#290 — What Went Wrong?

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Only the first 48 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the BLACK podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 1 hour and 53 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE <a href= "https://www.samharris.org/subscribe">here</a>. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Marc Andreessen about the current state of Internet technology and culture. They discuss Marc's background in tech, the birth of the Internet, how advertising became the business model for digital media, the three stages of the Web, the blockchain, how successful technology reorders status and power in society, the Bitcoin white paper, the mystery surrounding the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the importance of distributed consensus, Bitcoin as digital gold, how society has performed during Covid, James Burnham and managerial capitalism, the principal-agent problem, negative externalities, risk and regulation, trust in institutions, WTF happened in 1971, regulatory capture, banning Trump and Alex Jones from social media, perverse incentives in philanthropy, and other topics.</span></p> <p><strong>Marc Andreessen</strong> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">is a co-founder and general partner at the venture capital firm</span> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a</span> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to</span> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">establish multiple billion-dollar companies.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Pa