Marc Andreessen: prediction

Transcript context

…So the beautiful picture you painted of the roaring 20s, how can the Trump administration play a part in making that future happen? So look, a big part of this is getting the government boot off the neck of the American economy, the American technology industry, the American people. And again, this is a replay of what happened in the 60s and 70s, which is for what started out looking like, I’m sure good and virtuous purposes, we ended up both then and now with this, what I describe as sort of a form of soft authoritarianism. The good news is it’s not like a military dictatorship. It’s not like you get thrown into Lubyanka. For the most part, [inaudible 00:20:28] not coming at four in the morning. You’re not getting dragged off to a cell. So it’s not hard authoritarianism, but it is soft authoritarianism. And so it’s this incredible suppressive blanket of regulation rules, this concept of a vetocracy. What’s required to get anything done? You need to get 40 people to sign off on anything, any one of them can veto it. There’s a lot of [inaudible 00:20:47] political system works. And then just this general idea of progress is bad, and technology is bad, and capitalism is bad, and building businesses is bad and success is bad. Tall poppy syndrome, basically, anybody who sticks their head up deserves to get it chopped off. Anybody who’s wrong about anything deserves to get condemned forever. Just this very kind of grinding repression. And then coupled with specific government actions such as censorship regimes and debanking and Draconian, deliberately kneecapping critical American industries, and then congratulating yourselves on the back for doing it or having these horrible social policies, like let’s let all the criminals out of jail and see what happens. And so we’ve just been through this period, I call it a demoralization campaign. We’ve just been through this period, whether it started that way or not, it ended up basically being this comprehensive message that says, “You’re terrible and if you try to do anything, you’re terrible and fuck you.” And the Biden administration reached the full pinnacle of that in our time. They got really bad on many fronts at the same time. And so just relieving that and getting back to a reasonably optimistic, constructive, pro-growth frame of mind, there’s so much pent-up energy and potentially in the American system, that alone is going to, I think cause growth and spirit to take off. And then there’s a lot of things proactively that could be done. So how do you relieve that? To what degree has the thing you describe ideologically permeated government and permeated big companies?…

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