Marc Andreessen: belief

Transcript context

…The roaring 20s. I mean, look, couple of things. It is remarkable over the last several years with all of the issues including not just everything in politics, but also COVID and every other thing that’s happened. It’s really amazing, the United States just kept growing. If you just look at economic growth charts, the US just kept growing and very significantly, many other countries stopped growing. So Canada stopped growing, the UK has stopped growing, Germany has stopped growing, and some of those countries may be actually growing backwards at this point. And there’s a very long discussion to be had about what’s wrong with those countries. And there’s of course, plenty of things that are wrong with our country, but the US is just flat out primed for growth. And I think that’s a consequence of many factors, some of which are lucky and some of which through hard work. And so the lucky part is just number one, we just have incredible physical security by being our own continent. We have incredible natural resources. There’s this running joke now that whenever it looks like the US is going to run out of some rare earth material, some farmer in North Dakota kicks over a hay bale and finds a $2 trillion deposit. I mean, we’re just blessed with geography and with natural resources. Energy. We can be energy independent anytime we want. This last administration decided they didn’t want to be, they wanted to turn off American energy. This new administration has declared that they have a goal of turning it on in a dramatic way. There’s no question we can be energy independent, we can be a giant net energy exporter. It’s purely a question of choice, and I think the new administration’s going to do that. And then I would say two other things. One is we are the beneficiaries, and you’re an example of this. We’re a beneficiary. We’re the beneficiary of 50, 100, 200 years of the basically most aggressive driven, smartest people in the world, most capable people moving to the US and raising their kids here. And so we’re by far the most dynamic population, most aggressive, we’re the most aggressive set of characters, certainly in any Western country and have been for a long time, and certainly are today. And so we’re by far the most dynamic population, most aggressive, we’re the most aggressive set of characters, certainly in any Western country and have been for a long time, and certainly are today. And then finally, I would just say, look, we are overwhelmingly the advanced technology leader. We have our issues and we have, I would say particular issue with manufacturing, which we could talk about. But for anything in software, anything in AI, anything in all these … Advanced biotech, all these advanced areas of technology, we’re by far the leader. Again, in part because many of the best scientists and engineers in those fields come to the US. And so we have all of the preconditions for just a monster boom. I could see economic growth going way up, I could see productivity growth going way up, rate of technology adoption going way up. And then we can do a global tour, if you like. But basically, all of our competitors have profound issues, and we could go through them one by one, but the competitive landscape just is … It’s like it’s remarkable how much better positioned we are for growth. What about the humans themselves? Almost a philosophical question. I travel across the world and there’s something about the American spirit, the entrepreneurial spirit that’s uniquely intense in America. I don’t know what that is. I’ve talked to Saagar who claims it might be the Scots-Irish blood that runs through the history of America. What is it? You, at the heart of Silicon Valley, is there something in the water? Why is there this entrepreneurial spirit?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.