Hi everyone, welcome to the A6&Z podcast. I'm Sonal. Happy New Year. Today's episode is on why we should be optimistic about the future, because it features two of the most optimistic people together in conversation. A6 and Z co-founder Mark Andreessen is interviewed by Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired Magazine and more.

The conversation originally took place at our most recent annual innovation conference,

the A6 and C Summit, and it was also previously released on YouTube if you'd like to check

it out there as well.

Good afternoon.

Thank you, Mark, for answering some questions.

I have a bunch of questions, which I hope that we can talk about.

And these all have to do about the future, where we're going.

I want to start with a question about the past.

A generation ago, a lot of smart people didn't think the Internet was going to work,

and therefore they were unprepared for its benefits.

What are we smart people today not prepared for?

Yeah, so you may remember actually generate.

It wasn't even just that a lot of people thought that the internet was going to work.

A lot of smart people didn't think that.

In fact, the inventor.

I can't resist.

I can't resist on the story. Actually, the inventor of Ethernet, which is a foundational technology for the inventor. I can't resist. I can't resist on the story. Actually, the inventor of

Ethernet, which is a foundational technology for the Internet, spent the 90s actually predicting

the Internet would crash, would collapse, and what we call it would be the Gigalapse, would take

down the Internet by like 1996, 1997. He wrote a column at the time for a magazine called InfoWorld,

and he said that if he was wrong, if the internet hadn't collapsed by 1997, he would eat his column.

...