Technological positivist Marc Andreessen was Russ Roberts’ guest on a really good installment of the EconTalk podcast. The Netscape founder and venture capitalist sees the world as moving in the right direction in the macro, perhaps giving short shrift to those sinking in the short-term and mid-term turmoil that attends transformation. Notes on myriad discussion topics.

• Google. Andreessen details how one of the most powerful companies on Earth had plenty of luck on its way to market dominance and its position as a latter-day Bell Labs. The search giant could have collapsed early on or been purchased, with Larry Page and Sergey Brin winding up as, say, Yahoo! middle managers. (“A fate worse than death,” as the host cleverly sums it up.) The guest recalls a fellow venture capital player calling the chief Google guys the “two most arrogant founders” he’d ever met.

• Jobs lost to automation. The guest believes that with the delivery of smartphones into the hands of (eventually) seven billion people, that we’re at the tipping point of an economic boom and great job creation. He doesn’t qualify his remarks by saying that we’re in for rough times in the short run with jobs because of robotics. Andreesen also doesn’t address the possibility that we could have both an economic boom and a jobs shortfall.

• Bitcoin. He’s over the moon for the crypto-currency company, saying it’s as revolutionary as the personal computer or the Internet. That seems like way too much hyperbole.

• MOOCs. Andreesen points out that good universities will never be able to expand to meet a growing global population, so online courses will be essential if we’re to avoid a disastrous educational collapse.

• Political upheavals. The one cloud the Netscape founder sees on the horizon is a barrage of political upheavals that will destabilize sections of the globe at times.

• Journalism. Andreessen is sanguine about the future of journalism, believing that companies will adjust to post-monopolistic competition. He points out formerly profitable things about newspapers (classified ads, sports scores, movie times, etc.) that have been cannibalized by the Internet without guessing what will replace them for those faltering companies. If his argument was that nothing need replace them and these erstwhile powerful news corporations were no longer necessary since news distribution is now diffuse, I think that would probably be a stronger argument than suggesting that all but a few such companies are salvageable.•