Modern Wisdom
#877 - Marc Andreessen - Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future
Sat, 14 Dec 2024
Marc Andreessen is a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz. America is entering a new chapter. With the recent election in the past, sweeping changes on the horizon, and a lot of uncertainty. Just how optimistic should we be about the upheaval the world is about to face? Expect to learn how we ended up on our current timeline, just how big the civil war is within the Democratic party right now, Marc’s thoughts on the motives and response to the Brian Thompson killing, how much government efficiency can be improved upon, Elon Musk's productivity secrets, how much of a political revolution is happening in Silicon Valley and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get the best bloodwork analysis in America and bypass Function’s 400,000-person waitlist at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Get $150 discount on Plunge’s amazing sauna or cold plunge at https://plunge.com (use code MW150) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: How much of a new timeline are we on right now?
How much of a new timeline are we on right now?
We are on a very, very different new timeline. So, yeah. So, you know, I think the timeline split twice. It split once in the second week of July. And then it split again on November 6th. And I don't know. You tell me. I mean, can you feel it?
The sense in the air, the ambiance has certainly taken a hard pivot. Lots of people that were happy are now unhappy. And lots of people that were unhappy are now fucking ecstatic.
So I think actually I've detected something interesting and maybe it's just my world or maybe business, but I think it's broader, which is, I actually think a fairly large number of people who didn't vote for Trump are actually feeling, people who run organizations who did not vote for Trump are feeling liberated.
They're feeling like they can make changes that they have been wanting to make for a long time. And they can really dial down a lot of the things that have really been causing the problems.
So the blast radius of the good vibes is wider than people might've anticipated. Yeah.
I think it's wider than people anticipated. And I've been in some discussions where people are like, yeah, it really feels like the air is coming out of the... It really feels like the tension is draining out of the system in an interesting way this time, which is, of course, the exact opposite of how it felt in 2016. And so it's... I don't know. I'm cautiously optimistic that actually...
You know, look, I don't think there's any like overnight, you know, transformation and there's going to be continued, you know, drama and strife and so forth.
But I think a lot of institutions, I think a lot of leaders and a lot of institutions, including ones that are left leaning, I think they've just simply had it with a lot of the chaos of the last 10 years and a lot of the drama and a lot of the pressure and conflict. And I think they're just done with it. And they want their, you know, if it's a company, they wanted to get back to business.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of the civil war within the Democratic Party?
And you mentioned the folks you've talked to, like, you know, there are now some, you know, I think some, you know, some voices, including some, you know, folks that are pretty far left who are kind of saying, all right, let's pause for a moment and make sure we're not going off the cliff.
You work with a lot of founders, CEOs, tons of your friends will be in that position too. What do you make of the response to the Brian Thompson killing and the situation more broadly?
Well, the killing itself was obviously an enormous shock, and I know people who knew him and had been with him recently. So he was a well-known figure in the healthcare industry, so very respected in sort of the business circles. So Yeah, I mean, enormous shock.
And then, of course, you know, at first, you're just like, well, these things are either random or, you know, you know, or most murders are, you know, committed by, you know, you know, somebody in somebody's personal life.
You know, the way this one seems to be unfolding, you know, is then I don't know anything that's not in the press, but it seems to have a, you know, ideological motivation behind it. And And then it's like, okay, is that just a one-off or is this the beginning of a pattern?
And I would say a lot of people I talk to are very disconcerted by, I would say, the enthusiasm that a lot of people in the press are showing. There have been a shockingly large number of stories of the line of, of course, murder is bad. But we shouldn't laugh.
I shouldn't laugh.
Right. Well, I mean, it is. I mean, you have to laugh or you cry. Right. So and then it's like 3000 words that come after the butt. Right. And it's like, OK, like, you know, which is basically a long, long, long winded sort of justification for murder. And so, you know, that that is that is disconcerting. There are some comedians now, comedians, you know, that have gotten in the game.
And so, you know, I would say this is fairly disconcerting. I mean, you know, we'll see what happens. The scary scenario, you know, I mentioned the 70s, you know, domestic terror actually got to be quite a thing in the 70s in the U.S.
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Chapter 5: What can we learn from the historical context of political change?
There's a societal question as to where we want the trade-off to be. Right. Do we want the tradeoff to be to stay to the current level of carnage because we're used to it? Right. Or do we want, you know, and wait until the computers are perfect or, you know, is it just is it enough for the computers to be much better, which is what's actually happening?
Interestingly and optimistically, we as a society have chosen to actually accept we have we have chosen to roll out self-driving without the computers being perfect. And so, you know, there's Teslas and Waymos on the road all over the place. And, you know, and people are fine with it. And I actually think that's like, it's a very optimistic thing that we were able to do that.
If you talk to the people who make self-driving cars, what they tell you is the problem is not ever a self-driving car colliding with a self-driving car. The problem is it's when you have other humans in the mix. Right. As you'd expect. Right. Because humans react in unpredictable ways. And so a lot of the engineering going into these cars is to accommodate the human drivers.
There will be some future state years in the future where there are no more human drivers, at least on public roads. And when that happens, these things will be like basically completely safe because then you won't have the human element in there. And so one of the things that we may want to drive, you know, we have to drive to ultimately is that.
There are a lot of questions around that, but that may be where we want to go to. I'm pretty optimistic about this. I think that these companies are making excellent progress. I think that the, this says pros and cons, but the Chinese auto industry is now coming online. And I think they're also going to be quite good at this. And I think they're coming now.
And so I think that this whole space is going to develop, I think, quite quickly.
What about personal autonomous vehicles like drone? I remember I was in Leonardo da Vinci Airport years ago, and there was one gyrocopter thing out front, this can fly itself, etc.
That feels like a much bigger problem in that you're not retrofitting a new piece of technology onto an existing infrastructure, that this is basically an entirely new thing that you need to have where they can float around.
Yeah. So the term most common in our world is they call it eVTOL, E-V-T-O-L. So electric vertical takeoff and landing. Okay. Right. So VTOL, everybody's seen VTOL, V-T-O-L, vertical takeoff and landing. It's a Harrier jet. the military flies. The movie True Lies, the big scene on the Harrier jet.
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