Marc Andreessen on His Intellectual Journey
I interviewed Marc Andreessen the other day and plan to release it tomorrow on Moment of Zen. I wanted to share our previous interview with Marc which is a prequel to it. This interview recounts his intellectual evolution and his quest to discover how the world works from 2016 onwards. The interview coming out tomorrow gets into what’s next, but it’s important to understand Marc’s evolution to fully appreciate it.
This has been edited for shortness and, at times, paraphrased. Any errors are mine! If you prefer to listen to the full interview— YouTube, Apple, Spotify.
Erik Torenberg: You tweeted about how 2016 shook your concept of how the world works, and you went on a reading journey to understand what had changed. What changed in 2016 that shook your understanding of how the world works?
Marc Andreessen: The hardest question is: How much does the world change versus how much do you change? We live in a specific kind of media environment today. I often wonder what it would have been like to live through the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Iran Contra, or World War II with modern social media and the level of second-guessing that would have taken place. Would the United States have ever entered World War II in an era of social media? [If you read the history, a very large percentage of the country was opposed to entering World War II up through the late 30s and basically up until Pearl Harbor.]
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