Thread by @eriktorenberg

Some of my favorite takeaways & quotes from various Marc Andreessen interviews:

"You bring up bitcoin, and they just get really upset. And I’m like did you get upset about your new toaster?

It’s just a thing.... it’s not going to bite you. It’s just a thing."

Every new form of media that's come out in the last thousand years...basically, there was a moral moral panic

And there were basically people who were like, Oh, my God, this is gonna ruin everything.

This is going to ruin kids. Like it's always it's always going to run the kids

it started with Socrates actually, Socrates hated writing.

B/c all of all of Western civilization up to that point was oral tradition

So Socrates says that said that the idea of you write this stuff down, you lose the you lose the magic. Writing will kill Western civilization

Two kinds of economy: Fast & Slow.

Fast changing sectors = in retail, transportation, & media, tech has had huge impact, resulting in massive productivity improvements.

Gigantic churn in jobs, also rapidly falling prices

Slow changing sectors: healthcare, education, construction, eldercare, childcare, gov’t

Price crisis—88% of all price inflation since 1990 to healthcare edu & construction

Left unchecked, these sectors will eat the economy

Tech needs to increase productivity & bend cost curves

Lump of Labor Fallacy:

Automobiles once went mainstream ridding us of horses & jobs (blacksmith)

Car industries became such a big employer we had to bail them out (1st order)

2nd order effects--apartment complexes, suburbs--created 1000x jobs more than blacksmiths ever had

Lump of Labor Fallacy:

Tech change = productivity growth = we produce more stuff w/ less resources, freeing up spending power to create new things & new industries & new jobs

100 yrs later we look back and we’re like I can’t believe anyone was a blacksmith

Self diving ppl will not only improve productivity for ppl in the car but ancillary industries will create new jobs like the automobile did before it.

Critique has changed from "omg not enough jobs" to "omg not enough workers"

On too much technology:

w/ all technology do you think productivity growth at generational highs or generational lows — it’s at generational lows, economists are writing books agonizing over why.

Rate of job churn? Generational lows, been declining for 40 yrs.

Rate of individuals turning over in jobs? Deccelerating. People are staying longer.

b/c of all disruption would you expect # of new entrants of new companies in existing industries to be accelerating or decelerating? Decelerating

Too much change? We don’t have enough!

Not only do we not have the prob everyones talking about, we have the opposite prob

the reason politics are going sideways isn't b/c too change, but not enough

b/c ppl don’t see the future, b/c they don’t see much changing

zero-sum nostalgia politics, Bernie left, Trump right

On VR:

When people say "What's wrong with the real world" and this is one I basically take a pretty strong position on this, which is if you like the real world, fair enough...but you have reality privilege.

But if you could go into a virtual world & if you could go, you know, if you could go into basically the equivalent of a Stanford classroom & take a class from one of the world's great professors, or get court side seats to NBA game....a lot of ppl lives can be made much better.

Miss the era of rational conversation?

Fake News. "Infamous Scribblers" shows how Ben Franklin ran newspapers that had many pseudonyms duking it out w each other to sell papers. Clickbait b4 clicks

Ppl don't want rational conversations, so we need a system that works w/o them.