MARC ANDREESSEN HAS helped a lot of people get rich—including Marc Andreessen. He’s made millions of people’s lives more fun, more efficient, or just a little weirder while making himself into a billionaire.
He is the co-creator of the first widely used web browser and co-founder of the venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz. Though he hates the term unicorn—industry lingo for a private tech firm valued at more than a billion dollars—he’s a famously successful unicorn wrangler: He was an early investor in Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Lyft, and more.
Andreessen is also aggressively quotable, whether it’s his classic 2011 pronouncement that “software is eating the world” or his more recent “There are no bad ideas, only early ones.” And in 2014 he said, “In 20 years, we’ll be talking about bitcoin the way we talk about the internet today.” A born bull, Andreessen is an optimist who places his hope for the future squarely in the hands of “the 19-year-olds and the startups that no one’s heard of.”
As splashy artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT and DALL-E begin to permeate our daily lives and the predictable panic revs up, Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Andreessen in February for a video and podcast interview about what the future will look like, whether it still will emerge from Silicon Valley, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the role of government in fostering or destroying innovation.
Reason: I tend to be skeptical of people who claim that this time it’s different, with any tech or cultural trend. But with artificial intelligence (A.I.), is this time different?
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THE REAL THREAT IS AN ISOLATED CHINA
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Against Our Own Best Souls'
SISTER HELEN PREJEAN ON HERLIFE ASA WITNESS ON DEATH ROW
'THE POLITICS HAVE COME TO US'
HOW A CHRISTIAN CHARITY IN EL PASO ENDED UP AT WAR WITH THE TEXAS GOVERNMENT FOR HELPING UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS
MATERIEL LOSS
HOW THE U.S. MILITARY BUSTS ITS BUDGET ON WASTEFUL, CARELESS, AND UNNECESSARY 'SELF-LICKING ICE CREAM CONES'
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HOW A 1949 SUPREME COURT DISSENT GAVE BIRTH TO A MEME THAT SUBVERTS FREE SPEECH AND CIVIL LIBERTIES
HOW MUSK CAN HELP TRUMP CUT TRILLIONS
DURING PRESIDENT DONALD Trump’s first term in office, the national debt increased by $8 trillion—due, in large part, to huge spending hikes that Congress passed and Trump signed.
THE IMPROBABLE RISE OF MAGA-MUSK
IS ELON MUSK A REACTIONARY WITHA DEFECTIVE BULLSHIT METER OR THE BEST PART OF THE SECOND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION?
A Free-Range Family
RIGHT NOW, CHILDHOOD is intensely meh. Maybe you read the recent report in The Journal of Pediatrics that said that as kids' independence and free play have gone down, their anxiety and depression have been going up.
Educulture Wars
THE CULTURE WAR is costing school districts billions, according to a report released in October 2024 by the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access. The report surveyed superintendents at 467 school districts nationwide about extra expenditures they undertook because of increased conflict over culture war issues such as critical race theory, book chal- lenges, gender-related debates, and other politicized topics. The report estimates that such fights cost school districts around $3.2 billion during the 2023-2024 school year.
Q&A Penny Lane
PENNY LANE'S NEW Netflix documentary, Confessions of a Good Samaritan, delves into her life-changing decision to donate a kidney to a stranger. Known for her thoughtful and provocative storytelling, Lane has explored human connection and empathy in films such as Hail Satan? and The Pain of Others. Last October she spoke with Reason's Nick Gillespie and shared her emotional, physical, and philosophical experience with anonymous kidney donation and the challenges that came with it.
