and just in general, individualism.…

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